Contemporary Art by Artist Steve Koll

When land art is threathened by land developers, what do you do? The Dia Art Foundation is hoping to raise $1.1m by the end of next month to protect 6,000 acres of land surrounding Walter De Maria’s land art installation Lightning Field.

The money will be used to pay a ranching family in western New Mexico, who own the land, for the right to restrict real estate and industrial development. This would create a three-mile radius around the installation. The restrictions on the property will bind all future landowners and become part of the chain of title for the estate. Read more →

I’ve already received the same feedback from several people: “You’re still a young artist, searching to find the way to expression”. And they are all right! When I made my series “Touch”, it felt very much “me”: a rational approach to art with an emotional subject. It’s typically me to tried to incorporate a balanced idea into everything. I can’t help it that I’m such a 50/50 person. With me, things are never a OR b, no, they’re always a AND b. Read more →

Last weekend we visited the 5th Berlin Biennale. And honestly, it was quite disappointing. Two years ago, the biennale was dispersed among several locations in the Auguststrasse, which made the exhibitions easy to visit.

This time the program is made up of a day and a night part. The day part consistsof 4 exhibitions on 4 locations throughout town.

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On Friday 25 (18-22 pm), Saturday 26 (10am-6pm) and Sunday 27 (10am-6pm) April 2008 you can visit the third edition of ‘Art Route Leuven’.
During these three days about 40 artists in Leuven open their studio to you.
The editions 2006 and 2007 were a big success. With thirteen new artists this edition will be still more interesting and varied.
‘Art-route-Leuven’ gives you a unique opportunity to explore the places where artists are active. Discover their creations, sources of inspiration, techniques, atmosphere and work processes. And don’t hesitate to ask questions: the focus lies on the meeting between artist and public.
With the map you can plan a route along the studios of your choice. You can visit as many artists as you want following your own choice.
Get inspired, watch and enjoy. And who knows: perhaps you will take home the work of art of your dreams.
You’ll find the free printed leaflet and the map at the artists’ studios, at ‘In&Uit Leuven’ and at the principal cultural centres in Leuven (from the beginning of April).
You can also find the map, the addresses and the pictures on this website (in Dutch): www.kunstroute-leuven.be.

Opening hours:

Friday 25 April 2008: 18-22 pm
Saturday 26 April 2008: 10am-6pm
Sunday 27 April 2008: 10am-6pm

Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray and Francis Picabia were at the cutting edge of art in the first half of the twentieth century, and made a lasting impression on modern and contemporary art.  Duchamp invented the concept of the ‘readymade’: presenting an everyday object as an artwork, Man Ray pioneered avant-garde photographic and film techniques and Picabia’s use of kitsch, popular or low-brow imagery in his paintings undermined artistic conventions.

Their shared outlook on life and art, with a taste for jokes, irony and the erotic, forged a friendship that provided support and inspiration. At the heart of the Dada movement and moving in the same artistic circles, they discussed ideas and collaborated, echoing and responding to each other’s works. Duchamp, Man Ray, Picabia explores their affinities and parallels, uncovering a shared approach to questioning the nature of art.

• Where: Tate Modern, London
• When: 21 Feb -  26 May 2008

(Source: Tate Modern website)

Internet trend watchers have been talking about it for years now: web2.0. A term for the “new” internet, version 2.0 (as if there ever was a version 1.0), that empowers the surfer. Before you had the internet publisher and the surfer that read it all. Now the surfer turned publisher and vice versa. Everyone is contributing to content on the world wide web, and everyone is linking with everyone. User generated content and social networking go hand in hand in the web2.0 world.

Myspace, Facebook, Linkedin, Plaxo (Pulse) are all examples of typical web2.0 websites where the surfer is in control of what he writes, who can see it, and with whom he’d like to be connected online. I don’t have a myspace-profile, neither will you find me on facebook, but I do have linkedin account and I’m on Plaxo pulse. These are general web2.0 sites, catering to everyone’s taste.

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Companies with good taste and lots of money to spare often open their own museum. Daimler AG is no exception. The Daimler Art Collection was started in 1977 and currently includes about 1300 works by German and international artists. The collection focuses on abstract and geometrical pictorial concepts, from which it derives its distinctive character.

You will have noticed that I have switched to more geometrical concepts recently, hence my liking  for the Daimler Art Collection. I hope I’ll find some time to visit the Daimler Contemporary in April when I’m visiting Berlin for the Biennial. There’s also a special sculpture exhibition around Potzdamer Platz with works by Keith Haring, Jeff Koons, François Morellet, Nam June Paik, Robert Rauschenberg, Mark di Suvero and Jean Tinguely.

More info: Daimler Collection

A convenient subtitle for this painting could be “Crossing the border”. This 85 x 85 cm oil painting is constructed using three square shapes, nested in each other. The white, unpainted square separates the black and the red. But paint is a powerful an rebellious medium succeeding in crossing the border with the white spacer. The black and the red oil paint penetrate the white space in the upper right corner of the red square. Oil paint cannot be forced into a shape or form, it is an autonomous medium, doing as it pleases. No matter how convinced the painter is that he controls the paint, the latter will always prevail.

It is an interesting synthesis to see that a painting’s subject, namely the tension between the presence and absence of touch, can be demonstrated so materialistically as two dabs of differently coloured paint approaching each other; crossing a white gaping void, courageously going agaist the painter’s will.

Paint is sinful.

Getting up at 7:30 in the morning is quite early for a Saturday for me, but I needed to be at the MuHKA in Antwerp at 8 o’clock to enter the preselections for the “Canvascollectie“. Sometime between 8:30 and 9:30 I had to opportunity to present 3 of my works to a professional jury during a 10 minute interview.

4610 artists will be competing during the next weekends, 1280 of them in Antwerp. After this weekend only 77 works (of the +3.500) of the Antwerp participants will be retained for the final exhibition in the Museum of Fine Arts, Bozar in Brussels.  Unfortunately, mine will not be one of them. The judges found my work interesting and encouraged me to continue searching for my modus operandi and to better document my work. The lack of consistency in my oeuvre however was the reason why I couldn’t continue to the next round. The three members of my jury finished their review by motivating me to compete again in a few years should this competition be repeated.

Two coloured planes of texturized oil paint: a smaller black plane and a larger red plane. I love the lamp black and the pure cadmium red, my favourites. Two white planes, unpainted, flat. The white planes communicate with the coloured planes through two touching sides, whereas the black and the red are only in touch with each other through an infinitely small point. Is that the last contact between the red and the black, or the first? Have the planes slided past each other in opposite directions, leaving behind a void of white that will soon fill the entire canvas? Or have they slided diagonally into our view from within the corners of the painting; and are they now experiencing that tentalizing, exciting tension of awaited touch?