Three months of lockdown… that’s a lot of online art. It’s easiest, for sure, to appreciate the virtual offerings of artists whose work you have already seen ‘for real’. But I have also been newly interested in artists now on my list of ‘see IRL when you get the chance’. Such as these three…
Mostafa Sarabi: Untitled, 2019 (top)
Tehran-based Mostafa Sarabi (born Iran 1983) integrates abstract patterning into representational scenes to joyful and distinctive effect – a knowing naivety, I’d say – which works particularly well in his pictures of mass swimming…
Fanny Sanín: Acrylic No. 4, 1980
At 82, New York based Colombian Fanny Sanín has been making distinctively symmetrical geometric abstractions for five decades without achieving the profile (at least in Britain) of the New York based Cuban Carmen Herrera. Maybe Sanín is due her time in Europe, just as Herrara – still active at 105 – remained somewhat under the radar until her 90’s.
Sébastien Gouju: Oies de Barbarie , 2015.
The simple move whereby the French artist / ceramicist Sébastien Gouju pots his birds proves an entertaining way to remove the vase function in favour of them acting as oddly enveloping sculptural plinths or, here, cutely individual nests for a family of Barbary Geese. I did have the darker thought that there might be a reference to constraining the geese for gavage but it’s the Barbary (and Muscovy) Duck which is mainly used for foie gras…
Three more next week…
Art writer and curator Paul Carey-Kent sees a lot of shows: we asked him to jot down whatever came into his head
