ART För Frihet

30/01/2023

Marlene Dumas
Marlene Dumas was born in 1953 in Cape Town, South Africa and grew up in Kuils River in the Western Cape, where her father had a vineyard. Dumas witnessed the system of Apartheid during her childhood. Dumas began painting in 1973 and showed her political concerns and reflections on her identity as a white woman of Afrikaans descent in South Africa.She studied art at the University of Cape Town from 1972 to 1975, and then at Ateliers '63 in Haarlem, which is now located in Amsterdam. She studied psychology at the University of Amsterdam in 1979 and 1980.She currently lives and works in the Netherlands and is one of the country's most prolific artists.
Dumas paintings are seen as portraits but they do not represent people but an emotional state that one could be in. Her art focuses on more serious issues and themes such as sexuality and race, guilt and innocence, violence and tenderness. Dumas style is more older Romanticism tradition. She uses loose brushstrokes to add distortion but also great detail to her art. Dumas likes to use a wet-on-wet technique, that combines thin layers of paint with thick ones. Her media of choice is oil on canvas and ink on paper. Her subjects range from new born babies, models, st*****rs, and many figures from popular culture.

25/10/2022

Laila Shawa (1940 – 24 October 2022) was a Palestinian visual artist whose work has been described as a personal reflection concerning the politics of her country, particularly highlighting perceived injustices and persecution. She was one of the most prominent and prolific artists of the Arabic revolutionary contemporary art scene. As a Palestinian living in the Gaza Strip for her formative years and the daughter of Rashad al-Shawa, activist and mayor of Gaza, Shawa's revolutionary mindset was inculcated at a young age. Often her artwork, which included paintings, sculptures, and installations, worked with photographs that served as the base for silkscreen printing. Her work has been internationally exhibited and is displayed in many public (e.g. The British Museum) and private collections.

14/02/2022

Doorway / tent - hanging by Salah El Din M. El Ozy
Cotton , canvas
Egypt , late 20th century
387 x 376 cm
British Museum , Af1998, 08.1
The inscription above the doorway reads : ' Say it to one who knows it all . You might have learned something , but many things have passed you by . '

11/12/2021

Artist and animator Jerry Williams (1943-2021)
Jerry was born in a small town outside Boston, USA,1943. In the year 1988 he met his wife Kjersti Remen and came to settle with her in Tanumshede in 1988.
Jerry Williams was an artist/animator. As an artist he worked with the box form creating figurative pieces with mixed media and electric lights. He view them as a sort of three dimensional painting. In animation he worked with stop-motion, cutouts, and After Effects. Sometimes with a story line and sometimes with abstract film montage using his art work.
Jerry studied painting at Rhode Island School of Design (1961 - 1965) and University of the Americas Painting (1966 - 1967). In Sweden he Studied animation at Konstfack (2000 - 2002).
Between the year 1997 to 2002 Jerry Williams worked for the Box Art Museum which is a special museum devoted to artists that work in the box form.
Jerry spent in Sweden 33 years of his life, and through his innate social talent and professionalism, he became a rallying point for many of his fellow artists in Västra Götaland at the West of Sweden, where he participated in a large number of solo and group exhibitions.

31/07/2021

How watermelon Become s Symbol of Palestinian Resistance?

A new tradition is emerging online, uniting Palestinians worldwide and drawing influence from the 20th-century motif.

03/04/2021

ANTONIO CARO (1950–2021)

"Antonio Caro, who was known as the father of Conceptualism in Colombia for his works placing iconic logos in the service of political and social commentary, died of heart failure in Bogotá on March 29 at the age of seventy-one. The news was announced by Bogotá’s Casas Riegner gallery, which represented him. Through a multivalent practice embracing painting, scultpture, xeroxing, public installations, lectures, posters, and materials, such as salt and achiote, relating to indigenous cultural practices, Caro critiqued commercialism in his home country, as well as political and corporate collusion.

Born in 1950 in Bogotá, where he would live all his life, Caro developed an interest in art in high school after seeing the exhibitions “Tribute by Colombian Artists to Dante” and “Espacios ambientales” (Environmental Spaces), both in 1966. After graduating, he enrolled in the fine arts program at the Universidad Nacional de Bogotá but dropped out and began making work under the mentorship of Bernardo Salcedo, whose work he had discovered at the Dante tribute. He began working with salt, notably creating Cabeza de Lleras (Head of Lleras), 1970, a bespectacled bust resembling former Colombian president Carlos Lleras Restrepo, out of the white crystals, exhibiting it inside a glass box within which it melted, sending salt water cascading onto the floor. That work and Sal (Salt), 1971, a text-based piece featuring the titular substance, were conceived as a salute to the workers in the salt mines of Zipaquirá.

Increasingly displeased with what he saw as rampant consumerism in his country imported from the US, he began his “Colombia-Marlboro” series in 1973, in which he variously replaced the cigarette maker’s logo with the word Colombia or with his own name. In 1976 he created what is perhaps his best-known series, “Coca-Cola/Colombia,” in which he presented the country's name in the familiar looping script of the popular soft drink, typically in the red-and-white scheme characteristic of the brand, but in at least one instance in the colors of the Colombian flag.

Described by artist Luis Camnitzer—who included Caro's work in the groundbreaking 1999 exhibition “Global Conceptualism” at the Queens Museum, New York—as a “visual guerrilla,” Caro worked steadily throughout the ensuing decades, his practice evolving around 1990 to incorporate public workshops, which became his primary focus later that decade and would remain so going forward. His work is widely held, including in the collections of the Queens Museum; Tate Modern, London; Blanton Museum of Art, Austin; and Museo de Arte Moderno, Bogotá.

“I have a secret weapon,” he told Bomb magazine in 2010. “The elements of my discourse are valid, real, and concrete in society, specifically in Colombian society. My work counts because the discourse that I use to disguise it as art is still valid without art. . . . The artistic value of my art,” he concluded “comes from outside of art.”"

28/11/2020

Fernando Botero Angulo (born 19 April 1932) is a Colombian figurative artist and sculptor, born in Medellín. His signature style, also known as "Boterismo", depicts people and figures in large, exaggerated volume, which can represent political criticism or humor, depending on the piece. He is considered the most recognized and quoted living artist from Latin America.
Fernando Botero's development can now be traced back over a period of dec- ades. His ocuvre encompasses a great variety of themes: self-portraits, portraits, nudes, loving couples, bishops, cardinals, saints, military men, still lifes, bo****lo scenes, bullfights, landscapes. Other subjects have been developed out of the still lifes of the Spaniards Luis Meléndez, Zurbarán, and Cotán or the Dutchman Heda. These are sup- plemented by continually fresh variations on works by such other earlier masters as van Eyck, Dürer, Rubens, Velázquez, Rigaud, Bonnard, and Cézanne. The enjoyment of storytelling apparent in many of his paintings can be compared to the narrative Baroque panels of his South American homeland. The paintings have been accompanied by drawings, large-format red chalk or char- coal drawings alternating with pastels, works in pen and ink, or watercolors. Finally, over the past decade or so Botero has translated a number of his motifs into the three- dimensional terms of sculpture. One thing becomes obvious from the evolution of Botero's ocuvre: his ment is not of the nervous type that reacts seismographically to every tremor of the art scene. The persistence and imperturbability with which, from the outset, he has fol- lowed his chosen path have probably contributed to the mistrust that so many critics tempera- have felt toward his ocuvre. His imagery is not casily related to avant-garde movements of the 1950s and 1960s; in fact, it seems virtually inoculated against their influence. Despite his very early success in Europe, Botero ran up against great obstacles to accep- tance on the American art scene, as the history of the reception of his work amply indi- cates. In none of the many descriptions of New York painting, in not one of the so com- pendious lexica devoted to artists of the United States and the New York School, does the name Botero occur. His achievement is passed over in silence-and this despite the fact that works of his entered the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Met- ropolitan Museum, and the Guggenheim Museum at a very carly date. Botero spent thirteen years of his life in New York. Perhaps the best description of his situation there is given by fellow artist Grace Hartigan: "I thought he had a unique vision, and that he was quite brave in preserving it and being solitary... This showed great strength. He was a remarkable young talent.. The abstract artists in New York hated his work, I defended him, just as I did Francis Bacon.

22/11/2020

Mahmoud Sabri was born in Baghdad in 1927, he studied social sciences at Loughborough University in the late forties. While in England, his interest in painting developed and he attended evening art classes. Following university, he worked in banking and at the early age of 32 he became the deputy head of the largest national bank in Iraq, the Al-Rafidain Bank. He resigned from the bank to take the responsibility for establishing the first Exhibitions Department in Iraq and to set up the first international exhibition in Baghdad in 1960. Following that, he decided to focus on painting, resigned from his job and went to study art academically at the Surikov Institute for Art in Moscow 1961-1963. After the Baathist coup d’état in Iraq (1963), he moved to Prague to join the Committee for the Defence of the Iraqi People. His paintings during that period reflected the suffering of the Iraqi people under that regime. From the late 60s he started working on Quantum Realism and continued to develop it until his death in April 2012 in the UK.

Mahmoud Sabri was a member of the Iraqi Avant-garde artists group. He was a founder member of the Society of Iraqi Artists. He had several publications on art, philosophy and politics (in Arabic and English). He lived most of his life in exile.