A great trio from the past - surreal female artists: Remedios Varo, Kati Horn and Leonora Carrington.

Before June 15, 2011 I had never heard about Remedios Varo, Leonora Carrington or Kati Horna. It just so happened that I had been reading about Leonora Carrington in Time magazine (June 13, 2011) in the Milestones section. She had passed away at the age of 94. Not that I knew Leonora Carrington very well. But because she was a partner to Max Ernst and I am a big fan of his art it made me curious about hers. I decided to begin a search for this female surrealist painter, sculptor and writer; very much unknown to me. First I went through all my books about surrealism, about modern art history. I found nothing. I searched in the books that I posses about Max Ernst, nothing either. The next step was getting online of course.  I wanted to discover more about her and her art work. Most of the posts I could find online mentioned her death. Independent, Guardian, Telegraph all the papers were telling the story about Britain's lost and unknown great surrealist painter. “English surrealist painter and sculptor regarded as a national treasure in Mexico” (from The Guardian). Within her own family, Leonora Carrington was rarely mentioned, the rebel who had run off to be an artist’s model. But when Joanna Moorhead tracked down her long-lost cousin in Mexico, her eyes were opened to the extraordinary story of the last surviving member of the great Surrealists (from the Daily Telegraph). And so on and so on.

I went to Amazon and did a search for surreal female artists. I ordered three books which were available about female surreal artists. One is an album including paintings of most surreal female artists. The other two are wonderfully written and illustrated books. One is a biography about Remedios Varo (maybe more about her artistic achievement) written by Janet A. Kaplan. The last one is about the friendship and artistic creation of three surreal artists from European backgrounds who all lived and worked in Mexico. I discovered that Leonora Carrington had two very good friends in Remedios Varo and Kati Horna. Remedios Varo was a surreal artist and writer like Leonora Carrington herself. Kati Horna was an exceptionally brilliant photographer.  Kati Horna as well as Remedios Varo were/are incredibly original and talented artists. They are as great as Max Ernst, Man Ray, Joan Miro, Salvador Dali, Meret Oppenheim or Andre Masson, Paul Klee or Rene Magritte (who by the way wasn’t really a good painter – he was a great illustrator). They are absolutely better than Frida Kahlo (from my point of view).

From the great trio: Carrington, Horna and Varo; works of Remedios Varo and Kati Horna speek/ convince me most.

Kati Horna, Stairway to the Cathedral, photo-montage; Spain 1937

Remedios Varo, Harmony, 1956, oil on masonite.

Remedios Varo, Phenomenon of Weightlessnes, 1963; oil on canvas

The book about Remedios Varo included almost all her work. I fell in love immediately with her paintings. They are amazingly mysterious, scientifically imaginary, mathematically sophisticated and aesthetically absolutely beautiful.
You can probably imagine my feeling of embarrassment, surprise and disbelief that not even in one of the thousands books about art that I own could I find even one mention of her. After seeing her incredibly original art I felt kind of stupid and ashamed that I didn’t know Remedios Varo before. Expect lots of posts about her in the near future from me……..maybe even tomorrow!

Jacek Yerka and Toruń

I wrote this text a year ago and had forgotten to post it. Postpone today!

A few weeks ago I visited Toruń, a very old and historic city in Poland. The city is famous for having preserved almost intact its medieval spatial layout and many Gothic buildings, all built from brick, including monumental churches, the Town Hall and many burgher houses. I went there to see an exhibition of my ex-mother in law, a famous Polish film Movie star, the late Helena Grossówna. When lying in bed at the hotel during the night, I was thinking about all the famous people who were born and worked in this city. Nicolaus Copernicus was born in Toruń on 19 February 1473. At that time Toruń was part of Royal Prussia, a region of the Kingdom of Poland. Helenka Grossówna was born in Toruń too, in 1904. In her time Toruń wasn’t Polish anymore, the city was part of the German Empire. After the Second World War Toruń returned to Poland. I started to think about famous painters born in Toruń. At first I couldn’t remember any, and then suddenly Eureka! Jacek Yerka of course. He was born and studied in Toruń and he is one of the most famous fantastic artists of his time all over the world. The perfect subject for my surreal-fantasy art blog.
Jacek Yerka was born in Torun in 1952 studied art at the University in Toruń. It was a time (and probably still is) when technique was less important, and no one studied the old Masters. But Yerka did, he learnt directly from the masters of Northern Europe - the Van Eycks, Dierck Bouts, Robert Campin, Bosch, and surrealists such as Magritte.
Yerka said:

I did the first painting in my life a year before going to college, where I began studying graphics. My instructors always tried to get me to paint in the more contemporary abstract style, and move away from my fascination with realism. I saw this as an attempt to stifle my own creative style and steadfastly refused to fall in line. Eventually, my teachers relented.

His paintings are acrylic on canvas, pastels and drawings on paper.
His works are neo-surreal, fairy tale like, fantastic and sometimes more Sci-Fi than fantastic. The colours are now and then very brutal and powerful and occasionally very delicate, but nevertheless very expressive. The details are amazingly excellent. You really sense the hand of a Master, (F.E.: Between Heaven and Hell, The Way). As a painter I can tell you how time consuming it is to make these kinds of paintings.

I don’t like every work of his, but I definitely respect his imagination and his technique. I even think of buying one of his paintings of his grandmother’s kitchen. I hope he will make a few new paintings with this motif. Especially I like “Between Heaven and Hell”, "Cupboard Sunset", "Indian Summer", "the Strawberry Grove" and the "Illegal Production of Light".
Yerka's work has been exhibited in Poland, Germany, Monaco, France, and the United States. His works are also to be seen in Polish art museums. Yerka's work can also be seen in Mind Fields, a book in which Harlan Ellison has provided narration for each of Yerka's selected pieces.
In 1995 the artist was awarded the prestigious World Fantasy Award for the best artist.

On his website you can read more about Jacek Yerka, by Jacek Yerka.
http://www.yerkaland.com/bio_en.php
By the way the website is an excellent one, congratulations!

Below are a few images of my favourite paintings by Jacek Yerka.

The Strawberry Grove

The cupboard sunset

The winter wave

The road

Playing with Magritte in the spirit of Breughel

Life can be very surrealistic from time to time, in fact more often than you might expect. But surrealistic and at the same time optimistic doesn’t happen very often. But it happened to me on Sunday (May 30th 2009) in Brussels.
Reneé Magritte’s universe was conjured up on the Place Royal… giant creatures and live installations from Magritte’s paintings, a ballerina dancing on top of a piano, girls with baskets full of apples, and men with bowler hats all on a beautiful sunny day and with great music. The magical, surreal universe of Reneé Magritte came to life. The Musée Magritte Museum opened that door for us.
My partner and I were among the hundreds of fortunate people in Brussels to visit the new Musée Magritte Museum, before the official opening, and for free! René Magritte is without doubt one of the most important Belgian artists and one of the most influential ‘mass culture’ surrealist painters. He was possibly more of a thinker and illustrator than a painter. As a surrealist and a socialist he hoped to change the world and the mentality of the crowd, but he didn’t. Instead he became the most popular artist of the XX century. At the end of his life he also became very wealthy; he painted what the buyers wanted. What I personally like in his work is not his technique (Dali was absolutely a better painter), not the paintings by themselves, but the irony behind his surrealism. I love Magritte’s imagination and his jokes with his viewers - “Hey folks - I am taking you in!”. In some sense he had the same credo the I have; I believe that we are here on this planet by accident and not for long, actually and that our existence is meaningless, and that we shouldn’t take ourselves so damn seriously – it seems to me that Magritte thought about his own universe in much the same way. In fact I discovered at the weekend that during the second world war Magritte went so far as to paint works in the style of Picasso, Braque, Max Ernst and others. Some of these "forgeries" were subsequently sold in an auction at the Palace of Fine Arts in Brussels. He also forged money and he spent it successfully. (I like this man).

The great Surrealist René Magritte once said:

My painting is visible images which conceal nothing…. they evoke mystery and indeed when one sees one of my pictures, one asks oneself this simple question 'What does that mean'? It does not mean anything, because mystery means nothing either, it is unknowable.

Inspirited by Magritte, my partner Jim and one of my favourite painters, Peter Breughel the Elder, here is a new work of mine

“Playing with Magritte in the spirit of Breughel”.

This work is available for sale as a quality print and/or poster on RedBubble

View words about the new Musée Magritte Museum. The multidisciplinary collection contains more than 200 works consisting in oils on canvas, gouaches, drawings, sculptures and painted objects but also in advertising posters, music scores and vintage. Official opening of the museum was yesterday, June, 2nd 2009. The museum is situated close to the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, on Place Royale 1.

Arcimboldo - an eccentric artis

I am busy at the moment writing a book about Fantasy Art and its history. While searching online and reading reports and books on this subject, I have discovered that some artists, that for me so obviously (and without any doubt) should belong to the genre of unique fantasy art/fantastic artists haven’t been mention at all; either in books or reports. Extremely peculiar.

One of the artists that I haven’t come across in any of the sources I looked through is Giuseppe Arcimboldo. Maybe the reason that nobody has mentioned him is the fact that his art is very bizarre and very difficult to categorize. People love to pigeonhole everything. If something or somebody is very unique or uncanny or extremely original and difficult to put away in a drawer with other similar things than sometimes we just ignore it or forget it. This is only my speculation.

Back to the artist Giuseppe Arcimboldo. Arcimboldo was born in Milan in 1527 and grew up during the High Renaissance (Mannerism). He was extremely famous during his lifetime. He was a court painter of Emperor Ferdinand I (Habsburg), then Maximilian II and at the end Rudolph II. Part of Arcimboldo's duties included designing gala events for the imperial family. These were flashy affairs with gilded fountains and rivers of champagne, parades and promenades, flocks of coloured birds, music, theatre, tons of original artwork, sculptures, and much pageantry. Arcimboldo invented many unique special effects for these events such as an enormous hydro-mechanically powered musical instrument which acted like a modern colour organ; called the "Harpsichord of Colour." He was a man of many talents, and in the vein of other Renaissance great spirits (like Leonardo da Vinci) he served also as an architect, stage designer, engineer, water engineer and art specialist.

But as soon as he was dead he was totally forgotten. I can only speculate again about the reason, why people lost interest in his art. Perhaps he was misunderstood by the generations that followed? Maybe his sinister paintings weren’t enjoyable, interesting or intriguing? Or maybe they were too bamboozling, too insane for people of past centuries. Some of the contemporary reviews spoke about “the state of a deranged mind”. The interest in his abstruse and fantastic pictures, of which we only have a very few originals nowadays, revived only at the end of the 19th century. The surrealist movement brought him back into the public interest.

Personally I like his bizarre paintings. They are such unique art works, unique concepts, the creations of a very eccentric, intelligent and sophisticated brain. The documents of the time bear witness to the fact that monarchs and his contemporaries in general were also enthusiastic about his art.

His most recognizable paintings are known as the The Four Seasons series. The artistic concept of these pictures from 1563 was unique and laid the foundation of Arcimboldo’s success as a painter. The Four Seasons consist of four paintings - Winter, Spring, Summer and Autumn. All of them depict faces and heads but not normal human heads, vegetable-fruit-flower-tree heads.

Other famous works by him are: Water and Fire (1566), The Lawyer (1566), The Cook (1570) another series of the Four Seasons from 1572, two series of Four Seasons in 1573. He painted The Four Seasons twice again in 1577.

In 1591 he painted two of his most famous pictures, Flora (c.1591) and Vertumnus (1590-1591. Vertumnus is a portrait of Rudolph II, showing him as Vertumnus, the ancient Roman god of vegetation and transformation. The painting Verumnus consists entirely of magnificent fruits, flowers and vegetables. Rudolph II awarded Arcimboldo one of his highest orders in 1592. Next year on 11 July 1593 the painter died.

The Winter 1572 (Private Collection, Bergamo)

Looking at Arcimboldo’s bizarre paintings I can’t escape from thoughts about the human brain and the endless possibilities of the uncontrolled imagination. How did a man born in the time of the Renaissance, in a time when nobody painted such paintings, decide to create monstrous images of human heads?

For example, have a look at the Winter - head from The Four Seasons. The profile of the man is made up from the knobby stump of a tree, with a broken branch for the nose, moss for the stubble on the chin and two parasitic mushrooms for the lips. Is this more or less sinister than the hellish monsters thought up by Hieronymus Bosch? Arcimboldo paints a parody that is at times almost plausible in its suggestions of death and decay in a living being. The Winter portrait, the image of the head can horrify people, but at the same time it is so amazingly beautiful. The balance of the colour-palette is astonishing and tremendous. What a great imagination Arcimboldo had, and what a great colourist he was!

These puzzle-visionary-capriccio images of all the Portraits-Heads-Faces made by Arcimboldo are incredibly unusual, surreal and fantastic. I am curious if there are viewers who won’t see any faces in his paintings, only flowers and vegetables?

Above is a painting from a series based on the Four Seasons; this one is called Summer. The nose of the person appears to be made out of a very ripe cucumber. The chin is from a pear, and the cheek is made from a peach. Look closely at the man's coat. Can you see the name of the artist woven into the collar of his jacket, and the date 1573 embroidered on the shoulder?

Shoji Tanaka and Surreal Art

Do you have any idea, even a fuzzy one, what you get if you mix together the spirit of Hieronymus Bosch's creations and the legacy of the medieval art plus the speck of Chagall's "world of dreams" plus Japanese background? No...........I haven't had any idea too.......till I found Shoji Tanaka.

Shoji Tanaka is a Japanese artist, genre Fantasy Art or maybe he will appreciate the name Fantastic Artist or Surreal Art (but I think he is not sensu stricto).

I have discovered (maybe I am wrong, please correct me if I am) that his paintings are hard to be found in galleries in Europe.

But there is something to see in USA, Main Street, Maroochy, Queensland. Never been there.

This year there is a great, great exhibition of Fantasy Art & Fantastic Art & Surreal Art in Japan, in Kyoto. Most of the Artist will be Japanese's artist. I would love to see it, I have been fascinated since 30 years by Japanese literature – incredible magical and beautiful.

I think it will be amazing to be there, but I am not sure how to accomplish it. The opening is today, the exhibition is open only one week and I still can't walk right after my foot-surgery in February..

Bye, bye Fantasy Art......

Surrealist Artist - Jaroslaw Kukowski

His name is Jaroslaw Kukowski and you should know about him. Why? Because he is a great artist.
He was born on 11 April 1972 in Tczew, Poland. In his paintings he deals with moral and social issues in a controversial manner. Early in his artistic career, his works, which were regarded as symbolic, were filled with drama and sadness. Full of pain, deformed human figures along with mystic creatures were depicted against the background of surrealistic landscapes. He defined this series of works as Undreams. During another period, he lightened his palette when he became interested in nudes; nevertheless, even there, a viewer can perceive the brand of disintegration and passing time. In another stage of his artistic career, he moved back to his early works, but despite fairer colouring, his work became more and more ironic and provocative. In 2001, some of his works were removed from an exhibition in The Gallery SD following complaints from some members of the audience.

Jaroslaw Kukowski is one of 50 Artists featured in the first publication entitled Metamorphosis.The best publication about contemporary Surreal & Fantastic Artists. You should have IT.