Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: austria, burroughs, drawing, helnwein, hyper realism, mixed media, photography, subtlety, surprised recognition, watercolor
well i don’t think it’s possible to describe helnwein/his works/his vision with ordinary words. so i keep myself away from an introduction text that i usually would like to put in the beginning of a post. but this time i feel like i’m not gonna be able to make a proper impression of helnwein, so i leave this to you. he’s one of the most inspirational artists(maybe the most) to me and i think william s. burroughs found a pretty good way to talk about him so i don’t have anything to do with it:
“it is the function of the artist to evoke the experience of the surprised recognition: to show the viewer what he knows but does not know that he knows. helnwein is the master of the surprised recognition”.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: andy warhol, beauty, black and white, composition, homophobia, human body, patti smith, photography, polaroid, portrait, robert mapplethorpe, sexual identity, statuesque, stereotype, subtlety
how does the name “patti smith” sound to you? what would it evoke in your mind? music? barefoot? rebellious? rimbaud? horses? punk?.. on and on it keeps going in my mind. but other than all these ‘things’, a name just arises from the crowd of associations-robert mapplethorpe. and i owe this remembrance of mapplethorpe to a close friend of mine.
i met his works for the first time while i was wandering around the pictures of patti smith. most of them-taken in 70′s- belonged to robert mapplethorpe. he reflected her in a multi dimensional way which is a quite valuable and also challenging ability. i mean she does not look classically beautiful or like a distorted punk queen. subtle and sharp, masculine and feminine, pure and remarkable..all together in one simple composition. i like the togetherness of white doves and lunatic regards and wild black hair.
while observing mapplethorpe’s photographic tendencies, one comes face to face with highly varying works since in every part of his life he tried to experiment new techniques. after several series of portraits in 70′s, he headed for a “refinement of subject and an emphasis on classical formal beauty” in 80′s. in this period he focused on nude models-statuesque males and females, exquisite flower still lives. i never found the compositions with flowers to be so interesting in any part of my life, until i saw the works of mapplethorpe and the power of subtlety in these flower images.
another crucial characteristic of mapplethorpe’s work is his unique and very distinctive approach to human body. in these photographs with nude male and females, actually he declares a very clear message about sexual equality-condemning the stereotypes on sexual identity and racism. in this period-80′s- his images were judged as shocking, violent, gruesome..which exactly approved the homophobic and segregationist attitude of the society, that’s why many of his exhibitions were closed down at that time. despite all these challenges it’s really inspirational how he managed to integrate the human body in his artistic way of expressing oneself.
