In 2011, I went on a summer tour of art museums along the Great Lakes and stopped to see friends as well. I went to the Toledo Museum of Art to see the Frank Stella exhibit. I saw a great number of wonderful artists I had never been exposed to, but the Stella exhibit was simple and large and child-like. It featured work from his Polygon series:
Frank Stella is known for his minimalism and his post-painterly abstractions. He is still alive today and active in his work.
Through his lifetime he has explored many facets of minimalism. In the 50's and 60's he did work from the Black Painting series:
In the late 60's and 70's he did work in the Protractor series:
In the 80's and afterward, Stella has been active in sculpture and architecture pieces:
In all that he has done it is apparent that he enjoys himself. There is something wonderful about that childhood feeling of your first picture done inside the lines. His precision and color choices never stop pleasing me.
Also, Instagram Project update....piece #2 is done!
Joe says:
As a biology major, and one who loves life sciences, art which explores these themes has always excited me. Combined with my love for the avant garde, the unique, the bizarrely beautiful, I occasionally come across some pretty neat works of art. Over the next few weeks, I hope to create a short series tentatively called The Art of Life, an exploration of where these two fantastical fields meet.
To start us off, we're looking at the kinetic sculpture work of Dutch artist Theo Jansen. Since 1991, Jansen has been working exclusively on a project to create strandbeests (roughly translated to "beach animals"), a series of moving "lifeforms" built from PVC piping. Before going any further, here's one in action, accompanied by Theo himself:
More videos of the artist and his creations exist, but this one is a personal favorite of mine since it has no narration, no extraneous noises. Just Theo and the strandbeest.
This particular sculpture manages to evoke numerous real-world organisms in my mind, simultaneously accomplishing insectile motion...
...while also resembling the float of a Portuguese man-o-war.
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Like life itself, Jansen's strandbeests comes in a variety of flavors, such as this one that looks like a lobster built from windmills:
Then there's this sturdy-looking wall of a sculpture Jansen calls the "rhinoceros."
For me, there is no better example of the blurring between art and science than seeing these magnificent creatures pull away from their creator and take to the wind (literally; these things are wind-powered!).
And that's a wrap of our first installment of The Art of Life! Have suggestions for future installments? Leave a comment below! Anything that bends the barrier between art and biology, anatomy as sculpture or stranger things besides.
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