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10 Inspirational Artists on Instagram to Follow Right Now
Thanks to the power of Instagram, art has been given another platform to express itself.
The result of which allows artists, far and wide, to showcase their work while broadening their audiences. What's more it also gives artists the chance to let viewers in on parts of their personal life. So whether it's art previews, art archives, or just art friends and art lives you want to get to know, here are 10 of our top artists to follow and get your art fix right now.
Ai Wei Wei
Instagram: @aiww
Follow for: an insight into the Chinese renegade artist's creative and political viewpoint. As well as plenty of selfies with his work and friends of the art world to scroll through.
Anish Kapoor
View this post on Instagram
Instagram: @dirty_corner
Follow for: art using the world's 'blackest black', in which Anish Kapoor has purchased exclusive rights to, along with more hyper-pigmented work from the British Indian sculptor.
Banksy
Instagram: @banksy
Follow for: unannounced projects, sneak peeks and more from the anonymous and unpredictable street artist. There are also a few witty socio-political thoughts (typical of Banksy) to read now and again.
Damien Hirst
Instagram: @damienhirst
Follow for: recent works and exhibitions from the celebrated British contemporary artist, as well as shots of him in action in studio.
Jeff Koons
Instagram: @jeffkoons
Follow for: images of the American artist's works, both old and new. His Instagram also illustrates parts of his personal life including his travels and family that will feature on the 'gram from time to time.
JR
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Instagram: @jr
Follow for: records of the French photographer and street artist's works all over the world. The 'photograffeur' (as he describes himself) also likes to post a fair few selfies with famous friends and will sometimes share their works too.
Kaws
Instagram: @kaws
Follow for: what the American artist and designer (real name Brian Donnelly) is known for: giant inflatables and mutant toys, but also for candid snapshots of his personal life, including photos of friends and his children.
Olafur Eliasson
Instagram: @studioolafureliasson
Follow for: eco-inspired thoughts and artworks from the Danish-Icelandic artist who often uses natural elements to convey the movement. He will also post photos of his most recent projects alongside art archives, and even environmental calls for action.
Petra Collins
Instagram: @petrafcollins
Follow for: a blend of fashion photography and editorial art. The Canadian artist, model and photographer's feed has a very distinct aesthetic that showcases sexy pastel-
Takashi Murakami
Instagram: @takashipom
Follow for: fun snaps of the Japanese contemporary artist and his popular works. Aside form his celebrated super flats, you will also find selfies and photos with celeb friends including the likes of Pharrell and Kanye West.
The post 10 Inspirational Artists on Instagram to Follow Right Now appeared first on Prestige Online - Hong Kong.
3 Days in Siem Reap gives LUXUO an experience of Southeast Asia’s Rich Diversity and Artistry
Siem Reap was a quiet little city until 2001's Tomb Raider catapulted the neighbouring Ta Prohm into international tourist consciousness. What LUXUO found was a destination rich in artistry and hidden gems.
The post 3 Days in Siem Reap gives LUXUO an experience of Southeast Asia’s Rich Diversity and Artistry appeared first on LUXUO.
Wee Wei Ling on giving back to the community, and the secret to staying young and active
The executive director of Pan Pacific Hotels Group is also a staunch supporter of local artists.
The post Wee Wei Ling on giving back to the community, and the secret to staying young and active appeared first on The Peak Magazine.
Wee Wei Ling on giving back to the community, and the secret to staying young and active
The executive director of Pan Pacific Hotels Group is also a staunch supporter of local artists.
For more stories like this, visit www.thepeakmagazine.com.sg.
6 Leading Artists Leave Their Mark on Louis Vuitton’s Iconic Capucines Handbag
The beauty of creative collaboration lies in the seamless integration of classic style with fresh, innovative flair -- so when Louis Vuitton invited six artists to reinvent their iconic Capucines bag, we knew there was something special in store for us.
The new, vividly colourful, limited-edition ArtyCapucines Collection features six distinctive reinterpretations of the luxury French label’s handbag, as visualised by leading contemporary artists from around the world including American artists Sam Falls, Tschabalala Self, Alex Israel and Jonas Wood; along with Swiss visual artist Urs Fischer and South African artist Nicholas Hlobo.
Originally introduced in 2013, the Capucines bag is named after Rue des Capucines, the famous Parisian street where Louis Vuitton opened their first store in 1854. It soon became one of their most successful creations, known for its structured silhouette that, interestingly, provides the perfect blank canvas for artists to express their imagination.
The ArtyCapucines Collection
[gallery ids="157047,157045,157046,157042,157043,157044"]
Sam Falls, for instance, presents intricate mother-of-pearl work on the LV signature and handles of his Capucines bag. An elegant jacquard weave complements the high-definition hand embroidery on the multi-coloured piece.
Quirky is the theme of Urs Fischer’s creation, as he provides a playful twist with six very realistic silicone fruits and vegetables that can be attached to the white leather bag with gold-coloured hardware. Much like adding charms on a bracelet, wearers can choose which item to display depending on their mood for that day.
The black base of Nicholas Hlobo’s bag presents a striking contrast to the hand-sewn blue flower and its petals that spread across the piece, highlighting the craftsmanship of the knotted leatherwork and exquisite embroidery.
Tschabalala Self’s artistic vision comes to the forefront with stunning patchwork of 19 types of leather, featuring 200 hand-cut and colourfully painted shapes that showcase a deconstructed version of Louis Vuitton’s monogram. The complexity of the embroidered leatherwork is evident on this bag, which features individually handmade shapes that are truly unique.
The Capucines bag designed by Jonas Wood is inspired by his paintings and reflect the depth of his work in the shape of a striking grayscale printed pattern. This has then been layered with dense 3D embroidery that comprises more than 20,000 intricate stitches to create a rich tactile texture. A pink LV logo and gold-coloured giraffe charm offer a fun contrast.
And last but definitely not least, Alex Israel’s brightly coloured pop creation is marked by a large wave sweeping across the bag. Two functional ‘surfboards’ emerge from within the bag, serving as holders for a comb on one side and a mirror on the other. Inspired by the artist’s famous ‘California Wave’ design, the fun, beach-y motif is a visual delight.
The ArtyCapucines Collection is limited to 300 pieces each, which are available for purchase (HK$ 72,000) at Louis Vuitton stores.
Louis Vuitton, G/F, Shop 7-17, Landmark Atrium, Central, +852 8100 1182
The post 6 Leading Artists Leave Their Mark on Louis Vuitton’s Iconic Capucines Handbag appeared first on Prestige Online - Hong Kong.
Artist Neo Rauch on His Paintings and His Upcoming Hong Kong Exhibition
Neo Rauch's canvases are dense panopticons, the figures he paints trapped in their own story, frozen in time among other lost souls condemned to the same fate. The stories the paintings tell are just as easily interpreted as misinterpreted: twisting roads that lead to haunted houses or burning furnaces, oversized beetles performing for or preying on their human companions, and often a stern-looking woman chastising an exhausted man hiding behind a canvas or hunched over a table with his head in hands.
“They come from my mind, my soul and therefore must be of me, but they are also not me,” their creator says, when we meet at his studio on the top floor of an old cotton mill in Leipzig, Germany. The 58-year-old Leipzig native goes on to describe how the pieces flow out of him, at times summoned through excursions or trips, such as a visit to Crete, and other times bubbling up from his childhood or seemingly thin air.
“I approach the canvas like a white haze. I spend hours, days, weeks meditating into that fog until the images start to surface in front of my eyes,” he says. “I often paint a figure over and over again, the shoulder or arms or head all need to be of a very specific weight and proportion before they are finished and sit perfectly in the frame -- one figure could send the whole cosmos another way.”
[caption id="attachment_132910" align="alignnone" width="1200"]
Photo credit: Uwe Walter[/caption]
Rauch says a “quick” painting could take around a year but it’s never as linear as that. And his studio definitely attests to the fact. The space is filled with canvases, some on easels, others stacked against walls, table legs, chairs. In fact, every available surface seems to be supporting a frame. There are also books, CDs, bottles of wine and whisky, and even a beautiful array of house plants. It’s every bit the studio you’d imagine, down to the thick crust of oil paint coating it all. The only rather uncanny fixture is a little pug, who dominates the space in a loveable way that reveals a hint of Rauch’s sweeter side.
When asked to explain his process, Rauch says, “In general my work bundles all the images, reflections and information into one stream of consciousness. I then occupy that particular point of internal and external influences, and react to that. I paint from that starting point always. That’s the moment when the image finds me.
[caption id="attachment_132921" align="alignnone" width="1200"]
Photo credit: Uwe Walter[/caption]
“I’m a rather chaotic person and so the canvas tames my mind. My images reflect on narratives that I find inside me. They are somehow inconsistent and hence painting them gives them a form that holds a certain plausibility; saying that, they do keep me awake at night. They are a waking dream. I do see one consistent trope in my expression and that is that the form has to be legitimate and has to tame the pandemonium that is my internal landscape.”
The air in the studio is heavy with turpentine and oil. It’s a smell that reminds me of lilies, I tell Rauch. He smiles and says, “Every studio has its own scent.” We talk briefly about lilies being symbolic of the moon, a space of light and death, and this leads to talk of his formative years and how he began to paint.
Rauch’s life has been as tumultuous as his paintings -- skewed awkward reveries that would haunt anyone, well, forever. At birth he was christened Neo, an ancient Greek prefix meaning “new” or “revived”. It was just four weeks later when he lost his mother and father in a train accident, and a year after that when the wall was built that would divide Berlin for almost three decades.
[caption id="attachment_132917" align="alignnone" width="1200"]
Photo credit: Uwe Walter[/caption]
Rauch, who recalls despising the wall, grew up in East Germany under strict Socialist order, where art was seen as political. It had to fall under the doctrine of Socialist Realism, a genre that dealt with proletariat depictions that were often easy to grasp conceptually in order to be accepted by the dominating powers. There were, however, certain younger artists like Rauch who didn’t aspire to such norms and would hold bootleg shows in living rooms and other private spaces.
[inline-quote author="Neo Rauch"]"Art is about leaving the airtight concrete surfaces and entering the marsh districts, the peripheral areas."[/inline-quote]
When I ask him if his own history and story influenced his paintings, he answers while slowly turning the pages of a book of his works from the early ’90s -- sullen dark blurs of abstract shapes and rough lines entitled Dromos or Gesang. “We all, in the first years of our lives, unconsciously absorb and memorise certain things, without reflecting on them or sorting through them in an intellectual or logical manner,” he says. “These memories, this material is getting stored in subterraneous archives, it is unconsidered and unsorted. It might reappear and emerge much later or it may not, but it’s always there.
“For example, if you’re a painter, it’s likely you archive colours and shapes. You can see that certainly inside me. I have a lot of stored aesthetics (in my mind) from the early ’60s. The way I accessed this was much more intense, say, 20 years ago,” he continues. “Today I’m not that focused on infantile perception -- or should I say I’m not really pulling from that memory bank. But these early childhood experiences definitely have been a great source of inspiration for me once I found my real artistic/painterly identity around 1993.
“This was when I finished the first period of self-reflection. Until that point, I was going down all different routes, trying to find my own language. I had idols and role models, but I was mostly wandering around in foreign territory, disconnected from my peculiar and authentic self.”
Rauch and his peers fell into a genre that was dubbed the New Leipzig School, a somewhat controversial term for a group of artists who emerged in post-reunification Germany in the 1990s and was championed by the likes of Eigen art gallery, curator Christian Ehrentraut and dealer Gerd Harry Lybke.
[caption id="attachment_132915" align="alignnone" width="1200"]
Photo credit: Uwe Walter[/caption]
The self-described “very angry young man”, who studied at the famous Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst in Leipzig, found painting to be an outlet for his penchant for rebellion and irony, and railing against the Concrete Art movement that had declared the medium dead. “I’ve found it’s about creating openings on the canvas that allow the human mind to sink into them,” he says. “Art is about leaving the airtight concrete surfaces and entering the marsh districts, the peripheral areas, the zone of transition where language fails, where I as the painter have to trust my instincts and my perception.
“That’s how I find my place in the production of art. That’s the domain of art. If I find I can explain everything rationally, it’s not art. It remains only an airtight surface under some neon lights framed in the studio or gallery or seminar room or in the latest Documenta.”[inline_related_article article_id="104737"]
When I visit, Rauch is preparing for Propaganda, a solo exhibition at David Zwirner’s Hong Kong gallery that opens on March 26 in conjunction with Art Basel. His debut solo exhibition in Asia features 15 new paintings and is accompanied by a new catalogue with a short story by novelist and playwright Daniel Kehlmann.
A tiny mock-up of the space sits in the corner of the room. “Would you like to see the show?” he says, laughing. The canvases overwhelm even the model of the gallery, squeezed on to its tiny walls. As I look down into the rooms, I feel as if I could walk straight into his paintings. The familiar figures Rauch depicts are there, all hegemonic in a European aesthetical sense. They mostly conform to traditional gender norms and roles, yet in these new paintings they’re dressed as clowns, magicians, animal tamers or jesters doting more on the mystical.
There’s something morbid about the figures, almost like the walking dead. I once heard someone refer to them as “sleep walkers”, but this description seems somehow too comfortable. They’re frozen and cast into their roles forever, unable to escape.
[caption id="attachment_132923" align="alignnone" width="1200"]
Photo credit: Uwe Walter[/caption]
When asked if his figures are inspired by sleep and dreams, Rauch explains that he no longer uses his dreams as inspiration but instead paints as if he could be dreaming. He speaks in depth about the practice of becoming lucid and the point of view that creates.
“We, of course, are not able to grasp dreams in any rational way,” he says. “They have their own mechanics. Time changes and proportions become irrational. And then there is, of course, the demonic component of every sleeping pattern. There’s often something eerie to dreams. Freud spoke of it as if a dream could be likened to some sort of hairline crack in the familiar. For example, when we dream we encounter a familiar person and recognise that there’s something slightly different to them. It might not even be that person. That’s the weirdness I try to capture and for me, that is a space where painting as a form of expression can become very interesting.”
This hairline crack seems to have found its way into Rauch’s new body of work -- you see it depicted in curtains that fall away into the sky or openings that slip into passages of worlds all connected by rhizomes of rooms. They could be likened to works by MC Escher, although they’re never as regimented and nor do they simulate one pattern for one frame.[inline_related_article article_id="112921"]
Rauch’s paintings seem more to traverse between frames. “There are periods in the studio, and each canvas then becomes familiar to the others,” he says. “Like a family, they exist next to one another and therefore they begin to take on characteristics from the others. That’s why you see recurring motifs. They almost become genetically connected, as they’re formed in this room.”
It’s a very romantic notion of painting, I tell him. “Well yeah, sure,” he says with a smile. “It’s about re-enchanting the world.”
Re-enchanting or possessing? This is the question I pose to Rauch, as all art aims to possess the viewer in the sense that the eyes cannot look away. “If we encounter real art, which isn’t always the case just because someone claims it to be art, we experience a moment of absence of gravity. Paused time,” he responds. “We become unhinged, taken away from any rational frame of reference we might have held before. Something is talking to us that’s not entirely human, such as a painting, and it’s sucking us into a parallel universe. In any case, a painting has to have the ability to imprint itself on to someone’s retina to call itself art.”
The post Artist Neo Rauch on His Paintings and His Upcoming Hong Kong Exhibition appeared first on Prestige Online - Hong Kong.
Exploring The Interplay Between Human, Machine And Technology
What it means to be human is an omnipresent question of our time and there is a gallery by the name of Hatch Art Gallery which embodies enough edge to explore this climatic relationship. Exhibiting Young Regional and Singaporean Artists, who deconstruct and demonstrate their perception of a post-human world using clever mediums and exquisite thought.
The post Exploring The Interplay Between Human, Machine And Technology appeared first on LUXUO.
How to personalise luxury leather goods
Designer items may come with their own stamp of exclusivity, but what better way to make your bag truly one of a kind than to have an artist paint custom designs on it?
The post How to personalise luxury leather goods appeared first on The Peak Magazine.
How to personalise luxury leather goods
Designer items may come with their own stamp of exclusivity, but what better way to make your bag truly one of a kind than to have an artist paint custom designs on it?
For more stories like this, visit www.thepeakmagazine.com.sg.