Category Archives: artist

Serendipitous Ads and artist Tara Giannini

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Good advertising brings your attention to things you want to know. One day I looked up at the top of my blog, and saw an ‘ad’ I immediately liked. It was a detail of the work above. You see, I belong to Culture Pundits, a network of art blogs and artists who display ads related to the arts (and for some reason Tekserve). Serendipity! I can’t think of the last time an ad showed me anything of interest, much less introduced me to a new artist.

Idiotically, I did not click on the ad. So I had to do some sleuthing to find artist Tara Giannini‘s website and more of her intricate, layered panels. I can’t decide if they would fit better in a Regency mansion or creepy junkshop. Apparently, the artist had something similar in mind, stating that she tries to find the line between ugliness and beauty.

Based in Brooklyn, Giannini describes her work as exploring “the implications, limitations and individual perceptions of taste, beauty and excess in both art and culture, while simultaneously exploring my interests in overindulgence, visual complexity and ornamentation. It is a romantic and celebratory exploration into personal ideals of the beautiful, and the play that exists between the natural and the artificial.”
I love the thickness of the paint and lushness of the materials. While these works don’t quite have that creepy air of Victorian dolls, Giannini takes the same neo-Baroque, over the top aesthetic and pushes it until it’s on the cusp of breaking down. It’s interesting and sensual in an unpleasant way.

This kind of detailed, 3D works is better appreciated in person, especially for grasping scale, but sometimes you just know you like something, right?

Shepard Fairey: Over Exposed and Over It

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Shepard Fairey. You’ve heard the name, I’ve heard the name. We’ve seen the posters, read about the ad campaign for department store Saks. Lord knows we’ve heard about the recent Obama photograph debacle.

Look at the art. We get it. Nothing more need be said. Or even done by him. There’s a website that can do his art for you. (Note the website is pretty neat.) Never want to hear the name again, nor see another person’s internet photo Obama-ized.

Pardon me, am I ranting? If so, only because as an artist his recent work in itself is not that interesting.
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There. I said it.

Dirk Stewen’s Watercolors: Not Another Organic Blob

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Thank you Contemporary Art Daily, for bringing to my attention these works by Dirk Stewen now on view in Berlin.

Quite a few artists are doing this pale style of waterbased pigment on paper, typically organic blobs with perhaps some line drawing. I love the delicacy and subtlely these works exude. The loose medium softens the lines. Stewen’s work contains definitive silouettes rather than organic blobs, and I enjoy the simple lines and elegant coloring.


The Hamburg-based artist, born in 1972, had a show in New York in 2006, but has since retreated back to Germany. Typically his works on paper include collage and photography. Both Stewen’s style and choice of medium are part of a growing trend, and it’s one that favors delicacy over monumentality. Combined with the tendency to show vaguely defined shapes, it suggests mutability and transience in its most fragile sense.