January 12, 2016 Look Enter the O By Dan Piepenbring Hiroki Tsukuda, 4466 Void, 2015, black ink and charcoal on paper, 79″ x 53″. Hiroki Tsukuda’s “Enter the O,” the artist’s first exhibition in the U.S., opens this Thursday, January 14, at Petzel Gallery, in New York. Tsukuda, who lives in Tokyo, draws his inspiration from science fiction and video games; his works in ink and charcoal feature a welter of futurist architecture and industrial design. His compositions are always dense with infrastructure, looping and jutting out at acute angles. It’s as if some midcentury modernist utopia had been corroded by the needs of a burgeoning population, and eventually abandoned to the forces of nature. Having been colorblind since he was a child, Tsukuda developed a sensitivity to shading and contrast—reflected in the works on display here, which are largely monochromatic. He said in a 2013 interview with Freunde von Freunden that he aims to create the sense of having escaped to an alternate reality: I always had a strong desire to travel to another realm outside of this world, even from a young age. It’s not that I hated reality and wanted to escape; it was more like I wanted to take a peek into the parallel universe that exists on the other side of this world. So when seeing a landscape or buildings, I always imagined that there was a spacecraft launching pad in the mountains or was convinced that the building was actually a secret research lab. A huge bridge 12,300 meters in length called Seto-Ohashi was built when I was a child, and I remember vividly seeing it close up for the first time. I was blown away by the unbelievable size of its concrete mass. For me, it was absolutely an ancient ruin from another universe. So I doodled a bunch of stuff like that as a kid, like a cross-section of a mountain and a facility underneath it … I often choose motifs that are symbolically beautiful: beautiful landscapes, sculptures that are considered historically beautiful or sexy images that I find online. By transforming a part of this, a sense of awkwardness is created, as well as an indication or a sign, that broadly speaking creates a feeling of being abducted. “Enter the O” is at Petzel Gallery through February 20. See more images below. Read More
January 7, 2016 Look Russian Book Jackets from the 1930s By Dan Piepenbring E. Kuznetsov, Circus, 1931. These Russian book jackets from the thirties are among the many riches on offer in the New York Public Library’s newly enhanced digital collections. Below are some favorites; you can see the whole collection here. Read More
January 4, 2016 Look Resolutions By Jason Novak & Ron Padgett Jason Novak, whose drawings accompany Chris Bachelder’s The Throwback Special in our Winter issue, is working on an illustrated edition of Ron Padgett’s poem “How to Be Perfect.” The first ten lines are below. Read More
December 3, 2015 Look East of the Sun and West of the Moon By Dan Piepenbring Kay Nielsen, illustration from “The Three Princesses in the Blue Mountain” (“No sooner had he whistled … ”), 1914. All images © Courtesy of TASCHEN If you’ve seen Fantasia, you are, whether you know it or not, familiar with the work of Kay Nielsen, a Danish artist whose illustrations collide light and dark in sublime, often disquieting quantities, with patterns of feverish detail abutting vast stretches of negative space. His work was used in Fantasia’s “Ave Maria” and “Night on Bald Mountain” sequences, but his stint at Disney came late in his career. It’s worth, instead, seeking out his work as a book illustrator, especially 1914’s East of the Sun and West of the Moon, which Taschen has just reissued in a lavish new edition. East of the Sun comprises fifteen stoical and weirdly moving Norwegian folktales, boasting names like “Prince Lindworm,” and “The Giant Who Had No Heart in His Body.” The stories came hard-won from the folklorists Peter Christen Asbjørnsen and Jørgen Engebretsen Moe, who had spent years in the mid-nineteenth century journeying across the fjords to remote fishing, farming, and mining villages to transcribe the local lore. A cast of trolls, ogres, and witches roots the stories clearly in Norse pagan mythology, but what makes them distinctly Scandinavian, Taschen’s editor Noel Daniel told me, is the outsized, often personified role of the natural world: the North Wind is a character, brawny and menacing, and nature itself is a character, alternately gloomy and glowing. After a four-hundred-year sleep in which Norway had been subjugated to Denmark, tales from the vernacular like these helped to form the country’s national identity. As the art historian Colin White writes in an introduction to the new edition, “Snow, ice, and brittleness determined the character of these northern legends. The clash of sword blades echoed the crack of ice. The crunch of frozen ground was all the more sinister when it was made with an armored foot or a heavily shod battle charger.” Read More
November 23, 2015 Look We Are Unable to Use the Enclosed Material By Lilly Lampe An artist’s quixotic attempt to convince The New Yorker to embrace photography. From “The New Yorker Project.” Courtesy Institute 193 Nina Howell Starr’s “The New Yorker Project,” currently on view at Institute 193 in Lexington, Kentucky, is a collection of photos and archival material never intended for publication—it began as a sort of letter to the editor, intended to convince her favorite magazine of the power of photography. Starr, born in 1903, was a fan of The New Yorker from the beginning: she subscribed from the magazine’s inception in 1925 until her death in 2000. She came to photography much later, earning her M.F.A. from University of Florida in Gainesville, in 1963, at the age of sixty. Her husband was an English professor, which meant that the couple lived an itinerant academic life; when he retired, they relocated to New York City, where Nina’s career began in earnest. Read More
November 19, 2015 Look Paradise Fire By David Benjamin Sherry Ghost Forest, Eatonville, Washington, August 2015, 2015, archival pigment print, 48″ x 61″. Courtesy of the artist and Moran Bondaroff, Los Angeles. David Benjamin Sherry’s exhibition “Paradise Fire” is at Moran Bondaroff Gallery, in Los Angeles, through December 12. Sherry photographs the American West using an unwieldy 8×10 field camera. “My interest lays in the changing American landscape, and this new series of pictures reflects my unease,” he wrote in a statement for the exhibition. He told Opening Ceremony, “I was drawn into the desert for its sheer brilliance of fossilized time, the blinding luminosity of its stones and rocks, the infinite desolate space, the wildly varied and brightly colored sun-bleached palettes, the supernatural light, the invisibility of space and surroundings, the supreme silence like no other natural landscape, and the infinite horizon and endless repetition in minimal form.” —D. P. Read More