Eyeblog

DORIS SALCEDO'S 'SHIBBOLETH'

Work by reknowned south American artist Doris Salcedo is currently on display at the Tate Modern’s turbine hall until April 2008. The sculpture entitled ‘Shibboleth’ is part of the Unilever Series which have been appearing at the Tate modern over the last 4 years.

The sculpture was created by digging a space in the Turbine Hall floor which at some points recedes at 3 feet. At the unveiling of the highly publicised piece, Salcedo exclaimed ‘I don’t think people will like it’. Since the piece has been on public display, thousands have flocked in to see the piece and it has appeared for discussion on numerous radio stations and in many national newspapers.

The sculpture is centured on the theme of the divide between culture and racism, emphasizing the still apparent underclass in Western society.

Salcedo is a South American artist born in Colombia in 1958. She currently works and resides in South America.

If you come to view this exhibition at the tate Modern, be sure to pop accross the road to the Eyestorm Gallery to see ‘Buenos aires: Art for Export’, a collaboration of two Argentinian galleries which plays host to the work of some of the finest South American born artists.

BUENOS AIRES: ART FOR EXPORT

18 Oct – 9 Nov 2007

Eyestorm is pleased to present an exhibition of new work from Argentinean contemporary artists, in collaboration with two prestigious galleries in Argentina: Gachi Prieto Arte Latino Americano Contemporáneo and Braga Menendez Contemporáneo with the coordination of Inés Etchebarne & Sebastian Alderete.

Coleccion Fotografos Argentinos

The exhibition Buenos Aires: Art for Export is complemented by a range of art books, entitled ‘Coleccion Fotografos Argentinos’. The first three books in the series are available online or from the Eyestorm Gallery. The ‘coleccion’ includes ‘Presagio’ by Dani Yako, ‘El Jugador’ by Marcos Lopez and ‘Los Restos’ by Juan Travnik.

Go here to view and purchase the ‘Coleccion’. 

ARTISTS

SEBASTIANO MAURI (1972)

Sebastiano Mauri lives and works between Buenos Aires and Milan. The concern for identity is present through out his body of work. An individual may simultaneously bear many adjectives and nevertheless neither defines him or her as a person in an absolute way. From the different artistic approaches and techniques he uses: painting,
photography and video, Mauri makes us think about the prejudices that affect us, in an almost automatic way, and dangerously limit us in our way of relating to one another.

CHINO SORIA (1964)

Architect, digital artist, his work explores the consequent rhetoric of the inherent aspects of digital language, specifically concerning the possibility of infinite combinations and the questions dealing with the boundaries of possibility. His animations, theoretical alterations, paintings and digital installations each respond equally to a conception which is both vital and committed to the notion of art as an attitude / choice of life.

LEONEL LUNA (1965)

At the present time, the epic acquires a new meaning through our own history; on the basis of a terrible violence, embodied, sometimes, by the civilization, sometimes by the barbarian. Leonel Luna’s works are “the presentation of the representation”, like a part of historic conceptions that attempt to pronounce about “the real”. He tries to re-invent traditions, genealogies and to put new topics up for discussion. The photographic language lets him modify the perspective of the observer. He intends to open new semantic orders, trying to cross the mirror of that we should believe to see”.

CLAUDIA MAZZUCCHELLI (1966)

Claudia Mazzucchelli works and lives in Palma de Mallorca, Spain. Disciple of Roberto Aizemberg and the French cubist school of André Lothe, trained in the most rigorous academics, the artist makes use of pictorial historic heterogeneous resources which result in a scan of the contemporary feminine gaze upon the political power of
Mexican muralism and the sexual vitality of Pop. In any case, heir to the Argentine painters’ praxis of industrial times, of the elaborate manufacturing and post Cezannean oil painting and the Spilimbergo drawing tradition, she revitalizes the paradigm.

ANDRES WAISSMAN (1955)

Waissman’s Multitudes, refugees, emigrants and immigrants personify an agonizing speech, a narrative with plenty of conflictive situations that at the same time are tales of efforts and commitment. His paintings are not mere chronicles of fictitious events, but a real positioning before the contemporary world, expressed in the language of unique plastic images. Rather than a disappearing universe, Waissman represents an emerging world, the “Collective Cartographies” of increasingly existent and unavoidable situations demanding reflection and a conscious look. His painting is neither indulgent nor evasive; on the contrary, it is urgent.

JOSEFINA ROBIROSA

Even if Josefina Robirosa´s paintings do not inscribe in the most recent trends, they come apart from the old tradition. The mimetic representation of picturesque or sublime whereabouts yields to a process of reduction, of fragmentation. Her abstract landscapes, barren of human figures, animals or architectural structures, gently
establish analogies between Nature and Art as the place of systemic complexities. The natural phenomena, such as chaos and order, the ephemeral and the permanent, the states of tension and polarities, the processes of fusion of energy, become those of painting. If Nature confronts us with constant scale differences between the infinitely small of the microscopic detail and the immeasurable, Josefina Robirosa´s works repeat them and conserve that bewildering ambiguity. Is this about the representation of lichen or the immensity of a forest? Is it about parcels or about a huge territory? Is it a puddle or an ocean? Nature is used as the matter upon which the artist intervenes on the natural order of the world.

NESSY COHEN (1961)

Nessy Cohen is an artist of the revival of the avant-gardes of the first years of XX century: especially Dadaism and surrealism, an artist who at the same time confronts, - in a temporary décalage - a series of contemporary details related to publicity and fashion.
In these paintings the Body becomes a character. Here, the echoes of his research - between abstraction and representation - reconcile with narration:  if we used to see a cell or a torso, now we see a whole body, dressed: that is to say, the character tells us a series of anecdotes of metaphysical nature. His work does not close upon an explanation or a certainty but in a series of questions, essential to any search: what the Body identifies with, what it invents or rejects or what it sublimates.  And in all of these cases, the art is the only statement.

MIGUEL MITLAG (1969)

Miguel Mitlag is a chaser of images, both moving and static. A film director, he is known to produce photographic essays that reflect the creation of precarious spaces, in which the artifice is underscored, tones are driven to extremes, and the insignificant gains prominence. His photographic compositions also show his predilection for the intervention into real world sites. They present themselves as an ambiguous interplay of shapes and colors, in which texture and context engage in dialog from a seemingly neutral starting point. Amid curved outlines and rectilinear profiles, pieces of metal, glass and wood seem to be guarding some small miracle – or a wished-for intimacy – rather than delimiting a social space.

JUAN MARTIN JUARES (1974)

Holding a degree in Arts from the Universidad Nacional de Cordoba, he writes poetry, designs objects, draws and paints prolifically. His work explores intersections between design, craft and art within daily life. He blurs the frontiers among poetic objects. Instinctive, intelligent non-speculative drawing. Self absorbed lines creates a lyric representation of knowledge “I’m interested in action, poetry, the connection, intimacy with the drawing, gesture, stroke, the surroundings, the moment of action. When I work, I don’t plan, everything just happens, ideas just come up. Alchemy of matter, based on the transformation of energy. The image flows. I’m a channel an antenna. I’m a poetic draftsman."

CARLA BERTONE (1975)

Carla Bertone has chosen Abstraction since she began to paint.
However any representation is always an abstraction, idea or thinking that potentially contains all the possibilities. But also in the Geometric Abstraction, the shapes are a visual language that meditates on the structures, the space, and the representation and fundamentally it confronts the spectators with the surprise of their own perception. The geometry could be for her the metaphor of a simultaneous experience among the instant of the affirmation (a form in a context), the instant of the doubt (what, how, why, what for) the moment that brings for the answer and the same answer or result as a new question. It is a discipline of the present, a constant exercise of the perception. In her irregular shaped works, colour is a fundamental element.

CARLOS HERRERA (1976)

Describing himself as sleepy and fun, this artist has carried out a range of projects with homey and intimate characteristics.  He has done installations and video, photography and audio pieces.  He works together with Claudia del Río in a duet called Trulalala.  He directs the Marasca Trip gallery along with José Ignacio Pfaffen. His works are found in private collections and national and international museums. He lives and works in the countryside, in Rosario, Argentina.

RAFAEL GONZALEZ MORENO

Rafael loves plastic, as if it were candy for his eyes. It is natural; his affective reasoning takes him to look for well known, friendly materials: the happy plastic that accompanies us from childhood to the elder days. In times of brutal change, Rafael treasures memories and feelings around the use of his close toys and colours; dearly to him through days, nights, and years of unconscious intimacy. His hands manipulate plastic and transform it into diverse forms. He humanizes it; he turns it into nutrients, happiness and faith. His work represents the faith in Magic; he believes all changes are possible if you are the habilitated magician responsible for the world that acts that gig. He believes in Magic because he has witnessed it, because he does it.

MARIA NOEL (1965)

Every one of her fragment compositions, even when serially centered on some summoning or (to put it in the old fashion way) inspiring theme – “South” as an homage to Torres García, among others -, don’t feel like they had been constructed along the lines of some rationally intended plan. On the contrary, these works seem to have operated as filters open to a multitude of traces from diverse origins, materializing as fine papers, music scores, readable or unreadable graphs, metal sheets, or a never-ending variety of things.
It becomes evident that this artist working process emerges from a spontaneous stream of consciousness, such as the Surrealists expected. However, some form of distillation mechanism seems to permeate this process, an exchange between the real and the inner worlds, a bridge between the outside, the poetic experience and its shaping into the work. Tenuousness, subtlety, and pristine, translucent expression seem to be decisive aesthetic traits in
Maria Noel’s works.
(by Mercedes Casanegra, art critic)

CLAUDIA DEL RIO (1957)

Her work is profuse. The materials she uses, are multiple, the processes are heterogeneous. Photographs, soap, resins, foil dishes, paper, embroidered fabric, mud, coca cola cans, it all builds a universe of works that, in spite of their multiplicity, appear to turn around a unique concern: to create a register, both material and intimate, of the richness and complexity of human relationships: their erotism, solitude, violence, farewells, rivalries, splits, distances, blindness. Sometimes the characters who cross her works are evocated in their absence. Sometimes there are silences and vacuum, expressed as momentary stillness. Claudia del Rio´s work, crosses the physical barriers of the body and places itself directly into the interior, in an erotic gesture.
(by Maria Spinelli, art critic)

Angie Davey from Eyestorm says: “This is a great opportunity for collectors to see high quality work that they may not have otherwise been able to view unless they travelled to Buenos Aires. Eyestorm are proud to be bringing Argentinean artists into the limelight in London and be a part of furthering the careers of these highly talented individuals.”

Art For Export is sponsored by Martas Vineyard.

To view the artworks of the Argentinian artists, please go here.

ICA Exhibiting at Eyestorm

ALL TOMORROW’S PICTURES

In association with the ICA and Sony Ericsson

2nd – 12th October 2007

Eyestorm gallery, Southbank, SE1 (next to Tate Modern)

Eyestorm are pleased to be showing a selection of work from All Tomorrow’s Pictures, a unique fundraising project organised by the Institute of Contemporary Arts in association with Sony Ericsson as part of their 60th Anniversary celebrations.

These special, limited edition prints are available for sale and all funds raised from the sale of the prints will help to support the future work of the ICA.

The pioneering venture aims to highlight the creative potential of fusing art and technology and presents a searing vision of the future as imagined through the eyes of some of our most influential and creative talent.  Fifty-nine high profile contributors spanning the artistic and cultural spectrum, including Tracey Emin, Peter Blake, Jake and Dino Chapman, Tim Noble & Sue Webster, Nick Knight, Polly Morgan, Idris Kahn, Dan Holdsworth, Graham Coxon, Helena Christensen and Beth Ditto, were invited to produce a single image or series of images inspired by the theme of ‘Tomorrow’ - using the Sony Ericsson K800i camera phone.

All proceeds from the sale of these prints goes to the ICA which is a non-profit making organisation, supporting emerging artists.

To view the work of the ICA artists please go here.

What is Eyestorm

Eyestorm is the leading online retailer of limited edition contemporary art. Founded in 1999, Eyestorm came under new management in 2006 and has refined its operations to make buying the finest contemporary art easier and more enjoyable than ever before.