Byron Galvez

Byron Gálvez (October 28, 1941 – October 27, 2009) was a Mexican artist who was primarily known for his painting but also created sculpture, including monumental works. He was born in rural Hidalgo state, to a father who played jazz music and read literature, a rarity in 1930s rural Mexico. However, it exposed Gálvez to culture, even though this led to an interest in visual art rather than musing or writing. He went to Mexico City to study art at both the undergraduate and graduate level, but never completed his degrees, opting instead to begin career after his coursework. Before his first individual exhibition, his work was criticized by Justino Fernández, but all of the paintings were sold in advance to foreign buyers including American actor Vincent Price, who called Gálvez a “Mexican Picasso.” Gálvez then managed to replace the forty five paintings for the exhibition in a week. Since then he had individual and collective exhibitions in Mexico, the United States and other parts of the world. He concentrated on painting, which he is better known for, in the 1970s and 1980s, but moved on to sculpture, including monumental works later in his career. Recognitions for Gálvez’s work include membership in the Salón de la Plástica Mexicana, a retrospective at the Palacio de Bellas Artes and two books published about his life.

 Gálvez’s work included painting, sculpture, etching, lithography, and drawing. For Galvez, art was spiritual and disconnected with physical logic, when only aesthetics mattered. Female figures are common, and often are sensual. He work has been influenced by the Cubism of Picasso and Georges Braque, by African and Oceanic folk art and by pre-Columbian sculpture. He preferred large scale works often bigger than seven by seven feet.He painted while listening to classical, jazz and occasionally, rock music.Galvez’s work experienced periods in which different artistic currents dominated including expressionism, abstract art and mixtures of the two.In his work, he tried to achieve a balance between figurative and abstract expression.The first stage of his painting was figurative expressionism, then abstract expressionism, under strong influence of Carlos Mérida, Rufino Tamaho, Santos Balmori, Kandinsky, Wifredo Lam and Picasso, along with some from classical painters such as Rembrandt and Caravaggio . Then for some time, he practiced abstract art, but then felt the need to draw human bodies again, especially female ones because he felt it allowed him better expression.Around 1980, he moved on to geometric figurativism, marked by the “Woman” exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art.This has also been describes as “pure chromatic constructivism."He considered himself primarily a sculptor and painted in that fashion.

 Despite their abstract quality, his paintings have an intense romanticism which arises from a mixture of nostalgia and affection, showing the influence of Rodríguez Luna and Santos Balmori His use of color and texture shows influence from the work of Rufino Tamayo with many works showing the forms of Picasso and the color schemes of Tamayo. He considered Picasso to be the greatest artist of all time. (vision) He works in “cold colors” and used chiaroscuro (a technique from Rembrandt) to indicate movement.
As student he specialized in painting but he also created sculpture and monumental pieces. During the 1970s and 1980s, he concentrated on painting but never left sculpture completely.He began doing sculpture though his work with murals, with his initial sculptural work showing the influence of Manuel Felguérez (seen in later pieces as well) with sculptures evolving from two dimensional to three. His European travels influenced his sculptural work with exposure to the works of Henry Moore, Brâncuși and Chillida. A visit to Stonehenge influenced his sense of space and Mesoamerican influence comes by way of his cultural heritage.His sculptural work is mostly in metals, with both geometric and figurative designs, which include reliefs and bronze sculptures.There are also mixed-media pieces such as metal fountain work on a mosaic base.Latter sculptures often feature feminine figures that float in space, gazing upon the onlooker and often sensuous. His sculpting work influenced his painting and vice versa.Wikipedia

Tomie Ohtake

Tomie Ohtake (November 21, 1913 – February 12, 2015) was a Japanese naturalized Brazilian artist.Her work includes paintings, prints and sculptures. She was one of the main representatives of informal abstractionism in Brazil.
In 1936, when she was twenty-three years old, Ohtake traveled to Brazil to visit a brother but could not return due to World War II.Ohtake settled herself in São Paulo with her husband and started painting in 1951, after a visit to the studio of the painter Keisuke Sugano.She had her first exhibition in 1957, in the Salão Nacional de Arte Moderna and in 1961 she participated in the São Paulo Biennale. In 1972 she participated in the Prints section of the Venice Biennale and in 1978 of the Tokyo Biennale. She created dozens of public space sculptures from the late eighties; her work has been featured in several cities in Brazil, but especially in the state of São Paulo.
In 1988 Ohtake was awarded the Order of Rio Branco by the public sculpture commemorating the 80th anniversary of Japanese immigration in São Paulo, and in 2006 she was awarded the Order of Cultural Merit.
She died on February 12, 2015 at the age of 101.Wikipedia

 

Hypnosis paintings Adolf Bierbrauer

Adolf Bierbrauer (* July 26, 1915 in Düsseldorf - September 2, 2012 in Ratingen) was a German conceptual artist, painter and sculpturer. He is known for his "hypnosis paintings" and somnambulistic paintings as well as for his sculptures
Bierbrauer's key works are his hypnosis pictures from the early 1950s and his somnambulistic works created in the last five decades, as well as his sculptures out of different materials.
The focus of his work is the human being. In his the early work pure representations of people, such as portraits and nudes can be found. As he approached in the course of his activities as an artist, physician and psychotherapist, the hidden content of the human psyche determined his works.
Bierbrauer painted the hypnosis images after stories and pictures from his patients in trance. They were created after the end of World War II created until the early 1950s. The images based on Bierbrauers knowledge to find ways to help patients to developed their experiences through war and personal past traumas to free the hypnosis and the narration behind their images, in which he told these pictures were painted for the patients, in order to discuss connected with them. Like this, Bierbrauers were not only able to help his patients, but to make entirely new works of art through the assistance of the patient. In his understanding the artist can be a healer of the sick individual in the society. With these works he had been one of the pioneers of the conceptual art of the sixties in Europe.

For Bierbrauer, since the late 1960s somnambulistic work has many parallels to works by informal artists as Emilio Vedova and Emil Schumacher. Their technique and way of expression are comparable also to the works of the abstract expressionism as by Jackson Pollock or Jean-Michel Basquiat. Bierbrauer, trained by the hypnosis of his patients, began in this period to abstract from the patient's images and now betook himself into a somnambulistic, in a daydream-like state in order to access as an artist to his very own self. These images he created until the end of his life, impressed by the interaction between the "incorporation" of others in the interplay with the search for his own identity.

Also noteworthy are his sculptures captivate already started in the 1950s and to this day by their expressiveness and their ingenuity and their own design language and title determination. In his bronze figures such as the elephantine tantrum from 2001 he used an expressive free, unbound to the concrete form design, which received its informal expression which is increased by the titles-finding. They appear as trash-like sculptures, mostly composed of material remains , connected with glue, metal wires and tinfoil.Wikipedia