ILLEGAL GALLERY PRESENTS: “Automatic Writing” by William Kentridge
“William Kentridge was born in Johannesburg, South Africa, in 1955. He attended the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg (1973–76), Johannesburg Art Foundation (1976–78), and studied mime and theater at L’École Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq, Paris (1981–82). Having witnessed first-hand one of the twentieth century’s most contentious struggles—the dissolution of apartheid—Kentridge brings the ambiguity and subtlety of personal experience to public subjects that are most often framed in narrowly defined terms. Using film, drawing, sculpture, animation, and performance, he transmutes sobering political events into powerful poetic allegories. In a now-signature technique, Kentridge photographs his charcoal drawings and paper collages over time, recording scenes as they evolve. Working without a script or storyboard, he plots out each animated film, preserving every addition and erasure. Aware of myriad ways in which we construct the world by looking, Kentridge uses stereoscopic viewers and creates optical illusions with anamorphic projection, to extend his drawings-in-time into three dimensions. ”
Illegal Gallery presents: Alexa Meade: Your body is my canvas
Alexa Meade takes an innovative approach to art. Not for her a life of sketching and stretching canvases. Instead, she selects a topic and then paints it–literally. She covers everything in a scene–people, chairs, food, you name it–in a mask of paint that mimics what’s below it. In this eye-opening talk Meade shows off photographs of some of the more outlandish results, and shares a new project involving people, paint and milk.
ILLEGAL GALLERY PRESENTS: Brice Marden’s Theory of Painting
“Painter Brice Marden (American, b.1938) is often associated with Minimalism and is best known for his subtle explorations of color, texture, and form in his work. Marden was born in Bronxville, NY, and attended Boston University’s School of Fine and Applied Arts before receiving an MFA at the Yale School of Art and Architecture in 1963. While still a student, Marden developed his formal style of abstract painting, and gave up his early preoccupation with figural techniques. Though his early works reference an objective creator and the purity of minimalism, Marden has described these works as highly emotional and subjective. His paintings are either monochrome or composed of different color fields that are painted in a rich but atmospheric manner. Marden moved to New York in 1963, and then traveled to Greece and Asia in the beginning of the 1970s; his impressions of the southern European landscape, as well as of antique mythology and Greek architecture, have left a great impact on his work. In the 1970s, Marden’s colors and shapes became lighter and more fluid than those of his earlier works, and the size of his paintings more monumental. Marden also profoundly changed his formal technique after an additional stay in Asia; in the works Marden created after this trip, his curved lines overlap such as Beyond Eagles Mere, creating visual parallels with East Asian writing and with the gestural brushstrokes of Abstract Expressionism. Marden has exhibited his work internationally, including exhibitions at Documenta 5 in 1972 in Kassel, as well as retrospectives at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Hamburger Bahnhof Museum for Contemporary Art in Berlin. Marden, now regarded as one of the most important Contemporary Abstract painters, lives in New York. ”
