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B.D. Graft | |
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| Born | Brian de Graft 21 September 1988 Mayen, Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany |
| Education | University of Amsterdam (BA, MA) |
| Occupation | Visual artist |
Brian de Graft (born 21 September 1988), better known by the name B.D. Graft, [1] is a German visual artist living and working in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
De Graft was born in Mayen, Germany to a German mother and a half Ghanaian, half Dutch father. When he was seven, the family moved to South-East London, England, where they would stay for seven years. It was here that De Graft discovered his love for music and skateboarding, which would go on to influence his art.
When de Graft was 14, the family moved to Cologne, Germany, where de Graft finished highschool.
In 2011, de Graft moved to Amsterdam, the Netherlands, to study at the University of Amsterdam. He obtained a BA in Media and Culture (with a specialization in Film), followed by an MA in English literature and Culture. During his studies, de Graft began making art as a hobby. In 2014, he started uploading his work to Instagram and decided to concentrate on his art full time in late 2016.
Recurring themes in De Graft's work include ownership (most notably his project "Is It Mine if I Add Some Yellow?" [2] ), nature, the pursuit of happiness, and the ‘deceptively decorative’. He mainly works on paper and canvas using acrylic, Oil pastels and charcoal.
De Graft has exhibited internationally, including in Seoul [3] and New York City, [4] and has collaborated with notable creatives and brands, including Australian rock band Pond [5] and fashion brand Off-White. [6]
De Graft's debut book "Living Things", [7] which showcases his plant-based artworks, was published through Zioxla [8] publishing house in 2019.
Living Things is the debut book from German artist B.D. Graft, whose light, graphic style recalls Matisse's cutouts mixed with Bauhaus-era design and Pop Art levity. In the 64-page softcover book, foliage and fruit play a central role, as does color. The book includes key works from Graft's ongoing series of plants in vases – collages and paintings of gestural foliage emerging from boldly hued vessels – and emphasizes the artist's playful side. For example, in an oil pastel titled "Pot Head," a loosely rendered, fleshy figure has a big blue planter for a head. "Making art brightens up my day," Graft explains, "and I’d like to pass that feeling on to the observer."
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De Stijl, incorporating the ideas of Neoplasticism, was a Dutch art movement founded in 1917 in Leiden, consisting of artists and architects. The term De Stijl is also used to refer to a body of work from 1917 to 1931 created in the Netherlands. Proponents of De Stijl advocated pure abstraction and universality by a reduction to the essentials of form and colour. They simplified visual compositions to vertical and horizontal, using only black, white and primary colors.
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Lucebert was a Dutch artist who first became known as the poet of the COBRA movement.
Tree shaping uses living trees and other woody plants as the medium to create structures and art. There are a few different methods used by the various artists to shape their trees, which share a common heritage with other artistic horticultural and agricultural practices, such as pleaching, bonsai, espalier, and topiary, and employing some similar techniques. Most artists use grafting to deliberately induce the inosculation of living trunks, branches, and roots, into artistic designs or functional structures.
Pieter Cornelis Mondriaan, after 1906 known as Piet Mondrian, was a Dutch painter and art theoretician who is regarded as one of the greatest artists of the 20th century. He is known for being one of the pioneers of 20th-century abstract art, as he changed his artistic direction from figurative painting to an increasingly abstract style, until he reached a point where his artistic vocabulary was reduced to simple geometric elements.
Frans Wildenhain also known as Franz Rudolf Wildenhain was a Bauhaus-trained German potter and sculptor, who taught for many years at the School for American Craftsmen at the Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, New York.
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