Very, very interesting work by Anne Hardy, more at the Bellwether gallery.

Great work of this Slovakian artist.

I wrote about Banksy in my previous mail. I bought a print before prices went through the roof. Banksy is best known for his graffiti, and art stunts such as some "modified art" that he placed in museums, or his work on West Bank Barrier. Although I was never fond of graffiti, Banksy’s in your face kind of humour is fantastic.

Conceptual  artist Sol LeWitt died last Sunday.

I always felt that his work had a strong architectural quality to, being very simple yet complex at the same time.

Tracey Bashkoff: Have you ever made photographic portraits?

Hiroshi Sugimoto: Of live people? No–I’m not interested in living people at all. [Laughs]

Interesting pictures that Sugimoto took of diorama’s. He mentioned that:

“I made a curious discovery while looking at the exhibition of animal dioramas: the stuffed animals positioned before painted backdrops looked utterly fake, yet by taking a quick peek with one eye closed, all perspective vanished, and suddenly they looked very real. I had found a way to see the world as a camera does. However fake the subject, once photographed, it’s as good as real. ”

Some podcasts here

The portraits are great as well, especially the way they were created:

“In the sixteenth century Hans Holbein the Younger (1497-1543), Flemish court painter to the British Crown, painted several imposing and regal portraits of Henry VIII. Based on these portraits the highly skilled artisans of Madame Tussauds wax museum re-created an absolutely faithful likeness of the king. Using my own studies of the Renaissance lighting by which the artist might have painted, I remade the royal portrait, substituting photography for painting. If this photograph now appears lifelike to you, perhaps you should reconsider what it means to be alive here and now.”

I bought a book on this young German painter last year. Matthias Weischer’s work focusses mainly on interiors. On the surface these interiors look almost normal, almost as there are apartments without roofs like the Egyptian room, weird perspectives, strange settings. Most of paintings are quite big like the 200 x 280 cm “Buhne”, a clumsy stage set in a Rousseaunesque jungle. The work has an air of quiteness to it mostly devoid of figures, or sometimes the people in the paintings are more like ghostly shadows like the empty trousers in “Hohse”, or doll-like figures like “Madonna” or “Sitzende”.

I was contemplating to buy a painting, but the price tag: 200,000 - 300,000 U$ is a bit(!) steep…

The Dutch artist Saskia Olde Wolbers is creating video art, amazing video landscapes made with narratives spoken as if in a dream:

Here I am …
Lying next to my lover Jean, in intensive care.

Slipping in and out of consciousness in shifts.
Life slowly dripping out of us …

Most of her work is only 5 to 6 minutes long, but she spends about a year working on her stories, building the scenes in minute detail.

Stills from Placebo (2002)

Still from Interloper (2003)