Rosen

Gerhard Richter - Rosen (1994)

Narcissus

François Bard: Narcissus II - Le bain (2019)

Selvportrett i spanskesyken

Munch became ill at the turn of the year 1918–19. He was probably suffering from the Spanish flu, a deadly influenza that would claim the lives of many millions of people during a global epidemic from 1917 to 1920. In a series of studies, sketches, and paintings, Munch detailed the various stages of the disease and how death came ever closer.

It is a sick, incapacitated artist who meets our gaze in Self-Portrait with the Spanish Flu. His hair is thin, his complexion is jaundiced, and he is wrapped in a dressing gown and blanket. Munch shows us his frail condition, intimately and straight to the point, as he sits in a wicker chair in front of his unmade sickbed. The style itself seems equally direct, with simple, wavy lines and with colours applied with rough sweeps of the brush – red, blue, yellow, green, and brown – used to depict the figure. Munch’s experiences become condensed here: the room seems narrow, and the dominant yellow hues heighten the composition’s sense of restlessness.

The self-portrait belongs to a later phase of Munch’s career, created a few years after he set up house at Ekely on the outskirts of Kristiania. Munch had recently completed his major decoration of the University Aula, and the colours and monumentality of this self-portrait seem to be a continuation of this work. Here, however, he has returned to one of his recurring themes: himself. The picture’s large format, broad register, and forceful style make it stand out among Munch’s many self-portraits.

Text: Øystein Ustvedt
From "Edvard Munch in the National Museum", Nasjonalmuseet 2008, ISBN 978-82-8154-035-54

La Finestra e il Libro

Antonio Calderara - La finestra e il libro - 1935 // Antonio Calderara (Abbiategrasso, 28 ottobre 1903 – Vacciago, 28 giugno 1978) è stato un pittore italiano.

Bagnanti a San Niccolò

Domenico Cresti, o Crespi, detto il Passignano (Passignano, gennaio 1559 – Firenze, 17 maggio 1638) - Bagnanti a San Niccolò (1600)

Passignano’s painting of men bathing is a picture of tantalizing paradoxes: it can be associated with a tradition of bath house and bathing pictures going back to antiquity while at the same time being totally unique. It anticipated, by nearly three hundred years, Thomas Eakins’ Swimming Picture, revealing both the erotic tensions and the underlying classicism of Eakins’ modernity and the modernity of Passignano’s anecdotal classicism.   

Painted with Passignano’s renowned rapidity and bravura, beautiful in its surface qualities, the picture combines close observation of reality with an idealizing vision of friendship and possibly love. Proudly signed and dated 1600 in the center foreground, it is exceptional among Passignano’s works, which consisted largely of a conventional blend of religious and historical subjects and portraiture. Nothing is known of its origins, although in his seventeeth-century book of biographical notices on artists Filippo Baldinucci mentions a painting belonging to the Marchese Filippo Niccolini in Florence with a number of women bathing in the Arno that has tentatively been associated with the Bathers at San Niccolò. Wrong gender, but close in subject and site; unless Filippo was very nearsighted or only had a glimpse of a painting vaguely recalled, it might have been a pendant, adding mystery to mystery. The painting’s scale – also remarkable for a genre scene that is hardly generic – proves that it was a significant commission and an important one for the original owner who must have been a Florentine with fond associations of summer days at San Niccolò, which is recognizably portrayed.  

T.J Agbo

An abstract artist with an affinity for portraiture. Used abstract themes to conceive a pattern that is used alongside areas of white and black, to represent the human form and skin in a new innovative way. The work is heavily focused on colours and their relationships together; whilst exploring themes of beauty with the help of nature and the human form.

Jean-Claude Götting

Jean-Claude Götting est né à Paris en 1963.

Shane McClatchey

Shane McClatchey is a painter working in Laguna Beach, California. He received an MFA in Painting at the Laguna College of Art and Design. Shane teaches Figure Drawing for Citrus College and California School of the Arts. In the summer months, Shane is an ocean lifeguard at the Jersey Shore. Represented by Main Street Gallery in Manasquan, New Jersey.

Liu Ye

Beijing-born painter Liu Ye (b. 1964) combines abstraction and figuration to create bold, meditative paintings that investigate the intersections of history and representation through a distinct vocabulary that transcends traditional Eastern and Western art-historical categories. Drawing on both his childhood memories of China and his early education in Europe, the artist’s carefully balanced, methodical compositions play on perspective and ways of seeing, while also referencing a diverse range of aesthetic, literary, and cultural sources. Among these are the fairy-tale worlds of Hans Christian Andersen and Lewis Carroll; literature by Leo Tolstoy and Vladimir Nabokov; and modernist painting, architecture, and design, from Balthus to the Bauhaus. These various points of reference have inspired Liu’s artistic output for more than twenty-five years, resulting in a body of work that is at once rich in its historical quotations and singularly his own.

Liu studied mural painting at the Central Academy of Fine Arts and industrial design at the School of Arts & Crafts, both in Beijing, before studying at the Hochschule der Künste in Berlin. The artist spent six years living and studying in Europe, which included a six-month-long residency in 1998 at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam.

The artist’s work was recently the subject of a solo exhibition at Prada Rong Zhai, Shanghai (November 2018 through January 2019). Other solo museum presentations include shows at Mondriaanhuis, Amersfoort, The Netherlands (2016) and Kunstmuseum Bern, Switzerland (2007).

His work has also been featured in significant international group exhibitions, including Hello World: Revising a Collection, Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin (2018); The World in 2015, Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing (2015); Focus Beijing: De Heus-Zomer Collection, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam (2014); Re-View: Opening Exhibition of Long Museum West Bund, Long Museum, Shanghai (2014); In Time, 2012 Chinese Oil Painting Biennale, National Art Museum of China, Beijing (2012); Future Pass: From Asia to the World, 54th Venice Biennale (2011; traveled to Wereldmuseum, Rotterdam; National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Taichung; and Today Art Museum, Beijing); Chinamania, Arken Museum of Modern Art, Ishøj, Denmark (2009); and Mahjong: Contemporary Chinese Art from the Sigg Collection, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, University of California, Berkeley (2008; traveled to Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts). In 2017, Liu’s work was included in the 57th Venice Biennale as part of Viva Arte Viva, curated by Christine Macel, director of the 2017 Venice Biennale and chief curator at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.

Work by Liu is held in numerous public collections, including the Long Museum, Shanghai; M+ Sigg Collection, Hong Kong; the Shanghai Art Museum; Today Art Museum, Beijing; and the Yuz Museum, Shanghai. Liu lives and works in Beijing.

Matthijs Röling

The themes to be found in Matthijs Röling's work are many and varied: still lifes, interiors, portraits, nudes, landscapes and mythological scenes. The painter does not care to deny that many of his paintings represent a release from everyday life. "I do not pretend to have a message for the world. I am an escapist, searching for another place, for peace and pleasure; far from this terrible world which I still seem to love so much."