Niki de Saint Phalle’s Shooting Paintings

September 3, 2016January 24, 2023 ~ theartdive ~ 7 Comments

I was revisiting today Niki de Saint Phalle’s Shooting Paintings (Tirs) of the early 1960s, where for the most part she creates plaster-covered canvases or assemblages and shoots at plastic bags or spray cans concealed within these sculptural paintings—thus doing painting, sculpture, assemblage, and performance art all at once. (To which we should add the photos and films which document the shooting sessions or her creative process.)

What I love about her Tirs is that she starts from Pollock’s action painting, which is so often regarded as very macho, and makes it seem rather feeble. Niki de Saint Phalle doesn’t dance around her canvases pouring out her emotions in a balanced fashion but rather takes aim at those paint containers and renders her works finished in a way that posits her as a powerful agent who has found a way to stand up to the violence in her life and the world around her.

In a future post I’ll look at her Nanas, voluptuous, colorful, and life-affirming, which she started creating in 1964 after her Tirs series.

Photomontages, Matthew Chase-Daniel

August 30, 2016January 24, 2023 ~ theartdive ~ 4 Comments

I wrote something a few days ago about Santiago Sierra’s 396 Women. The House of the People. Bucharest, Romania. October of 2005, which I saw in July 2011 at the Contemporary Art Center in Málaga, Spain, and, as I often do, I went to Google afterward looking up photomontages of different kinds, in particular that species where a scene is composed through various details observed at different moments; where photography becomes a conduit akin to writing, the artist’s and viewer’s gaze dwelling on particular details as they move through a landscape.

Here are some of my favorite examples, courtesy of the artist Matthew Chase-Daniel. Notice how in Panamint Valley, California his gaze runs back and forth. Wonderful! Just as precious are the others, where the focus is calibrated within a smaller range, but with just enough difference from shot to shot to suggest the presence of the artist adjusting his presence to that of the fields of vision he’s in.

To see more photomontages by Chase-Daniel and his explorations in other media, visit his website.

white sands_new mexico_21 in x 40 in_2007 — *White Sands*, New Mexico, 2007. 21″ x 40″

grand mesa, colorado_43 in x 32 in_2009_matthew chase-daniel — *Grand Mesa*, Colorado, 2009. 43″ x 32″

trinity site_new mexico_21 in x 44 in _2008 — *Trinity Site*, New Mexico, 2008. 21″ x 44″

panamint valley, california_18 in x 44 in_2005 — *Panamint Valley*, California, 2005. 18″ x 44″

tres piedras_new mexico_2009_matthew chase-daniel — *Tres Piedras*, New Mexico, 2009

Louise Bourgeois, Maman

August 27, 2016January 24, 2023 ~ theartdive ~ 5 Comments

I’ve been thinking about Louise Bourgeois these days, about the ways in which she suggests mental and emotional strength in Maman (1999).

She came up with the idea of giant spiders in the late nineties. She did Maman in 1999. Maman is a weaver, organic, and female (holding her eggs under her belly), and yet she is large and menacing, and her legs crush the earth like the mechanical, inorganic limbs of a robot. It is the ultimate portrayal of fear and vulnerability and mixing of categories: male-female, organic-inorganic, doing-destroying-mending. Bourgeois talked of how spiders restore their webs if they are damaged and how she, the artist, felt “caught in a web of fear.” She was, in fact, both a creature caught in a spider’s web of fear, and the spider which vanquishes this fear by mending its vulnerable cobweb.

Alexandru Ariciu, Ceramics

August 19, 2016December 4, 2022 ~ theartdive ~ 4 Comments

If I had a little girl, I’d buy her dolls that are also graphic art, the kind Alexandru Ariciu makes. I love it when artists working in ceramics are also accomplished graphic artists, for they make something which is aesthetically and haptically pleasing, quirky and fun, and inviting to reverie, all at once.

Here’s Alexandru Ariciu at Elite Art Gallery in Bucharest.