#friezeweek

Frieze Week – Kunst trifft Glamour

🎨 Art is the new Luxury! Wenn London, NYC & Seoul während der Frieze Week zu Hotspots der internationalen Kunstszene werden, dann zählt ein Detail besonders: deine Begleitung.

🥂 Private Collector’s Dinners, Rooftop-Cocktails oder Avantgarde-Supper – mit einem Model von Blue Label Models an deiner Seite wird jedes Event zum Statement.

💎 Stil, Eleganz & Ausstrahlung – das sind die Essentials, um im Inner Circle der Kunstwelt wirklich aufzufallen.

Margit Szilvitzky (1931 – 2018) graduated from the textile and fashion design department of the University of Applied Arts Budapest in 1954. She worked as a fashion designer before beginning to experiment with fabric. 

Following her early artistic period, inspired by the history of clothing, folk art and the neo-secessionist style, Szilvitzky turned to white canvases in the second half of the seventies. It was also during this time that her attention was shifted to the square, and to a methodology of folding that reflects the influence of Josef Albers’s paper studies. 

Spanning five decades, her artistic approach articulated in various media such as drawing, painting and art books as well. Szilvitzky’s serial works and process art pieces, which represented a shift toward minimal and conceptual art, drew her system-seeking attention not only to the examination of the sculptural potential of textiles, but also to the exploration of interrelation of light and shadow. She was a regular participant in international exhibitions of Hungarian fibre art (Aalborg, Helsinki, etc.), and she also took part in several graphic and artists’ book shows.

Image 1: Margit Szilvitzky, Floor Object 1, 1977

Image 2: Margit Szilvitzky, Evidence No. 2, 1976

Image 3: Artist Margit Szilvitzky. Photo by Miklós Sulyok

"There is no need to perfect, but always to complete, to continue, " born in Brussels in 1930, Marthe Wéry was a self-taught artist, visiting many museums and galleries, and going to the artistic environments of her era. In 1966, she showed her first works, geometric engravings, at the Saint-Laurent gallery in Brussels. She then taught engraving at the Institut Saint-Luc in Brussels before the engraving studio was merged with the painting studio, at her initiative. She helped train many artists. Teaching was an important part of her life. 

During a trip to the USA, Marthe Wéry discovered American Minimalism, as well as, and especially Unism, which Polish Wladyslaw Strzeminski theorised during the interwar period. She considered the painting as a whole made of equal parts.

Colour itself became her way of thinking and doing. Wéry pushes the limits of painting, exploring all its basic components. Inspired by artists such as Kazimir Malevich or Barnett Newman, her work evolved from geometrical studies and minimalistic work on paper to monochromes that are marked by colour, the interplay of light, transparency and structure provides her paintings tactility and poetry, moving her away from sterile minimalism.

By the end of the 1970s, Wéry start to achieve international recognition. Among her numerous exhibitions, we could note the Venice Biennale in 1982 with a solo show in the Belgium Pavillion.

Image 1:  Marthe Wéry, Untitled, 1998

Image 2: Marthe Wéry, Série Tournai, 2004

Daniela Vinopalová was born in Opava, Czechoslovakia, in 1928 and died in Prague in 2017. She grew up and experienced the turbulence of the 20th-cerntury, living through the German occupation 1939-1945, followed by the republic’s assimilation into the Eastern Bloc from 1948 to 1989. She witnessed the period of liberalization in 1968, known as the Prague Spring, which violently ended when the troops of the Warsaw Pact invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968. Communist rule came to an end with the Velvet Revolution in 1989 and the re-establishment of a democratic parliamentary republic. Vinopalová therefore lived and created her work in conditions in which it was difficult to be an artist and in which life itself was difficult.

Despite this or perhaps because of it, Vinopalová created extraordinary abstract sculptures, in a variety of media, in her Prague apartment-studio, which expressed her spiritual and emotional engagement with the world around her. The birth of something that she could genuinely regard as her own sculptural idiom occurred in the early 1960s as soon as she began to mark out space through the medium of clay, a material so symbolic of human civilisation. Vinopalová tried to discover forms that would emerge from deep within herself. This challenging pursuit gave rise to the original ‘sculpture-vase’.  These non-figurative sculptures resemble a vase but are based on a figure and have no connection with decorative vases.

Her legacy continues with the efforts of the artist’s family and the London based artist estate advisory Stephenson art. 

Image 1: Daniela Vinopalová, Spatial Study II, 1959-1960

Image 2: Daniela Vinopalová, Sculpture vase

Image 3: Daniela Vinopalová in her studio. Photograph by Miroslav Hak

Sylvia Snowden is an African-American artist, who lives and works in Washington D.C. 

“I do not believe in an artist’s statement for me because it seems to narrow the viewer’s reaction and direct him/her to draw specific limitations. In my work, I hope to evoke stimulating responses.” - Sylvia Snowden 

Snowden decided to make portraits of people around her all of whom she encountered in her Shaw neighborhood in Washington, D.C. They look abstract and don’t see faces in these portraits. The drama of Snowden’s subjects, and the sheer grace of their ability to survive and thrive, references the strength and delicate beauty in the human figure that her art celebrates. From dark and earthy tones to the vibrant and artificial, Snowden’s command of chromatic range is the fuel of her expressionistic style. She encapsulates the psychological essence of her subjects; their deliberations, triumphs, angst, and joy are all laid bare.

Sylvia Snowden holds both Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts degrees from Howard University (Washington, D.C.). Snowden has taught at Cornell University (Ithaca, NY), Howard University (Washington, D.C.), and Yale University (New Haven, CT). In 2018, Snowden’s work was notably featured in the landmark exhibition Magnetic Fields: Expanding American Abstraction, 1960-Today at the National Museum for Women in the Arts (Washington, D.C.). Her works have been shown globally in Chile, the Netherlands, Ethiopia, Australia, the Bahamas, France, Mexico, Italy and Japan.

Image 1: Sylvia Snowden, ‘Brown - Yo II’, 1989

Image 2: Sylvia Snowden, ‘M Street - Francine 11 (Haberon Series)’, c. 1978