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How to master the art of lost wax

islandlass — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 00:18:00 +0000

I had a private chuckle when I read this article in The Guardian. The reason being is that in a previous life, my ex husband and I owned and ran a fine arts, bronze casting foundry, and the question of how the bronze “magically” came out of a mold that had once contained a wax pattern, was a fairly common one from visitors (and some clients). It is a complicated process, from mold-making to wax pouring to the firing of molds to the pouring of molten bronze. An alchemical process always full of excitement and danger. Our pour crew (including me) executed the pour like a finely choreographed ballet, which is was. We had to know and totally trust each other’s moves on the pour floor or there could have been disastrous results with a crucible full of 2,000 ° F molten metal. Thank goodness there never were.

How to master the art of lost wax

With its layers, phases, funnels and pins, this ancient sculpture technique is devilishly complicated. But I think I’ve got it

So that’s how they do it … Molten bronze is poured into a mould in the final stage of the lost wax process. Photograph: Frank Trapper/Corbis

Yesterday I tried to understand the lost wax method of bronze casting. First used in ancient China, later deployed by Greek and Roman sculptors to create their lifelike human figures, and still in favour (I assume) with craftspeople who cast bronze, this is a technique absolutely central to the history of sculpture. But have you ever tried to follow an explanation of it?

In textbooks and museum displays alike, I have come across many brief accounts of the lost wax process. But at a certain point, it all gets confusing. The inner and outer moulds, the pins and pipes, boggle the mind. Probably the only way to truly comprehend it is to do it. But at the V&A Museum in London, in its gallery devoted to the materials and methods of sculpture, you can learn quite a lot if you pay attention. So here goes.

The lost wax method does what it says on the box: it works by creating and then destroying a layer of wax which is then replaced with molten bronze. First, you have to make your wax model. Mould a statue or, in the case of ancient China, a complex sculptural vessel.

How to master the art of lost wax

Fiona Rae, one of the Young British Artists (YBA)

islandlass — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 00:09:02 +0000

Recently I’ve come across quite a few artists I hadn’t heard of before (a whole group of them in fact whom I hope eventually to do individual posts on) and they are all really good, most gaining acceptance at an early age, most British (hence the YBA acronym). And I’ll begin with Fiona Rae.

Rae was born in 1963 in Hong Kong and moved to England in 1970, where she attended Croydon College of Art (1983-84) and Goldsmiths College (1984-1987), and was one of the artists in the seminal Freeze exhibition curated by Damien Hirst in 1988. It seems to me that when Charles Saatchi buys an artist’s work, that artist has it made, and after he bought some of Rae’s work it was shown in the major 1997 Sensation exhibition, which brought Britart into the establishment as it was hosted by the Royal Academy, London, before touring abroad. She was nominated for the Turner Prize in 1991, and in 1993 for the Austrian Eliette Von Karajan Prize for Young Painters. She was commissioned by Tate Modern to create a 10 metre triptych Shadowland for the restaurant there in 2002.

From artnet.com Magazine Features - fiona rae: retro meets rococo

Despite her best efforts, Fiona Rae has emerged as a true original. She has an icy nonchalance and a deep-frozen conceptualist agenda, but her painterly exuberance is positively scorching.

Her reputation is still welded to the group she has helped define, known under the aliases of Cool School, Brit Pop or Goldsmith’s Generation. Goldsmith’s was her college in south London where classmates numbered Damien Hirst (who included her in his 1988 “Freeze” exhibition), Julian Opie, Ian Davenport and Gary Hume. At the time of this article’s publication (my words) she was/is “currently” showing with Hume in a two-person exhibition at Charles Saatchi’s spacious private museum, running until the end of April. The esthetic of the Cool School can be summed up in three words: vacuity with attitude. Apolitical, anti-expressive, stand-offishly enigmatic and anti-romantic, neo-conceptualism in its British guise was first and foremost about playing the system.

Untitled (one on brown), 1989

It’s interesting that Rae uses Photoshop to create her abstract compositions. She supposedly layers her patterns on the canvas in the same way Photoshop layers are formed on a screen – quite a feat in itself. Her results remind one of psychedelic rock posters and traditional Oriental decorative prints simultaneously, although her work has a more natural and less controlled look to them.

Untitled (yellow), 1990

According to the Royal Academy of Arts, Rae’s paintings contrast flat areas of color with sign-making. This includes elements of text and pixilation. Throughout the 1990s her work became more structured and began to concentrate on particular motifs.

From artnet and Timothy Taylor Gallery:

Untitled (orange, green and black), 1991 Oil on canvas, h: 84 x w: 60 in

Rae makes highly coloured, vivid abstract paintings that draw on and develop a variety of formal, painterly motifs. Common to all her work is the self-conscious juxtaposition of flat areas of colour with dragged, daubed or scumbled paint marks. Although her compositions can appear accidental, almost arbitrary, close inspection reveals a highly controlled handling of paint and style and a tight underlying structure. As her work developed throughout the 1990s it became still more structured, and focused in a more condensed manner on certain motifs. Untitled (Parliament) (oil and acrylic on canvas, 2.74×2.44 m, 1996; London, Saatchi Gal.) presents varied target motifs, perhaps referring to paintings made in the early 1960s by Kenneth Noland, floating in a furious field of black and white. The stillness and formal calm of the circles plays off the chaos of their surround, an instance of the strongly antithetical juxtapositions that Rae often employs. Her approach to painting is based on a playful engagement with her predecessors, using both quotation and a repertoire of surface effects to suggest both the superficiality and self-absorption of the act of painting. Tate Collection

From Christie’s:

Untitled (Parliament) 1996 Oil on canvas 108 x 96in

From artnet:

Blush, 1997 oil and acrylic on canvas, 96 x 84 in.

From artnet:

Swamp, 1998 Acrylic and oil on canvas, 96.1 x 84.1 in.

From artnet and Timothy Taylor Gallery:

Untitled (red) 2003 Mixed media on archive paper, h: 19 x w: 13 in

According to Rae, in an interview in The Observer from September 20th 2009:

What I love about painting is that it embodies a series of thought and feeling processes. It’s all there on the canvas as a record. I can put something on the canvas, consider it, adjust it, remove it, replace it, add to it, conceal it, reveal it, destroy it and repair it. I can be in a good mood, a bad mood, a cheerful mood or a destructive mood – it’s all useful.

I tend to improvise what I do on the canvas. I have a vague roadmap in mind, but usually have to abandon it pretty sharpish. I use canvas on wooden stretchers, prepared with a couple of coats of acrylic primer. I then paint the canvas a flat colour in acrylic paint. Acrylic is a good base for oil colours. It provides an even, unabsorbent surface, whereas oils absorb other oils at different rates and you can end up with a dry, patchy or cracked surface.

From artnet and PaceWildenstein

Cute Motion!! So Lovely!! 2005 Oil, acrylic and gouache on canvas h: 91 x w: 75 in

If I want to paint a hard-edged graphic symbol such as a letter, I usually do this in acrylic as well. Occasionally I use gouache on some of the little images, in order to have a different kind of look to the paint. Each type of paint has a different quality and texture, and I think it adds to the visual richness to apply colours using different paint media.

From artnet and Timothy Taylor Gallery

We go in search of our Dream…. 2007 Oil and acrylic on canvas, h: 84 x w: 69 in

I use oil paint for all the brushstrokes and drawing – this is because oil paint is so flexible that I can adjust what I’m doing almost endlessly. Oil paint is the most fantastically malleable substance: once you’ve figured out how not to turn everything into a sludgy grey, oil paint remains wet long enough for endless changes of mind, and because of the way the pigment is held in the oil, it is beautifully luminescent. Read more from Ms. Rae at: Artist Fiona Rae on how she paints

From artnet and Buchmann Galerie

Untitled (butterflies) 2009 Oil, acrylic on cellulose canvas, h: 7.1 x w: 5.9 in

In a statement for a 2005 residency at the Atlantic Center for the Arts, she commented: I like lively, heartfelt and witty art that can also be cool and ironic. Doesn’t necessarily have to be painting, but that’s my favorite thing, partly because I think it’s the hardest way to be fresh and original in the 21st century.

Rae is now a Royal Academician and also a Trustee of the Tate Gallery, both significant accolades for the artist.

Berlin Inaugurates Restored Section of the Concrete Wall

islandlass — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 16:37:18 +0000

Tourists pass a painting on a segment of the reopened East Side Gallery in Berlin. AP Photo/Gero Breloer.

BERLIN (AP).- The Berlin Wall’s longest remaining stretch has been restored to its state of nearly two decades ago after artists repainted the colorful murals they created in the aftermath of the notorious barrier’s opening. Berlin on Friday inaugurated the restored section of the concrete wall, which is known as the East Side Gallery and snakes along the bank of the Spree river for three quarters of a mile (1.3 kilometers). A popular tourist attraction, … More

More on Urs Fischer

islandlass — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 18:40:38 +0000

A Whole New Museum

The Urs Fischer–izing of a four-story institution.

Fischer’s fourth-floor installation at the New Museum. (Photo: Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zürich; Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, New York; and Sadie Coles HQ, London. Photograph by Benoit Pailley/Courtesy of the New Museum)

Urs Fischer specializes in making jaws drop. Cutting giant holes in gallery walls, digging a crater in Gavin Brown’s gallery floor in 2007, creating amazing hyperrealist wallpaper for a group show at Tony Shafrazi: It all percolates with uncanny destructiveness, operatic uncontrollability, and barbaric sculptural power. It’s set expectations for his full-building retrospective at the New Museum incredibly high, and he’s working hard to meet them. Fischer has lowered ceilings, added lights, and closed off doors, trying to get the effects he wants in this cold, almost soulless exhibition space. So much so that the curator Massimiliano Gioni mused to one writer, “I have thought a couple of times of killing him.”

Thrill seekers, be forewarned: There’s bravura work but no drop-dead moment here. Each of Fischer’s three floors is beautiful, and each has an elfin elusiveness and deep material intelligence. They also have dead spots and duds. Fischer is weakest at smaller discrete sculptures and best when he’s taking over entire spaces or reacting to other artworks nearby. (Also, at a rumored $330,000 to stage, the show is another example of an art world that doesn’t know when to say no.) Had Fischer made a swashbuckling statement by (let’s say) demolishing the museum’s second and third floors, he would have wowed everyone. Instead, thankfully, he took the hard way, putting together multiple ideas: exploring the sculptural-philosophical-experiential qualities of fullness on the fourth floor, emptiness on the third, and a mixture of both on the second floor. (For the record, the only hole here is a little one in a third-floor wall; a pink latex tongue sticks out, making it seem like the museum is clowning around, blowing you off, talking back, enticing, or hitting on you. A sight gag, and a great illustration of the weird ways museums have desires, needs, ideas, and consciousness.)

Installation of Sculptures and Prints by Ian Hamilton Finlay at David Nolan Gallery

islandlass — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 21:35:48 +0000

Ian Hamilton Finlay, Age Quod Agis/Rubbing Post for a Wild Boar, 1997, stone, 31 1/8 x 7 7/8 x 7 7/8 inches, 79 x 20 x 20 cm. IF2790. Photo: Courtesy David Nolan Gallery, New York.

NEW YORK, NY.- David Nolan Gallery presents Camouflage, an installation of sculptures and prints by the renowned Scottish artist, Ian Hamilton Finlay (b. 1925, Nassau, the Bahamas – d. 2006, Lanark, Scotland). The exhibition at David Nolan Gallery will consist of ten stone, bronze and plaster sculptures and related prints, on view from November 5 through December 12, 2009. A concurrent exhibition of Finlay’s printed works from Wild Hawthorn Press will also be on view at Paul Kasmin Gallery at 511 West 27th Street from November 5 – November 28, 2009.

Camouflage exists in the natural world as a mode of defense, primarily using coloration to conceal and obscure. It was not until modern times that camouflage became widely adopted in military strategy to thwart enemies. This exhibition, consisting of works from 1987 through 2002, explores camouflage as part of a dialectic between war (or culture, for Finlay) and nature.

Language is the central subject of Finlay’s works. A writer of Concrete poetry—a genre that understood the visual arrangement of words to be just as important in a poem as rhythm and rhyme—Finlay took literally the Greek word poiesis, meaning “making,” and fused words with sculpture. These inscribed objects have not only appeared internationally in galleries and museums but also throughout his most well known work of art, the garden of Little Sparta, located outside of Edinburgh. Containing flowers, trees, grasses and bodies of water, Little Sparta could be considered the artist’s greatest epic poem. Finlay began the garden with his wife Sue in the 1960s, and Scottish artists collaborated with him to create the objects for the garden, which he purposefully placed throughout the landscape to conjure up other worlds. Finlay was not only a poet and a visual artist, but also a philosopher and historian. He was interested in Western culture generally, and he made the garden of Little Sparta a locus of multifaceted representation of the ideas that emerged from his lifelong study of the history of gardening, Modern art, the French Revolution, Classicism, the technology and aesthetics of World War II warfare, and the sea. Little Sparta represents Finlay’s pointed critique of the modern sculpture garden, whose environment was by definition at odds with the art objects placed therein. Words, ideas, and objects are in constant discourse with nature in Little Sparta.

Contemporary artists must do better

islandlass — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 01:06:26 +0000

London has never teemed with as many celebrated artists as it does now – but how many will we remember?

One that stands up to scrutiny … sculptor Richard Serra’s installation, Open Ended (2007-8). Photograph: David Levene

When it comes to quantity, art lovers in 21st-century Britain have got it made. The range of exhibitions and events on offer boggles the mind, the number of famous artists defies all the laws of cultural gravity. I mean, we have – how many art stars? Dozens. You might even be able to count our artist celebrities in hundreds.

In New York in the 1980s, there were probably five or six artists who were famous in this way, and that was a time and place when people thought art was turning into pop. There has simply never been a moment in modern history when a city so teemed with celebrated artists as London does now. There is a real sense in which to be an artist at all here confers a kind of fame on you.

But is there any chance of anyone in 20 years giving a flying fondu about even 5% of our famous artists? And does that matter? Presumably the answer, in many people’s eyes, is no. We don’t care if, say, Bob and Roberta Smith is going to be remembered as a significant artist – that’s for the future to fret about. Perhaps this is an apocalyptic mood, this present-mindedness: why should we care about history’s verdict on us when we suspect there won’t be much future history anyway?

Contemporary artists must do better

David Hockney: not just bigger, but better

islandlass — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 00:08:05 +0000

Hockney’s vast landscape Bigger Trees Near Warter – recently donated to the Tate – is a glorious work, not least because it’s so honest about the conditions of its creation

Size matters … David Hockney with Bigger Trees Near Warter. Photograph: David Levene

David Hockney is no fool. He understands art history – he has, after all, written books about it. For almost half a century he has succeeded in maintaining a place in the world of art, however unfashionable or odd the directions he happened to be taking. He’s pursued his own interests, and at the same time kept his art in the public eye. And in giving his painting Bigger Trees Near Warter to the Tate he executed a masterstroke. This painting, which has just gone on view for all to see at Tate Britain, will do his reputation wonders as the century progresses. It is a triumph.

You thought Hockney was old hat? We all get it wrong. Art is beautiful because it makes fools of us. You can set up any ideology you like, define taste by any criteria you choose, and a work of art will come along to stand your prejudice on its head. If you prove by logic and erudition that art cannot come readymade, some young philosophe will display the most incredible found object that was ever put in a vitrine. This is what happened to critics 20 years ago. Nowadays, the prejudices are reversed – and so are the surprises. As the artistic ideas of the 1990s gradually sputter out, the life comes from elsewhere. From Bridlington, in this case.

David Hockney: not just bigger, but better

Pioneering Research Project on Acrylic Paints – Findings Revealed

islandlass — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 20:58:29 +0000

Art expert Bronwyn Ormsby observes an acrylic by John Hoyland. Photo: EFE/Tate.

LONDON.- A pioneering three-year research project, the Tate AXA Art Modern Paints Project (TAAMPP), has now been completed, providing vital information for conservators and artists about the properties of acrylic-based paints. This project has enabled the expansion of the first major in-depth study of these paints anywhere in the world and the results will help to preserve modern masterpieces and provide the springboard for further much-needed research into this now widely-used medium.

Since the early 1960s, acrylic emulsion paints and primers have been extensively used by artists, accounting for approximately 50% of paint sales over the last 30 years. They are also the most common priming medium for modern canvases. The need to explore conservation issues surrounding these paints has recently become more pressing as early acrylic works are now approaching 50 years old. Despite the frequent occurrence of acrylic paint in collections, conservators have previously had access to little information on how acrylic emulsion paints might alter with age, or how they are affected by conservation treatments such as surface cleaning.

Exploration of Space

islandlass — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 02:41:51 +0000

Angel Franco/The New York Times

Urs Fischer: Marguerite de Ponty The exhibition of recent works by this Swiss-born sculptor at the New Museum includes “Service à la Française,” a 51-piece installation on the second floor.

The sculptor Urs Fischer is hot, young and European. When it comes to installation art, he is prone to an efficient form of spectacle: he simply has very large holes cut or dug in the walls or floors of galleries, museums and the occasional art fair booth, usually to startlingly beautiful effect. Implicitly Duchampian yet marvelously experiential, these pieces have seemed to signal the end of installation art, like monochrome paintings sometimes seem to forewarn the end of painting. Add nothing, just use the space and the architecture, dummy. Boom.

The New Museum, seeking some heat of its own, has given Mr. Fischer the run of nearly all the exhibition space — three full floors — in its two-year-old building. It’s a smart move, even if those hoping for a sizable new aperture in one of the museum’s surfaces will be disappointed. The exhibition, titled “Urs Fischer: Marguerite de Ponty” (the subtitle referring to a character from the Symbolist poet Mallarmé), has been supervised by Massimiliano Gioni, a New Museum curator.

In the trifecta of sculpture surveys at major New York museums this fall — expect Roni Horn at the Whitney next week and Gabriel Orozco at the Museum of Modern Art in December — Mr. Fischer’s show started in the lead, with the most anticipation. It felt premature, presumptuous and unpredictable, even though Mr. Fischer, who was born in Switzerland in 1973, descends from a line of German-speaking bad boys that includes Sigmar Polke and Martin Kippenberger and that has been one of the strongest strains of postwar art. Anything could happen, the thinking went, given Mr. Fischer’s capricious, encompassing and, at best, fearless conception of sculpture.

Read more from ROBERTA SMITH at The New York Times: Art Review | Urs Fischer: Exploration of Space

What is Damien Hirst really up to?

islandlass — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 01:33:49 +0000

No one doubts that Damien Hirst’s paintings are terrible. But they’re more than that – they reveal everything that’s wrong with contemporary art

Last (and least) of the old masters … Damien Hirst stands in front of White Roses and Butterflies (2008) at the Wallace Collection. Photograph: Sarah Lee

Damien Hirst, it turns out, is a savagely conservative critic of the art of our time. He’s leading the backlash – against himself. No one has done more to popularise the idea that art as concept beats art as craft. No one has more spectacularly – or lucratively – shown that art can be a team-built, hands-off, readymade phenomenon. A whole generation has taken Hirst’s licence to produce art that doesn’t so much reject as coldly ignore traditions of painting, drawing and sculpture. And now Hirst is basically saying it was all nonsense. He didn’t mean it. He wanted to be a great painter all along. But, as any visitor to his show at the Wallace Collection can see, he’s not.

It is shocking to see an artist so successful in arguing that art owes nothing to its past, sacrifice himself to that past. Hirst’s exhibition is a stupefying admission of defeat, a self-obliterating homage, that reveals the most successful artist of our time to be a tiny talent, with less to offer than even the most obscure Victorian painter in the Wallace Collection, let alone its Fragonards and Rembrandts. He reveals this because he chooses to meet them on their own terms, as a painter.