The New trend: photo-sculpture?

Have you ever seen that? It is a bit clumsy but impressive life size human figure that makes you wonder for 10 seconds what are you looking at until you realize it is a 3D photo collage. It happened to me last Thursday at the second Nest opening at De DCR exhibition space in The Hague.

Here there were three heads at life size height staring to the horizon. I was afraid but I was attracted and curious. Pity I didn't write down the name of the artist, so I can not tell you now.
But today I receive this photo of a work by Osang Gwon and then it comes the obviously official name: photo-sculpture.

It is just as when you learn a new word, from that moment it seems at it has been everywhere but because you didn't know it you were not able to see it and hear it. Maybe is what is happening to me just as the revelation of last Thursday I may start seeing it now everywhere. I will keep my eyes open.
Any way, I think that the way it has been done it is rather different, the one in The Hague is more like a scan or very scientific development, completely under control nearly robot like. The second one is more home made, with faults and more like a David Hockney Polaroid collage. All the blues of the dress are wrongly printed and that gives part of the charm. Also as the first is nearly soldier like: "yes, sir". The second is more thought as one of this late photographs of unsure teenagers in uncomfortable or impossible positions. The second is more a 3 dimensional photograph and the first is more like a 3D digital idea.

I just discover the third one: Jasper de Beijer and here two examples. De Beijer makes a photograph of the photo-sculpture and it is a lot less realistic it is with irony or at least with a twist to the mouth. It is nearer to the building of a cartoon.

Same materials, same new idea but a very different result. More examples.
photosculpture

Am I a Mexican painter?

Yesterday I started to paint a commission that I had already for a year. There had been so many things in our lives. Leaving my big and established but not so mine studio was painful even though I was moving to my very own, big and ground floor studio next to our home. Making it ready took three times more months than I thought it would. And then finally finding a place for everything was very complicated and even more tiring having to remember where I left everything. I didn't realize about this last difficulty, apart from all the other new tasks as more administration beforehand. I believe that it is in the human being not to realize in advance the difficulties of a new project because if we really knew what it will involve we would not do a thing.

Back about the painting. I changed plans about painting this 83 year old lady. As I was supposed to make two portraits of her (I made very sharp photographs of her 1 year ago), I took again a look to all the old beautiful albums that I was brought for the preparation for this paintings. And then I got it! I would make one painting as Seve was when she became part of my friend's and commissioner's family and one of her the way she is now.
As I start a painting I always try to do it with another approach and another beginning. So I made first these very curly colorful wide lines, (and as I realize now, just the same kind of drawings I did when I was 7 or 8 and I was inspired by Miro, Calder, op- and conceptual- art). As the lines were drying I thought: Oh, this is a very bad beginning, I have to paint my canvas white again! I don't know why but I didn't do it.
Just like with each new painting I need patience again. In my case there isn't a good painting without patience. Each painting has its own time of development you have to go with it not against.

Rather soon I realized this was going to be a special painting. It was flowing, just as it happened with Lying Marisa. I had the feeling of being guided by the artists I followed and I learned of specially in my younger years in Mexico. I felt the hand of Siqueiros, Rivera and Orozco leading my hand very gently but very sure.
Not long ago at the lecture I gave about portrait, some one noticed how impressed she was with one of the photographs of my oldest self portraits. She said that it reminded her of Frida Kahlo. For the first time (how could it be?) I accepted that link, because it was so obvious. I just couldn't deny it.
As a child we went very often to Frida's home, which was actually very close to my own home. And I try to imaging the Coyoacan, our neighbourhood, on the times she lived there, as my mother would tell me having seeing her walking with Diego Rivera. Those paintings I all ways disliked them and liked them just as now I do. Her clothes, the surrealistic touches like the apes were pure reality, she HAD apes.

My favorite painting was the one at the Museo de Arte Moderno, where we luckily went also very often: Las Dos Fridas, I didn't know at that time but that was her biggest painting and the only one that the Mexican government ever bought from her.
Any way, for me a (self) portrait was the most natural and obvious theme of an artist, so obvious that I didn't think about it. My first portrait was a very surrealistic painting, of more my favorite objects that would represent me. Later already at San Carlos in Mexico when Nishizawa was my teacher I took my self as model being what I would call the most accessible and cheap model. I didn't think twice about the meaning of it.
Whenever we went to Museo Carrillo Gil, then brand new and beautiful, and at walking distance to our home I also came into very close contact with the three "muralistas" (Siqueiros, Rivera and Orozco), but not to their traditional huge, didactic and lefty wall fresco paintings but to their private, personal (and more commercial) easel work.
There I saw many times Orozco's paintings -for long time my favorite- those made in New York.

The thick works of Siqueiros caused me in a way a repulsive reaction but I couldn't stop looking at them.

In 1986 was the 100th anniversary of Rivera and we were able to see many of his greatest portraits, not as childish as those of the wall paintings but sitters full of character (and money). Of them all you only had to go to the Palacio de Bellas Artes and see some of their best examples of their wall paintings. Not far from there in the heart of Mexico City you could drop into nearly any governmental building and find a wall painting of any of them of their contemporaries or followers.
That broad and powerful way of painting probably was tattooed into my memory and with the Seve painting it all flowed naturally through my hand.
I was very happy when I asked Elias what do you think when you see this painting and he replied: I think of Diego Rivera.
Am I finally becoming a Mexican painter?

Siblings

Here are Sebastian and Emma. They are a beautiful combination of intelligence from Spanish, Dutch, Mexican and North American blood. They are the cute grandchildren of our friends Jan and Consuelo. I wonder how would they like the paintings?

The Danube behind

Hans and I in front of the Danube in Budapest. Hans worked there for a month and I visited him for a week. Budapest is a beautiful warm city (in June!) with great architecture.
Gabriel is still in Mexico with my cousin and her kids. He is going to the school with his nephews and although he is having a good time we would like to have him here soon. We miss him a lot. Finally Hans has his new post at the Capital Market Supervision Authority of the Netherlands (AFM). He is happy and ready to start mid-September. The official opening of my gallery ArtCube (and the studio) will be 30th of September. So I have to work really hard to have all new work.
You are invited, and in case you can't come then the ArtCube gallery site will be ready.

One style

It nearly seems as it has only been but one style of taking photographs. But I know it is not true. As I saw trough the window of Dorttya Gallery in Budapest I said with enthusiasm: hey, Rineke Dijkstra! (our top Dutch photographer from whom I am a truly admirer).

No, my husband said, it only looks like, it is not Dijkstra's work. He was right. It was Charles Freger work, showing rows and rows of chest portraits of naked men. Same background (a white backdrop!?), the same unsure looks, the variety in the repetition.

Some days later in Vienna I went to Krinzinger Gallery, I know this gallery from the Art Fair in Mexico last year so after receiving regular digital invitations I had I a chance to see their space. It resulted that it is a great space, (with one of the kindest receptionist I ever met at a gallery!).

The work of Ulrike Lienbacher I have seen it on Internet: the red, hairy drawings that could make you think of Babette Wagenvoort's in The Hague. Yes, attractive big hairy drawings but as the receptionist told me, she just started photographing. What do I see? Again Rineke Dijkstra's style: rows of unsure teenagers who just stopped sporting, with that "Vondel Park" like backgrounds of Dijkstra. Same hanging, same looks, same compositions, the insecurity, the youth, all the same (of course not exactly the same).
So, what is it happening? Is it that everybody is copying Rineke, which I doubt, may be some of them are copies, like the drinks advertisement from years ago, but not all. Is it that Rineke copied others? Is it that this is the photographic synthesis of this days' photography?
Any way, here are the examples. And by the way after Krinzinger I went to Gallery Mario Mauroner and what do I see? Again the red hairy drawings by the Spanish artistJavier Perez, luckily only a few among a wide variety of works and materials, but still very much like Urike's.
As artists we are not alone, it seems as there is always someone doing the same things you do. Maybe that is the truth.

Photographs: Rineke Dijkstra (2x), Charles Freger, Ulrike Lienbacher (2x).
Red hairy drawings: Babette Wagenvoort, Ulrike Lienbacher, Javier Perez.