"Ricardo Cat" by Niki De Saint Phalle

"Ricardo Cat" by Niki De Saint Phalle.
Mosaic work: stones, mirror pieces, tiles etc...

       Niki de Saint Phalle was born on the 29th of October 1930 and she died on the 21rst of May 2002. She was a French-American sculptor, painter, and filmmaker. She was one of the few women artists widely known for monumental sculpture.

       She had a difficult and traumatic childhood and education, which she wrote about decades later. After an early marriage and two children, she began creating art in a naïve, experimental style. She first received world-wide attention for angry, violent assemblages which had been shot by firearms. These evolved into Nanas, light-hearted, whimsical, colorful, large-scale sculptures of animals, monsters, and female figures. Her most comprehensive work was the Tarot Garden, a large sculpture garden containing numerous works ranging up to house-sized creations. Her idiosyncratic style has been called "outsider art"; she had no formal training in art, but associated freely with many other contemporary artists, writers, and composers.

       Throughout her creative career, she collaborated with other well-known artists such as Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Larry Rivers, composer John Cage, and architect Mario Botta, as well as dozens of less-known artists and craftspersons. For several decades, she worked especially closely with Swiss kinetic artist Jean Tinguely, who also became her second husband. In her later years, she suffered from multiple chronic health problems attributed to repeated exposure to glass fibers and petrochemical fumes from the experimental materials she had used in her pioneering artworks, but she continued to create prolifically until the end of her life. Read more...

Backside views of "Ricardo Cat"

Inside and up-close views of Niki De Saint Phalle's "Ricardo Cat"

"Vase de Fleurs" by Pierre Bonnard

"Vase de Fleurs" by Pierre Bonnard.

       Pierre Bonnard was born in  Born in Fontenay-aux-Roses, in the Ile-de-France, France in 1867 and he died in 1947. He studied at the Academie Jullian, where he met Vuillard, Maurice Denis, K. X. Roussel, and Serusier, with whom he participated in the Nabis. As a young student he was influenced by Degas, Renoir, Van Gogh, and Toulouse-Lautrec, and developed a great interest in Japanese prints. In 1891 he exhibited for the first time at the Salon des Independants and in group shows with the Nabis. Five years later he had his first one-man show of paintings, posters, and lithographs at Durand-Ruel's. During this period his lithographs appeared in the Revue Blanche and L'Escarmouche, as well as in a portfolio called Quelques Aspects de la Vie de Paris which Vollard published in 1895. He also worked on sets, costumes, and posters for the Theatre de l'CEuvre and the Theatre des Pantins and modeled marionettes for a play with music by his brother-in-law, Claude Terrasse. In 1900 Ambroise Vollard commissioned him to illustrate with lithographs Parellilement and Daphnis et Chloi. Both are masterpieces of graphic art. In 1903 Bonnard exhibited in the first Salon d'Automne and in the Viennese Secession show and subsequently participated in many important exhibitions in Europe and America. He also had a number of one-man shows in Paris, London, New York, and other cities. His style, at first decorative and subdued in color, became much freer and brighter after 1900. Transposing the universe into colors, he painted landscapes, still lifes, and nudes transfigured by a shining light. Revolting against the fashions and theories of his contemporaries, Bonnard went his own way. He was an extremely modest man and very hard on himself, but his work is characterized by a charming ever-youthful, good-natured cheerfulness and by an increasing audacity of color harmonies. In 1912 he bought a house at Vernnet, in the Seine Valley, not far from Paris, and subsequently divided his time between there and the south of France. He died in 1947 in his house in Le Cannet on the Cote d'Azur.

"Sunflowers" by Van Gogh

"Sunflowers" by Vincent Van Gogh

       Born into an upper-middle-class family, Van Gogh drew as a child and was serious, quiet and thoughtful. As a young man he worked as an art dealer, often travelling, but became depressed after he was transferred to London. He turned to religion, and spent time as a Protestant missionary in southern Belgium. He drifted in ill health and solitude before taking up painting in 1881, having moved back home with his parents. His younger brother Theo supported him financially, and the two kept up a long correspondence by letter. His early works, mostly still lifes and depictions of peasant labourers, contain few signs of the vivid color that distinguished his later work. In 1886, he moved to Paris, where he met members of the avant-garde, including Émile Bernard and Paul Gauguin, who were reacting against the Impressionist sensibility. As his work developed he created a new approach to still lifes and local landscapes. His paintings grew brighter in colour as he developed a style that became fully realised during his stay in Arles in the south of France in 1888. During this period he broadened his subject matter to include olive trees, cypresses, wheat fields and sunflowers. 

"Egyptian Girl" by Alexej Jawlensky

"Egyptian Girl" by Alexej Jawlensky.

       Alexej Georgewitsch von Jawlensky was born on 13 March 1864  and died on the 15th of March 1941. He was a Russian expressionist painter active in Germany. He was a key member of the New Munich Artist's Association (Neue Künstlervereinigung München), Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) group and later the Die Blaue Vier (The Blue Four). Read more...

"Aurelia Roma" by Manuel Neri

"Aurelia Roma" by Manuel Neri.
 Laumeier Sculpture Park.

       Manuel Neri was born April 12, 1930 is an American sculptor who is recognized for his life-size figurative sculptures in plaster, bronze, and marble, as well as for his association with the Bay Area Figurative Movement during the 1960s. In Neri's work with the figure, he conveys an emotional inner state that is revealed through body language and gesture. Since 1965 his studio has been in Benicia, California; in 1981 he purchased a studio in Carrara, Italy, for working in marble. During the past four decades, Neri has worked primarily with the same model, Mary Julia, creating drawings and sculptures that merge contemporary sculptural concerns with classical forms. Read more...