Chinese Painting

Wu Guanzhong (吴冠中)

Wu Guanzhong (August 29, 1919 – June 25, 2010) is a contemporary Chinese painter widely recognized as the father of modern Chinese painting. Wu had painted various aspects of China, including much of its architecture, plants, animals, people, as well as many of its landscapes and waterscapes in a style reminiscent of the impressionist painters of the early 1900s. He was also a writer on contemporary Chinese art.

Current Exhibition
Seeing the Kite Again

又见风筝：吴冠中捐赠作品展
Runs through 12 November 2012
Singapore Art Museum

'This exhibition, entitled Seeing the Kite Again, is inspired by the late master Wu Guanzhong’s metaphor of a kite and how it expresses the connection between an artist, his life and the people around him. By bridging Chinese and Western aesthetics, Wu blazed the trail for the modernisation of Chinese art. In 2008, the internationally acclaimed artist donated his largest gift of 113 important works to the National Heritage Board. Selected paintings from the donation has been presented since 2009 by the National Art Gallery, Singapore. The current exhibition showcases some of Wu’s most outstanding works produced from 1960s to 2000s in the oil and ink medium.'

Wood Sculptures

The Duramen Series by Bonsoir Paris

The Duramen Series, designed by French duo Remy Clemente and Morgan Maccari of Bonsoir Paris, consists of  wooden sculptures that allow the mind to visualize an objects form that has been twisted from its original skeleton. Each piece, in the shape of a picture frame, was transformed to a point where they couldn’t properly function and almost unrecognizable. The choice of noble materials (Oak, Fir, Wenge, Pear, Linden) and the quest for finesse, enables them – with the DURAMEN series – to position themselves on the razor’s edge between two opposites, that of the deformed and that of the elegant, instinctive and thoughtful.

Illustration

Katie Scott

She illustrates plants, creatures with scientific and anatomical precision. Some of her projects explored biological hybridisation with fantastical anatomy and Haeckel-esque curiosity.

http://katie-scott.tumblr.com/

Fashion/Personality

Iris Apfel

She (born August 29, 1921) is an American interior designer and fashion icon who has studied art history at New York University and attended art school at the University of Wisconsin. In 1948, she married Carl Apfel. Two years later they launched the textile firm Old World Weavers and ran it until they retired in 1992. During this time, Iris Apfel took part in several design restoration projects, including work at the White House for nine presidents: Truman, Eisenhower, Nixon, Kennedy, Johnson, Carter, Reagan, and Clinton.

In 2005, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City premiered an exhibition about Apfel titled Rara Avis (Rare Bird): The Irreverent Iris Apfel. The exhibit's success prompted a traveling version of the exhibit, which included stops at the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach, Florida, the Nassau County Museum in Nassau County, New York, and the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts.

Here is a quotation from our fashion Icon regarding accessories : “For me the key to personal style lies in accessories. My friends tell me that my oversized glasses and my pairs of bracelets have become my unwritten signature. I have amassed an enormous ‘collection’ of bags, belts, bangles and beads without which I would be lost. One can change the entire look of an outfit by substituting one accessory for another. I love objects from different worlds, different eras, combined my way. Never uptight, achieving – hopefully – a kind of throwaway chic.” Iris Apfel.

Apfel still consults and lectures about style and other fashion topics.

Fine Art (Painting)

Dexter Dalwood

He is an artist based in London and has shown work internationally in many important exhibitions including the 2002 Sydney Biennial, “Hollywood is a Verb” at Gagosian Gallery in New York, the 19th John Moore’s Painting Prize at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool, “Die Young Stay Pretty” at the ICA London.
He makes paintings of famous places he’s never seen. Offering plausible suggestions of those iconic haunts lingering invisibly in collective consciousness, Dalwood pictures his own documentation of history.

McCarthy’s living room, Kurt Cobain’s greenhouse, or Jackie O’s yacht are depicted with uncanny believability; not as real occupied places, but our media-constructed fantasies of them. Devoid of any bric-a-brac signs of human life, Dexter Dalwood pictures these lairs of rumour with Hello! magazine cleanliness; show homes of glamour, dark theme-park panoramas of gossip tourism.

Through painting, he masters the strategies of propaganda dissemination and the superfluous nature of information currency in a mass media age. Working in the traditional genre of historical painting, Dexter Dalwood presents the makings of our sociological zeitgeist as an elevated hierarchy of lasting cultural significance.

Mixed Media Relief Art

Gregory Euclide

He is an American contemporary artist and teacher who currently lives and works outside of Minneapolis, Minnesota. His work are mixed media landscape paintings that explore ideas surrounding nature and the human experience, while void of the human figure. His sculptural paintings juxtapose natural occurring, organic matter with artificial, man-made materials. The artist collects found objects, interesting plant material and incorporates such materials into multi-dimensional objects made from crumpled paper, on which might be elaborate and detailed drawings or paintings.

http://www.gregoryeuclide.com/

Photography

Dina Goldstein

 Dina Goldstein, Canadian photographer, tells everyday life with a bit of black humor after the sentence “happily ever after” in her “Fallen Princesses” set.
“Fallen Princesses” project was thought up while Dina Goldstein was observing how little girls assimilate Disney fairy tales where there’s always a happy ending to story of a lower class girl saved by a prince.

http://www.fallenprincesses.com/