Search results for ""author kelly grovier""

A unique approach to the history of art told through the story of colour and pigments. Did you know that the ultramarine that shimmers at the centre of Vermeer’s Milkmaid connects that masterpiece with 6th-century Zoroastrian paintings found on the walls of cave temples in Bamiyan, Afghanistan? Or that the surging waves that crest and curl in Hokusai’s perilous Great Wave off Kanagawa owe their absorbing blue lustre to an alchemist who was born in Frankenstein’s Castle in 1673? And were the Pre-Raphaelites really obsessed with a murky brown hue derived from the pulverized remains of ancient mummies? (Spoiler: they were.) Invented by prehistoric cave-dwellers and medieval conjurers, cunning conmen and savvy scientists, the colours of art tell a riveting tale all their own. Over ten scintillating chapters, acclaimed author Kelly Grovier helps bring that tale vividly to life, revealing the astonishing backstories of the pigments that define the greatest works in the history of art. Interwoven between these chapters is a series of features focusing on key moments in the evolution of colour theory – from the revelations of the Enlightenment to the radicalism of the Bauhaus – while reproductions of carefully selected artworks help illuminate the narrative’s twists and turns. The history of colour is an epic saga of human ingenuity and insatiable desire. Read this book and you will never look at a work of art in quite the same way.

Read more less

A new take on the history of art from da Vinci to Warhol as reinterpreted and ultimately reinforced by the international phenomenon that is Banksy Few would dispute that Banksy is the most famous urban artist in the world today. That he is also one of the most perceptive art historians of our age might come as a surprise to many. But the myriad memorable works he has created over the past thirty years constitute an audacious commentary on the history of image-making a captivating critique waiting to be pieced together. Armed with little more than stencils, spray paint and an anonymizing cloak of after-hours darkness, Banksy has forged an alluring identity for himself as an incorrigible prankster who doesn't embrace tradition but shreds it. What actually illuminates Banksy's audacious murals, impromptu urban sculptures and vandalized paintings, however, is a profound understanding of the story of art. Banksy recasts masterpieces as powerful comments on contemporary

Read more less

A new way of appreciating art that puts the artwork front and centre, brought to us by one of the freshest and most exciting voices in cultural criticism. What makes great art great? Why do some works pulse in the imagination, generation after generation, century after century? From Botticelli’s Birth of Venus to Picasso’s Guernica, some paintings and sculptures have become so famous, so much a part of who we are, that we no longer really look at them. We take their greatness for granted; our eyes have become near-obsolete. We need a new way of seeing. Unsatisfied with traditional interpretations of masterpieces, which are so often interested only in learning about art, and not from it, Kelly Grovier combed the surface of revered works from the Terracotta Army to Frida Kahlo’s self-portraits, in a quest to find the key to their lasting power to move and delight us. He discovered that every truly great work is hardwired with an underappreciated detail that ignites it from deep within. Stepping away from biography, style and the chronology of ‘isms’ that preoccupies most art history, Grovier tells a new story in which we learn from the artworks, not just about them.

Read more less

The title of Kelly Grovier's third collection, The Lantern Cage, conjures contrasting images of illumination and shadow, warmth and confinement, the burning soul and the material body. The poems it brings together are fascinated by a universe whose meaning flickers dimly across the walls of our experience. Prompted by scenes that occur in life's everyday spaces - city streets and secondhand shops, museum galleries and trains - these are poems that seek to shine a warm light on the mysteries that underlie our existence. This is a world of 'undeciphered sands', 'lost cathedrals', 'buried books', and 'bone machines' - a land where substance and shadow blur. By turns lyrical and philosophical, romantic and playful, The Lantern Cage is a collection located on the margins of vision, where the invisible calculations of being ('algorithms of rain'; 'the long divisions / of suffering') remain unsolvable - a realm whose secrets are kept 'under lough and quay'.

Read more less

"A Lens in the Palm" speaks from a world of fragmented philosophies and troubled meditations. Haunted by the ghosts of Keats and Spinoza, of Rodin and Turner, the voices that echo through these poems lead us into a place that is at once familiar and dazzlingly strange. Poems materialise from a palimpsest of twenty-first-century cities "Paris and New Orleans, Oxford, Milan" where declarations of faith and disbelief clash and blur. Here, the stars 'think themselves into existence', the bones of Giotto jangle, and the 'hairs on a dandelion fizz'.

Read more less

An Ode to Vanishing Beauty It is estimated that, as a result of climate change, illegal trade, and habitat loss from the encroachments of technology and industrialization, as many as one in eight species of birds is heading towards extinction. Created in close collaboration between Sean Scully and Kelly Grovier, each pairing of poem and drawing is devoted to the beauty and mystery of an individual species of bird. Scully’s visual language, at once measured and impassioned, geometric and free-flowing, captures the essence of creatures that are, themselves, on the brink of becoming mere abstractions. Though his first series of iPhone drawings are consistent with his signature style, they reveal a fresh intimacy, playfulness, and exhilaration of gesture, color, and form that is in accord with the wonder of feathered flight. Created on a digital device, the drawings are, as Scully remarked, the ironic embodiment of “technology which is ruining nature turned inside out to protest its demise.” Yet taken together, these duets aim to offer something uplifting in the face of an accelerating tragedy. “Hope” is, after all as Emily Dickinson famously wrote, “the thing with feathers / That perches in the soul.”

Read more less

For over 800 years Newgate was the grimy axle around which British society slowly twisted. This is where such legendary outlaws as Robin Hood and Captain Kidd met their fates, where the rapier-wielding playwrights Ben Jonson and Christopher Marlowe sharpened their quills, and where flamboyant highwaymen like Claude Duval and James Maclaine made legions of women swoon. While London's theatres came and went, the gaol endured as Londons unofficial stage. From the Peasants Revolt to the Great Fire, it was at Newgate that England's greatest dramas unfolded. By piecing together the lives of forgotten figures as well as re-examining the prison's links with more famous individuals, from Dick Whittington to Charles Dickens, this thrilling history goes in search of a ghostly place, erased by time, which has inspired more poems and plays, paintings and novels, than any other structure in British history.

Read more less

What makes great art great? Why do some works pulse in the imagination generation after generation, century after century? From Botticelli’s Birth of Venus to Picasso’s Guernica, some paintings and sculptures have become so famous, so much a part of who we are, we no longer really look at them. We take their greatness for granted; our eyes have become near-obsolete. We need a new way of seeing. Unsatisfied with traditional, hand-me-down interpretations of these masterpieces interested only in learning about art, and not from it, Kelly Grovier combed the surface of revered works from the Terracotta Army of the First Qin Emperor to Frida Kahlo’s self-portraits. What did he find? The key to their enduring power to move and delight us. He discovered that every truly great work is hardwired with an underappreciated detail, a flourish of strangeness, that ignites it from deep inside. From a carved mammoth tusk (c. 40,000 bce) to Duchamp’s Fountain (1917), and Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights (1505–10) to Louise Bourgeois’s Maman (1999), a remarkable lexicon of astonishing imagery has imprinted itself onto cultural consciousness over the past 40,000 years – a resilient visual vocabulary whose meaning has proved elastic and endlessly renewable from era to era. It is to these works that Kelly Grovier devotes himself in this radical new art history. Stepping away from biography, style and the chronology of ‘isms’ that preoccupies most art history to focus on the artworks themselves, Grovier tells a new story in which we learn from the artworks, not just about them. Looking closely at each work, he identifies an ‘eye-hook’ – the part of the artwork that ‘bridges the divide between art and life, giving it palpable purpose and elevating its value beyond the visual to the vital’ – and encourages us to squint through this narrow aperture to perceive the work’s truest meanings. This book is unique in emphasizing the durability of what is made over the ephemerality of its making and serves as a rejoinder to a growing sensibility that conceives of artists as brands and the works they create as nothing more than material commodities to hoard, hide, and flip for profit. Lavishly illustrated with many of the most breathtaking and enduring artworks ever created, as well as many that inspired or took inspiration from them, this refreshing book will spark a debate about how it is that artworks articulate who we are and what it means to be alive in the world.

Read more less

A unique insight into the life and art of Sean Scully, an internationally celebrated artist and creative practitioner at the height of his powers. Sean Scully’s paintings of brushy stripes and blocks of sumptuous colour are critically acclaimed and widely admired. Less well known is what a gifted storyteller and profound commentator on the history of art he is. In this fascinating book, the record of countless hours of conversations with Scully’s friend, the art critic Kelly Grovier, the painter reflects on his extraordinary journey – from homelessness on the streets of Dublin in the mid-1940s to his current position as one of the most important abstract artists working today. In these revealing conversations, Scully recalls with poignancy and wit his rough-and-tumble childhood in London (where his family moved when he was a toddler), his tenacity in the face of rejection from nearly every art school in England, and his rise to prominence in New York in the 1980s. Illustrated throughout with images that capture both the artist and his work, this volume explores Scully’s relationship with past masters, from Rembrandt to Rothko, and delves deep into his eventual rejection in the late 1970s of minimalism – the dominant force in abstract art at the time. Punctuated throughout by passionately recounted stories of struggle and loss, perseverance and triumph, the portrait that emerges from these pages is at once intimate and surprising. The book reflects the scope of Scully’s broad interests and opinions, with segments devoted not only to his attitudes towards the art world and his most significant works, but also culture, politics and philosophy. Scully communicates with a raw pugnacity that is every bit as hard-hitting as his big brushstrokes.With 146 illustrations in colour

Read more less

The years since 1989 have seen a complete untethering of what art can be, who makes it and where it can be found, which has been matched by a reassessment of art's appropriate place in society and the financial value that should be attached to it. In this new book in the World of Art series, Kelly Grovier surveys the dynamic developments in art practice worldwide since 1989, going in search of those artists who have undertaken to shape a fresh visual vocabulary and whose work reflects on these turbulent years. The book’s ten chapters examine the key themes in contemporary art, from portraiture in the age of face transplants and facial recognition software, to political activism, science and religion. Artists discussed include Jeff Koons, Louise Bourgeois, Damien Hirst, George Condo, Marlene Dumas, Sean Scully, Cindy Sherman, Banksy, Ai Weiwei, Antony Gormley, Christo and Jean-Claude, Jenny Holzer, Chuck Close and Cornelia Parker. The final chapter, a timeline, traces the evolution of art practice in this period by looking closely at one key artwork from each year.

Read more less

A wide-ranging and engaging introduction to the place and power of colour in life and art by John Gage, author of the award-winning Colour and Culture. The complex phenomenon of colour has received detailed attention from the perspectives of physics, chemistry, physiology, psychology, linguistics and philosophy. However, the people who work most closely with colour – artists – have rarely been canvassed for their opinions on this mysterious subject. John Gage sets out to address this omission by focusing on the thoughts and practices of artists. Colour in Art is concerned with the history of colour, but is not itself a history; instead each chapter develops a theme from a different scientific discipline, as seen from the viewpoint of such diverse artists such as Wassily Kandinsky, Vincent van Gogh, Sonia Delaunay, Bridget Riley and Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri. Drawing on examples through the ages, from ancient times to the present, the many topics covered include flags, synaesthesia, Theosophy, theatre design, film, chromotherapy and chromophobia. Featuring a new foreword by art writer Kelly Grovier outlining contemporary developments in the study of colour, and an updated bibliography, this new edition of this classic text offers a wide-ranging and engaging introduction to the place and power of colour in life and art.

Read more less