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.

Jack Whitten

Jack Whitten at Alexander Gray Associates

28 Black Holes, 1994

This is Japanese rock garden in its western reincarnation. Where there should be rocks and pruned trees to symbolize a natural landscape, there are dress buttons. Those buttons represent how materialistic our world became. Instead to admire and meditate the abstract landscape created with rocks and sand, we admire and meditate on things and objects we possess. Did we lose the true meaning of life? Or all these objects that we have that make our life easier. That we don't have to think about some mundane details. And we can concentrate on what is really important.

Janaina Tschäpe

Janaina Tschäpe at Carlier Gebaue(Art Basel Miami Beach 2011)

Staubwolke

Entertainment is an universe in itself : celebrities, gossips, games and new releases. It is very tempting and mesmerizing. It can keep you busy for hours.By diving deep in this ant house you can forget the main purpose of it - to fill the void. The entertainment is a veil to cover up a vast empty dessert(the bottom part of background reds and oranges). The question is whether it is good or bad. And the answer probably depends on what kind of entertainment you are using to waste your life on.

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.

Steven Bindernagel

Steven Bindernagel at CRG Gallery(Art Basel Miami Beach 2011)

Untitled

The white lines are frames. You fill those with knowledge, experience, events and memories. But as you grow older more and more frames are left blank. By being unused the frames' number starts to decrease. Until you disappear entirely. The more you have the will and the power to fill out the frames, the longer you live.

Debra Goertz

Debra Goertz at Stricoff Fine Art

Cool Light in Warm Space

How Art influences people's lives. "The floor" (brown, red, orange lower part) is your life. It's everyone's basic life full of pragmatism, rationality and down-to-earth choices. The Art puts breathes into your life something different, something unexpected(the reflections of the paintings). It makes the life more interesting, less routine.It gives you something to think about besides your daily chords and errands. And when you think about abstract matters, it opens you up for spiritual things(light blue parallelogram in the upper left). The spiritual things, the soul(blue reflection on the lower left) flows into your life and changes it.

Lloyd Martin

Lloyd Martin at Stephen Haller Gallery

Stratum

This is human memory. The vertically-aligned rectangles are events in our life. Some are better(gray), some are worse(black). The horizontal rectangles are associations, analysis and other tricks that humans do to make their life tolerable. The tricks distort the memory of events, but make the events look better than they were. The tricks tie the event blocks together, thus they provide some meaning to life.