Day one!
Day one!
The surreal and disturbing sculptures by Yui Ishibari
Yui Ishibari is a japanese artist who works with paintings and sculptures, but her main focus is her sculptures. Ishibari creates disturbing and bizarre art pieces, portraying children taken by plants, in a grotesque fusion of body, leaves, branches and roots. Ishibari’s sculptures are made from a wide range of materials, from resin, steel wires, cloth, stone powder cray and wood. The final pieces are surreal figures, hopeless against the forces of nature, figures who accepted their cruel destiny, a metaphor for nature’s power over the man.
Amazing art by Takato Yamamoto
The dark, gothic and surreal paintings by Yaroslav Gerzhedovich
Russian artist Yaroslav Gerzhedovich mixes photography, digital post-production (photoshop) and paintwork to create his fantastic and dark art pieces. In this post, let’s focus on his paintings.
It doesn’t matter if they are photo-based or painting-based. Gerzhedovich’s illustrations are dark and gothic. They seem extracted from dark corners of the worst nightmares, where there is barely a thin light, where invisible eyes are constantly and secretly watching you, where gods or other ancient beigns play carelessly with the life of mortals, generally driving them crazy.
Appreciate ahe dark, gothic and surreal paintings by Yaroslav Gerzhedovich:
Zdzislaw beksinki
“It misses the point to ask me what scenes in my paintings ‘mean’. Simply, I do not know, myself. Moreover, I am not at all interested in knowing.”–Zdzislaw Beksinski
Zdzislaw Beksinski was born in Poland in the town of Sanok near the Carpathians Mountains in 1929. After a childhood was spent during the Second World War, Beksinski went on to university where he studied architecture in Cracow. Subsequent to this education he spent several years as a construction site supervisor, a job he hated, frought with pressures and countless boring details. He would soon throw himself into the arts. In 1958, Beksinski began to gain critical praise for his photography, and later went on to drawing. His highly detailed drawings are often quite large, and may remind some of the works of Ernst Fuchs in their intricate, and nearly obsessive rendering.
Beksinski eventually threw himself into painting with a passion, and worked constantly, always to the strains of classical music. He soon became the leading figure in contemporary Polish art.
Beksinski and his family moved to Warsaw in 1977. The artist had many exhibitions throughout his native Poland and Europe. He rarely attended any of them. Bekinski’s art hangs in the National Museums Warsaw, Sanok, Krakow, Poznan, and the Goteborgs Art Museum in Sweden. Much of his art is displayed in the Sanok Museum of art in his native city.
“I have quite simply been trying, from the very beginning, to paint beautiful paintings.”
Drawings from the 1960s
Beksinki’s remarkable drawings possess a strength in both mood and subject matter. Like his later paintings, they are intensely haunting and mysterious. The drawings, particularly, project a nightmarish quality reminiscent of the surrealist, Bohemian master, Alfred Kubin.
“I react strongly to images that have no obvious answer to their mysteries. If there is a key to their construction, they are simply illustration.”
Paintings from the 1970s
Beksinski began painting in oils on masonite around the year 1970. His ability to manipulate the effects of light quickly became a hallmark of his work, and can only be compared with the renown abilities of William Turner. Beksinski’s paintings aremasterfully rendered, monumental enigmans. One thing they share is an aesthetic of beauty so potent that it overpowers any desperate nature of the given subject matter, as is similarly the case with Swiss artist, H.R. Giger. The paintings as a whole are wonderfully dark, and allow the viewer to interperet them as they will, as they will certainly get no help from this particular artist. As Magritte said: “The purpose of art is mystery.”
“The blend of vivid colors in relation to other more subdued colors in my paintings is like a musical theme. As in a symphony, a motif occurs, is blurred, comes back in crescendo, is finally accentuated and becomes pure and complete.”
Paintings from the 1980s
“Meaning is meaningless to me. I do not care for symbolism and I paint what I paint without medatating on a story.”
Paintings and Computer Graphics from the 1990s: Beksniski’s paintings have grown less representational over the years and now seem almost abstract in nature. Color and texture and now the proncipal themes in themselves. Not so odd, as the artist began his career in the abstract realm. His recent computer art, however, continues the lineage of fantastic realism, and the artist never allows the technology to get in the way of that he is attempting to convey creatively.
Beksinski was murdered in February of 2005, during a robbery attempt at his flat in Warsaw. He will be remembered as a brilliant artist, and by those who knew him, as a docile man with a profound wit and keen sense of the human condition. I cherish the time we spent corresponding as friends, self-aware neurotics who could not wait to try and top the other. What a remarkeble piece of work he was. A bit of Woody Allen, a dash of Oscar Wilde for spice, and brushes of Francisco Goya and William Turner. – James Cowan
Necropants
The Strandagaldur Museum of Icelandic Sorcery & Witchcraft in Holmavik tells the story of seventeen people burned at the stake in the 17th century for occult practices. The museum’s claim to fame is an exhibit showcasing the macabre legend of Necropants, or nábrók.
According to legend, necropants could produce an endless flow of coins if done correctly.
To begin with, one would need to get permission from a living man to use his skin upon his death. After burial, the sorcerer would then have to dig up the body and skin it in one piece from the waist down. A coin stolen from a poor widow must then be placed in the scrotum, along with a magic sign called nábrókarstafur scrawled on paper.
Once worn, the scrotum of the necropants would never empty of coins so long as the original coin remains.
Day 4/365
The weird and wonderful world of Walter Potter
In addition to preserving and posing each creature he used, Potter also painstakingly crafted each little implement and prop from old wooden cigar boxes, and placed them against painted back drops often reminiscent of the local area.
Although originally made for his own amusement, his macabre scenes quickly grew in popularity and he was encouraged to open his own museum in 1861, in the summer-house of the pub his family owned. His collection of anthropomorphic taxidermy grew over the years, supplemented by examples of physically deformed animals that he collected from local farmers.
Eventually his curious menagerie expanded into a full museum known as “Mr Potter’s Museum of Curiosities”, a must-see attraction which turned the village of Bramber into a thriving tourist destination for many years. When Walter Potter died in 1918 the museum supposedly contained 10,000 specimens, but the fashion for such morbid curiosities had already begun to wane. Remarkably, however, the museum didn’t close until the 1970s, when it was sold by his heirs and moved to various locations in Britain until it ended up at the Jamaica Inn in Cornwall. There it stayed until 2003, when the contents were auctioned off to individual collectors around the world, sadly separating the strange collection for good. Damien Hirst, himself a dabbler in the dark arts of taxidermy, notoriously offered £1 million to keep Potter’s collection together at the time, but his bid was apparently rejected by the auction house.
Despite the scattering of his collection, interest in Walter Potter and his remarkable anthropomorphic dioramas has certainly not faded. The internet has helped govern a revival in interest in curious collections and sensibilities by exposing new audiences to these sorts of obscure artifacts and hidden histories. The internet also enables individuals to view many of Potter’s creations in one place, helping it to retain some semblance of a cohesive collection. Most recently, a significant number of Potter’s works were even reunited from private collections in an exhibition curated by Sir Peter Blake at the Museum of Everything in London in 2010.
Pat Morris, a scholar on the history of taxidermy, has observed that Potter’s taxidermy has now become an internationally famous icon of Victorian whimsy. This, I think, is a key reason why Potter’s collections have inspired such a renewed sense of curiosity in recent years. Although his created world where kittens play croquet and squirrels drink port is indeed a bizarre sight, to contemporary eyes the truly curious thing about it is that this was once an acceptable form of museum display, a respectable pastime, and a delightful tourist destination. In an age of the slick, white-walled, politically-correct, ethically-meticulous, compulsively-edifying modern museum, it is the anachronistic sensibility of the bizarre dioramas that is so compelling to a contemporary audience.
Lee Bul
Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan
Lee Bul: From Me, Belongs to You Only
New works made especially for this show
The exhibition subtitle, “From Me, Belongs to You Only,” is a message to society in general but it also demonstrates Lee’s stance of emphasizing the personal relations and emotions of individuals, which tend to be overrun by the waves of political and social change. The phrase is rich with the suggestion that we should always be conscious of the relationship between the whole and the individual. We can observe same attitude in a new work made especially for this show, which will be exhibited at the end of the exhibition.
Memento Mori 