Daily Art Fixx

visual arts blog, painting, drawing, sculpture, illustration and more!

DAF Group Feature: Vol. 174

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Your Weekly Mixx! DAF’s Weekly Mixx is a selection of contemporary artworks and/or art related videos chosen from artist and gallery submissions and from our own search for new and interesting works. This week, we feature the work of Carlos Garaicoa, Dan Tirels, Eric Esterle, Michaël Husser, Gilles Bensimon, Kiki Xue, Linda Jacobson, Shai Yossef and a video from the Whitney Museum of American Art,  Human Interest: Martha Wilson on John Coplans, artist Martha Wilson discusses honesty in John Coplans’s portrait Frieze, No. 2, Four Panels, 1994 and her own.

If you would like your work featured in the Weekly Mixx, visit the Submissions page for information on how to apply.

DAF Group Feature: Vol. 173

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Your Weekly Mixx! DAF’s Weekly Mixx is a selection of contemporary artworks and/or art related videos chosen from artist and gallery submissions and from our own search for new and interesting works. This week, we feature the work of Alexandre Alonso, Dan May, Donald Martiny, Firelei Baez, Francis Krieg, Isabelle Wenzel, Yh Lee, Marta Spendows, and Henrique Oliveira.

If you would like your work featured in the weekly mixx, visit the Submissions page for information on how to apply.

DAF Group Feature: Vol. 172

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Your Weekly Mixx! DAF’s Weekly Mixx is a selection of contemporary artworks and/or art related videos chosen from artist and gallery submissions and from our own search for new and interesting works. This week, we feature the work of Gemmy Woud-Binnedjik, Brad Jesson, Iva Gueorguieva, Rachel Ducker, Warren King, Coroso Zundert, Gemma Capdevila, and short video Aether – a spatial audio-visual collaboration between musician Max Cooper and architects Satyajit Das and Regan Appleton. It plays on the beauty of fundamental natural forms – waves, surfaces, symmetries and surreal landscapes, as the building blocks and underlying structure of the world around us – a modern interpretation of the luminiferous aether.

DAF Group Feature: Vol. 171

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Your Weekly Mixx! DAF’s Weekly Mixx is a selection of contemporary artworks and/or art related videos chosen from artist and gallery submissions and from our own search for new and interesting works. This week, we feature the work of Antony Gormley, Flora Borsi, Herakut, Kyle Stewart, Max Serradifalco, Murray Mcculloch, Scott Marr, Tony Cragg and a video by More Than who recently commissioned a unique art exhibition for dogs from British artist and inventor Dominic Wilcox. Wilcox’s interactive exhibits include ‘Cruising Canines’ – an open car window simulator, ‘Dinnertime Dreams’ – an oversized 10 foot dog bowl filled to the brim with hundreds of play balls to look like dog food, and ‘Watery Wonder’ – a series of dancing water jets that jump from one dog bowl to the next for dogs to chase. A selection of paintings and drawings created in a dog’s colour spectrum are also on display at the exhibition for the visiting dogs to enjoy.

DAF Group Feature: Vol. 170

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Your Weekly Mixx! DAF’s Weekly Mixx is a selection of contemporary artworks and/or art related videos chosen from artist and gallery submissions and from our own search for new and interesting works. This week, we feature the work of Andrew Hem, Andy Scott, Meredith Marson, Ostinelli & Priest, Sigalit Landau, Vadim Stein, Wolf Ademeit, Elisabeth Higgins O’Connor and the video All the art in London in one day by Alex Gorosh who documents his attempt to see every piece of art in London in one day. (in collaboration with Art Fund U.K.’s National Art Pass)

DAF Group Feature: Vol. 169

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Your Weekly Mixx! DAF’s Weekly Mixx is a selection of contemporary artworks and/or art related videos chosen from artist and gallery submissions and from our own search for new and interesting works. This week, we feature the work of Sofia Bonati, Amy Gesner, Chrystal Wagner, Lisa Kristine, Izumi Kato, Jonathan Nyik Fui, Mike Dargas, Nazar Bilyk and a time lapse video of the making of Etnias (Ethnicities), a larger-than-life work created by Brazilian artist Eduardo Kobra for the Olympic and Paralympic Games in Rio de Janeiro. The 3,000 square metre mural depicts Indigenous faces from the five continents, and was created at Porto Maravilha in Rio.

Buy work from contemporary artists and artisans at the DAF shop.

DAF Group Feature: Vol. 168

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Your Weekly Mixx! DAF’s Weekly Mixx is a selection of nine contemporary artworks and/or art related videos chosen from artist and gallery submissions and from our own search for new and interesting works. This week, we feature the work of Anne Lemanski, Cameron Mathieson, Elizaveta Porodina, Linus Lundin (aka YASH), Andrea Myers, JR, Meryl McMaster, Aida Muluneh and the short film “Balance” by photographer/director Tobias Hutzler, inspired by Rigolo Swiss Nouveau Cirque artist Maedir Eugster.

DAF Group Feature: Vol. 167

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Your Weekly Mixx! DAF’s Weekly Mixx is a selection of nine contemporary artworks and/or art related videos chosen from artist and gallery submissions and from our own search for new and interesting works. This week, we feature the work of David Breuer-Weil, Floyd Elzinga, Gilles Bensimon, Gil Maia, Igor Melnikov, JR, Marchal Mithouard (aka Shaka), Mohau Modisakeng and Zeng Fanzh.

Henry Moore: 1898 – 1986

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Widely recognized as one of the most important British sculptors of the 20th century, Henry Spencer Moore was born on July 30, 1898, in Castleford, Yorkshire. Moore had an early interest in sculpting, however he began his career as a teacher in Castleford. After serving in the military during World War I, Moore studied at Leeds School of Art on an ex-serviceman’s grant. In 1921, he won a Royal Exhibition Scholarship to study sculpture at the Royal Academy of Art in London.  Between 1924 and 1931, Moore was an Instructor of Sculpture at the Royal Academy. His first solo exhibition was held at the Warren Gallery, London, in 1928.

“Throughout his life Moore’s appetite for the history of world sculpture was insatiable. Drawings of sculptures in his early sketchbooks indicate that Palaeolithic fertility goddesses, Cycladic and early Greek art, Sumerian, Egyptian and Etruscan sculpture, African, Oceanic, Peruvian and Pre-Columbian sculpture particularly interested him. Moore believed passionately in direct carving and in ‘truth to materials’, respecting the inherent character of stone or wood. Almost all of his works from the 1920s and 1930s were carved sculptures, initially inspired by Pre-Columbian stone carving.” (MoMa)

Moore married Irina Radetsky in 1929. A student of painting at the Royal College, she would be Moore’s model for a series of life drawings over a six year period.

Moore’s sculpture of the 1930s was influenced by the work of Picasso, Hans Arp and Alberto Giacometti. “The subject-matter of Moore’s work of 1932 to 1936 is, in some cases, no longer readily identifiable, although the human, psychological element informs even the seemingly abstract work of the 1930s.”

In the 1930s Moore was a member of Unit One, a group of artists lead by English landscape painter Paul Nash. From 1932 to 1939, he taught at the Chelsea School of Art. Moore was “an important force in the English Surrealist movement, although he was not entirely committed to its doctrines; Moore participated in the International Surrealist Exhibition at the New Burlington Galleries, London, in 1936.”

In 1940, Moore was appointed an official war artist and was commissioned by the War Artists Advisory Committee to execute drawings of life in underground bomb shelters. From 1940 to 1943, he focused almost entirely on drawing. His first retrospective took place at Temple Newsam, Leeds, in 1941 and he was given his first major retrospective in the United States by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1946. Moore won the International Prize for Sculpture at the Venice Biennale of 1948.

Moore’s bronze Reclining Figure commissioned by the Arts Council for the Festival of Britain in 1951 was key in Moore’s development. “Previously the holes in his sculptures were dominated by the solid forms surrounding them but here ‘the space and the form are completely dependent on and inseparable from each other’ His work became less frontal and more completely three-dimensional. The reclining figure and the mother and child remained the dominant subjects of his sculpture.”

After the mid-1950s,  many of Moore’s sculptures were made from natural objects including bones, shells, pebbles and flint stones.

Until the mid-1950s, Moore made numerous preparatory drawings for his sculptures as well as pictorial studies of interiors and sculptures in landscape settings. He drew little between 1955 and 1970, but during the last 15 years of his life he devoted more of his time to drawing for pleasure,  independent of his sculpture. He first made prints in 1931, and he experimented with a process he called collograph. By the end of his life Moore had produced 719 prints.

“Moore executed several important public commissions in the 1950s, among them Reclining Figure, 1956–58, for the UNESCO Building in Paris. In 1963, the artist was awarded the British Order of Merit. In the 1970s, there were many major exhibitions of Moore’s work, the finest being at Forte di Belvedere, overlooking Florence (1972). The Henry Moore Sculpture Centre in the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, opened in 1974. It comprises the world’s largest public collection of Moore’s work, most of it donated by the artist himself between 1971 and 1974. In 1977, the Henry Moore Foundation was established at Much Hadham, and Moore presented 36 sculptures to the Tate Gallery in 1978.”

Henry Moore died in Much Hadham, Hertfordshire, on August 31, 1986.

Sources: Guggenheim, MoMA, Wikimedia Commons (images), Tate,  Oval With Points Photo by Maia C

DAF Group Feature: Vol. 166

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Your Weekly Mixx! DAF’s Weekly Mixx is a selection of nine contemporary artworks and/or art related videos chosen from artist and gallery submissions and from our own search for new and interesting works. This week, we feature the work of DALeast, Janko de Beer, Norman Stiff, Steve Driscoll, Andy Goldsworthy, Alessandra Maria, Katharine Morlin, Kim Leuenberger and a video with body painter Alexa Meade.