In this project what I did was, I took the ideas from three artists: Jason Salavon, Alberto Burii and Rachel Whiteread. The reason for choosing these different artists was because I wanted to get a wide range of different styles into my work. for example blurring and burning.
On the left it is just a couple of my edits and observations. In my opinion these are my best pictures the reason for this is because they are very high quality images and I believe that each of my images tell a story. |
Alberto Burii
Alberto Burri born 12 March 1915 in Città di Castello, Italy, died 13 February 1995 in Nice, France was an Italian painter and sculptor.
Early life Alberto Burri was born in Città di Castello, in Umbria in 1915 to a wine merchant and an elementary school teacher. He earned a medical degree from the University of Perugia specializing in tropical medicine. On 12 October 1940, two days after Italy entered World War II, Burri was called up as a medic and sent to Libya. On 8 May 1943 after the Axis forces were defeated at El Alamein, his unit was captured in Tunisia. He was interned in Camp Howze prisoner of war camp in Gainesville, Texas, where he began to paint. World War II had wreaked havoc on Italy. The country's resources had bled dry, defeat had made it old and bitter and years of fascism had imposed an agonizing cultural narrow-mindedness. A sort of modern Renaissance however swept through the country with the end of the Second World War. Artists began to use their work as a way to reexamine the past and the future of a country trying to find confidence in itself. Painters, poets and intellectuals formed new groups, cultural associations and drafted specialized periodicals and invited new theories, paving the way for a brand new platform for art. Personal life Burri was married to American dancer Minsa Craig. In 1963, they began spending winters in the Hollywood Hills of Los Angeles and the remainder of the year in Italy. In 1991, they settled in Beaulieu-sur-Mer, and moved between there and Italy. The couple kept two houses in Città di Castello, one in the city center, another in the countryside, so that Burri could pursue one of his favourite pastimes, hunting. Burri died from a respiratory failure at Pasteur Hospital in Nice in February 1995 at the age of 79; he suffered from emphysema. Also known as chronic obstructive lung disease, and chronic obstructive airway disease, among others, is a type of obstructive lung disease characterized by chronically poor airflow. It typically worsens over time. The main symptoms include shortness of breath, cough, and sputum production. The POW experience Burri, a young Italian doctor and a member of the Fascist Party was transformed by the dramatic and painful experience of being a prisoner of war in an American camp. Even though his political views changed dramatically after the war, he remained mute on the subject. Instead, he embarked on a lifelong creative journey. He used the limited materials available to him at the camp, converting them into pieces of art marked by his experience of turmoil and violence. The POW camps offered a much easier life to Italian prisoners compared to their German and Japanese counterparts. They were allowed to mix with the local Italian-American community, were offered recreational activities such as building religious altars, playing soccer or tending to vegetable gardens. As an officer, Burri was exempt from manual labor, but he was not permitted to practice medicine; like many of his fellow officers, he took up painting. He became a part of a group of Italian detainee-artists assigned to repaint a local church. In many ways Burri's increasing involvement in art, allowed him to resign completely from medicine upon his return to Italy. Work Burri's first paintings were views of the desert he could see from the prison camp and still life with paints and canvases supplied by the YMCA. He primarily painted "nostalgic Umbrian landscapes and figures", as Milton Gendel described in an Art news issue published in 1954. He collected old burlap sacks and brought them with him upon his return to Italy and continued to use them in place of canvas. Burlap, a symbol of the war itself was a cheap and durable material used for tents, supplies, sacks, sandbags and camouflage netting during the war. He continued to use burlap, having a supply from the local miller. After his release in 1946, Burri moved to Rome to pursue a full-time career as painter, despite the disapproval of most his friends and family. He joined his cousin, a musician and sole supporter in his decision, who helped to connect him with the Roman art circles. However, he was a very private and solitary artist, working incessantly. Milton Gendel, an American critic living in Rome, visited Burri’s studio in 1954 and described the atmosphere: “The studio is thick-walled, whitewashed, neat and ascetic; his work is ‘blood and flesh,’ reddened torn fabric that seems to parallel the staunching of wounds that Burri experienced in wartime.” Burri was influenced by his contemporary Enrico Prampolini, whose involvement in Dada and Surrealism shaped Burri's approach to art. Burri had also been attracted to the Italian concept of "poly materialism" or the ability of a single work of art to contain a variety of material effects. In order to push the limitations of a flat painting. Burri started investigating the use of non-traditional materials such as burlap, wood, tar, plastic, zinc oxide, pumice, kaolin, PVC adhesives, cellotex and fabric in the late 1940s. In the mid-1950s, Burri introduced charred wood into his burlap works, followed by scrap iron sheets fixed onto the wood, as well as colored and transparent sheets of plastic. In the 1970s he began his "cracked" paintings, or cretti. He created a series of works in the industrial insulating material, Celotex, from 1979 through the 1990s. In part, the use of these materials reflects Burri's tendency as a scientist, creating results that he desired in a controlled environment and his extensive knowledge of chemicals. Burri was obsessed with the materiality of his works. It is no surprise then that he chose to title his works on the name of the substance used to make the piece of art or the method used to create the desired effect. In the 1980s, Burri created a form of land art project on the town of Gibellina in Sicily. The town was abandoned following the 1968 Belice earthquake, with the inhabitants being rehoused in a newly built town 18 km away. Burri covered an area of over 120,000 square metres (1,300,000 sq ft), most of the old town, and an area roughly 300 metres by 400 metres with white concrete. He called this the Grande Cretto. |
Jason Salavon
Jason Salavon is an American contemporary artist. He is noted for his use of computer software of his own design to manipulate and reconfigure pre-existing media and data to create new visual works of fine art.
Born in Indiana 1970, raised in Texas, and based in Chicago, Salavon earned his MFA at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and his BA from The University of Texas at Austin. His work has been shown in museums and galleries the world. Reviews of his exhibitions have been included in such publications as Artforum, Art in America, The New York Times, and WIRED. Examples of his artwork are included in prominent public and private collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of Art, and the Art Institute of Chicago among many others. Using software processes of his own design, Jason Salavon generates and reconfigures masses of communal material to present new perspectives on the familiar. The final compositions are exhibited as art objects, such as photographic prints and video installations, while others exist in a real-time software context. Salavon is noted for his use of custom computer software to manipulate and reconfigure media and data to create new visual works of art. A significant body of Salavon's work involves two general means of manipulating pre-existing media to create works of art: first, by overlaying images (such as multiple photographs) and averaging the result to create visual amalgamations and, second, by distributing processed media (such as individual frames of a movie) side by side or in other configurations. An example of the first means is Salavon's 2004 suite of works, 100 Special Moments, which consists of images based on the average of groups of 100 distinct commemorative photographs culled from the Internet. An example of the second means is his 2000 work, Salavon's work has been and continues to be shown in numerous exhibitions around the world and is a part of many public and private collections (Hill 2004:54). He has also received commissions to create site-specific artworks, including a commission at the US Census Bureau in Suitland, Maryland. More recently, he received a commission to create art for the expansion of McCormick Place in Chicago. At one point, the Google search results for the term "Playboy" placed Salavon's website in a higher position than Playboy's own website. This was likely the result of extensive blogosphere discussion about and linking to Salavon's website for his works Every Playboy Centerfold, The Decades, amalgamations showing the decade-by-decade evolution of the "average" Playboy centerfold from the 1960s to the 1990s. |
Rachel WhitereadBorn in 20 April 1963 is an English artist who primarily produces sculptures, which typically take the form of casts. She was the first woman to win the annual Turner Prize in 1993.
Whiteread is one of the Young British Artists, and exhibited at the Royal Academy's Sensation exhibition in 1997. Among her most renowned works are House, a large concrete cast of the inside of an entire Victorian house, the holocaust memorial sculpture in Judenplatz Vienna and her resin sculpture for the empty plinth in London's Trafalgar Square. Her mother, Patricia Whiteread, who was also an artist, died in 2003 at the age of 72. Her death had a profound impact on Rachel's work. Whiteread studied at the Faculty of Arts and Architecture, Brighton Polytechnic from 1982 to 1985. Though she graduated with a BA in painting, she spent much of her time doing sculpture. She took a workshop on casting with the sculptor Richard Wilson and began to realize the possibilities in casting objects. She was briefly at the Cyprus College of Art. From 1985 to 1987 she studied sculpture at Slade School of Art, University College, London, graduating with an MA in 1987. She began to exhibit in 1987, with her first solo exhibition coming in 1988. She lives and works in a former synagogue in east London with long-term partner and fellow sculptor Marcus Taylor. Work Many of Whiteread's works are casts of ordinary domestic objects and, in numerous cases, their so-called negative space. For example, she is known for making solid casts of the open space in and around pieces of furniture such as tables and chairs, architectural details and even entire rooms and buildings. While still at the Slade, Whiteread cast domestic objects and created her first sculpture, Closet. She made a plaster cast of the interior of a wooden wardrobe and covered it with black felt. It was based on comforting childhood memories of hiding in a dark closet. After she graduated she rented space for a studio using the Enterprise Allowance Scheme. In 1988 she created Shallow Breath, the cast of the underside of a bed, made not long after her father died. Both sculptures were exhibited in her first solo show in 1988 along with casts of other domestic pieces. Ghost After her first solo exhibition, Whiteread decided to cast the space that her domestic objects could have inhabited. She applied for grants, describing the project as "mummifying the air in a room." She completed Ghost in 1990. It was cast from a room in a house on Archway Road in north London, much like the house she grew up in. The road was being widened and the house torn down. She used plaster to cast the parlor walls and ceiling in sections and assembled them on a metal frame. Ghost was first shown at the non-profit Chisenhale Gallery. It was purchased by Charles Saatchi and included with other works by Whiteread in his first "Young British Art" show in 1992. In May 2004 a fire in a Momart storage warehouse destroyed many works from the Saatchi collection, including, it is believed, some by Whiteread. However Ghost had recently been moved from the warehouse to the new Gagosian Gallery in London. The work was acquired by the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. in the fall of 2004. House and the Turner Prize In October 1993 Whiteread completed House, the cast of a Victorian terrace house. She had begun considering casting an entire house in 1991. She and James Lingwood looked at houses to be torn down in North and East London in 1992, but without success in securing one. During this period in 1992 and 1993 Whiteread had an artist residency in Berlin with a scholarship from the DAAD Artist's Programme. While in Berlin, she created Untitled (Room), the cast of a generic, anonymous room that she built herself. She finished the interior of a room-size box with wallpaper, windows and door before casting. The sculpture is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. House, perhaps her best known work, was a concrete cast of the inside of an entire Victorian terraced house completed in autumn 1993, exhibited at the location of the original house – 193 Grove Road – in East London (all the houses in the street had earlier been knocked down by the council). It drew mixed responses, winning her both the Turner Prize for best young British artist in 1993 and the K Foundation art award for worst British artist. Tower Hamlets London Borough Council demolished House on 11 January 1994, a decision which caused some controversy itself. |