Urodzona w Warszawie. Mieszka i pracuje w Olsztynie. W 1997 r. ukończyła olsztyńskie Państwowe Liceum Sztuk Plastycznych o profilu wystawienniczym. W 2004 r. uzyskała dyplom w dziedzinie grafiki warsztatowej – Wydział Pedagogiki i Wychowania Artystycznego na Uniwersytecie Warmińsko-Mazurskim otrzymując tytuł magistra sztuki.
Agnieszka Kurlenda was born in Warsaw, Poland. Graduated Olsztyn National School of Arts in 1997, on an Exhibitions dedicated profile. Received a Master of Arts degree in Graphic Arts at the Facility of Pedagogy and Art Education from the University of Varma and Mazury.
Hilma Af Klint (1862-1944) należała do grupy artystycznej „Pięć” skupiającej artystki o filozoficznie i duchowo złożonym rozumieniu świata. Podobnie jak Wasilij Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian czy Kazimierz Malewicz, Klint inspirowała się spirytualizmem i teozofią oraz podkreślała duchowy wymiar poznania. Wierzyła, że w akcie tworzenia przemawia przez nią wyższa świadomość. Prace Hilmy łączą geometryczne kształty z bogatą ornamentacją. Rozbudowana symbolika oferuje wgląd w różne wymiary egzystencji, makro- i mikrokosmos stanowią tu swoje odbicia.Po tym, jak autorka zwróciła się ku malarstwu abstrakcyjnemu, przestała wystawiać swoje prace, a w testamencie zastrzegła, że nie mogą być one publicznie pokazywane przez 20 lat po jej śmierci. Była przekonana, że dopiero wtedy świat będzie przygotowany na odbiór jej twórczości. (artbiznes)
For Hilma af Klint as for other pioneers of Abstract Art – such as Wassily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian and Kasimir Malevich – it was the works’ spiritual dimension that mattered most. As with many artists and intellectuals of her generation, she was interested in theosophy and anthroposophy and gathered decisive impulses for her creative work as an artist from taking part in spiritualistic séances. Her oeuvre can be seen as an attempt to reach a deeper understanding of the world and human existence.
Hilma af Klint created more than one thousand paintings, sketches and water-colours. But throughout her lifetime she never exhibited her abstract pieces, in which she developed a predominantly organic, and later geometric, formal language. According to her will these works were not supposed to be made accessible to the public until twenty years after her death because she assumed that her contemporaries were not yet able to grasp their full meaning. Yet it was not until the mid-1980s that these works were finally exhibited and honoured for the first time. In view of her significant contribution to the history of abstraction, Hilma af Klint’s oeuvre deserves to be rediscovered by a larger audience. (hamburgerbahnhof)
Yayoi Kusama (ur. 22 marca 1929 w Matsumoto) – japońska rzeźbiarka, malarka, pisarka, aktywistka polityczna i performerka awangardowa.
Zaczęła tworzyć w wieku dziesięciu lat. Nazywa swoją twórczość „sztuką obsesyjną”. Od 1977 roku mieszka w tokijskim szpitalu psychiatrycznym i otwarcie mówi o swoich problemach psychicznych. Jej znakiem rozpoznawczym są krzykliwe wzory (najczęściej kropki), którymi pokrywa swoje dzieła (instalacje, kolaże, obrazy, rzeźby).
W roku 1957 wyjechała do Nowego Jorku. W 1965 roku stworzyła pracę Infinity Mirror Room – Filled with the Brilliance of Life – lustrzany pokój wypełniony refleksami i różnokolorowymi światłami. W 1968 roku wykonała performance udzielając ślubu parze jednopłciowej, ubranej w stroje, które zaprojektowała. W ramach prowokacji artystycznej napisała list do prezydenta USA Richarda Nixona, proponując mu seks w zamian za zakończenie amerykańskiej wojny w Wietnamie.
W 1993 roku była pierwszą Japonką reprezentującą swoje państwo na Biennale w Wenecji. W 2006 roku została nagrodzona Praemium Imperiale, nazywanym Noblem w dziedzinie sztuki, przez Japoński Związek Artystów. W 2008 roku jej najdroższa praca została sprzedana za 5,1 mln dolarów, co stanowi rekordową cenę za pracę żyjącej artystki. (wikipedia)
Yayoi Kusama (born March 29, 1929) has been called Japan’s greatest living artist.
Born in Matsumoto, Nagano Prefecture, Kusama has experienced hallucinations and severe obsessive thoughts since childhood, often of a suicidal nature.
Early in Kusama’s career, she began covering surfaces (walls, floors, canvases, and later, household objects and naked assistants) with the polka dots that would become a trademark of her work. The vast fields of polka dots, or „infinity nets”, as she called them, were taken directly from her hallucinations.
She left her native country at the age of 27 for New York City, on the advice of Georgia O’Keefe. During her time in the United States, she quickly established her reputation as a leader in the avant-garde movement. She organized outlandish happenings in conspicuous spots like Central Park and the Brookyln Bridge, was enormously productive, and counted Joseph Cornell among her friends and supporters, but did not profit financially from her work. She returned to Japan in ill health in 1973.
Her work shares some attributes of feminism, minimalism, surrealism, Art Brut, pop, and abstract expressionism, but she describes herself as an obsessive artist. Her artwork is infused with autobiographical, psychological, and sexual content, and includes paintings, soft sculptures, performance art and installations.
Yayoi Kusama has exhibited work with Claes Oldenburg, Andy Warhol, and Jasper Johns. Kusama represented Japan at the Venice Biennale in 1993, and in 1998 & 1999 a major retrospective exhibition of her work toured the U.S. and Japan.
Today she lives, by choice, in a mental hospital in Tokyo, where she has continued to produce work since the mid-1970s. Her studio is a short distance from the hospital. „If it were not for art, I would have killed myself a long time ago,” Kusama is often quoted as saying.
Yayoi Kusama said about her 1954 painting titled Flower (D.S.P.S),
„One day I was looking at the red flower patterns of the tablecloth on a table, and when I looked up I saw the same pattern covering the ceiling, the windows and the walls, and finally all over the room, my body and the universe. I felt as if I had begun to self-obliterate, to revolve in the infinity of endless time and the absoluteness of space, and be reduced to nothingness. As I realized it was actually happening and not just in my imagination, I was frightened. I knew I had to run away lest I should be deprived of my life by the spell of the red flowers. I ran desperately up the stairs. The steps below me began to fall apart and I fell down the stairs straining my ankle.” (metroartwork)
Adolph Gottlieb (ur. 14 marca 1903, zm. 3 marca 1974) – amerykański malarz, przedstawiciel ekspresjonizmu abstrakcyjnego.
Urodził się w Nowym Jorku. Studiował w Nowym Jorku (m.in. pod kierunkiem Johna Sloana) oraz w Paryżu.
W 1935 współzakładał grupę The Ten (Dziesiątka), zajmującą się malarstwem abstrakcyjnym i ekspresjonistycznym. Rok później poprzez organizację Works Progress Administration, zajmującą się zatrudnianiem bezrobotnych, zaangażował się w tzw. Federal Art Project (projekt wykorzystujący bezrobotnych artystów do tworzenia tzw. sztuki publicznej – plakatów, malowideł ściennych i obrazów mających ozdabiać miejsca publiczne). Zajmował się tam malarstwem sztalugowym.
W 1939 wygrał krajowy konkurs na malowidło ścienne mające zdobić budynek poczty w Yerrington w stanie Nevada. Dwa lata później rozpoczął pracę nad cyklem „Piktogramy”. Pierwszy z obrazów został wystawiony w 1942 na drugiej dorocznej wystawie Federacji Malarzy i Rzeźbiarzy Nowoczesnych w galerii Wildenstein w Nowym Jorku. Pierwsza indywidualna wystawa Gottlieba została otwarta w nowojorskiej Artists Gallery 28 grudnia tego samego roku.
W 1943 Gottlieb wraz z innymi malarzami abstrakcyjnymi, jak m.in. Mark Rothko, John Graham i George Constant, założył stowarzyszenie New York Artist Painters. Wspólnie z M. Rothko wystosował list – manifest twórczy abstrakcyjnych ekspresjonistów opublikowany 13 czerwca w New York Times.
W 1944 został prezesem Federacji Malarzy i Rzeźbiarzy Nowoczesnych – piastował tę funkcję do następnego roku. W 1945 Muzeum Guggenheima kupiło 11 obrazów i jeden gwasz Gottlieba.
W kolejnych latach prace Gottlieba wystawiano wielokrotnie m.in. w Nowym Jorku i Paryżu. Nagradzano go też za osiągnięcia artystyczne.
W 1966 w pożarze zostało doszczętnie zniszczone jego studio. W 1970 po wylewie został lewostronnie sparaliżowany i skazany na życie na wózku inwalidzkim – kontynuował jednak malowanie. Zmarł w Nowym Jorku. (wikipedia)
Born in New York City in 1903. From 1920-1921 he studied at the Art Students League of New York, after which he traveled in France and Germany for a year. Before his skills had fully developed he studied at the Académie de la Grande Chaumiere in Paris. When he returned, he was one of the most traveled New York Artists. In the mid-1930’s, he became a teacher using his acquired technical and art history knowledge to teach while he painted. In 1935 he was a founding member of The Ten, a group devoted to abstract art, and he became a major exponent of Abstract Expressionism whose painting style is linked to Marc Rothko, Clyfford Still, and Barnet Newman. A major theme in his painting was the challenge to humans to resolve dualities within the universe, the pressure of opposites: male and female, chaos and order, creation and destruction, order and chaos.
He was a WPA mural artist and from 1937 to 1939 was in Arizona, which influenced his subsequent „pictograph” series that occupied him the remainder of his life. The pictographs involved grid divisions of the canvas, primitive iconography, and imaginary landscapes. For him, the time in the Arizona desert was a time of transition from expressionist landscapes to highly personal still lifes of simple desert items such as gourds and peppers.
During World War II, Gottlieb encountered exiled Surrealists in New York and they added to and reaffirmed his belief in the subconscious as the well for evocative and universal art. This belief led him to experiment with basic and elemental symbols. The results of his experiments manifested themselves in his series “Pictographs” which spanned from 1941-1950. In his painting Voyager’s Return, he juxtaposes these symbols in compartmentalized spaces. His symbols reflect those of indigenous populations of North America and the Ancient Near East. However, once he found out one of his symbols was not original, he no longer used it. He wanted his symbols to have the same impact on all his viewers, striking a chord not because they had seen it before, but because it was so basic and elemental that it resounded within them.
In the 1950 he began his new series Imaginary Landscapes he retained his usage of a ‘pseudo-language,’ but added the new element of space. He was not painting landscapes in the traditional sense, rather he modified that genre to match his own style of painting. He painted simple figures in the foreground, and simple figures in the background, and the viewer can read the depth.
In his last series Burst which started in 1957, he simplifies his representation down to two shapes discs and winding masses. His paintings are variations with these elements arranged in different ways. This series, unlike the Imaginary Landscape series, suggests a basic landscape with a sun and a ground. On another level, the shapes are so rudimentary; they are not limited to this one interpretation. Gottlieb was a masterful colorist as well and in the Burst series his use of color is particularly crucial. He is considered one of the first color field painters and is one of the forerunners of Lyrical Abstraction.
Gottlieb’s career was marked by the evolution of space and universality. Gottlieb had a stroke in 1970, but continued on with his painting and worked on the Burst series until his death in 1974. In 1976 the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation was formed, offering grants to visual artists. (rogallery)
Harry Smith to postać niezwykła w świecie sztuki XX wieku. Muzykolog (autor legendarnej kompilacji Antologia Muzyki Amerykańskiej), prekursor New Age – miłośnik ezoteryki i filozofii Wschodu, malarz, antropolog, bitnik i filmowiec.
Zainteresowanie Smitha filmem animowanym to przede wszystkim fascynacja animacją europejską – przedwojennymi filmami Len Lye`a i Oskara Fischingera. Pierwsze, powstałe pod koniec lat 40. filmy Smitha to niezwykle barwne, abstrakcyjne animacje realizowane nierzadko w technice animacji bezpośredniej. Prace te zapowiadają już estetykę psychodelii, która miała zdominować kulturę amerykańską po kilkunastu latach. Mimo częstego wykorzystywania figur geometrycznych, animacja Smitha to głównie organiczna abstrakcja spod znaku Jeana Miro, próba nawiązania do czystych, absolutnych filmów Fischingera za pomocą malarskiej estetyki filmów Len Lye`a z połowy lat 30.
Inspiracją dla tych prac były nierzadko stany wywołane narkotykami, popularnymi wśród kultury bitników i powojennej bohemy artystycznej Zachodniego Wybrzeża. Filmy Smitha to także kontynuacja Fischingerowskiego poszukiwania relacji między obrazem (w szczególności kolorem) i muzyką.
Kolejne filmy Smitha to odejście w stronę kolażowej abstrakcji figuratywnej inspirowanej buddyzmem i Kabałą. Jego najważniejszy, ponadgodzinny film z tego okresu to nr 12 – Smith numerował wszystkie swoje filmy – znany także pod nadaną przez Jonasa Mekasa nazwą Heaven and Earth Magic.
Mnogość zainteresowań Smitha nie pozwalała mu skupić się na niezwykle pracochłonnym filmie animowanym – w kolejnych latach powstawały tylko ich krótkie fragmenty. Ostatnie lata życia artysta spędził dzieląc mieszkanie z Allenem Ginsbergiem, tworząc kolejne kolekcje (m.in. największą na świecie kolekcję papierowych modeli samolotów czy kolekcję ukraińskich pisanek). Za swoje dokonania w dziedzinie archiwizacji klasyki korzennej muzyki amerykańskiej został uchonorowany w 1991 roku prestiżową nagrodą Grammy. (3cinema)
Harry Smith was an artist whose activities and interests put him at the center of the mid twentieth-century American avant-garde. Although best known as a filmmaker and musicologist, he frequently described himself as a painter, and his varied projects called on his skills as an anthropologist, linguist, and translator. He had a lifelong interest in the occult and esoteric fields of knowledge, leading him to speak of his art in alchemical and cosmological terms.
Harry Smith was born May 29, 1923, in Portland, Oregon, and his early childhood was spent in the Pacific Northwest. Smith’s father, Robert James Smith, was a watchman for the local salmon canning company. His mother, Mary Louise, taught school on the Lummi Indian reservation. Robert Smith’s grandfather had been a prominent Freemason who was a Union General in the Civil War. Harry’s parents were Theosophists, who exposed him to a variety of pantheistic ideas, which persisted in his fascination with unorthodox spirituality and comparative religion and philosophy. By the age of 15, Harry had spent time recording many songs and rituals of the Lummi and Samish peoples and was compiling a dictionary of several Puget Sound dialects. He later became proficient in Kiowa sign-language and Kwakiutl. In addition to developing complicated systems for transcription, he also amassed an important collection of sacred religious objects, one of a number of museological endeavors that occupied Smith throughout his life.
Smith studied anthropology at the University of Washington for five semesters between 1943 and 1944. After a weekend visit to Berkeley, during which he attended a Woody Guthrie concert, met members of San Francisco’s bohemian community of artists and intellectuals, and experimented with marijuana for the first time, Smith decided that the type of intellectual stimulation he was seeking was unavailable in his student life.
It was in San Francisco that Smith began to build a reputation as one of the leading American experimental filmmakers. He showed frequently in the „Art in Cinema” screenings organized by Frank Stauffacher at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Smith not only became close with other avant-garde filmmakers in the Bay Area, such as Jordan Belson and Hy Hirsh, but traveled frequently to Los Angeles to see the films of Oskar Fischinger, Kenneth Anger, and other Southern Californians experimentalists. Smith developed his own methods of animation, using both stop motion collage techniques and, more uniquely, hand-painting directly on film. Often a single film required years of painstakingly precise labor. While a few other filmmakers had employed similar frame-by-frame processes, few matched the complexity of composition, movement, and integration in Smith’s work. Smith’s films have been interpreted as investigations of conscious and unconscious mental processes, while his fusion of color and sound are acknowledged as precursors of sixties psychedelia. At times, Smith spoke of his films in terms of synaethesia, the search for correspondences between color and sound and sound and movement.
Smith’s films cannot be easily separated from his paintings, and in both he was influenced by the abstract work of Kandinsky, Marc, and others who formed the foundation of the collection of the Museum of Non-Objective Painting (later the Guggenheim Museum) in New York. Smith developed a relationship with Hilla Rebay, the museum’s director, and she arranged for Smith to come to New York and to receive a Solomon Guggenheim grant in 1950. He moved to New York permanently in the early fifties. In need of money, he offered to sell his extraordinary record collection of American vernacular music to Folkways Records. Instead, Moses Asch, the label’s president, challenged Smith to cull his collection into an anthology.
In 1952 Folkways issued Smith’s multi-volume Anthology of American Folk Music. The Anthology was comprised entirely of recordings issued between 1927 (the year electronic recording made accurate reproduction possible) and 1932, the period between the realization by the major record companies of distinct regional markets and the Depression’s stifling of folk music sales. Released in three volumes of two discs each, the 84 tracks of the anthology are recognized as having been a seminal inspiration for the folk music revival of the 1950s and 1960 (the 1997 reissue by the Smithsonian was embraced with critical acclaim and two Grammy awards). Traditional American music was only one of Smith’s musical interests. From the late 1940s, he was a passionate jazz enthusiast, going so far as to create paintings that are note-by-note transcriptions of particular tunes. He spent much of the fifties in the company of jazz pioneers like Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and Thelonious Monk. Smith’s involvement with recording continued into the sixties and seventies as he produced and recorded the first album by the Fugs in 1965. His long term friendships with many of the Beat writers led to the release of Allen Ginsberg’s First Blues in 1976 as well as unreleased recordings of Gregory Corso’s poetry and Peter Orlovsky’s songs. Smith spent part of this era living with groups of Native Americans, and this resulted in his recording the peyote songs of the Kiowa Indians (Kiowa Peyote Meeting, Folkways, 1973).
Smith’s broad range of interests resulted in a number of collections. He donated the largest known paper airplane collection in the world to the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum. He was a collector of Seminole textiles and Ukrainian Easter Eggs. He also considered himself the world’s leading authority on string figures, having mastered hundreds of forms from around the world.
Smith spent his last years 1988-1991) as „shaman in residence” at Naropa Institute, where he offered a series of lectures, worked on sound projects, and continued collecting and researching. In 1991 he received a Chairman’s Merit Award at the Grammy Awards ceremony for his contribution to American Folk Music. Upon receiving the award, he proclaimed, „I’m glad to say my dreams came true. I saw America changed by music.”
Harry Everett Smith died at the Chelsea Hotel on November 27, 1991. (harrysmitharchives)
Szwajcar Adolf Wolfli (1864-1930), typ psychotyka, którego urojeniom towarzyszyły napady agresji. Wolfli, nękany atakami wściekłości i halucynacjami, w 1895 roku (po próbie gwałtu na nieletniej dziewczynce) został umieszczony w zakładzie zamkniętym Waldau w Bernie. Tam od roku 1904 z pasją oddawał się tworzeniu własnej mitologii, w której osobiście występował jako św. Adolf II, wędrujący po niesamowitym świecie, w którym wszystko jest groteskowo wyolbrzymione i udziwnione.
Dzieło życia Wolfliego, którego tworzenie rozpoczął w roku 1908 liczy 45 tomów, łącznie 25000 stron, a zawiera ok. 3000 ilustracji. W pracach Wolfliego mieszają się w przytłaczającej obfitości uzupełniające się wzajem przedmioty i postacie: fajki, buty, parasole, naczynia kuchenne, hotele, linie kolejowe, statki parowe, fabryki, mosty, zegary o ludzkich twarzach, klatki schodowe, owalne drzewa, ryby, katedry, drogi i tunele, słońca, księżyce i komety. (…) Wszystko w jego dziełach jest ogromne, wręcz monstrualne. (…) Podczas swych podróży odkrywał [św. Adolf II, czyli Wolfli we własnym wyobrażeniu] urwiska wysokie na ponad 350 mil, długości 25 000 000 mil i szerokości 900 000, zbadał największą w świecie jaskinię na 24 000 000 długą, 500 000 mil szeroką i 250 000 mil wysoką (…) Wolfli zapełnił swoje uniwersum niezwykłymi stworzeniami, takimi jak Gigantyczny Ptak Transportowy, Wielki Wąż Śnieżny, czy Wielka Bogini Regentia, a św. Adolfa II uczynił także uczonym i wynalazcą całej masy przedmiotów codziennego użytku (jak np. telefonu, zegarka elektrycznego, łodzi podwodnej, nowego rodzaju hamulca etc.).
W 1921 roku Walter Morgenthaler, lekarz w klinice Waldau, zainteresował się przypadkiem Wolfliego, czego owocem stało się opracowanie „Ein Geisteskranker als Künstler” („Pacjent chory umysłowo jako artysta”), dzięki któremu szwajcarski pensjonariusz stał się znany w świecie sztuki. Później zafascynował się nim m.in. znany malarz i rzeźbiarz Jean Dubuffet.
Wolfli parał się nie tylko literaturą i plastyką, ale także muzyką – komponował mianowicie utwory, które zapisywał za pomocą własnej notacji. Wiele lat po jego śmierci podjęto próby jej odczytania i wykonania dzieł Wolfiego – m.in. w roku 1976 zadania tego podjęli się Kjell Keller i Peter Streif. Okazały się to być utwory silnie zrytmizowane, zdradzające podobieństwa m.in. do muzyki ludowej i marszowej. Z kolei album oparty między innymi o kompozycje Wolfliego (lecz przetworzone i połączone z elementami muzyki industrialnej) wydał w 1987 Graeme Revell (m.in. SPK) przy współpracy Nurse With Wound i DDAA. (legitymizm)
Adolf Wolfli’s childhood was one of degradation and indigence. The youngest of the seven children born to a stonecutter and a laundress, Wolfli, orphaned before his tenth birthday, was made a ward of the community and lived in a succession of wretched foster homes. Forbidden to court the girl he loved by her scornful father, Wolfli temporarily abandoned life as an itinerant farm laborer in 1883 to join the infantry. In 1890, he was sentenced to two years in prison for the attempted molestation of two young girls, and in 1895, after a third incident of alleged molestation of a three-and-a-half-year-old-girl, he was committed to the Waldau Psychiatric Clinic in Bern, where he remained until his death in 1930. Suffering from terrifying hallucinations, Wolfli was often placed in isolation during the first decade of his hospitalization. From 1910, working systematically on his writing and drawing, Wolfli desired the solitude and protection of a private cell, which he decorated with his own works.
After four years in the Waldau clinic, Wolfli began to draw. The earliest preserved works, dating from 1904, are restless, symmetrical pencil drawings on newsprint. Combining images, words, and musical notations, the early works forecast the principal motifs and pictorial devices of his later work. In 1908, the year Dr. Walter Morgenthaler arrived at Waldau, Wolfli embarked upon the epic autobiographical project that would consume the remaining twenty-two years of his life. The text of the fanciful autobiography, interspersed with poetry, musical composition, and three thousand illustrations, comprises more than twenty-five thousand pages. Hand bound by Wolfli and stacked in his cell, the forty-five volumes eventually reached a height of more than six feet. Intermingling reality and fiction, Wolfli’s autobiography begins as an adventurous geographical world expedition, of which Doufi (Wolfli’s childhood name) is the hero, and expands to a grandiose tale of cosmic war, catastrophe, and conquest with Doufi transformed into St. Adolf II. The fascinating illustrations of the narrative are labyrinthine creations and mandalalike compositions of densely combined text and idiosyncratic motifs.
A few days before his death, Wolfli lamented his inability to complete the final section of the autobiography, a grandiose finale of nearly three thousand songs, which he titled „Funeral March”. In 1972, Wolfli’s work was exhibited at Documenta 5 and since then has been shown throughout Europe and the United States. In 1975, forty-five years after his death, Wolfli’s staggering artistic production — including the autobiography and its illustrations, as well as some eight hundred loose leaf drawings-was transferred from the Waldau Psychiatric Clinic to the Kunst Museum in Bern. (phylliskindgallery)
The Savage Saints 