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Trevor Chowning is an American pop artist known for his extensive use of unique materials and strange objects in his work. Paintings have featured precious metals such as gold or silver leaf, and have included everything from antique hummingbird feathers, genuine diamonds, animal bones and obsolete pieces of NASA spacecraft among other things.
Before picking up the paintbrush, Chowning worked in the New York City music scene and as a Hollywood talent manager and producer representing Johnny Cash's band and MTV celebrities such as Tina Barta. He is widely credited with reviving the career of Cash's band after the singer's death. His TV and film career spans projects such as "Lone Star" for Fox TV, with other projects for Universal Studios, and Doug Liman of Hypnotic (Director of Swingers, Go, Bourne Identity, Mr. & Mrs. Smith). Chowning acted as casting director for the Victor Buhler film Chaperone, which later won the Martin Scorsese Director's Award and was nominated for an Academy Award. He presently works as a Producer in film, television and online media with several feature and short films in development and production.
He was noted in 2007 for his controversial art piece "Lindsay Lohan Child's Costume" which was originally censored at the World of Wonder gallery but later placed back on exhibit. His "Damien Hearse" homage to Damien Hirst was a large model hearse cast in metal and covered with over 3,000 rhinestones. Chowning's 2008 body of work included a silver leafed painting of the James Dean death car for the "DepARTed" gallery show and a revealing look at Madonna for the "Dial M for Madonna" group show, both in Hollywood, CA. An art show celebrating the American election opened in Los Angeles in October 2008 titled "Hollywood D.C.- Lights, Camera, Election!" and showcased some of his newer work.
On January 20, 2009 the artist revealed his Inauguration Portrait of Barack Obama titled "Inspiration". The painting featured an optimistic President Obama in the foreground, with an ethereal Abraham Lincoln laying a guiding hand upon the new leader's shoulder.
In the summer of 2013 Chowning was chosen to create the official "Masterpiece Edition: Portland" bottle for Absolut Vodka. His four-foot tall replica was displayed on the city's waterfront during summer festivities.
Diesel Jeans of Italy sponsored his three-month solo exhibit at their Portland, OR store. It was Chowning's longest running exhibition to date and featured over a dozen original works, including a Fabergé egg replica made from a real Peanut M&M paved in real diamonds and presented beneath a glass dome.
His close friend, the actor Daniel Franzese has curated several art exhibits in Los Angeles and has included Chowning in every show to date. Franzese's interest in Chowning's art began when the artist gave him a small handmade ornament featuring the likeness of the rapper Notorious B.I.G.
Trevor Chowning is the creator and trademark holder of "¥£$", the combination of monetary symbols for the Yen, British Pound, and United States Dollar features in his artwork in a series of prints and posters. One of his original paintings featuring the slogan utilizes gold leaf for the symbols and is studded with thirty genuine diamonds.
As of 2009, Chowning is a supporting artist of the Aspie Art project that benefits artists who have Asperger syndrome, a condition on the autism spectrum.[ citation needed ]
Chowning worked as an A&R representative and studio manager for Antique Boutique Audio in New York City before relocating to Southern California. While with AB Audio he signed former Death Comet Crew founder Shinichi Shimokawa, Grammy Award Nominee Larry Tee, Alexi DeLano among others. He also worked with NASA club founder, Scotto, hosting a weekly night at NYC's club Carbon, the same venue that was hosting Michael Alig's club night at the time of his arrest for murder, as depicted in the film Party Monster .
He is the Los Angeles liaison for the Indiana Media Industry Network (IMIN), an organization that worked to successfully pass a tax incentive bill to aid filmmakers wishing to shoot in his home state of Indiana. In March 2005 he accompanied actor Sean Astin, an IMIN supporter, to Indiana where the star spoke at the Statehouse and met with then-Governor Mitch Daniels to gain support for the bill. He works alternately from studios in Indiana and rural Oregon.
Stuckism is an international art movement founded in 1999 by Billy Childish and Charles Thomson to promote figurative painting as opposed to conceptual art. By May 2017 the initial group of 13 British artists had expanded to 236 groups in 52 countries.
The Young British Artists, or YBAs—also referred to as Brit artists and Britart—is a loose group of visual artists who first began to exhibit together in London in 1988. Many of the YBA artists graduated from the BA Fine Art course at Goldsmiths, in the late 1980s, whereas some from the group had trained at Royal College of Art.
Damien Steven Hirst is an English artist, entrepreneur, and art collector. He is one of the Young British Artists (YBAs) who dominated the art scene in the UK during the 1990s. He is reportedly the United Kingdom's richest living artist, with his wealth estimated at US$384 million in the 2020 Sunday Times Rich List. During the 1990s his career was closely linked with the collector Charles Saatchi, but increasing frictions came to a head in 2003 and the relationship ended.
The Saatchi Gallery is a London gallery for contemporary art and an independent charity opened by Charles Saatchi in 1985. Exhibitions which drew upon the collection of Charles Saatchi, starting with US artists and minimalism, moving to the Damien Hirst-led Young British Artists, followed by shows purely of painting, led to Saatchi Gallery becoming a recognised authority in contemporary art globally. It has occupied different premises, first in North London, then the South Bank by the River Thames, and finally in Chelsea, Duke of York's HQ, its current location. In 2019 Saatchi Gallery became a registered charity and begun a new chapter in its history. Recent exhibitions include the major solo exhibition of the artist JR, JR: Chronicles, and London Grads Now in September 2019 lending the gallery spaces to graduates from leading fine art schools who experienced the cancellation of physical degree shows due to the pandemic.
Marcus Harvey is an English artist and painter, one of the Young British Artists (YBAs).
Freeze is the title of an art exhibition that took place in July 1988 in an empty London Port Authority building at Surrey Docks in London Docklands. Its main organiser was Damien Hirst. It was significant in the subsequent development of the Young British Artists.
Stella Vine is an English artist, who lives and works in London. Her work is figurative painting, with subjects drawn from personal life, as well as from rock stars, royalty, and other celebrities.
Paul Arthur Harvey is a British musician and Stuckist artist, whose work was used to promote the Stuckists' 2004 show at the Liverpool Biennial. His paintings draw on pop art and the work of Alphonse Mucha, and often depict celebrities, including Madonna.
Daniel Franzese is an American actor, comedian, and activist best known for his roles in director Larry Clark's Bully and as Damian in Tina Fey's 2004 feature film Mean Girls. Franzese is the creator of several live comedy shows, including the 2011 rock opera Jersey Shoresical: A Frickin' Rock Opera! and his one-man stand-up performance I've Never Really Made the Kind of Money to Become a Mess in 2013.
Euan Macleod is a New Zealand-born artist. Macleod was born in Christchurch, New Zealand and moved to Sydney, Australia in 1981, where he lives and works. He received a Certificate in Graphic Design from Christchurch Technical College in 1975 and a Diploma in Fine Arts (Painting) from the University of Canterbury in 1979. As well as pursuing his art he also teaches painting at the National Art School in Sydney.
Art intervention is an interaction with a previously existing artwork, audience, venue/space or situation. It has the auspice of conceptual art and is commonly a form of performance art. It is associated with the Viennese Actionists, the Dada movement and Neo-Dadaists. Stuckists have made extensive use of it to affect perceptions of artworks they oppose and as a protest against existing interventions.
Adrian Searle is the chief art critic of The Guardian newspaper in Britain, and has been writing for the paper since 1996. Previously he was a painter.
Stuckist demonstrations since 2000 have been a key part of the Stuckist art group's activities and have succeeded in giving them a high-profile both in Britain and abroad. Their primary agenda is the promotion of painting and opposition to conceptual art.
Adam Cvijanovic is a painter based in New York City who was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He paints in large-scale format often using Tyvek sheeting as a substrate, which allows his work to be easily installed at multiple locations. His work is concerned with exposing the historical and enduring hubris of American culture, painting forms that depict the search for and physical manifestation of American power and success on a monumental scale. He is represented by Postmasters Gallery in New York.
Rodney McMillian is an artist based in Los Angeles. McMillian is a Professor of Sculpture at the UCLA School of Arts and Architecture at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Art historians and philosophers of art have long had classificatory disputes about art regarding whether a particular cultural form or piece of work should be classified as art. Disputes about what does and does not count as art continue to occur today.
Neo-conceptual art describes art practices in the 1980s and particularly 1990s to date that derive from the conceptual art movement of the 1960s and 1970s. These subsequent initiatives have included the Moscow Conceptualists, United States neo-conceptualists such as Sherrie Levine and the Young British Artists, notably Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin in the United Kingdom, where there is also a Stuckism counter-movement and criticism from the 1970s conceptual art group Art and Language.
The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living is an artwork created in 1991 by Damien Hirst, an English artist and a leading member of the "Young British Artists". It consists of a preserved tiger shark submerged in formaldehyde in a glass-panel display case. It was originally commissioned in 1991 by Charles Saatchi, who sold it in 2004 to Steven A. Cohen for an undisclosed amount, widely reported to have been at least $8 million. However, the title of Don Thompson's book, The $12 Million Stuffed Shark: The Curious Economics of Contemporary Art, suggests a higher figure.
For the Love of God is a sculpture by artist Damien Hirst produced in 2007. It consists of a platinum cast of an 18th-century human skull encrusted with 8,601 flawless diamonds, including a pear-shaped pink diamond located in the forehead that is known as the Skull Star Diamond. The skull's teeth are original, and were purchased by Hirst in London. The artwork is a memento mori, or reminder of the mortality of the viewer.
Ben Moore is a British art curator, entrepreneur and artist. He is the founder and curator of Art Below, a contemporary art organisation that places art in public spaces and has had shows in England, Germany, Japan and the United States. He is also the founder and curator of Art Wars, an exhibition of designs based on the Imperial Stormtrooper helmets from Star Wars. In 2021, Moore was part of the Art Wars NFT project which received some publicity.