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YAYOI KUSAMA

WINK X ARTOSTOMY

YAYOI KUSAMA

Over the last five years, more than 5 million museum visitors have queued – and queued up a few more – for a quick glimpse of Yayoi Kusama’s work. The 89-year-old Japanese artist, who has stayed willingly in a mental hospital for the past 41 years, has had large-scale solo exhibits of her work in Mexico City, Rio, Seoul, Taiwan and Chile, as well as big tour exhibitions in the US and Europe. Last year, she opened her own five-story gallery in Tokyo. The Large Museum in Los Angeles recently sold 90,000 $25 tickets in the afternoon to its Kusama show, leading the LA Times to ask if the artist was “Hotter than Hamilton?”

 

 

 

 

As the numbers have gone up, so the time that any visitor will spend in Kusama’s installations—the interactive “infinity mirror rooms” with colored lights and painted pumpkins and polka dots that represent forever—has gone down. In 2013, the David Zwirner Gallery in New York reduced time slots to 45 seconds for each viewer. Five years later, tourists to the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C., who had been queuing for more than two hours, were down to half a minute.

 

 

When did this happen to you? The most obvious single word to answer is “Instagram.” People – hundreds of thousands of them (see #YayoiKusama or #InfiniteKusama) – take pictures of themselves in Kusama’s special spatial wonderland and share the results. Many contemporary art galleries are currently discussing the concept of an exhibition as a “experience” of uploadable social media. Kusama – in creating a concept that she first proposed in New York in 1966 – has already cornered the market. Kusama confidently took the decision to leave Japan to go to New York though that was a fairly surprising thing to do. Heather Lenz, Director Speaking on the phone last week, Lenz admitted that the smartphone-friendly nature of the job is obviously part of the draw – but said it could only lead to a deeper understanding of Kusama’s career.

 

 

In the first of these, Kusama’s childhood, the curious seeds of the art world’s favorite selfie-craze were seeded. Kusama was born into a wealthy family in rural Japan who operated extensive plant nurseries, growing varieties of violets and peonies and zinnias to be sold all over the world. From a very young age, Kusama would take her sketchbook down to the seed-harvesting grounds and sit among the flowers until, as in a fairy tale of the kind of Grimm, one day she saw the flowers crowding in and talking to her. “I thought that only humans could talk, so I was shocked that the violets used words. I was so frightened that my legs started trembling.” This was the first in a series of terrifying hallucinations – she calls them depersonalizations – that haunted her childhood. These episodes seem to have been linked to the dislocations of her home life. Kusama grew up in a very dysfunctional household. Her father was a philander, and her mother sent Kusama to spy on him with her mistresses, but when she reported back, she recalls in her autobiography, “My mother was going to vent all her rage on me.”

 

 

“My mother was against me being an artist. She just wanted me to marry a rich man.”

Her mother tried to stop Kusama from painting – ripping the canvas out of her hands and smashing it – demanding that she learned etiquette to make a successful marriage. Kusama kept drawing. It was her way of making sense of her hallucinations: the flowers of the tablecloth that enveloped her and chased her upstairs; the unexpected shimmering of the sky. “When things like this happened, I would hurry back home and draw what I saw in my sketchbook… recording them helped to ease the shock and fear of the episodes,” she remembers.

 

It seems that many of the motifs that have become her trademarks have been embedded in this tradition. The first Kusama pumpkin to see was with her grandfather. When she went to pick it up, she started talking to her. It was the size of the head of a guy. She decorated the pumpkin and received an award for it, her first 11-year-old. Eighty years later, her biggest silver pumpkin sculptures were sold for $500,000. After the assault on Pearl Harbor, when Kusama was 13, she was forced to work in a factory making parachute fabrics. She painted intricate flowers over and over throughout the evening. In a notice of her first show, the local paper reported her producing 70 aquarelles a day 

 

 

 

 

Watching the stills of Kusama’s early life in Lenz’s documentary – her hair cut straight across her forehead, photographed between flowers – is a sharp and moving contrast to the footage of the artist at work in her studio. The same slightly bulbous eyes look out from under the red wig as she connects her dots with a magic marker, chewing her lip like a girl. “To me,” Lenz says, “Kusama’s childhood trauma was instrumental in her work, not only because of her difficult family, but also because of her society and the nightmare of the Second World War.”

 

 

 

 

Lenz came to understand these stresses more profoundly because, when making a film, she married from a Japanese family and heard the story of her husband’s grandfather, killed by the Hiroshima bomb, and her mother-and father-in-law, who had an arranged marriage. “That gave me a better understanding of her childhood,” she says. “The standards of the time for a young woman, an arranged marriage, children. Kusama confidently took the decision to leave Japan and go to New York though it was a fairly surprising thing to do.”

 

 

 

The second chapter of Kusama’s journey started when she first visited Georgia O’Keeffe’s work in a bookshop in Matsumoto, her hometown. She found O’Keeffe’s address in New Mexico, and wrote to her for advice on how to make her way into the art world of New York, sending some of her own intricate aquariums of abstract vegetal shapes and bursting seed pods. O’Keeffe answered, puzzled at first why anyone, let alone a young woman in rural Japan, would want to do such a thing, but the interest has grown over a number of years into a kind of mentorship. “The artist has a hard time making a living in this country,” O’Keeffe answered. “You’re just going to have to find the best way you can.”

 

 

 

Kusama arrived in New York in 1958, at the age of 27, with a few hundred dollars sewn in the linen of her dresses, along with 60 kimonos of silk and some sketches. Her intention was to survive the sale of one or the other. In her own account, she initially subsisted on food scraps, including fish heads scavenged from the fishmonger’s trash, which she boiled for soup. She’s been following her job around the area. “One day,” she recalls in her autobiography, “I brought a canvas more than 40 blocks in the streets of Manhattan to present it for consideration at the Whitney Annual. My painting was not chosen, and I had to take it back 40 blocks. The wind was blowing hard that day, and more than once it looked as though the canvas was floating up into the air, taking me with it. When I got home, I was so tired that I slept like a dead man for two days.”

 

 

 

 

Her breakthrough pieces, the Infinity Net paintings, originated from an earlier collection of aquariums called the Pacific Ocean, which she had made in response to the tracery of waves on the surface of the sea when she first flew from Tokyo. The nets she painted were made of a repetitive singular impasto gesture in small circles, like interlocking scales; the longest canvases were 30ft in length. One of these canvases sold for $7.1m in 2014, a record for a living female artist. The first ones she sold for $75 to fellow artists Frank Stella and Donald Judd in 1962.

 

 

 

 

Judd and Kusama have been living in the same building on 19th Street in Manhattan for a while. “She’d sit around my apartment and talk, or I’d go down there and talk,” Judd said in a 1988 interview. “She must have worked through the night, as far as I could tell. Most of the paintings were done in one take. I don’t understand how she’d be able to do that, but she’d start in the corner and then go over.” One of the startling aspects about seeing Lenz’s film is the way Kusama appeared to be written out of the history of pop art. There was a period in the 1960s when she shared nearly equal billing – and popularity – with the likes of Andy Warhol and Claes Oldenburg. Part of this eclipse seems to have been by design – Kusama has long said that the Waspish men around her appropriated her original ideas and moved away as their own.

 

 

 

 

In 1963, she began to create chairs and other objects decorated, fungi-like, with white painted phallic shapes made of stuffed fabric; her piece of resistance was a rowing boat, complete with oars, which she and Judd rescued from a junkyard. It was presented in a box-like room, the walls, the ceiling and the floor of which were papered with 999 silk-screen images of the phallic ship. She saw this as her own private aversion therapy.

 

 

 

 

“I started making penises to heal my feelings of disgust with sex,” she wrote later. “My fear was the hide-in-the-closet-trembling sort. I was told that sex was filthy, shameful, something to hide. Complicating matters even more was all the talk of ‘healthy families’ and ‘arranged marriages’ and the utter resistance to romantic love… I also experienced a sex act when I was a toddler, and the terror that came through my eye blew up inside me.” There is a grim irony in this act of therapy in that Oldenburg seems to have embraced her soft sculpture technique and Warhol’s repeated wallpaper prints. She was desperate at the way the men around her sought fame for her theories.

 

 

 

 

Lenz’s film aims to reveal this appropriation. “Every single Q&A I get a question about how true the allegations that these white male artists stole her ideas were,” Lenz says. “Obviously, I’ve reviewed all the dates, and they’re all working out like she said. People who had degrees in art history always questioned this, though; it was as if they didn’t want to change their mind. They know what they know, I suppose.” Kusama saw something like her ideal man in Joseph Cornell, the reclusive genius of the outer world of art, the founder of surreal boxes of found objects, and a man who had always lived with his mother in the 1950s. Cornell became fascinated with Kusama, giving her a dozen poems a day, never hanging from a phone call, so he was there when she picked it up. This was her only known romantic relationship, though, “he didn’t like sex, and I didn’t like sex, so we weren’t having sex.” He wasn’t a very easy guy. 

 

"I, Kusama, am the modern Alice in Wonderland."

 

 

 

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Extraweg

Extraweg

“I think that somehow all Artists related to nature, because that’s the purest form of art, as a universal language. All kinds of animals are perfect, like the way humans do. In my opinion birds, butterflies symbolize feelings and emotions which I can’t explain throughout my portraits of faces only.”

HOW HAS YOUR PRACTICE CHANGED OVER TIME?

Think before you do it. Don’t waste time on something you don’t like to do. Believe more about your feeling. Try new things. Get things done

COULD YOU EXPLAIN THE ENVIRONMENTAL MESSAGE BEHIND YOUR ARTWORK “PLASTIC LOVE”?

It’s about the love-hate relationship between us humans and the use of plastic in our everyday lives. Getting rid of plastic, however, is harder said than done. Purchasing a reusable coffee cup and drink bottle or avoiding plastic straws might sound easy (and it is!) but ridding it from our lives completely is almost impossible for now. And that’s a problem

YOUR ARTWORK WORKOUT YOU HAVE A BOUNCING BRAIN, HOW DO YOU THINK PEOPLE CAN TRAIN THEIR MINDS TO ADAPT AND RELAX ESPECIALLY IN THEIR MODERN CROWDED WORD?

We live in a visually overexploited world. Every time we are more and more informed by social networks, and their content is more and more adapted to us, to our personal tastes and choices.

A good start is to put off the phone for a while.

WHAT’S YOUR STRONGEST MEMORY OF YOUR CHILDHOOD?

I grew up surrounded by nature and as a child, I spent a lot of time outside. I remember myself getting up early to see the morning fog, it was very aesthetic, very cinematographic. That mix of nature, calm and haze always fascinated me and I guess discovering old trees, observing deers or simply exploring nature

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Flora Borsi

FLORA BORSI

“I think that somehow all Artists related to nature, because that’s the purest form of art, as a universal language. All kinds of animals are perfect, like the way humans do. In my opinion birds, butterflies symbolize feelings and emotions which I can’t explain throughout my portraits of faces only.”

“ COGNITIVE DISSONANCE “ IS INSPIRED BY TRAUMA IN YOUR LIFE AND IF IT’S TRUE WHAT WAS IT?

It’s about private events in my life – losing friends and partners and processing this loss throughout my visual concepts.

WHAT IS YOUR DREAM PROJECT, AND WHAT ARE YOUR UPCOMING PROJECTS.

My dream project would be to make album covers for singers & bands and conceptual projects for big brands where I’m free to create the way I want. My upcoming projects are secrets right now .

HOW WAS YOUR JOURNEY SO FAR IN THE ART CAREER. HOW DID YOU START AND WHAT ARE THE OBSTACLES THAT FACED YOU?

It would ba a lot of pages to tell this story, but I always believed and had faith that I’m meant to create images and be an artist. The greatest obsticle was my self-doubt.

IF YOU CAN GO BACK IN TIME AND CHANGE JUST ONE THING, WHAT WOULD IT BE?

Nothing. I wouldn’t change anything since my life is perfect as the way it is, even if I have to go through hard times. Everything has a reason to

teachsomething.

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INDIGO

“I AM A FEMALE ARTIST FROM SERBIA, THE NAME BASICALLY WAS A MEANINGFUL COINCIDENCE, IT KEPT POPPING UP THROUGHOUT MY LIFE IN THE MOST PECULIAR OF PLACES”

YOUR WORK IS A MIX OF LUCID DREAMS AND RAINBOWS YOU HAVE OUR OWN PARALLEL WORLD, HOW DID YOU VISUALIZE THAT COMBINATION OF IDEAS IN YOUR MIND?

It is simply a way I ‘see’ things and feel that it’s the way they should look so I’m trying to get that vision across to others.

DO YOU HAVE A FAVORITE ART FORM YOU LIKE TO PRESENT YOUR WORK?

I prefer digital art but hope to get into music someday as well, have been obsessed with music my whole life.

WHAT TRIGGERS YOUR IMAGINATION?

Just anything I see in my day to day life but most often it’s nature and music respectively.

IF YOU COULD MEET UP WITH ONE OF YOU’RE FAVORITE ICONS, WHO WOULD IT BE AND WHY?

I would love to have been able to meet George Michael, besides being a superbly talented singer he also seemed like a one of a kind human being with a heart of gold.

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DENIS SHECKLER

I love to create collages or funky images in Photoshop. I started to explore photoshop back in 2012. I always search for inspiration by looking through thousands and thousands of photos and pictures.

HOW DO YOU GIVE THAT KINDA A DESATURATED VINTAGE LOOK TO YOUR WORK? 

Once I tried to develop a unique style for my Instagram feed and decided that the film style with grain and low saturation would be the best! I do this in Adobe Lightroom. 

HOW WAS YOUR EXHIBITION AT GALLERIE SAKURA PARIS?

This is a big experience for me, it is my first exhibition. It has only started from June 1st and I hope it will be a success.

WHAT IS THE BEST PHASE OF YOUR LIFE AND WHAT IS THE WORST?

The best phase of my life is studying at university: so many friends and parties, this is the school of life. The worst phase of my life are the days when you dont get an inspiration to do your lovely collages. Sometimes it can be a long process time when I sit and think about concept etc, it can take from 6 hours to 2-3 days.

DOES YOUR WORK REPRESENT A REFLECTION OF YOUR IDENTITY? AND WHAT DO YOU WANT PEOPLE TO THINK OF YOUR WORK?

So in each collage I try to add some objects which will get some resonance with social problems, but sometimes I make just those things that I love “just beauty of 3d objects, shapes, etc”. It often reflects my emotions at that time when I create new collage, when I listen to my favorite music and so on.

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REKODE

“Since childhood, I have always been fascinated with large, residential buildings. Not because of the architecture, but because they have personality, defined by what’s inside. So many stories. Some tragic. I find them both beautiful and frightening”

GROWING UP DID YOU KNEW WHAT YOU WANTED TO BECOME?

No, and I still don’t. I don’t do very well with blank canvases, which is what those decisions are like as a kid.

WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE MOVIE AND HAVE YOU EVER CRIED WHILE WATCHING A MOVIE? IF YES WHAT IS THE NAME OF IT?

The Matrix Trilogy, as one long movie, is my favorite, but it’s closely followed by many others. I love movies so much, and I tend to get carried away by stories and music, so I cry in most movies.

WHAT’S YOU PHILOSOPHY IN LIFE? AND DO YOU THINK WE MUST FAIL TO SUCCEED?

Existential dread, but without the actual dread. I look at the vastness of space and time in comparison to my own existence and am quite content with being completely insignificant. Yes and no. I think we must repeat the process to succeed. Failure is part of the repetition process.

YOUR STYLE IS QUITE UNIQUE HOW DID YOU DEVELOP THIS STYLE?

It wasn’t conscious. Over time, I have just gotten better at converting ideas to something visually interesting, and this is really just how my imagination looks.

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Alvaro Castro

Rebirth of romanticism

Rebirth of romanticism

Alvaro Castro

Based in Almeria in the south of Spain, Alvaro Castro has transformed his work into unforgettable illustrations that reveal various facets of our daily lives. “I do conceptual illustrations of a wide range of subjects, but most notably love, interpersonal relationships, and social networks,” he says.

HOW DID YOU START YOUR CAREER AS AN ARTIST? 

I started participating in small contests online about 13 years ago and winning a contest. Then I finished studying at the Art School and from that moment I wanted to be a graphic designer for the rest of my life, it has always been my passion. 

 

HOW DO YOU GET THE CONCEPT OF YOUR WORK OF ART?

I try to express a complex idea in a few very concise words and with these words I try to look for very direct elements that are capable of expressing them as best as possible.

 

 

HOW DO YOU INTRODUCE YOURSELF? 

My name is Alvaro Castro, I’m a graphic designerillustrator born and raised in Andalucia, southern Spain, the son of parents, teachers and brother of two sisters, and a brother. I consider myself a cheerful person, very joking and who is always thinking about new things to do.

 

WHO ARE YOUR IDOLS? 

I have an icon outside the world of illustration in which I fix at the time of synthesizing the elements to express an idea with the least number of these is Chema Madoz, a great photographer who does fantastic works.

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Beyonce X Jay-Z

Beyonce X Jay-Z | Takes over the Louvre

The couple caused a heated controversy by using the Louvre as a location for their recently released music video and collaborative album, the Carters show just how much their dynamic as a couple has evolved. There new album The most widely shared photograph showed Jay-Z and Beyoncé flanking the “Mona Lisa,” approximating her dodgy expression.

 
The Atlantic ~ So how did one of the most visible couples in the music world—who have already toured together and put out decades of videos about their love, sex, and mutual success—create something that feels even the slightest bit fresh? The spectacle of making new art using some of the most famous Western art in the world certainly helped. But though the duo had grappled with their evolving conceptions of gender in their own projects, “Apeshit” and Everything Is Love represent the Carters’ first real attempt to stitch those ideas together into a cohesive whole. Until this point, most of their collaborations had credited them by their respective names: as “Jay-Z feat. Beyoncé” or vice versa. But their new joint alias, “the Carters,” signals a blending of their artistry.

 

Throughout their nearly 15-year relationship, Beyoncé, 36, and JAY-Z, 48 have always made powerful collaborations that changed the music industry all around the world. Lately the release of there latest album was a complete wrap of combining the old history of the louvre with modern pop.
 
 
The R&B stars’ hit song “Apeshit” which used some of the museum’s greatest masterpieces as backdrops  has been viewed 88 million times on YouTube alone since it was released on june the 16th. Now the Louvre, which already has a tour based on the US rapper will.i.am’s hit “Smile Mona Lisa”, has created another based on the Carters’ night in the museum.
 
The video  showed a stunning 17 paintings and sculptures which feature in a six-minute video clip, going from the monumental white Greek marble “Nike of Samothrace” to Marie Benoist’s .
 
The choice of works which they used or posed in front of has been taken as a celebration of black bodies and empowerment in an institution which was built on the spoils of conquest and imperialism.
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Iris Van Herpen

 

Iris van Herpen the 34 years old Dutch fashion designer who is widely recognized as one of fashion’s 
most talented and forward-thinking designers that always push to break  the boundaries of fashion design. Since her first show in 2007 van Herpen has been preoccupied with inventing new forms and methods of sartorial expression of fashion by combining the most traditional and the most radical materials  constructing master pieces by her unique methods to take us into her unique aesthetic vision. She calls this design ethos “New Couture.”
 
~Van Herpen about describing her work
 

If I were to use one word to describe my work, it would be movement 
as one of the most influential things in my life has been my classical ballet practice. Through dance I learned about the seduction of movement, the transformation of the body and the ‘evolution’ of shape. Those years taught me how to shift shape and were the birth of my interest in fashion.

I Don’t think of fashion as being clothes, or a discipline. I think of it being much more. I see fashion as a dialogue between our inside and our outside.
For me fashion is a form of art that is close related to me and my body. I see it as a very personal expression of identity combined with desire, mood and culture.

Looking around me, I consider what I can’t see as much as what I can see, and that transformative focus creates freedom in my work. Each garment and every collection is an embodiment to new understanding and discovery, on conceptual level, on the level of materiality and on the level of femininity. Its my search to new forms of femininity through organic silhouettes, delicate craftsmanship, innovation and the collaboration with other artists, architects and scientists. 

There’s beauty in contrast, new terrains are found at the intersection between precision and chaos, art and science, the human touch and the high-tech, the artificial and the organic.”

 
Collections
 
with over 15 collections van herpen has always made it clear about her extraordinary talent introducing her collection in Paris fashion week 2017 AERIFORM 
 
AERIFORM – ‘Aeriform’ examines the nature and anatomy of air and the idea of airborne materiality and lightness, creating negative and positive space with shadow and light. 
 

Van Herpen also drew inspiration from the Danish underwater artists Between Music who challenge the relationship between the body and its elemental surround, in a subaquatic environment where air is absent. 

“Their liquid voices and the subsonic darkness from Between Music overwhelmed me. It motivated me to dive into the contrasts between water and air, between inside and outside, between darkness and lightness.”
Iris van Herpen
 
 

Between Music have collaborated with deep sea divers, physicists and neuroscientists over many years to develop a hypnotic biophonic sound sculpture which they perform on custom-built instruments while submerged in water. Their work transcends and transforms the conventional and natural relationship between our bodies and the elements.

“I’m doubly fascinated: I feel so free in the water – and at the same time I feel a slight hint of terror. Water is a fantastically exciting element because of its dual nature.”
Leila Skovmand, Between Music

Air and water are the structural and visual components of the eighteen elaborate silhouettes of the collection and have influenced the development of both the textiles and garment construction, which is reflected in their volumes, rippling patterning and translucent layering.

Biomorphic structures include a feathery-light metal lace of geodesic floral patterns in collaboration with Philip Beesley, which float around the body like a silver cloud. Echo waves of mylar bonded cotton ripple across the skin mapping the surface of the body and painting its contours.

The shoes are made from a soft suede with a parametric welded metal heel, creating a delicate molecular lattice around the foot.

 
LUCID – For her Lucid collection the Dutch designer Iris van Herpen explores the concept of lucid dreaming. Within a lucid dream, the dreamer is conscious of the dream state and therefore is able to exert a degree of control on what is happening.
 
“When I design, the draping process most of the time happens to me unconsciously. I see lucid dreams as a microscope with which I can look into my unconsciousness. In this collection, I have tried to bring my state of ‘reality’ and my state of dreaming, together,” notes the designer.
 
 
Both the models and the audience are mirrored as one in the show space, creating a close-up and intimate experience that is amplified by seventeen large optical light screens (OLF). Depending on the viewing angle, movement and proximity to the sheets, the perception of the audience that view the models is continuously shifted and deluded to reflect the fine line between reality and unreality
 
. The visual alienation of the OLF was influential to van Herpen her design process. There are 2 main design techniques presented in the collection: the lucid looks and the phantom dresses. The lucid looks result from the designer’s continuous collaboration with the artist and architect Philip Beesley. These looks are made from transparent hexagonal laser-cut elements that are connected with translucent flexible tubes, creating a glistering bubble-like exoskeleton around the wearer’s body. 
 
The phantom looks are made with a super light tulle to which iridescent stripes are fused, shimmering the silhouette illusory. Continuing van Herpen’s vigor of fusing technology with handcraft, the collection features two 3D printed Magma dresses that are combining flexible TPU printing, creating a fine web together with polyamide printing. One of the dresses is stitched from 5,000 3D printed elements. This season van Herpen opted for organic, circular, and voluminous silhouettes in light, iridescent colors of nude, green, and gray.
The Aero shoes in collaboration with Finsk, are made from wood, laser-cut leather and an ultra-thin transparent acrylic heel that separate the sole and the upper, creating a hovering look.