I love this vase. It looks like toxic space goop from hell dripping all down its sides. I’m down with that aesthetic.
Tag: 20th century
Friday
Hey, look! It’s another vase! You know why? Because it’s Thanksgiving and people have vases for centerpieces and stuff. Okay, that’s a stretch because cornucopias are the traditional centerpieces, but whatever. I give up and digress, but look at the color feathering on that sucker – isn’t it gorgeous? It looks like a rising red dust storm.
Thursday
I love the Art Nouveau in-your-faceness of this piece. There is absolutely nothing subtle about it whatsoever.
Wednesday
This looks so simple, but in reality, it’s very difficult: keeping the glaze out of certain areas is incredibly hard, even with tools and effort. It’s a very deco design before art deco was a thing, and it borrows a bit from the Aztec legacy.
Sunday
Even though the subject is clearly a prepubescent girl, the perspective is all off. Her legs aren’t shaped correctly, her arms are disproportionate, her head is too large for her shoulders in context, etc. Clearly, this is all meant to add to the theme of surrealism and be a stopping off point for making everything just a little tiny bit wonky. It’s working.
Saturday
Where Mondrian was only about sharp geometric lines and intersections on a linear grid of basic concept abstraction, those who were able to tread his footsteps and branch away such as Helion with the movement into curved forms and other similar but still basic abstraction soon laid the groundwork for explosion into a world of abstraction of pure color as a form of its own.
Wednesday
The composition of this painting reminds me, funnily enough, of a candle, both in coloring and in structural elements. It has a very distinct feel to it, and even the paint reflects light and shimmers like the flame of a candle.
Saturday
I love this because it’s a poem wrapped in a bow, tied up in the knots in a forgotten language that only the soul understands. It is a siren song to those who hear it and chaos to those who do not.
Friday
Maybe it’s my overactive imagination, but I feel like I see lovers embracing in this work – the lines are there, the emotion is there, the sense of movement is there. But, then again, I am the weird kid.
Thursday
Of all the contemporary/modern artists on display at SLAM, Gerhard Richter is my favorite. I know how that sounds, but I adore all of the pieces of his that the museum owns – including this one. I hadn’t seen it before they unveiled the Bauhaus retrospective exhibition, but I kept coming back to it and going, “Oh, I love that so much.” I hadn’t even looked at the plaque, just the painting itself – and then suddenly, it all made so much sense. It has a very dreamy feel, much like Grey Mirrors (literally grey paneled mirrors) and Betty (a portrait version of his daughter), while maintaining an almost abstract version of real objects.