Search results for ""Author Robert Hobbs""

Painting as simulation and hyperreality: Peter Halley and the digital age. In the 1980s, Peter Halley revitalised painting by relying on sociology and science fiction. He employed fluorescent colours and Roll-A-Tex to deconstruct early and mid-twentieth-century transcendent geometric abstraction into abstract cells and prisons and by adding conduits to imaginatively access outside forces. Peter Halley has met many challenges posed by the Information Age and French poststructuralism by situating his painting on the divide separating analogue and digital worlds. Robert Hobbs's monograph analyses Halley's geometric and highly keyed art in terms of opportunities provided by the Internet, aesthetic possibilities afforded by Photoshop, timely relevance advanced by Michel Foucault's and Jean Baudrillard's sociological theories, and conundrums presented by both science fiction and physics.

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Themes and motifs in the art of Kara Walker, from blackface to abjection, by a leading art historian In 2002, Kara Walker was selected to represent the United States at the prestigious São Paulo Art Biennial. Curator Robert Hobbs wrote extended essays on her work for this exhibition, and also for her show later that year at the Kunstverein Hannover. Because these essays have not been distributed in the US and remain among the most in-depth and essential investigations of her work, Karma is now republishing them in this new clothbound volume. Among the most celebrated artists of the past three decades, with over 93 solo exhibitions to her credit, including a major survey at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Walker is known for her tough, critical, provocative and highly imaginative representations of African Americans and whites reaching back to antebellum times. In his analysis, Hobbs looks at the five main sources of her art: blackface Americana, Harlequin romances, Julia Kristeva’s concept of abjection, Stone Mountain’s racist tourist attraction and the minstrel tradition. Robert Hobbs (born 1946) has written more than 50 books and catalogs, focusing on such artists as Milton Avery, Alice Aycock, Lee Krasner, Robert Smithson and Kehinde Wiley. Since 1991 he has held the Rhoda Thalhimer Endowed Chair of American Art in the School of Arts, Virginia Commonwealth University. Since 2004 he has served as a visiting professor at Yale University. Now based in New York, Kara Walker was born in Stockton, California, in 1969. She received her MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1994; soon afterward, Walker rose to prominence for her large, provocative silhouettes installed directly onto the walls of exhibition spaces.

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Taking humanity and popular culture as his subject matter, Nate Lowman (born 1979) approaches these themes as an active participant in the collective American experience. Underscoring this is desire: a longing for something or someone, or a wish for something to happen. The duality inherent in desire is contained in Lowman’s use of well-known images whose meanings are both instantly recognizable and constantly in flux. Appropriated, relatable images and language from American pop culture and its 24-hour news cycle form a narrative and tell part of the American story. Angels, poppies, hearts, pine-tree air fresheners, smiley faces, iconic celebrities, crosses and news articles—all presented through the lens of desire—confront viewers with the things of modern life that are often left unsaid and unexamined. For more than a decade, Nate Lowman has produced paintings, sculptures, and (often salon-style) installations that process and represent the unfolding human experience in a visual environment of endlessly proliferating public media archives. Re-presenting and reframing techniques of image reproduction as painterly practice, Lowman constructs narratives condensed in layers of studio techniques, including printing, cropping, projecting, cutting, staining, repurposing, lacquering, stripping and stretching. His paintings explore the capacity of images to mediate between the personal and the universal in cycles of decay and renewal. Published on the occasion of the Aspen Art Museum’s exhibition of the New York–based artist, Nate Lowman is the first comprehensive monograph on the artist to date.

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Portraits of the picturesque Massachusetts city, painted a century apart In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the coastal city of Gloucester, Massachusetts, long a major hub for America’s fishing industry, became a celebrated summer resort for prominent American painters and writers including Winslow Homer, Childe Hassam, Cecilia Beaux and T.S. Eliot. As a young man visiting Gloucester, Edward Hopper (1882–1967) turned away from the allure of its ragged coast line and instead created atmospheric watercolors of homes, lighthouses and street scenes in Gloucester. In this volume, art historian Robert Hobbs revisits these works from the 1920s, which he positions alongside the work of New York–based painter Dike Blair (born 1952), who, a century later, has created a new body of work centered on the small fishing city.

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Born in London and raised in Nigeria, Shonibare employs a diverse range of media - from sculpture, painting and installation to photography and film - to probe matters of race, class, cultural identity and history. He is perhaps best known for his signature use of a colourful "African" batik fabric that actually originated in Indonesia and was introduced to Africa in the 19th century by British and Dutch colonisers. Incorporated into Victorian costumes, covering sculptures of extraterrestrials, or stretched like canvas for paintings, these vibrant textiles cleverly challenge issues of origin and authenticity. This book - the most comprehensive resource available on Shonibare - presents the best work of the London-based artist's career, including his high-profile project for the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square, London and other innovative public sculptures. Whether lampooning Victorian propriety or commenting on what it means to be an "alien," Shonibare makes art that challenges straightforward interpretations.

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The first in-depth survey of the life and work of Jim Hodges, one of America's most celebrated contemporary artistsJim Hodges is an artist who addresses issues such as memory, love, and existential struggles through a multifaceted practice that includes photography, screen printing, and sculpture. His use of found materials including rocks and denim, coupled with the adoption of transitory shapes like spiderwebs, speaks of a personal experience that resonates on a collective level filtered through elements available in nature. Mysterious, beautiful, poetic, and conceptually deep, Hodges's work has the rare quality of being simultaneously thought-provoking and visually beautiful.

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The celebrated survey of female Abstract Expressionist artists revealing the richness and lasting influence of their work The artists Jay DeFeo, Helen Frankenthaler, Grace Hartigan, Elaine de Kooning, Lee Krasner, Joan Mitchell, and many other women played major roles in the development of Abstract Expressionism, which flourished in New York and San Francisco in the 1940s and 1950s and has been recognized as the first fully American modern art movement. Though the contributions of these women were central to American art of the twentieth century, their work has not received the same critical attention as that of their male counterparts. Women of Abstract Expressionism is a long-overdue survey. Lavishly illustrated with full-color plates emphasizing the expressive freedom of direct gesture and process at the core of the movement, this book features biographies of more than forty artists, offering insight into their lives and work. Essays by noted scholars explore the techniques, concerns, and legacies of women in Abstract Expressionism, shedding light on their unique experiences. This groundbreaking book reveals the richness of the careers of these important artists and offers keen new reflections on their work and the movement as a whole.Published in association with the Denver Art MuseumExhibition Schedule:Mint Museum, Charlotte, N.C. (10/22/16–01/22/17)Palm Springs Art Museum (02/18/17–05/28/17)

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