Gunilla Klingberg
Gunilla Klingberg has worked with many types of consumer goods, or their branding and logos, combining them physically or graphically to the point that they lose their individual form and become something altogether new. Klingberg has used paper and plastic bags from supermarkets, cheap rice-paper lamps, surveillance mirrors like those used in convenience stores, neon lights, plastic flowers, fans, and in general any product that is readily available in a consumer economy. She often combines logos in geometric patterns so that they become pure form, and their communicative role neutralized, only recognizable as distinct brands upon a close inspection. Klingberg’s is a poignant take on the pervasiveness of corporate persuasion in our daily lives, while turning them into beautiful, seductive environments where the viewer is immersed.
Klingberg was born in Stockholm, 1966; lives and works there. She studied magazine and newspaper design at RMI-Berghs, Stockholm, and sculpture at Konsfstack, University College of Arts, Crafts, Design, Stockholm. Numerous solo exhibitions across Europe. Received five-year working grant from the Swedish Visual Arts Fund, 2005.
Virgil Marti
Informed by a wide range of art-historical and pop-cultural references, Virgil Marti creates hybrid objects and environments that merge found imagery from art nouveau, baroque and rococo with 1960s psychedelia and science fiction. Marti’s landscape at once evokes the grandeur of Hudson River school painting and the kitsch of glow in the dark head-shop posters of the Garden of Eden from the 1960s and ’70s. This confluence can be seen in his fluorescent flocked wallpaper of a panoramic landscape lit by black lights. It combines sci-fi-inspired imagery based on the 1976 film of The Man Who Fell to Earth with designs drawn from the work of Frank Furness, the late-19thcentury architect who designed the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.
Marti was born Saint Louis, Missouri, 1962. Lives and works in Philadelphia. He holds and MFA from Tyler School of Art, Temple University, Philadelphia, 1990. Pew Fellowship in the Arts, 1995. Solo exhibitions held at: Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. 2007; Memphis College of Art, 2005; Santa Monica Museum of Art; Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Philadelphia, 2003; Morris Gallery, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, 2001; Moore College of Art & Design, Philadelphia, 1992. Group exhibitions include: Tristan Lowe, Virgil Marti, Peter Rose and Ryan Trecartin at The Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia, 2009; Montreal Biennial, 2007; Whitney Biennial 2004, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Flowers Observed, Flowers Transformed, The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh 2004 and On the Wall: Wallpaper and Tableau at The Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia, 2003.
Paul Morrison
Paul Morrison creates boldly graphic, black-and-white landscape paintings, wall drawings, sculpture and animations. His work incorporates found imagery of nature culled from various pictorial genres and different time periods, such as Disney cartoons, early botanical illustrations, and Northern Renaissance woodcuts. Morrison manipulates the images by removing color, editing detail, and altering scale. The separate images are then collaged together to create a new composition which is transferred onto canvas or, for site-specific murals, directly on the wall or panels using an elaborate system of stencils and black acrylic paint.
Often large-scale and site-specific, Morrison’s work reinterprets the physical space in which it is shown and positions the viewer within a fantastical landscape. Shifting sensations of scale and space transforms the viewer’s experience of the familiar and allows for associative interpretations of the artist’s imagery.
Morrison was born in Liverpool, 1966. Lives and works in Sheffield and London. Received his MFA from Goldsmiths College of Art, London, 1998. Solo exhibitions include: The Horticultural Society of New York; Manchester Art Gallery, Manchester, 2009; Las Vegas Art Museum, Nevada, 2008; Bloomberg Space, London, 2007; Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2003); Wallworks: Ingrid Calame/Paul Morrison, Aspen Art Museum, Colorado, 2001; UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, 2000. Commissions and long term installations include: Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence; Arts Towada, Towada Arts Center, Aomori, Japan, 2008; Contemporary Art Museum, Honolulu, 2006; and Bloomberg, Public Art Fund, New York, 2005.Group shows include: the Museum of Modern Art, Tate Britain, and the Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh.
Betsabeé Romero
Betsabeé Romero repurposes used tires in her work to make reference to the fact that the wheel is often described as the technical innovation of Western culture. Romero turns this cultural myth on its head by showing that the wheel had a long history in Aztec and Maya culture, where it was used primarily for printing and sport activities. By carving tread back into used automobile tires and using them as print mechanisms she recovers the Mesoamerican iconography and memory that has been erased by the technology of speed.
Romero was born in Mexico City, 1963; lives and works there. She holds an MA in the history of art, and MFA from Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, 1987. Romero has exhibited regularly in Mexico and abroad, and recently had a solo show, Lágrimas Negras, at Museo Amparo, Puebla, Mexico, 2009. Other solo shows include: Éxodo, site-specific installation, El Faro del Oriente, Iztapalapa, Mexico, 2007; El cielo al revés, Centro Cultural de España, Mexico City, 2006; SUR, traveled to: Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes, Lima, Peru; National Planetarium, Bogota, Colombia; Palacio de Correos de Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; La Recoleta and Museo Proa, Buenos Aires, Argentina. She was awarded first prize at the Cairo Biennale, Egypt, 2006.
Regina Silveira
For more than 30 years, Regina Silveira has been investigating the ways in which reality is represented, and the codes and procedures used to achieve its representation. She has used various methods to rework and deconstruct images of shadows and silhouettes, producing paradoxical images that often inhabit space without a solid form or visible source. Silveira has also used traces and imprints to speak about presence and absence and has used several printing techniques in her work, which often attains architectural proportions.
Making parodic use of perspective–-a system that should guarantee an accurate representation of forms in relation to the physical space they occupy—the artist makes visible the distortions that appear in the process of projection. She also references the anamorphosis, a system of geometric deformation which produces enigmatic images and which was first used to create visual curiosities in the 16th century. Through the deformation of the Renaissance projection technique, Regina Silveira breaks down the indexical relationship existing between an object and its shadow, and between the shadow and the object that produces it.
Silveira was born in Porto Alegre, Brazil, 1939. Lives and works in São Paulo. She has a PhD from Escola de Comunicações e Artes da Universidade de São Paulo, 1984. Since the 1970s, Silveira’s work has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions around the world. Shadow Line a survey of her work, was recently presented at the Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, Rio de Janeiro, 2009. Among her many remarkable projects are environmentally scaled works created for significant buildings including: the Reina Sofia’s Palacio de Cristal in Madrid, 2005; the Centro Cultural España, Montevideo, Uruguay, 2004; and the Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil in São Paulo, 2003. In 1998 she covered the facade of the Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer’s building with more than 2,000 square feet of vinyl for the 24th São Paulo Biennale and in 1996 she created a highly political work on immigration for the inauguration of Robert Venturi’s extension of the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego.