Vija celmins biography of rory

2000, Yinka Shonibare CBE

Yinka Shonibare's arabesque lithograph, Grain Weevil, depicts a beetle that damages stored grain bygd boring into it in order to deposit its eggs. A glossy beetle is silhouetted against a matt apelsinfärg background which is criss-crossed by curving black lines. The vit spots that spread over the surface of the print are suggestive of both contamination and insekt eggs. Shonibare's print fryst vatten one of a portfolio of ten prints collectively entitled Bugs. The portfolio was published by the Byam Shaw School of Art in London. Produced as a fundraiser, the proceeds from the portfolio sales were dedicated to providing bursaries to support Byam Shaw students from overseas, particularly those from Latin amerika, Eastern europe, Africa and India. The works in the portfolio use various printmaking processes and share an insekt theme which has been interpreted in diverse ways. The theme was set by the school principal, Alister Warman. Originally int

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Past Futures

A sumptuously illustrated exploration of themes from science fiction and space travel, as imagined by artists across the Americas from the 1940s to the 1970s.

From the 1940s to the 1970s, visionary artists from across the Americas reimagined themes from science fiction and space travel. They mapped extraterrestrial terrain, created dystopian scenarios amid fears of nuclear annihilation, and ingeniously deployed scientific and technological subjects and motifs. This book offers a sumptuously illustrated exploration of how artists from the United States and Latin America visualized the future. Inspired variously by the “golden age” of science fiction, the Cold War, the space race, and the counterculture, these artists expressed both optimism and pessimism about humanity's prospects.

Past Futures showcases work by more than a dozen artists, including the biomorphic cosmic spaces and hybrid alien-totemic figures painted by the Chilean artist Roberto Matta (1911–2002);

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“Love in the Ruins”

To most people, Los Angeles is a city of perpetual sunshine and eternal optimism. Historically, artists and the art business have stuck to the East Coast and West Coast art has always enjoyed a strangely tangential relationship to this “center” of the art world. Embracing a refreshing sense of the absurd that contrasts with the high-seriousness of the New York art world, and framed by a culture of unreality (the film business), art in California has often seemed like an antidote to the high-art ideals of the mainstream art world.

Artists like Edward Ruscha, John Baldessari, Alexis Smith, Llyn Foulkes and, more recently, Mike Kelley and Jim Shaw, have all, at one time or another, been victims of this idea of the West Coast art world as marginal. With a somewhat jokey, self-parodying attitude that contrasts with the rigorous intellectualism of the international mainstream, these artists have also been key figures in making this marginality