Esteban Francés (1913-1976) was a Spanish surrealist painter.
Francés was an important member of the surrealist movements in Paris, Mexico, and New York City. He fled the Spanish Civil War and traveled to Paris where he became a member of the surrealist circle that included André Breton, Yves Tanguy, Óscar Domínguez, Victor Brauner, Roberto Matta and Gordon Onslow Ford, amongst others. In the 1930s Francés became romantically involved with the important Spanish/Mexican painter Remedios Varo.
Irène Hamoir re-tells the story of a violent argument, which took place if 1938, between Dominguez, Louis Scutenaire and Francés. Victor Brauner attempted to protect Esteban and was hit by a glass thrown by Domínguez. He was permanently deprived of his left eye ás a result. Also present were Paul Éluard, Georges Hugnet, Wolfgang Paalen, Benjamin Péret and Tanguy

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«David Hamilton (15 April 1933 – 25 November 2016) was a British photographer and film director best known for his nude images of young women and girls
His artistic skills began to emerge during a job at an architect's office. At age 20, he went to Paris, where he worked as graphic designer for Peter Knapp of Elle magazine. After becoming known and successful, he was hired away from Elle by Queen magazine in London as art director. Hamilton soon realised his love for Paris, however, and after returning there became the art director of Printemps, the city's largest department store. Hamilton began photographing commercially while still employed, and the dreamy, grainy style of his images quickly brought him success.....»

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«Tony Fomison (12 July 1939 – 7 February 1990) was a notable artist in New Zealand. He was an important post-war visual artist in the country and influenced New Zealand art by incorporating elements of narrative and myth into contemporary art.
Fomison was born in Christchurch. He studied sculpture at Canterbury Art School, where he was taught by Rudi Gopas, and during these early years he continued an interest in archaeology which had begun in high school. He also compiled photographic essays during this period. Fomison began painting in earnest in 1960-61. In 1964, he travelled to England and Spain and lived in the former for three years before returning to Christchurch in 1967.During his time in England, he was hospitalised at Banstead Hospital after succumbing to drug addiction.
Fomison moved to Auckland, the largest Polynesian city in the world, in 1973. From that time, his work was influenced by Polynesian culture, including attempts to help revive the skill of traditional Tā moko tattooing. At around this time he met fellow artist Colin McCahon, with whom he struck up a long close friendship.
Fomison was tattooed by Samoan master tattooist Sua Sulu'ape Paulo II with a pe'a, the traditional male tattoo of Samoa.Only a few Europeans have received the traditional Samoan tattoo.
In 1985 Fomison was the inaugural recipient of the Rita Angus Residency. Media reports from the time state that he intended to spend his time in Wellington on the residency developing his contacts with the local Samoan community.
Fomison died at Waitangi during the commemorations of the 150th anniversary of the signing of New Zealand's founding document, the Treaty of Waitangi.»

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Emerson Woelffer (July 27, 1914 – February 2, 2003) was a prominent abstract expressionist artist and painter born in Chicago. He studied Education at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago between 1935 and 1937. In 1938 he joined the WPA Arts Program. In 1949 he taught at Black Mountain College at the request of Buckminster Fuller. Between 1949 and 1959, he lived in Yucatán, Mexico and Forio d'Ischia Naples, Italy. In 1960 he moved to Los Angeles, California and from 1969 to 1973 he taught at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, California. From 1974 and 1992 he taught at The Otis Art Institute (now called Otis College of Art and Design) in Los Angeles, serving as Chair of the Painting Department from 1974 to 1978.

In 1970, he was artist-in-residence at the Honolulu Museum of Art. He received the Pollock-Krasner Grant in 1984 and the Francis J. Greenburger Award, in conjunction with Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum of New York City in 1988. In 1991 he received an Honorary Doctorate Degree from Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles. He felt such a strong attachment to Otis that he left his estate to the college to set up a scholarship fund to benefit future artists. He died in Los Angeles in 2003

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Leslie George Hurry (10 February 1909– 20 November 1978) was a British artist and set designer for ballet, theatre and opera.
Hurry was born in London, where his father, A. G. Hurry, was a funeral director in St John's Wood. Leslie Hurray was educated at Haberdashers' Aske's Boys' School before, resisting pressure to join the family business, he attended St. John's Wood Art School and the Royal Academy Schools. Leaving the Royal Academy School of Painting in 1931, before the completion of his five-year scholarship, his first commission was from a brewing firm to decorate a chain of saloon bars with landscape murals.
A papier-mâché tray by Hurry, showing a circus artiste hanging off the back of a black horse

 In the second half of the 1930s he wandered Britain and Ireland painting landscapes. Depressed with his work and seeking inspiration to develop a personal style, he moved to Brittany then Paris, but was forced to return to Britain due to health problems.
In 1939, found unfit for military service and disturbed by the war, he isolated himself in his secluded cottage at Thaxted, Essex. At this time he was befriended by Grace Sholto Douglas, an elderly patron of arts who died in 1942. In 1940–41 he produced two books of intricate automatic drawings that were exhibited at the Redfern Gallery, leading to his acclaim as an «ultra-surrealist».
His first stage work was for a production of Hamlet for the Sadler's Wells Ballet in 1942, work commissioned by Robert Helpmann, who had seen his paintings in a London gallery. He subsequently worked for Sadler's Wells, the Old Vic, Aldwych Theatre, Glyndebourne, the Royal Opera House, the Royal Shakespeare Company and the theatre in Canada, particularly in Stratford, Ontario.
He left a large corpus of paintings, including abstract, portraiture and landscape works.

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I would like to invite you to present your art work on my blog Exposition. Please, send me pictures of your work on my e-mail address: [email protected] Description should include; your name, some details about your work. All art work will be published on the blog free of charge.

Milena Olesinska

Exposition Art Blog

«Ferruccio Bortoluzzi (December 6, 1920 – May 25, 2007) was an Italian modern painter, he was one of the founders of the Centro di Unità della Cultura L'Arco together with venetian artists and writers.
Born in Venice in 1920, Ferruccio Bortoluzzi received his diploma from the Art Institute there in 1947.He has taught for the same Institute, the Artistic High School as well as for the Senior Course of Industrial Design. Immediately following the war, he was one of the founders of „L'Arco“ Cultural Center in Venice. From 1943-2003 he had several one-man shows both in Italy and abroad, for example the Museum of Modern Art of Cà Pesaro (1982 and 2003) and Fondazione Querini Stampalia (2001). Bortoluzzi's works can be seen in public and private collections in Italy and abroad. A contemporary documentation of his artistic activities can be found at the Historical Archive of Contemporary Art in Venice. The artist died in Venice in 2007.»

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«The Kunsthaus Tacheles (Art House Tacheles) was an art center in Berlin, Germany, a large (9,000 m2 (97,000 sq ft)) building and sculpture park on Oranienburger Straße in the district known as Mitte. Huge, colorful graffiti-style murals are painted on the exterior walls, and modern art sculptures are featured inside. The building houses an artists collective which is threatened with eviction.
Originally called Friedrichsstadtpassagen, it was built as a department store in the Jewish quarter (Scheunenviertel) of Berlin, next to the synagogue. Serving as a Nazi prison for a short while, it was later partially demolished. After the Berlin Wall had come down, it was taken over by artists, who called it Tacheles, Yiddish for „straight talking“. The building contained studios and workshops, a nightclub, and a cinema. Outside, the garden featured an open-air exhibition of metal sculptures as well as galleries and studios for sculptors and painters. A part of the garden still remains open to the public.
The house was finally closed on September 4, 2012. Tacheles Metallwerkstatt, the sculpture park, was open until March 2013, when the financial group Nordbank decided to make money out of it.»

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Robert Mapplethorpe (November 4, 1946 – March 9, 1989) was an American photographer, known for his sensitive yet blunt treatment of controversial subject-matter in the large-scale, highly stylized black and white medium of photography. His work featured an array of subjects, including celebrity portraits, male and female nudes, self-portraits and still-life images of flowers. His most controversial work is that of the underground BDSM scene in the late 1960s and early 1970s of New York City. The homoeroticism of this work fuelled a national debate over the public funding of controversial artwork.

 Robert took areas of dark human consent and made them into art. He worked without apology, investing the homosexual with grandeur, masculinity, and enviable nobility. Without affectation, he created a presence that was wholly male without sacrificing feminine grace. He was not looking to make a political statement or an announcement of his evolving sexual persuasion. He was presenting something new, something not seen or explored as he saw and explored it. Robert sought to elevate aspects of male experience, to imbue homosexuality with mysticism. As Cocteau said of a Genet poem, «His obscenity is never obscene.»
    — Patti Smith, Just Kids.

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