Monday, August 3, 2020

Artist of the day, August 3, 2020: Olga Sinclair, a Panamanian visual artist (#1037)

Olga Sinclair (1957), a woman, a mother, a Panamanian visual artist.
Born in Panama City, Republic of Panama. She started her artistic career under the tutelage of her father, the Maestro Alfredo Sinclair. At the early age of 14 she participated in a collective exhibit along with renowned Panamanian artists. In 1976, she began her studies at the School of Applied Arts and Works in Madrid, Spain, followed by a three-year training in classical drawing at Arjona Studios. She then moved to Amsterdam to study the great Dutch masters of the XVIII Century.

Olga returned to Panama and enrolled at the Santa Maria la Antigua University, obtaining a degree in Interior Design in 1984. A year later, she travelled to London to resume her studies, she also worked, presented an exhibition, and had her first encounter with Francis Bacon’s works at the Tate Gallery.

In 1987, she moved to Bolivia as the Cultural Attaché of the Panamanian Embassy. She then lived in Jakarta, Indonesia, for 5 years during which her two daughters, Natasha and Suzanna, were born.

After almost forty years of expressing herself as an artist, and with a deep desire to share human values with children, to awaken their five senses and bring them closer to art in all its expressions, in August 2010, the Olga Sinclair Foundation (FOS for its acronym in Spanish) is born. This non-profit organization aims to encourage the artistic expression, culture and talent of our youth, promoting sociocultural and racial union through the love for art; thus achieving an integral development of human beings in a space of harmony, sensitivity and respect.

Throughout her career, Olga has received various awards, tributes, and national and international recognitions for her artistic and social work. She is a member of a variety of foundations and national councils for the Panamanian society and the environment, and she is the country’s Cultural Ambassador.

Her artwork has toured several continents including America, Asia and Europe, in more than 40 solo and 200 collective exhibitions.


© 2020. All content on this blog is protected by international copyright laws All images are copyrighted © by Olga Sinclair. 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


Ms. Olga Sinclair

Opening night

Installation

Paisaje
1975

La Mantilla de ines
1986

 Nostalgie du dernier rendez-vous
1988

Sin título (Seate woman with glove)
1989

 Untitled
1989

 El Viejo Pescador
1995

Dama con peces
1996

 Bodegón en azul
2002

Sin título
2006

Sin título
2007

Brad Pitt
2007

Sin título
2007

Orion
2009

Sin título
2009

África Mía
2012

 El Salvador
2012

 La Tormenta
2013

 Sin título
2017

 Sin título
2017
Figura En Paisaje
n.d.






Peras
n.d.





Saturday, August 1, 2020

Artist of the day, August 1, 2020: Grete Stern, a German-Argentine photographer (#1057)

Grete Stern (1904 – 1999) was a German-Argentine photographer. Like her husband Horacio Coppola, she helped modernize the visual arts in Argentina, and presented the first exhibition of modern photographic art in Buenos Aires, in 1935.

The daughter of Frida Hochberger and Louis Stern, Grete Stern was born in Elberfeld, Germany. She often visited family in England and attended primary school there. After reaching adulthood, from 1923 to 1925 she studied graphic arts at the Kunstgewerbeschule, Stuttgart, but after a short term working in the field she was inspired by the photography of Edward Weston and Paul Outerbridge to change her focus to photography. Relocating to Berlin, she took private lessons from Walter Peterhans.

In 1930 Stern and Ellen Rosenberg Auerbach founded ringl+pit, a critically acclaimed, prize-winning Berlin based photography and design studio. They used equipment purchased from Peterhans and became well known for innovative work in advertising. The name ringl+pit is after their childhood nicknames (Ringl for Grete, Pit for Ellen).

Intermittently between April 1930 and March 1933, Stern continued her studies with Peterhans at the Bauhaus photography workshop in Dessau, where she met the Argentinian photographer Horacio Coppola. In 1933 the political climate of Nazi Germany led her to emigrate with her brother to England, where Stern set up a new studio, soon to resume her collaboration there with Auerbach.

Stern first traveled to Argentina in the company of her new husband, Horacio Coppola in 1935. The newlyweds mounted an exhibition in Buenos Aires at Sur magazine, which according to the magazine, was the first modern photography exhibition in Argentina. In 1958, she became a citizen of Argentina.

In 1948 Stern began working for Idilio, an illustrated women's magazine, targeted specifically at lower/lower-middle class women. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Stern created Los Sueños as illustrations for the woman's magazine Idilio and its column "El psicoanálisis te ayudará" (Psychoanalysis Will Help You). Readers were encouraged to submit their dreams to be analyzed by the 'experts' as an aid for its readers to dins "self-knowledge and self-aid that would help them succeed in love, family and work". Each week, one dream would be selected, analyzed in depth by the expert, Richard Rest, and then illustrated by Stern through photomontage. Stern created about 150 of these photomontages, of which only 46 survive in negatives. Stern's photomontages are surreal interpretations of the readers' dreams that often subtly pushed back on the traditional values and concepts in Idilio magazine by inserting feminist critique of Argentinian gender roles and the psychoanalytic project in her images. The Idilio series has often been compared to Francisco Goya's Sueños drawings, a series of preliminary drawings for his later body of work, Los Caprichos; they have also been directly compared to Los Caprichos themselves.

Stern provided photographs for the magazine and served for a stint as a photography teacher in Resistencia at the National University of the Northeast in 1959 and continued to teach until 1985.

In 1985, she retired from photography, but lived another 14 years until 1999, dying in Buenos Aires on 24 December at the age of 95.

In 1995 documentarian Juan Mandelbaum made a documentary about Studio Ringl + Pit, which was reviewed in the New York Times In 2005 her work was the subject of an exhibition at New York's Museum of Modern Art called "From Bauhaus to Buenos Aires: Grete Stern and Horatio Coppola."


© 2020. All content on this blog is protected by international copyright laws All images are copyrighted © by Grete Stern 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


Ms. Grete Stern

 Self portrait
1946-47


  D.L.H..
1925

  Profile of a Woman
Berlin, 1928

  Hat and Gloves
1930

 Columbus’s Egg
1930

 Soapsuds
1930

 Petrol Hahn
 1931

 Gyula Kosice
1945

Photomontage for Madí, Ramos Mejía
Argentina, 1946-47

  Dream Nº 6: Untitled
1948

 dilio N° 10: Niño Flo
1948

 Dream Nº 43
1948

 Dream Nº 44: La acusada
1948

 Dream Nº 5
1948

 Dream Nº 6: Dream of animals
1948
 Dream Nº 18: Café Concert
1948

  Dream Nº 22:  Last Kiss
1949

 A dream of danger
1949

Electrical items for the home
1949

 Dream Nº 35: Untitled
1949

 Dream  Nº 15
1949

 Dream Nº 3: Untitled
1949

 Dream Nº 7: Who Will She Be?
1949

 Dream Nº 29
1949

 Dream Nº 37
1949

 Dream N° 13: Consentimiento
1949

 Dream Nº 25: Perspectiva
1949

 Dream Nº 39
1949

 Drean Nº 2: En el andén
1949

 Dream Nº 31: Made in England
1950

 Dream Nº 84: Evasion
1950

 Dream Nº 61: Los suenos de desastres cosmicos
1950

 Dream Nº 5: Botella del mar
1950

 Dream Nº 16: Mermaid
1950

 Dream Nº 26: The Eternal Eye
1951