How the early work of Herbert Bayer became human-scale environments of positive or negative volumes in the landscape… — Artist and designer Herbert Bayer is perhaps best known for being a Master at the Bauhaus design school, in charge of graphic design, advertising, and typography. In the early-1920s, he’d studied large-scale painting and murals under Wassily Kandinsky at their Weimar campus, where he also devised the Universal typeface by…

Bonnie Lautenberg —

Jacob Epstein’s ‘Rock Drill’ prefigured Readymades, realia-fusion, and the Futurist figure in sculpture — No one really knew what to make of Rock Drill, including its creator, the sculptor Jacob Epstein. In 1913, the imposing ‘monster’ was unlike anything else, perhaps more akin to a work of science fiction than fine art. A human form resembling some sort of cybernetic fusion of flesh and…

Reflecting on the life and works of an artist who elevated the everyday and freed us from the power of things — Often referred to as ‘the soft sculpture guy’, Claes Oldenburg is best remembered for his monumental Pop Art in public spaces — for making the unremarkable remarkable and changing our relationship with everyday things. After all, it’s the ‘little things’ that sometimes matter most… Privileged beginnings and a Punk ethos…

A collection of three 1970s giallo’s in ‘Smile Before Death’, ‘The Weapon, the Hour, the Motive’, and ‘The Killer Reserved Nine Seats’. —

Cinema and canvas join in conceptual collisions for ‘Artistica! Art Meets Hollywood’ — Culture is complex. Too complex to comprehend ‘at a glance’ as it continues to change and develop each time we interact with it. After all, that’s what culture is — a very diverse, interrelated, and interdependent network of meanings, interpretations, associations, ideas, and concepts. Any culture is defined by its…

The vengeful doctor rises again, seeking the Scrolls of Life in an attempt to resurrect his deceased wife. —

Before film could become an art medium, ‘motion pictures’ had to be invented and the conventions of ‘cinema’ set-out — The appetite for film grew from the Victorian craze for stereograms and the ensuing pier-end Mutoscopes that used the ‘flip-book’ method to create moving pictures, often revealing ‘what the butler saw’. Cinema started out as the stuff of quick-thrill sideshows, a form of novelty entertainment having more in common with…