Self, Scrolls, Strings, and Showers
Welcome to your April edition of Signified
Art is a great talking point. Why not start a conversation by forwarding this newsletter to someone you know who shares your love of art?
Announcing the April exhibition at : six : shot : gallery
‘Oswaldo Vigas & the Principle of All Things’
Six paintings selected by Lorenzo Vigas — a special showcase presented by The Signifier : six : shot : gallery with the kind cooperation of the Fundación Oswaldo Vigas and the Boca Raton Museum of Art. The accompanying text is compiled from an interview with Lorenzo Vigas, writer, filmmaker, and son of the Venezuelan artist, Oswaldo Vigas.
From a very young age, my father was attracted by the cultural origins of Latin America. As a young artist he travelled in search of signs that revealed the most authentic and primitive aspects of his country. He filled his notebooks with images of petroglyphs, pre-Columbian ornaments, and facial paintings of the Guajira culture — a quest that would determine the direction of his work...
Continue reading and see the art at : six : shot : gallery
Recently published in Signifier:
Alone With Frida
Frida Kahlo painted many self-portraits during her tumultuous life. She observed this was because she was so often alone, and her self was the subject matter she knew best. The two self-portraits discussed here can be seen as marking milestones in her relationship with her husband, the artist Diego Rivera, and reflect developments in how she used her art to portray her inner self and correlation within the cosmos…
How Long is a Piece of String?
In 1913, the French artist Marcel Duchamp measured and cut a piece of string into three sections, each one metre long. He took these strings and held them horizontally one metre above a primed canvas, painted a deep dark blue, onto which he dropped each piece of string. He then preserved the curves formed by the strings as they fell by fixing them to the canvas which was mounted as three separate pieces. This was the beginning of a conceptual narrative…
A Rainy Day in Paris
Pierre-Auguste Renoir spent five years between 1881 and 1886 on his painting, The Umbrellas, yet it seems to capture a moment suspended in time. Rain is starting to fall and the bustling pedestrians pause to put up their umbrellas. The people are so close the shapes of the open umbrellas are held at awkward angles above them. At the centre one woman is in the process of opening her umbrella, while in the left foreground is a grisette…
The Awe of the Land
Fan K’uan is best remembered for painting the hanging-scroll titled Travellers Among Streams and Mountains (谿山行旅圖). It has been interpreted as a visually expressed philosophical response to times of great socio-political upheaval around the beginning of the eleventh-century. The Song Dynasty was attempting to reunify China and there were frequent military conflicts with peripheral provinces contested by nomadic clans and other established Dynasties…
Popular Signifier (ICYMI)
Spotlight on one of our most popular or trending articles…
Bauhaus & the Politics of Design
If you understand the Bauhaus, you will, pretty much, understand twentieth century art and design… and much of what followed.
The artists, designers, teachers and students who worked at the Bauhaus have a more direct and encompassing influence on the culture of the current western world than any other school or movement. A bold and sweeping claim, perhaps, and one not made lightly…
Spring Equinox & Easter: from the archives of Signifier
In this regular feature of our Signified Newsletter, we select a few choice articles from our archives linked by a monthly theme. It’s that time of year, in the northern hemisphere, with lambs gambolling in the fields and birds preparing their nests in earnest…
The Egg & the Architect
Inspired by natural form, Brunelleschi’s famous Florentine dome remains the biggest of its kind ever built. A church, of some sort, had stood at the site of Florence Cathedral since the fourth-century. Not surprisingly, by the thirteenth-century, it was no longer in a good state of repair and in dire need of an overhaul. The building of the ‘new’ cathedral began in 1296 and was not completed until 1436. That’s 140 years under construction…
The Joys of Spring: Botticelli’s Primavera
Sandro Botticelli’s Primavera is among the most famous and analysed paintings of the Renaissance. A beautiful evocation of Spring, it depicts over 500 different plant species and 190 different flowers within its mythical orange grove setting. It is also emblematic of the powerful Medici family of Florentine Bankers that encouraged a different flowering — of Classical Knowledge, of Neoplatonism, energising the development of European arts and science…
Suffering and Salvation, an Easter Promise
The paintings for the Isenheim Altarpiece are a powerful and groundbreaking series of works and the central crucifixion is one of the most uncompromising and gruesome depictions of the subject. Featuring the figure of Christ so prominently had gone out of fashion, but here he is, ‘centre stage’…
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If you know anyone who enjoys reading “imaginative fiction at its best”, you can further support our editor and curator by recommending or purchasing their latest novels in the series, This, That, and The Other, written by Remy Dean with Zel Cariad and published by The Red Sparrow Press.
“Bursting at the seams with magic!”
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