Richard Konvička

 

Richard Konvička was born on April 30, 1957, in Prague – Died, 6 August 2021. 1973 to 1977, he studied at the Secondary School of Fine Arts in Prague and later at the Academy of Fine Arts (AVU) in Prague under the guidance of Professor Jan Smetana (1977-1983).

In 1990, he received a grant from The Pollock-Krasner Foundation, Inc., New York, to study abroad for half a year. Since 1997 he has been a member of Umělecká beseda arts association."Richard Konvička's work was and is up-to-date and is not easy to understand. He has his informed interprets (e.g. Richard Drury, Ivan Neumann), who have written the most important about it. Probably, even I can join them. Every new attempt at his ”portrait“ cannot avoid once already written. The author paints and also destructs. This seemingly ironic expression gives a true picture of the art program his work, points out the essential expressionistic and content components of his paintings, where sensuality softens (disturbs?, corrects?) the mind. Konvička´s art is stormy, stimulates, provokes; but it is also kind and especially human to be always contemporary in all these levels.His art attacks human senses and provides also testimony about his own turbulent spirit, which is too open for the surrounding world. Richard Konvička belongs to a relatively small group of artists, who are not afraid to get down searching for the new ways of art expression. It is historically nothing new that many soon used all the optimism of their Prometheus energy and integrated into the ”middle“ classic stream in art. Others have fallen through the professional routine and became uncreative epigones of their idols. Only a few remained and focused their attention on the search in themselves, with their own eyes, opinions and life. From their family comes also Richard Konvička, direct by nature, lustily tempered, robust (by art, not by his fi gure) painter. "(richardkonvicka.cz)

 

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Alice Rahon - Surrealism

 

Alice Rahon ( 1904 –1987) was a French/Mexican poet and artist whose work contributed to the beginning of abstract expression in Mexico. She began as a surrealist poet in Europe but began painting in Mexico."Alice Rahon was an integral member of the Surrealist group that lived and worked in Mexico City in the late 1930s. Displaced by World War II, Rahon and her husband, painter Wolfgang Paalen, fled France in 1939, joining André Breton, Leonora Carrington, and Remedios Varo as well as local Mexican artists Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, and Manuel Álvarez Bravo. Rahon and her peers found community in exile, and their artwork was informed by the landscape, Indigenous history, and artistic legacies of Mexico. Rahon took a Surrealist approach to all of her work, marrying poetry and myth in an array of media. In Thunderbird (1946), she invokes the aesthetics of prehistoric cave painting, with gestural brushstrokes and contour lines that connect a web of symbolic figures on floating backgrounds. In 1946, a year after the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, she created a ballet inspired by the ancient Mayans’ expertise in astronomy. In the ballet, five characters – first imagined through gouache paintings, and then configured as three-dimensional marionettes made of wire – including The Juggler (a magician) and Androgyne (a non-binary gender being), ponder the beginning of life following the destruction of the planet. Rahon was able to channel the spiritual energy of ancestral cultures and did so through a plethora of artistic expressions."(Isabella Achenbach) 

 

 

Susan Hiller

 

 "With a multimedia practice extending over 40 years, Susan Hiller was one of the most influential artists of her generation. Since first making innovative use of audio and visual technology in the early 1980s, her groundbreaking installations, multi-screen videos and audio works have achieved international recognition. Each of Hiller’s works is based on specific cultural artefacts from our society, which are used as basic materials. Many pieces explore the liminality of certain phenomena including the practice of automatic writing (Sisters of Menon, 1972/79), near death experiences (Channels, 2013) and collective experiences of unconscious, subconscious and paranormal activity (Belshazzar’s Feast, 1983-4; Psi Girls, 1999; Witness, 2000). Hiller’s powerful and resonant films range from the J Street Project (2002-05), a chillingly extensive search for every street sign in Germany bearing the word Juden (Jew), to The Last Silent Movie (2007), which also documents disappearance and absence, although this time through speech recordings of dying or extinct languages. Her psychologically charged and thematically varied practice amounts to an impassioned plea for the joys and mysteries associated with irrationality.
Susan Hiller (1940-2019) was born in Tallahasse, Florida. After graduating from Smith College in 1961, she went on to do doctoral studies in anthropology at Tulane University in New Orleans with a National Science Foundation fellowship. However she abandoned anthropology to become an artist, and from the mid ‘60s was based mainly in London. Her career has been recognised by major solo and survey exhibitions at institutions including Bloomberg SPACE, London, UK. "(lissongallery.com)

 

Roberto Chabet - Philippine Conceptual Art

 

 Roberto Chabet (1937–2013) was a renowned Filipino conceptual artist, teacher, and curator, who played a key role in the development of Philippine contemporary art. Through his expanded art practice, he supported and nurtured the artistic development of several generations of Filipino artists, from his contemporaries in the 1960s and 1970s to his numerous students at the University of the Philippines College of Fine Arts.
He is highly regarded for his experimental works, ranging from sculptures and installations made from everyday and found materials, to paintings, drawings and collages. He was the founding Museum Director of the Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP) from 1967–70 and subsequently led the alternative artist group Shop 6. He taught for more than thirty years at the University of the Philippines while continuing to be involved with artist-run spaces in Manila. Chabet’s sculptures often drew on and extended conceptual ideas of relational and serial structures, using materials such as plywood for their association with the rebuilding of Manila after it was bombed at the end of World War Two, and implicating the body of the viewer into an experience of the work in space.