Grimanesa Amorós

Exploring Light and Essence: The Luminescence of Grimanesa Amorós

Grimanesa Amorós, a luminary within the artistic realm, has enraptured audiences with her profound and contemplative light installations. Drawing upon her formidable background in painting and her unyielding passion for materials, she has transcended the boundaries of her medium, fashioning immersive experiences that provoke introspection and challenge the perceptual confines of our world. This evocative exposition embarks on a profound odyssey into the labyrinthine recesses of the artist’s inspiration, techniques, career highlights, and forthcoming projects, illuminating the extraordinary artistic ethos that defines her.

Grimanesa Amorós, portrait by Chiara Cussatti.

Born in Lima, Peru, in 1962 and living in New York City since 1984, Amorós is known for her large-scale light sculpture installations. She began her artistic career as a painter and studied at the Miguel Gayo Art Atelier in Lima and the Art Students League of New York. In the early 2000s, she began to incorporate light into her work. She was greatly inspired by the northern lights she saw during a trip to Iceland. Fully understanding the potential of light to create immersive and transformative experiences, the artist set on a newfound path.

She has exhibited her work in major cities worldwide, including New York, London, Paris, and Beijing. Amorós’ work has been praised for its beauty, thoughtfulness, and ability to create a sense of wonder. She has been awarded numerous prizes, including the National Endowment for the Arts Visual Artist Fellowship and the Art in Embassies Program of the U.S. Amorós’s work has been exhibited in galleries and museums around the world, and her work is a testament to the power of art to transform our lives. Her light sculptures are more than just beautiful objects; they are also invitations to introspection and reflection. They challenge us to see the world … Click here to read more

Roland Gebhardt

Roland Gebhardt: The Incisionary Construction of Space and the Void as Imaginary

When someone trains to become an artist, s/he or they are given a set of biases. S/he or they are told that light carries information and must come forward in space, while darkness lacks such information and must recede back into space. The person is also made to believe that the positive space positions the subject and the foreground, while the negative space carries the background. At a certain point, however, a reversal of relationships occurs in what s/he or they observe and conceive. It is a reversal of highlight to shadow, foreground to background, and positive to negative space, which breaks the rigid associations and hierarchies in how one perceives and understands the visual world around oneself. Roland Gebhardt (Born 1939, Suriname) has dedicated a lifetime honing a practice wrought from this paradigm shift, and the presence of the void is the basis of Gebhardt’s solo exhibition at David Richard Gallery, titled “Framing Perceptual Illusions: A series of wall sculptures examines presence, absence, and voids.” The viewer is presented with white, minimalistic geometric constructions that play with the concept of information in terms of presence versus absence and the real versus the imaginary.

*Untitled LV0110*, painted poplar wood, 42 x 42 x 12 in | 107 x 107 x 30 cm, 2021. Photograph by Yao Zu Lu.

Gebhardt pioneered minimal sculptural works in the early 1960s when he initially played with the concept of in-between spaces that result from the interaction of shapes. Subsequently, the artist began to make precise surgical incisions in the form of a long line or edge of a plane into objects to create “linear voids” that he equates to drawings. Gebhardt continued this trajectory by … Click here to read more

In the Flow of the Spirit

“In the Flow of the Spirit”: Iutian Tsai’s sculptures balance people’s inner souls and outer lives, bringing them back to their original intention of being human. Tsai is a sculptor who uses his art to help people find their inner balance. His oversized sculptures can be seen in many significant buildings in Taiwan. Tsai’s creations are inspired by water, which represents natural healing, harmony, and calm in Eastern philosophy. Water possesses a quiet power endowed by nature, awakening the world to return to its original pure heart.

“Flow with Spirit of Water”, mirror-finished stainless steel, 20 x 26 x 16 ft | 6 x 8 x 5 m, 2019

In the Western world, people also seek the tranquility of water. They go to lakefront cottages for vacations, suspend all distracting thoughts, and focus on the peace that water brings. Some people have ponds in their backyards; others buy Japanese-style interior decorations with flowing water. One of the most famous buildings in the United States, Fallingwater, is a Frank Lloyd Wright design that brings the waterfall of nature into the Kaufmann family home’s living room. Water energy is believed to make people most peaceful, aiding in recovering from a complicated and busy life to a state of harmonious enjoyment. There is also a power to water in Eastern philosophy, such as the power of flexibility and the magic of gentleness. When there is no way across, water finds a way around. Hence, we often see Japanese-style gardens with the tranquil sound of water flow.

Iutian Tsai is an artist hailing from Taiwan. After graduating from the Fine Arts Department at Tunghai University, he dedicated himself to public construction management. In Taiwan, the government encouraged integrating public art into building construction and development. This led him … Click here to read more

Lily Kostrzewa

Luis Cortez

Reality is a Constant Becoming

Luis Cortés, a sculptor from Zaragoza who lives in Barcelona, has spent years investigating movement through his articulated sculptures, a series made up mostly of small minimalist sculptures with pure shapes, representing different animals, such as the horse, the elephant, or the whale. However, he has also studied the human figure and the hand. In Luis Cortés’ sculptures, you can observe a part of scientific research, and the artist investigates movement carefully. Each of his sculptures is made with a different number of wooden pieces, all of them with geometric shapes. These pieces are linked together through pivot points, thus allowing movement.

In Barcelona, Spain, the presence of exceptional creativity and imagination is around every corner, where artists like Gaudi, Picasso, Miro, and Dali once resided. I was lucky enough to visit Luis Cortes’ art studio, where I wandered around like a child in a Toyland. I was fascinated by his geometrical jigsaw puzzles that turn into motion sculptures.

Animals, plants and ultimately all living beings are important examples of morphological changes, their displacement, and relationships with other beings, based on their intentions, instinct, and intelligence.

– Luis Cortez

Luis Cortes went to school at Facultat de Belles Arts, Universitat de Barcelona (The Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Barcelona) and was initially trained as a filmmaker. Throughout his career, he has made a living as a special effects maker for motion pictures and commercials. Eventually, the evolution of sculptures made with kinetic chains captured his mind. He devoted his focus to it as he became a full-time artist. Over the last ten years, he has applied polygons’ continuous lines and rigid elements to create various figures through endless detailed calculations of multiple pivot … Click here to read more

Peju Alatise

Nigerian-born artist and architect Peju Alatise on her back-to-back Venice Biennales, Yoruba influences, and giving back to Africa

We recently sat down with Nigerian-born artist and architect Peju Alatise at her new Glasgow studio to find out more about her back-to-back Venice Biennales, how she juxtaposes being a contemporary architect and fine artist, and how Yoruba culture has helped her work stand out in today’s global art world.

“You need a little bit of luck, as we know arduous work isn’t everything. Do what you do because you love it, and because you can’t live without it.”

– Peju Alatise

“Alagemo” sculpture, part of “Alasiri” installation at the Arsenale of the Venice Biennale of Architecture 2021. Photo credit: Adeyemo Shokunbi

Alatise is an interdisciplinary artist, architect, and author of two novels. She started her professional career as an architect while running a private art studio. These days, she is a leading voice in contemporary art on the African continent. Her practice is relentlessly experimental and labor-intensive. She produces works across a variety of mediums, techniques, and materials, including but not limited to paintings, film, installations, sculptures. Her work is also pointedly political, often asking damning questions, and provoking reflections about the times, the state of affairs at home and abroad. The artist’s work has, in the past, explored exploitative labor practices in Nigeria, child rights with a focus on young girls, state-sanctioned violence against citizens, migration and the policies that ensure that many die at sea, seeking a better life. Alatise now produces through the lens of spirituality and Yoruba cosmology, leaning into ancient storytelling traditions and crafting alternative social imageries.

When asked about some of her favorite artists, Alatise hesitated for a moment, and eventually offered the answer that it changes from season to season. Right now, she is looking at Mexican sculptor Javier Marín and continues to be impressed Chiharu Shiota whose work she first discovered at the Venice Biennale in 2015. Marin’s … Click here to read more

Willie Cole

The Future of Art: Willie Cole, a contemporary artist creating unique work and positive change.

Willie Cole has been making innovative work with unique iconography for over half a century, but talking to him, he sounds like a friendly, smart colleague or neighbor next store. Perhaps that’s why his work is so accessible and inspirational.

The artist, who lives in Mine Hill, NJ, has been the subject of shows at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1998), Bronx Museum of the Arts (2001), and Miami Art Museum (2001). These institutions, some of the biggest in the world, along with private collectors from New York to Los Angeles, see something provocative in his work.

When Art Review City caught up with him, the artist invited us to a visit his home studio where he was finishing the works for the collective exhibition “There’s There There,” curated by renowned American artist Rashid Johnson at blue-chip gallery Hauser and Wirth’s Southampton location. This show invites visitors to reflect upon the pleasures and complex histories of the shapes, movements, and objects that permeate the everyday, and Cole’s ironing board works are clearly the stars of the show.

Installation view, ‘There’s There There’, Hauser & Wirth Southampton, 2021. © Hauser & Wirth. Courtesy Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Thomas Barratt.

The artist has spent a lifetime working to look at thing differently than most artists. He is most concerned with recycling, green energy, and living a healthy and spiritual life to live at one with Mother Earth. He spent many of his early days in a pew at Sunday School, and later studied Buddhism in high school and college, but today he says he is a “no-frills nature worshipper” which explains a lot about him as a man and as an artist. “Nature, no matter what you call it, is powerful, and it deserves to be admired … Click here to read more

David Kastner

Bonnie Richards Becker sat down with artist David Kastner and spoke with him about growing up in the Midwest, his constant experimentations of materials of the course of his life’s work, and his current phase that has a renewed focus on color and the process of painting.

“Finding that moment when the human mind is free, but before conscious activity develops consecutive thought, was a difficult mental space to understand, exist in, and use for the creative moment of expression..”

– David Kastner

My first real recollection of art came from the Art Institute in Chicago. My mother took me to the Museum when I was about five years old. Seeing the various paintings, sculptures, and other media left a deep impression that persists in my life today. Before that, I only knew of my own love for making and building things. But there I first felt the effects of the many great artists who left their ideas for others to see. Without really knowing what the creative process meant, I knew I wanted to create.

While it is possible to reflect on early childhood development, attempting to identify when and how the creative process came into being in one person’s life, it is likely there is a more general creative essence in that person’s life, rather than a singular epiphany. For me, I knew early on that I liked making things. This meant piling sticks, digging, and making marks in mud, etc. These early renderings were a precursor for more complex mark making that became the pursuit of my life’s work to date.

In elementary school we had art class with pencils, paints, and clay – and all the other materials a small child needs to build their first artistic masterpieces. Inspired by … Click here to read more