„Gego (*1912 in Hamburg/Germany) is one of the most significant artists to emerge from Latin America during the second half of the twentieth century, yet her work remains better known in the United States.“
https://www.guggenheim.org/exhibition/gego-measuring-infinity
The exciting thing about Contemporary Art, in addition to the fact that it presents the current zeitgeist: in the sense of which subjects are communicated, and what drives an artist where on earth, is that we can talk to the artist, or at least read interviews, watch videos, and perhaps also attend artist talks at museums or galleries.
She or he is among us.
He or she is one of us.
The beautiful thing about Contemporary Art is that strong women paint strong pictures. Just like Christina Quarles.
The 38-year-old American artist was born in Illinois and moved with her single mother to Los Angeles during childhood. Christina later studied at LACHSA in L.A., highlights the painting technique of her teacher (Joseph Gatto), she’s still working with today. In terms of moving the body and reworking a painting, Gatto’s muscle memory helped her, she said in a previous interview.
The fact that Christina’s father is black doesn’t show on her face and skin. She looks white. And in case we’re queer, we don’t have that tattooed on our foreheads. Christina is that, too.
People who get to know us a little have a very different image of us than one that would match our real personality, our roots, our life. Christina addressed this very issue in an interview for The Cut in 2017. Also that as a woman, black and queer, she doesn’t want to perpetuate the passive consumption of the body, but she really loves to paint bodies!
These bodies are highly distorted, as we know to some extent from the era of Mannerism, and sexually subtly charged, as the 20th-century artists started to paint.
Named a few years ago as „the hottest artist in America today“ by art critic Jeffrey Deitch, and hailed by the recently deceased Schjeldahl as one, who knows how to use her talent for using abstract aesthetics to paint carnality, Christina is one whose works have just made it to the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin.
I highly recommend this exhibition on the 2nd floor. Hamburger Bahnhof is wonderfully centrally located in the heart of Berlin, just a 7 minute walk from Berlin’s – very attractive – main train station.
Asked Christina what she wants to express or achieve with her paintings, she states that she involves the viewer. That it is in connection of her represented bodies, the questions of the viewer, which he asks himself: For example, which point of view of identity and body he has for himself, and what he knows and does not know about himself.
Same here: what constitutes the basis of her work for herself, is to be able to get to the bottom of the question of what it means – physically – to have a body of a certain ethnicity, a spirit that is homosexual, and the standpoint of her own knowledge and ignorance about her body and the issues with it.
By strong images here is meant: nudity. No coquetry, rather a disclosure, a presentation of the uncovered flesh for the deep look of the soul itself, and its relationship to the body. Deepening felt quite possible, by the fact that the pictorially depicted limbs are stretched to length.
Das Schöne, – „Spannende“ trifft es vermutlich deutlich besser – innerhalb der Contemporary Art ist, neben der Tatsache, dass sie ganz wunderbar den aktuellen Zeitgeist widerspiegelt: Im Sinne von welche Sujets behandelt werden, und was den jeweiligen Künstler wo auf der Erde gerade an- und umtreibt, dass wir mit den Künstlern sprechen können, mindestens aber aktuelle Interviews und Videos verfolgen und vielleicht auch dem ein oder anderen Künstlergespräch beiwohnen.
Das Schöne – und jetzt sind wir tatsächlich beim Schönen – der Contemporary Art ist, dass starke Frauen starke Bilder malen. So wie (auch) Christina Quarles.
Die 38-jährige amerikanische Künstlerin wurde in Illinois geboren, was sie mit ihrer alleinerziehenden Mutter für Los Angeles verließ. Christina, die später in L.A. an der LACHSA studierte, hebt die Maltechnik ihrer Lehrers (Joseph Gatto) hervor, die sie noch heute nutzen würde. Im Bezug auf die Bewegungen des Körpers und des Überarbeiten eines Bildes, habe ihr Gatto’s muscle memory geholfen.
Dass Christina’s Vater schwarz ist sieht man ihr nicht an. Und auch wenn wir queer sind, haben wir dies nicht auf der Stirn tätowiert. Christina ist auch das.
Menschen, die uns flüchtig kennenlernen haben ein ganz anderes Bild von uns, als es dem tatsächlichen entspricht. Christina thematisierte eben dies in einem interview für The Cut. Auch, dass sie als Frau, schwarz und queer, nicht den passiven Konsum des Körpers aufrechterhalten wolle, sie es jedoch liebe Körper zu malen.
Ihre Körper sind stark verzerrt, wie wir es aus der Epoche des Manierismus ansatzweise kennen, und sexuell subtil aufgeladen, wie es das 20. Jahrhundert verstärkt aufzubringen wusste.
Vor ein paar Jahren als die „aktuell heißeste Künstlerin Amerikas“ vom Kunstkritiker Jeffrey Deitch benannt, und vom jüngst verstorbenen Schjeldahl als eine geheißen, die ihr Talent zu nutzen wisse, sich der abstrakten Ästhetik bedienen zu können um Fleischeslust zu malen, ist Christina eine, die es gerade in den Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin geschafft hat.
Ich empfehle dieses Ausstellung im 1. Stock. Der Hamburger Bahnhof liegt wunderbar zentral im Herzen Berlins nur 7 Fußminuten vom – sehr attraktiven – Berliner Hauptbahnhof entfernt.
Gefragt, was sie mit ihren Bildern ausdrücken oder erreichen wolle, gibt Christina an, dass sie den Betrachter miteinbeziehe. Dass es in Verbindung der dargestellten Körper die Fragen des Betrachters seien, die er sich selbst stelle, welchen Standpunkt der Identität er für sich selbst habe, und was er über sich weiß und was nicht.
Was für sie selbst die Basis ihrer Arbeiten ausmacht, ist der Frage auf den Grund gehen zu können, was es bedeutet – körperlich – eine gewisse ethnische Zugehörigkeit zu haben, einen Körper, einen Geist der homosexuell sei, und der Standpunkt ihres eigene Wissens und Nichtswissens über ihren Körper und die Themen damit.
Mit starken Bildern ist hier also durchaus Nacktheit gemeint. Keine Koketterie, vielmehr eine Offenlegung, eine Präsentation des unbedeckten Fleisches für den Blick auf die Seele selbst, die eigene Beziehung zum Körper. Vertiefend gefühlt durchaus dadurch möglich, da die bildlich dargestellten Gliedmaßen in die Länge gezerrt sind.
Representative gallery – among others : Hauser & Wirth.
Text & Photos: cj.staiger@gmx.net / artis-cj.com
Und was ich so toll an Berlin finde, wenn ich von Potsdam aus komme:
Auf den Bahnsteigen und in der Stadt wird erfrischend gerannt.
“Ich will diese Bahn noch erreichen”,
“ich muss schnell noch da hin”,
“will das!”
“jetzt!”
Wie in New York. Oder sonstwo.
The universe loves speed! Nicht immer natürlich, doch überwiegend. And so do I.
NFT’s : https://opensea.io/KeepYourDreamJustGiveMeTheMoney
Inspired by Pet Shop Boys’ “Flamboyant“ und Berliner Currywurst & JFK.
Martin Wong – 1946 in Oregon, raised in San Francisco, California – studied and graduated in ceramics at Humboldt State University in 1968. The artist is well-known for depicting political, social and sexual scenographies from the 1970s to 1990s in the United States. He stood out as someone with a very important countercultural voice. In his works he combines United States history with his Chinese background, and social realism to confront it with criticism. His works are often aesthetic and show his interest, talent and knowledge in calligraphy and poetry, too.
While in the earlier years Wong mostly chose subjects like free love, theatrical performance, psychedelic and drugs, for which was San Francisco maybe the perfect choice, city and inspiration during these times, he became increasingly critical of the regime and what can happen behind walls, unseen by the public, in his later years. Wong’s paintings and sculptures often play with queer overtones, refer to homosexual topics, as well as to the abuse of power in this regard, which can be found in prisons and through executive authority for example, and in Wong’s oeuvre again and again.
Interesting and noticeable are also his frequently painted brick house facades, with which he was also able to express whole faces. So closeness and distance seem to be a major theme of his works, when we just find these brick facades as visages, and the sexual demand and force in a relationship of dependence, which due to this had to be based on distance. Actually.
Perceived appearance and abysses show up – and show us – astrology, mythology and, repeatedly, male eroticism, desire and imagination.
During his life, Wong traveled through Europe, India, and Afghanistan. He lived on the West Coast and the East Coast of the United States and died – back in San Francisco – in 1999, from a disease triggered by AIDS.
Representative gallery, among others: Buchholz Gallery. Berlin. Fasanenstraße.
Current exhibition and photography taken at: Institute for Contemporary Art. Berlin.
Art is Painting, Dance, Poetry and Music.
Take three!
Helmut Newton was born in Berlin in 1920. At the age of 12 he purchased his first camera and started to work for a German photographer as he was 16. His family was Jewish and left Germany in 1938. His parents went to Argentina and he made his way through Italy and China to Singapore, where he started working for a local newsmagazine. From Singapore he made it 1940 to Australia where he worked as a truck driver before he opened a studio in fashionable in 1946.
In 1957 he left Australia to move to London as he had already gained a reputation as a fashion photographer and has been published for the Vogue magazine – more than once. Two years later he went back to Australia to stay there for two more years, left again, and finally settled down – with his wife – in Paris after, at the age of 41.
In his later years, Helmut Newton lived in both Los Angeles, California and Monte Carlo.
Newton works are often, (always!), amazingly beautiful, interestingly sexual, mysterious, and may be dramatic as well .. And always – time by time – there occur voices that his photographs are cruel and pornographic, too, or only have to be seen in this way.
I don’t know, but – why not – love to dive and dig deep and relishing in his world of erotic inspired aestheticism, and believe his words, that he considered himself as a feminist who admired and adored strong, triumphant women.
My Job as Photographer is to seduce, amuse and entertain.
Helmut Newton
Photos taken @ Helmut Newton Foundation Berlin
Lipstick or Gloss? Bubblegum or Bonbon? House or Garden? Friendship or Love? And: Unpredictability or Real Passion? So: What’s the Sentence of Your Life?
https://opensea.io/KeepYourDreamJustGiveMeTheMoney
inspired by Drive / Daniel H. Pink