The Taschen Collection: Art of our time
By Marga Paz
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Christopher Wool's interest in open confrontations related to mass culture coming from film, television or music was very much in step with artists including Jeff Koons, Robert Gober and Haim Steinbach, who like him were born in around 1955 and lived in New York's SoHo. " Wool's work shares pop affection for the vulgar and the vernacular, and in form it recalls pop's graphic economy of means, iconic images, and depersonalized mechanical registration."
This was clear in his painting, which was the result of the relationship of various discourses from a critical, impersonal perspective. The works come from the realm of mass production, literally, due to his use of industrial materials, procedures and techniques in the paintings (aluminium, silk-screening, varnish); and figuratively, in his use of an iconography of artificial flowers, vegetation and birds from wallpaper designs, presented in series and enlarged to occupy the entire surface area of the painting.
On the other hand, in taking a large part of their energy, vocabulary and materials from pop culture, Oehlen and Kippenberger present their paintings as permanently and unconditionally influenced by the world around them, thus moving painting away from the modern myth of its autonomy and even taking it to the opposite extreme.
Some of the new artists who emerged in the 1990s still share this interest in images and products from the consumer society and pop culture of their times. This is true of the London-based German photographer Wolfgang Tillmans, in whose works a heterogeneous mix of abstract photographs can be found alongside portraits of his friends, strangers, still lifes, landscapes and anything that can be photographed. His broad spectrum of motifs forms a constellation of images that, by contaminating each other, are capable of describing the complexity of "the surface of life", which in reality is his private perception of the world: heterogeneous, simultaneous and global.
The novelty that Tillmans provides is that he no longer establishes any barrier between these motifs according to whether they pertain to the realms of mass culture or art - just as he refuses to establish hierarchies between art and life. To him, all are equally usable, whether in the installations of his photographs in museums or art galleries, in the illustrations for music and fashion magazines, or in postcards, posters or commercial catalogues. By means of the multi-faceted nature of his vision, the use of different formats and techniques, the co-existence of "found" and "fabricated" images, and the platforms through which he distributes, he manages to empower the audience to manufacture ist own visual experience when viewing his works.
Page [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12] [13]
Page [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12] [13]
Christopher Wool's interest in open confrontations related to mass culture coming from film, television or music was very much in step with artists including Jeff Koons, Robert Gober and Haim Steinbach, who like him were born in around 1955 and lived in New York's SoHo. " Wool's work shares pop affection for the vulgar and the vernacular, and in form it recalls pop's graphic economy of means, iconic images, and depersonalized mechanical registration."
This was clear in his painting, which was the result of the relationship of various discourses from a critical, impersonal perspective. The works come from the realm of mass production, literally, due to his use of industrial materials, procedures and techniques in the paintings (aluminium, silk-screening, varnish); and figuratively, in his use of an iconography of artificial flowers, vegetation and birds from wallpaper designs, presented in series and enlarged to occupy the entire surface area of the painting.
On the other hand, in taking a large part of their energy, vocabulary and materials from pop culture, Oehlen and Kippenberger present their paintings as permanently and unconditionally influenced by the world around them, thus moving painting away from the modern myth of its autonomy and even taking it to the opposite extreme.
Some of the new artists who emerged in the 1990s still share this interest in images and products from the consumer society and pop culture of their times. This is true of the London-based German photographer Wolfgang Tillmans, in whose works a heterogeneous mix of abstract photographs can be found alongside portraits of his friends, strangers, still lifes, landscapes and anything that can be photographed. His broad spectrum of motifs forms a constellation of images that, by contaminating each other, are capable of describing the complexity of "the surface of life", which in reality is his private perception of the world: heterogeneous, simultaneous and global.
The novelty that Tillmans provides is that he no longer establishes any barrier between these motifs according to whether they pertain to the realms of mass culture or art - just as he refuses to establish hierarchies between art and life. To him, all are equally usable, whether in the installations of his photographs in museums or art galleries, in the illustrations for music and fashion magazines, or in postcards, posters or commercial catalogues. By means of the multi-faceted nature of his vision, the use of different formats and techniques, the co-existence of "found" and "fabricated" images, and the platforms through which he distributes, he manages to empower the audience to manufacture ist own visual experience when viewing his works.
Page [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12] [13]
Taschen Collection
Hardcover, 29.7 x 42 cm (11.7 x 16.5 in.), 254 pages
$ 70.00
$ 70.00
The Benedikt Taschen Collection on show at Reina Sofía
TASCHEN publishing house, casino, with paintings by Martin Kippenberger Vorsicht Durchbruch (centre), 1984, and The capitalistic futuristic painter in his car, 1985, and a floor mosaic by Albert Oehlen. Foto: Taschen, Eric Laignel, 2001
Wolfgang Tillmans installing the Concorde series at the TASCHEN publishing house. Foto: Taschen, 1999