RICARDO ASENSIO
Prestigious portraitist of the illustrious and the intellectuals, he is an artist who has a compromise with the renovation in paint. His artwork started as purely figurative, only centered in the face of person that he was painting as well as the landscape, in oil or pastel, his palette managing to make a turnaround from a realism almost photographic due to the perfection of his drawing to an expressionism very strong in sober hues and well defined compositions. He studied in Valencia, Barcelona and Rome.
Exhibitions: More than 30 years in many individual an group shows in art galleries, museums, biennials and international arts fairs in European countries and in the United States.
Awards: He has obtained numerous awards granted by important international competitions dedicated to figurative painting such as Honorary Mention in New York, even thought it is in Italy where the artist reaches the peak of his career in 1979 when he became a finalist for the scholarship in painting granted by the Spanish Academy in Rome where he lives and exhibits his portraits obtaining the Award “Villa Alessandra” in 1981. Prize “Controvento”, 1982. The fine Arts Merit Medal 1996. “Villa Serravalle” award Florence, 1997. The “Gran Collare d´Argento” Palinuro nel Mondo . The award “Old Florence” and “The Oscar of Culture” 2001. The Italy Grand Award 2003. “La Dea Alata” award Florence, 2003. The Gold Medal of the Trophy “Medusa Aurea”, 26th edition, Rome, 2003 granted by the Modern Art International Academy . Great Award “Maremma” in the Trophy Costa d´Argento , Toscana, Italy. The Great Award “City of Florence” 2003 from “Il Marzzoco”Academy. The first prize “Costa Toscana”, IV Italy Biennial. The first prize “Europe 2004”, Turin. The first prize “Sant Ambroggio d´Oro”. Milan 2004. The “Gran Collare Academico” Rome 2004. The Gran Prize Europe Art “Mediolanum” Milan 2005. First Prize “Hans Christian Andersen Festival”, Copenhagen (Denmark). First Prize “Rembrandt” 2006, Netherlands. Career Award Prize Sever, Milan. “Artist of the year 2007″Academy Severiade, Milan. Prize for culture “Artistic Centre La Conca” Roma. Prize “Leonardo Da Vinci” 2009. “Prize Universal ” 2009, Florence.
NOBEL Prize for the Arts, Milan Italy… and many others.
Honors: He is an “Honorary Academician”Michelangelo Order from the International Santa Rita Academy of Turin; Academician from the Universal Academy “Antonio Canova”; Academician from the International “Il Marzzoco” Academy in Florence; Academician from the “Greci-Marino” Academy; Academician from the”Verbano” (Arts, Sciences and Literature), Italy.
Collections: As a portraistwe should mention as oustanding his magnificent portrait of NOBEL Prize Camilo José Cela, the writer Antonio Buero Vallejo, the Princess of Orleans, Isabel Preysler, Marisa Yordi de Borbon, Carmen Martinez Bordiu, actresses Kim Novak, Virna Lisi, Brooke Shields, Dalila Di Lazzaro, Victoria Vera and Faye Dunaway.
Artworks are in public and private collections in the United States, France, Italy, Germany and Spain.
RICHARD AVEDON
Richard Avedon (May 15, 1923 – October 1, 2004) was an American photographer. Avedon capitalized on his early success in fashion photography and expanded into the realm of fine art.
Avedon was born in New York City to a Jewish-Russian family. After briefly attending Columbia University, he started as a photographer for the Merchant Marines in 1942, taking identification pictures of the crewmen with his Rolleiflex camera given to him by his father as a going-away present. In 1944, he began working as an advertising photographer for a department store, but was quickly discovered by Alexey Brodovitch, the art director for the fashion magazine Harper’s Bazaar. In 1946, Avedon had set up his own studio and began providing images for magazines including Vogue and Life. He soon became the chief photographer for Harper’s Bazaar. Avedon did not conform to the standard technique of taking fashion photographs, where models stood emotionless and seemingly indifferent to the camera. Instead, Avedon showed models full of emotion, smiling, laughing, and, many times, in action.
In 1966, Avedon left Harper’s Bazaar to work as a staff photographer for Vogue magazine. He proceeded to become the lead photographer of Vogue and photographed most of the covers from 1973 until Anna Wintour became editor in chief in late 1988 . Notable among his fashion advertisement photograph series, are the recurring assignments for Gianni Versace, starting from the spring/summer campaign 1980.
In addition to his continuing fashion work, Avedon began to branch out and photographed patients of mental hospitals, the Civil Rights Movement in 1963, protesters of the Vietnam War, and the fall of the Berlin Wall.
During this period Avedon also created two famous sets of portraits of The Beatles. The first, taken in mid to late 1967, became one of the first major rock poster series, and consisted of five striking psychedelic portraits of the group — four heavily solarised individual colour portraits (solarisation of prints by his assistant, Gideon Lewin, retouching by Bob Bishop) and a black-and-white group portrait taken with a Rolleiflex camera and a normal Planar lens. The next year he photographed the much more restrained portraits that were included with The White Album in 1968. Among the many other rock bands photographed by Avedon, in 1973 he shot Electric Light Orchestra with all the members exposing their bellybuttons for recording, On the Third Day.
Avedon was always interested in how portraiture captures the personality and soul of its subject. As his reputation as a photographer became widely known, he brought in many famous faces to his studio and photographed them with a large-format 8×10 view camera. His portraits are easily distinguished by their minimalist style, where the person is looking squarely in the camera, posed in front of a sheer white background. Avedon would at times provoke reactions from his portrait subjects by guiding them into uncomfortable areas of discussion or asking them psychologically probing questions. Through these means he would produce images revealing aspects of his subject’s character and personality that were not typically captured by others.
He is also distinguished by his large prints, sometimes measuring over three feet in height. His large-format portrait work of drifters, miners, cowboys and others from the western United States became a best-selling book and traveling exhibit entitled In the American West, and is regarded as an important hallmark in 20th Century portrait photography, and by some as Avedon’s magnum opus. Commissioned by the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, it was a six-year project Avedon embarked on in 1979, that produced 125 portraits of people in the American west who caught Avedon’s eye.
Avedon was drawn to working people such as miners and oil field workers in their soiled work clothes, unemployed drifters, and teenagers growing up in the West circa 1979-84. When first published and exhibited, In the American West was criticized for showing what some considered to be a disparaging view of America. Avedon was also lauded for treating his subjects with the attention and dignity usually reserved for the politically powerful and celebrities. Laura Wilson served as Avedon’s assistant during the creation of In the American West and in 2003 published a photo book documenting the experiences, Avedon at Work, In the American West.
Avedon became the first staff photographer for The New Yorker in 1992. He has won many awards for his photography, including the International Center of Photography Master of Photography Award in 1993, the Prix Nadar in 1994 for his photobook Evidence, and the Royal Photographic Society 150th Anniversary Medal in 2003.
Forest Spiral – Hundertwasser Building (Darmstadt, Germany)
The Torre Galatea Figueres (Spain)
Ferdinand Cheval Palace a.k.a Ideal Palace (France)
The Basket Building (Ohio, United States)
Kansas City Public Library (Missouri, United States)
Wonderworks (Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, United States)
Habitat 67 (Montreal, Canada)
Cubic Houses (Rotterdam, Netherlands)
Hang Nga Guesthouse a.k.a Crazy House (Vietnam)
Chapel in the Rock (Arizona, United States)
Dancing Building (Prague, Czech Republic)
Calakmul building a.k.a La Lavadora a.k.a The Washing Mashine (Mexico, Mexico)
Kettle House (Texas, United States)
Manchester Civil Justice Centre (Manchester, UK)
Nakagin Capsule Tower (Tokyo, Japan)
Mind House (Barcelona, Spain)
Stone House (Guimarães, Portugal)
Shoe House (Pennsylvania, United States)
Weird House in Alps
The Ufo House (Sanjhih, Taiwan)
The Hole House (Texas, United States)
Ryugyong Hotel (Pyongyang, North Korea)
The National Library (Minsk, Belarus)
Grand Lisboa (Macao)
Wall House (Groningen, Netherlands)
Guggenheim Museum (Bilbao, Spain)
Bahá’í House of Worship a.k.a Lotus Temple (Delhi, India)
Container City (London, UK)
Erwin Wurm: House Attack (Viena, Austria)
Wooden Gagster House (Archangelsk, Russia)
Air Force Academy Chapel (Colorado, United States)
Solar Furnace (Odeillo, France)
Dome House (Florida, United States)
Beijing National Stadium (Beijing, China)
Fashion Show Mall (Las Vegas, United States)
Luxor Hotel & Casino (Las Vegas, United States)
Zenith Europe (Strasbourg, France)
Civic Center (Santa Monica)
Mammy’s Cupboard (Natchez, MS, United States)
Pickle Barrel House (Grand Marais, Michigan)
The Egg (Empire State Plaza, Albany, New York, United States)
Gherkin Building (London City, UK)
Nord LB building (Hannover, Germany)
Lloyd’s building (London City, UK)
“Druzhba Holiday Center (Yalta, Ukraine)
Fuji television building (Tokyo, Japan)
UCSD Geisel Library (San Diego, California, United States)
Ripley’s Building (Ontario, Canada)
The Bank of Asia a.k.a Robot Building (Bangkok, Thailand)
Agbar Tower (Barcelona, Spain)
JOHN SINGER SARGENT
He was born in Florence, to American parents and traveled extensively throughout Europe. His parents never settled back in America, not stepping foot in the States himself until right before his 21st birthday to retain his citizenship.
He was schooled as a French artist, heavily influenced by the Impressionist movement, the Spanish Master Velazquez, the Dutch Master Frans Hals, and his teacher Carolus-Duran . He was the darling of Paris until the scandal of his Madame X painting at the 1884 Salon.
Discouraged at the rejection, even considered leaving art at the age of 28, he left Paris and settled (if that word could ever be used for him) in England where he reached the height of his fame. To be painted by Sargent was to be painted by the best.
Although England would be his home, he never stopped traveling and he never stopped painting. To describe Sargent is to say that he painted. It was his life and yet he had a deep appreciation for music and all art forms and went out of his way to promote other artists — for this selflessness he was greatly loved.
Extremely bright, extremely gifted, an intense hard worker, he was the last great generalist. It is hard to put a label on him for he could master so many different painting styles. He was an Impressionist, a Classical Portraitist, a Landscape Artist, a Water Colorist, a Muralist of public art, and even started sculpting at the last of his life. He was all of these things and yet he was none of them in total.
He once said that the knowledge of a technique for an artist, such as Impressionism, “does not make a man an Artist any more than the knowledge of perspective does — it is mearly a refining of one’s means towards representing things and one step further away from the hieroglyph”.
He is often passed by, not studied, or dismissed because he was never a radical artist or trend-setter. He always worked within the wide, rich textured pallet of known and established styles. Yet his brilliance was in fusing these elements together and for this he has never fully gotten credit.
His output was prodigious. Working dawn til dusk in some cases — even on vacations, and sometimes seven days a week. Between 1877 (when his work really started taking off) and 1925, he did over 900 oils and more than 2,000 watercolors along with countless charcoal sketch-portraits and endless pencil drawings.
He painted two United States presidents, the aristocracy of Europe, the new and emerging tycoons and barons of business — Rockefeller, Sears, Vanderbilt; and he painted gypsies, tramps, and street children with the same gusto and passion. He hiked through the Rocky Mountains with a canvas tent under pouring rain to paint the beauty of waterfalls, and painted near the front lines during World War I to capture the horrors of war. He painted the back alleys of Venice, sleeping gondoliers, fishing boats and the dusty side streets of Spain. He painted opulent interiors and vacant Moorish Ruins. He painted the artists of his time — performers, poets, dancers, musicians, and writers — Robert Louis Stevenson, and Henry James. He painted the great generals of the Great War, and the Bedouin nomads in their camps. He painted grand allegorical murals, and his friends as they slept.
And he painted . . . .
Where others kept journals, John Singer Sargent painted his, and his life can easily be chronicled by these records in color and canvas. He loved people, yet was intensely private. And he loved his family deeply and devotedly, though he never had a family himself (was childless and never married). He was simply, a great man and a great Artist.
Édouard Manet
ÉDOUARD MANET
Édouard Manet was born in Paris on 23 January 1832, to an affluent and well connected family. His mother, Eugénie-Desirée Fournier, was the daughter of a diplomat and the goddaughter of the Swedish crown prince, Charles Bernadotte, from whom the current Swedish monarchs are descended. His father, Auguste Manet, was a French judge who expected Édouard to pursue a career in law. His uncle, Charles Fournier, encouraged him to pursue painting and often took young Manet to the Louvre. In 1845, following the advice of his uncle, Manet enrolled in a special course of drawing where he met Antonin Proust, future Minister of Fine Arts, and a subsequent life-long friend.
At his father’s suggestion, in 1848 he sailed on a training vessel to Rio de Janeiro. After twice failing the examination to join the navy, the elder Manet relented to his son’s wishes to pursue an art education. From 1850 to 1856, Manet studied under the academic painter Thomas Couture, a painter of large historical paintings. In his spare time he copied the old masters in the Louvre.
From 1853 to 1856 he visited Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands, during which time he absorbed the influences of the Dutch painter Frans Hals, and the Spanish artists Diego Velázquez and Francisco José de Goya.
In 1856, he opened his own studio. His style in this period was characterized by loose brush strokes, simplification of details, and the suppression of transitional tones. Adopting the current style of realism initiated by Gustave Courbet, he painted The Absinthe Drinker (1858-59) and other contemporary subjects such as beggars, singers, Gypsies, people in cafés, and bullfights. After his early years, he rarely painted religious, mythological, or historical subjects; examples include his Christ Mocked, now in the Art Institute of Chicago, and Christ with Angels, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
SPACE 