Tag Archives: ART

I chatted with artist Michael Brennan for Zyzzyva.

If you’ve dined at any number of swanky Bay Area establishments, you might have unwittingly enjoyed your meal in a restaurant designed by one of the few people who is as well known and well respected for his fine art … Continue reading

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Masked Ball, Venetian Masters, and trippy mashups at the de Young, Zyzzyva

Gerhard Richter’s enormous mural Strontium glowered over Wilsey Court. The mural, made from a collection of blurred photographs representing the atomic structure of strontium titanate (a substance used to make artificial diamonds), might have been interpreted as a bit of a symbolic … Continue reading

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Paul Madonna’s Everything is its Own Reward, Art Practical

In 1955, the French theorist, writer, and filmmaker Guy Debord defined the term psychogeography as “the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals.”1 The art that charges … Continue reading

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Francesca Woodman at SFMOMA, Huffington Post

There are things in that paper which nobody knows but me, or ever will. Behind that outside pattern the dim shapes get clearer every day. It is always the same shape, only very numerous. And it is like a woman … Continue reading

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Carte Blanche Gallery and Bookshop

I discovered a lovely gallery/bookshop in the Mission the other day. Carte Blanche features the work of twelve international emerging artists, curated by Parisian transplant Gwen Lafage. Prints are for sale framed or unframed, and there is a small but … Continue reading

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Masters of Venice at the De Young, Art Practical

Masters of Venice: Renaissance Painters of Passion and Power, composed of work on loan from Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum, provides a small but potent display of both the flights of inspiration and technical advancements that made fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Venice an … Continue reading

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some thoughts on OWS art

I’m late to this party, obviously, but I’ve enjoyed viewing the art inspired by Occupy Wall Street, and find a lot of it beautiful, provocative, and inspiring, an ideal combination for what is, forgive the now-derogatory term, propaganda. Some images … Continue reading

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David Linger’s “Narratives in Porcelain at Meridian Gallery, SF Examiner

  On the one hand, works in David Linger’s “Narratives in Porcelain” on view at Meridian Gallery evoke a vision of Russia that is straight David Lean — all bare birch trees, troikas, fur hats and snow-swept promenades.The fuzzy black-and-white … Continue reading

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I had problems with Asian Art Museum’s (and V&A’s) Maharaja show, SF Weekly

Any exhibition on the wealth of a nation’s royal class is an exhibition of the inflated amour-propre of men with money and armies at their beck. Well-fed bluebloods wrap themselves in theater curtains, pile on the baubles, and commission royal portraits for … Continue reading

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Elin Høyland’s “Brothers” at Rayko, for the Huffington Post

It is tempting to regard a life that takes place “off the grid” of modern culture — sans TV, sans cellphone, sans facebook, sans travel — with pity, as if the person living this way was “left behind” or just … Continue reading

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