fine art
New work from former comic artists David Choe and Glenn Barr
Sometimes, artists who make the jump from comics to galleries have been out of the drawing-funny-books business for so long, it’s hard to tell what their current feelings are toward the medium that gave them their first push forward.
For example, it’s been a while since I heard an interview with David Choe, but when I did, they all focused on what his Facebook stock options were worth, rather than if he had any plans to bring Slow Jams back into print. We’ll give Choe the benefit of the doubt, though: He may have chanced of becoming the fourth- or fifth-richest living artist (depending on whose estimate you believe), but he still seems to be living the same productive bohemian life he’s always led. Just this week, two new projects of his have reached the internet: some street art he collaborated on in LA, and the release of a screen-print based on a mural painted on the former home of Pablo Escobar in Medellín. The print is called “Stockholm Syndrome,” presumably a comment on the madness that overtook Columbia during Escobar’s reign.
James Jean publishes catalog for new exhibition, sells out quick
Just as an addendum to Wednesday’s news when we ran a link to the modern art blog Arrested Motion’s preview coverage of the new James Jean exhibition at New York’s Tilton Gallery: they have now posted a couple of pages of images from the show’s catalog, published by Pressure Printing in a signed-and-numbered limited edition of 1000 that sold out in less than two days — well, it was an extremely handsome edition, packed full of beautiful new work, priced at only $38! Presumably when these start showing up soon on Ebay, they’ll be going for considerably more than that. Join me in consoling yourself for missing out on this bargain by checking out the gallery of beautiful artwork below. Continue Reading »
New James Jean exhibit opens at New York’s Tilton Gallery
James Jean‘s new solo exhibition “Parallel Lives” opens today at the Tilton Gallery in New York City. It’s great to see the former Vertigo staple continue to make a splash in the fine art world with his amazing work. The art blog Arrested Motion has a three-page preview of the spectacular show, with many shots of Jean and his team installing giant multi-canvas/multi-media pieces. See some examples below.
Recreating Kandor
For over a decade, artist Mike Kelley has been re-creating the bottled city of Kandor in various forms, including blown glass, lightboxes, and videos, as a commentary on memory and change (Chris recently noted an exhibit of his work in LA). While doing this, he realized that—unlike every other aspect of superhero comics—the appearance of Kandor, the last remaining city from Superman’s home planet of Krypton, is not canon. From the exhibit catalog (quoted at Super Punch):
Interestingly, the image of Kandor was never codified and the numerous representations of it in the comic book throughout the years vary widely in appearance. In this exhibition Kelley reconstructs ten unique versions of Kandor, with its enclosing bottle, which, despite obvious differences, purport to depict the same city. Thus, Kandor – as an eternally maintained, but constantly reconfigured, relic of Superman’s childhood – is an apt symbol of Kelley’s interests in the vagaries of memory…
and so on and so forth. This isn’t the only thing Kelley does—if it was, he would be a mere obsessed fanboy as opposed to a Fine Artist—and his other work ties into it in different ways.
Anyway, Kelley’s work has been collected in a new book, Mike Kelley: Kandors, and that has prompted the New York Times to put a slideshow of some of his images online. They are beautiful but also oddly generic; I think of Kandor as being more detailed than that, but as Kelley is interested in what is forgotten as well as what is remembered, maybe that’s part of the concept.