Ken Kelly was an American fantasy artist in the style of Frank Frazetta.
Kelly is best-known for his rock and heavy metal album cover artwork, as well as his illustrations for American horror magazines.
Tag Archives: art
RIP Jacques Villeglé (1926 – 2022)
Jacques Villeglé was a French mixed-media artist best known for his work in décollage, the process of tearing (lacerating) posters from city walls revealing other posters underneath, thus arriving at new compositions.
His work Ach Alma Manetro (1949) is in the Centre Pompidou.
RIP Cynthia Plaster Caster (1947 – 2022)
Cynthia Plaster Caster was an American visual artist known for creating plaster casts of celebrities’ erect penises.
If you are looking for a recording in mainstream cinema of a penis being cast, check Nancy Godfrey‘s work in W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism (1971).
RIP Hermann Nitsch (1938 – 2022)
Hermann Nitsch was an Austrian artist who is known for his transgressive performance art.
His seven minute short “Maria-Conception-Action: Hermann Nitsch” (1969) illustrates how the past is a foreign country.
The performance is a combination of a sadomasochistic performance, artsploitation and carnography.
A typical scene from Herman Nitsch’s happenings featured cruelty, sexuality, blood and violence.
In the “Maria-Conception-Action: Hermann Nitsch” a young women is crucified and defiled with a disemboweled lamb carcass.
That film is not featured on YouTube but it can be faintly seen on footage of a concert by the band Concrete Flesh.
The closest I ever came to witnessing a spectacle like this is, is seeing Tier Mon (1988) by La Fura dels Baus in Antwerp when I was 23. And then there was Abattoir Fermé, the Belgian theater group whose aesthetics sometimes flirt somewhat with that of Nitsch.
RIP Dan Graham (1942 – 2022)
Dan Graham was an American visual artist known for such artworks as Belgian Fun (2004).
RIP John Wesley (1928 – 2022)
John Wesley was an American painter, known for his spareness of technique and flat-style of painting.
RIP Jacques Calonne (1930 – 2022)
Jacques Calonne was a Belgian artist, actor and musician.
RIP Christian Boltanski (1944 – 2021)
Christian Boltanski was a French artist working in sculpture, photography, painting, and filmmaking, known for such works as Personnes (2010).
RIP Christo (1935–2009)
Christo was a Bulgarian-American artist best-known for wrapping up monument-sized objects.
Grotesques in Antwerp
The Antwerp Plantin-Moretus Museum currently hosts Grotesques. A fascinating fantasy world.
Highlights include four of the Pourtraicture ingenieuse de plusieurs façon de Masques by Cornelis Floris de Vriendt and two prints of caricatures by Philippe de Soye and Hans Liefrinck I after Leonardo da Vinci.
Some photographic impressions can be found below.
One of the four
Pourtraicture ingenieuse de plusieurs façon de Masques by Cornelis Floris de Vriendt
One of the four
Pourtraicture ingenieuse de plusieurs façon de Masques by Cornelis Floris de Vriendt
One of the four
Pourtraicture ingenieuse de plusieurs façon de Masques by Cornelis Floris de Vriendt
One of the four
Pourtraicture ingenieuse de plusieurs façon de Masques by Cornelis Floris de Vriendt
One of the
caricatures after Leonardo da Vinci
One of the
caricatures after Leonardo da Vinci
See also: Flemish fantastique and grotesque