ARTES MAGAZINE

“The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery.”   ~Francis Bacon   Left: Yoshitora (active circa 1840 – 1880)  Lovely Beauty Design (1870). Private collection   Losing Your Head in New York ARTES, a fine arts magazine, is always on the lookout for cool images that could fit the old adage: art is [...]

In a 1995 set of three paradigmatic, black and white photographs, Ai Weiwei (Born Beijing, 1957), the conceptual Chinese artist, iconoclast, and dissident, is documented Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn (below). The setting is austere and generic. The artist is shown dressed informally standing with weight distributed on spread legs in front of a brick [...]

Kathleen Elliot’s new series of flame worked glass botanical sculptures are both unexpected and intriguing. She achieves rich surface textures and pure luminous colors in imagery that spans natural form from flowers, fruits, pods and nests, to complex entwined linear vines. The artist accentuates details that are often overlooked when one confronts nature, providing a [...]

On a recent trip to Europe, my plane had an extended layover in Amsterdam. So, on a pre-planned quest, I journeyed by train from the airport to the ancient university city of Utrecht, The Netherlands, to see the austere, sculptural house—the Rietveld-Schroeder Huis, designed and built in 1924, by Gerrit Rietveld (left: photo by Mark [...]

Nightfall / New Tendencies in Figurative Painting Galerie Rudolfinum, Prague, Czech Republic, March 29 – May 24, 2013 MODEM, Debrecen, Hungary October 7, 2012 – February 10, 2013  Mankind has always been fascinated by darkness. In the beginning as the Bible says, “darkness covered the face of the deep,” and since then looking into the [...]

The Cross is arguably the most familiar symbol of Christianity, but nowhere is this iconography as crucial or culture-entrenched, as it is in Armenia. Wherever you go, thousands of khachkars, or Armenian cross-stones, pervade the mountainous conscience of the world’s oldest Christian nation, providing a rare glimpse into the art of spiritual expression and its [...]

In 1995, the gallery of the Massachusetts College of Art presented Language Lost, a deconstruction of text and communication by Xu Bing. Seventeen years later Phoenix, two enormous, junk metal birds (left), are suspended in the vast space of Building Five of Mass MoCA. They will remain on view for the coming year. Other elements [...]

A recent tour of the newly expanded and renovated Yale University Art Gallery, in New Haven Connecticut, has visitors treading on a little-noticed engraved marker inlayed in the stone floor of the Ancient Arts gallery. Cool winter light slants into the space from nearby Chapel Street, illuminating the inscription: ‘Col. JOHN TRUMBULL, Patriot and Artist, Friend [...]

Joyce Melander-Dayton and Janis Pozzi-Johnson: Evolution, curated by Herb Williams, was on view in September, 2012 at The Rymer Gallery in Nashville, Tennessee. Evolution featured new work by two artists who explore the nature of chance and expectation within the scope of empty space. Joyce Melander-Dayton combines eloquently woven textiles in physically rounded sculptural forms [...]

The sprawling, dense, complex, exhilarating, confounding Oh Canada, which opened recently at Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA), will remain on view for the next ten months, is the visual equivalent of a polyglot menagerie evoking Noah’s Ark. No, it has not rained in the Berkshire Hills of western Massachusetts for forty days and forty [...]