I love this! Artist James Reynolds on Boarded Up: “With more and more businesses being forced to close down, the sight of bare wood across the windows and doors is now commonplace and unsightly. By pasting the wooden panels with actual images, this problem is solved.”
These are just two of the hundred or so paintings by Bob Dylan going up next fall at Denmark’s National Gallery in Copenhagen. As Culture Monster reports:
Publicists for the show were able to provide images of two works that will appear at the museum. Both images come from Dylan’s “The Drawn Blank” series.
In the first image (above), titled “Train Tracks” (2009), Dylan revisits his obsession with railway tracks that he has depicted in numerous paintings in the past. This latest variation features a blood-red sky dominating an anonymous rural landscape. The earth seems to reflect the hues of the sky as the railway stretches into infinity.
In the second image (below), titled “Man on a Bridge” (2009), Dylan once again depicts a favorite visual subject—a man in a hat standing solitary in what appears to be a European city. The musician has created many variations on this striking composition. In a statement, the museum’s chief curator, Kasper Monrad, said that several of Dylan’s images “reveal an affinity for some of the modernist masters, not least Henri Matisse’s works from the 1920s.”
Won’t be making it to Denmark next year? Well, below you can watch a Drawn Blank slideshow. It’s set to Dylan’s exceedingly lovely, Suze (the Cough Song).
Stunning, disturbing, majestic new work from Swedish photographer Simen Johan at Yossi Milo Gallery in New York, until October 31, 2009.
Until The Kingdom Comes via Dossier magazine’s blog
PornoGraphics tribute to the unique font styling of the X-rated film world. It’s amusing to see this style become a legitimate design choice. That’s progress! Or something like that…
Via Nerdcore
Fifty years ago, an Italian photographer named Tazio Secchiaroli became the symbol of a new generation of photographers. His nom de guerre was Paparazzo and he was the photographic bounty hunter of the Via Veneto in Rome in the 1950s. Secchiaroli was the first of the paparazzi, immortalised by Federico Fellini in his 1960 film La Dolce Vita. Calling himself an ?
Without making this the longer post I’m planning on Peter Kember and Jason Pierce, guiding lights, respectively, behind Spectrum and Spiritualized, and jointly behind my beloved Spacemen 3, it saddens me to read this about one of their artistic collaborators:
British artist Natty Brooker is debuting his life?
Along with Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin, Marc Quinn belongs to that select group known, for better or worse, as The Young British Artists (YBAs). While Hirst has his formaldehyde-dipped sharks, and Emin has her unmade beds, Quinn is perhaps best known for Siren, his solid-gold, wildly contorted statue of Kate Moss, of whom the artist calls, charmingly, a “cultural hallucination.”
You can watch below as Quinn explains how, in creating Siren, he drew inspiration from a ‘70s museum trip to see Tutankhamun. Okay, a Goldfingered Kate Moss is nice, but I’m more intrigued by the Quinn piece unveiled yesterday at London’s National Portrait Gallery:
Quinn has been making casts of his own head and creating models using his own frozen blood since 1991. He has made a new one every five years to document how he is aging, but the first three are all overseas. The gallery said the acquisition of the latest edition, made in 2006 and entitled “Self,” was a major addition to its contemporary collection.
“Quinn’s ‘Self’ is an outstanding acquisition—a major icon of contemporary British art, both startling and revealing,” said Sandy Nairne, director of the National Portrait Gallery. The gallery paid 300,000 pounds for what it describes as an “unconventional, innovative and challenging” piece of art, bought using a grant from the Art Fund charity and other donations.
Quinn used about nine or 10 pints of blood for the artwork, which he said was all about pushing the boundaries. “To me this sculpture came from wanting to push portraiture to an extreme, a representation which not only has the form of the sitter, but is actually made from the sitter’s flesh,” he said. “It only exists in certain conditions, in this case being frozen, analogous to me, with a person being alive.
