Category: Painting

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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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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Carmen Herrera

This is one insprirational story:

Carmen Herrera was born in Cuba in 1915, and started painting in the 1930′s. Through six decades, she created her radiantly ascetic work in relative solitude, and never sold a painting. That all changed in 2004: at the age of 89, Ms Herrara sold her first painting.

With that first sale, her world changed rapidly. Collectors started to avidly pursue her, up to the point where her paintings have entered the permanent collections of institutions like the Museum of Modern Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and the Tate Modern.

Herrera has been on a lifelong quest to pare down her paintings to their essence, even though a large part of her work dates from well before the rise of Minimal Art in the 1960′s. Wow!

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Endoresuhoridei

The 2008 series Endoresuhoridei (‘Endless holiday’) of minimalist painter Sakamoto Tokuro brings about a sense of innocence and nostalgia.

Surrounded by nothingness, the playground objects are depicted in their purest form. The colourful plastics, selected to invite children to play, tell the story of the careful design of the objects. Through these paintings, Tokuro seems to want the honor the designers of these symbols of childhood innocence and times past.

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