Art Dallas Archives | Art Dallas Contemporary Art Fair

June 26, 2020 In Art By Hannah Smith for Art Dallas

Richard Caldicott, Sous Les Etoiles Gallery

With a profound sense of method and extreme rigor bases on the direct drive and the precision of gesture, Richard Caldicott approaches the medium of photography as an endless enigma. “Iterations” is a series about overlaying, scaling, repeating, and multiplying. Through the process of duplication, replication and the subtle adjustments of color, his images follow a discernible linear compositional logic. Forms, surfaces and colors are developed according to his experience and vision that invite us to dive into his universe at any moment. Other existing works – from his archive – have been manipulated in a post-photography, post-production experimental way of working. Incidental marks and processes overlap. The artist explores issues of layering, or over-writing, as in a palimpsest, but his starting point is always the hand made method. The sense of recycling echoes Jasper John’s work and his famous sketchbook quote: “Take an object. Do something to it. Do something else to it.” Introducing a new chromatic range, simple in form, yet meticulously focuses and detailed, each work provides a sense of continuity that develops a richness in complexity of space, surface and texture. Reflections and counterpoint structures also create delicate impressions. In “Iterations”, Richard Caldicott reveals once again his jubilant pleasure of exploration and enchanted lyricism of combinations. Since the artist’s acclaimed series featuring Tupperware in the 1990s, Richard Caldicott has continually challenged photographic codes of representation in favor of new aesthetic and symbolic intentions. Employing traditional analog photography methods, Caldicott imbues his minimalist set of components with rich, vibrant color. Richard Caldicott’s work has been acquired in several significant public and private collections, including The David Kronn Collection; Peter C. Ruppert Collection; Museum im Kulturspeicher, Germany; Goss-Michael Foundation, Dallas, TX; Goldman Sachs International, London; Kunstmuseum Bonn, Germany; Sir Elton John Collection / Ann and Jürgen Wilde, Köln; and Fidelity Worldwide Investment, London, among others. His work has been exhibited extensively in solo and group shows, as well as several art fairs, including Art Basel, Photo Miami, Paris Photo, FIAC, The AIPAD Photography Show, and the Venice Biennale. Richard Caldicott (b. 1962) graduated from The Royal College of Art in 1987 and currently lives in London.

http://www.souslesetoilesgallery.net/exhibitions/richard-caldicott2

May 1, 2020 In Art By Hannah Smith for Art Dallas

Artist Arno Elias, Markowicz Fine Art

Arno Elias was born in Paris, France. He is a multi-talented musician, painter, and photographer. Arno Elias is known for his compositions of the globally renowned Buddha Bar music. Through his involvement with UNICEF, Arno composed the music for their worldwide campaign with Latin recording artist, Shakira. In his early music career, as a songwriter and singer in France, Arno is the only artist in the history of Buddha Bar to have composed and produced the first original Buddha Bar album titled, “BUDDHA BAR Nature.” Buddha Bar sold millions of his albums worldwide. From 2001 to 2009, Arno produced and composed some of the most significant Buddha Bar classic hits, such as Amor Amor, El Corazon, and Guide Me. Arno Elias was chosen by Brigitte Bardot to compose special music for her Animal Rights “Brigitte Bardot Foundation”, which was created to help protect animals from abuse. His creative talents did not stop at his prodigious musical career that began at an early age, but continued to his artistic career, leading him into the world of painting and photography.

Studying the European contemporary artists from the 60’s and 70’s and the American pop art movement inspired Arno. Working alongside Jean Paul Gaultier and Mario Testino in the fashion industry further influenced and informed his creative direction. To date, Arno has exhibited in Miami, Atlanta, Chicago, Paris, New York, Las Vegas, Basel, and Los Angeles. His work has been reviewed in The New York Times, PBS Television, U.S.A. Today, NBC, the Miami Herald, Miami Magazine, Florida International, Haute Living, and the Chicago Tribune. His paintings and photographs have been featured in art fairs throughout North America to include Scope Miami, Scope Basel, Art Chicago, San Francisco Art Mrkt, ART MIAMI, as well as the prestigious Art Basel Switzerland.

He was recently commissioned by the St. Regis Hotel in New York City to create two unique works of art for the hotel’s permanent collection. One of which, a mixed media photographic painting of the founder, John Jacob Astor IV, will be prominently featured in the lobby of the prestigious hotel. His artistic sophistication, sense of color and dramatic expression can be seen in his diverse spectrum of artistic creations. In 2007, Arno Elias debuted his contemporary painting collection in the United States in a solo show at Art Features Gallery in the Wynwood District in Miami, Florida and continued shows there for the next few years. PBS produced a documentary piece about Arno that same year showcasing his paintings, his life, and his future plans for solo photographic journeys.

Arno was exhibited from 2008 through 2011 in Miami with several solo shows being mounted for Art Basel Miami. Galerie Protee in Paris on the Rue Seine exhibited his work in 2010 alongside French Masters Soulage and Mathieu. During the same time, Keszler Gallery in New York City showed Arno with Banksy and Peter Beard. He then was also seen at the Besharat Gallery in Atlanta in 2010 through 2011 and Lichtfeld Gallery exhibited Arno Elias’ art during Art Basel in Switzerland in June 2011. His work is also exhibited at Markowicz Fine Art in the Design District in Miami.

https://markowiczfineart.com/

April 10, 2020 In Art By Hannah Smith for Art Dallas

Artist Jamie Adams, Zolla / Lieberman Gallery

“My work functions as a kind of personal memoir, drawing from memory, desire, and dreaming. It’s my response to life, to bear witness, while operating somewhere between private confession and public entertainment. I borrow images from my own personal stash—images of family and friends, cinematic/TV culture from the 1950s and 60s, or other paintings, photos, vintage books. For the last decade in particular the work has mixed aspects of painting with cinema—its personae, projective nature or use of montage, etc… as a way to suggest some kind of complication or disturbance.”

Jamie often gives himself projects. He works similar to how a director works by hiring actors, a crew, etc. His most recent work, Niagara Series, draws from an array of sources including American Luminist and The Technicolor films of the 1950s. He draws aspects of his favorite films from that period into his work, such as Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows, Hathaway’s Niagara, and Leone’s Once Upon A Time in the West. From a contemporary perspective Technicolor’s overly saturated color in those films seems to embody the anxieties of postwar trauma, and societies striving for conformity, prosperity, peace. In Hathaway’s film Niagara, he essentially takes the ‘Honeymoon Capital of the World’ and turns it into a crime scene. Niagara Falls, recognized as one of the grand, natural wonders on the American landscape, and elevated to iconic status through a multitude of luminous American paintings by Church, Bierstadt, Inness, and others, is transformed into what Adams believes to be the ‘monster’ in the film—the American equivalent to Japan’s Godzilla– a more sublime sense of catastrophe or dread…much more palatable for an American audience.

The earlier jeannie series (2005-2012), was a group of black and white paintings based on a black and white film– Jean-Luc Godard’s French new wave films, Breathless, released around 1960. “I was initially drawn to Jean Seberg’s character in the film, and the wonderful ambient light in her bedroom apartment where monochromatic folds of flesh, and bed sheets and cotton clothing merged into one continuous surface. Jeannie kept changing though. For a while she was everything to me—the reason to make the next painting. It’s because she seemed an empty vessel that I thought I could fill with my own ideas, memories, wishes. And she could play any role–the surrogate, model-mother, furtive lover, ephebic male, the muse, youth…the artist. At the time I wanted to belong to this filmic space; to settle down, set up shop and make something. Initially the painting’s black and white surfaces were suggestive of early film technologies or a painting’s under layer of grisaille. The painted figures, with their curvaceous volumes, additionally began to take on the appearance of Neo-Classical sculpture, semblances of marble statuary.”

Jamie creates paintings based on what he wants to see. For him, it is always a negotiation between idea, the visual experience, and manipulating paint matter. While many of his paintings begin in an organized fashion, they usually slip into chaos. Some characters that begin as one gender sometimes end up burlesquing another; others added are eliminated; scenes come and go. Characters are made to ‘fit’ into the painting. “I construct them in relation to the frame and other elements within it, and as a story reveals itself. And certain aspects of the body may become accentuated in order to highlight particular qualities: a torque of the hip, iridescence of flesh, a hand gesture, attenuation of the sternal notch or canopy of the chin, etc…I suppose this is my theatrical experiences coming into play….How the painting at a certain point needs to assert itself, make its own demands, project to its own audience. One move affects the need for another and then another and so on.”

https://www.zollaliebermangallery.com/

February 19, 2020 In Art By Hannah Smith for Art Dallas

Artist Deborah Butterfield, Greg Kucera Gallery

Along with her artist-husband John Buck, Deborah Butterfield divides her time between a farm in Montana, and studio space in Hawaii. She is known for her sculptures of horses made from found objects, like metal, and especially pieces of wood. Butterfield’s work has been exhibited widely and there is demand among art collectors for her sculptures. One of her most prestigious galleries is the Greg Kucera Gallery in Seattle, Washington.

Bronze hasn’t always been Butterfield’s choice of materials. In fact, her earliest works from the mid-1970s were made from sticks and natural detritus gathered on her property in Montana. She explains: “The materials and images were meant to suggest that the horses were both figures and ground, merging external world with the subject. I first used the horse images as a metaphorical substitute for myself–it was a way of doing a self-portrait one step removed from the specificity of Deborah Butterfield.” She began building full-size horses from metal salvaged from scrap yards in the early 1980s. She would sculpt a piece using metal, wood, and other materials fastened together with wire, then photograph the piece from all angles so as to be able to reassemble the piece in metal.

Still using her found object process today, it’s easy to see that the unevenly rusted surface of the found metal work suggests the coloring of types of horses—an appaloosa, chestnut or perhaps a dapple-gray. Butterfield is clearly not obsessed with replicating any aspect of the horse specifically, but in any one of the sculptures, the architectural structure, contour, and mass of the horse are readily apparent. Often, the weighty and crumpled metal pieces used for the shoulders and rump suggest powerful muscles. Carefully choosing from her scrap yard of parts and pieces, she suggests some of the most delicate and surprising aspects of the horse. A massive metal fire escape was twisted into a powerful stallion in a large work that is part of the collection of the Seattle Art Museum. In another work, the curve of an industrial part suggests the neck and mane of the horse in a most uncanny way.

The artist collects metal from wrecked cars, industrial salvage yards, demolished buildings and construction sites and combines them in her Montana studio to create these equine sculptures. Some of the works have utilized three-dimensional letters scavenged from commercial signage bringing an unexpected new element into play. Butterfield has also recently used painted metal from flat signage. Occasionally, recognizable elements such as a child’s tricycle can still be identified within the tangled assemblage of metal parts.

In constructing her horses Butterfield tries to alter the found shape of the metal pieces as little as possible. The separate parts are not often individually important but gain an elegant context in the artist’s ability to meld them into such a suggestive sculpture. She has said that her horses are intended to make a feminist statement. “I wanted to do these big, beautiful mares that were as strong and imposing as stallions but capable of creation and nourishing life. It was a very personal feminist statement.”

Butterfield also creates small sculptures, measuring roughly three feet tall by four feet in length, a size that the artist relates to ancient Chinese ceramic sculptures of the Tang Dynasty. They are not intended to be seen as colts or as baby horses, but as miniatures relating to artworks depicting horses. Butterfield has never been interested in the naturalistic depiction of horses in the common sense of realism in the art world. She prefers that her small works be viewed on pedestals to alleviate any confusion as to her intention regarding the abstract nature of her sculpture.

With works in museums and private collections across the country and around the world, Deborah Butterfield’s work is recognizable. See her most recent works to add to your collection at Art Dallas 2020 in the Greg Kucera Gallery Booth, April 16-19, 2020, at Dallas Market Hall in the Dallas Market Center.

https://gregkucera.com/butterfield_description.htm

Muriel Guepin Gallery - Isabelle-Menin_Rome-ou-la-tentation

February 17, 2020 In Art By Hannah Smith for Art Dallas

Artist Isabelle Menin, Muriel Guepin Gallery NYC

Belgian photographer Isabelle Menin creates portraits of flowers that are not only gorgeous in form and color, but also uniquely expressive. Fresh blossoms and withering blooms melt into each other in dreamy washes of color and hazy drips and swirls. Hues and flowers are reflected in pools of water, as forms disintegrate and reappear in trickles and indistinct glimmers of light. The resulting images are breathtaking interplays of light and shadow, form and reflections, and breathtaking colors and textures.

Looking at Menin’s vibrant and organic work, it isn’t surprising to learn that she has a background in painting. After exploring working with paint while developing a career as a graphic designer for over a decade, the artist turned to digital photography. Taking pictures, scanning pieces of nature, she constantly plays with textures and colors, transforming them, mixing them, in order to give shape to a fictional nature, dense and flamboyant at the same time. With rich colors, bold textures, and a stunning abstract quality, her creations look more like masterful illustrations and paintings than conventional photographs.

The complex outcome of every artwork is due to the digital manipulation that Menin loves using to transform and blend her images in order to create her beautifully moody works. As she explains: “Going digital allowed me to push back my limits, to find a much wider sphere of activity where things tied up fluidly and were reversible. I create a space that unfolds through the depth I get by accumulating layers, by light, by transparency and opacity; I put elements together that create a kind of fake landscape, I photograph and then manipulate them in order to twist them and show the sometimes hidden sides.”

Menin calls her work “inland photographs and disordered landscapes” in reference to the strange complexity of nature, which reminds her of human complexity. She says, “The uncontrolled forces, the shapes’ complexity, the inter-weavings and the synergy of the elements, they all look to me like a mirror of human spirit. We are not straight lines, we are like nature, a very large network of interferences that work together to produce something which sometimes looks accomplished and then gets destroyed in a perpetual coming and going between order and disorder.”

In the past five years, Isabelle Menin has had numerous exhibitions in Europe and internationally, both at art fairs and museums. Isabelle Menin lives and works in Brussels, Belgium, and is represented by the Muriel Guépin Gallery.

http://www.murielguepingallery.com/artists/isabelle-menin

February 14, 2020 In Art By Hannah Smith for Art Dallas

Artist Daniel Sprick, MM Fine Art

Colorado artist, Daniel Sprick’s subjects range from extraordinarily realistic portraits to hauntingly contemplative still lifes. His paintings, while reminiscent of the Dutch and Flemish tradition, are wholly contemporary, subtly blurring the line between realism and abstraction. His paintings feature a range of subjects, from still lifes of flowers and unlikely assortments of objects to interiors and urban and pastoral scenes. A diverse range of men, women, and youth populate his portraits and figurative works; taken together, they reflect a rich and encompassing view of humanity. The meticulous representation of everyday objects and stirring interpretation of the human form provide viewers a new way to look at the world.

As Timothy J. Standring, exhibition curator and Gates Foundation Curator at the Denver Art Museum explains Sprick’s work: “Upon first glance, viewers might think Daniel’s works are photographs because of their stunningly realistic elements. However, the longer we look at one of his paintings, the more we become aware that they are anything but a part of our world. We encounter Sprick’s paintings not so much as statements, but more as experiences, whereby we engage deeply with his creativity.”

Born in 1953 in Little Rock, Arkansas, Sprick currently lives and works in Denver, CO. Sprick and his work have been the subject of museum shows, including the Museum of Outdoor Art in Englewood, Colorado; the Hunter Museum of Art, Chattanooga, Tennessee; the Evansville Museum of Art and Science, Indiana; and the Denver Art Museum. Sprick’s work is represented in numerous public collections, among them the Arkansas Art Center, Little Rock; the Denver Art Museum; and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C. An articulate spokesman about the nature of art and his own work, Sprick is the subject of a recently released PBS documentary.

Daniel Sprick is represented by MM Fine Art in Southampton, New York.

http://www.mmfineart.com/sprick-daniel.html