It’s a familiar scene; family members crowd expectantly around the dining table watching as a birthday cake is cut into slices. But this is no ordinary, nostalgic snapshot – instead, faces are partially concealed by pixelated grids of embroidery, rendering them as fuzzy and unrecognisable as distant memories. This artwork, titled New Jersey XIII, 2016,…
All posts by Rosie Lesso
French painter Pierre Soulages made a career out of painting with shades of black like ANTHRACITE, sweeping it in broad, confident gestures across paper and canvas. His stark, minimal designs nod towards the simple confidence of cave paintings and Japanese calligraphy, with loose marks crisscrossing over one another to create the sensations of depth, space…
Artist, African-American, woman and mother: these are the many roles woven into Kara Walker’s identity. Her art brings these personal experiences out into the open, examining them in a wider social context informed by history, mythology and politics. In particular, Walker’s role as a mother has undoubtedly informed some of her most powerful works of…
Abstract Expressionist Joan Mitchell brought swirling tornadoes of colour into her art, and BLUE APATITE was one of her favourites. She loved how this rich teal blue could energise her paintings with the colour of electricity, twirling this way and that in dynamized ribbons, or pooling into watery patches of translucency. Though her densely patterned…
Colour was a driving force in the Surrealist art of Joan Miro, pulsing through his images with a passionate and rhythmic energy. He played with all the colours of the rainbow throughout his long and prolific career, exploring how curious and unexpected relationships could be discovered between them. The fresh, cool and minty shade of…
Soft, delicate pinks like BLUSH linen are a recurring feature in Cecily Browns rich, expressionistic paintings, conveying nude flesh, spring blossoms in the sunlight, or freshly fallen snow, painted with the fluttering decadence of the Baroque era once led by Jean-Honore Fragonard. A leading New York artist since the early aughts, Brown has been painting…
Pioneering American Minimalist Agnes Martin is world-renowned for her vast, meditative canvases, with broad planes of luminous colour and trembling, hand-drawn lines. Primarily a painter with a capital ‘P’, and with little interest in fashion, she might seem an unlikely figure to associate with fabric and textiles. Yet closer examination of her practice, and indeed…
In her sparse, elemental canvases, British artist Sandra Blow captures fragile, fleeting moments, often bleached out with HEATHER linen’s cold, hazy light. A pioneering abstract artist of the 1950s, Blow challenged the macho, male-led school of Abstract Expressionism with a surprising informality, incorporating unexpected found materials such as sawdust, sackcloth and plaster alongside pale colours…
Painter, poet, filmmaker and sculptor, Danish artist Per Kirkeby had a prolific practice spanning multiple styles, but underpinning his ideas was a fascination with the structures and patterns of nature. The fertile, olive shade of green in DRIED HERB Linen appeared often in his evocative, expressive paintings, a colour that allowed him to express the…
MAROON Linen’s deep, dark red often appears in the art of German painter Gerhard Richter, smeared across his canvases in daring streaks of deliciously thick oil paint. One of the most prominent living painters in the world, Richter’s art has encompassed a huge range of styles, from monochrome photorealism to expressive abstraction and almost everything…
Leading American sculptor Anne Truitt is widely recognised as a singular figure in the Washington Colour School of the mid-20th century, whose monumental columns of colour are steeped with intense human emotion. She successfully weaved her family life into this artistic practice, exploring how the two could feed creatively and intuitively into one another. At…
Richard Diebenkorn is one of the greatest colourists in the history of American art. Throughout his long and varied career, he moved through various styles of figuration and abstraction, but it was always an emphasis on the expressive properties of bold, brilliantly bright colour that he returned to over and over again. In soaring shades…
Like many artists of her generation, mid-20th century sculptor Dame Barbara Hepworth saw the importance of honing an intimate personal style, one that could reflect the same language as her art. And like her bold, sleek sculptures, her way of dressing was equally as elegant, classic and refined, often with practicality in mind. Along with…
There is a quiet, entrancing magic to Marc Chagall’s art, a quality that allows us to escape the challenges of life, if even just for the briefest interludes. Deep indigo blues like BLUE WHALE appear often, invoking the dark blue air of dusk, when day turns into night and the mind slowly shifts into a…
With a successful career spanning more than 60 years, Serbian-American artist Marina Abramovic has jokingly named herself the “grandmother of performance art.” In this time, she has pushed her body to the extreme, inflicting pain, suffering, trauma and violence on herself in the name of art. Her work is no theatrical performance – instead it…
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