| The first limited set of artistic dishes drawn in exclusive for La Piola by Robert Indiana, James Brown and Donald Beachler can be bought in the restaurants La Piola or Piazza Duomo at Piazza Risorgimento 4, Alba. For further information please contact +39.0173.442800 or +39.0173.366167 |
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The Artists 2005 | |||
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Donald Baechler Born in Hartford, Connecticut in 1956. Critics have stated that Donald Baechler's work "places him in the painterly tribe of Twombly, Ryman, Rauschenberg and Schwitters." Baechler works from his great inventory of worldly images. Recorded on slides and collected in the archives of his enormous Lower Manhattan studio, they are the sources for many of the compelling images in his paintings and graphic work. The cast of characters, which also includes himself, come from every source imaginable, and are stamped, silk-screened, projected, drawn, painted, printed or collaged onto surfaces. Then the process begins: underpainting, overpainting, canceling, adding, subtracting, editing until the final work emerges. Baechler has also worked extensively in the graphic medium. Donald Baechler has a large international following and his work can be seen in museums throughout the world. His work is in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and the Centre George Pompidou in Paris. James Brown Born in Los Angeles, California in 1951. He received his formal art training from Ecole Supérieure des Beaux Arts (Paris, 1973-75), Immaculate Heart College (Hollywood, M.A. 1975), and Instituto Michelangelo (Firenze, 1979). His work is described as primitive, yet refined, and is inspired by tribal arts - American Indian, African, Hawaiian. He lives and works between New York, Paris and Oaxaca (Mexico). Robert Indiana Born in New Castle, Indiana in 1928 as Robert Clark. His early works were inspired by traffic signs, automatic amusement machines, commercial stencils and old tradenames. In the early sixties he created sculpture assemblages and developed his style of vivid color surfaces, involving letters, words and numbers. Robert Indiana is characteristically categorized as a "Pop artist" even if some of his methods set him apart from other artists in the movement. Rather than using symbols from the mass media, Indiana makes images of words that focus on identity, particularly American identity, and the "American Dream." He questions the validity and goodness of a cultural identity that prizes materialism and hypersexuality. He manages to provide a direct and honest description of American culture. The simple familiarity of these words and the flattened manner in which Indiana presents them demonstrates the Pop art accessibility of content; viewers need not read much past the surface. The first limited edition set of artistic plates designed exclusively for La Piola by Robert Indiana, James Brown and Donald Beachler can be purchased in the restaurants La Piola or Piazza Duomo at Piazza Risorgimento 4, Alba. For further information please contact +39.0173.442800 or +39.0173.366167. The Artists 2007 Terry Winters Born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1949. Winters' paintings, which now span the course of four decades, continually explore and map natural biological processes and build a vocabulary of images culled from the many scientific sources which the artist has used in his paintings and drawings. Among the images are Winters' typical plant, spore and crystalline shapes but also the densely drawn linear and organic shapes. It is difficult to tell in looking at his images whether Winters is depicting a cluster of berries, some fantastic aquatic plant or jellyfish, or a microscopic view of cellular forms. Though reminiscent of botanical or natural history illustrations, Winters has a less than scientific interest in these images as he invents hybridized images of life and phenomena. As is customary in Winters' work, the palette is muted, but among the subtle variations of black, grey and brown are washes of brighter and more brilliant colors. While Winters often concentrates on a central image, he repeats that image in sketches and loose smudgy references all over the page. Philip Taaffe Born in Elizabeth, New Jersey in 1955. Taaffe studied at Cooper Union in New York. His interest in the language of decoration and abstraction brought him international recognition in the 1980's. A long time admirer of Matisse's cut-outs and of Synthetic Cubism, from the mid 1980's he began to borrow images and designs directly from more recent artists. This appropriation of the work of others and the use of it as the subject of his own work places him alongside other contemporary "Appropriationists" such as Sherrie Levine and Mike Bidlo. He has traveled widely in the Middle East, India, South America, and Morocco, where he collaborated with Mohammed Mrabet on the book Chocolate Creams and Dollars, translated by Paul Bowles (Inanout Press, New York: 1993). Taaffe lived and worked in Naples from 1988-91. His first solo exhibition was in New York in 1982, and he has since been included in numerous museum exhibitions, including the Carnagie International, two Sidney Bienniales, and three Whitney Bienniales. His work is also held in several public collections, including the MoMa, New York, the SFMoMa, San Francisco, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum of Art . Taffe currently lives and works in New York. Kiki Smith Born in a U.S. Army hospital in Nuremburg, West Germany in 1954. Though she now lives and works in New York, Smith was raised in South Orange, New Jersey with two sisters. Her mother was the opera singer and actress Jane Lawrence, her father the architect, painter and sculptor Tony Smith. Smith worked with her hands from a young age, quilting, knitting and sewing, as well as helping her father with models for his sculptures. She was attracted early-on to the materials she works in now. Her childhood was rich with myth. Raised Catholic, Smith was also exposed to many cultures' stories and rituals. She read fairy tales and was encouraged to explore her interests. She is best known for her sculptures; however, she creates pieces in a variety of media including print-making. Smith began sculpting in the late 1970's. Her print collection is particularly extensive and began in the 1980's. On prints, Smith has stated that "Prints mimic what we are as humans: we are all the same and yet every one is different. I think there's a spiritual power in repetition, a devotional quality, like saying rosaries." Smith's first works were screen-prints on dresses, scarves and shirts, often with images of body parts. In association with artist group Colab, Smith printed an array of posters in the early 1980s containing political statements or announcing upcoming events. Smith has also created an extensive collection of self-portraits, nature-themed works, and many pieces that depict scenes from fairy-tales, often in unconventional ways. Her Body Art is imbued with political significance, undermining the traditional erotic representations of women by male artists, and often exposes the inner biological systems of females as a metaphor for hidden social issues. Adam Fuss Born in England in 1961. Fuss is based in New York, where he began exhibiting in 1985 to immediate acclaim. He has created contemporary photograms in color as well as black and white, showing moving light, live creatures, and organic things. His series featuring newborns lolling on their backs in shallow baths is particularly well known. Seen as if from below, the infants look safe yet precarious, levitating in rings of water, haloed by saturated color born from the chemical properties of cibachrome paper. Fuss's work is usually compared to early 19th century "sun print" photograms rather than cameraless darkroom techniques that evolved under the influence of Bauhaus innovators in the early 20th century. It's easy to see how his affinity for the natural world puts him close in spirit to 19th century practitioners who exposed sensitized paper holding plants and laces to the sun, but technically, his darkroom photograms have more in common with Moholy-Nagy and Man Ray than William Henry Fox Talbot and Anna Atkins. Art critics often describe the artist’s work as speaking to the ephemerality of a moment in time and life itself. |