Artist Four: Boo Ritson

Boo Ritson was born in 1969 in Surrey, England. She paints on the human body. She uses the person as a canvas applying vivid colors of thick household emulsion. Her theme is creating American stereotypes; the flight attendant, the waitress, the cowboy and cowgirl, the beauty pageant, the trucker, the cop. She has 20 minutes to create her pieces, before the paint dries, her work is short-lived and lives on as a photographic document, shot by Andy Crawford. Boo’s work blurs the lines of sculpture, performance art, and photography.

Her work leaves me speechless. I find it to be eerie and brilliant. She leaves me scratching my head, questioning exactly what her art form is; photographer, sculpture, painter? I think it is purely genius that she uses people as her canvas and leaves the viewer with so many questions.

Sites used: http://www.poppysebire.com/artists/Boo_Ritson.htm#

                  http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/artists/boo_ritson.htm

"Nina." 2006, Digital Archival Print. 

"At the Diner." 2009, Archival Digital Print. 

"The Sunbather." 2008 Archival Digital Print. 

"Kite." 2012 Digital C-Type Print. 

"Ocean." 2012 Digital C-Type Print. 

  

Artist Two: Urs Fischer

Untitled, 2011. Wax, pigments, wicks, steel.

http://www.ursfischer.com/

Noisette, 2009. Hole in wall, silicon, motion detector, mechanism.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZb5hqGHCu0&feature=BFa&list=PL54E9E6B526BDB0F1 and http://www.ursfischer.com

Untitled (Soft Bed), 2011. Cast aluminum, epoxy primer, polyester filler, one-component acrylic putty, urethane primer, polyester paint, acrylic polyurethane matte clearcoat.

http://www.ursfischer.com/media/138175.preview.jpeg

You, 2007. Excavation, gallery space

Urs Fischer is a Swedish artist working in New York. He was born in 1973 in Sweden and studied photography at the Schule fur Gestaltung in Zurich. He began showing his work in the 90's. Fischer is a prolific maker, and creates and displays massive amounts of work ranging from freestanding sculpture to installation and everything in between, in almost every medium under the sun. He's been associated with anti-art movements like neo-dadaism or the Lost Art and the Situationist International. His waxworks have gained a lot of attention, one selling at Sotheby's auction house for a million dollars. 

I chose Urs Fischer to write about because his diversity of mediums and the way he goes about creating. His work isn't about an aesthetic so much as it is about subversive messages and upending what we think we know about sculpture and art. I believe this makes his work all the more poignant.

Architecture and simple parts: project made with collaborative teaching trade: Jerry Allan

Critique parameters we give ourselves

On Wood containment

Artist One: Jözef Sumichrast

HAIR 2007© - urethane 18" X 24" X 10"

DIVER 1995© - plaster 32" x 11" x 11"

Jözef Sumichrast creates work that exists both representationally and abstractly, which is a representation of the mystery he likes to incorporate into his works. His work encourages movement and exploration of space, light, and viewer participation. He works with sheet metal and cardboard.

I found this artist interesting because of the not-quite-normal stylistic approaches and simply because some of his art just looks cool. His art is also painfully personal: following a traumatic event in his life, he started incorporating the color red into his works, representative of his legs being surgically reattached.

HORIZONTAL AND VERTICAL 2010© -bronze 28” x 16” x 18”

(I like this piece significantly less than the others, only because their thin heads make me uneasy)

When asked about whether he was an abstract artist, he said: "Arshile Gorky hanged himself. Jackson Pollock got drunk and drove into a tree. Terry Kitchen shot himself in the mouth and Mark Rothko slashed himself to death with a kitchen knife. Hummm, no, no, I'm not an abstract expressionist."

S MERMAID 1992© - bronze 54" x 30" x 13"

cupric patina