Four artists women: 2 painters and 2 photographs

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Vieira de Silva

Maria Helena Vieira da Silva (June 13, 1908 – March 6, 1992) was a Portuguese-French  abstractionist painter. She is considered to be one of the most important Post-War abstract artists although she is not a “pure” abstract painter.  Her work is related to French Tachisme, American Abstract expressionism, and Surrealism—as were many of her contemporaries who were painting in Post-War Paris during the mid to late 1940s and early 1950s. Her paintings often resemble mazes, cities seen in profile or from high above or even library shelves in what seems to be an allegory to a never-ending search for Knowledge or the Absolute.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sally Mann

Sally Mann ( May 1, 1951) is an American photographer, best known for her large black-and-white photographs—at first of her young children, then later of landscapes suggesting decay and death. Her works are included in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Corcoran Gallery of Art, The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, The Museum of Fine Arts, in Boston,  The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of New York City among many others.

 

 

 

 

 

Francesca Woodman

Francesca Woodman (April 3, 1958 – January 19, 1981) was an American photographer best known for her black and white pictures featuring herself and female models. Many of her photographs show young women who are nude, who are blurred (due to movement and long exposure times), who are merging with their surroundings, or whose faces are obscured. Her work continues to be the subject of much attention, years after she committed suicide at the age of 22.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jenny Saville

Jenny Saville (born in Cambridge in 1970) is a contemporary British painter; best known as one of the Young British Artists. She is known for her large-scale painted depictions of naked women. Saville has dedicated her career to traditional figurative oil painting. Her painterly style has been compared to that of Lucian Freud and Rubens. Her paintings are usually much larger than life size. They are strongly pigmented and give a highly sensual impression of the surface of the skin as well as the mass of the body. She sometimes adds marks onto the body, such as white “target” rings.

 

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The Unknown Masterpiece / La Belle Noiseuse

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Honoré de Balzac; 20 May 1799 – 18 August 1850) was a French novelist and playwright. His magnum opus was a sequence of short stories and novels collectively entitled La Comédie humaine, which presents a panorama of French life in the years after the 1815 fall of Napoleon. 

Due to his keen observation of detail and unfiltered representation of society, Balzac is regarded as one of the founders of realism in European literature. He is renowned for his multi-faceted characters, who are complex, morally ambiguous and fully human. His writing influenced many subsequent novelists such as Marcel Proust, Émile Zola, Charles Dickens, Edgar Allan Poe, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Gustave Flaubert, Marie Corelli, Henry James, William Faulkner, Jack Kerouac, and Italo Calvino, and philosophers such as Friedrich Engels. Many of Balzac’s works have been made into or have inspired films, and they are a continuing source of inspiration for writers, filmmakers and critics.

The Unknown Masterpiece

Le Chef-d’œuvre inconnu (English ”The Unknown Masterpiece”) is a short story by Honoré de Balzac. It was first published in the newspaper L’Artiste with the title “Maître Frenhofer” (English: “Master Frenhofer”) in August 1831. It appeared again later in the same year under the title “Catherine Lescault, conte fantastique.” It was published in Balzac’s Études philosophiques in 1837 and was integrated into the La Comédie humaine in 1846. At the most fundamental level, “Le Chef-d’œuvre inconnu” is a reflection on art.

      

Curiosity

In 1921, Ambroise Vollard asked Picasso to illustrate Le Chef-d’œuvre inconnu. Picasso was fascinated by the text and identified with Frenhofer so much that he moved to the rue des Grands-Augustins in Paris where Porbus’ studio was supposedly located. It was in his new studio that he painted his own Masterpiece, Guernica. Picasso lived here during World War II.

     

La Belle Noiseuse

La Belle Noiseuse is a 1991 film directed by Jacques Rivette and starring Michel Piccoli, Jane Birkin, and Emmanuelle Béart. Its title means “The Beautiful Troublemaker”. The film is loosely adapted from the short story “The Unknown Masterpiece” by the nineteenth-century French writer Honoré de Balzac.

The film won the Grand Prix at the 1991 Cannes Film Festival. The film had a good critical reception, and occasioned much comment on Béart’s frank onscreen nudity and Rivette’s characteristic use of an extreme running time. Chicago Sun-Times film critic Roger Ebert added the film to his Great Movies collection in April 2009. note In this post, I would nor refer to the storyline, so now, I attach a link to the work of Honoré de Balzac, The Unknown Masterpiece.

      

Note

In this post, I would nor refer to the storyline, so now, I attach a link to the work of Honoré de Balzac, The Unknown Masterpiece. I hope you enjoy this text as much as I have done on so many ocasions.

The Unknown Masterpiece_Honoré De Balzac

Gerhard Richter: Panorama

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Tate Modern (London) 6 October 2011  –  8 January 2012  

Spanning nearly five decades, and coinciding with the artist’s 80th birthday, Gerhard Richter: Panorama is a major retrospective exhibition that groups together significant moments of his remarkable career.

Since 1960s, Gerhard Richter has immersed himself in a rich and varied exploration of painting. Gerhard Richter: Panorama highlights the full extent of the artist’s work, which has encompassed a diverse range of techniques and ideas. It includes realist paintings based on photographs, colourful gestural abstractions such as the squeegee paintings, portraits, subtle landscapes and history paintings.

Gerhard Richter was one of the first German artists to reflect on the history of National Socialism, creating paintings of family members who had been members, as well as victims of, the Nazi party. Continuing his historical interest, he produced the 15-part work October 18 1977 1988, a sequence of black and white paintings based on images of the Baader Meinhof group. Richter has continued to respond to significant moments in history throughout his career; the final room of the exhibition includes September 2005, a painting of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York in 2001.

Lovers of the epic beauty of Rothko, Twombly and Hodgkin will have much to enjoy, as will those who appreciate striking portraiture or the crystal-clear precision of photorealism.

* Text taken from the presentation of the exhibition: http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/gerhardrichter/default.shtm

Boolab’s motion graphics

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Hi all, like to share, as I find very interesting, the work of this production house based in Barcelona (Spain), now, a few facts about them and show you a few examples of his work, I hope you enjoy !

Boolab is a production house dedicated to motion graphics, animation (2D and 3D) and the development of other visual techniques, both traditional and cutting or bleeding edge. It came into being in 2004 within the framework of Booker, an advertising production house in the field of live-action, founded in 1996.

Initially, boolab was envisaged as an in-house lab for research into new audiovisual languages, but it soon set its sights beyond the company walls. Success was not long in coming, and it rapidly developed into what it is today – a production house that is a benchmark in audiovisual innovation throughout Spain and Europe.