Mad C

The works shown above are by Mad C, one of Germany's finest graffiti artist. Instead of discarding all of her used-up spray cans—a fair bit, rest assured—she carefully encrusts them with rhinestones, gems and crystals making up top-shelf references to the culture-of-bling. They are all unique, handmade and more on them can be found here. Find Mad C's website here. I advise you dig deep—lots of great work up there.

From top to bottom: From the series Parallel Kingdom (2009). Images courtesy of Mad C.

Mike Bray's 24 Frames

From time to time I come across an artwork that in my opinion, takes the cake. In this case, it's Mike Bray's piece entitled 24 Frames. Perhaps it's because it has—for me—all the makings of a great artwork: replication and falsities, historic references, Jeff Beck, smashed guitars...

The work is an homage to Jeff Beck's guitar smashing scene in Michelangelo Antonioni's 1966 film, Blow Up. In the scene, the Yardbirds are playing to a packed modish nightclub audience when Beck's guitar amp fails him. Tired at tinkering with it, he starts hitting the amp with his guitar before throwing it to the ground. He continues trampling the instrument on the stage floor with his crisp suede shoes. Here's the clip from YouTube.

Reading more about the film, I found out that The Who was supposed to be the band playing that stage as Antonioni was quite taken by Pete Townsend's guitar smashings at the time. The guitar used (a Gibson hollow body) is a bit misleading too, Beck was playing almost only Fender. Turns out that second to The Who, Antonioni chose The In Crowd to play in the film. They were later replaced by The Yardbirds as they were more popular. So Beck played a replica of Steve Howe's Gibson ES125 built for the performance.

Anyway, back to Mike Bray. Find more of his work here.

From top to bottom: Details from the installation 24 Frames (2009).

Work In Progress v8.1

Back to these now. Seven canvases in total, to be shown in one full length of approx. 35' wide. Here's a few detail shots.

From top top bottom: TTYL, detail (2009); WTF, detail (2009); IDK, detail (2009); BTW, detail (2009). Click any image for a larger view, hit back to return to the blog.

Rirkrit Tiravanija

I'm spending a few hours today researching artists that have used the gallery space as a living environment as opposed to a place for showing stuff. One of my stops was spent looking at the work of Buenos Aires-born, NY-based, artist Rirkrit Tiravanija. In the early 90's he would turn galleries into living kitchens and cook Thai food for visitors. Since then, he created installations that offered special places for people either to play, read, eat or rest. Really cool stuff. Follow this link for an article by Jerry Saltz. It's totally on-point.

From top to bottom: Untitled, Still (1992); Untitled, the raw and the cooked (2002, photo: Kioku Keizo); La salle de jeux (1998, photo: Florian Kleinefenn); East Village Apartment [replica] (2009).

Swet

Here's an interesting one: Swet, the Danish graffiti artist, started a project that would see him paint 100 graffiti pieces over 100 days. Sponsored by the German paint makers Molotow, he started December 1st 2009 and is now somewhere producing his 40th piece. You can follow his quest here.

From top to bottom: Swet, reversed (Day 1) 2009; Swet (Day 7) 2009; Swet (Day 30) 2009; Swet One (Day 35) 2010.

(RIP) Kenneth Noland

Kenneth Noland passed away Tuesday. He was 85. Read the article by Roberta Smith here.

Image: Whirl (1960) Photo by Mark Trade.

Michel de Broin

Here are images from the Québec-born artist Michel de Broin. His site can be found here.

From top to bottom: Monument (2009, image: Denis Prieur); Dead Star (2008); Black Whole Conference (2006); Entrelacement (2001).