Ocula Conversation Hito Steyerl: How To Build a Sustainable Art World 'A Picture of War is Not War', we read in Hito Steyerl's iconic film November (2004), an essayistic Super 8 film tackling the definition of terrorism constructed around the figure of the artist's best friend Andrea Wolf, who was killed as a terrorist in 1998 in Eastern Anatolia after she joined the PKK (Kurdistan Workers' Party). Mixing documentary...
Ocula Report Aichi to Okayama: Art in Japan Looks to the Future 11 Oct 2019 : Stephanie Bailey for Ocula There has been a flurry of triennial and biennial art activity in Japan this year. The Aichi Triennale opened in Nagoya this August, sparking a national debate about the shutting down of a display of formerly censored works—the result of public backlash against a burnt image of Emperor Hirohito and a statue commemorating the women forced into...
Ocula Insight | Video Hans Hartung and Art Informel at Mazzoleni London (1 October 2019-18 January 2020) presents key works by the French-German painter while highlighting his connection with artists active in Paris during the 50s and 60s. In this video, writer and historian Alan Montgomery discusses Hartung's practice and its legacy.Born in Leipzig in 1904, Hans...
Born in 1928, Yves Klein was a French artist most recognized for his colour field paintings and committment to the colour blue. Klein began to paint in the 1940s and formulate his first monochromatic theories which resulted in stark canvases of yellow, pink, orange, red, and green. However, in 1957 he abandoned the use of other colours in favour of the colour blue with the exhibition Proposition Monochrome: Blue Epoch. The exhibition comprised of eleven identical blue canvases made use of a colour that he and a chemist developed called the 'International Klein Blue'. The colour, made from pure colour pigments and a binding medium, was thought by Klein to evoke the boundlessness and immateriality of his utopian view of the world. As well as using conventional methods of painting, Klein also had naked women covered in blue paint drag their bodies across a surface to create a series of works called Anthropometries. He is considered an important figure in Post-War art as his work represents a response to the monochrome style present in the twentieth century. His work is most-notably included in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Guggenheim Museum, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Klein died in Paris of a heart attack in 1962.
Related Press Stanley Whitney’s Machine for Painting Hyperallergic : 13 July 2019 MAHÓN, Menorca — I usually don't go around ranking artists but I was enormously impressed by the Albert Oehlen retrospective in Venice this past January. I thought, who do we have as good as this guy? Seeing Stanley Whitney's most recent work this summer gave me my answer. While not departing from his known program, his newest seems to...
Related Press Yves Klein artworks electrify Blenheim Palace’s baroque interiors Wallpaper* : 23 July 2018 He’s a household name yet ‘most people do not know anything about Yves Klein’, says Daniel Moquay, director of the late French artist’s estate, and husband of Klein’s widow, Rotraut. Moquay has helped to coordinate an exhibition on Klein – who would have been 90 this year – taking place in the spectacular settings of Blenheim Palace.
Related Press An Ode to an Alley Modern Magazine : 5 January 2017 In Paris, a short, narrow alley in the fifteenth arrondissement known as Impasse Ronsin became a hub for some of the most prominent artists of the twentieth century, including Constantin Brancusi, Max Ernst, Yves Klein, Les Lalanne, Niki de Saint Phalle, and Jean Tinguely, among others. An exhibition, Impasse Ronsin, at the Paul Kasmin Gallery on...
Related Press The woman who painted her body for artist Yves Klein BBC : 23 October 2016 It has come to be seen as one of the landmark events in the history of performance art. The evening was conducted by French artist Yves Klein, who wore a black dinner jacket and white bow tie for the occasion, and who gave us a radically different type of nude in art. But there has been criticism of the way Klein used young women - dubbed...
