Biomorphic Human Body Extension Art Biomorphic Body Extension Art Exhibit
Artworks and Artists of Biomorphism
Progression of Art
1924-25
Harlequin's Carnival
Every area of this festive pictorial space is inhabited by lively and quixotic biomorphs, some of which are identifiable while simultaneously existence non-representational like the pocket-sized "true cat" in the lower right, continuing on its hind legs and leaning forward with outstretched "artillery." The juxtaposition between true resemblances evoked and those improbably reconfigured creates a sense of an imagined world, itself evoked past the green earth at center right, populated by dream creatures. The title'southward harlequin stands at central left, identifiable as the stock character in the Italian commedia dell'arte by the black and white checks on his "torso." His body is shaped like a distorted guitar, every bit, wearing an admiral's hat and sporting a pipe and a long swirling mustache, his whimsical advent is belied past his sadness. His cerise and blue face stares out at the viewer, while a hole in his stomach perhaps reflects the artist'due south own hunger, as he described coming dwelling house after a solar day of no food and creating the painting in a kind of automated trance.
Pioneering Miró's biomorphic approach, the work was his first truly Surrealist painting. The biomorphic forms invited symbolic meaning, as Miró explained the dark-green sphere represented his obsession with "conquering the world," or that the black triangle symbolized the Eiffel Tower, while the ladder with its ear and eye represented both evasion and height. Nonetheless, the forms, merging and melding similar teaming protozoa seen by a microscope, overturn the hierarchies of the conscious world, including those of art. The viewer is fatigued into the wonderment of the floating mitt, the strange squiggly creatures, and the shooting stars. As the artist said, "I'yard simply interested in bearding art, the kind that springs from the collective unconscious."
The harlequin, a character known every bit foolish and always unhappy in love, became a popular stand-in for artists as early as the Rococo menses. It was seen in Antoine Watteau's Harlequin, Emperor on the Moon (1707), and was oftentimes employed by Picasso as seen in his Harlequin with Glass (1905).
Oil on canvass - Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York
1927
Mama, Papa is Wounded!
In a vast landscape, a kind of eerie low-cal illuminates a hairy stalk extending upward on the right toward a dark clotted form. On the upper left, forth a night horizon, a cactus-like form is caught in a kind of cat'south cradle of cobwebs that extend into the foreground. Minor biomorphic shapes, casting strong shadows, stand on the pallid sand. A mysteriously ominous feeling is created as associations are evoked while escaping identification.
To create the work, the artist painted the groundwork first, earlier calculation his unique creatures, that resemble microscopic animals, bone-like shapes, vegetable forms, and melted stone. Andre Breton dubbed them "subject-objects" equally they seem both objects of contemplation only subjects with bureau.
As art historian James Thrall Soby wrote, "The picture illustrates with extraordinary acuteness a relative constant of Tanguy's technique: the dual manipulation of perspective, from far to well-nigh and from high to low.. perhaps no other mod painter has and then insistently dramatized an opposition betwixt these two dimensions. The fascination.. stems in role from its ambiguous placing of forms within vertical infinite, as if.. gravity had lost its hold and released a chimerical medley above the placid earth."
This work was exhibited in Tanguy'southward beginning solo exhibition at the Galerie Surréaliste, where Breton wrote in the catalogue that Tanguy "invited united states today to run across him in a place which he truly discovered...In that location are no landscapes. There is non even a horizon. At that place is only, from the physical point of view, our immense suspicion which surrounds everything." Breton likewise described the origins of the championship; "I remember spending a whole afternoon with him...leafing through books on psychiatry in the search for statements of patients which could be used as titles for paintings. The picture.. Mama, Papa is Wounded! is one of them." The title simply heightens the ambiguity of what art historian Nathalia Brodskaïa described every bit "The emptiness of the endless plain, the threatening cloud of black smoke moving overhead, the solitary, prickly found and the forsaken, helpless creature-objects inspire a sensation of acute anxiety."
Tanguy became well known due to such works, and he influenced his contemporaries including Arp, Salvador Dali, and Isamu Noguchi, besides as subsequently Surrealists including Roberto Matta, Esteban Francés, and Wolfgang Paalen. His evolution of automatic painting also influenced Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock. Carl Jung, whose psychological theories informed Surrealism, after used one of Tanguy's works to illustrate his concept of the commonage unconscious.
Oil on canvass - The Museum of Modern Fine art, New York
1953
Cloud Shepherd
The highly polished surface of this statuary work lends an illusion of softness, equally if the surface had been eroded by air current or rain. The voluptuous lower forms propose limbs as they uplift into curvaceous and buoyant shapes. The figure is whimsically anthropomorphic.
Arp is well known for Cloud Shepherd, his first large calibration public work which exists in several versions throughout the world, and which also plays with the viewer's perception, as it both evokes clouds and reflects clouds and their shadows on the burnished mirror of its surface. By the 1950s Arp had become famous for his biomorphic sculptures which he pioneered 20 years earlier as he created plaster models and so sanded them in a kind of automated country, saying, "I work until enough of my life has flowed into its body." He intended to create a correspondence between creative inventiveness and nature'southward creative forces, every bit he saw both every bit flowing from an intuitive source.
Originally he fabricated pocket-sized sculptures and placed them in the forest, almost his home in Meudon, France, so they might be randomly discovered by passersby. As art curator Cathy Craft said, "He wanted to give his works more than freedom for interpretations, to permit in other emotions like humor and non control the viewer'southward response.. viewers could actually become participants in the composition of the sculpture past moving these objects around. And that kind of liberty in 1930 was very unusual."
Arp's sculpture influenced Barbara Hepworth, Henry Moore, and later on artists, including Ken Price and Tony Craig. As fine art critic Michael Kimmelman wrote, "dozens of painters who nowadays explore biomorphic abstraction depend, more or less knowingly, on Arp. And then do many of the Conceptualists, who trace their roots to Dada. And then exercise many of the abstruse painters whose textured, layered surfaces find precedents in some of the painted wood reliefs.. Arp was also amidst the starting time to promote collective, anonymous art."
Bronze - Collection of Central Academy of Venezuela, Caracas
1934
Female parent and Child
This pocket-sized, horizontal abstruse sculpture, made of 2 pieces of Cumberland alabaster, takes on an undulating biomorphic shape that suggests a reclining mother with child upon her knees. The stone'south warm colors, veined with brown, black, and greyness, create a unity between the independent figures and suggests intimate feeling, while the form besides denotes a natural landscape, conveying harmony with nature.
Equally artist and author Adrian Stokes wrote, "So poignant are these shapes of rock, that in spite of the degree in which a more representational aim and treatment have been avoided, no 1 could mistake the underlying subject of the group.. Miss Hepworth's stone is a mother, her huge pebble its child." Hepworth explored the mother and child motif as early on as 1927, in work that both reflected her ain experience as a female parent, and became a ascendant subject field of her fine art. In 1934, when this piece of work was created, she had only had triplets, and she described, how in "a turbulent menstruation 1933-34," the piece of work "mattered a lot emotionally and sculpturally."
Hepworth was radically innovative for employing negative space within her forms, which in this piece is seen as a pigsty in the center. Art historian Matthew Gale wrote, "for Hepworth the piercing of Female parent and Child went beyond a formal device. It carried a conceptual value, with the proffer that the child had come up from - and outgrown - the vacant space in the centre of the female parent's torso." Hepworth was besides the offset British sculptor to use two pieces, rather than what Gale and Chris Stephens chosen "a unmarried integral sculptural mass." Though Arp'south multi-pieced sculptures influenced her work, rather than inviting the viewer to hold and reconfigure the sculpture as he did, she primarily used the 2 pieces to establish identity and duality, while positing information technology so the two seemed conceptually and necessarily one.
This work was informed by Brancusi's 1906 do of Straight Carving, rather than using models, where the qualities of this Cumberland alabaster played a dominant role in shaping and polishing the work. Both Hepworth and Henry Moore used the stone from 1930-34, as the sculptor John Skeaping, who was Hepworth's ex-hubby, had given them the raw stone, ploughed upwards by a local farmer.
Cumberland alabaster on marble base - Collection of the Tate, Great britain
1944
The Leafage of the Artichoke Is an Owl
This painting, created past automatism, is a dynamic plethora of curving lines, seeping transparencies, and melting forms, recognizable vaguely and momentarily as a hint of table, the handle and red stained blade of a pocketknife, and a lamp base and triangular shade. All the same, the overall outcome is of a densely overgrown forest floor, swarming with mushroom-like forms, $.25 of plants, and decaying matter. Though this work depicts an interior scene, as art critic Martin Ries wrote, "information technology is non-spatial and mental. Nosotros, the observer, are.. in the midst of a pantheism of fungi, affair and verdant shags of grassland."
Gorky innovatively poured thin paint onto the canvas, utilizing the liquidity of the pigment to follow his automatic gestures. The piece of work originated from a dinner with André Breton in New York, at which the leader of the Surrealists compared an artichoke leaf to an owl, thus giving the work its championship. Breton said Gorky was "the first painter to whom the secret has been completely revealed," and dubbed the creative person'south biomorphic images "hybrids," which he said were "resultants provoked in an observer contemplating a natural spectacle and a flux of babyhood and other memories."
In the early on 1940s Gorky was influenced by both Kandinsky and Miró, and began a series of drawings and paintings that focused on landscape, as he visited his wife's family subcontract in Virginia. He stated, "I got them [the abstract forms] from getting down close to the earth." He described looking with intense concentration into the grass, "I could hear it and odour information technology. Like a little world down at that place."
Oil on canvass - The Museum of Modern Art, New York
1945
Kouros
This nine-foot-tall sculpture pays homage to the kouros, or "beau" statues, frequently nude, that were pop in the historic period of Classical Greece. Its assemblage of biomorphic parts resembles a fragmented body'south thighbones or femurs. The grain and color of the pink marble enhance the effect, giving the extended verticals a weathered look, as if subjected to the effects of erosion and of time. The classical ideal of human being and aesthetic beauty is here transformed into a work that conveys the feeling of an ancient ruin, excavated out of sandy earth, and equanimous like a sign or marker, testifying to the past.
Notching was used to connect the individual pieces, as Noguchi said, "You have to consider the weight of the material, the forces that conspire to hold up the figure - applied science problems, essentially. Everything I do has an element of engineering in it - particularly since I dislike gluing parts together or taking advantage of something that is non inherent in the cloth . . . there are no adhesives of any kind - just the stones holding themselves together." Between 1945-48, he made 15 of these interlocking works and saw them as reflecting "the encroaching void" felt later on World War Two.
Built-in and raised in Japan, Noguchi moved for his studies to the United states in 1918 and later to Paris in 1927 where he met Brâncuși and spent seven months working as his studio assistant. Working in stone was a new medium for the young creative person, and his work was profoundly impacted by both Brâncuși's practice of Directly Carving and utilise of biomorphic shapes, though Noguchi felt his work'southward organic quality was primarily sourced from traditional Japanese art.
Marble - The Metropolitan Museum of Fine art, New York
1951
Reclining Figure
Considering of its flowing contours and open course, this biomorphic shape both resembles a reclining woman while evoking hills, valleys, and eroded rock formations. Although the viewer recognizes the allusions to body parts in the human head, shoulders, and breasts, the open up space where her body would be interrupts the identification and creates a sense of fluid ambiguity. As Moore wrote in 1937, "in that location are universal natural shapes to which everybody is subconsciously conditioned and to which they can respond if their witting control does not close them off."
The Chacmool, a pre-Columbian sculpture of a reclining figure, heavily influenced Moore. In 1924, he began creating his ain figures that were similarly athwart and bulky, though, dissimilar the Chacmool, always feminine. In the 1930s, influenced by Surrealism and also by his association with Barbara Hepworth, the creative person turned to biomorphic treatments made past Direct Etching. Feeling, as he said, that the fabric itself had "an intense life of its own," he described his process every bit a sculptor who "gets the solid shape, as it were, inside his head.. he identifies himself with its center of gravity."
When the 1948 Venice Biennale awarded the prize for sculpture to Moore, it cemented his continuing as Britain's greatest living sculptor. This piece of work was commissioned by the Arts Council for the Festival of Britain in 1951. To create the work, Moore developed a different working method, commencement creating plaster maquettes, so a minor bronze which became the model for the work. He felt this sculpture was ane of his nigh of import works, describing information technology every bit, "my first sculpture where the space and the class are completely dependent on and inseparable from each other. I had reached the stage where I wanted my sculpture to be truly 3-dimensional. In my earliest utilize of holes in sculpture, the holes were features in themselves. Now the space and form are so naturally fused that they are one."
Bronze - Scottish National Gallery of Modernistic Art, Edinburgh, Scotland
1951
Grosse Kugelform (Large Spherical Form)
From one viewpoint, this big rock sphere suggests the shape of the earth, while, from another viewpoint, securely hollowed and asymmetrically concave, it suggests a cellular form reminiscent of a blood-red blood prison cell. As fine art historian Godehard Janzing wrote, the abstract work creates "a tense formal relationship betwixt convex and concave curvatures," but also powerfully resonated inside post-war Germany, a country divided into East and West. The wedge-shaped cut at the top of the sphere evokes both injury and a oral cavity, and as Janzing wrote, the sculpture, "suggested the possibility of further growth - which could be either a generative or a degenerative motility. These formal characteristics were compared with the fate of the nation, its supposed incompleteness and its struggle for unity."
Hartung, a German language artist, outset trained as a forest sculptor in Paris and Florence before returning domicile to Federal republic of germany. His work in the early 1930s became influenced past Brâncuși and Arp. This work was the kickoff abstract public monument in West Germany. Originally displayed in 1951 at Constructa, a post-war architectural exhibition, it provided an organic dissimilarity to the exhibition's Cubist pavilion. Though the creative person resisted assigning pregnant to the abstract piece of work, the public and critics saw information technology as the formal apotheosis of a divided Germany. As a upshot, the work was installed as a public monument in 1959 in the heart of Hanover and dedicated to the E German uprising on June 17, 1953. A plaque reading "Unity, justice, and freedom" was installed in the pavement abreast information technology, and the piece of work, as noted by Janzing, marked "a new era of monuments."
Stone - Hanover, Deutschland
1966
Pájaro lunar (Moonbird)
In this signature work, Miró presents a strange, biomorphic creature with a lunar-shaped face up and "horns," which simultaneously evoke the crescent moon and the Spanish tradition of bull fighting. Additionally, the hybrid is part bird, though its 2 "wings" are upward arcs, devoid of plumage. The piece of work has a kind of totemic effect, its squat horizontal trunk suggesting a powerful grounding in the earth, while its replicating arcs evoke the heavens. As art historian Carmen Fernández Aparicio wrote, "Miró brought together metaphorical mineral forms and ideas from the natural and cosmic world to create a foreign, hybrid character, a sort of monster with a shining, polished surface."
In the 1940s Miró began creating sculptures like this one, molding them by hand, before casting. As Aparicio noted, "one tin encounter the legacy of the nature-based organic forms so closely associated with i section of early on surrealist sculpture - .. but with a subject area that was typical of the Catalan painter, referring every bit to the Constellations series done during Second Globe State of war and to the world of birds, which Miró saw as the connection between the terrestrial and angelic worlds." As the artist said, "The spectacle of the heaven overwhelms me. I'thousand overwhelmed when I see, in an immense heaven, the crescent of the moon, or the sun." Casts of the iconic work can be found in museums, institutions, and parks throughout the world.
Bronze - Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid
1967
Soft Landscape
Here, two biomorphic shapes seem to chimera out of a molten footing suggesting both landscape and the man body. The apply of caramel-colored resin creates a sense of living fluidity, evoking membranes and soft moist surfaces that flux and burgeon, as the shapes have on an ambiguous sexuality. Every bit the artist said, the "body could be considered from a topological point of view, a landscape with mounds and valleys and caves and holes, then it seems rather axiomatic . . . that our trunk is a figuration that appears in Female parent Globe."
In the 1950s Bourgeois began to explore what she called a "softening" in her work, using more than curvilinear and bulbous forms, furthered emphasized in her 1960s plough to plastic and resins. Her work explored childhood trauma and the deep psychic recesses of human consciousness. She has said, "Psychoanalysis is my faith."
Conservative evolved the legacy of biomorphic Surrealism while innovatively exploring what critic Siri Hustvedt called, "a hallucinatory pre-linguistic space of fundamental drives" with its "unstable borders, sliding recognitions, aggressive sexual ambiguity, and visions of the body amputated, in pieces, or sprouting actress parts." Past utilizing her own traumatic autobiography and personal psychology to guide highly intuitive works, she paved the way for a generation of artists who were turning the personal political, or trying to shed light on how art can process out wounds through the very act of its practice - the Surrealist impetus pushed into a gimmicky, conceptual, confessional lexicon. Her work influenced artists similar Louise Nevelson and informed the Feminist art movement of the 1970s, influencing Lynda Benglis and Judy Chicago, likewise as later artists like Tracey Emin.
Plastic - Cheim & Read, Galerie Karsten Greve and Hauser & Wirth
1970
Personage
In this powerful and imaginative work, the human is abstracted to the humanoid, equally the large sunken eyes, emphasized by curving incisions in the flattened curvilinear shape of the head, likewise evoke a figure freshly stepped out from one of Miró's own paintings. The biomorphic treatment allows for surreal associations that work metaphorically: the eyes are owl-like, the wide body on its differently sized "legs" evokes a vegetable shape, while the small handless artillery appear equally flippers.
By the 1960s, Miro had made a number of these types of "personages." The work related to Carl Jung'southward concept of the persona, or social mask, that all humans wearable, giving usa a glimpse into various forms, figures, and feelings the artist connected with his own self, or was inspired by in others. Every bit the artist said, "Mocking my personages. Mocking human being, that boob which cannot exist taken seriously," the works are both whimsical and tragic. They allude to the archetypes and characters that are common to united states of america all in the communal buffoonery nosotros telephone call life.
The piece perfectly reflects Miro's own artistic argument, "Information technology is in sculpture that I volition create a truly phantasmagoric world of living monsters," by which he meant showing humanity's true reality.
Statuary - Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona, Spain
Like Art
Content compiled and written by Rebecca Seiferle
Edited and revised, with Summary and Accomplishments added by Kimberly Nichols
"Biomorphism Move Overview and Assay". [Internet]. . TheArtStory.org
Content compiled and written by Rebecca Seiferle
Edited and revised, with Summary and Accomplishments added by Kimberly Nichols
Available from:
First published on 09 Mar 2019. Updated and modified regularly
[Accessed ]
Source: https://www.theartstory.org/movement/biomorphism/artworks/
Post a Comment for "Biomorphic Human Body Extension Art Biomorphic Body Extension Art Exhibit"