Barbara Gilhooly

at Barbara Gilhooly

Logjam, 2007

You jump from a log to a log(lower part of the painting). You are desperately trying to get to the shore. But the current is too strong. So while you are running with all your power, at best you are keeping your position.  Most those things that you postpone for later, for "when I grew up", for "when I get rich" and to the bucket list stay there unfulfilled. The only thing that keeps you running is hope (the light blue background) that the day to get items from the bucket list will come earlier than the bucket.

Andree Carter

at Ann Connelly Fine Art

Slightly Silver

Everything that was important in your life became small irrelevant. It is torn into small pieces and seems to you as a collage of your former life. Everything is still. The big black grief is blocking any movements in your life. The grief is feeding on your memories (the white structure). The only thing that is fighting the standstill is the desire to live/hope (the blue structures). The hope is creating new life(the thicker red nets) and trying to bond thouse pockets of resistance together.

Riddle Edition 4

at Leonid Golender Art

Strongholds of Life

?

Pia Fries

at CRG Gallery

Untitled, 2003/2004

All the tinsel will be washed away over time. All the unimportant stuff will be forgotten. The essence of your past emerges. And if you had a happy life (though you didn't realize it, while the events were unraveling), the happiness will dominate your memories(the light turquoise spots).

Eva Berendes

at Ancient & Modern

Untitled, 2008

You open a box(white triangles as part of box upper lid). Inside the box there is another box. Or it could be several boxes. Inside those boxes there more boxes. The box could be a good one (blue or green), a bad one(yellow, red or black). It depends how you open it. You are going through the numerous boxes until you get to where you started (the white box). That is your life. And all those boxes are a lovely screen that tries to cover up the emptiness of the room.

Liu Wei

at Long March Space (Art 43 Basel 2012)

Beyond the Sky Limits, 2012

Sky is the dream. Your life is gray, dull and depressing(the lower gray ribbon). Then you have a clearing in your thinking(a small white line). You have to act on your impulse. You start working hard(the reddish ribbon). And when you think you are almost broke and you don't have strength to go on, you get a break-through(the white ribbon). You are in the vacuum. You left your old comfortable life, but you haven't get to your destination. It is scary to be in the vacuum, but you know where you are heading and this gives you power to continue. Then you hit the jackpot(the blue ribbon). You have arrived to your dream. You are almost blacked out of the ecstasy (the black ribbon). When you gain back the conscience, you found yourself in a new unknown reality(the white ribbon with burgundy hue). You need to do something. You start working hard(the burgundy ribbon). It leads to a gray, dull and depressing life(the upper gray ribbon). You need a dream, now!

Lesley Vance

at David Kordansky Gallery (Art 43 Basel 2012)

Untitled, 2012

Sometimes you think that you have a major problem, a life-threatening issue(the figure in lower left corner).  You feel that your life is changing because of the problem. But if you look around, if you see a bigger picture, you will notice that your life is not threaten. The only thing that changed is your routine. The problem is temporary. It will be resolved with time. And there are much more fearful and really life-changing problem that could possible threaten your existence or lives of your loved ones(the structure in the center).

Katharina Grosse

at Johann König, Berlin (Art 43 Basel 2012)

Untitled, 2012

Art fills  up the human being life (the left half). Without the art, it feels empty, bland and without a purpose(the right half). Art is important. Imagine your life without art. I mean any art: conceptual, abstract, representative, performing, pop, TV. Art is part of the design of all things that we use in our every day life.

Weekend Edition 30

Paul Cezanne

The Cards Players, 1892

The players are the regulars in the place. They are relaxed. A lomg night of card playing is ahead of them. The players are concetrated on the game, because the game is the only enertainment in their life. They are simple people, their life is simple. They don't have hobbies, they don't have interests. They work. They earn money. They survive. The meetings at the card table in the joint is the best thing that happens in their life.

Sean Scully

at Timothy Taylor Gallery (Frieze Art Fair New York 2012)

Doric, 2011

There are black days. Those are the days when you just survive. When later you try to remember those days, you cannot because nothing happened. There are better days(gray). They are filled with hopes, dreams. On those days you do things to improve your life. And there are bright days. Those days you remember all your life. On those days you feel that you accomplished something, you have improved your life or lives of others. On those days you were happy. The bright days are the pillars of your life. There are not a lot of bright, happy days, but if you have any, your life can withstand any disaster

Ivan Morley

at Kimmerich (Frieze Art Fair New York 2012)

A True Tale, 2011

Life is unexpected and surprising. Real things and real events could be stitched together so randomly in real life, so it creates a surreal scenario. It creates a plot that impossible to think of. If someone would put it in a movie or a book, I would say that his imagination's got too wild. The plot seems like a tale, but all the events are true. Sot it is a true tale. 

Victoria Morton

at Sadie Coles HQ (Frieze Art Fair New York 2012)

Figurine, 2011

The person's life consists of myriads of small dot-sized tasks. There is a lot of commotion that fills up all your space/time/soul. They are necessary things to do. But because you are busy you are postponing your big things - your dreams. "When I grow up". "When I get rich". "When I graduate". "When I retire". "As soon as I turn 30/40/50....". People think that the time is unlimited resource. When they get to the point where they suppose to start implementing their dreams, they find other more urgent things to do. So they move from a checkpoint to a checkpoint in their life, but their dreams are left out. The dreams are only frames to dot-filled pictures of their life.

Weekend Edition 17

Paul Gauguin

Brittany Landscape The David Mill, 1894

 A man has a house to live in , a business to take care of. But he is dreaming(The mill on the left half). He is dreaming of moving to another place, doing something different(The remote house in the middle). Or he is even dreaming of  something that he does not know exactly what it is or where it is(the remote forest and the cloud in upper right corner). This last dream is most appealing. The man always seeks new experiences. He always dreams of something new. What keeps him from doing dangerous and maybe stupid steps toward his dreams are common sense(the tree in the center) and his family (figures in the lower middle).

Brice Marden

Brice Marden at Matthew Marks Gallery

Window Study 3, 1985

A window is a connection with outside world. It is your bridge out. Some bridges you want to build. Some bridges you want to burn. Some bridge you cross because you have to. Every window, every bridge, every connection has two sides. Sometimes the feelings you have while you are spanning the bridge are similar to the party on the other end, but in most cases they are different. Your life is a huge window constructed from myriads of small, big and tiny windows.Each one of those windows has a set of bridges crossed, spanned or burnt.

Cathy Wilkes

Cathy Wilkes at The Modern Institute (Art Basel Miami Beach 2011)

Untitled

Life is black.Life is dark. Life is confusing. That's true when you are absolutely alone. People define your life. People give your life proportions, directions and colors(the rectangles). Some of people are nice, some are more bleak. But interactions with this huge, diverse crowd are the essence of everyone's life.

Weekend Edition 11

Pablo Picasso at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Guitar and Clarinet on a Mantelpiece

The brown background is the earthiness of common life, where most of the time you are occupied with material needs. The mantelpiece is a decoration for a fireplace, where the fire of life is flaming. But when the fire is out, what is left are black smoke, ash and emptiness.The place is pretty gruesome. But you fell a fresh breeze (light blue at center bottom). It is a mantelpiece(blue figure in the center). It makes your fireplace prettier. Human beings have this urge to beatify the life, to invent artificial things that decorates the nature of life. The guitar and clarinet represent art as the most purified decoration of all. The art makes you dream(the white figure). And even that they are very fragile (the upper right corner of the blue figure), they make you see life much more bright (the white dotted corner).

Anselm Reyle

Anselm Reyle at Almine Rech Gallery (Art Basel Miami Beach 2011)

Untitled

This is a life of a person. First, there is nothing. You are starting to learn about borders and boundaries. Then you are trying to revolt (the pink stains at the right bottom). Eventually it goes away, and you start filling the blanks in your life(center). At some point you start degenerating, your life became black.At the end the black turns into a blank again.

Franz Kline

Franz Kline at Richard Gray Gallery (Art Basel Miami Beach 2011)

Untitled

People change. They change physically and mentally over time. A quadrilateral in the lower left corner is a person. A big event in his life (a line from top left corner that dissects the quadrilateral) makes him, after a while of processing, dramatically turn his life's direction( a thick line that goes from the quadrilateral to the bottom). The life line continues from the bottom to the top. But there is another line, a thin one. This is a physical change line. So you see when the life (the mental) line intersects the physical line the quadrilateral has been changed in form. It is not that squarish, it is crumpled.

Katharina Grosse

Katharina Grosse at Galerie Nachst st.Stephan Rosemarie Schwarzwalder(Art Basel Miami Beach 2011)

Untitled

If you look closer, you will see that those diagonal-almost-vertical lines consists of several layers of paint.This is your life experience. The lines represent events, people and things that happened in your life.Some were small, some were bigger, some occurred several times and some never happened (well those you can't see, they remained unpainted :). This experience helps you to get the meaning (the foreground swirls) from current events(the white lines) - to connect the dots and to start a new layer of experience on your life painting.

Günther Förg

Günther Förg at Galerie Krinzinger (Art Basel Miami Beach 2011)

Ohne Titel

Our life is built from events.Events are constructed from details. Myriads of small interconnected details make up the fabrics of our existence. You can easily get lost in the ocean of small things.The jungle of interwoven interconnected details is very inviting. You always have to keep some perspective on what's important in life.And given the right perspective you can see that not all events are equal. Some of them are better than others. The better ones are those that you will remember. That's what holds our life together.