2000s

Now THAT’S delicate work! Artists carve intricate portraits onto egg shells in quirky new art trend

“Now THAT’S delicate work! Artists carve intricate portraits onto egg shells in quirky new art trend”

by Qin Xie via “Daily Mail“

Yunnan born Zhao Zexi is the artist behind the egg carvings.

The 27 year old revealed in an interview that he’s been carving egg shells for around 10 years and has worked with everything from hen’s eggs to duck and ostrich eggs.

He said: ‘I liked drawing from a young age. When I went to Hangzhou to train as a chef, my main job was food carving.’

‘I stumbled across egg carving by accident after seeing it on television. Since then I’ve been obsessed with the idea so started learning to do it.’

Initially he found that every egg shell he tried to carve collapsed as soon as the blade touched its surface.

Zhao Zexi creates human portraits, like Abraham Lincoln above, as well as Chinese landscapes and plants

Egg art created by Zhao Zexi start from 500 Yuan (£50) for hen’s egg and 6,000 Yuan (£600) for an ostrich egg

But with hard work, determination and a little help from other egg carving artists, he soon progressed from carving words to landscapes to human portraits.

The work is extremely time consuming.

Carvings on hen’s eggs require one or two days to complete while goose and ostrich eggs need 10 to 15 days.

However, he is able to charge 500 Yuan (£50) for a finished hen’s egg and around 6,000 Yuan (£600) for an ostrich egg.

Last year, he quit his job as a chef to concentrate on egg carving.

Speaking of his decision, he said: ‘There’s people who ask about my work every day. I’ve already received 10 commissions from art collectors.’

Zhu De featured in the egg shell carving by Li, above, was one of the pioneers of the Chinese Communist Party

Li’s work include Chinese leaders such as Mao Zedong and Soviet figures like Carl Marx and Joseph Stalin

Zhao Zexi is not the only egg shell artist to emerge recently.

A 29 year old woman in Jiangsu, eastern China, named as Han Liping shared her work in January this year.

Han normally works at a fast food restaurant but started egg carving as a hobby.

She empties the eggs of their content before starting work but says that every stage of the carving throws up challenges.

The shells breaking is the most obvious concern but if she makes any mistakes, she will have to start over again as there is no way to repair the damage. . . . .

Coming Exhibition: Magnum – Contact Sheets

“Magnum – Contact Sheets”

Who:

Istanbul Modern

When: Feb. 26, 2015 – Aug. 2, 2015 (Hours Vary)

Where:

Istanbul Modern
Meclis-i Mebusan Cad. Liman İşletmeleri Sahası Antrepo No: 4, 34433 Karaköy – İSTANBUL

More Information: Here.

“Magnum – Contact Sheets” is a major exhibition that takes the contact sheet as the basis for exploring the creative process behind some of the world’s most iconic photographs from the Magnum Photos agency. The exhibition gives audiences remarkable access and insight into the decision-making processes of many of Magnum’s famous members through the inclusion of first-person accounts. With the development of digital technologies and their huge impact on photographic production, this exploration of photography’s analogue period sets out to both investigate and celebrate a technique that is becoming increasingly historic; to provide an “epitaph”, in the words of Martin Parr.

A contact print is obtained by exposing an image or a set of images against a single sheet of photographic paper of the same size as the negative. Often compared to an artist’s sketchbook, contact sheets are the photographer’s first look at what he or she has captured on the film roll. Because contact sheets provide raw images of the photographs, without any interventions in the process, they offer the artist an opportunity for self-criticism and making a choice. In this sense, looking at contact sheets is like entering the photographer’s private area of work, which he or she keeps secret. On the other hand, by showing us the before and after of the unique scene selected by the photographer, they enable us to witness how that moment came to be. They give the viewer a sense of walking alongside the photographer and seeing through their eyesas they capture the scene. Contact sheets give clues as to the artist’s working process, the way they approach the subject matter and the extent to which the selected snapshot reflects reality.

Shedding light on the behind the scenes process of Magnum photographers, the exhibition reproduces work from over seventy years of visual history, including the D-Day landings by Robert Capa, the 1968 Paris riots by Bruno Barbey, Stuart Franklin’s Tiananmen Square, the Vietnam war by Philip Jones Griffiths and 9/11 by Thomas Hoepker. It showcases iconic portraiture of political figures, actors, artists and musicians, from Che Guevara and Malcolm X, to Miles Davies and The Beatles. Contact sheets and photographs are accompanied by close-up details, articles, books and magazine spreads.

The World Bodypainting Festival in Austria, in pictures

“The World Bodypainting Festival in Austria, in pictures”

via “The Telegraph“

The World Bodypainting Festival 2015 in Poertschach am Woerthersee, Austria

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20 Unusually Awesome Art Mediums

“20 Unusually Awesome Art Mediums”

by Alice Yoo via “My Modern Met”

“This post is dedicated to the idea that creativity can flow out of any of us. Everywhere you look these days, you see people turning something quite ordinary into something unbelievably extraordinary. Like Yuken Teruya who delicately carves commercial paper bags and transforms them into magnificent miniature trees or Maurizio Savini who turns Hubba Bubba into high art, these artists are the ones who remind us that the best kind of art isn’t the most complicated, it’s the kind that leaves us with an experience.

Eden Project [Via WebUrbanist] Medium: Colored Pencils

iri5 [Link] Medium: Post-it Notes

ih8gates [Link] Medium: Kodaimai Rice

Coming Exhibition: Collectionism and Modernity

“Collectionism and Modernity:

Two Case Studies~ The Im Obersteg and Rudolf Staechelin Collections”

Pablo Picasso. Buveuse d’absinthe (The Absinthe Drinker), 1901. Oil on canvas, 81 x 60 cm. Im Obersteg Foundation, permanent loan to the Kunstmuseum Basel. Photography: Mark Gisler, Müllheim

Who: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte, The Phillips Collection, the Im Obersteg Foundation, the Rudolf Staechelin Foundation

When: Mar. 18, 2015 – Sept. 14, 2015 (View Hours Here)

Where:

Museo Nacional Centro de Arte
Calle Santa Isabel 52
Madrid, Spain 28012

How Much: (View Pricing Here)

More Information: Here

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It was not the work of artists, critics and curators alone that made the development of modern and contemporary art possible. Another factor related to both economic and social concerns intervened as a catalyst in the process. This was art collecting.

This exhibition brings together two leading collections of early modernist art that now form part of the holdings of the Kunstmuseum Basel (Basel, Switzerland), the Im Obersteg Collection and the Rudolf Staechelin Collection, offering an opportunity to enjoy works by the most reputed early modernist masters, the vast majority of which have never before been seen in Spain. It is moreover a chance to explore the phenomenon of collecting, with a focus on its centrality to the formation of modern art.

Private collections of early modernism have traditionally been studied and exhibited with an emphasis on the contemplation of the works on display, neglecting the economic, social and political implications inherent to the activity of collecting in a context like that of Europe in the first decades of the 20th century. Nevertheless, collecting is above all discursive, and may be studied as such. A collection of whatever kind is made up not only of the works it contains but also of the narratives it successfully generates. It was in this sense that Walter Benjamin regarded the collector in his Arcades Project, viewing the act of collecting as related to the desire to understand and organize theworld as a cosmos: “Perhaps in this way it is possible to concretize the secret motive that underlies collecting: the fight against dispersion. The great collector is perturbed from the outset by the dispersion and chaos that subsume everything in theworld.”

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