Maria Manuela

Harajuku Girls series: San

2009

Free shipment worldwide Acquired directly from the artist. MariaManuela’s pictures define the contrasts between the culture of the Far East and the western world’s pop-culture at the same time as they bring the two forms together. She derives her inspiration from classic Japanese woodcuts and their motifs of fantastically coiffured, cherry-lipsticked women, dressed in exquisitely patterned kimonos. But what she presents for the viewer are modern young Japanese women in mini-skirts, dancing among the cherry blossom and haiku poems. Her Pop Icons are painted in vinyl on linen canvas – layer upon layer laboriously laid down to achieve the effect of a printed, japanned surface. The lines of the lips, the semi-circular contours of the eyes and the billowing coiffures are expressed against a monochromatic background. Her advertisement-like images combine mystique with unequivocal simplicity, setting a stage for all manner of different facial expressions – melancholy, pensive, jovial. Born in Stockholm in 1959, Maria Manuela Vintilescu’s first serious encounter with art came at the age of seven. It was with fascination that she viewed Niki de Saint-Phalle’s giant sculpture She, then displayed at the Museum of Modern Art in Stockholm. After graduating from the Ecole Française in Stockholm, Maria took courses in painting, drawing and advertising. After ten years as a scene painter in the theatre, she turned to her own art. Her Pop Icons appeared for the first time in 1998. Two years later her Flower Year suite was exhibited in the Stockholm Spring Show at Liljevalch’s Gallery. These twelve female portraits were published in booklet form accompanied by Japanese haiku poetry interpreted by her father, Jan Vintilescu. It was his book that had first introduced this Japanese lyric form to a wider audience of Swedes in 1959. Since the exhibition at Liljevalchs in 2000, her Pop Icons have been exposed at galeries, art fairs and museums in Europe and elsewhere, like in Tokyo Art Factory in Japan, at Villa Tamaris-Centre d’art in la Seyne-sur-Mer and at SOMA Museum of modern Art in Seoul. In much the same way as the haiku moves us by the eloquence of its brevity, MariaManuela seeks through her pictures to convey situations, facial expressions and frames of mind by the most sparing and subtle of means. Her father had sought the same in rendering the haikus of the Japanese poet...

Artwork size: 81 x 119 cm. Frame size: 94 x 132 cm Free shipment worldwide. Acquired directly from the artist. Signed and dated on the verso. “I paint because painting is a private Utopia,” Erró writes of his art. The landscapes in Erró’s work are a constantly changing kaleidoscope of images, multivalent and mysterious, not infrequently controversial, bursting with life – and titillating, too! There is room in his pictures for both paradise and visions of fear. Erró is the alias of Gudmundur Gudmundsson, born on 19 July 1932 in Olafsvik, in north-western Iceland. Since Gudmundur first became enthralled by pictures of works of art in a catalogue from the Museum of Modern Art in New York at the tender age of ten, painting has been his passion and his mission in life. He was accepted into art school in Reykjavik as a 19-year old, subsequently complementing what he had learned there with further studies in Oslo. Erró travelled extensively in Spain, Italy, France and Germany in the 1950s, studying at the Florence Academy of Art in 1954 and at the School of Byzantine Mosaic Art in Ravenna in 1955. It was around this time that he began to exhibit his works, first and foremost in Paris, where he chose to make his home in 1958. During the 1960s he established contact with the Swedish museum director Pontus Hultén, who encouraged him and took him under his wing. Over the years Erró has taken part in hundreds of exhibitions and today his works are on show in museums all over the world, including the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Erró’s pictorial world is peopled by comic-strip characters and autocratic despots alike. Donald Duck with his Daisy, Chip & Dale, and other Walt Disney creations are unselfconsciously juxtaposed with Greek gods and madonnas. Elsewhere the German dictator Adolf Hitler stands shoulder to shoulder with his Iraqi counterpart Saddam Hussein...

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