Jennifer Losch Bartlett - Essay Example

5 Artists Jennifer Losch Bartlett Jennifer Losch Barlett is one of the few renowned modern-day female artists inthe United States. Born in 1941 in Long Beach, California, Bartlett is best known for her paintings which exhibit elements from both abstract and representational art concepts. She received her MFA in 1965 from the Yale School of Art and Architecture. By this time, minimalism was a dominant art style that was widely being used by several artists in the US (Gray 26). While studying for her MFA, she was influenced by artists such as Jim Dine, James Rosenquist, Alex Katz, Al Held and Robert Rauschenberg. It is at Yale that Bartlett fully understood the progressive approach to modern artistry. This combined with the vibrant art scene in nearby New York was instrumental to her development as an artist in those early years (37). Bartlett’s first solo exhibition in 1970 at Alan Saret’s loft and a later exhibition in 1974 at the Paula Cooper Gallery showcased her unique artistic concepts. Her work which incorporated the use of various systems to create order and at the same time oppose it made her an icon in the world of art. She was bale to explore the use of different materials and the conceptual process to make objects and images. This post-minimalist and realist painter is well known for her interiors and landscapes which are created in a way that explore the relationship between the object and the painted image. She used materials such as pen and ink, pencil, brush and ink, gouache and oil pastel to create her paintings. (Gaze 218). One of her most famous works is the gigantic mural situated at the Federal Building in Atlanta, Georgia. She created this two hundred foot mural in 1981. Since then, she has been creating works of art which all have characteristics of her use of mundane objects. Bartlett’s paintings can be found in various public collections in Museums such as the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington DC, New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the walker Art center in Minnesota, Honolulu’s Contemporary museum and the Tate Gallery in London (Gaze 219). Julian Schnabel In the world of art, Julian Schnabel is considered as one of the most outstanding artists of the 20th century. He was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1951 to Jack Schnabel and Esta Greenberg. He resolved to be an artist while he was still a young boy. After receiving his B.F.A from the University of Houston, he joined the Whitney Museum of American Art under the inde[pendent study program. He had his first show as a solo artist in 1975, and thereafter he traveled to Europe where he came across and was impressed by the works of such legendary artists as Cy Twombly, Joseph Beuys and Antoni Gaudi (Moos, Schnabel, Sperone and Voena 34). Schnabel’s paintings were characterized by bold strokes and vibrant colors on gigantic canvases. It was after his first exhibition at the Mary Boone gallery in 1980 that his emotion filled works first gained widespread recognition. His art concepts lay on the edge of brutality, but managed to maintain a compositional energy (96). He described his paintings as being aimed at an emotional state, with which people could connect. His neo-expressionist works gained a bigger following in 1981 at the Mary Boone and Leo Castelli exhibition. For both his figurative and abstract paintings, Schnabel used pieces of broken crockery or black canvas as a base (106). Other materials that the artist used in his paintings include: antlers, pottery, pieces of wood, felt, surf boards and tarpaulins (107). His paintings encouraged the return of Action Painting that revolved around minimalist and conceptual art concepts. Through his use of classical pictorial elements that are inspired by neo-expressionist art forms, Schnabel is unafraid to tackle such themes as obsession, sexuality, death, belief, suffering and redemption. The audacity of his works has made him a critical and commercial success (Moos, et. al 108). Robert Rauschenberg Robert Rauschenberg was an American artist involved in painting, printmaking and sculpting. He was born as Milton Ernest Rauschenberg in Port Arthur, Texas in 1925. his formal art training started in 1946 at the City Art Institute in Kansas. He later went to study more art skills at the Academie Julian in Paris. In 1948, he started studying under Josef Albers who became. Rauschenberg is known to many as a neo-Dada artist for his experimental approaches that stretched art boundaries, thereby creating many possibilities for would be artists. Rauschenberg’s work was seen as being a shift from abstract expressionalism to modern day movements. The artist’s methods and imagery had a profound influence conceptual, pop and other modern art forms (Mattison and Rauschenberg 17). At first Rauschenberg’s paintings were all white, but he later changed them to all black. These are the paintings that gave rise to the giant colored collages and richly textured combines. His famous Combines of the 1950s incorporated different objects such as stuffed birds, traffic barricades and soda bottles. These paintings were seen as an introduction to pop art. In his later works he used objects such as silk screens to transfer print and photographic images to canvas. He then reinforced and unified the images by applying bold paint strokes (Jones 439). Among his best known combines are the Monogram and the Bed. The Bed is a bed that has been spattered with paint. The bed also contains a patchwork pillow and quilt (Mattison and Rauschenberg 219). Rauschenberg used any materials that he could find to create his art work. Some of these materials included: wood, newspapers, stones, fabric, dirt, gold leaf and tissue paper (214). Rauschenberg use of the silk screen process enabled him to make multiple reproducible images. This process had been previously used only in commercial applications. His combines and silk screen works both earned him recognition both at home and globally. His paintings were used by other later artists as a basis for their pop art (Jones 509). Eugene J. Martin Eugene James Martin was an African-American visual artist born in 1938 in Washington, DC. Martin is perhaps best remembered for his imaginative but complex paper and canvas collages. His collages were characterized by materials from a mixture of media that included photography and other print media. During his childhood, Martin spent most of his time drawing nature scenes and realistic portraits. He attended the Corcoran School of Art and became a professional painter in 1963. Although he refused to adhere to any one particular art movement, he chose hat he regarded as artistic integrity as his guide. His concept is known as being individualist as it defies any kind of categorization. For him, art was a creative act, something that was uncompromising (Fredericq 7). Martin relied on his simple drawing materials to create structural, biomorphic and abstraction imagery, an art form that made him stand out among thousands of artists. He sued materials such as pen and ink, pencils, acrylics on canvas and paper, collages and oils on canvas. His processes of creating contrasting emotions using simple objects made his work more real than abstract. Up until his death in 2005, Martin continued painting his individualist paintings which have garnered immense critical and commercial success. His most famous paintings include ‘I am not a Mockingbird’ done in 1978, the ‘Dancing Stringbean’ in 1987 and the 1991 Joyful Abstraction. His unique art, which does not adhere to any contemporary art movement, can be accessed from a number of Museums across the United States (97). Luc Tuymans Luc Tuymans is one of the best known Belgian contemporary artists. Born in 1958 in Antwerp, Belgium, he is one of the few painters who are still using the figurative concept even when the new information age has greatly eroded this form of art. He began studying fine art back in 1976 and had started figurative painting by the early 1980s. In the mid-1980s, he introduced new techniques such as close-ups, cropping, sequencing and framing into his paintings. These techniques have remained as some of the key characteristics of his work to date. According to the artist, his work is concerned with what he terms as the belatedness of painting (Tuymans, Grynztejn and Molesworth 107). Tuymans’ paintings are characterized by a depository of data which is mainly drawn from television, photography and film. He combines a variety styles and subject matter in his paintings to make them unique. For his figurative paintings, Tuymans uses mouldy pastels, dead plaster white and cool grey colors to create blurred and obtuse images. The artist holds a firm belief that art representation can only be subjective and partial, hence the use of a reductive color scheme in his paintings. The events and ideas in Tuymans’ paintings cannot be expressed explicitly, which makes his works hard to categorize (Cork 44). His source materials included: oil on canvas, magazines, film stills, Polaroid photos as well as images from historical books (76). Tuymans’ influential work transforms mediated television, film and print images into historical examinations. He is one of the few modern artists who are using the modern technology to create works of art that have concepts of both modernity and tradition (Tuymans, Grynztejn and Molesworth 107). He is most noted for his Mwana Kitoko paintings whose themes are extracted from the visit that King Baudoin of Belgium paid to Congo in the 1950s. Tuymans also created an art form of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. The artist’s work can be found in various public collections in museums in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Antwerp, Paris, Munich and London (Jones 344). Works Cited Cork, Richard. Breaking Down the Barriers: Art in the 1990s. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2003. Print. Fredericq, Suzanne. Transformations: Works on Paper by artist Eugene J. Martin, Part 1. Washington DC: Estate of Eugene James Martin, 2010. Gaze, Delia. Dictionary of Women Artists. Oxford: Taylor & Francis Publishers, 2010 Jones, Amelia. A Companion to Contemporary Art Since 1945. New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2006. Print. Gray, Richard. Jennifer Bartlett: Amagansett, Richard gray Gallery, Chicago, Il, 2008. Mattison, Robert and Robert Rauschenberg. Robert Rauschenberg: Breaking Boundaries. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2003. Print Moos, David, Julian Schnabel, Gian Enzo Sperone and Marco Voena. Julian Schnabel. London: Skira, 2009. Print Tuymans, L, Madeleine Grynztejn and Helen Anne Molesworth. Luc Tuymans. San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 2009, Print. Read More