Untangling is a color photograph created by Canadian photographer Jeff Wall, in 1994. It is a staged photograph, like most of his pictures, depicting a scene that takes place in a basement workshop where, in the foreground, a mechanic tries to untagle a large pile of rope. The photograph is a color cibachrome transparency, and is exhibited in a lightbox. [1]
Wall takes often inspiration from painting and cinema, among other mediums, to create his staged photographs. This one was staged in a studio, where it was recreated what seems to be a typical basement workshop, with two actors impersonating a mechanic and a possible costumer. The mechanic is seen seated at the left on a pile of rubber tubing. He wears mechanic attire and is starting patiently the hard work of untangling a very large pile of rope, lying in the ground, in front of him. His concerned expression reflects the large amount of work and time that he still has to do. In the background there are two shelves with dozens of objects, mostly mechanic related, and at the left, a man is seen looking carefully, possibly in search of an item, while apparently unaware of the man's work at the foreground. [2]
Art critic Robert Nelson states concerning the photograph: "The coils sprawl across the foreground in a convulsive corkscrew, recalling the ancient Laocoön sculpture group./ The symbolism of this motif and the air of resignation in the gent who faces the challenge make a potent emblem of the impossible, or the depressing work of recognising it. The photograph translates the labours of Hercules to a thing of the mind, where they make our energy - or lack of it - uncannily transparent." [3]
There are copies of this photograph at the National Gallery of Victoria, in Melbourne, and at the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg. [4] [5] The copy held at the National Gallery of Victoria was allegedly bought by $AU 1,000,000, in 2006, but it was a private sale and its real price is unconfirmed. [6]
Bernardo Bellotto, was an Italian urban landscape painter or vedutista, and printmaker in etching famous for his vedute of European cities – Dresden, Vienna, Turin, and Warsaw. He was the student and nephew of the renowned Giovanni Antonio Canal, known as Canaletto, and sometimes used the latter's illustrious name, signing himself as Bernardo Canaletto. In Germany and Poland, Bellotto called himself by his uncle's name, Canaletto. This caused some confusion, however Bellotto’s work is more sombre in color than Canaletto's and his depiction of clouds and shadows brings him closer to Dutch painting.
Jeffrey Wall, OC, RSA is a Canadian photographer. He is artist best known for his large-scale back-lit Cibachrome photographs and art history writing. Early in his career, he helped define the Vancouver School and he has published essays on the work of his colleagues and fellow Vancouverites Rodney Graham, Ken Lum, and Ian Wallace. His photographic tableaux often take Vancouver's mixture of natural beauty, urban decay, and postmodern and industrial featurelessness as their backdrop.
Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe – originally titled Le Bain – is a large oil on canvas painting by Édouard Manet created in 1862 and 1863.
Compositing is the process or technique of combining visual elements from separate sources into single images, often to create the illusion that all those elements are parts of the same scene. Live-action shooting for compositing is variously called "chroma key", "blue screen", "green screen" and other names. Today, most compositing is achieved through digital image manipulation. Pre-digital compositing techniques, however, go back as far as the trick films of Georges Méliès in the late 19th century, and some are still in use.
Andreas Gursky is a German photographer and professor at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, Germany.
Christ Falling on the Way to Calvary, also known as Lo Spasimo or Il Spasimo di Sicilia, is a painting by the Italian High Renaissance painter Raphael, of c. 1514–16, now in the Museo del Prado in Madrid. It is an important work for the development of his style.
Günther Förg was a German painter, graphic designer, sculptor and photographer. His abstract style was influenced by American abstract painting.
Sam Gilliam was an American abstract painter, sculptor, and arts educator. Born in Mississippi, and raised in Kentucky, Gilliam spent his entire adult life in Washington, D.C., eventually being described as the "dean" of the city's arts community. Originally associated with the Washington Color School, a group of Washington-area artists that developed a form of abstract art from color field painting in the 1950s and 1960s, Gilliam moved beyond the group's core aesthetics of flat fields of color in the mid-60s by introducing both process and sculptural elements to his paintings.
Paul Graham is a British fine-art and documentary photographer. He has published three survey monographs, along with 26 other dedicated books.
Burhan C. Doğançay was a Turkish-American artist. Doğançay is best known for tracking walls in various cities across the world for half a century, integrating them in his artistic work.
Daubigny's Garden, painted three times by Vincent van Gogh, depicts the enclosed garden of Charles-François Daubigny, a painter whom Van Gogh admired throughout his life.
Work (1852–1865) is a painting by Ford Madox Brown that is generally considered to be his most important achievement. It exists in two versions. The painting attempts to portray, both literally and analytically, the totality of the Victorian social system and the transition from a rural to an urban economy. Brown began the painting in 1852 and completed it in 1865, when he set up a special exhibition to show it along with several of his other works. He wrote a detailed catalogue explaining the significance of the picture.
The Pioneer is a 1904 painting by Australian artist Frederick McCubbin. The painting is a triptych; the three panels tell a story of a free selector and his family making a life in the Australian bush. It is widely considered one of the masterpieces of Australian art.
Robin Rhode is a South African artist based in Berlin. He has made wall drawings, photographs and sculptures.
James Welling is an American artist, photographer and educator living in New York City. He attended Carnegie-Mellon University where he studied drawing with Gandy Brodie and at the University of Pittsburgh where he took modern dance classes. Welling transferred to the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, California in 1971 and received a B.F.A. and an M.F.A. in the School of Art. At Cal Arts, he studied with John Baldessari, Wolfgang Stoerchle and Jack Goldstein.
Ginger Riley Munduwalawala was an Aboriginal Australian contemporary artist. He was born in South East Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory of Australia in the Limmen Bight area, 45 kilometers inland from the Gulf of Carpentaria coast. His first language was Marra, now critically endangered.
The Triptych of Temptation of St. Anthony is an oil painting on wood panels by the Early Netherlandish painter Hieronymus Bosch, dating from around 1501. The work portrays the mental and spiritual torments endured by Saint Anthony the Great, one of the most prominent of the Desert Fathers of Egypt in the late 3rd and early 4th centuries. The Temptation of St. Anthony was a popular subject in Medieval and Renaissance art. In common with many of Bosch's works, the triptych contains much fantastic imagery. The painting hangs in the Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga in Lisbon.
Sharon Lockhart is an American artist whose work considers social subjects primarily through motion film and still photography, often engaging with communities to create work as part of long-term projects. She received her BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1991 and her MFA from Art Center College of Design in 1993. She has been a Radcliffe fellow, a Guggenheim fellow, and a Rockefeller fellow. Her films and photographic work have been widely exhibited at international film festivals and in museums, cultural institutions, and galleries around the world. She was an associate professor at the University of Southern California's Roski School of Fine Arts, resigning from the school in August 2015 in response to the continued administrative turmoil at Roski to take a position at the California Institute for the Arts. Lockhart lives and works in Los Angeles, California.
The Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg is an art museum in central Wolfsburg, Lower Saxony, opened 1994. It presents modern and contemporary art and is financed by the Kunststiftung Volkswagen.
Art Institute of Chicago II, Chicago is a color photograph taken by German photographer Thomas Struth, in 1990. It was part of the series Museum Photographs, depicting several museums and monuments all over the world, and their visitors. In this case it was the second that he took in the Art Institute of Chicago.