Cardboard in Detail

Chris Gilmour is an English artist who makes familiar objects like cars, bikes, and guitars out of cardboard and glue, He uses both plain packaging cardboard and recycled packaging material. His work recreates in extraordinary detail these everyday objects that many of us use. His works look so real many assume that the object is painted or covered in paper. 

Gilmour makes these pieces without any support, it is all cardboard. His use of cardboard comes from his passion to promote recycling and it is a material he has easy access to and it is a material many of us can  understand. Imagine the expense creating these objects in bronze or marble. 

The objects he chooses to create are picked due to the memories and emotions that we connect to our experience using them and the chooses objects that we interact with. The objects create an immediacy to the viewer because of their familiarity with them. The use of re-cycled material to create his work brings about a proximity to these things and their familiarity, for example the cardboard typewriter engages the viewer who used a typewriter in their job years ago. 

Gilmour's art was influenced by the works of other sculptors who seem to share his interest in materials and give the impression that their ideas come from playing about with things. For example, artists Gilmour admires for their approach to materials are Anish Kapoor, Andy Goldsworthy, Tom Friedman, and Bill Woodrow.

Brooklyn Museum: Jean-Michel Othoniel: My Way

Jean-Michel Othoniel (French, b. 1964), The Secret Happy End, 2008. Murano glass, Saint Just's mirror glass, metal, vintage carriage, 106 5/16 x 145 11/16 x 59 1/16 in. (270 x 370 x 150 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin, Paris/Miami, and the artist, 2010.11. © Jean-Michel Othoniel

August 17–December 2, 2012

This exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum presents a survey of the twenty-five-year career of Jean-Michel Othoniel (French, born 1964), from his first intimate, enigmatic works made of sulfur and wax to his recent large-scale, colorful glass sculptures. Working with these mutable materials, he has fashioned a poetic visual language to explore themes surrounding the body, beauty, desire, and metamorphosis.

 Works on view include embellished heraldic banners, Murano glass sculptures, and magnified necklaces and knots, evoking the fantasy universe of a fairytale. Read more this exhibit at The Huffington Post.

Wild Kingdom: The World of Claude and Francois-Xavier Lalanne

Claude Lalanne's Choupatte in copper and bronze

LES LALANNE

Known individually and collectively, Les Lalanne is the husband and wife team of French artists who defined a new sculptural style. At their farm studio they worked for more than 50 years where they created surreal poetic sculptures where cabbages have chicken feet and benches grow out of the earth.

Working since the 1960s, the two began the Renaissance art of casting from life and then used contemporary electro-plating techniques. With electro-plating the two were able to achieve fine detail that was unparalleled in cast bronze. Claude created intricate botanicals while her husband achieved the same fine detail in animal figures. He said, "The animal world constitutes the richest and most varied forms on the planet."

Entering the world of Les Lalanne is like entering a fairy tale world full of imagination and wildness. They inhabit a world full of animals, wild gardens, old fashioned gates and flower beds. Their sculptures are whimsical and at the same time elegant, with references to ancient French craftsmanship and twentieth-century Surrealism. An example of Claude’s work comes from her garden of choupattes or cabbages. Her cabbages are four feet tall and have chicken feet. As she casts from life, the size of her cabbage sculptures are determined by the size of the cabbage she grows, She says in Town and County, “the bigger the cabbage; the longer and more involved the casting and founding process. The sculptures are finished when they are given their chicken feet.”

Right now through June 16, 2012 you can see their whimsical work at The Paul Kasmin Gallery in New York City. Along with the exhibit is the first book covering their work. Photographed by Paul Kasmin at Les Lalanne home, studio, and gardens, it is entitled, Claude & Francois-Xavier:Art Work Life. 

Claude Lalanne (b. 1924 in Paris, lives and works in Ury, France) François-Xavier Lalanne (b. 1927 in Agen, died 2008 in Ury, France).Read more about Les Lalanne in the New York Times, Living Treasures. In Vogue, Design: Les Lalanne.

Book about Claude and Francois-Xavier Lalanne. Click on the image to locate it in our catalog.

New American Wing at the Met

New American Wing: Galleries for Painting, Sculpture, and Decorative Arts

Mrs. Mayer and Daughter  Ammi Phillips  (1788–1865)

The Metropolitan Museum's collection of American art, one of the finest and most comprehensive in the world, returned to view in expanded, reconceived, and dramatic new galleries on January 16, 2012, when the Museum inaugurated the New American Wing Galleries for Paintings, Sculpture, and Decorative Arts. The new installation provides visitors with a rich and captivating experience of the history of American art from the eighteenth through the early twentieth century. The suite of elegant new galleries encompasses 30,000 square feet for the display of the Museum's superb collection.

Yayoi Kusama at the Tate Modern

Yayoi Kusama 

February 9 –  June 5 2012

If you aren't aware of Yayoi Kusama You can now see a major exhibition of her work at the Tate Modern. The nine decades of Yayoi Kusama's life have taken her from rural Japan to the New York art scene to contemporary Tokyo, in a career in which she has continuously innovated and re-invented her style. Well-known for her repeating dot patterns, her art encompasses an astonishing variety of media, including painting, drawing, sculpture, film, performance and immersive installation. It ranges from works on paper featuring intense semi-abstract imagery, to soft sculpture known as "Accumulations", to her "Infinity Net" paintings, made up of carefully repeated arcs of paint built up into large patterns. Since 1977 Kusama has lived voluntarily in a psychiatric institution, and much of her work has been marked with obsessiveness and a desire to escape from psychological trauma. In an attempt to share her experiences, she creates installations that immerse the viewer in her obsessively charged vision of endless dots and nets or infinitely mirrored space.

At the centre of the art world in the 1960s, she came into contact with artists including Donald Judd, Andy Warhol, Joseph Cornell and Claes Oldenburg, influencing many along the way. She has traded on her identity as an "outsider" in many contexts - as a female artist in a male-dominated society, as a Japanese person in the Western art world, and as a victim of her own neurotic and obsessional symptoms. After achieving fame and notoriety with groundbreaking art happenings and events, she returned to her country of birth and is now Japan's most prominent contemporary artist.