THE EXTRAORDINARY MODERNITY OF JOSEF KALLEYA (1898-1998) (original) (raw)

Mariano Girada: A Maltese Sculptor from Valencia

It was certainly unusual for a Maltese eighteenth-century sculptor not to proceed to Rome for his studies where he could also acquaint himself with the latest trends and works of leading artists. This is the case of Mariano Girada (1771-1823), the leading sculptor of his times and the only known Maltese artist so far to have secure and documented links with the Spanish city of Valencia. This paper seeks to review Girada’s artistic activity within the broader remit of eighteenth-century hispano-maltese connections. It suggests links with Spain, particularly Valencia, through economic activity. This could be the reason why Girada studied in Spain which, by consequence, empowered Girada to introduce a new style and aesthetics to Malta.

Karol Tchorek – an Artist Justly Forgotten?

"Seminar in Place", Muzeum Narodowe w Warszawie: Królikarnia, 2013

Who was Karol Tchorek, the founder of the studio we are in right now? In the correspondence between two of the main characters of Polish modernity, Ryszard Stanisławski and Alina Szapocznikow, he gets a mention as a creator of kitschy sculptures à la nineteenth-century Naturalism. If so, is there a point in paying attention to this figure? His main achievement was a cycle of memorial tablets marking places of executions from the time of the Nazi occupation in Warsaw, which we all know very well; a fairly successful project, admittedly. Another of his widely known sculptures is "Kobieta z dzieckiem" [Woman and Child], adorning the façade of a block of flats in the MDM district in Warsaw;

Centre Five sculptors: the formation of an alternative professional avant-garde

2016

ion and spirituality in art. It is not known what happened to the collection other than that it was lost during or after the war. Laima Jomantas recalled her husband Vincas observing ruefully that, had it not been so, he could have retired on the proceeds of its sale. However, the early exposure to such work and the receptivity to abstract art likely to have been thereby cultivated were arguably of great significance to Jomantas. His uncle’s collection offered a window onto the world of art beyond the confines of Kaunas. Vincas’ father, Vilius Benediktos Jomantas (1891-1960), was a printmaker who designed postage stamps and banknotes for the Lithuanian state as well as political and commercial advertising posters, book jackets and book illustrations. Like Juozas Zikaras, Vilius Jomantas’ life and career reflected the vagaries of Lithuanian history. Although born in the Latvian coastal port of Liepāja, near the border with Lithuania, he was raised in Romny, a small industrial town in...

Discovering an Unknown Sculptor, 30 Years After His Death

Hyperallergic Weekend , 2019

Leo Amino (1911-1989) was a Filipino sculptor on the faculty of Black Mountain College (1948-50). He was in a two-person show with Isamu Noguchi in 1939 and began experimenting with Polyester resin in the 1940s.

Two Russian Sculptors of the Twentieth Century

Russian Review, 2005

Publications on the history of Russian art are rare in these hard times, with publishers suffering from recession wary of the expense of illustrated editions on what they regard as minority interests. Books dedicated to Russian sculpture are particularly few and far between. The appearance of these two volumes, each dedicated to a twentieth-century Russian sculptor, written in an accessible style and extensively illustrated, must therefore be welcomed. This reviewer's pleasure at such a rare double treat is marred somewhat, however, by the fact that both take the form of the "life and work" study of a single artist, a genre which, while it serves the market well, is problematic for scholarship, tending toward uncritical celebration, and even hagiography, rather than analysis. Seemingly, publishers will only undertake to publish on art when a named individual "genius" is placed at the center, thereby making the individual life the explanation of the work. While Marie Lampard et al.'s multiauthored study of Sergei Konenkov succeeds to an important extent in transcending the limitations of this genre, Albert Leong's Centaur: The Life of Ernst Neizvestny demonstrates some of its pitfalls. If monographs are to be written, both Konenkov and Neizvestnyi clearly make fascinating subjects. Apart from any artistic merit they might have, their long and eventful lives brought them into contact, and sometimes confrontation, with major historical events and players. Konenkov's life spanned a century-from the heyday of the Peredvizhniki, Narodniki, and national revival to the Brezhnev era. Both are major figures of Russian twentieth-century sculpture, yet stand somewhat aside from the mainstream of either of the major tendencies of the period, modernism or Socialist Realism. They also make an interesting and potentially fruitful comparison.

Four African American Sculptors a Vision for Today

Sculpture Review, 2011

Proclamation of 1863, African American poet James Weldon Johnson celebrated the anniversary in The New York Times: "Courage! Look out, beyond, and see/ The far horizon's beckoning span!/ Faith in your God-known destiny!" 1 With the end of the Civil War and the reordering of society that followed, a destiny began to unfold that would bring America's nearly 4.5 million black citizens 2 out of bondage and into a different kind of struggle for equality, opportunity, and freedom of expression. New generations of African American artists gained freedom of movement and the resources needed to reach schools, studios, and workshops in Europe and America. Those who arrived in New York during the 1920s found an atmosphere of growing opportunity for patronage and recognition in the great flowering of black art, literature, and music known as the Harlem Renaissance. Sculptor Sargent Johnson was among the artists who achieved prominence in the 1920s and 1930s, when the Harmon Foundation dedicated support to African Americans in the arts and the Federal Art Project provided employment in creating art for public spaces. Considered a West Coast member of the Harlem Renaissance, Sargent Johnson moved to San Francisco in 1915 to pursue his art training. A student of noted sculptors, Ralph Stackpole and Beniamino Bufano, Johnson enjoyed a long and distinguished career, becoming known for his terracotta portrait heads, African masks in metal, bas-relief carvings, and large figures in wood and stone. Johnson's career foreshadowed the richness of possibility for honoring cultural heritage and achieving artistic expression that African American sculptors share in today. Reflecting on the ways in which the past informs the present, sculptor Richard Blake discusses the history of his own artistic development. Beginning his formal art training in 1955 at age nine, he credits delight in the visual world with setting him on his creative path. Drawing was his first love, he says, and his discovery of sculpture at fifteen became a natural next step. "The pleasure I was getting from understanding what I saw visually and graphically-I got that same kind of pleasure from looking at and analyzing form,

KIRILA FAEH or perhaps one of the last Surrealists, Vesna Victoria,Ljubica Mrkalj, Vesna Bajalska

Kirila Radovanovic-Fäeh belongs to a rare group of cameleon-artists who graduated from the school of Beaux-Arts in Belgrade in the early 1980s and who packed their suitcase eager to conquer the brave new world. She managed to do it, with success. The cameleon element of her artistic personna expressed itself mainly through the changes of the artistic genres that she accomplished in her work. I found her working and living in Zürick today where she settled in finally, after her 15 year long stay in New York. Our immediate reason for a dialogue was her participation in an established group show, Kunstscene 2007 in Zurick, as well as the publication of her metafictional book »The Telephone Book« which was published by Plavi Jahac in Belgrade. She comes from that a bit complex territory of ex-Yugoslavia (her mother is Croatian and her father a Serb) which is called Zemun, a small cosmopolitan town near Belgrade, but her artistic formative years, so called »the crazy '80s«, she lived in New York. At that time she was involved with the surrealist photography; I used to call her »the anonimous Cindy Sherman who had gone wild«. I was curious to know why did she got interested in photography, at that time when everyone was doing something else in New York City. She told me that at that time, she was doing her 'déjà-vues«, in fact she was collageing the portraits of her friends onto the reproductions of the old masters. The photos that she was taking in numerous night clubs or streets in New York seemed to represent to her a natural growth if not replicas of these ancient portraits. And the photography seemed to her a natural artistic medium to be used in the city ruled by speed and velocity, above all filled with an incredible energy that could have been recorded only through a camera lense. However, she never considered herself to be a photographer-although her mother as well as her grandparents were the professional photographers and had a shop. When I asked if New York was an open city or rather a closed one for all sorts of artists who would flood the city with their artwork, she said that it was both open and closed at the same time. It was open in a sense that numerous galleries were being opened on a daily basis in East Village, however, despite the fact that these places offered some kind of participation to the newcomers, she emphasized the fact »that the winners were already predestined in that game«. The majority of these spaces had favored the local, homegrown artists, the kids who had come out of the prestigeous New York art schools. Many of them had also gained certain notoriety, won a number of awards thus they were not really ready to accept new artists who were there to conquer their block. Kirila says that it was really rare to see an European artist conquer the same artistic ground, although foreign artists often had the same qualifications as the locals. Perhaps that of one of the predominant reasons why Kirila went back to Europe, more precisely to Zürich where she has lived eversince.

The Sculptor as an Artist and Engineer

IFAC Proceedings Volumes, 1995

ln this presentation, the author reports on his experiences as a sculptor to create and build a large wooden sculpture for public view in Munich, Germany. During the process of modelling and building the sculpture, the artist turned engineer solving genuine engineering problems. His work included designing a new building construction to obtain wheather shielding for his work area; designing new cranes to move about the parts of the sculpture for assembly etc. This paper is based on an interview with the artist.

David Medalla: Dreams of Sculpture

Oxford Art Journal, 2020

David Medalla is perhaps best known as a pioneer of bio-kinetic sculpture and the co-founder of Signals London (1964-66), a gallery that was instrumental to the British reception of postwar Latin American art. For Medalla and his colleagues, new developments in technology promised not only a shift in sculptural techniques and materials, but also a radical redefinition of art’s imaginative integration into entirely new ecosystems, from the microscopic to the intergalactic. However, as with the most compelling articulations of futurism during the decade, Medalla’s vision tampered the utopic charge of science fiction with a keen awareness of the material realities of the so-called ‘developing’ world from which he hailed. His projects concerned not only perceptual capacity, but also an ideological worldview: how to bridge the creative scientific outlook that marveled at new universes in nature with the instrumental approach to nature that drove developmentalist models of Third World progress? If Medalla deserves critical attention today, it is because he envisioned the technological turn in sculpture to be as vital to re-enchanting the world as to reconfiguring the orders by which the world was defined.

Sculpting the Sculptor conference, november 2016 Universitat de Barcelona

The sculpture trade is certainly one of the most complex among the artistic practices, both regarding the technical specifications of the activity and the nature of the works produced. The definitive realisation of sculpture into tangible matter is a long and arduos, yet progressive process, which besides being usually physically demanding, entails the assumption of risks linked to the execution of the work of art. On top of this, the work of art is fundamentally three-dimensional, and thus must be conceived to occupy the space and dialogue with human beings. Even though that the presence of the public sculpture has declined in recent times, its importance as a cultural and ideological vehicle in the western world has been crucial through the ages. The SCULPTING THE SCULPTOR Congress deals with the processes by which the sculptor evolves and develops their professional career, from start to end. It also analyses the processes that result in the relative success of both the sculptor and their work among their peers and for the future generations. These evaluations may present interesting contrasts, whether in their geographical and/ or chronological dimensions. The Congress also looks at the evaluation of the resources used by sculptors to acquire prestige and get ahead in their field, with a particular stress on their travels, analysing their motives and consequence. In addition, we will investigate international projects that lead to transfer processes and hybridizations. Other subjects at the Congress are the work of those sculptors that went into exile in their later years, and the Art as a service to the State. However, the Congress's main focus is the comprehension of the mechanisms through which the figure of the sculptor and their reputation is built as well as their professional career development. Here, we will focus especially on Catalan sculptors evolving within the framework of the Spanish State during the 19th and 20th centuries.