The Taschen Collection: Art of our time
By Marga Paz
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However, the austerity and apparent simplicity of Struth's vision from the series he began in the early 1990s - natural and urban landscapes, family portraits, interiors of churches and museums, flowers, paradises - show that his photographs do not attempt to be mere cold, impartial documents. Instead, they are descriptions of the world in which time, history and culture can be revealed. They become essential instruments for understanding the world, thanks to their intuitive ability to analyse reality and their refinement of vision.
Another key figure in understanding the development of this generation is Gerhard Richter, who was also Struth's professor at the Düsseldorf academy, and who is, without a doubt, one of the most influential painters today. His reconsideration of the aptitudes of the pictorial medium led him to experiment simultaneously with the possibilities of painting and his fascination with the photographic image, which was the result of the conceptual legacy.
These strategies have made Richter an indisputable benchmark in today's painting. Like him, Wool, too, undertakes different operations aimed at modernizing the pictorial codes: "The act of covering the surface in a undifferentiated way allowed the instrument to introduce its own, highly suggestive figuration. He thus could transfer to discrete paintings - dense with varied incidents, proportioned and scaled like traditional stretched canvases - the impersonality of procedure that conceptual art had sought in the mimicry of information systems and bureaucratic order ... Wool for the sake of recovering a credible platform for painting took up the actual use of painting inside such structures, where economic utility and a certain archaic, depressed aesthetic impulse had come to coincide. At the same time, his decision to paint on smooth aluminium panels removed the warmly familiar weave of the canvas as an automatic signifier of painting's fictional consolations."
Biography
Contemporary culture has been characterized by the pre-eminence of private life over public. The importance currently placed on concepts such as biography, subjectivity, intimacy, personality, human relations and trauma, has marked a true revolution in the concept of the human being and his or her relationship with the world since the advent of modernity in the 19th century.
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]
However, the austerity and apparent simplicity of Struth's vision from the series he began in the early 1990s - natural and urban landscapes, family portraits, interiors of churches and museums, flowers, paradises - show that his photographs do not attempt to be mere cold, impartial documents. Instead, they are descriptions of the world in which time, history and culture can be revealed. They become essential instruments for understanding the world, thanks to their intuitive ability to analyse reality and their refinement of vision.
Another key figure in understanding the development of this generation is Gerhard Richter, who was also Struth's professor at the Düsseldorf academy, and who is, without a doubt, one of the most influential painters today. His reconsideration of the aptitudes of the pictorial medium led him to experiment simultaneously with the possibilities of painting and his fascination with the photographic image, which was the result of the conceptual legacy.
These strategies have made Richter an indisputable benchmark in today's painting. Like him, Wool, too, undertakes different operations aimed at modernizing the pictorial codes: "The act of covering the surface in a undifferentiated way allowed the instrument to introduce its own, highly suggestive figuration. He thus could transfer to discrete paintings - dense with varied incidents, proportioned and scaled like traditional stretched canvases - the impersonality of procedure that conceptual art had sought in the mimicry of information systems and bureaucratic order ... Wool for the sake of recovering a credible platform for painting took up the actual use of painting inside such structures, where economic utility and a certain archaic, depressed aesthetic impulse had come to coincide. At the same time, his decision to paint on smooth aluminium panels removed the warmly familiar weave of the canvas as an automatic signifier of painting's fictional consolations."
Biography
Contemporary culture has been characterized by the pre-eminence of private life over public. The importance currently placed on concepts such as biography, subjectivity, intimacy, personality, human relations and trauma, has marked a true revolution in the concept of the human being and his or her relationship with the world since the advent of modernity in the 19th century.
Page [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12] [13]
Taschen Collection
Hardcover 11.7 x 16.5 in., 254 pages
$ 70.00
$ 70.00
The art of a particular moment in history from a new point of view
Taschen residence Cologne, with the paintings Hell, 1984, by Albert Oehlen and Martin Kippenberger Untitled, 1992. Furniture by Oscar Niemeyer, Gaetano Pesce, Salvador Dalí and Harry Bertoia. Foto: Tuca Reinés, 2002