November/December 2021

Habitual. Art.

Painting & Surrealism Volume 32 November/December 2021 www.artdictionmagazine.com

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FEATURES 15 Nature’s Still Life

Inspired by the Flemish Masters, Tatjana Cechun is a still life painter who delves into recreating nature in her art.

26 Naturally Surrealistic

Fusing real life with the inanimate, Lara Zankoul is a visual artist who creates thought provoking art that also provides an escape from reality.

28 Fearless Strokes of Paint

Torsten Wolber has developed his unique portraiture

style by listening to his inner voice. Discover how he

has learned to trust his talent over the course of his career.

Cover photo courtesy of Lara Zankoul

In Each Issue 5 small talk 6 news 12 exhibits 53 artist & ad index

Photo courtesy of Torsten Wolber

©2021 by Devika Akeise Publishing

ArtDiction | 4 | November/December 2021

small talk

©Tatjana Cechuna.

N

eedless to say, 2021 has been a year like we have never seen before. And personally, I’m happy to leave it behind and see what’s in store for 2022. But I’m also proud of the way the art industry, including its artists, has pivoted during the pandemic.

Digital art sales have reached new levels and virtual art exhibits have emerged, starting a trend that will most likely remain. The Great Resignation has contributed to a rise in new artists who have focused their pursuits on an art career instead of remaining in the corporate world (my silver lining).

directions in their careers.

Lara Zankoul pursed economic research before diving into her successful career as a multi-media visual artist.

Torsten Wolber studied graphic design before developing a prolific portraiture style. I also interviewed Tatjana Cechun, an oil painter who continues to push her skills, finding inspiration from the masters in the field.

In this issue, I interviewed two artists who chose to change

Wishing everyone a peaceful and prosperous 2022.

As we transition to the new year, pivot however you feel necessary and embrace your new normal.

Afterall, what really is “normal” nowadays?

ArtDiction | 5 | November/December 2021

news 2021 — The Year of the NFT A year has gone by since NFTs entered mainstream culture. But many still wonder – What is an NFT? An NFT, or stands for non-fungible token, is a unique unit of data employing technology that allows digital content — from videos to songs to images — to become logged and authenticated on cryptocurrency blockchains, primarily Ethereum. After content is logged onto the blockchain, every transaction from transfers to sales is recorded on-chain. This creates an easily accessible ledger of provenance and price history. Generally speaking, NFTs is making it easy to own and sell digital content.

Previously, for example, digital artists could build up large followings on social media, attract freelance commercial work, and sell prints and other merch with their designs.

However, artist faced the challenge of monetizing digital art directly, since consumers could simply take a screenshot of the artist’s work.

While the technology behind NFTs made it easy to trade and sell images online, it is really the NFT community that has to be credited with creating a market for these digital assets, because technically, as many detractors point out, digital images that have been turned into NFTs can still be saved or screenshot without cost.

Artists typically will mint (create an NFT) their work on an NFT marketplace, and create a smart contract that will be stored on the blockchain. The smart contract lists the creator of the work and ensures that the creator, or other parties, receive royalties each time the NFT is sold.

The ability for artists to collect returns on resale value automatically is part of NFTs’ draw for artists (all platforms make their money by receiving a small percentage of royalties through the smart

A popular NFT work in New York.

contract). But the process isn’t perfect: technological glitches can make it so that parties don’t always receive royalties. And a smart contract does not have the legal weight of copyright — it will take a relevant court case to see how the law regards smart contracts.

Smart contracts are stored on

Perhaps the most prohibitive is that minting an NFT is not free, and its cost increases the more congested the Ethereum network becomes, and the more computational effort is needed to do the job.

blockchain, but the artwork itself is most often not stored on-chain because storing that much data is too laborious and expensive; accordingly, most smart contracts contain a link to the work they ArtDiction | 6 | November/December 2021

represent. This means that many NFTs comprise two parts, the smart contract and the asset itself. This can cause some confusion about where the value actually resides.

However, there are works that are not only stored on-chain but are also created using blockchain tech (more on this below).

While artists are constantly encouraged by their peers to make big bucks making NFTs of their work, there are obstacles. Perhaps the most prohibitive is that minting an NFT is not free, and its cost increases the more congested the Ethereum network becomes, and the more computational effort is needed to do the job. The financial cost of that necessary computational effort is the “gas fee,” which is constantly fluctuating. Currently, it costs some $70 to mint an NFT on Ethereum. The NFT creator doesn’t always do the minting; certain platforms will offload that process and the subsequent cost to the consumer.

While NFTs have had a positive impact on many artists, there isn’t enough data available yet to see if NFTs are benefiting the many or just a select few. Detractors call NFTs a Ponzi scheme. The only comprehensive study of NFTs published so far collected prices from

news 2017 to April 2021, and reported that $15 was the average sale price of 75 percent of NFTs, with only 1 percent of NFTs reaching prices higher than $1,500. This data, however, should be taken with a grain of salt. It is heavily skewed because the majority of its data points hail from a time before NFTs were adopted at the current scale.

Preventing theft is an ongoing challenge: artists who have held back on creating NFTs have often seen their work minted by unknown parties, and only a few NFT marketplaces verify a piece’s creator before allowing it to sell. Artists who have complained about this issue online have been told to create NFTs of their work just to stop theft, an imperfect solution that has artists feeling as if they’re being forced to create NFTs. Additionally, many artists have refused to create NFTs on moral grounds.

One reason some artists have held back on making NFTs is because they don’t want to profit from the polluting infrastructure of Ethereum. Basically, cryptocurrencies like Ethereum consume immense quantities of power to operate. Currently, a single transaction on Ethereum consumes as much electricity as does a house in a workweek, according to Forbes.

While there are alternative cryptocurrencies with a much lower environmental footprint, like Tezos, they have not yet been adopted widely (and the NFT platform built on Tezos recently dissolved). Some NFT platforms buy carbon offsets to mitigate their impact but the actual efficacy of carbon offsets is debatable. The majority of the NFT community has looked past the environmental impacts because Ethereum 2.0 is coming, which will utilize a significantly less polluting infrastructure. It is said to be arriving in early 2022, though its

deployment has been “imminent” for years.

Digital art, new media art, software, and blockchain art all represent genres that take advantage of varying specific digital mediums.

Work created through any digital medium, or even traditional mediums, can become an NFT. However, there are cases when an artist will use blockchain and smart contracts to create the artwork itself, and it is in these cases only that NFTs represent a medium.

Notably, it is only under these circumstances that the rift between smart contract and artwork are healed, because they are one and the same.

Regardless of questions of tech versus medium, it’s also clear that the NFT market has uplifted certain kinds of aesthetics and processes.

Preventing theft is an ongoing challenge: artists who have held back on creating NFTs have often seen their work minted by unknown parties, and only a few NFT marketplaces verify a piece’s creator before allowing it to sell.

Artistic values in the NFT community have shifted, expanded, contracted, and evolved again over the past year as collectors, mainly outside the art world, develop their tastes in tandem with the changing market. Collectors are not just building private collections for their own enjoyment. The majority of collectors are more analogous to

ArtDiction | 7 | November/December 2021

stock traders, betting on particular collections to rise in value, thus making them perfect for flipping, or as stable stores of value of their cryptocurrency.

Though we have been discussing NFTs through the lens of art, the majority of content being minted is categorized as gaming and collectibles, though there are large swaths of NFTs where the line between collectibles and artworks are blurred—as in the contemporary, traditional art world. There is a higher profit margin to be found in works sold as art rather than as collectibles, and so long as auction houses, collectors, and other institutions know that, it may be difficult to clarify the boundary between those two categories.

But 2021 left little space for wider debate as the baffling and novel market evolved at lightning speed; 2022 might see the art world and the public coming to their own conclusions.

Phillips Reports $1.2 B. in 2021 Sales, Plots New Asia Headquarters for Hong Kong Arts District Phillips will establish a new Asia headquarters in Hong Kong’s storied West Kowloon Cultural District in the fall of 2022, putting it close to the newly opened M+ museum. The news came shortly after Phillips reported that it had made $1.2 billion in sales during the last year. That annual figure was a record for the house, and it marked a 32 percent increase over 2019’s number.

In 2021, the house’s auctions generated $993.3 million, an increase of 35 percent over 2019. Likewise, its private sales channel also managed to thrive, even as people returned to live sales. That area of business brought in the remaining $208.2 million.

news The new Hong Kong headquarters will put the boutique house, which is owned by Russian retailer Mercury Group, at the center of one of Asia’s bustling cultural hubs. The auction house will rent out 48,000 square feet in the West Kowloon Cultural District Authority Tower, taking over five and a half floors floors of the 16-story building that overlooks the region’s Victoria Harbour. The top two floors will be used as an exhibition space for auction previews, while the remaining three will serve as retail and office space.’

West Kowloon’s chief executive officer, Betty Fung Ching Suk-yee, said in a statement that the addition of Phillips to the area will begin a “long-term collaboration” that will see Phillips contribute to “local, regional and international arts and cultural development.”

The auction house, which already has headquarters in New York and London, has seen its intake from its sales in Hong Kong almost double in the last year, as it continues to reap profits from an ongoing collaboration with China’s Poly Auction.

In Asia, the house sold more than HKD $2.1 billion ($270 million) in art, nearly doubling 2020’s figure.

Asian buyers accounted for 36 percent of spending across auction channels at Phillips globally.

Phillips reported that half of the top ten lots sold in 2021, went to buyers in Asia. Among those lots were works by Francis Bacon and Georgia O’Keeffe, two juggernauts on the auction block.

The record year signifies that Stephen Brooks, who took over as CEO for Ed Dolman this year, has so far led the house to success. In a statement, Brooks said he believes the house is poised for even larger sums in 2022. He called bolstering Phillips’s presence in Asia a “critical

Rendering of Phillips’ new Asia headquarters in the WKCDA Tower in West Kowloon Cultural District, Hong Kong

component of our growth strategy.”

In September, the CEO sad in an interview in April that part of his long-term plan for the house was to expand the size of evening sales, which have remained the same size for five years, in order to accommodate hunger among buyers.

The Bronx Museum of the Arts Is Celebrating 50 Years by Announcing a $21 Million Capital Campaign and Major Renovation The Bronx Museum of the Arts is marking its 50th anniversary with an ambitious $21 million capital campaign that will support a new entrance and lobby prominently placed at the corner of Grand Concourse and 165th Street.

The development marks an exciting new phase for the beloved institution, which has endured a few tumultuous years, including the untimely death of revered leader Holly Block in 2017 and some pandemic-related stops and starts with construction and renovation. It is one of only a handful of New York City institutions that offers entirely free admission.

“As I came on board, it was one thing I was really interested in, the ArtDiction | 8 | November/December 2021

transformation of the museum,” executive director Klaudio Rodriguez said in an interview. He was appointed executive director in November 2020 after serving as deputy director since 2017. One of his first priorities, he said, was to “fast-track” the plan.

After reviewing proposals from 50 architectural firms, the board selected Marvel, whose founding principal is architect and urban designer Jonathan Marvel. “The pitch was really about the community as much as it was about trying to position the building for its next phase,” Marvel stated. “The critical thing at this point was to make sense of the new entrance, putting the front door in the obvious place where it should always have been, and where it was originally, when the building was a synagogue.”

Rodriguez noted that the seed for the entrance relocation was originally planted by Block during her tenure, and that everyone had long agreed that there were under-utilized spaces. He praised Marvel for their “holistic” approach to the project and extensive history of working with cultural institutions— including the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Battery Maritime Building downtown, and St. Ann’s

Warehouse in Brooklyn—as well as more than three decades of experience. “We are partners in this process,” he adds.

A major plus is that the renovation will not interfere with the museum’s galleries or programming and it will remain open during the process, which is estimated to wrap up in 2025.

The Bronx museum’s last expansion, in 2006, was a $19 million north wing addition designed

by Miami-based Arquitectonica.

Marvel’s renovation will integrate the south wing into the existing extension and reimagine the lobby with a multi-level entrance that will have seating, a gathering space, and large street-facing walls for artwork. The relocation of the main entrance to Grand Concourse will open up the facade and serve as an extension of the sidewalk, offering multiple opportunities for art and public programming to be visible from the street.

Rodriguez hopes the transformation will bolster public engagement.

“It will create much better flow throughout the museum and reintegrate the two halves,” he said. “I really want to make it a central part of the community, where people can gather and feel like they’re in their living room.”

The museum has been admission-free since 2012, and over the past decade, annual attendance increased from 25,000 to more than 100,000.

The renovation will be supported by city funds, with additional support from the state, and will be overseen by the New York City Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC) on behalf of the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs (DCLA) and the museum itself.

The museum was founded in 1971 by community leaders and activists at a time when the borough was in crisis, and over the past five decades, has carved an identity as a museum dedicated to social justice. More than half of Bronx residents are of Hispanic or Latino origin.

Marvel, who was born and raised in Puerto Rico, says that working on behalf of the Latino community is “one of the great pleasures in my career.” He recounts being somewhat taken aback, albeit happily, upon learning the firm was selected: “During the interview, we did most of the talking and there were very few questions at the end.

It turned out we were saying all the right things and there were few questions because they liked everything we said.”

Of the stiff competition for the project, he said: “Everyone wants to work on the Bronx Museum. This

A major plus is that the renovation will not interfere with the museum’s galleries or programming and it will remain open during the process, which is estimated to wrap up in 2025. is a community-based organization, this is grassroots; it doesn’t get better than this. It’s a beautiful project and a great client.” bell hooks, Essential Writer on Black Art and Feminism, Dies at 69 bell hooks, a writer and thinker whose texts about Black art,

ArtDiction | 9 | November/December 2021

feminism, and identity that inspired legions within academia and far beyond, has died. The Washington Post reported that the cause of death was end-stage renal failure.

Since the ’70s, hooks had been writing essential essays and poetry on an array of topics, many of them pertaining to the inner lives of Black women and to her own experiences. These essays were influential not only because of their groundbreaking subject matter — which, when she began writing, was largely kept out of white-led academic spaces — but also because of their style. In lush, elegant prose, hooks combined theory and poetry, the personal and the political, and academic and vernacular language.

A prolific writer with over 40 books published, the writings that made hooks famous carved out a space for Black women at a time when many white feminists did not believe race was related to their cause. Ain’t I a Woman? Black Women and Feminism, whose title refers to a famed Sojourner Truth speech, had been written while hooks was an undergraduate during the ’70s, but it did not make it to press until 1981. It advocated for an understanding that race, gender, and class could not be viewed apart from one another, and that “the struggle to end racism and the struggle to end sexism were intertwined,” as she wrote.

“We, black women who advocate feminist ideology, are pioneers,” she wrote at the book’s end. “We are clearing a path for ourselves and our sisters. We hope that they see us reach our goal — no longer victimized, no longer unrecognized, no longer afraid — they will take courage to follow.”

She applied that clear-eyed prose to the art she saw as well. Her 1995 book Art on My Mind: Visual Politics features interviews with artists like

news Carrie Mae Weems, Emma Amos, and Alison Saar, as well as hooks’s own musings on the role art played in her own life. She implied that art could have revolutionary potential, even for the Black community, whose members, she believed, often saw the field as something disconnected from their own lives.

“Taking our cues from mainstream white culture, black folks have tended to see art as completely unimportant in the struggle for survival,” she wrote in the book’s first chapter. “Art as propaganda was and is acceptable, but not art that was concerned with any old subject, content, or form. And black folks who thought there could be some art for art’s sake for black people, well, they were seen as being out of the loop, apolitical.

Hence, black leaders have rarely included in their visions of black liberation the necessity to affirm in a sustained manner creative expression and freedom in the visual arts.

Much of our political focus on the visual has been related to the issue of good and bad images. Indeed, many folks think the problem of black identification with art is simply the problem of underrepresentation, not enough images, not enough visible black artists, not enough prestigious galleries showing their work.”

While the focus in Art on My Mind was largely Black women, as it had been in other works by hooks, she also periodically turned her attention to men, in particular Jean-Michel Basquiat. Of him, in an essay originally published by Art in America in 1993, she wrote, “To bear witness in his work, Basquiat struggled to utter the unspeakable.” Quickly, her prose turned conversational. She wrote of how a Whitney Museum retrospective characterized him as “the stereotypical black stud randomly fucking white women,” and then concluded

bell hooks.

that Basquiat taught her something important: “we are more than our pain.”

we’re thinking about solidarity and the links between Black culture and Latino culture.”

Whipping between writerly modes like these was—and remains— unconventional within art essays. hooks described it as a necessary strategy, saying that it could bring theory beyond academia. “Part of the challenge for insurgent intellectuals, particularly those of us who are artists in this society, is to pull back from academe, actually, and academic settings,” she told Lawrence Chua in 1994 Bomb interview.

hooks was born under the name Gloria Jean Watkins in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, in 1952. Raised by a working-class family that she said gave her a different voice on the subjects she would later address, she went on to attend Stanford University for a B.A. and the University of Wisconsin– Madison for an M.A. In 1978, for a book of poetry called And Then We Wept, she took on the alias bell hooks in reference to her maternal great-grandmother, Bell Blair Hooks. The unusual lowercase stylization also marked an attempt to “emphasize the importance of the substance of her writing as opposed to who she is,” she once wrote.

In 2006, hooks discussed this topic further in a series of conversations with artist and scholar Amalia Mesa-Bains, titled Homegrown: Engaged Cultural Criticism, which also touched on the role of art and activism, feminist iconography, and much more. In the book’s preface, hooks says, “This conversation should nurture others. … And by actions like these, which are forms of activism, we repudiate the notion that as cultural workers and intellectuals, we are at odds with the world that we come from. And I agree with you–in this project, ArtDiction | 10 | November/December 2021

As hooks’s writing rose in popularity, it was read widely by artists and more. But not everyone was seduced by it. In a famed article published by the Village Voice in 1995, critic Michele Wallace wrote, “Everybody knows that p.c. rhetoric has become a problem, and Hooks has made herself queen of

p.c. rhetoric. Without the unlovely p.c. code phrases, ‘white supremacy,’ ‘patriarchal domination’ and ‘self-recovery,’ Hooks couldn’t write a sentence.”

At its core, hooks’s writing remains so widely read because of its openness. “When I find myself raging at the lack of thought behind so many of the images produced by our dominant film and television culture, I turn to the appealing complexity of bell’s writing — a challenge equivalent to the difficulty that should go into creating images,” artist Isaac Julien once wrote in Artforum. Countless other artists have been inspired by hooks over the years since.

Richard Rogers, Architect Behind Paris’s Centre Pompidou, Dies at 88 Richard Rogers, who, with Renzo Piano, designed one of the most famous modern art museums in the world, has died at 88. His firm, the London-based Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners, announced Roger’s passing on Sunday. It did not state a cause of death.

“A man of immense drive and charisma, he was equally a man of civility and integrity, dedicated to the art and science of architecture, of urbanism, the life of the city, of political commitment and positive social change,” the firm wrote.

Rogers has been considered one of the finest architects of his era, and went on to collect accolades such as the Pritzker Architecture Prize, the world’s top architecture award, and to join France’s Chevaliers de l’Ordre de la Légion d’Honneur, a title bestowed upon few in his field.

But his most famous buildings were often greeted with a mix of confusion and anger upon their unveiling.

His most important building, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, is now

considered an iconic structure, though it did not always hold that distinction. Designed with Piano, Rogers’s former partner, the Centre Pompidou is essentially an inverted museum. Its air conditioning, electrical, and plumbing systems are each given a specific color and displayed on the building’s exterior.

With these systems placed outside the structure, the inside is more easily open and easily rearrangeable. “You can do anything you want on those floors,” Rogers told Dezeen in 2013.

Inaugurated in 1977, the building was initially considered an eyesore

by Parisians. The French newspaper Le Monde, for example, dispar-

Periodically, Rogers oversaw projects that had an explicitly sociopolitical context.

In 1998, he was invited by the British government to lead an urban task force focused on a housing crisis impacting the nation. agingly labeled it “an architectural King Kong.” Today, however, it is beloved it by many. In 2021, T: The New York Times Style Magazine put the Centre Pompidou at #16 on its list of the top 25 most significant works of postwar architecture.

Born in Florence in 1933, Rogers once labeled himself the “last of the late modernists” when speaking to the New Yorker in 1988.

He founded his firm in 1977, and departed it in 2020. During that time, he undertook an array of

ArtDiction | 11 | November/December 2021

projects now considered major, including the Lloyd’s building in London, an imposing structure that, like the Centre Pompidou, has its architectural innards on its exterior. At 14 stories tall, this building is one of the most instantly recognizable ones in the British capital.

Another Rogers design in London is the Millennium Dome, which is among the largest structures of its kind in the world. Intended to celebrate the beginning of the third millennium when it was unveiled in 2000, it was viewed as a flop, having failed to draw the crowds many had hoped for.

Periodically, Rogers oversaw projects that had an explicitly sociopolitical context. In 1998, he was invited by the British government to lead an urban task force focused on a housing crisis impacting the nation. Between 2001 and 2008, he acted as London Mayor Ken Livingstone’s chief advisor on architecture and urbanism. Boris Johnson later asked him to return in 2008, and Rogers agreed. Then Rogers departed the post amid an explosive standoff with Prince Charles over a plan to redevelop the Chelsea Barracks.

“I have always believed that there is more to architecture than architecture,” Rogers wrote in his 2017 book A Place for All People: Life, Architecture, and Fair Society. “The first line of my practice’s constitution states: ‘Architecture is inseparable from the social and economic values of the individuals who practise it and the society which sustains it.’” .

exhibits Everything Is Beautiful Oct 30, 2021 – Jan 23, 2022 Phillips Collection Alma W. Thomas: Everything Is Beautiful provides a fresh perspective on the artist’s vibrant life (1891-1978) and multifaceted career that was defined by constant creativity. This retrospective traces her journey from semi-rural Georgia to Washington, DC, to becoming the first Black woman given a solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art at age 81. Through artworks and archival materials, this exhibition demonstrates how Thomas’ artistic practices extended far beyond her studio, shaping every facet of her life — from community service, to teaching, to gardening.

In 1907, Thomas and her family migrated from Columbus, Georgia, to DC, and by 1924, she became the first art department graduate at Howard University.

A constant learner, she studied the latest developments in art, visiting museums in New York, Europe, and DC, including The Phillips Collection. For 35 years and in a segregated city, she empowered art students at Shaw Junior High School to see beauty in the everyday and brought exhibition opportunities and cultural enrichment to Black youth.

Thomas’s home located at 1530 15th Street, NW, was her artistic epicenter. There, she created small watercolors, aerial landscapes, and brightly patterned large-scale abstractions that reflect her local surroundings, her fascination with space, and her dedication to the environment. Along with these themes, the exhibition explores her interests in performance, puppetry, costume design, and fashion.

Everything Is Beautiful contextualizes Thomas’s art and life within her creative community, delving into her association with Howard University, American University, and the Barnett Aden Gallery, which she helped co-found.

Some of her works are placed alongside examples by her friends and contemporaries like Loïs Mailou Jones and Morris Louis who also helped shape the DC art scene. The exhibition offers an intimate look at this inspiring cultural icon who used her imagination and ingenuity to lead a rich and beautiful life.

Alma Thomas, Pansies in Washington, 1969.

Imogen Cunningham: A Retrospective showcases the innovation and influence of this photographer who pushed the boundaries for both women in the arts and photography as an art form. Nearly 200 of

the artist’s Seattle upbringing and includes works by female artists such as Ruth Asawa and Martha Graham who Cunningham championed, as well as works

by Group f/64, which she helped found with Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, and others.

Cunningham’s spark of creative possibility asserted photography as a distinct and valuable art form in the 20th century.

For $15, she received a four-by-five-inch view camera and a study guide in the mail.

The photographs she took with this camera were the start of Cunningham’s 70-year career.

Born in 1883 in Portland, Oregon, Cunningham’s family moved to Seattle in 1889. While attending Seattle High School, Cunningham enrolled in the American School of Art and Photography, which offered home study courses.

For $15, she received a fourby-five-inch view camera and a study guide in the mail. The photographs she took with this camera were the start of Cunningham’s 70-year career.

Cunningham’s portraits, flower and plant studies, street pictures, and nudes present a singular vision developed over seven decades of work. The first major retrospective in the United States of Cunningham’s work in 35 years, the exhibition examines

One of her first successful photographs was a nude selfportrait, created as a University of Washington student. At the time, nude studies were predominantly made by men.

Nine years later, Cunningham earned some notoriety exploring feminine desire in a series of nude photographs of her

Imogen Cunningham: A Retrospective Nov 18, 2021 – Feb 6, 2022 Seattle Art Museum

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exhibits husband, Roi Partridge on Mt. Rainier. Throughout her career, Cunningham photographed the nude human form, sometimes abstracted and sometimes clearly defining the sexuality of her subjects.

Over the course of two years, Cunningham worked as an assistant in a Seattle portrait studio, where she gained valuable artistic and practical experience. During this time, she developed a distinctive style inspired by Pictorialism and the Pacific Northwest landscape. In 1910 Cunningham opened her own studio in Seattle’s First Hill neighborhood specializing in artistic portraiture. She ran this successful photography business for six years before moving to San Francisco.

After having three children in two years and moving to San Francisco in 1917, Cunningham’s style shifted. She began photographing plants in her garden out of a need to have subjects close to home as a new mother. Some of her bestknown images come from this period during which Cunningham abstracted the natural world and offered a unique way of seeing through the art of photography.

As her photographs gained attention, Cunningham began collaborating with Californiabased camera artists — Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, Dorothea Lange, among others — and adopted the sharp modernist aesthetic for which she became best known. Some of these images are highly regarded in the history of photography.

These include her portraits of woman artists that Cunningham championed. Her striking portraits generated editorial assignments.

She famously told an editor at Vanity Fair that she wished to make portraits of ugly men. Her

photographs of Hollywood’s elite included the actors James Cagney, Cary Grant, and Spencer Tracy.

Cunningham’s photographs of San Francisco’s Fillmore district made in the 1930s and ‘40s were avant-garde at the time.

Cunningham was uncomfortable confronting candid subjects with her camera and occasionally used windows or bent over, pretending to be searching for something in her bag to hide her camera. Her optimistic portrayals of Black life and other street photography earned her recognition from the National Urban League in 1961.

As a founding member of the informal Group f/64, Cunningham was associated with objective, modernist West Coast photographers. Photographs by the artists in this group can be seen in one of the galleries, including works by Edward Weston, Ansel Adams, and Sonya Noskowiak. The group’s name derives from the smallest aperture then available on a large-format camera lens, which provided the greatest depth of field and sharpest detail.

Cunningham was supportive of the group’s purist philosophy, though she continued to experiment with multiple imagery, double exposures, and negative prints.

On view in the exhibition for the first time in Seattle are seven sculptures by Cunningham’s close friend and regular subject in the 1950s and ‘60s, Ruth Asawa.

Their careers became inextricably linked as Cunningham’s photos of Asawa’s sculptures gained attention for the artistic pursuits of both women. Seattle Art Museum will be the only venue to exhibit these works. Examples of works by other woman artists that

ArtDiction | 13 | November/December 2021

Dancer, Mills College, 1929, Imogen Cunningham.

Cunningham supported through photography will also be on view, such as a video of dancer Martha Graham, and ceramic work by Laura Andreson.

The last decade of Cunningham’s life was active and fruitful. She taught, organized an archive of her work, was awarded a Gugenheim grant, and released a book through University of Washington Press. At age 92 Cunningham started a new portrait project, photographing people of advanced age with the intent to include them in a publication that she would call After Ninety. The collection was eventually published the year after Cunningham’s death, a testament to this artist’s endless ideas and output.

This exhibition is organized by the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.

Incomparable Impressionism from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Through March 27, 2022 Museum of Fine Arts, Houston For the first time, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, is lending some 100 of the most significant paintings and works

exhibits on paper from its renowned Impressionist collection for an exhibition that opens at the MFAH, its only U.S. venue.

Incomparable Impressionism from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston has been curated exclusively for this presentation.

The collection of French Impressionist and PostImpressionist work traces the evolution of the radical movement, from its roots in the novel, naturalistic landscapes of Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Charles Francois Daubigny, and other painters of the Barbizon School; to the early “optical color” experimentations in plein-air landscape painting by Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, and Alfred Sisley; to the frank depictions of modern urban life

by Mary Cassatt, Edgar Degas, Edouard Manet, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.

The exhibition brings together paintings from the 19th and early 20th century, assembled in nine thematic groupings. Among the highlights is a display of 16 canvases by Monet featuring his most beloved sites. Also included are Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s lifesize Dance at Bougival, with its swirling evocation of modern café life; Monet’s luminous Grainstack (Snow Effect); and Degas’s empathic double portrait of his sister, Thérèse, and her husband, Edmondo Morbilli. An integral aspect of the exhibition is a fascinating selection of works on paper showcasing the artists’ working methods.

Pan American Unity by Diego Rivera June 28, 2021 – 2023 San Francisco Museum of Modern Art In partnership with City College of San Francisco, SFMOMA hosts

Claude Monet, Camille Monet and a Child in the Artist’s Garden in Argenteull, 1875 oil on canvas, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, anonymous gift in memory of Mr. and Mrs. Edwin S. Webster. © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston / All Rights Reserved.

Diego Rivera’s monumental mural The Marriage of the Artistic Expression of the North and of the South on the Continent, more commonly known as Pan American Unity, in the museum’s Roberts

The exhibition brings together paintings from the 19th and early 20th century, assembled in nine thematic groupings.

Among the highlights is a display of 16 canvases

by Monet featuring his most beloved sites.

Family Gallery free space. The mural, originally painted in front of a live audience at the 1940 Golden Gate International Exposition on San Francisco’s Treasure Island, is comprised of 10 fresco panels and measures 22 feet high and 74 feet wide (over 1,600 square feet).

It was Rivera’s last project outside of Mexico and is not only a treasured part of San Francisco history, but also one of the most important works of public art in the United States. Pan American Unity is installed in SFMOMA’s free-to-visit Roberts Family Gallery on the ground floor in conjunction with Diego Rivera’s America.

Presenting support for Pan American Unity is provided by Sir Deryck and Lady Va Maughan,

Diego Rivera, The Marriage of the Artistic Expression of the North and of the South on this Continent (Pan American Unity), 1940; © Banco de México Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico D.F. / Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York; image: courtesy City College of San Francisco

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However, the exhibition is not a retrospective. Challenging notions of career building and a strict chronology, Kruger has re-envisioned the retrospective itself by rethinking, remaking, and replaying her work over the decades for the constantly moving present.

Artist’s rendering of exhibition entryway at the Art Institute of Chicago, 2011/2020 Courtesy of the artist

Helen and Charles Schwab, Pat Wilson, and anonymous donors.

Major support is provided by Doris Fisher, Randi and Bob Fisher, the Koret Foundation, Diana Nelson and John Atwater, The Bernard Osher Foundation, and Sanford Robertson. Generous support is provided by the Breyer Family Foundation, Katherine Harbin Clammer and Adam Clammer, Roberta and Steve Denning, Jean and James E. Douglas, Jr., and John and Ali Walecka. Additional support is provided by Mary Leonard Robinson and Susan Swig. Funding for the conservation of Pan American Unity was generously provided through a grant from the Bank of America Art Conservation Project.

Barbara Kruger: THINKING OF YOU. I MEAN ME. I MEAN YOU Sep 19, 2021–Jan 24, 2022 Art Institute of Chicago

Combining images with provocative text, Kruger uses direct address — along with humor, vigilance, and empathy — to expose and undermine the power dynamics of identity, desire, and consumerism. reconsider how we relate to one another.

For more than 40 years, American artist Barbara Kruger has been a consistent, critical observer of the ways that images circulate through our culture.

Combining images with provocative text, Kruger uses direct address — along with humor, vigilance, and empathy — to expose and undermine the power dynamics of identity, desire, and consumerism.

As shrinking attention spans collide with the voyeurism and narcissism that define contemporary life, her immersive installations and widely circulated pictures and words invite us to

THINKING OF YOU. I MEAN ME. I MEAN YOU. encompasses the full breadth of her career — from early and rarely seen “pasteups” (works that use an analog technique for physically arranging a page’s contents with manual “cut and paste”) to digital productions of the last two decades. The presentation includes works on vinyl, sitespecific installations, animations, and multichannel video installations.

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The exhibition at the Art Institute — collaboratively designed with the artist — interrogates the specific cultural context of our museum, as it transcends the traditional exhibition space and extends into the museum’s public spaces and the city beyond.

Kruger’s work not only fills the entirety of the museum’s largest exhibition space, the 18,000 square-foot Regenstein Hall, but also occupies Griffin Court — an 8,000-square-foot atrium running the length of the Modern Wing — with new site-specific work. Kruger’s text and images address both the architecture and relational spaces throughout the museum — from the windows in the historic Michigan Avenue building and the Modern Wing to various public spaces, some of which will also feature an ambient soundscape. Kruger will additionally engage the surrounding cityscape, creating work for billboards, the Chicago Transit Authority, and Art on theMART, among other locations and organizations.

Nature’s Still Life

T

ters - Peter Klas, Jan Vermeer, Jacob de Gein. “I wanted to combine the technique of the old masters with a modern understanding and twist.”

Tatjana studied journalism in school but says she never worked in the field.

Instead, she chose to pursue an art career. She is a still life painter with subjects that range from flowers to animals, sunsets and landscapes. “I was inspired to create the latest series of still lifes by the works of Flemish Mas-

To see more of Tatjana’s work go to facebook.com/artchechun.

atjana Cechun is an oil painter from Lithuania who has been painting and drawing for 30 years. She’s been surrounded by art since her childhood.

“My parents were artists. My husband, with whom we have been friends since childhood, is an artist. Therefore, the creative atmosphere in fills my whole life.”

Tatjana is inspired by nature and tries to understand it to then reproduce it on canvas. “And of course, I fantasize a lot. Much of what I depict in my works simply does not exist. I don’t have to look at a bouquet to draw it, invent it, imagine it. I hope that someday I will be able to create something very good.”

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Tatjana Cechun

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Tatjana Cechun

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Tatjana Cechun

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Alberto Zamaniego Figueroa Retorre

Tatjana Cechun

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Naturally Surrealistic L

ara Zankoul is a visual artist based in Beirut whose work captures every human behavior and the issues that occur within society through photographic media and video and 3D mediums. Her aim is to allow her audiences to come up with their own interpretation and understanding of the works and the stories behind them. “My work is heavily based on experimentation and world building to create moments and craft them rather than just document them. My art [is] conceptual, dreamy, surreal and minimal,” she says.

Lara became interested in art from a very young age. She remembers how much she enjoyed attending art exhibitions and looking at photos from fashion magazines and wishing she could capture photos like the ones she was seeing.

But she always assumed she wasn’t very cre-

ative, basing that assumption on the fact that she excelled in mathematical subjects at school.

“I decided to study economics at university, not because I loved it, but because it seemed like a safe choice back then. When I first started my full-time job as an economics researcher, I decided to buy a camera and teach myself photography,” Lara says.

Lara’s surrealist style of art came very naturally.

She uses photography to escape reality rather than document it. “It started by defying gravity, photographing misplaced objects, changing the function of objects, or playing with proportions.

All these techniques led to this surreal aspect.

Using the camera –which was primarily created to capture reality – to document surrealism was the challenge that kept me passionate.”

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Lara Zankoul

Her concepts come from her state of mind, her triggers, and her daily life experiences. She is also inspired by subjects related to photography and technique, including good lighting, a subject, nice colors and textures, even, architecture, an emotion, or movie. “It is very psychological and quite personal even if it seems universal and timeless at the same time,” she says. “Creating conceptual photos could be like writing philosophy but with a visual language; it’s about digging deeper than the surface of things, questioning, introspecting.” After she comes up with a concept or an intention, Lara moves to the execution by breaking down the photoshoot into the following categories: location, model, art direction, wardrobe, and lighting. “During the shoot, I follow the initial idea but a lot of times, I leave room for improvisation. I love to feel very

present and go with the flow during the process, and sometimes unexpected things happen. They are the most beautiful.”

Lara has recently tapped into the world of NFTS and has been inspired to create more virtual and surreal pieces using different mediums. “I am working on many ideas in parallel, some will be a learning experience, others will succeed; so stay tuned!”

Go to linktr.ee/larazankoul to see more of Lara’s art.

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Lara Zankoul

Lara Zankoul

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Lara Zankoul

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Lara Zankoul

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Lara Zankoul

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Lara Zankoul

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Lara Zankoul

Lara Zankoul

Fearless Strokes of Paint

“

My goal is not to paint one single stroke with fear. I do not want to be afraid to preserve something already well done,” says Torsten Wolber, a portrait painter based in Cologne, Germany. His fearless approach to art, however, was developed over time. He remembers that he was no more interested in drawing than any other child.

“Since we moved around a lot during my childhood, the last move at the age of 11 ended up being less harmonious and exciting than the others before. We had moved to a very rich — and unfortunately also arrogant — area.”

During this time Torsten began drawing as a means of escape and to hopefully gain the respect of his peers. “I was still the strange duck, but at least I was cool because I could draw.

And for what I’m hearing this still works!”

Torsten was first exposed to painting by way of the magazine, MAD. “The covers in Germany at that time were repainted for legal reasons by a classical painter who was really very very good.

I was hooked immediately and looked at these paintings for hours.”

Torsten later went on to study graphic design, including layout and typography. His preference was to purse a field in illustration, but this wasn’t very common in the late 80s in Germany. “Later, I did move to illustration, but I must admit that the study was useless for

someone like me who wanted to draw and paint realistically,” he says. “But it was much hipper to devote oneself without basic training immediately to one’s basic expression. Bottomline, I had little competition in my niche and had a successful career as an illustrator for over 25 Years.”

Believing that the beauty of art is its journey, Torsten does not try to define his art. His art is his journey whereby he will never reach a permanent destination. “The path I have traveled so far I would describe as the expression of intuition, strength and freedom, having discovered these qualities in this order. The freedom is ultimately what fascinates me the most, to recognize my own blockages and to let the expression flow even more authentically,” he explains. “At the moment I´m still like a child who is practicing to let go of the handlebars of the bicycle. Such an adventure and so much to learn.”

Torsten’s portfolio is full of portrait painting.

Using the German express to describe his initial feelings of portraiture, he says portrait painting “was always the king discipline” and too difficult for him to master. “I went around it like a cat around the bush. But, my first attempts were promising, and since then I have painted hundreds of portraits until my own style developed,” Torsten says.

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Torsten Wolber

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He empathizes with artists who might get lost in the examples of so many wonderful and talented artists and think: I want to be able to do that. Or this! Or that! “My advice to younger artists is to take a deep breath and listen to yourself. What is the thing that feels easiest and most natural [for you] right now? This is your unique expression; every artist has this.”

Instead of relying on the fixed ideas about what art should look like and how it should affect people, Torsten believes it’s more important to listen to one’s inner voice, and he has heeded is own advice. “My developed style is a bit surprising for me, really. It looks so …confident.

But it feels authentic to me. So although I’m a bit of an introvert, I’m proud and happy to present my art and enjoy to be present at art fairs and openings. Because this is me, nobody could critique this away.”

Torsten believes it’s important for to paint “without being blocked” for any reason, resulting in art that can be unexpected yet rewarding.

“In the middle of painting, I destroy parts of the picture with wild strokes. I want to remain free until the end and not neglect the expression, my intuition because of a particularly beautiful and successful parts of the painting. The same applies to the edge quality, the density and effect of edges is formed only in the course of the painting itself, usually at the end, where I once again emphasize important areas.”

Another creative endeavor has been nagging Torsten since the beginning of 2020 — dance and movement. “I myself have always loved dancing. I dance a lot with my wife, and we both just love dance theater.,” he says. “Early in 2022 there will be some work on this topic, otherwise I´ll be blocked. Which is definitely not the state I want to be in.

To see more of Torsten’s art, visit allaprima.de.

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Torsten Wolber

Torsten Wolber

Torsten Wolber

Torsten Wolber

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Torsten Wolber

Torsten Wolber

Torsten Wolber

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artist & ad index

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