Friday, December 12

Arvo Pärt


Arvo Pärt (born 11 September 1935 in Paide, Estonia), (IPA: [ˈɑr̺vɔ ˈpær̺t]) is Estonia's most renowned composer, working in a minimalist style that employs tintinnabulation and hypnotic repetitions that is also influenced by the intellectual counterpoint elements of European jazz, but fits a European-American post-modernism rather than an example of so-called world music.
Continuing struggles with Soviet officials led him to emigrate in 1980 with his wife and their two sons. Pärt lived first in Vienna, Austria, where he took Austrian citizenship, and then he re-located to Berlin, Germany where he still lives.

www.arvopart.info







Sunday, December 7

Ryoichi Kurokawa


Japanese audiovisual artist. His works take on multiple forms such as screening works, recordings, installation and live performance. Kurokawa composes time based sculpture with digital generated materials and field recorded sources, and the minimal and the complexities coexist there. Kurokawa accepts sound and imagery as a unit not as separately, and constructs very exquisite and precise computer based works with the audiovisual language. That shortens mutual distance, the reciprocity and the synchronization of sound and visual composition. He also performed live-visual for musicians such as HUMAN AUDIO SPONGE(ex.YMO: Sketch Show + Ryuichi Sakamoto). In recent years, Kurokawa is invited to numerous noted international festivals and museums in Europe, US and Asia including TATE MODERN[UK], ARS ELECTRONICA[AT], Shanghai eARTS[CN], MUTEK[CA], TodaysArt[NL] and SONAR[ES] for exhibition, screening or audiovisual concert, and he continues to be an active presence on the international stage.

www.ryoichikurokawa.com







Thursday, November 27

Dumb Type

Founded in 1984, the artist collective Dumb Type is based in Kyoto, Japan.
Members are trained in varied disciplines, including visual arts, theatre, dance, architecture, music composition and computer programming. Their work ranges across such diverse media as art exhibitions, performances, audiovisuals and publications.
Dumb Type is known for portraying a dark, cynical, and humorous world in which technology is a way of life--if not necessarily a welcome one. In a 1990 interview in High Performance, the late Teiji Furuhashi, one of Dumb Type's founding members, described their work as political in nature. "Something Japanese theater never does. Japanese audiences don't want to see that. They want to avoid it. They just want entertainment. Yes, I think we should always have a political view. We should represent that this is Japan." Notable in a country plagued by political apathy, the group has played the unpopular role of AIDS activist, organizing symposia and other events, motivated in part by the fact that Furuhashi died of AIDS in 1995.
While based in Kyoto, Japan's ancient capital, Dumb Type is oriented more to the global than the local, the contemporary over the traditional. Dumb Type members claim that Japanese art movements have had little influence on their work. Furuhashi explained that the core group--Furuhashi, Toru Koyamada, Yukihiro Hozumi, Shiro Takatani, Takayuki Fujimoto and Hiromasa Tomari--began working together in 1982, while still students at Kyoto University of the Arts. "We were frustrated artists, and wanted to start creating something new with our skills. Most of the time we spent discussing society or whatever, not specific art things. When someone had an idea it would be presented on a piece of paper. If the group was interested, we made it come true. At first the idea would be really open, then gradually it became something very specific. In that way, we're really democratic. Dumb Type is a collaborative group; we don't want a king."
Their work has been exhibited and performed at notable venues internationally.

www.dumbtype.com







Thursday, September 4

Donald Judd


Donald Clarence Judd (June 3, 1928 - February 12, 1994) was a minimalist artist (a term he stridently disavowed). In his work, Judd sought autonomy and clarity for the constructed object and the space created by it, ultimately achieving a rigorously democratic presentation without compositional hierarchy. It created an outpouring of seemingly effervescent structure without the rigor associated with minimalism proper.

www.juddfoundation.org







Wednesday, August 20

Stanley Donwood


Stanley Donwood is the pen name of English writer and artist Dan Rickwood. He is probably best known for his close association with the British rock group Radiohead, having created all their album and poster art since the My Iron Lung EP (1994). Since 1996, he has also collaborated with Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke and others on the band's websites, and appeared in the occasional band webcast and the 2001 Grammy Award ceremony.

www.slowlydownward.com







Tuesday, August 5

M.C. Hesher


Maurits Cornelis Escher (June 17, 1898 – March 27, 1972), usually referred to as M. C. Escher (IPA: ['ɛsxəɾ]), was a Dutch graphic artist. He is known for his often mathematically inspired woodcuts, lithographs and mezzotints. These feature impossible constructions, explorations of infinity, architecture and tessellations.

www.mcescher.com







Wednesday, July 30

Robert Rauschenberg


Robert Rauschenberg (born Milton Ernst Rauschenberg; October 22, 1925 – May 12, 2008) was an American artist who came to prominence in the 1950s transition from Abstract Expressionism to Pop Art.
Rauschenberg is perhaps most famous for his "Combines" of the 1950s, in which non-traditional materials and objects were employed in innovative combinations. While the Combines are both painting and sculpture, Rauschenberg has also worked with photography, printmaking, papermaking, and performance. Rauschenberg had a tendency to pick up the trash that interested him on the streets of New York City and bringing it back to his studio to use it in his works. He claimed he "wanted something other than what I could make myself and I wanted to use the surprise and the collectiveness and the generosity of finding surprises. And if it wasn't a surprise at first, by the time I got through with it, it was. So the object itself was changed by its context and therefore it became a new thing."
In 1953, Rauschenberg famously erased a drawing by de Kooning. In 1964 Rauschenberg was the first American artist to win the Grand Prize at the Venice Biennale (Mark Tobey and James Whistler had previously won the Painting Prize). Since then he enjoyed a rare degree of institutional support. Rauschenberg lived and worked in New York City and on Captiva Island, Florida until his death on May 12, 2008, from heart failure.

www.guggenheimcollection.org/site/artist_bio_133.html







Tuesday, July 29

Mark Rothko


Mark Rothko, born Marcus Rothkowitz (Latvian: Marks Rotko; September 25, 1903–February 25, 1970), was a Latvian-born Jewish American painter and printmaker who is classified as an abstract expressionist, although he rejected not only the label but even being called an abstract painter.

www.nga.gov/feature/rothko







Thursday, July 24

Hiroshi Sugimoto


Hiroshi Sugimoto (杉本博司, Sugimoto Hiroshi), born on February 23, 1948, is a Japanese photographer currently dividing his time between Tokyo, Japan and New York City, USA. His catalog is made up of a number of series, each having a distinct theme and similar attributes.

www.sugimotohiroshi.com