Artist of the day

Thursday, April 2, 2020

Artist of the day, April 2, 2020: Andrew Christofides, Cyprus-born Australian artist (#958)

Andrew Christofides was born in Cyprus and migrated to Australia with his family in 1951. After studying Economics at the University of NSW (1968-71), he traveled to Cyprus and the United Kingdom where he lived from 1974 to 1982.

He completed studies in Fine Art at the Byam Shaw School of Drawing and Painting (1974-75) and the Chelsea School of Art (1975-78) in London, after which he received an Abbey Major Scholarship and a studio residency at the British School in Rome (1978-79). This was followed by the Picker fellowship in Painting at Kingston Polytechnic in London (1979-80). In 1993 he completed a Master of Fine Arts by research at the University of New South Wales.

He has lectured in painting and drawing at various institutions including Reading University and Canterbury College of Art, UK and most recently at the College of Fine Arts, Sydney, where he was Head of Drawing from 2003 until 2012.

Andrew works across both painting and drawing and has been interested in the visual languages of Abstraction and in particular of Geometric Abstraction. His particular interests lie in early Renaissance painting and early European Abstraction and Modernism.

He has had numerous solo exhibitions since 1974 in Australia, New York, London, and Rome, and has exhibited regularly in Sydney and Melbourne since the mid-1980s

© 2020. All content on this blog is protected by international copyright laws All images are copyrighted © by Andrew Christofides. Apart from fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review as permitted under the Copyright Act, the use of any image from this site is prohibited unless prior written permission is obtained. All images used for illustrative purposes only

Mr. Andrew Christofides, Sydney Studio

Untitled Construction. 1979

Untitled Construction. 1984

Grey Construction No. 10. 1989

Relief No- 10. 1991

Grey Painting no. 27. 1993

Relief No 20. 1993

Relief No 19. 1993

Untitled No. 110. 2000

Between Heaven and Hell. 2001

Delta Palestina III. 2001

Marshes. 2001

Odyssey II. 2001

Slave Trade. 2001

Western Gate. 2001

Dark Continent. 2002

Valley of Kings. 2002

Dark Continent. 2003

Ruins. 2004

Mud Brick. 2006

(5, 3, 13) Subtractive, Rotation x1. 2008

Icon for Malevich. 2008

(3, 5, 13) Subtractive, Cluster I. 2011

(3, 5, 8) Subtractive Cluster I. 2012

(2,3,5) x 4, Cluster 2. 2013

(2,3,5) x 4, Cluster 3. 2013

(2, 3, 5) x 15, Fragment I. 2016

(2,3,5) x 15, Fragment 2. 2016

Wednesday, April 1, 2020

Artist of the day, April 1, 2020: Xu Zhen, a Chinese Sculptor, multimedia artist (#957)

Xu Zhen (1977) is a multimedia artist living and working in Shanghai, China. He is a leading figure among the young generation of Chinese artists. His extensive body of work, which includes photography, installation art, and video, entails theatrical humor and social critique. His projects are informed by performance and conceptual art. Xu’s work focuses on human sensitivity and dramatizes the humdrum of urban living.

Xu Zhen’s earlier representative individual works include the video Rainbow (1998), where a man’s back is beaten until it burns red, yet the hand doing the beating is abstracted. This work made him the youngest Chinese artist to have participated in the main thematic exhibition of the Venice Biennale.

His recent pieces survey ancient and new art while fusing Chinese and Western cultures into monumental installations or into new art forms. European Thousand-Hand Classical Sculpture (2014) assembles 19 different Western classical sculptures of various forms; borrowing from the shape of the Thousand-Hand Guanyin (Bodhisattva) in Buddhist iconography.

Xu Zhen’s curatorial experiments and engagement with an alternative art space BizArt (closed in 2010) complement and extend practice. Aside from being an artist, Xu Zhen organizes various art activities and co-curates with other artists. Major exhibitions in Shanghai

Xu Zhen has exhibited internationally at museums and biennales. He won the prize for ‘Best Artist’ at the China Contemporary Art Award in 2004 and ‘Best Artist of the Year’ at the AAC Award in 2014. His work has been collected by many institutions and private collections worldwide including the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, the Centre Pompidou, Paris, the Daimler Collection (Berlin, Germany), The White Rabbit Collection (Chippendale, Australia), the Rubell Famil Collection, (Miami, USA), the Musée d'Art Contemporain de Lyon (Lyon, France), the K11 (Shanghai) Collection, among others.

In 2009, Xu Zhen founded ‘MadeIn Company,’ a contemporary art creation corporate that plays off of the phrase "Made in China". In 2013, MadeIn Company launched the brand “Xu Zhen”.

In 2014, MadeIn Company founded MadeIn Gallery, a gallery dedicated to the promotion of international artists with an accent on contemporary culture development and communication. Located in M50 Shanghai contemporary art district, MadeIn Gallery aims to be a platform for creativity in China, giving access to the latest artworks of established artists as well as younger and lesser-known talents. MadeIn Gallery was featured in the China Focus Section of the Armory Show in New York in March 2014. On this occasion, detailed images of the series Under Heaven by Xu Zhen, commissioned artist of the Armory, was featured in all the visual promotional materials.

© 2020. All content on this blog is protected by international copyright laws All images are copyrighted © by Xu Zhen or assignee. Apart from fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review as permitted under the Copyright Act, the use of any image from this site is prohibited unless prior written permission is obtained. All images used for illustrative purposes only