Tag Archive "al-hansen"

Holiday Books 2012 Part 2

Makoto Azuma and Shunsuke Shiinoki Encyclopedia of Flowers (Lars Muller Publishers, Zurich: 2012) ISBN 978-3-03778=313-9 This extraordinary volume will certainly appeal to connoisseurs of flowers, but should be of equal interest to anyone susceptible to the seductions of color and form. Azuma is considered an haute-couture florist (whatever that may be), but the wonderous photographs, by Shiinoki,  show no actual arrangements as they might exist in life.  All are details in which groupings of flowers are freed from gravity and the need to be grounded in a vase or on a kenzan (flower frog). Some photographs are taken from surprising ... More » »

Al Hansen, freshest of what we saw

The back room at Andrea Rosen Gallery in Chelsea had a show of works by Al Hansen. I hadn’t heard of him, or so I thought, but I loved the works. The room was full of female totems and female-obsessed works. There were fetish/torsos like this one, made of cigarette filters, that were great objects. There were also collage-maps made of cut up Hershey’s chocolate wrappers. The logo was cut up into Her’s and She’s and Yes’s and Hey’s and the whole thing was a weirdly wonderful obsessive playland full of Western-made but African-feeling totems. The guard stopped me from ... More » »