Alexandre Istrati (1915 in Dorohoi, Romania – 1991 in Paris, France) was a Franco-Romanian painter. He won numerous prizes, including 1953 the Prix Kandinsky.
He married fellow Romanian abstract expressionist painter, Natalia Dumitresco.
«Istrati was an internationally acclaimed exponent of the Abstraction Lyrique movement which was the European equivalent to Abstract Expressionism in America, and included Soulages, Schneider, Germain and Lanskoy amongst others. This magnificent example painted at the height of the movement wonderfully demonstrates his powerful style of sensuously nurtured surfaces and supremacy of colour. This was the apogee of the Modernist era which advocated a purely self-referential autonomy of art and in this work we experience the raw physicality of the paint so dramatically that we no longer read the painting as a two dimensional representation, but as a vibrant and highly energised sculptural object.
Having attended the Academy of Art in Bucharest Istrati arrived in Paris in 1947, where he and his wife, the painter Natalia Dumitresco, were befriended by their compatriot Constantin Brancusi who gave them a studio next to his and helped introduce them to the thriving Paris art scene. Istrati’s uncompromising avant-garde spirit soon became renowned and when he exhibited his first abstract paintings at the Salon des Superindépendants  in 1948 the critics applauded his radical new style. The following year in 1949 he held his first one-man show at Galerie Breteau which was so successful the leading art dealers Collete Allendy and Dénise René both invited Istrati to exhibit at their eponymous galleries. In the circle of these highly influential gallerists Istrati found himself at the forefront of the post-war avant-garde along with artists such as Soulages, Deyrolle, Magnelli and Poliakoff with whom he became particularly close. In 1953 he was awarded the prestigious Prix Kandinsky and was appointed to the committee of the Salon d’Octobre and in the next few years he would also serve on the committees of the Salon Comparaison and the groundbreaking Salon des Réaltités Nouvelles.»

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«Guo Pei swings between reality and fantasy as easily as one walks through a door. This season, she was firmly in wonderland and turned her set at the Cirque d’Hiver into a gateway toward Elysium, a paradise found. In the middle, the tangled roots of a tree served as an organic chandelier, the work of French papier maché artist Charles Macaire.Out came an oblong dress woven in bamboo harvested from the forests of Huangshan mountain ranges in China, beset with golden flowers; 22 more dresses followed, all inspired by flora and richly embellished. Few take florals to quite the lengths that Guo does. She has been considering life as a quasi-mystical force and shaped her work of the season accordingly, letting handcraft take its most exuberant course.Each look pushed the envelope on a technique that the Chinese couturier harnesses when her real-life clients come calling: appliqués, beading, pleating, fringing. Perching on transparent chopines, models resembled flowers in a violently bountiful garden. One purple pleated number looked like a blowsy peony, while another came heavy with pearly drops. Elsewhere, blooms simply climbed up a tabard.For the finale, an immaculate gown with trailing crystals glided across the slick surface of the circular runway. A djembé performer came out as the models took their place around the circular platform. Feathers fell from the rafters. The clapping was as loud as for any performance.At a time where commercial realities abound even in couture, Guo Pei approaches creation is an end unto itself. Who cares if her designs look like they belong in the costume department of an opera house?»
(By Lily Templeton on January 25, 2018 )

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Hidetoshi Nagasawa (30 October 1940 – 24 March 2018) was a Japanese sculptor and architect, who lived and worked in Italy from 1967 until his death in 2018
«Strongly evocative as well as being of highly symbolic and lyrical value, the works of Hidetoshi Nagasawa (Tonei, 1940) are always intensely permeated with Far Eastern philosophy, thereby leading to research that syncretically combines the spiritual heritage of the East and of the West, filtered through crossreferences and ideas stemming from an experiential and human dimension that he has never disregarded. The artist and his family moved from Manchuria to Japan, and already in the 1950s he became familiar with the various trends in avant-garde art through his contact with the Gutaj group as well as by regularly visiting the independent exhibitions organized by the magazine “Yamiuri.”
Nagasawa arrived in Italy in 1967 and was quickly immersed in a climate of intense artistic fervor, in which he came to know artists such Enrico Castellani, Luciano Fabro, Mario Nigro, Antonio Trotta, Gaetano Ongaro. His training as an architect and a designer, combined with his skills as a sculptor, led to the artist’s extensive and visionary spacialism, which was constantly referring back to the heart of a poetics that consisted of balances and counterpoints, of voids and fulls, of shadows that fade into the direction of a concise, essential, condensed sign that allows for a glimpse of the inner nature of objects. The journey as concrete experience and tòpos of Nagasawa’s exploration takes on the value of a relevant passage of symbolic crossing, the transcending of sign-related and cultural borders, the acknowledgment of what is new through a reading of the known.
The artist’s choice of themes associated with a variety of materials such as wood, iron, wax, paper, bamboo makes tangible the sense of a research that is in constant tension between the visible and the invisible, inclined toward a creative idea which moves from its manual nature to a sensory and eidetic horizon via a pathway strewn with material and immaterial “places,” which Nagasawa puts together in the form of habitats, rooms, doors, walls, gardens, fences, boats, screens.
In 1991 Nagasawa showed at Framart Studio in Naples: on view were hitherto unseen works in marble, iron, wood, bronze and silver, including the work in the collection called In medio virtus: this consists of two marble statues made in 1975 by the Pietrasanta sculptor Gugliemo Antognazzi. As they face each other on two plinths covered with white sheets, they mimic antique marble statues, relating the concept of a space-time that is both mental and physical, as if suspended between them.»

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Oil painting on canvas 70cm x 50cm

 
www.iobrazy.com.pl

Robert Beauchamp (1923 – March 1995) was an American figurative painter and arts educator. Beauchamp's paintings and drawings are known for depicting dramatic creatures and figures with expressionistic colors. His work was described in the New York Times as being «both frightening and amusing,».He was a Guggenheim Fellow and a student of Hans Hofmann.Beauchamp described his drawings as painterly, seeking the spontaneity in an image. He would develop a drawing then a painting, and vice versa. His heavily impastoed paintings, often described as sculptures themselves, came from the pouring of paint from a can, with little planning and constant evolution in the medium upon the canvas. He preferred little planning to his creations, believing that an artists work would become stale and repetitive with constant planning.He also created large scale works, at times 70 inches long. Beauchamp had little intention of ever selling his large works, preferring to create them due to the slow and intense experience he received from the process. The large drawings he created on the floor, and the smaller works were created on a table. Paintings were created on either the floor or wall and he described his painting process as «splattering», «pushing the paint around,» and sponging.Animals often appear in his paintings, despite a dislike for domestic animals outside of his artistic creations. He called the characters in his paintings as Beauchamps. Some Beauchamps hold meaning, with Beauchamp rarely sharing the meaning behind the symbols and characters. He made up the creatures himself, seeking to emphasize the character of each

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«Hélio Oiticica (1937–1980) was one of the most innovative Brazilian artists of the twentieth century and is now recognised as a highly significant figure in the development of contemporary art. Oiticica produced an outstanding body of work, which had its origins in the legacy of European Modernism as it developed in Brazil in the 1950s. But his unique and radical investigations led Oiticica to develop his artistic production in ever more inventive directions.
Through his work he was to challenge the traditional boundaries of art, and its relationship with life, and to undermine the separation of the art-object from the viewer, whom he turned into an active participant. Among Oiticica’s most original achievements was his inventive and uncompromising use of colour.
This exhibition explores the dimension of colour as a vital focus of his work, from his early career onwards. It includes several related series of works which unfold in sequence, showing the conceptual and technical processes that led to the artist’s liberation of colour from the twodimensional realm of painting out into space, to be walked around and through, looked into, manipulated, inhabited and experienced. Oiticica emerged as an artist during a period of optimism in Brazil, before the utopian dream of a modern society was thwarted by the oppressive military regime in the 1960s. In the cultural sphere this period saw many new developments: the instigation of progressive architectural projects by Lúcio Costa, Oscar Niemeyer and others; important innovations in the worlds of avant-garde film, music, poetry, theatre and choreography; the establishment of the international Sao Paulo Biennale; and the founding of museums of modern art in both Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo....»

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Lilly Fenichel (1927-2016), was an American painter who explored abstraction through a wide range of media and approaches, with her various periods linked together by a common emphasis on color harmonies and expressive, often calligraphic gesture.Her earliest work is associated with second-generation Bay Area Abstract Expressionism.Lilly Fenichel was born in Vienna, Austria, to a Jewish family. Her father was a doctor and her mother a fashion designer; the psychoanalyst Otto Fenichel was her uncle. In 1939, following the Nazi invasion of Austria, her family fled the country, going first to the United Kingdom and then to the United States, where they settled in Hollywood.Fenichel studied art at the Chouinard Art Institute (1946–47) and Los Angeles City College (1947–48). She then moved to the San Francisco Bay Area to study at the California School of Fine Arts (1950–52),[5] where she worked with the painters Edward Corbett, Hassel Smith, Elmer Bischoff, and David Park.She started showing her work in the early 1950s. Her vigorously gestural, often black-and-white paintings from the 1960s and 1970s are grouped with work by other West Coast second-generation Abstract Expressionists such as Joan Brown, Jay DeFeo, and Sonia Gechtoff.Stylistically, her work from this period shows the influence of both West Coast Abstract Expressionism and the New York School. Of her own work from this period, Fenichel has said it was Abstract Expressionism «with a lot of drawing in it.»Unable to support herself with her painting, she worked as a photographers' stylist and as an art director and costume designer for movies. She served as the art director for the 1975 film Lucky Lady starring Liza Minnelli.

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«Kosso Eloul was an important Israeli/Canadian post-war sculptor. His polished, monumental geometric sculptures can be found in Canadian cities such as Toronto, Kingston, Montreal and Ottawa. Kosso Eloul also has sculptures located in Los Angeles, New York, Miami, Tokyo, Jerusalem and Mexico City. He was born in Mourom, U.S.S.R and relocated to Tel-Aviv, Israel at the age of four. In 1938, he began his formal art training under Israeli sculptor Yitzhak Danziger. One year later, Kosso Eloul moved to the United States to study at both the Art Institute of Chicago and the Chicago School of Design. He attended lectures, workshops and classes by esteemed professors such as architect Frank Lloyd Wright and Bauhaus professor Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. Between the years of 1943 and 1948, Kosso Eloul served in WWII and the War of Independence in Palestine, before returning to sculpting.
In 1959 he represented Israel at the 29th Venice Biennale. After the First Sculpture Symposium in Yugoslavia in 1961, he set up a similar event in the Negev Desert in 1962; his lifelong involvement with international sculpture conferences began then. In the 1960's, Kosso Eloul began to develop his signature style of balanced, geometric metal sculptures, earning him commissions in Israel, Canada and the United States. In 1962, Kosso Eloul met Canadian artist Rita Letendre in Spoleto, Italy while working at the 5th Festival de Due Mondi, „Scultura Della Citta“. They married two years later, and, after living in Los Angeles for some time, permanently settled in Toronto in 1969.
Some of Kosso Eloul's best-known works include „Meeting Place,“ which sits at the intersection of Bloor and Church in Toronto, and „Eternal Flame“ at the Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, which is Israel's largest memorial to the Holocaust.
Kosso Eloul passed away from heart failure on November 8th, 1995 at the age of 75.

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Olbram Zoubek (21 April 1926 – 15 June 2017) was a contemporary Czech sculptor and designer. His work was inspired by Swiss-Italian sculptor Alberto Giacometti.
Some of Zoubek's sculptures
2002 Memorial to the Victims of Communism in Prague is the work of Olbram Zoubek and architects Jan Kerel and Zdeněk HolzelThere is an extensive permanent exhibition of his sculptures and art in Litomyšl Castle Vault Gallery.
Zoubek was particularly well known for having taken a death mask of Jan Palach, a Charles University student who burned himself to death in protest over the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. One of his most famous works is his «Memorial to the Victims of Communism» in Prague (done in collaboration with the architects Jan Kerel and Zdeněk Holzel) Wikipedia
«Olbram Zoubek started studying sculpture soon after World War II. He was one of Czechoslovakia’s leading artists until he began to be persecuted by the totalitarian authorities during the period of “Normalization” (following the 1968 invasion by fellow Warsaw pact countries). Being unable to enter public competitions or even exhibit, he turned to restoration work, came to Litomyšl and spent 20 years restoring sgraffiti patterns on the chateau.During this time he was part of the artistic underground that opposed the communist regime. After the fall of communism in 1989, new president Václav Havel was often photographed in his office with one of Zoubek’s sculptures keeping watch over his shoulder.»

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Libor Fára (12 September 1925, Prague — 3 March 1988, Prague) was a Czech sculptor and painter.The versatile Libor Fára graduated from the Academy of Applied Arts in Prague in the studio of Emil Filla in the second half of the 1940s, developing his artistic opinion in the circle of the Prague Surrealists. The main fields of Fára’s interest were collages, assemblages and objects as well as photography. During the 1950s, Fára participated at various activities of artists, writers and theoreticians from the circle of Karel Teige. Even though his works, based on poetic construction were not created spontaneously, they recollect the production of the Fluxus movement. During the 1960s, Fára collaborated with the Prague's Theatre on the Balustrade for which he created many timeless stage designs and posters.
Libor Fára is represented in the permanent collections of various major art museums, including the National Gallery, Prague, Czech Museum of Fine Arts, Prague, Gallery of Modern Art, Roudnice nad Labem.In 1952, he married the Czech art historian and photography theorist Anna Fárová

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