FINA F101 BLOG

the burning tree by `garrit

author

Brooklyn based artist Graham Caldwell creates surfaces marked by crumpled and stretched distortions. Like seen in his latest works ‘Compound Eye’ and ‘Before After’ he mostly uses blown glass, steel, epoxy, mirrors, and other materials to create these otherworldly sculptures.

(GIFs made with Echograph)

The artist’s own website is a good place to watch the creatures in action.

recently opened: NICOLA HICKS Flowers Gallery, 529 W20th St., NYC “Hicks’ generally life-size sculptures straddle such ambiguous territory between anthropomorphic and theriomorphic that the human-animal divide becomes nearly irrelevant, indeed even immaterial despite the grave, weighty materiality of her forms. A minotaur-like character, actual or masked, plods along with audible tread—in one hand a smaller beast’s posterior quarters, in the other its head. This is a towering bronze called Banker II, its implications both chilling and clear. Banker I is a less beastly, somewhat more ghostly pairing: whether the bear is leashed to the financier, or vice-versa, is debatable; to whom the market belongs, or who dominates, an open question. Amalgams of straw and plaster, which are then occasionally cast in bronze, lend prickle and clump to these creatures Hicks has been crafting since the ’80s, and their monstrosities are at once haunting and placid. Behold calmly the spent eyes of these mysteriously menacing, or perhaps amiable souls. To call them captivating is most certainly understatement.” -  Paul D’Agostino, The L Magazine

“Reflections from Damaged Life” at Raven Row

“Imprisoned, Jailbreak” at XYZ Collective

just opened: “The Black Box”  Stefan Bondell The Hole Gallery, 312 Bowery, NYC The Black Box is conceived as an exhibition about the secrets paintings can contain. Like the black box of an airplane or the expression as applied to covert ops, insider trading or government surveillance, New York artist Stefan Bondell considers this installation as his own black box, where his concerns and opinions are thrashed out in each of the paintings. Four ten-by-ten-foot paintings are installed in the room, each a deep black gouache and oil on canvas, and through the suggestion of shapes in each work, a narrative emerges. The floor of the gallery has been covered with over a million dollars of shredded US currency. - thru Dec 28

Paraffin wax mixture, pigment, steel and wicks

"A series of drawings produced using drawing implements attached to the tips of tree branches, the wind’s effects on the tree recorded on paper. Like signatures each drawing reveals the different qualities and characteristics of each tree.”

Huge congrats to Laure Prouvost on winning this year’s Turner Prize! The artist’s first solo museum presentation in the United States opens on February 12. 

Paul Clowney