[ pronounced chee·dem ah·sah·tek·in. writer and painter in Brooklyn. telling stories about art and its makers. ]
She had fair and healthy skin, slightly red on the cheeks, and flawlessly taut around the eyes. Her aquiline nose was the most prominent feature of her face, protruding over shapely lips. Brown eyes, light like unripened almonds, were half-covered by sleepy eyelids, and framed subtly by modest brows.
In the group exhibition A Bridge Between You and Everything many artworks are slightly concealed. Sometimes the veil is a thin coat of blue paint, or a glaze of dirty water blurring the black ink, or fully opaque, jet-black brush strokes over pictures of famous landmarks.
A cardboard dollhouse cracks open in the middle, revealing a nude, pregnant woman also of cardboard. Her legs are spread and vulva dilated and, surrounded by flowers, bushes, and other flora, she clutches her rounded belly.
To artist Vija Celmins, everything in the world is of equal importance: a heater, a fan, an old letter addressed to Miss Vija Celmins, a burning plane from WWII, Saturn, the sea, the stars. Celmins fixes her objects of inspiration in time, as perfectly as can be.
In Feng Shui, a wind chime is a symbol of good fortune and peaceful spirits. One hangs inside the Paula Cooper Gallery in Chelsea.
On a foggy, grim October evening in 1913, the famous Barnum’s Circus was transporting its animals and equipment through the cobblestone streets of Leipzig, Germany, when a streetcar collided with one of its carriages. Inside this particular carriage were eight Barbary lions from North Africa, all of whom escaped and disappeared into the mist. For four long hours, wild beasts haunted the city’s dark alleyways, before the lions were hunted down and killed by local police. [...]
This is a story about monsters. I met one on a hot summer day on the subway to Coney Island. While listening to an audiobook, 'The Ocean at the End of the Lane' (HarperCollins, 2013), read by its author Neil Gaiman, he gave a name to someone I already knew well: "The thing that called itself Ursula Monkton hung in the air, about twenty feet above me, and lightnings crawled and flickered in the air behind her." [...]
One of the most prominent figures in Turkish contemporary art, Taner Ceylan is renowned internationally for his hyperrealist paintings. What he strives for, though, is something beyond simple reproduction of reality—he’s after the sentiment. [...]
Our physical presence as human beings and the decisions and designs made by robotics give the work a certain anthropomorphic quality, and our perception of machines can be obscured with their seemingly organic behavior. [...]
Colors come from everywhere, and out of every material, including walls and found objects surrounding us: azure blues and bright reds and a very distinct yellow: a deep, saturated saffron with a tint of orange. [...]
