Werner Drewes

Bauhaus Abstract Color Woodcut Mechanical Ballet Woodblock Print

1978

Yasuhide Kobashi (古橋 矢須秀 Kobashi Yasuhide, 1931–2003) was a Japanese woodblock print artist, painter, sculptor and stage designer. He was born in Kojima in Okayama Prefecture. His father was a ceramic clay artist and head of the Kyoto Industrial Craft Company. Kobashi learned printmaking from the sōsaku hanga (creative prints) master Unichi Hiratsuka (1895–1997). In 1955, Kobashi graduated from the Kyoto College of Crafts and Textiles, and in 1959, he moved to New York City. At first he was sponsored by Lincoln Kirstein of the New York City Ballet, who had visited his studio in Kyoto and commissioned a number of works from him. Elaine De Kooning, art critic and wife of influential Abstract Expressionist Willem De Kooning recommended Kobashi to the Allan Stone Gallery, He would continue to work with this gallery for more than 30 years. When Kobashi moved to New York in 1959, many American intellectuals and artists were eager to learn about Japan. Among the early influences to reach a wide cross section of American society was Suzuki Daisetsu's (1870-1966) Introduction to Zen Buddhism, published in English in 1949 with a preface by the noted psychologist Carl Jung. Nelson Rockefeller (governor of New York and later vice-president) was Kobashi's patron, and acquired one of the artist's sculptures for the New York State Executive Mansion in Albany. As a young man he was exposed to a wide range of arts, including sculpture, stage design, carpentry, stone cutting, ceramics, calligraphy, painting, and furniture design. Most notably, he studied woodblock printmaking under Hiratsuka Unichi (1895-1997), one of the leading innovators in the Creative Print (ssaku-hanga) movement that advocated total artistic control by a single artist over the entire printmaking process, in contrast to the traditional methods of ukiyo-e in which designer, carver, printer, and publisher all had a role in production. Kobashi is best known for his sosaku hanga woodblock prints and his sculptures intended to be rearranged, which he called "self-constructions". The Cleveland Museum of Art, the Honolulu Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA New York City), the Neuberger Museum of Art (Purchase, New York), the Albright Knox, the Weisman Art Museum (University of Minnesota, Minneapolis), and Southern Illinois University Edwardsville are among the public collections holding work by Kobashi. Yasuhide Kobashi created some of his first prints in New York at the Pratt Graphic Art Center. He became a member of the Society of Independent Artists and exhibited regularly with them. He is included in the book JAPANESE SCULPTORS: Isamu Noguchi, Yayoi Kusama, Akio Takamori, Yoshimoto Nara...

Chryssa Vardea-Mavromichali (Greek: Χρύσα Βαρδέα-Μαυρομιχάλη; December 31, 1933 – December 23, 2013) was a Greek American artist who worked in a wide variety of media. An American art pioneer in light art and luminist sculpture widely known for her neon, steel, aluminum and acrylic glass installations, she has always used the mononym Chryssa professionally. She worked from the mid-1950s in New York City studios and worked since 1992 in the studio she established in Neos Kosmos, Athens, Greece. Chryssa was born in Athens into the famous Mavromichalis family from the Mani Peninsula. one of her sisters, who studied medicine, was a friend of the poet and novelist Nikos Kazantzakis. Chryssa began painting during her teenage years and also studied to be a social worker.In 1953, on the advice of a Greek art critic, her family sent her to Paris to study at the Académie de la Grande Chaumiere where Andre Breton, Edgard Varese, and Max Ernst were among her associates and Alberto Giacometti was a visiting professor. In 1954, at age twenty-one, Chryssa sailed for the United States, arrived in New York and went to San Francisco, California to study at the California School of Fine Arts. Returning to New York in 1955, she became a United States citizen and established a studio in the city. Chryssa's first major work was The Cycladic Books preceded American minimalism by seventeen years. 1961, Chryssa's first solo exhibition was mounted at The Guggenheim. 1963, Chryssa's work was shown at the Museum of Modern Art in curator Dorothy Canning Miller's Americans 1963 exhibition. The artists represented in the show also included Richard Anuszkiewicz, Lee Bontecou, Robert Indiana, Richard Lindner, Marisol, Claes Oldenburg, Ad Reinhardt, James Rosenquist and others. 1966, The Gates to Times Square, regarded as "one of the most important American sculptures of all time" and "a thrilling homage to the living American culture of advertising and mass communications." The work is a 10 ft cube installation of two huge letter 'A's through which visitors may walk into "a gleaming block of stainless steel and Plexiglas that seems to quiver in the play of pale blue neon light" which is controlled by programmed timers. First shown in Manhattan's Pace Gallery, it was given to the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York in 1972. 1972, The Whitney Museum of American Art mounted a solo exhibition of works by Chryssa. That's All (early 1970s), the central panel of a triptych related to The Gates of Times Square, was acquired by the Museum of Modern Art between 1975 and 1979. 1973, Chryssa's solo exhibition at the Gallerie Denise René was reviewed for TIME magazine by art critic Robert Hughes before it went on to the Galleries Denise René in Düsseldorf and Paris. Other works by Chryssa in composite honeycomb aluminum and neon in the 1980s and 1990s include Chinatown, Siren, Urban Traffic, and Flapping Birds. Chryssa 60/90 retrospective exhibition in Athens in the Mihalarias Art Center. After her long absence from Greece, a major exhibition including large aluminum sculptures - cityscapes, "neon boxes" from the Gates to the Times Square, paintings, drawings etc. was held in Athens. In 1992, after closing her SoHo studio, which art dealer Leo Castelli had described as "one of the loveliest in the world," Chryssa returned to Greece. She found a derelict cinema which had become a storeroom stacked with abandoned school desks and chairs, behind the old Fix Brewery near the city center in Neos Kosmos, Athens. Using the desks to construct enormous benches, she converted the space into a studio for working on designs and aluminum composite honeycomb sculptures. The Athens National Museum of Contemporary Art, which was founded in 2000 and owns Chryssa's Cycladic Books, is in the process of converting the Fix Brewery into its permanent premises. Greek Exhibits, European Cultural Center of Delphi (Council of Europe). "Apollo's Heritage"(July 4, 2003 – July 30, 2003). Works by sixteen artists: Giorgio de Chirico, Salvador Dalí, Nikos Hadjikyriakos-Ghikas, Nikos Engonopoulos, Yannis Tsarouchis, Giorgos Sikeliotis, Takis, Arman, Fernando Botero, Chryssa, Dimitris Mytaras...

Dee Shapiro is a Contemporary American artist and writer associated with the Pattern and Decoration movement. I have seen this referred to as Hejaz. Dee Shapiro was inspired to be an...

Pat Steir (born 1940) is an American painter and printmaker. Her early work was loosely associated with Conceptual Art and Minimalism, however, she is best known for her abstract dri...

Pat Steir (born 1940) is an American painter and printmaker. Her early work was loosely associated with Conceptual Art and Minimalism, however, she is best known for her abstract dri...

Pat Steir (born 1940) is an American painter and printmaker. Her early work was loosely associated with Conceptual Art and Minimalism, however, she is best known for her abstract dri...

MARIA STELMASZCZYK (born in 1983) Studies at the Faculty of Graphic Arts and Painting Laboratory of Woodcut Techniques and Artistic Book at the Academy of Fine Arts Władysław Strzemi...

Raoul Ubac - Rythm - Original Woodcut Title: Rythm Dimensions: 32 x 24 cm Revue Art de France The painter-sculptor Raoul Ubac was born in 1910 in Malmédy (Ardennes, Belgium). He wen...

"Red Poppies, Gray Target" is an etching and woodcut in red and silver inks, printed on Hahnemühle Copperplate paper in an edition of 20. Artist's signature, title, date and edition ...

Color woodcut/lithograph, Edition 30. In this print Morinoue creates an evocative sense of place. He captures the reflections on a pond’s surface and the play of light on the ston...

Color woodcut, Edition 30. Lotus is a twenty-six color woodcut from seven woodblocks printed in an edition of 30, plus proofs, on white Thai Mulberry paper. In this print, a compe...

Color woodcut, Edition 30. In this print Morinoue uses symbolic, stylized and realistic images to evoke the play of light on water. In each of the four panels we see the reflectio...