The Prague Project

Last updated

The Prague Project was an art project involving the photorealist painters Anthony Brunelli, Clive Head, Bertrand Meniel and Raphaella Spence, and the writer Michael Paraskos, held in Prague in 2003. It culminated in an exhibition at the Roberson Museum and Science Center, Binghamton, New York in 2004-2005, and an accompanying catalogue. [1]

Contents

History

The Prague Project was organised by the Bernarducci Meisel Gallery in New York, involving the artists Anthony Brunelli, Clive Head, Bertrand Meniel and Raphaella Spence. The project began with a commission given to Brunelli to paint Prague, but quickly grew into a more elaborate project involving the three other artists, all of whom were associated with the Bernarducci Meisel Gallery at that time. [2]

From this start the aim of the project became to send a group of Photorealist painters from Europe and the United States to the Czech capital Prague and ask them each to produce two paintings based on their experience of the city. These were then to be exhibited in the United States. [3]

The artists travelled together to Prague, and stayed in the same accommodation, in order to promote a dialogue between them, and explore differing methods of photorealist painting. In this the participation of Clive Head is of significance as he has denied frequently he is a photorealist painter. [4] At the request of Clive Head, the art critic Michael Paraskos was included in the trip to Prague. However he was not subsequently selected to write the catalogue essay that accompanied the exhibition of the paintings produced, with that role being taken instead by Gregory Saraceno. [3] The exclusion of Paraskos was possibly due to his known criticism of mainstream photorealist painting. [5] Nonetheless the exhibition was described by one journalist as "showing the breadth and richness of photorealism." [6]

Also accompanying the artists was a film crew from Binghamton University invited by Anthony Brunelli to record the Prague visit.

Further Projects

Following the project further group projects involving photorealist painters have been organised, including The Zurich Project in 2007, which brought in the first generation photorealist painter Tom Blackwell, and the Monaco Project, based around the Monaco Grand Prix, which involved the artists Roberto Bernardi, Tom Blackwell, Anthony Brunelli, Clive Head, Robert Gniewek, Ron Kleemann, Bertrand Meniel and Raphaella Spence. They were accompanied by the art critic Linda Chase. [7]

In 2011 the New York Project was shown, involving fifteen artists: Anthony Brunelli, Tom Blackwell, Paul Caranicas, Richard Estes, Robert Gniewek, Gus Heinze, Don Jacot, Charles Jarboe, Ron Kleemann, Bertrand Meniel, Robert Neffson, Matthew Pierog, Raphaella Spence, Bernardo Torrens and Doug Webb. [8]

Artists involved

Writers involved

Related Research Articles

Max Ernst German artist

Max Ernst was a German painter, sculptor, graphic artist, and poet. A prolific artist, Ernst was a primary pioneer of the Dada movement and surrealism. He had no formal artistic training, but his experimental attitude toward the making of art resulted in his invention of frottage—a technique that uses pencil rubbings of objects as a source of images—and grattage, an analogous technique in which paint is scraped across canvas to reveal the imprints of the objects placed beneath. He is also noted for his novels consisting of collages.

Binghamton, New York City in New York, United States

Binghamton is a city in, and the county seat of, Broome County, New York, United States. It lies in the state's Southern Tier region near the Pennsylvania border, in a bowl-shaped valley at the confluence of the Susquehanna and Chenango Rivers. Binghamton is the principal city and cultural center of the Binghamton metropolitan area, home to a quarter million people. The population of the city itself, according to the 2010 census, is 47,376.

Alphonse Mucha Czechoslovak photographer, painter and illustrator

Alfons Maria Mucha, known internationally as Alphonse Mucha, was a Czech painter, illustrator and graphic artist, living in Paris during the Art Nouveau period, best known for his distinctly stylized and decorative theatrical posters, particularly those of Sarah Bernhardt. He produced illustrations, advertisements, decorative panels, and designs, which became among the best-known images of the period.

Anthony van Dyck 17th-century Flemish Baroque artist

Sir Anthony van Dyck was a Flemish Baroque artist who became the leading court painter in England after success in the Southern Netherlands and Italy.

Photorealism art genre and movement

Photorealism is a genre of art that encompasses painting, drawing and other graphic media, in which an artist studies a photograph and then attempts to reproduce the image as realistically as possible in another medium. Although the term can be used broadly to describe artworks in many different media, it is also used to refer specifically to a group of paintings and painters of the American art movement that began in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Jack Vettriano Scottish painter

Jack Vettriano,, is a Scottish painter. His 1992 painting The Singing Butler became a best-selling image in Britain.

The Cyprus College of Art (CyCA) is an artists' studio group, located in the village of Lempa on the west coast of Cyprus. It was founded in 1969 by the artist Stass Paraskos; the current director is the Cyprus-based artist Margaret Paraskos.

Stass Paraskos Cypriot artist

Stass Paraskos was an artist from Cyprus, although much of his life was spent teaching and working in England.

Hyperrealism (visual arts) art movement

Hyperrealism is a genre of painting and sculpture resembling a high-resolution photograph. Hyperrealism is considered an advancement of Photorealism by the methods used to create the resulting paintings or sculptures. The term is primarily applied to an independent art movement and art style in the United States and Europe that has developed since the early 1970s. Carole Feuerman is the forerunner in the hyperrealism movement along with Duane Hanson and John De Andrea.

Idelle Lois Weber was an American artist most closely aligned with the Pop art and Photorealist movements.

Robert Neffson is an American painter known for his street scenes of various cities around the world, museum interiors and for early still lifes and figure paintings.

Northern Mannerism art movement

Northern Mannerism is the form of Mannerism found in the visual arts north of the Alps in the 16th and early 17th centuries. Styles largely derived from Italian Mannerism were found in the Netherlands and elsewhere from around the mid-century, especially Mannerist ornament in architecture; this article concentrates on those times and places where Northern Mannerism generated its most original and distinctive work.

The New Aesthetics is an art movement that stresses the material and physical processes in the making of visual art. It is unrelated to "The New Aesthetic" as coined by James Bridle.

Clive Head British artist

Clive Head is a painter from Britain.

Roberto Bernardi is a photorealist painter who explores the beauty of everyday life though the reflections and transparencies in his still life paintings, using as his main subject plates and glasses, kitchens appliances, dishwashers, fridges and more recently lollypops and candies.

Raphaella Beatrice Spence is a British photorealist and hyperrealist painter.

Frank Bernarducci is a New York City art dealer and curator. He is currently the owner of Bernarducci Gallery, located at 525 West 25th Street in New York, NY. Bernarducci began exhibiting Graffiti art in the 1980s in the East Village while director of Frank Bernarducci Gallery. Bernarducci continues to curate exhibitions featuring emerging and seasoned artists. His gallery is known for exhibiting realist and Photorealist art.

Cheryl Kelley American painter

Cheryl Kelley is an American painter known for her photorealism, especially her paintings of classic and muscle cars. Her work has been featured on the cover of Harper's Magazine and can be seen at the Scott Richards Contemporary Art gallery in San Francisco, California, the Bernarducci·Meisel Gallery in New York City, New York, and the Seven Bridges Foundation in Greenwich, Connecticut. In 2009 and 2011 she was a finalist for the Hunting Art Prize, and in 2012 she received a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant. The art collectors' resource Artsy considers her one of ten "Masters of Photorealism".

Nathan Walsh is a contemporary realist painter living and working in Wales, United Kingdom. While he paints in his studio in Wales, he travels abroad to large cities like New York to research his compositions.

Hynek Martinec Czech painter

Hynek Martinec is a Czech painter, who graduated from the Studio of Classical Painting Techniques under the supervision of Prof. Zdeněk Beran at the Academy of Fine Arts, Prague. After his studies he left for Paris (2005-2007) and since 2007 has been living in London. He received the prestigious BP Young Artist Award (2007) for his hyperrealistic portraits. His paintings are inspired by Old Masters and/or photographs, which link the past with the future, using modern technologies.

References

  1. ↑ Gregory Saraceno (ed.), The Prague Project (Binghamton: Roberson Museum and Science Center, 2004)
  2. ↑ Meisel Gallery Website
  3. 1 2 Gregory Saraceno (ed.), The Prague Project (Binghamton: Roberson Museum and Science Center, 2004)
  4. ↑ See Michael Paraskos, Clive Head (London: Lund Humphries, 2010) passim
  5. ↑ See Michael Paraskos, 'The Real Deal' in The Epoch Times (UK edition of newspaper) 29 April 2009, p.10.
  6. ↑ Sarah Miller, 'The Prague Project' in The Press and Sun Bulletin (New York newspaper), 7 October, 2004, p. 14 (Good Times section)
  7. ↑ Monaco Project
  8. ↑ Press Release
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.