Although it’s a classic optical trick employed by the masters of old, anamorphic art has seen a major resurgence of interest lately. Long before the recent trend, however, Paris based artist Bernard Pras was creating room filling art pieces which at first look to be obsessively arranged piles of junk – step into the right place however and you are treated to a replication of a classic painting or famous portrait. [Read more...]
Japanese artist Shintaro Ohata combines painting and sculptures to create a world somewhere between two and three dimensional. When viewed head on, the unique sculpture/painting duos look like a flawless painting, but stepping further back from another angle you can see that the characters in each painting are actually polystyrene 3d sculptures of the same texture and color as their canvas background. Ohata was born in Hiroshima in 1975 and has spent his career as an artist depicting scenes from every day life in a cinematic way. [Read more...]
Unaware that the Pre-Columbian sculptures he spent a lot of money on were fake, Nadín Ospina found a silver lining to the situation. He came up with a brilliant idea to make his own “Pre-Columbian” pieces that are a little more difficult to mistake for ancient. He sculpted famous cartoon characters like The Simpsons, Mickey Mouse, and Snoopy imitating the styles that ancient Aztec, Mayan, and Incan people used. The fusion between mass pop culture and ancient art is as funny as it is ironic, hinting at themes of globalization and corruption. [Read more...]
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Viewed from the back, Olga Ziemska’s Stillness in Motion is only a bush of twigs, or at the most a tied bundle; but walk around to the front and you come face-to-face with a womanly figure cut with precision into the round wood sticks. Such is the case with much of this artists surprising work, at once looking familiar and then changing into something wholly unexpected. [Read more...]
Remember making “fossils” in Science class? Austrian designer Andreas Scheiger takes that old lab up a notch with this fantastic series of typography. Inspired by the 1918 book, The Alphabet and Elements of Lettering by Frederic W. Goudy which explains how language went from sounds to recognizable symbols and letters, Scheiger started a project called Evolution of Type. In this unique typography, he combines lettering with anatomy and paleontology to show an imaginary biological evolution, with “preserved” letters in amber, muscles and bones composing a segment of a letter sculpture, and now fossilized letters using plasticine, chicken bones, wood, water colors and gypsum. [Read more...]
Remember the days when your status was measured by which pack of Crayolas your mom sent you to school with? If you were lucky enough to have the 64 pack with the sharpener in the back, then this series of crayon sculptures will take you back to the good ol’ days. Vietnamese artist Diem Chau has carved out the entire alphabet along with a corresponding animal for each letter into Crayolas for a colorful collection that’s more fun than a brand new coloring book! A for aardvark, B for boy, C for cat, D for dove, E for elephant, and F for frog… [Read more...]
It’s a huge structure, but it weighs only a small fraction of most things its size. That’s because the floating tube featured here is built out of 8,000 sheets of rice paper, 800 shafts of bamboo, and cotton. Chinese abstract artist Zhu Jinshi installed the 12-meter long hanging structure, called Boat, last month at Art13 London, a new international art fair where the highly experiential piece featured as the centerpiece for the show. [Read more...]
Korean artist Seung Mo Park uses an unusual medium to create his fantastically detailed portraits: wire. The process is one of painstaking addition and subtraction, cutting wires away from his layered mats to reveal a figure or face. To create the works, Park superimposes pieces of square wire mesh or layers of individual wires, later cutting and bending them to release the image he sees hidden inside. It’s a process much like stippling in reverse, and translated to a highly unusual format. [Read more...]
Many people like to leave their spirit carved in a tree, but most of the time it takes the form of a carved heart and a few letters symbolizing the lovers who put it there. Sculptor Keith Jennings takes tree carving in another direction, carving into the bark of living trees and revealing mystical spaces from inside their trunks. It’s a view that would fascinate and potentially frighten those lucky enough to walk by and witness it. [Read more...]
