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Meet Patricia Piccinini. She's the mother of Skywhale and a much-loved artist. The artist shares why her work is driven by a fascination for the frontiers of science and its potential — and her fears of what we're doing to the world.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries on May 21, 2024 - 6 comments

An interview (~13min video, in English, alt link) with Portuguese artist Joana Vasconcelos recounts her 2012 exhibit as the first female artist to be invited to present her work at the annual contemporary art exhibition of the Palace of Versailles. Also discussed is her current installation Simone at Le Bon Marché in Paris and other works.
posted by XMLicious on Feb 18, 2019 - 1 comment

Russian artist makes eerily realistic dolls. [more inside]
posted by sively on Jan 21, 2016 - 21 comments

Count Pier Francesco Orsini (Google auto-translate) was a man much given to melancholy. The premature death of his wife, Giulia Farnese, and other troubles contributing to the decay of the once proud Orsini dynasty, darkened his outlook on life. Like the world-hating Jacques in Shakespeare's As You Like It, he seems to have come to regard the world around him with a somewhat self-advertising disgust. Orsini retreated noisily from the world of human affairs into nature, albeit a nature much improved by art (Google books preview). Those improvements came in the form of larger-than-life sculptures, some sculpted in the bedrock, which populated Sacro Bosco ("Sacred Grove"), colloquially called Parco dei Mostri ("Park of the Monsters"). [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief on Aug 27, 2015 - 7 comments

Antonio Gaudi [YouTube] a 1984 Japanese documentary film by Hiroshi Teshigahara about the works of Antoni Gaudi. In the film the director visits the buildings including houses in Barcelona and the Sagrada Família. [more inside]
posted by Fizz on Oct 22, 2014 - 10 comments

Greer Lankton, darling of the 1980s East Village art scene, made glamorous and grotesque dolls that reflected her struggles with anorexia and drug addiction as well as her fascination with sexuality and gender in all their mutable permutations. She died of an overdose only a month after completing her final masterpiece, a recreation of her Chicago apartment inside Pittsburgh's Mattress Factory. [more inside]
posted by Juliet Banana on Jan 23, 2014 - 2 comments

Beth Ann Magnuson hand-carves intricate, lace-like patterns on eggshells. Videos: Samples / Carving and Etching techniques. [more inside]
posted by zarq on Jan 4, 2013 - 6 comments

Cedric Laquieze is a sculptor specializing in unusual creatures like fairy flowers and goddesses made from organic materials.
posted by netbros on Oct 30, 2011 - 6 comments

Franz Xaver Messerschmidt Character Heads. [PDF] [more inside]
posted by IndigoJones on Oct 18, 2010 - 11 comments

I had never heard of Dustin Shuler before today. So, this is not an obit post, even if I learned about his death at the same time I discovered his art in this nytimes article. So I visited his website. Although his work has been dismissed as "derivative", there is only one word to describe an artist who has created "Destruction of the Nightmare Towers" in 1977 and "Death of an era" in 1980: visionary.
posted by bru on May 14, 2010 - 22 comments

Haven't we all, at one time or another, wanted to carve an enormous circle into an industrial building facade and have it rotate in three dimensions? Of course we have. But Richard Wilson did it. That's right, he actually did it. [more inside]
posted by flapjax at midnite on Oct 30, 2009 - 75 comments

Oak twig carved from dissolved recording of the heartbeat of an unborn child and the last heartbeats of a loved one, bone dust from every bone in the body, ring finger bones coated in bullet lead from various American wars, glass eyes for wounded soldiers coated with trinitite produced during the first atomic explosion, WWI cavalry boots made from a melted record of Skeeter Davis' "The End Of The World".

San Antonio-based artist (he prefers "marterialist poet") Dario Robleto crafts exquisite objects using a physical lexicon that includes bone dust, analog audio recordings, war objects and remnants of extinction. By recontextualizing these items he hopes to reverse "historical amnesia" and to reengage the past by "seeking out and sympathizing with another era's hopes and losses through its people's stories and materials." Highly influenced by music, he considers his work sampling. As he says: "you don't have to make up anything; the world is magical on its own."
posted by nathancaswell on Sep 25, 2009 - 32 comments

"Swept Off My Feet" is a current wonder by Sculptor Christina Bothwell, who works primarily in kiln cast glass, often with raku ceramic or mixed-media. Examples of her beautiful yet strange, compelling work can be found on her site, as well as on various galleries and the Web.
posted by Shane on Mar 1, 2004 - 5 comments