07.23.15

Sighted

A Tumblr Devoted to 80s Art

Here's the thing about the '80s: Some of us actually grew up in them. And for us, seeing a Tumblr full of art from that decade doesn't so much trigger an Internet-age wet dream as a blast of straight-up nostalgia — for the kinds of things we remember hanging in our rich friends' parents living rooms, or on the walls of our orthodontist, or in fancy department-store furniture displays.

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07.14.15

Up and Coming

Dutch Artist Thomas Raat

Unlike most of his contemporaries, Dutch artist Thomas Raat — whose colorful and intricate compositions recall the great European modernist graphic design tradition — isn't particularly concerned with the emotional aspects of art but instead focuses purely on the visual techniques and functionality of the medium. Referencing a deep and thorough understanding of modernist philosophy and analytical thinking, Raat creates large-scale paintings and sculptures that employ the use of symmetry, repetition, and other basic principles of design to create pleasing and visually stimulating compositions.

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07.13.15

Sighted

Michael Wilkinson’s Decay-Inspired Landscape Series

Much of the collage-based work of Glasgow artist Michael Wilkinson, according to his New York gallery Tanya Bonakdar, "examines notions of power and resistance through an intricate web of political, cultural, and personal references" — among them the "histories of art and political radicalism, Marxist theory, popular music, and punk subculture of the 1970s and 1980s" — incorporating things like survival gear and vintage photographs. Yet his new gridded Landscape pieces, which we spotted in Bonakdar's booth at Frieze New York in May, take a more subtle (and visually beautiful) approach.

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07.11.15

Saturday Selects

Week of July 6, 2015

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week, a drool-worthy closet tour, a much-anticipated nail art collaboration, and a colorful update on one of our favorite pieces of furniture, the three-legged stool from Makers & Brothers (above).

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04.27.15

Studio Visit

Samantha Bittman, Artist

It was a couple of years ago that Chicago-based artist Samantha Bittman first captivated us with her intricate, meticulous paintings on woven textiles. We’ve been transfixed by her work ever since, so when we had the chance recently to visit her studio and delve into her process, we jumped. Bittman creates dazzling surfaces of optically challenging patterns that draw you in to reveal greater depths, dimensionality, and unsteadying shifts in perspective. There’s an objective, mathematical precision to her pieces but there’s also a remarkably human warmth — the result, perhaps, of giving in to the parameters created by the loom while also resisting them.

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04.03.15

Up and Coming

Lauren Clay, Artist

Artist Lauren Clay has a background in painting and printmaking, but her work is hardly confined to the two-dimensional plane. Her body of work began as a series of large paintings on paper. But as she progressed, she became more and more interested in the inherent tendencies of paper to curl away from the wall, and she began to explore the third dimension, bridging the gap between painting and sculpture. We can see this in her delicate cut-out grids on marbled acrylic paper, which naturally curl away from the wall, creating a presence in the viewer's space and a dialogue between paper and wall, paper and viewer, and 2D vs. 3D.

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03.19.15

Studio Visit

Nous Vous, Graphic Artists

“It’s about making language visual,” respond the three members of Nous Vous when I ask them about their distinctly French name, which translates to We, You. “Well, it rolls off the tongue nicely, too,” laughs Jay Cover, who founded the London-based trio with William Edmonds and Nicolas Burrows back in 2007. “But aside from that, our external influences tend to be design manifestos where the process is conscious of the audience and collaboration.” We, You — there is a certain anonymity to their practice, reflected also in their European website domain (nousvous.eu), placing the group nowhere specific, perhaps in an effort to avoid defining their collective body of work.

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03.13.15

Sighted

Ivin Ballen, Artist

We love an artist who can successfully blur the line between sculpture and painting, and Brooklyn-based Ivin Ballen is certainly no exception. Upon first viewing his work, you perceive a few colored shapes (some rectilinear, others more organic) haphazardly arranged on a vast backdrop. Upon closer inspection, you begin to notice those colored shapes are an assemblage of found materials, and that, in fact, those found materials are simply just painted casts of the originals.

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02.24.15

Up and Coming

Meet the Baltimore-Based Artist Making Abstract Art from Yoga Mats

Balance balls, dumbbells, pool noodles — is the recent incorporation of exercise equipment into the visual arts part and parcel with normcore or is it something more? The latest adherent to the trend is Baltimore-based artist Alex Ebstein, who works with a variety of materials — most notably yoga mats — but in Ebstein's hands, those basic materials become less trendy and more textural. Her brightly colored canvases resemble something Matisse may have constructed had his cut-out phase occurred during the Memphis movement.

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02.16.15

Sighted

Valentin Dommanget, Artist

Like most visually inclined folks his age, 25-year-old French artist Valentin Dommanget — who studied fashion as an undergrad before receiving his MFA at Central Saint Martins last spring — grew up with a steady diet of internet art. Having internalized a certain digital aesthetic that embraces all things geological and hypercolor, natural yet unnatural, he created a series of paintings that take those virtual influences and represent them through actual real-world handicraft, pairing paint-marbled canvases with torqued stretchers that mimic some kind of Photoshop rotation effect. Pictured above and below are selections from that series, plus other pieces that apply the same techniques to concrete tables, paper books, framed canvases, and crooked canvases that appear balanced atop geometric plywood cutouts.

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01.29.15

Sighted

Elizabeth Atterbury, Artist

While the Maine-based artist Elizabeth Atterbury has done amazing things with just simple shapes cut into paper and steel, lately she's been getting a wee bit more ambitious — building a 3-by-4-foot sandbox in her studio and photographing compositions she's raked into it, or using a bandsaw to carve grill bricks into arcs and zigzags then documenting the crumbly results. Aside from photography — which she studied in school — she also exhibits sculptures in clay and painted wood. You can see them in person now through May 10 at Colby College Art Museum in Waterville, Maine, or pick up a copy of Atterbury's 2013 book with Bodega gallery, "In the Middle, an Oasis."

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12.22.14

Up and Coming

Mathieu Julien and Jin Angdoo of Amateurs

For all its perks — freedom, travel, never having to take off your pajamas — the freelance life has one perpetual drawback: the panic that starts to creep in whenever you're between jobs. Add that to the sense of creative fulfillment that every designer and artist craves, and it's no wonder so many of them start their own projects on the side. For the Paris-based couple Mathieu Julien and Jin Angdoo, whenever they don't have work as a freelance illustrator (Julien) and a film and animation director (Angdoo), they dream up new projects to release under the extra-wide umbrella of their shared endeavor, Amateurs; launched in June, the website comprises projects that are experimental, hand-crafted, and fall somewhere between art and design, like painted tea towels and flags, embroidered sweaters and blankets, plus actual paintings as well. We checked in with the duo to find out more about the collaboration.

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