Portfolios Archive - Page 2 sur 9 - Robin Rosenberg Fine Art

Alexander Calder

Alexander Calder was an American artist, best known as a sculptor, who gained notoriety in the 20th century as a pioneer of the kinetic art movement. His sculptures are renowned for their innovative ability to transform mundane found materials such as wire, sheet metal, and metallic rods into whimsical works through the advent of colour, size, and, most famously, movement. Calder is recognized for his ability to transgress the boundaries of sculpture in the unique way he animates his pieces both playfully and performatively.

Calder was born in Pennsylvania to parents that were both artists. He originally pursued a career in mechanical engineering which greatly influenced his artistry, evidenced through his source materials. In the mid 1920s, he moved to Paris and enrolled in the Académie de la Grande Chaumière where he developed his first canonical piece: The Cirque Calder. It consisted of hundreds of miniature wired sculptures the artist manipulated himself to perform a small-scale mechanical circus. Calder received his first solo exhibition in 1927.

In the 1930s, Calder befriended various avant-garde artists including Fernand Léger, Marcel Duchamp, Joan Miro, and Piet Mondrian. His relationships with these artists, particularly Mondrian, heavily influenced his artistic practice as he was introduced to abstraction. Calder’s work evolved from figurative sculpture to more abstract works that emphasized colour and shape, yet continued to be lively in their allusions to the natural world and the presence they take up where ever they reside. In addition to sculpture, he worked heavily in print media as well as in tapestry.

Today, Calder’s sculptures proliferate throughout the art world and are showcased in many major museums around the world such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Recently, in 2018, the Musée des Beaux Art in Montreal hosted a blockbuster retrospective entitled, Alexander Calder: Radical Inventor.

Emily Carr

Emily Carr was a Canadian artist and writer best known for her vibrant paintings of British Colombia’s nature and Indigenous communities. In addition to painting, Carr wrote extensively about her indigenous friends and studies. Carr is widely considered a national icon and one of the most important Canadian artists for her ingenuity and independence.

She was born in Victoria, British Columbia in 1871. After the death of her parents in 1890, she attended the San Francisco Art Institute for two years. In 1898, she made her first sketches and paintings of aboriginal villages inspired by the Indigenous people of the Pacific Northwest Coast. In 1899, she traveled to London to study at the Westminster School of Art and in 1910 she went to Paris to study at the Académie Colarossi. While in France, she met the painter Harry Gibb, whose use of distortion and vibrant colours would significantly influence Carr’s work.

In 1927, she was invited to include her works in an exhibition on West Coast aboriginal art at the National Gallery in Ottawa, an exhibit that later traveled to Toronto and Montreal. It was at this exhibition where Carr met the members of the Group of Seven, individuals who were considered pioneers of Canadian Modernism and inspired her to continue creating and innovating. In the 1930s, she showed her work in other major Canadian cities as well as in London, Paris, Washington, D.C., and Amsterdam. In 1952, her work was chosen to represent Canada at the Venice Biennale alongside artists David Milne, Goodridge Roberts, and Alfred Pellan. Later in life, she shifted her focus from aboriginal themes to landscapes, in particular, scenes of dreamlike forests.

Carr’s work is housed in a number of prestigious national museums, including the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa. Her appeal expands beyond Canada’s borders as well, evidenced in the subject of a solo exhibition at the Dulwich Picture Gallery held in London (2014-2015) that focused on her work, and in an exhibition that was part of DOCUMENTA (13) in Kassel, Germany.

Lynn Chadwick

Lynn Chadwick was an English sculptor known for creating semi-abstract sculptures in bronze and steel. Although he did not attend art school or receive any formal training as a sculptor, Chadwick achieved international recognition and success during his lifetime.

He was born in London in 1914 and studied at the Merchant Taylor’s School. He became a trainee draughtsman and worked in architecture offices throughout his youth. During World War II, he served as a pilot escorting Atlantic convoys. After the war, he became more involved in the design field by working in textiles, furniture, and mobiles.

In 1947, he moved to a more rural area in England and established a studio where he began designing his first sculptures. Three years later, Chadwick had his first solo exhibition and soon after received several large commissions for the Festival of Britain complex, the Arts Council of Great Britain, and the Battersea Park Open Air Sculpture Exhibition.

In 1951, Chadwick had his first international exhibition with the American Abstract Artists Group in New York. The following year, his work was selected to represent Britain at the Venice Biennale, which gained him an international reputation for using bronze rods as opposed to traditional materials to create his pieces. In the late 1950s, the artist was once again chosen to represent Britain at the Venice Biennale where he won the International Sculpture Prize. This exhibition traveled to Vienna, Munich, Paris, Amsterdam, Brussels, and London. In the 1960s, his work became more experimental with the creation of abstract human forms in addition to other complex figures.

His first retrospective exhibition was held at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park in 1992 and a second was held in 2003 at the Tate Britain. In 2001 he was appointed a position as Senior Royal Academician of the Royal Academy of Arts. Today, his work is in the prestigious collections of the MoMA and the Guggenheim Museum in New York, NY, the Tate Modern in London, England, the Centre Pompidou and the Musée Rodin in Paris, France, and the Art Gallery of Ontario in Canada, among many others throughout North America, Europe, and Africa.

Marc Chagall

Marc Chagall was born near Vitebsk, Russia (today Belarus). He was raised in a Jewish community and attended religious schools throughout his youth. In 1906, Chagall left Vitebsk to study at the Zvantseva School of Drawing and Painting in St. Petersburg. During his studies he was apprenticed under Leon Bakst, an artist and set designer who encouraged Chagall to express his Jewish heritage through his art practice.

He moved to France in 1910 and became a prominent painter at the École de Paris. His work combined Fauvism, Cubism, and Surrealism to create dream-like motifs in a poetic and figurative style. As his practice evolved, Chagall continued to express his Jewish identity, bringing together cultural traditions coupled with aspects of modernism.

When Chagall returned to Russia for a short visit, he was forced to stay in the country due to the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and, while there, took up the political post of Commissar of Arts. During this time, he managed to create new paintings and exhibit in Moscow and St. Petersburg. In 1923, he was able to move back to Paris with his wife. He began working on commissions, traveling and exhibiting his work until the outbreak of World War II. With the threat of Hitler’s Third Reich and his publicly known Jewish identity, Chagall and his family sought refuge in New York City. In 1947, he moved back to Europe and settled in Vance, France.

Throughout the decades that followed, Chagall was commissioned to create numerous large-scale public artworks such as a stained-glass window for the Hadassah University Medical Center in Jerusalem, the memorial Peace window for the United Nations, The American Windows for The Art Institute of Chicago, the ceiling of the Paris Opera House, and murals for the Metropolitan Opera in New York.

Throughout his lifetime, Chagall mastered a number of mediums including oil and gouache, and watercolour painting, etching, lithography, drawing, ceramics, set and costume design, as well as stained glass. His work is housed in the Palais Garnier in Paris, France, the Tate Modern in London, England, and the Metropolitan Opera in New York, NY, among other prestigious international collections.

Christo

Christo Vladimirov Javacheff and Jeanne-Claude were a married couple that created large works of art in different environments. Their works became part of the environments themselves with the intention that spaces could be seen with new perspectives and consciousness. Artistic credit was only given to Christo for their large instillations up until 1994 when their works began being credited to “Christo and Jeanne-Claude.”

Both artists were born on the same day in 1935, Christo in Gabrovo, Bulgaria and Jeanne-Claude in Casablanca, Morocco. Christo studied art at the Sofia Academy from 1953-1956 and lived in both Prague and Austria in the late 1950s. He later studied at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts and moved to Paris in 1958, where he met Jeanne- Claude when he was commissioned to paint a portrait of her mother. Jeanne-Claude graduated with a baccalauréat in Latin and philosophy from the University of Tunis in 1952. She received no formal art education during her lifetime and claims that she became an artist out of her love for Christo. During their projects, it was her responsibility to oversee work crews and raise funds.

In the 1960s, the couple began collaborating on their installations. In 1962, they covered barrels at the port of Cologne and, the following year, they blocked off Rue Visconti in Paris with a wall of oil barrels as a protest against the Berlin Wall. In addition to their barrel works, other major works include Wrapped Trees (1966-1998), The Gates (1971-2005), Wrapped Reichstag (1971-1995), The Pont Neuf Wrapped (1975-1985), Running Fence (1972-1976) and many more.

Although their work was often considered controversial due to their colossal sizes and invasiveness on the environment, the artists maintained that the purpose of their artwork was merely to bring joy and beauty and to create new ways of seeing familiar landscapes.

Jean-Claude passed away in 2009 and Christo passed away in 2020.

Chuck Close

Chuck Close is an American artist known for his photorealistic, large-scale portraits. Born in Monroe, Washington in 1940, Close graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in 1962 from the University of Washington, Seattle and went on to obtain a Master’s degree in Fine Arts from Yale University in 1964. After graduation, he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, worked as a teacher at the University of Massachusetts, and later moved to New York City in 1967 where he established his studio.

Close struggles with dyslexia and suffers from prosopagnosia, a neurological disorder characterized by the inability to recognize faces, also called ‘face blindness’. Throughout his life, he found solace in turning to the arts. For the majority of his career, Close has focused on portraiture, mastering techniques such as watercolour, finger painting, pastel, graphite, and printmaking. His large-scale paintings are created from an initial gridded photograph of a subject to produce system-driven portrait painting.

His first solo exhibition was held at the University of Massachusetts Art Gallery in 1967 and his second was held at the Bykert Gallery, New York in 1970. He has since exhibited in almost eight hundred exhibitions at institutions and art festivals such as the MoMA, the 1979 Whitney Biennial, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, NY, the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, Australia, and many more throughout North America and Europe. His work was also selected to represent the United States in the 1993, 1995, and 2003 Venice Biennales.

Close is the recipient of numerous awards and honours including the Skowhegan Arts Medal (1992), the New York State Governor’s Art Award (1997), as well as the National Medal of Arts from President Bill Clinton (2000). In 2010 President Obama appointed him to the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities. In that same year, Close was commissioned to create twelve large mosaics for the 86th Street subway station in New York City, and in 2016 his portrait of Paul Simon was used as the cover art for the singer’s album, Stranger to Stranger.

Today, after suffering from a spinal artery collapse in 1988, Close continues to work with brushes strapped to his wrist to help him paint large portraits, but in a style that is more abstract, drawing from low-resolution photos which appear pixelated from afar. His works remain highly sought after by museums and collectors.

Alexander Colville

Alexander Colville was a Canadian painter whose works captured a number of subjects in New Brunswick including the ocean, boats, people, and the natural expanse of the province. His ordinary subjects were rendered in a static, slightly eerie style, echoing elements of Surrealism.

Colville was born in Toronto, Ontario in 1920. In 1942, he graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Mount Allison University in Sackville, New Brunswick and, shortly after, enlisted in the Canadian Army infantry during World War II. After two years in the military, Colville was employed as a war artist. With his drawings he captured the horrors of the war in the Netherlands, Germany, and the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. After the war, he returned to New Brunswick and taught in the Fine Arts Department at his alma mater, Mount Allison University. In 1963, he left teaching to devote his time to painting and printmaking full-time in his studio.

During his career, Colville exhibited extensively across Canada and abroad. In 1966, along with artists Yves Gaucher and Sorel Etrog, his work represented Canada at the Venice Biennale. His works can be found in the collections of the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia in Halifax, the New Brunswick Museum in Saint John, the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, the MoMA in New York, and the Musée National d’Art Moderne in Paris.

George Condo

George Condo is an American artist known for combining Cubist-inspired faces with realistic forms to realistically represent the unreal, an approach that he has dubbed ‘Artificial Realism’. He blends elements from the European Old Masters with popular culture in his paintings, drawings, sculptures, and prints. Inspired by notable artists like Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, and Diego Velázquez, Condo created a surrealistic style for himself that he has also termed ‘psychological cubism’.

He studied Art History and Music Theory at the University of Massachusetts and moved to Boston where he worked as a silkscreen printer after graduation. Condo met Jean-Michel Basquiat in 1979 and was soon after inspired to pursue a career in the arts. He began to exhibit at galleries in New York in 1981 and, during this time, he worked in Andy Warhol’s silkscreen production studio. As Condo progressed throughout the 1980s, he began exhibiting in more prestigious institutions in New York, Los Angeles, and throughout Europe, a high point being his participation in the 1987 Whitney Biennial.

In 1999, Condo received an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and has been an invited lecturer at prestigious institutions including Yale University, the Guggenheim, and Harvard University where he taught a six-month course titled Painting Memory in 2004.

Condo has received numerous commissions throughout his career including book covers, album artwork for rappers such as Kanye West, and t-shirt designs for Barney’s New York. He continues to exhibit extensively in North America and Europe in institutions such as the Whitney Museum, the MoMA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Guggenheim Museum in New York, NY. He currently lives and works in New York.

Robert Cottingham

Robert Cottingham is an American artist predominantly known for his paintings and prints of urban building façades, neon signs, and shop fronts. He was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1935. After completing his service in the U.S. Army, Cottingham studied at the Pratt Institute in New York, earning his Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1963.

During the 1960s, he worked as an artistic director for an advertising firm while producing paintings inspired by the works of American Photorealists such as Edward Hopper and Charles Sheeler. Additionally, like many artists in the 1960s, Cottingham’s work was heavily influenced by Pop Art. His enlarged scales evoke the work of James Rosenquist and his employment of text echoes that of Andy Warhol and Robert Indiana.

In 1964, Cottingham moved to Los Angeles where he focused exclusively on his art practice. He experimented with photography and used his photographs as a reference point for his paintings. In the 1970s he moved to rural Connecticut and, although removed from the urban environment, he continued to paint more expansive and broad urban landscapes.

During his career, he exhibited extensively, most notably at the Whitney Museum in New York, NY, the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., the Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin, Germany, Documenta in Kassel, Germany, the Serpentine Gallery in London, England, and the Samsung Museum of Modern Art in Seoul, South Korea. Cottingham continues to live and work in Connecticut.

Maurice Cullen

Maurice Cullen was a Canadian landscape painter known for his winter landscape paintings. He was born in St. John’s, Newfoundland in 1866 but was mostly raised in Montreal, Quebec. In 1889, he travelled to Paris to study at the École des Beaux-Arts and at the Académie Julian where he learned the traditional French style of Academic painting. While in Paris, Cullen discovered and was greatly inspired by the work of the Impressionists. During World War I, Cullen was assigned to be an official war artist to document the horrors of battle.

Cullen’s landscape paintings maintained the tradition of both European and Canadian painting, but employed more luminous, Impressionistic colours. Cullen’s Impressionist influence helped inspire the next generation of Canadian artists, having taught from 1891 to 1920 at the Art Association of Montreal. He was the first Canadian to be elected an associate member of the Société national des Beaux-Arts, Paris. In 1899, he was also elected to be an associate member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts.