Category: Art & Illustration

Thor Vigfusson’s wall sculptures

These wall sculptures by Icelandic artist Thor Vigfusson are terrific. He works with mirrors, plastic and glass in a formalist fashion with mainly subdued (but also sometimes bright) colour palettes. Reflectivity and light play an important role in the way they capture and represent the space in which they are installed.

i8 (a gallery in Iceland where Thor has exhibited) said this of his work:

Deceptively simple, his pieces are constantly changing and engage the viewer in intimate contemplation.

I couldn’t agree more.

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Room for One Colour

Room for One Colour by Berlin-based artist Olafur Eliasson is pretty much as minimal as installations get. (Unless you recount Yves Klein’s exhibition called The Void.)

In this work, Eliasson is perhaps expressing his dissastisfaction with the materiality of art, and the notion that an exhibition is about putting art into a space. Instead, he seems to be interested in using a space as the actual artwork. In this instance, he reconfigures the space using mono-frequency lights to transform it into a room filled with a single colour. I find this quite a clean, minimal and slick method.

Having seen this work in person earlier this year at the MCA, I can say from experience that it has a disorienting affect on people within and outside of the space. In the pictures, you can see how the lighting drains colour out of anything within the space.

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Naoto Fukasawa’s notebook

(This is the second of a series of two posts)

Examine a paper notebook. Mostly, it captures our dreams around ideas. As if doodling on a notepad would be the happiest activity on earth. Detour notepad global exhibition, including fifty Moleskine notebooks showcased the creative discipline of architects, designers, and artists in 2009. Japanese product designer, Naoto Fukasawa’s notebook was featured.

Mr. Fukasawa’s Moleskine notebook sketches show the main attributes of his creative philosophy: Simplicity, objectivity, and modesty. He believes we can live with fewer objects. Instead of creating new forms, he feels we should rethink how objects are used. Some of Mr. Fukasawa’s iconic work includes a wall-mounted MUJI CD player and a humidifier for ±0 (Plus Minus Zero).

“I want to design the unnoticeable.” says Naoto Fukasawa. And no more. Call it human simplicity.

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Yellow Paintings

The work of French based artist Roland Orépük belongs to a genre some call Reductive Art (if you live in France) or Non Objective Art (if you live in Australia), a vibrant scene of abstract art populating all over the world with roots in minimalism.

Roland has been using yellow and white exclusively since 2004. In his Yellow Paintings series he makes striking use of these colours in a minimal, abstract and geometric fashion.

In these examples, I am attracted to the way in which Roland address the physicality of painting, and uses elements, such as the frame and the canvas itself, as a means of transcending into the three-dimensionality of sculpture and installation art. The ‘out-line’ or ‘perimeter’ style of some of these paintings also reminds me a lot of American minimalist Robert Ryman.

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Slant/Light/Volume

Throughout his career, Californian artist Robert Irwin has pondered whether we ever have an absolutely pure or direct moment in front of a work of art.

This installation piece, Slant/Light/Volume, represents his effort to foster such an experience.

Reader Dan, who submitted this for Minimalissimo, says it is absolutely beautiful and ethereal. He adds: Great manipulation of lighting and scrim fabric produce a work that looks plain, but feels indescribable.

With reactions like that, it sounds like Irwin achieved what he aimed for.

You can experience Slant/Light/Volume yourself until November 2010 at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA.

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1-Bit Symphony

New York City based musician and visual artist Tristan Perich has composed an electronic symphony which resides on a single microchip, named 1-Bit Symphony.

1-Bit Symphony has a similar aesthetic and principle as 1-Bit Music, a project Perich worked on 6 years ago. But this time Perich coded a longer piece of music onto the chip and simplified the components housed in the CD case.

“I wanted to respond to the symphonic form and think about how simple audio waveforms (1-bit tones) does not necessarily mean that the music itself must be simplistic. That it could be possible to create a long-form rich composition with 1-bit audio.” – Tristan Perich

Daylight entrance

Sunlight has an important role in sustaining life on earth and has shown a positive affect on the mood. Born in Oslo – Norway and currently based Gothenburg – Sweden designer Daniel Rybakken made an installation – Daylight entrance – to “replicate the positive sensation of sunlight” in both the entrance and staircase of an office building in central Stockholm.

Using the technical princples of one of his previous projects Rybakken used over 6000 LED lights over 3 stories to give the visitor or employee the suggestion of multiple windows somewhere in the staircase.

Photography by Kalle Sanner.

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Landschaft Mit Haus

Moscow based corporate identity designer and freelance illustrator Maria Zaikina creates landscape art titled “Landschaft Mit Haus” (English: “Landscape With House”).

Maria is inspired by travelling around the world with her camera and Wim Wenders‘ movie Alice in the Cities, in which the mean character Alice is searching the cities of Germany for her grandmother, whose name and address Alice can’t remember. The subject of journey is very close to her she says.

“Melancholic contemplation during a journey is evoked by landscapes drifting past the window, where details merge into stripes and colours. The scenery floats past in front of our eyes, changing our mood or remaining as a background for thought, leaving perhaps just an implicit impression in the memory. Our eyes glimpse a house standing lonely amongst the fields.”

Each of the illustration of the series houses is like a stopped frame of a film.

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Ultra-Violet Live

Ultra-Violet Live is an improvised live audio visual performance with savage, minimalist and low-fi aesthetics.

The artists, French musician Jerome Montagne and video artist Philippe Fontes used nothing more that UV tables and a no-input mixing board.

Fontes and Montagne belong to the French electronic art collective Plusmoins (translated: Plus Minus). Their work balances on the fine line between ‘very stimulating’ and ‘disturbing’.

Can you handle it?

Kinetic Sculpture

Oooh this is nice!

The Kinetic Sculpture consists of 714 metal spheres, hanging from thin steel wires. Each sphere can be moved individually, and through some amazing software, moving shapes can be created.

The Kinetic Sculpture is created by ART+COM, a digital media design agency based in Berlin, Germany, for the BMW Museum in Munich, Germany.

ART+COM have animated a seven minute long mechatronic narrative – a dance in mid-air. (Thx, Floris!)

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