Lilah Fowler’s been making a name for herself on the contemporary art scene and rightly so. She’s developed an intriguing visual language playing with perspective, puzzles, geometry and framing – structures balance in seemingly impossible scenarios. Fowler encourages a tension between objects and the way they relate to, or lightly rest on each other. It’s only frustrating that we’re viewing her work on a screen and not in person.
Berlin-based artist Maiko Gubler can usually be found creating deceptively three-dimensional imagery utilising a mixture of 3D modelling software. She’s created glossy ceramic-like fruits for magazine covers, metallic fish for German club albums but now she’s actually making objects that exist in the real world. Her collection of Gradient Bangles are created from 3D-printed gypsum and uniquely coloured to create an extraordinary range of jewellery. Lovely stuff.
Rodan Kane Hart is a South African artist and graduate of the Michaelis School of Art in Cape Town. Having only received his bachelors degree in 2011 he’s got a pretty impressive body of sculptures to his name already that broadly deal with the colonial origins of modern South Africa. Though I’d struggle to say that I appreciate the fine details of the concepts behind his practise, I’m incredibly impressed by his use of materials; the balance of industrial and natural substances and the interplay he creates between geometric forms and landscape. Definitely one to watch.
Elena Stonaker is part fine artist, part fashion designer with the sensibilities of a quilter thrown in for good measure. She makes dolls, paints pictures, and fashions bizarre wearable sculptures from amalgamations of fabric, jewels and imagery that sit somewhere between tapestry and garments. In short, she is one of a kind.
As much as the sculptures of the time insinuate, the average man hanging round the forum in 500 BC didn’t necessarily have rippling quads, a laurel wreath and an angry God hot on his trail. This is perhaps why Tom Price’s sculptures of men he sees hanging around South London ring so true. In these beautiful sculptures of men, toned abs are replaced with beer bellies, divine movements swapped with bored slouching and catapults with mobile phones.
German artist Katharina Grosse has an obsession with scale. She told as much when we spoke to her for the autumn issue of Printed Pages magazine, an interview in which she revealed she goes surfing in New Zealand every year to reset her own sense of her place against the infinite natural scale. All this puts her latest project in a Brooklyn Park into perspective (in every sense of the word). Just Two Of Us is a series of massive multi-coloured sculptures which have taken over the MetroTech Commons plaza, looking like the architectural remains of a post-punk psychedelic society. It’s bright, bold and inescapably interactive; three things Katharina does as well as any artist we can think of.
At this year’s Here conference I introduced Andy Rementer to the stage saying that “we feature him so often on the site he probably thinks we have a bit of a crush on him, which we basically do.” I’m not saying I regret saying that necessarily but I have replayed it in my mind a few times wondering just how appropriate it was. Nonetheless Andy got in touch a few weeks ago telling us about his new project which sees his bright and colourful cavalcade of characters go all 3D.
Lina Sponberg’s still a student in her third year at the Broby Grafiska College of Cross Media, Sweden but the professional standard of her work belies her young age. She’s enrolled on a packaging and graphic design course, meaning she gets to learn the basics of good design but also has to apply it to some very specific applications. She’s already created album covers and cosmetics packaging that looks incredibly convincing but we’ve been enthralled by her personal poster project that creates beautiful geometric illustrations from carefully-crafted 3D paper-scapes. The posters play with our natural sense of perspective, warping and distorting as you move around them, the final pattern only revealed from a specific angle. The idea itself is interesting enough but Lina’s attention to detail in the finishing shows off an impressive range of construction and design skills.
We’ve all seen paper sculpture before; it’s the impressive 3D stuff cut from sheets of brightly-coloured modelling card that makes you wonder how anyone could have the patience to sit at a desk for hours and ruin their fingertips for just one piece of work. But what you probably haven’t seen before is sandpaper sculpture – same principle, much more dangerous material. Paper sculpture veteran Mandy Smith has just collaborated with photographer Bruno Drummond to produce these uncomfortable looking, hand-crafted creations. There’s a bikini that we’d suggest should never be worn, a slide that encourages severe chaffing and the less said about the toilet roll the better. That’s a nightmare hangover scenario that we never want to experience. Look at that torn roll just sat there, all unassuming looking, waiting to wreak havoc on your undercarriage.
Only the most capable creatives can create what feels like an entire parallel universe in a single room inside a gallery, but Korean artist Soo Sunny Park has made this tricky task her niche. Toying with light and space to conjure up waves of rainbows from thousands of squares of prismatic glass tied to a wire frame, she warps our perception of reality into a phosphorescent shimmer of what we know.
You might remember us talking about Ai Weiwei’s impressive Forever Bicycles installation in January (if you don’t you should – we made a terrible but unavoidable joke about Katie Melua) and this weekend he recreated it in Toronto for La Nuit Blanche, an all night arts and culture festival.
Artist Cadi Froehlich co-ordinates something very beautiful out of her own kind of chaos. She makes sculpture on large and small scales from salvaged copper and materials which have a Rauschenberg-esque “found object” quality to them, resulting in artwork which is both curiously inviting and strangely detached at the same time.
Window dressers often go unnoticed, don’t you think? Involved in their own unique brand of set design, they create micro-universes designed both to frame and to contextualise a fashion designer or retail outlet’s vision, and yet unless they’re dressing the enormous storefronts of Louis Vuitton or transforming Selfridges into a submarine they rarely get the credit they deserve.
There’s something fascinating about artwork which transcends its own medium to masquerade as another, and artist Mathilde Roussel has perfected the mastery of making paper look like anything but. Using graphite (lots of it) and a well-loved scalpel, Mathilde transforms large pieces of paper into what appears to be rubber, causing them to behave almost like organic forms draped over walls. Appropriately, then, and instead of being exhibited in frames, the final pieces are then hung from hooks and left to fall naturally. Droopy ears, abandoned socks, butterfly chrysalises – they look like any number of things, but paper is certainly not one of them.
