Recent UArts graduate Heet Lee had her first solo museum show in Leipzig, Germany earlier this month and Artblog correspondent Olivia Jia, who visited her friend’s exhibition, tells us about it. Lee’s energetic and aggressive compositions draw imagery from a dizzying array of sources, both public and private.
Read MoreNearly any contemporary art excursion around Philadelphia in 2016 is sure to yield a wide range of styles and spectacles, but one persistent–if scruffy–thread is certainly the DIY flavor of many Philly-based artists’ work. At Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery’s exhibit Circa 1995, this commonality is not merely present, it is represented in local art-historical context through objects crafted some twenty years ago. This juncture in Philadelphia’s visual culture would help give rise not only to the ongoing careers of the artists participating in this show, but to a distinctive artist-run flavor that persists in Philly to this day.
Read MoreAlthough the festival was put together almost on a whim last year—Settle and her artistic director Cesar Alvarez were seeking a way to use an empty Merriam Theater for two weeks—it became an instant success.
Read MoreTyler Kline is both metaphysical in his thinking and materials-focused in his making. The two go very well together in works whose subject deals with time going forward and back and realms from the primordial to the digital.
Read MoreThe artist’s choice of material makes the nature of tapestries a metaphor for man’s own nature, in which there is a struggle between control and spontaneity, the sacred and profane. The skilled art of creating a flokati rug is paired with Betbeze’s destruction of it, through both chemical processes (burning with fire and acid) and the careful act of sewing. The role of the artist is to create, but it is also to destroy the limits of what defines their medium. These paintings do precisely that, leaving the wall on which they are hung to spread at the feet of the viewer, the surface of fur and fiber a study in color and texture. Paired with the small, blackened sculpture, there is reverence to the elements as well as a mastery of them.
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