Jeff Koons

Jeff Koons is an American artist noted for his use of kitsch items in his artwork.  His work is large scale, ranging from paintings to sculptures.  He takes items from ‘childhood’ memories and takes them to the next level.  He makes them large scale, such as sitting thirty feet outside a building, to taking up an entire gallery wall with one painting. 

Koons uses kitsch items to portray artwork that people don’t really want to look at.  Why would we consider kitsch items are?  Who would use these items anyways?  Jeff Koons would.  He breaks boundaries with his work that we wouldn’t have thought were there, or would go there ourselves.  His art is different in itself because the objects or subjects he used wouldn’t normally be scene in a gallery setting, but at a trailer trash old woman’s house where it is considered fine art. 

Koons takes the obscene items from our past and shouts them out for the world to see.  His sculptures make statements in their size and his paintings are just outrageous.  He takes advantage of what is kitsch and what is art and questions us on thinking differently.  You just have to ask yourself, is what Koons does art? 

Balloon Dog (Magenta), 1994-2000. Jeff Koons. High chromium stainless steel with transparent color coating



Puppy, 1992



Cat Chow

Cat Chow’s artwork is made up of the invisible sub-products of the garment industry such as zippers, snaps, bobbins, tape measures, and other products.  “Chow invites us to consider these pieces as art objects, all the while raising a series of provocative questions. How can the intrinsic hardness of a metal be softened? How can a flexible fabric assume a structural role? How can a non-precious material be treated in a precious way? And perhaps most importantly, how can fashion be shaped into art?” (From the Manufactured website)

These questions help us to understand a little of what Chow’s artwork is about.  She uses objects in the fashion world to create her art, as well as objects from everyday life such as keys and records.  Her work helps transform our thoughts of the fashion world as just not being about clothes, but into fine art.  She uses objects we would not think to use such as keys and zippers to make visually appeasing pieces that move the eye around the piece and keep us wandering what it is made of. 

The question we have to ask ourselves is if what Chow is doing with her fashion is considered fine art, or if it is just left up to her design pieces?  Who defines art exactly?  We the viewer do and our choice will be made by us alone.  Cat Chow’s work is different from others in the way that is takes something that is already considered a form of art, and takes it to the next level.      

36 Chambers, 2008

Ceremony, 2008

Keeper, 2008

Mother, 2008

Vicious Circle, 2008

Kathryn Spence

Kathryn Spence creates objects and drawings that reference the natural world.  She makes owls, wolves, and other creatures as if they are right from nature.  Spence herself is an avid birder, gardener, and conservationists.  She creates her works that attempt to order and arrange both recognizable and unrecognizable forms as metaphors for psychological spaces.   

Spence makes animals out of everyday objects, such as trash, wire, string and other miscellaneous objects.  She sets them up as if they are real, such as an owl on a perch, with maybe a little of the string hanging down to give the viewer a sense of if it is real or not.  She uses these objects to help build a bridge between what is artificial and the existence of the untamed natural world that surrounds us.  Her works are detailed, most are life size to the creature she is creating, and each one is unique in what she uses to create it, whether it is old clothes, plastic bags or string.  Spence does use recycled materials the most, but she even used pieces of her own clothes to make the animals look real.  She poses them the way she does as if it is in nature, and the animals are looking at us, staring us down.

Kathryn Spence takes objects we may and do throw out every day and uses them to create something beautiful.  Her creations are lifelike that they give you a sense that she plucked them from nature and put them in the gallery.  Her works are there to help us understand that using materials that are already there and available instead of throwing them out is the way we should go.  If she can create something as beautiful as her animals, so can the world.  

Cloudless White

Pigeons, 1997 - street trash, wire, string, rubber bands, glue

Untitled (Snowy Owl), 2006 - stuffed animals, plastic bag, curtains, wire, thread

Untitled (Two Burrowing Owls), 2006 - newspaper, stuffed animals, fabric, towel, wire, thread

Untitled (Great Horned Owl), 2006 - pants, coats, shirts, beanie babies, stuffed animal fur, string, wire

Tom Friedman

Tom Friedman’s work explores material transformation through minimal, focused, repetitive interaction.  He takes everyday objects and transforms them into new things.  With is works, it is hard to determine what they original product was from a glance, but once you look at his art you begin to see what he has taken and transformed into something completely new. 

Friedman takes his time to construct each piece, so it does not look like its original form. He also helps objects to become or to look like something in real life, such as with his work with the bees.  His works are not complicated in sense that they are not made up of many objects, but they are complicated by how much detail and time he spends in each piece to make it look the way it does.  There are many strong elements in his pieces such as line, color, texture, and form, and he uses each term to bring each piece to the next level.  His pieces have movement, show depth and give a sense of awe when you look at them for how much detail is put into them.

Friedman works with many different objects, and his sculptures range in many sizes from very small like a bee to the size of a room.  Tom Friedman’s work helps give us a new description on everyday objects and see what they can be transformed into.   

   

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Untitled, 1999-2002 wooden school chair, 35 x16-½ x 24-½ inches

Untitled, 1995, toothpicks, 26 x 30 x 23 inches. A starburst construction made with 30,000 toothpicks

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Damien Hirst

Damien Hirst is a member of the Young British Artists group.  Hirst’s work is creepy, weird, foreboding, and everything else that is associated with those words.  His work is centered on death, a subject most people try and avoid in our everyday lives.

Hirst’s work shows us the relationship we have with death.  How we are separated from it, fear it, and just don’t want to look at it.  He forces us to look at it, in every detail possible.  He uses dead animals such as sheep, sharks, and cows and displays them in glass boxes.  This forces us to look at the animals as if they were alive, or even if they were fake, but knowing they are real in their tanks.  When we are looking at his art, we have no choice but to look at the objects he has presented to us in what fashion they are presented, and accept it.  Once we get past the idea that these subjects are dead, we can start to appreciate the detail they provide us and learn to look at them in a new light.
  
His artwork became an icon in the 1990’s and was the face of the Young British Artists.  Hirst has also worked with other materials, such as he has also made "spin paintings," created on a spinning circular surface, and "spot paintings", which are rows of randomly colored circles.  Though he has done other art, he is most well-known for his pieces done with animals.  Hirst has shown us a new way to look at life, even if it is threw a glass box.    

Away from the Flock, 1992

Isolated Elements Swimming in the Same Direction for the Purposes of Understanding, 1991

Mother and Child Divided, 1993

Pharmacy,1992. Mixed media installation

For the Love of God, 2007

Cornelia Parker

Cornelia Parker is a master of fine art and a destroyer of fine things.  When I say this, it mean it as she takes objects, removes the original meaning to them and gives them new meaning.  Some people would say it is destroying objects, but it is giving them new life. 

Parker’s most famous work is Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View (1991).  This piece is made up of parts from an exploded shed and arranged in a way that shows the explosion happening.  Each piece is suspended by fishing line, allowing the pieces to sway and move as people walk by.  There is a light in the middle of the piece showing the core of the explosion.  When you walk in the room with this piece, you can see the explosion happening as if you are the only on who is not frozen in time.  This is how Parker’s pieces work.  She may take things that are broken, seen as trash, and put them in a way that changes our whole perspective. 

Another kind of art that Parker does is takes everyday objects that have uses and takes those uses away from them, by flattening them.  We can see this in her famous piece, 30 Pieces of Silver.  Each one of the objects used to be useful, whether if it was a fork or a pitcher, it is no longer useful in its original form, thus many people would deem them useless.  Parker though transforms them into something new, whether they are hanging as disks from the ceiling or displayed as if they could still be used.

Cornelia Parker changes our outlook on everyday objects, and makes us find new ideas for them, if there are any.  She removes objects uses and shows us things we may never see in real life.  Parker makes us look at art in a different form.         

The Distance (a kiss with string attatched), 2003

Neither From Nor Towards, 1992

Doubtful Sound

Breathless, 2011

Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View, 1991

30 Pieces of Silver

Carl Andre

Carl Andre was one of the founders of the art movement known as Minimal, Systemic, or ABC Art.  It is a type of art that seeks to remove everything decorative, additive, or extra and leave the bare components.  This is the art.

Andre is a metal worker, brick layer, and a sculptor.  His works range from small to room size, leaving the viewer in awe of his work.  Andre’s work is a little harder to understand than most because using the minimal view on art, there is not much to look at.  Take his work with brick laying for example.  He takes bricks and stacks them, he may rearrange them and that is the art.  This frustrates most people because they can’t see how a stack of bricks, in perfect formation is art.  That is what the art is though; it is so minimal and systematic that it makes its own statement.  One hundred and twenty two bricks can be laid down many different ways, many patterns, varying heights and widths.  He chooses to lay them in his own systematic ways, using arithmetic as the bases for his work.  The preciseness of his work and the lines that run through it give the pieces structure.  They are minimal in style and maybe even function, but that is how Andre chooses to work. 

With Andre’s art, you have to look beyond the object in front of you and think why the artist decided to lay them this way or present it this way.  Is there meaning in its environment?  Does this show me something new?  Can I see what he is trying to convey or what is my conclusion to it?  Andre’s work asks many questions of it viewers and I believe that is the art in it.  If art doesn’t make us think, is it truly art?            

Copper Galaxy

Equivalent VIII, 1966

Lament for the children, 1976-1996

Magnesium Squares

Sum Roma, 1997

Uncarved Blocks, Vancouver 1975

Michael Criag-Martin

Michael Craig-Martin takes objects we may see as one thing and brings it into a new perspective, changing the meaning all together.  He takes generic objects and reinvents them; most famously know in the art piece An Oak Tree.  Martin is an icon of American pop culture and modernism, with his unconventional way of thinking, his use of color and lines in his works, and his of the wall designs.

Martin’s artwork is considered odd, outrageous, and upsetting to some.  In his paintings, he uses bright vibrant colors to portray the words or objects that are the subjects in his paintings.  The use of line in the projects are very important, the lines are what hold the bright colors in place and help stop the paintings from vibrating for an instant so you could get a look at them and see what they are.  What Martin does can be considered a definition of pop art, with the colors, lines, and format, but he does try and create his work to be something more, a major statement.  People say Martin’s works are lacking emotion and the humans are depicted as lifeless nothings, but I believe that is where he stumps them.  You have to look deeper into work to find the meaning and even sometimes just make up something yourself.  His people may be lifeless, but the colors act as the movement and narrative in the painting to give attention to what is important.  “In the contemporary world those things have become ordinary things,” Craig-Martin explains. “They are so ubiquitous, so ordinary that you can’t really describe the modern world without those objects” (Taken from an interview from BBC).

The objects that Martin paints or uses in his pieces are a part of everyday life.  He is trying to help us think past our normal associations with certain objects and come up with new ideas.  Michael Craig-Martin might be an unconventional artist, but his work is teaching people to think outside of the box.

To read the interview/artist statement for the piece An Oak Tree, follow this link:

http://www.mat.upm.es/~jcm/craig-martin--an-oak-tree.html



An Oak Tree



ART (Magenta) 2010, Acrylic on aluminium 122 cm x 120 cm

Big Fan, London (2003), flexible PVC & fluorescent lights.



Inhale (Yellow)



Lightbulb Sculpture

Zaha Hadid 2008