Nicola Bolla’s sculptures have many peculiarities, foremost among them, his choice of materials and subjects. He uses Swarovski crystals, playing cards, and glass to create macabre relics such as skulls, tibias, and skeletons; symbolic objects such as ropes, axes, and chains; and animals, including domestic cats, panthers, parrots, ostriches, and unicorns.
Pipe Dreams: A Conversation with Fergus Martin
Dreamscapes are often the subject of artworks, and Fergus Martin’s Pipe Dreams 2 takes dreams to a fundamentally visual level with a “floating raft of color in space.” But how was this visual solution achieved, and what decisions did Martin make when creating the work?
Northern Inspirations: A Conversation with Steve Dilworth
The site where an artist lives often provides inspirational material for his or her work, and such is certainly the case for Steve Dilworth. He has spent the past 25 years on the North Atlantic coast of the Isle of Harris in the Outer Hebrides in northwest Scotland, roughly equidistant from London and Iceland.
Performing Sculpture: A Conversation with Elizabeth King
Elizabeth King combines meticulously built figurative sculptures with stop-frame film animation in works that blur the perceptual boundary between actual and virtual space. Intimate in scale—she speaks of a theater for an audience of one—and distinguished by a level of craft that solicits close looking, the work reflects her interest in early clockwork automata, the
The Emblematic World of Joan Danziger
Joan Danziger’s uncanny sculptures do not fit into today’s fashionable art scene. Conjuring mythic, almost romantic worlds, they are the exception that proves the rule of the spiritual crisis that Donald Kuspit sees in contemporary art.1 Robert Rosenblum’s argument in Modern Painting and the Northern Romantic Tradition (1975) also comes to mind.2 In his alternative
The Daimler Art Collection: A Conversation with Renate Wiehager
Originally formed in 1977, the Daimler Art Collection includes about 1,800 works by approximately 600 German and international artists, focusing on abstract and geometrical painting. In the 1980s, the collection also began acquiring sculpture by internationally recognized modern and contemporary artists, including Jeff Koons, Heinz Mack, Keith Haring, Nam June Paik, Robert Rauschenberg, and Mark
Stephen Antonakos: Complex Simplicity
The new Benaki Museum Annex, re-designed by architects Maria Kokkinou and Andreas Kourkoulas and situated in an industrial section of Athens, hosted a retrospective of the work of Stephen Antonakos last year. Although the building’s stone façade seems formidable, it wraps around a courtyard that offered a protective intimacy for Antonakos’s neon chapel.
Seizing the Chaos of Life: A Conversation with Peter Buggenhout
Peter Buggenhout’s large, abstract sculptures force us to re-think the nature of art. They engage with the abject, with formlessness and chaos, preferring a jumbled reality to the order of symbolic systems. Covered with sometimes disturbing organic materials or dust, his works grow from a process of accretion; they are about transformation and, elliptically, about
Building New Topias: A Conversation with Pedro Reyes
The methods employed by an artist in producing a body of work are often made up of intricate and personal associations that may confound the way a viewer assimilates knowledge. Pedro Reyes, architect, cultural agent, and artist, employs simple means: objects and casual scenarios that blend the realms of utopia, psychology, function, individual fantasies, and
Reality Check: When Appropriation Becomes Copyright Infringement
In this day and age, what does an artist really need to know about copyright? What exactly can legally and ethically be claimed as one’s copyright—and as copyright infringement? And how to make sense of news reports in December 2008 of a demand sent to a 16-year-old collage artist in London for appropriating a photo
