Daily Art Fixx

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Salvador Dali: 1904 – 1989

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salvador daliSalvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domènech, Marquis of Dalí de Púbol (Salvador Dali) was born on May 11, 1904 in Figueres, Spain near the French border.  A painter, draughtsman, illustrator, sculptor, writer and film maker, Dali was one of the most prolific, flamboyant, and well-known artists of the 20th century.

He was a student at the San Fernando Academy of Fine Arts in Madrid but was expelled for encouraging students to rebel and for withdrawing from an exam because he said the teachers were not qualified to judge his work.

Dali gained recognition relatively quickly after just three shows: a solo show in Barcelona in 1925, a showing of his works at the Carnegie International Exhibition in Pittsburgh in 1928, and in 1929, his first solo show in Paris.  It was at this time that Dali joined the ranks of the surrealists and met his future wife, Gala Eluard.

“The Persistence of Memory” was painted in 1931 after seeing some Camembert cheese melting in the heat on a hot summer day. Later that night, he dreamt of clocks melting on a landscape.  The small work (24 cm x 33 cm) is one of the most famous of the surrealist paintings. During this time, and inspired by Sigmund Freud, Dali used his “paranoiac-critical method” to create his art.

During the 1930s Dalí’s political indifference alienated him from the other Surrealists who were mainly leftist. In 1937, he painted an unusual series of Adolf Hitler that were considered to be in bad taste and partly led to his expulsion from the movement.

Salvador and Gala spent World War II in the United States, where he became a popular figure. He painted portraits, dressed shop windows, created a dream sequence for Alfred Hitchcock’s film “Spellbound” and created a cartoon, “Destino”, with Walt Disney.

Dalí returned to Europe in 1948 and was completely disconnected from Surrealism. He painted mainly in Spain, with an eclectic approach focusing on history, religion, and science.  Dalí created over 1,500 paintings in his career as well as illustrations for books, lithographs, designs for theatre sets and costumes, numerous drawings,  sculptures, and various other projects.

Dali was greatly affected by the death of his wife Gala in 1982. After that time, he lost much of his passion for life. His health began to fail, and he painted very little. On January 23, 1989, at the age of 84, Salvador Dali died from heart failure with respiratory complications. He is buried in his Theater Museum in Figueres.

For a full biography of Salvador Dali, see the source links below.

Sources: MOMA, Salvador Dali Museum, Wikipedia

Remedios Varo: 1908-1963

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 Remedios VaroBorn on December 16, 1908,  in Anglés, near Girona, Spain, Remedios Varo is often overlooked as an important surrealist painter. As a child, Varo moved frequently with her family, following her father’s work as a hydraulic engineer.

Varo studied art in Madrid and moved several times between Paris and Spain where she met and exhibited with other leading Surrealist artists. She met her husband, the French surrealist poet Benjamin Péret, in Barcelona. In 1941, Varo and Péret fled the Nazi occupation in Paris and moved to Mexico City where many other Surrealists had sought exile.

Varo separated from Péret, and initially worked as a commercial artist and illustrator in Mexico City. At the encouragement of Walter Gruen, Austrian exile and businessman, she was able to devote herself full-time to painting for the last eleven years of her life. Her first solo exhibition in Mexico at the Galería Diana in 1955 was a great success and earned her international recognition.

Varo became skilled in Surrealist Automatism, a practice where several artists work together to devise unforeseen subjects with smoke or wax on paper or canvas. Varo’s palette consisted mainly of somber oranges, light browns, shadowy grays and greens. Her paintings were carefully drawn, and depicted stories or mystic legends. She often painted heroines engaged in alchemical activities. “A delicate figure may spin and weave tiny threads transforming them into musical instruments or fashion them into paintings of small birds. The settings are often medieval tower rooms equipped with occult laboratory devices.”

Varo was influenced by artists such as Francisco Goya, El Greco, Pablo Picasso, Giorgio de Chirico, Georges Braque, pre-Columbian art, and the writing of André Breton. She also borrowed from Romanesque Catalan frescoes and medieval architecture, mixed nature and technology, and combined reality and fantasy to create paintings that defied time and space.

Varo was also influenced by a variety of mystic and hermetic traditions. She was interested in the ideas of C. G. Jung and the theories of G. I. Gurdjieff, P. D. Ouspensky, Helena Blavatsky, Meister Eckhart, and the Sufis. She was also fascinated with the legend of the Holy Grail, sacred geometry, alchemy and the I-Ching. She saw in each of these an avenue to self-knowledge and the transformation of consciousness.

Remedios Varo died of a heart attack at the height of her fame in her home in Mexico City on October 8, 1963. Since that time, her works have been seen in over a dozen solo exhibitions and nearly one hundred group shows worldwide.

Sources: Ciudad de la Pintura (images), Wikipedia, NMWA

René Magritte: 1898-1967

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magritteBorn on November 21, 1898 in Lessines, Belgium, René François Ghislain Magritte was a major figure in the Surrealist movement and is considered by many to be the greatest Belgian artist of the 20th century. From 1916 to 1918, Magritte studied at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels under Constant Montald and his early paintings were Impressionistic in style. Between 1919 and 1924, Magritte was influenced by Futurism and abstraction under the influence of Cubo-Futurism. He was particularly impressed by the work of Giorgio de Chirico. However, “his doubts about abstract art led him to reintroduce more overt imagery into his work.”

By 1921, Magritte had completed his service in the Belgian infantry after which he worked as a draughtsman for a wallpaper factory and a poster and advertisement designer. In 1922, he married Georgette Berger whom he had known since childhood. In 1926, Magritte gained a contract with Galerie la Centaure in Brussels which enabled him to paint full-time. He had his first solo exhibition there in 1927. From 1927 to 1930, Magritte lived in Le Perreux-sur-Marne, near Paris, where he associated with Surrealists including Jean Arp, André Breton, Salvador Dalí, Paul Eluard, and Joan Miró. From the 1920s, Magritte also experimented with black-and-white still photography, “borrowing subjects from his paintings in order to record unconventional staged situations.”

“Magritte played an important role in the foundation of the primarily literary Belgian Surrealist group in 1926. He was also active in the formation of the group’s theories, which were developed independently from those of the French Surrealists. While the French strove for a transcendent experience of reality through the expression of the unconscious, Magritte tried to reach the same goal by consciously disrupting conventions for representing reality. In order to express his views about mysterious and inexplicable levels of experience beyond surface appearances, he changed the conventional order of objects, altered form, created new objects and redefined the relationship of words to images.”

Magritte is known for his “standardized human types” especially the man in the bowler hat who makes numerous appearances in his paintings. “Words and texts also began to play an important part in the paintings as a way of provoking an analysis of conventional assumptions as in the Treachery of Images (1929), in which a precise image of a pipe is accompanied by an inscription, ‘Ceci n’est pas une pipe’, that draws our attention to the essential difference between an actual object and its representation in two dimensions.”

During the Great Depression of the 1930s, Magritte and his brother Paul opened Studio Dongo in Brussels where they produced work for advertising and publicity including stands, displays, posters, advertising texts, drawings, and photo-montages. Magritte exhibited only twice at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels during this time. In 1938, his friend E. L. T. Mesens purchased the stock of Galerie la Centaure and moved to London, where he became director of the London Gallery. Through this action, Magritte gained greater recognition in Great Britain.

In reaction to WWII, Magritte adopted a more colourful, “painterly” style. “From 1943 even making use of a parody of Impressionism with lighter colours, while maintaining the Surrealist character of the imagery. Although he was consciously mocking Impressionism, such works were strongly criticized in Surrealist circles.” Following this, Magritte created a whimsical body of oil paintings and gouaches which he exhibited in his first solo show in Paris at the Galerie du Faubourg. The style of these works were somewhat related to Fauvism and were partly a way of “attacking what he considered the superficiality of the French public.”

In 1948, Magritte, already having considerable recognition as a part of the Surrealist group, became internationally famous when he signed a contract with New York Dealer Alexandre Iolas. From 1953, he exhibited often at the galleries of Alexander Iolas in New York, Paris and Geneva. Retrospectives were held in 1954 at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels and in 1960 at the Museum for Contemporary Arts, Dallas, and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. From 1956, Magritte also produced a series of short and often humorous Surrealist films, using friends as directors and actors. Magritte’s critical and popular recognition continued to grow during and after the 1960s. In 1965, Magritte traveled to New York for the first time for his retrospective at Museum of Modern Art.

René Magritte died from cancer of the pancreas on August 15, 1967. His work has influenced generations of artists, including Pop, minimalist, and conceptual art.

Sources: MoMA, Wikipedia, Guggenheim

Alberto Giacometti: 1901 – 1966

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Alberto Giacometti - Life MagazineBorn on October 10, 1901 in Borgonovo, Switzerland, Alberto Giacometti was a sculptor, painter, draughtsman and printmaker.   His father, Giovanni Giacometti, was a Post-Impressionist painter. From 1919 to 1920, Giacometti studied painting at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, and sculpture and drawing at the Ecole des Arts et Métiers in Geneva. Between 1922 and 1927, he studied sculpture off and on in Paris under Emile-Antoine Bourdelle at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. In 1927, Giacometti and his brother Diego, his lifelong companion and assistant, moved into a studio in Montparnasse, returning annually to Switzerland to visit family.

Giacometti made few noteworthy sculptures before 1925 when he turned to Cubism and was influenced by the works of Jacques Lipchitz and Henri Laurens. He was also influenced by African art which resulted in his first important sculptures, Man and Woman and Spoon Woman. “These totemic sculptures consist of radically simplified forms; their rigid frontality and use of male and female nudes as sexual types or symbols were to have long-lasting implications for Giacometti’s later work.”

Giacometti’s first period of significant creativity began in 1927 and over the next seven years, he created sculptures in a wide variety of styles. During this year, he exhibited his sculptures for the first time at the Salon des Tuileries in Paris and in Switzerland at the Galerie Aktuaryus in Zurich. In 1928, Giacometti met André Masson and from 1930 to 1935, he was a participant in the Surrealist circle. His first solo show took place in 1932 at the Galerie Pierre Colle, Paris and in 1934, he had a solo show at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York.

“Giacometti emerged as the Surrealists’ most innovative sculptor, extending the parameters of sculpture both conceptually and stylistically. In addition to modelling in plaster, he made constructed sculptures with varied and fragile materials, for example suspending elements such as plaster or glass in delicate structures of extremely thin wood and string. In nearly all his Surrealist sculptures, empty space plays an active role, both compositionally and psychologically.”

From 1930 to 1936 Giacometti participated in many exhibitions around the world, including Galerie Pierre, Paris, Museum of Modern Art, New York, New Burlington Galleries, London, and others in Brussels, Zurich and Copenhagen. However, in 1935 he rejected Surrealism to return to representational art based on study from life.

In the early 1940s, Giacometti became friends with Simone de Beauvoir, Pablo Picasso, and Jean-Paul Sartre. From 1942, Giacometti lived in Geneva, and associated with the publisher Albert Skira. In late 1945, he returned to Paris where he began his second period of intense creativity. His best-known post-war sculptures portray single or grouped figures, all startlingly skeletal in proportions and often mounted on large or heavy bases.

“Giacometti’s figures, with their seeming emaciation, anonymity and isolation in space, immediately struck a responsive chord in critics and collectors. His sculptures were perceived as appropriate metaphors for the human condition of post-war Europe: the horror of the concentration camps, displaced persons, destroyed lives. On a more philosophical level, critics also viewed Giacometti’s art as Existentialist, an interpretation introduced by Sartre in his two essays on Giacometti’s art.”

During this period,  Giacometti drew constantly and painted regularly. “His drawing style consisted of rapidly executed, often continuous lines that swirl around, over, and through his subject, never quite defining it yet conveying a sense of its mass and mystery. The earliest post-war drawings have heavy reworkings, often obscuring facial features in an expressionist vortex of lines. Around 1954, he expanded his drawing scope. His pencil drawings of portraits, nudes, still-lifes and interiors from the mid-1950s display a fusion of power and delicacy, as lines interweave in geometrically structured traceries overlaid with darker smudgings and greyed shadows in a ceaselessly moving realm where nothing appears solid or stable.”

Giacometti’s post-war work brought him international acclaim. Between 1948 and 1958, he exhibited several times at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York and at Galerie Maeght in Paris. Museums acquired his work, and the Kunsthalle in Berne held a one-man show in 1954. In 1955, he had separate retrospectives at the Arts Council Gallery in London and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York.

Public fame took up a great amount of Giacometti’s time in the last years of his life. Collectors, dealers, young artists, curators and the media flocked to his studio. He received the Sculpture Prize at the 1961 Carnegie International in Pittsburgh and the Grand Prize for Sculpture at the 1962 Venice Biennale. In 1965, exhibitions were held at the Tate Gallery, London, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Louisiana Museum, Humlebaek, Denmark, and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. That same year, he was awarded the Grand Prix National des Arts by the French government.

On January 11, 1966, Alberto Giacometti died of complications from pericarditis (heart disease)  in Chur, Switzerland. His body was returned to his birthplace of Borgonovo, Swizterland where he was interred close to his parents.

Sources: Guggenheim, MoMA

Rufino Tamayo: 1899-1991

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Rufino Tamayo - Dos Perros -1941Born to a Zapotecan Indian family on August 26, 1899, Rufino Tamayo is one of Mexico’s most renowned painters. An orphan by age 12, Tamayo moved to Mexico City to live with his aunt who enrolled him in commercial school. He began taking drawing lessons in 1915 and from 1917 to 1921, he studied at the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes.

Tamayo was appointed head of the Department of Ethnographic Drawing at the Museo Nacional de Arqueología, Mexico City in 1921 where he drew pre-Columbian objects in the Museum’s collection. The influence of the forms and tones of pre-Columbian ceramics are evident in Tamayo’s early works.

Unlike other well-known Mexican artists of the time such as Diego Rivera, Orozco, and Siquieros, Tamayo believed in the universality of painting.  His modern style that was influenced by pre-Columbian and European art, caused him some ridicule by the popular muralists who thought that their “only path” in art should serve revolutionary ideals. Tamayo’s response was “Can you believe that, to say that ours is the only path when the fundamental thing in art is freedom! In art, there are millions of paths—as many paths as there are artists.”

Tamayo’s differences with the Mexican muralists prompted him to move to New York from 1926 to 1928 where he was influenced by the work of European artists such as Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, and Henri Matisse. His painting became a fusion of the European styles of Cubism and Surrealism and his subject matter of Mexican culture.

By the 1930s Tamayo’s paintings that featured intense colours and textured surfaces had become well known.  He returned to New York, and stayed from 1936 until 1950, where he created a large body of work, taught at the Dalton School, and exhibited his work at the Valentine Gallery. Tamayo was also a prolific printmaker, and he experimented with bronze and iron sculpture.

Tamayo’s first retrospective was held at the Instituto de Bellas Artes, Mexico City in 1948. In 1950, his successful exhibition at the Venice Biennale led to international recognition.  As well, Tamayo was commissioned to design murals for the National Palace of Fine Arts in Mexico City (1952-53) and for UNESCO in Paris (Prometheus Bringing Fire to Man, 1958).

Tamayo and his wife Olga lived in Paris between 1957 and 1964 before returning to Mexico City permanently in 1964.  The French government named him Chevalier and Officier de la Légion d’Honneur in 1956 and 1969.

Tamayo donated his collection of pre-Columbian art to the city of Oaxaca in 1974, founding the Rufino Tamayo Museum of Pre-Hispanic Art. As well, in 1981, he and his wife donated their collection of international art to the people of Mexico, forming the Rufino Tamayo Museum of Contemporary Art in Mexico City.

Tamayo’s work was exhibited in group and solo shows around the world including retrospectives at the São Paulo Bienal in 1977 and at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, in 1979. In 1988, he received the Belisario Domínguez Medal of Honor. Tamayo created his final painting (a self portrait), in 1989 at the age of 90 – Hombre con Flor (Man with Flower). He died in Mexico City on June 24, 1991.

Sources: Guggenheim Collection, Albright-Knox Gallery, Wikipedia, Biography.com, Images: Ciudad de la Pintura

Frida Kahlo: 1907 – 1954

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Frida Kahlo - Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird 1940Born on July 6, 1907, in Coyoacán Mexico, Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderón is one of the most internationally known Mexican painters of our time. Kahlo survived many difficult events in her life including polio around the age of six, and a bus accident that left her permanently disabled.

Kahlo did not intend to be an artist and, before her accident, was enrolled at the National Preparatory School in Mexico City in the premedical program. She began painting while recovering from her injuries that left her bedridden for over a year.

Frida’s paintings were mostly self-portraits and dealt directly with her health, physical challenges, and sexuality. With no formal training, Kahlo painted in vibrant colours and her style was influenced by the tradition of Mexican folk art and European styles including Realism, Symbolism, and Surrealism.

In 1929, Kahlo met muralist Diego Rivera who was enthusiastic and supportive of her work. With their art and mutual support of Communism in common, they fell in love and despite their 20-year age difference, married the same year. Their relationship was a stormy and passionate one, filled with infidelities on both sides, the pressures of Rivera’s fame, and Kahlo’s poor health.  The couple eventually divorced, but then remarried in 1940.

Kahlo and Rivera traveled to the United States and France, where they connected with influential artists and politicians of the time. Frida had her first solo exhibition at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York City in 1938 and achieved some success during the 1940s. As well, during this time, Kahlo taught art and her students became known as Los Fridos.

Kahlo produced around 200 images in her lifetime. Despite more than 30 operations, she spent her life in constant pain and had several miscarriages. Frida Kahlo died on July 13, 1954 at the age of 47. Doctors reported her death as a pulmonary embolism, relating to pneumonia, although it is also suspected that she committed suicide through an overdose.

Kahlo was described as a “self-invented Surrealist” by André Breton in 1938, but she disagreed saying “They thought I was a Surrealist, but I wasn’t. I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality.”

Sources:  Tate Museum, MOMA, Wikipedia, SFMOMA,  Artchive

Max Ernst: 1891-1976

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The_Elephant_Celebes-Max-Ernst-1921Max Ernst was born on  April 2, 1891 in Brühl, Germany. A prolific artist, Ernst is considered to be one of the primary pioneers of the Dada movement and Surrealism.

Ernst studied philosophy at the University at Bonn in 1909 and was influenced by the ideas of Freud, Nietzsche and the  Max Stirner.  In 1911 Ernst became associated with August Macke and joined the Rheinische Expressionisten group in Bonn. He exhibited for the first time in 1912 at the Galerie Feldman in Cologne.  In 1913 he met poet Guillaume Apollinaire and Robert Delaunay and traveled to Paris. In 1914 he met Jean Arp, who was to become a lifelong friend.

From 1914-1918, Ernst served in the German Army.  He continued to paint, influenced semi-Cubist, semi-abstract motifs following Delaunay, Arp and Apollinaire.  “Like many German writers and artists he was scarred by his experience of the war; it led him to reject the values of his family and class and to join in with the provocative, critical stance of the Dada movement.”

Ernst married art historian Louise Strauss in 1918. Between 1919 and 1920,  he collaborated with Johannes Baargeld in Cologne on an exhibition and a series of publications similar in style of the Dada activities in Zurich and Berlin. In 1922, Ernst left his wife and child and moved illegally to Paris, where he lived and collaborated with French poet Paul Elouard and his wife Gala.

“After 1918 Ernst rarely employed conventional techniques in his paintings. His early work shows that he was a technically skilled painter and draughtsman. Between 1918 and 1924 virtually all his paintings and prints were based on the principle of collage, and this practice remained central to his later work. Ernst’s major paintings of 1921–4 do not employ collage, but their composition is based on the collage principle.  Ernst’s definition of collage as ‘the culture of systematic displacement’ and ‘the exploitation of the chance meeting of two distant realities on an unfamiliar plane’”

From 1925-1927, Ernst developed the  frottage technique which he said was a form of automatism. In 1926, he produced a series of drawings called Histoire naturelle that he exhibited and published. “The drawings were made by placing sheets of paper over different objects such as floorboards and leaves, and rubbing with a stick of graphite. Through precise selection, combination, control of texture and some discreet additions, he was able to build up delicate, surprising images of fantasy landscapes, plants and creatures. He adapted this fundamentally simple technique to painting in the form of grattage, by which textures and patterns were made through simultaneously rubbing and scraping off layers of paint. Representational forms were then extracted from the whole by means of overpainting.”  Ernst used variations on the technique in most of his paintings for the next several years, especially in the Forest series.”

Ernst held successful exhibitions between 1925 and 1928, and became a “fashionable” artist in Paris. In 1926 he painted sets for Diaghilev’s production of Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet in collaboration with Joan Miró.  In 1927, Ernst married Marie-Berthe Aurenche and painted After Us—Motherhood, using calm, harmonious forms and warm colours. “This painting, along with the three versions of Monument to the Birds,  illustrates Ernst’s growing preoccupation with bird imagery during this period.”

In 1929, Ernst renewed his interest in collage producing the  ‘novel’, La Femme 100 têtes (‘The woman with 100 heads’). The book consisted of 124 captioned pictures which were made by adapting images taken from late 19th-century illustrated magazines. From 1929 to 1932, Ernst also created a series of collages featuring ‘Loplop, the Bird-Superior’. “In these and other collages Loplop represents the artist himself and presents a sequence of tableaux illustrating Ernst’s technical methods and ideas.”

During this period, Ernst supported the ideas of the Surrealists. “Andre Breton’s novel Nadja and Dalí’s advocacy of the ‘paranoiac-critical’ method were important background influences on his work. Ernst renewed his solidarity with the group in his collage Loplop Introduces Members of the Surrealist Group.”

From 1925 to 1931 many of Ernst’s works carried imagery that was “violent and menacing. This aspect of his work became more prominent after 1933, partly in reaction to the political and social climate of the time.”  Ernst (as well as many other German artists and writers) was condemned by the Nazi cultural authorities.

During the 1930s Ernst became increasingly well known. He exhibited at the Julian Levy Gallery in New York and in 1936 and 1938, participated in the large international Surrealist exhibitions in London, New York and Paris.

At the outbreak of WWII,  Ernst was interned as an enemy alien. With the help of Peggy Guggenheim, was able flee to New York in July 1941. Ernst married Guggenheim in 1942 and became a leading figure among the art community in New York. His marriage to Guggenheim was short, and in  1946, Ernst married American artist Dorothea Tanning.

In New York, Ernst developed a technique using paint dripped from a suspended, swinging can and renewed his belief in the “unconscious sources of his work.” Many of his paintings of this period employ the technique of decalcomania where “rich, unpredictable patterns were obtained by either taking an impression from, or sponging, layers of liquid paint: figurative motifs were then developed by overpainting.”

In 1946 Ernst and Tanning settled in Sedona, Arizona, and in 1948, he gained American citizenship. Between 1943 and 1950 he  created a series of paintings in a controlled geometric style and produced a number of sculptures.

In 1953 Ernst and Tanning returned to France where he had his first major post-war retrospective at Knokke-Het Zoute. Ernst became a naturalized French citizen in 1958. His reputation grew steadily after his return to Europe and in 1954 he was awarded a Grand Prix at the Venice Biennale. In the following years,  major exhibitions of his work were held in New York, Cologne, and Stockholm. Major retrospectives of his work were held in New York and Paris in 1975.

Max Ernst died on April 1, 1976 in Paris. He was interred at the Père Lachaise Cemetery.

Sources: MoMA, Olga’s Gallery (images), Guggenheim, Wikipedia

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HR Giger: Biomechanics

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Born on February 5, 1940 in Chur, Switzerland, Hans Rudolf “Ruedi” Giger (HR Giger) was a surrealist painter, sculptor, and set designer. Giger’s fascination with all things surreal and macabre began at a young age and this led to an interest in expressing himself through visual arts. Following high school, Giger studied architecture and industrial design at Zurich’s School of Applied Arts.

In 1966 Giger worked as an interior designer and completed some early paintings. In 1968 he began working full time as an artist and a filmmaker. The following year his first posters were published and he had his first exhibitions outside of Zurich.

“Giger’s most distinctive stylistic innovation is the representation of human bodies and machines in a cold, interconnected relationship, described as “biomechanical”. His paintings often display fetishistic sexual imagery.”

Meticulously detailed, Giger’s paintings are usually produced in large formats and then  reworked. Giger’s popular art book, Necronominicon, caught the eye of director Ridley Scott who was looking for a creature for his soon to be produced film Alien. Giger’s designs for the film earned him an Academy Award in 1980.

Giger began work on The H.R. Giger Museum in the mid 1990s in the fortress structure of the Château St. Germain, a medieval castle in Gruyere, Switzerland. The museum holds Giger’s personal collection of art from around the world, as well as a substantial collection of his own paintings and sculptures.

Aside from the Alien movies, Giger has worked on numerous films including Dune, Poltergeist II, Species, and others. He has worked with  recording artists including Blondie, Emerson, Lake, and Palmer, Korn, and has created signature models for Ibanez Guitars. His work in interior design includes  the HRGigerMuseum and the Giger Bars in Switzerland. Giger’s work has been exhibited in galleries around the world.

H.R. Giger, passed away in May 2014 at the age of 74.

For more information about HR Giger, visit one of his official websites: HRGiger.com, Giger.com, or HRGigerMuseum.com.

Sources: System 75 (images), Giger.com, Wikipedia, HRGigerMuseum.com, HRGiger.com

Margo Selski: Painting

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Washington based artist Margo Selski is known for her “lush Surrealist paintings that quote Flemish painting and 19th century portraiture.”  Selski has a B.A. in Studio Art and Art Education Berea College, inKentucky, an Master of Arts for Children S.U.N.Y. Brockport, New York, and a Master in Fine Art in drawing and painting from the University of Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Of her paintings, Selski says: “My work may seem to parody old masterpieces. I create a theatre and people it with an ornate cast: queens, mothers, children, predators, prey, florae, faunae. They live in airless, still places where each creature knows whom she should love or hate. But then, the balances become uncertain. Relationships become inverted. Mothers become children. Children become empty eggs. Princesses become wolves. Eggs, children, families, all start to divide and become something unrecognizable. Soon, no one knows how they should think or feel. My sparkling utopia becomes unstable. Yet still, the unbending wish for love, certainty, permanence. So I lift the brush again. In this pose am I kept.”

To see more, visit Glass Garage Gallery.

Gervasio Gallardo: Surrealism

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Born in Barcelona in 1934, Gervasio Gallardo studied art in Spain and worked for several Spanish agencies before moving to Munich in 1959.  He then spent four years in Paris working with the Delpire Agency.  In 1963, he traveled to the United States where he met Frank and Jeff Lavaty who have represented him since that time. Gallardo went back and forth between Paris and the U.S.  and eventually returned to Barcelona to set up his own studio.

By the early 1970’s, Gallardo had gained recognition as a commercial artist.  “His paintings for advertisers in medical and trade journals were characterized by a style of extreme realism coupled with a puckish sense of humour – a tearful eye embedded in a thicket of greenery depicted the dire effects of not using a certain anti-histamine.”  At the same time, Gallardo worked on his personal paintings which he sold to collectors and museums.  His paintings leaned toward Surrealism and were influenced by Dali and Magritte but with more humour and whimsy.

In 1969, Ballantine Books commissioned Gallardo for its adult fantasy series.  These cover paintings became a signature for the series and were recognized immediately by fans.

Gallardo has received numerous awards in Europe and the United States and has had many solo exhibitions in Paris, Barcelona, and the United States.

To see more of Gallardo’s work, visit Lavaty Art.

 

Source: The Fantastic World of Gervasio Gallardo, ncuxo (images)