Koen van den Broek

"Flatliners" Koen van den Broek

2019

Koen van den Broek (*1973 in Bree, Belgium) graduated at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp. Before, he had studied at the Academy of Visual ...

Christof Mascher (*1979 in Hannover, lives and works in Braunschweig) studied at the University of Art Braunschweig and graduated in 2009 as a Master Student of Walter Dahn...

Christof Mascher studied at the University of Art Braunschweig and graduated in 2009 as a Master Student of Walter Dahn. Like his famous teacher, he is foc...

Christof Mascher studied at the University of Art Braunschweig and graduated in 2009 as a Master Student of Walter Dahn. Like his teacher, he is focusing o...

Cody Choi (*1961 in Seoul, where he lives and works) has been an artist and cultural theorist since the 1980s and since he flew from Korea to arrive in Los Angeles as an immigrant. He studied at CalArts with Mike Kelley and he was good friends with John Baldessari. As an artist in the US he has been exploring the cultural identity and relationships of authority in contemporary society. His paintings, sculptures, and installation works have focused on the clashes between the diverse cultures of our contemporary age, as well as hybrid cultures, and the endless newly-created social phenomena as a result. Having started his career in the United States, Choi experienced chaos and frustration in the conflicting ideas of the rational and emotional, visual and conceptual art, commercial galleries and art works, and the American and Korean culture. Based on his frustration, Choi‘s work has focused on the subject of finding the alien Asian identity in the American society. While such confusion and anxiety was a burden of suffering for the artist, he began to recognize them as beautiful experiences, which allowed him to discover broader and deeper meanings and to nurture his thoughts. Choi represented Korea at the Venice Biennial 2017. His retrospective „Cody Choi. Culture Cuts“ – first shown at Kunsthalle Düsseldorf (s) and the Musée d‘Art Moderne de Marseille (s) – was traveling major art museums and institutions throughout Europe, such as the University of Malaga, Spain and Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz, Germany, in Summer 2017. His work has been shown in numerous solo and group exhibitions such as „The Thinker“ at Deitch Projects in New York (s), „L‘ART AU CORPS: le corps exposé de Man Ray à nos jours“ at Musée d’Art Contemporain in Marseille (g), Busan Biennale (G), „A tribute to Mike Kelley“ at MOCA Los Angeles (g), Gwangju Biennale (g), Arko Art Center in Seoul (s), or Today Art Museum, Beijing (s). With the work „Cheesakhwa – Color Painting Colon 445“ he is offering us a plethora of different painting modes in one painting: the work shows us painted letters that denominate colors. These colors are all wrong in the sense of: the color the words signify is not the color in which they have been painted. Thus, a contradiction between what we read (and understand) and the written words that we see, is created. With these colored words and letters, Choi is reffering to Joseph Kosuth and his neon-pieces. However, in contrast to Kosuth’s practice, where the neon sentences described precisely what could be seen (for instance in the work “Four Colors Four Words”, which consisted of four neon words in four different colors), Choi is counteracting against this “logic”. In addition to the painted letters, we see streaks and patches of color that let us think of Jackson Pollock or rather recent abstract works (one can think of painters like Oscar Murillo, David Ostrowski, Lucien Smith...

Cody Choi (*1961 in Seoul, where he lives and works) has been an artist and cultural theorist since the 1980s and since he flew, in his early twenties, from Korea to the USA, where he arrived in Los Angeles as an immigrant. He studied at CalArts with Mike Kelley and he was good friends with John Baldessari. As an artist in the US he has been exploring the cultural identity and relationships of authority in contemporary society. His paintings, sculptures, and installation works have focused on the clashes between the diverse cultures of our contemporary age, as well as hybrid cultures, and the endless newly-created social phenomena as a result. Having started his career in the United States, Choi experienced chaos and frustration in the conflicting ideas of the rational and emotional, visual and conceptual art, commercial galleries and art works, and the American and Korean culture. Based on his frustration, Choi‘s work has focused on the subject of finding the alien Asian identity in the American society. While such confusion and anxiety was a burden of suffering for the artist, he began to recognize them as beautiful experiences, which allowed him to discover broader and deeper meanings and to nurture his thoughts. Choi represented Korea at the Venice Biennial in 2017. His retrospective „Cody Choi. Culture Cuts“ – first shown at Kunsthalle Düsseldorf (s) and the Musée d‘Art Moderne de Marseille (s) – was traveling major art museums and institutions throughout Europe, such as the University of Malaga, Spain and Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz, Germany, in Summer 2017. His work has been shown in numerous solo and group exhibitions such as „The Thinker“ at Deitch Projects in New York (s), „L‘ART AU CORPS: le corps exposé de Man Ray à nos jours“ at Musée d’Art Contemporain in Marseille (g), Busan Biennale (G), „A tribute to Mike Kelley“ at MOCA Los Angeles (g), Gwangju Biennale (g), Arko Art Center in Seoul (s), or Today Art Museum, Beijing (s). The painting „Episteme Sabotage – Corny Island“ (the canvas: 162 x 130 cm; the total work: 192 x 130 cm) is part of a group of works that all have the main title “Episteme Sabotage” to which a subtitle is added. They all question or deconstruct the process of “Episteme” from an Asian-Eastern perspective, that is: the usual knowledge (understanding of “objective truths”) that we think we have. For these paintings, Choi appropriated selected works of art that belong to the widely known pieces of art history in our Western societies (Choi painted after well-known master-works by Eduard Manet ['Olympia'], Henri Matisse ['La Danse'], Edvard Munch ['The Cry'], Gerhard Richter [‘Toilet Paper’] etc). In the specific case of „Episteme Sabotage – Corny Island“ he chose the 1937...

Jamel Akib Born in Leigh-on-sea, Essex in 1965 to English and Malaysian parents, Jamel moved to North Borneo at the age of five. At thirteen he returned to England to pursue his edu...

Jamel Akib Born in Leigh-on-sea, Essex in 1965 to English and Malaysian parents, Jamel moved to North Borneo at the age of five. At thirteen he returned to England to pursue his edu...

Blue Statue, 2020 "For Blackburn, the Western’s heroic drama, good-versus-evil narrative, and assertive landscape are challenges to face in her work. These aspects of film can overwhelm a painting, thus distancing the viewer from the art. She wants the art to be dominant; “Painting wins,” she declares. She finds this happens when a painting possesses what she terms “classical balance.” By this the artist means that everything is where it needs to be compositionally—nothing can be changed—and “the whole can be seen at once.” Linda Blackburn...

Bisti Wash, 2020 "For Blackburn, the Western’s heroic drama, good-versus-evil narrative, and assertive landscape are challenges to face in her work. These aspects of film can overwhelm a painting, thus distancing the viewer from the art. She wants the art to be dominant; “Painting wins,” she declares. She finds this happens when a painting possesses what she terms “classical balance.” By this the artist means that everything is where it needs to be compositionally—nothing can be changed—and “the whole can be seen at once.” Linda Blackburn...

I am not afraid to define it as a metaphysical painting, - says Angelo Crespi - and right in the suffix "beyond" (in Greek "meta") also of the title "Oltremare" the intent to climb over the wall of the sensible and the real is revealed. There is another vein to which the new paintings of Nahmad refer and it is that of Romanticism, in the strong idea that art should represent the sublime, not the beautiful. The skies like John Constable, thick with purplish blue clouds (such as "Rainstorm over the Sea" of 1828 which anticipates by a century modernity), the stormy seas like William Turner, give the viewer the idea of infinity and vastness of nature compared to the finitude and misery of the human. If Caspar Friedrich...

Zhang Lili oil paint on canvas 30 x 40cm dated 2019 Zhang lili was born in Hunan, China. She received her MA from Central Academy of Fine Arts in China in 1996.