01.25.12
Fab Ciraolo has some excellent pop-infused illustrations that mishmash iconic personas from film and art with contemporary culture.
10.13.11
It’s been a little while since I dropped in on pop culture, psychedelic painter extraordinaire Dave MacDowell and I am glad I did because he has since posted some new works to his Flickrfolio for the Thinkspace Gallery that are fantastic.
07.08.11
There is a lot of experimentation happening throughout the portfolio of artist, designer and illustrator Bryan Collins. He doesn’t limit himself to a single style or approach and as a result has arrived at some memorable outcomes within his work.
06.30.11
UK artist JKB Fletcher combines pop, consumerism, super heroes, fashion and a good healthy dose of sex then throws them all in a blender and whammo you have some deliciously devious art. It might be cynical but it looks devine.
05.15.11
Olly Moss caused quite a stir with his recent lasercut silhouette solo show at Gallery 1988. The gallery has sponsored and help bring forward some very interesting artists who are merging influences from movies, cartoons and pop culture. Olly’s poster work for the Alamo Drafthouse has helped his work reach a growing and passionate audience hungry for more. His show was a smash success with people lined up around the block to buy his prints. Apparently celebrities like Patton Oswalt were even at the show to grab a print while they lasted. Threadless has put together a nice little synopsis of the show that you can watch above and Slash Film also has a great interview with Moss posted on their site.
04.27.11
Philippe Chabot on his work, “My work deals with absurdity, dumbness, disenchantment, cult and decay. I am interested in the ways television, radio, web and entertainment culture affect our social and individual identities. I am also intrigued by the position of painting among all the other forms of visual media that surrounds us, and I believe that visual art, in its institutional format, is evolving away from the general public.”
I haven’t just flat out ‘liked’ someone’s fine art in a while as much as I like Chabot’s. It’s like a blender of Francis Bacon, Warhol, Jean Michel Basquiat and maybe just a hair of Walt Disney thrown in for seasoning. It’s everything I love combined.
03.28.11
Angelo Bramanti and Giuseppe Siracusa bring waste materials and found objects alive to create some truly strange but memorable pieces of pop art under the name l017.
01.26.11
I wasn’t entirely sure what to make of Mexican pop artist Ivan Crush’s work at first. It’s repetitive but deliberately so and I can’t quite make out if it’s serious or poking fun at itself. It feels very urban and fashion orientated but their is also a subversive layer of cynicism just under the surface. It takes a while for it to sink in but when it does the hook sets a little deeper.
01.12.11
I don’t know if it’s just trendy to say that you are ‘so over collage right now’ but just when I try to say it to myself I discover another collage artist I respond too. There is something very ‘now’ about collage in that there is so much visual clutter out there now with the internet. Soon that information will be streamed through window advertising offering up an internet-archived smorgasbord of information. It seems to make sense to want to rearrange all of that imagery into something more meaningfully abstract. And Mario Wagner is doing that but adding a little splash of pop color.
12.11.10
Self-taught Russian designer/illustrator Fill Ryabchikov isn’t afraid to use the color pink liberally. His glowing, 80′s sci-pop imagery will have you tripping through a retro-futuristic flashback forward like walking on a dream.
12.08.10
Unfortunately Adam Neate’s website is somewhat difficult to use but Today And Tomorrow along with Trendland have done a fine job documenting and providing large images of his ‘Flock Series’ of 3D paintings created for Elms Lester Painting Rooms. They definitely draw inspiration from Francis Bacon but pull that kinetic emotional expression into the realm of modern pop art.
05.24.10
Australian graffiti artist Numskull has continued updating his site with more examples of his sarcastic pop culture clash artwork that mixes typography, comic and cartoon imagery we all love and fear. If you are unfamiliar with his work you can read an interview with him at Side Street Sydney that gets into his process and the psychology behind his imagery. You can also purchase posters of his Wooden Toy Publishing and Stupid Krap.
I am a big fan of his work. His use of typography is of particular interest to me but the mixing of ‘pop/comic type’ with comic book and cartoon figures is just brilliant.
05.07.10
Sex, art, surrealism, trompe l’oeil, violence and consumerism all slam together in the pop realist meets surrealist paintings of Swiss artist Till Rabus and there are moments of sheer brilliance happening in the mixto-art-soup that looks absolutely delicious. It’s rare that the word fabulous is apropos but alas here we are.
04.08.10
“Combining influences from abstract expressionism, British landscape painting, Japanese woodcuts, and graphic street art, Ashcroft integrates varied visual styles to generate a crossover between space, object and environment.”
There is something almost ‘comic book’ about some of London based Phil Ashcroft’s work and although it is in a sense abstract expressionism there is a deliberate pop flair about it and I like that. Abstract comic pop-expressionism.
04.07.10
Russian artist Stas Chepurnov has a strange cache of work including the above installation that is hypnotic. His work is a mix of pop and reactionary cynicism to popular culture with a particular fascination for HD television. How cool would it be to have the above installation in your home or studio (a good client distraction at least)?
03.31.10
Painter Matt Mignanelli’s pop art painting confections have been peaking through the blogosphere subterfuge in the last few weeks. His subtly gradiating paintings of bricks (which I at first mistook at first for keys on a keyboard) seem to be popular. Mignanelli is currently based out of New York City but has exhibited far and wide. You can see his work at both his website and through his Flickr stream.
02.04.10
Artist Nick van Woert produces the kind of ‘reexamination of pre-existing/accepted western cultural art norms’ that could be described as trendy but forces you to reconsider something old as something colliding with the new. It’s the kind of art that is clever enough to make it into the highly curated postings of But Does it Float (damnit all that blog is cool). It’s also the kind of art that as an artist you look at and think, ‘shit that’s brilliant, why didn’t I think of that?’ Well, Nick beat you to it. Lastly, it’s the kind of sculptural art that could only be realized in a post pop art-modernism society. Placing one of Woert’s sculptures in your home would most certainly spark a conversation. One that would no doubt start with, ‘…well this is interesting’. Woert currently resides in Brooklyn which if you’ve been paying attention to all of the ‘it’s the kind of art that’ sentences in this post shouldn’t really come as a surprise.
01.29.10
Artist Nick Gentry has found a muse on our throwaway culture. He paints onto discarded computer disks and cassette tapes.
Here is a a section pulled from his artist statement:
“Since graduating from Central St Martins in 2006, the focus has been to explore how technological advancement is affecting society. Throughout history, information has always been recorded on physical objects. Important documents, favourite songs, videos and more were stored on mountains of tapes, polaroids, cassettes and disks. As media is rapidly absorbed into the World Wide Web the rich variety of formats of the past are becoming obsolete.”
