#2Dcontextualresearch

Ellen Gallagher

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‘Bird in hand 2006’

Born December 16th 1965 in Providence Rhode Island.She is referred to as African American.She is of biracial ethinicity:her fathers ethinicity is from Cape Verde in western Africa (but he was born in the United States) and her mothers background was Caucasian Irish Catholic. Gallagher is an American abstract Artist who became reckonised in 1995.Her work has been shown in many solo and group exhibitions and her work is part of the permanent collections of many major museums.

The media she uses is paint,work on paper,film and video.Some of her pieces refer to issues of race,and many combine formality with racial stereotypes and depict ‘ordering principles’ society imposes.

In those themes relating to race she sometimes uses pictographs,symbols,codes and repitisions. ‘Sambo lips’ and ‘bug eyes’ refer to Black Minstrel shows and are often seen through out her work.

Her infuences include the paintings of Agnes Martin and the repetitive writings of Gertude Stein.Some of Gallagers works involve repitively modernising advertising found in African American focused publications such as Ebony,sepia and our world’.Her most famous pieces are of magazines grouped together in larger pieces.Each of these works contain more then 60 prints employing techniques of photogravure,spit bite,collage,cutting,scratching,silkscreen,offset lithography and hand building.She is also known to glue notebook paper drawings to her canvases in order to create texture.

‘Deluxe’ 2004-2005

Some of her early influences  while attending the school of the museum of fine Arts in Boston were the Darkroom collective,a group of poets living and working out of Innman square Cambridge.

Pia Fries

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Capsian 2001-2002

Pia Fries was born 6th October 1955 and is a swiss abstract painter.She was born in Beromunster Switzerland and studied sculpture in Lucerne in 1980, and painted under Gerhard Richter at the Kunstaka Dusseldorf in 1986.She lives and works in Dusseldorf in Munich.

Fries uses a wide variation of colours and textures onto wood panel primed with 6 or 7 layers.Her paintings are described as sophisticated yet energetic.The surface must be ridged for the process she uses.Her paintings also merge between painting/and or sculpture due to the techniques she uses.

Dana Friis-Hansen summarizes Pia Fries’ work in a comprehensive review: “Pia Fries is one of an emerging generation of painters whose work results from a conceptual and aesthetic wrestling match modernist painting, the dominant artistic expression of the twentieth century.’

For a few years Fries has taken on an interest in the work of Dutch draughtsman a,painter and engraver Hendrick Goltzius (1558-1617) one of the leading engravers of the early Notrherm Mannerisms period.She has decided to focus on two of his series ‘The Four Disgracers’ which delves into Greek mythology and the falls of Icarus,Tantalus.Ixion and Phaeton and ‘The Standard Bearers’.Both of these series are known for their technical elements and incredible compostions of which parts of this are reflected in Fries own work.

Beringer 2002

Adrian Heath

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(Untitled 1961)
Study for Melbourne painting (Corsham)

Adrian heath was born 1920-1992 and was a British painter. He painted abstract and semi abstract pictures in oils and acrylics. He was also a collagist and constructivist

He was born in Burma and attended Bryanston school in Dorset, southern England.1938 he studied art under Stanhope Thorpes at Newlyn. In 1939 and 1945-47 he attended the Slade school of art. Heath served in the RAF as a tail gunner in Lancaster Bombers in WWII but spent almost the entire war as a prisoner of war.

The war was a big influence on heaths work and and his idealisims were felt and shared by an entire generation of post war abstract artists working in England. Ben  Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth were also huge influences.

Heath published an essay on Abstract Art: its origin and meaning in 1953. He was chairman of the politically idealist AIA (Artists International Association) from 1954 to 1964 and served on the Arts Council’s advisory art panel from 1964 to 1967.

He helped to organise the first post-war show of abstract art at the AIA gallery in 1951 The idea of the collective of art work was to give way to a better world.His work strayed away from descriptive detail and focused more on light, colour, texture and balanced structure.

In the early 1950’s he was associated with Victor Pasmore and Antony Hill. Due to this he became the main link between the emerging St Ives school and British constructivism. He was also influenced by D’Arcy Thompson.

Luc Tuymans

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Tuymans was born in Antwerp, Belgium in 1958 and died Sep 26th 2004.

He began studying fine art in 1976. He concentrated on painting but in the early 1980s he lost faith in the medium and gave up for two years. During this time he worked as a film-maker, and when he returned to painting in the mid-1980s, he introduced new techniques such as cropping, close-ups, framing and sequencing, which remain as important elements of his work today.

The subject of his works vary from major historical events, such as the Holocaust or the politics of the Belgian Congo, to wallpaper patterns, Christmas decorations, everyday objects There are also paintings based on abstract emotional states, titled ‘Embitterment’ or ‘Insomnia’, which hint towards philosophical responses to the human condition.

Tucmans paintings are so varied that they deliberately avoid being able to be catorgorised. Events and ideas are not overly expressed but done so in a very subtle manner through hints and allusion creating a double meaning behind his work using a collage of disconnected fragments and details.

Tuyman showed this approach when exhibiting at the Tate Modern. He choose to hang individual paintings from different works connecting different images from different stages in his career.

This was due to Tuymans belief that representation is subjective and meaning must be pieced together like memories through isolated fragments.

Issei Sagawa, 2014 Fragments of cold colours and tone piece together a ghostly image of a males face.
‘Easter’ 2006
‘Panel’ 2010
‘Speech’ 2010