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Belgian artist Luc Tuymans has been the talk of Europe for at least the last 5 years and has been described as Europe's greatest living artist after Gerhard Richter.

Now, thanks to the efforts of SFMOMA and others a retrospective of his work can be seen in the US.

It's work that on the surface challenges the conventions of painting, but more than that, uses art to provoke discussion about history and culture.

At first glance, it's hard to take in the work. The color palette is muted and depressed, there seems to be an artificial barrier between the canvas and the viewer, it's like he doesn't want you to get close.

There's one series of paintings of banal objects that are out of focus, blurred so that they look like fragments of our memories, but many of these have deeper stories behind them (that's Tuymans style); a body lying innocently on a couch turns out to be a murder victim, the portrait of a man that seems very ordinary, is in fact, a a cancer sufferer.

At its core, Tuymans best work deals with politics and history. There are two series that deal with World War 2; one with concentration camps and the other the broader theme of Nazism.

While many of these WW 2 paintings here are difficult to view, often being minimal and sparse, they all have deeper stories to tell,  but when viewed as a series, complete an arc.

In his architect series about Nazi Germany, there's a painting from a photo of Albert Speer on skis and a blurred out portrait of Himmler which render these key protagonists dangerously harmless and innocent. 

The work that explores the Belgian colonization of the Congo is perhaps the most impressive. It highlights the key motifs of the story by isolating the key players and covering the assassination of a leader and the exploitation of resources. It's also art that caused a political response, this series was first shown at the Venice Biennale in 2001 and caused ripples that forced the Belgian government to admit their role in assassination of the Congolese leader. 

American isn't spared as he explores the country post 9/11 with paintings that include a portrait of Condoleezza Rice and what appears to be a falling World Trade Center, but in reality is simply another demolition. Tuymans is telling us how we've all been manipulated by media repetition.

In a world where new, bright digital media is the "thing", Tuymans shows us that painting still has a potent role to play. He's using his art to challenge and warn us about the power of the diversity of media images that surround us. He's asking that   constantly question ourselves to find deeper meaning in these images.

Posted by Ed Cotton It seems that art has found it self in the same problem as advertising, it has to provoke in order to get people to pay attention.

Artists seem so desperate for attention, that they've got to come with ever more interesting ways of getting people to take notice.

They've got a hard balance to achieve between the spectacle and deeper meaning; if you push too hard for spectacle, the meaning can get lost. 

Turner Prize finalist, Roger Hiorns is an interesting case. He's big on the spectacle; his exhibit for the prize is the pile of dust that resulted from the destruction of a 747 jet engine.

The video below shows an installation he created in a disused London apartment using copper. It's quite a spectacle and certainly a brilliant idea on one level, but more than that, I am not sure.




Posted by Ed Cotton While everyone yesterday was in awe of the long overdue announcement of cut and paste for the iPhone, I found myself fixated by the art of Jorge Colombo.

Jorge is no ordinary artist, he's an iPhone artist; someone who uses his fingers and a downloaded application to make art. It's debatable whether MOMA or The Metropolitan will ever stage an exhibition of his work, but that's hardly the point.

To me it demonstrates how far the iPhone has come in redefining the experience of mobile technology and shows just how un-phone like the device really is.



Posted by Ed Cotton Some of biggest problems are tough to comprehend, if we can't understand them then how can we be expect to play a role and do our part?

The Environment

Lots of jargon and difficult theories to understand, but hardest of all is to comprehend the issue on a human scale. In Bristol this week, artist Chris Bodie with his Watermarks Project, shows us where the sea level will be on buildings if various events happen, such as the melting of the Greenland ice cap, shown below.




Thanks to BLDG BLOG


A Trillion

Here CNN tries to explain what a trillion is and ends up looking like a skit from The Daily Show.



Big challenges and issues are hard to communicate, but it appears artists, rather than journalists are the guys who can really do it. They seem to be able to think of ways to put human beings in the picture and give us a sense of scale.

Chris Jordan is an example of an artist who does this really well.


Posted by Ed Cotton Artist Donny Miller is using advertising to attack oil companies, who seem  to be everyone's enemy these days, despite the recent decline in gas prices.

Mr. Miller has created his own ads and posts them up around the gas stations belonging to oil companies. Obviously, these posters aren't going to stay up long, but if you film them and circulate the video around, you've made sure your message gets noticed.


Gas Signs Truth in Advertising. from Donny Miller on Vimeo.

The whole pass along and share phenom with the web has given artists a whole new medium to get their ideas across to a broad cross section of the population. For the oil companies, what might have been just been tomorrow's trash at their gas stations, becomes a little bit more of an annoyance.

Via Supertouch


Posted by Ed Cotton JR is creating an impact in the street space with such scale and imagination that it puts advertising to shame. His massive portraits are of inhabitants of Brazilian favelas, Parisian ghettos and Palestinian towns. He's a graffiti artist who picked up a camera and the results of his work are extraordinary. He has a show in London at the moment- the first two images are from there and the final image is from the favela project he did in Brazil. He's work blends the best in photography with graffiti and social causes.







Posted by Ed Cotton