Vitro Nasu

Billy Al Bengston- art in motion

Art News obit – Billy Al Bengston dead

(Honolulu, Water color)

See more here – Artnet

2019 – Interview Ed Ruscha and Billy Al Bengston

Ed Rucha answered here.

ER: I was very impressed with Billy painting something he seemingly loved to do, which was motorcycling. I thought, What a perfect combination, that is, making art out of something you’re really in tune with. Later on Billy got me into motorcycling, which diverted my attention away from making art. We went to Baja, all points north and south, a lot on motorcycles.

SF Gate Obit

His DNA was in San Francisco’: Prolific photographer Fred Lyon dies at 97

Fred Lyon Portfolio

Michael Heizer the City to open following half century wait

The City, a colossal sculpture by Michael Heizer on which the Land artist has labored for more than fifty years in the Nevada Desert, will welcome visitors September 2.

Visit New York times (Spectacular)

New Yorker

Michael Heizer – Gagosian

When Heizer was twelve years old, his parents permitted him to take a year off school to accompany his father, a renowned field archeologist, on a dig in Mexico. As his father researched the rock sources of ancient monuments, Heizer made site drawings, an exercise that he has continued to expand upon throughout his career. In the mid-1960s he left his studies at the San Francisco Art Institute and headed to New York, where he supported himself by painting apartments, including the loft of Walter De Maria, with whom he developed a close, lasting friendship. During this time Heizer began to work on shaped canvases that he called “negative paintings.”
In the winter of 1967 Heizer made a trip to the Sierra Nevada mountains, where he dug two large pits in the woods, lining one with plywood and the other with sheet metal. He declared this work to be “ultra-modern art,” and it was a turning point in his practice. Heizer further manipulated the landscape in Double Negative (1969), a pair of cuts fifty feet deep in facing cliff edges of Mormon Mesa in Nevada, made by removing 240,000 tons of sandstone and rhyolite.

Marta Palau Bosch (See more art here)

Art News Obit

Marta Palau, Mexican Sculptor Who Found Empowerment in Textiles, Has Died at 88

Marta Palau Bosch wiki

Marta Palau Bosch (17 July 1934 – 13 August 2022)[1] was a Spanish-Mexican artist who resided in Mexico. She worked in engraving, painting, sculpture, and most prominently in tapestries, defining herself by her profound artistic use and arrangement of native Mexican natural materials.[2] She was one of the first Mexican artists to focus on themes around women’s and immigrants’ experiences during the 1970s, especially in her Ilerda series of tapestries[3] and later with her Nahual sculptures.

Wim Wenders homepage

„THE TOKYO TOILET“ Art Project with Wim Wenders, Koji Yakusho, Tadao Ando et al.
Wim Wenders announces a new art project which includes a short film about high-end public toilets in Shibuya, Tokyo.

Japan’s leading international actor, Kōji Yakusho (Memoirs of a Geisha / Babel etc.) will play the lead role.
The spaces featured in THE TOKYO TOILET (TTT) were designed by world-renowned architects like Tadao Ando, Shigeru Ban,and designers like NIGO, with the idea that a pleasant public restroom could counter the common expectation of a dark, dirty and dangerous place.

“My first reaction was: What? Toilets? Chotto mattete,” said Wim Wenders during the press conference in Tokyo on Wednesday, using the Japanese expression for “wait a minute”.

For Wim Wenders, the project has high social value and he could immediately see the potential and story behind these stylish Tokyo toilets. „Because a toilet is a place where everybody is the same. There’s no rich and poor, no old and young, everybody’s part of humanity“, he said.

The film shooting will take place in Tokyo in October 2022.

via

Art News Obit

Mary Obering, Abstract Painter With a Passionate Following, Dies at 85

(See more Mary Obering artnet)

Mary Obering and David Lynch

Mary Obering and David Lynch shared a gallery space in 2018.

Kwon Young Wu Between Past and Future

Via

Kwon Young-Woo’s (1926-2013) works explore the relationship between traditional materials and abstract expression. The artist is considered as a pioneer in Korean abstract art known as Dansaekhwa.

Thanks to Pascal Blanchard for introducing this artist on FB.

Artforum Review- Leaking System by Jennifer Bartlett

Jennifer Bartlett Obit Artnet

Artist Jennifer Bartlett, Known for Her Intensive Investigations Into the Possibilities of Painting, Has Died at Age 81

Jennifer Bartlett wiki

Jennifer Losch Bartlett (March 14, 1941 – July 25, 2022) was an American artist. She was known for paintings and prints that combine the system-based aesthetic of conceptual art with the painterly approach of Neo-Expressionism

In 1983, she married German actor Mathieu Carrière, with whom she had a daughter, Alice; they divorced in the early 1990s.

MOMA Jennifer Bartlett

See “At Sea Japan”

Critic Calvin Tomkins on Jennifer Bartlett

Art in America – Oldenburg and Mouse House

(Two pocket sized books – Claes Oldenburg Notes in Hand (spread) and a novel by Harumi Setouchi – photo by Fung Lin Hall)

Widewalls – Claes Oldenburg

Claes Oldenburg homepage (He shares with his wife Coosje van Bruggen)

Ridiculous costume for Police.New York, 1967
Ball point pen, typewriter. His note below.

“You must realize cops are just you and I in uniform. Now I propose then a uniform which is ridiculous. When they do the thing they do, they learned to do,
namely when they do restrain you and they draw the blood – they look ridiculous. As you and and I if caught drawing , draining blood.”
Artts Magazine (New York) Summer 1967. p 34.
The costume is shown on a rack, as it might be hung in the station house.

Claes Oldenburg wiki

And more his giant Wikiart Claes Oldenburg sculptures from here .

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(Claes Oldenburg, Lucas Samaras, George Segal, Patty Mucha, and Robert Rauschenberg at George Segal’s New Jersey home, circa 1968)

(Ai Weiwei’s Arch Installation Opens in Central Stockholm)

Archdaily

Fadmagazine

The artwork was last seen in 2017 in New York, under the arch of the Washington Square Monument, as part of the Good Fences Make Good Neighbors installation. According to the artist, when the piece was first shown, it was about racism and the global refugee crisis caused by regional insecurity. Since then, the artwork has taken on new meanings, just as more crises and conflicts unfurl, like the collective isolation and vulnerability experienced during the pandemic, and more recently, the war between Russia and Ukraine.

Interview via Inews UK Rwanda Asylum Policy Racism

Books that inspire Ai-Wei-Wei
Existentialism Is a Humanism – Jean-Paul Sartre (1946)
The Communist Manifesto – Karl Marx (1848)
The Book of Songs: The Ancient Chinese Classic of Poetry (c. 11th – 7th Centuries BC)
Salt Seller: The Writings of Marcel Duchamp (1973)
The Classic of Mountains and Seas (c. 4th Century BC)
Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism – Vladimir Lenin (1917)
Gypsy Romance – Federico Garcia Lorca (1928)
Life on the Mississippi – Mark Twain (1883)
The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B & Back Again) – Andy Warhol (1975)
Permanent Record – Edward Snowden (2019)
Leaves of Grass – Walt Whitman (1855)
The Trial – Franz Kafka (1925)
Tao Te Ching – Laozi (c. 4th Century BC)
Philosophical Investigations – Ludwig Wittgenstein (1953)
A Brief History of Time – Stephen Hawking (1988)
Heavenly Questions – Qu Yuan (c. 475 – 221 BC)

Art News – Philadelphia Museum, Siah Armajani Floor

Siah Armajani wiki

Siah Armaani The Crime of Hospitality

Siah Armajani – Glass front porch for Walter Benjamin

(Read about Walter Benjamin’s tragic life from previous post)

Siah Armajani at The Met Breuer press preview of Siah Armajani: Follow This Line February 19, 2019.
Photo courtesy The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Prayer

NYtimes

Fraught and Fabulous: Art That Shows a Passion for Democracy

Artnet obit

Painter Sam Gilliam, Celebrated for His Boldly Colored Draped Canvases, Has Died at 88

The abstract painter died at his home in Washington, D.C.

Sam Gilliam – November 30, 1933 – June 25, 2022

(Dogon V, 2005 – Intaglio Lithograph)

Artforum obit

(Sam Gilliam’s work Yves Klein Blue at the Venice Biennale in 2017.)

Sam Gilliam loved Yves Klein.

I first encountered Yves Klein while stationed with the army in Japan. There was a Klein exhibition in Tokyo. The Gutai group was being born, and I was in the army, and I thought nothing about whether I would be an artist or not. In fact, I probably thought that I would never be an artist. But Klein had an effect on me, and I thought about making art beyond the interiors that it is usually presented in, about making art more in the outside world.