Marcia Spivak

A sculptor of metal horses, Marcia has worked at her art for more than a decade. She grew up in a Midwest equestrian culture, grooming, training and riding horses since early childhood. Her intimate knowledge of the conformation, performance and allure of horses translates seamlessly into authentic sculptural renderings. Though fabricated of found sheet steel scrap, Marcia’s sculpture is seemingly weightless. Often mounted on wood, steel and stone bases, her pieces range from tabletop size to larger than life. In the equestrian community, her works rank among the country’s best. Ms. Spivak creates her work in and around her studio in Wilton, CT.

Awards

1st Prize, Sculpture, Spectrum Show, New Canaan Society for the Arts, Juried Exhibition - 2009

1st Prize, Sculpture, Silvermine Galleries, 18th Annual Juried Student Exhibition - 2008

Honorable Mention, Sculpture, Silvermine Galleries, 13th Annual Juried Student Exhibition - 2003

Education

Sculpting, Silvermine School of Art, New Canaan, CT
Sculpting, Sculpture Barn, New Fairfield, CT
Monotypes, Pratt Institute of Art, NYC
Monotypes, Women’s Studio Workshop, Rosendale, CT
BA, Communications Arts, University of Wisconsin, Madison

(http://marciaspivak.artspan.com/index.php)


"Rearing Horse"
welded steel vinebar

"Grazing Horse"
Found steel, first exhibited Silvermine Guild June 2006

"Howl"
Found steel and wire steel vine bar

Niki de Saint Phalle

Niki de Saint Phalle was born in 1930 in France and died in 2002. She began producing her first paintings in 1950. This led to assemblages in plaster and her "shooting paintings". These pictures were plaster with containers of paint beneath the surface which would explode when she shot them with a firearm. More sculptural assemblages followed and in 1965, de Saint Phalle created her first "Nana". These large, voluptuous and brightly painted female figures were made originally in papier mache and later in polyester.

De Saint Phalle has designed stage sets and costumes, created movies, graphic work, chairs and a sculptural playground. One of her large works includes a giant Nana that can be entered by walking through the vagina. In addition, she and her son produced a book for children about AIDS and she has her own perfume.

A part of her most ambitious work is pictured here, the Tarot Garden, a sculpture park in Tuscany. The Wheel of Fortune in the water was created by her husband, Jean Tinguely. The Tarot Garden features mirrors, glass and ceramic mosaics. De Saint Phalle had never used these materials before and they show the influence that the architect Antonio Gaudi had on her work. This park contains Nana-like figures as well as the "skinnies" which proceeded them. You can see a skinny in the water in the photo here, the blue figure with an open wirey structure. Serpents, fountains and sculptures you can walk into are often a part of her work. They appear here on a grand scale. There is a fun, theme park quality to the place with its bright colors and sensual rounded forms covered with elaborate surface designs. A relationship to "outsider " art can be seen in this playful portrayal of the arcana of the Tarot deck.
http://www.oneroom.org/sculptors/desaintphalle.html

Marc Andre Robinson

Marc Andre Robinson works in sculpture, drawing, video and interactive public projects that revolve around a psychology of historical, cultural and familial belonging. Playing with the dialogue between art and artifact, he collects discarded furniture and transforms it into sculptural assemblages with complex and delicately balanced symbology. Robinson’s drawings are often marked by meticulous patterning and repetition, while his public projects have involved creating catalysts for members of the community to voice their historical reflections.

Born in Los Angeles, Robinson earned a BFA from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and an MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art. He participated in the Whitney Independent Study Program and was artist-in-residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and The Rocktower in Kingston Jamaica. Robinson has exhibited extensively in the US and abroad at venues including the New Museum of Contemporary Art, NY; the Contemporary Museum of Baltimore and the Centre for Contemporary Arts in Glasgow. His work has been featured in Art Forum, Art News, Paris Vogue, New York Times and other international publications. Robinson was recently awarded an Art Matters grant to travel to South Africa in 2010 and has upcoming exhibitions in New York City, Long Island, Baltimore and Philadelphia. He currently lives and works in Brooklyn.

http://www.marcandrerobinson.com/marc_andre_robinson_web_site/Bio.html

Nairy Baghramian

Born in 1971, the Iranian artist relocated to Germany in her teens. Now based in Berlin, Baghramian is a rising figure among a younger generation of artists, like Paulina Olowska and last year's Turner prize nominee Goshka Macuga, who are reinterpreting art history on their own terms. An earlier work like Fourth Wall, Two Female Protagonists, for example, was a minimal piece of stage set: rectangular metal frames that conjured the invisible wall between performer and viewer.

Though her work frequently alludes to furniture and domestic spaces, Baghramian is more interested in the secret histories that exist behind closed doors. In the 1930s and 1940s, interior design was a haven for women like Janette Laverrière, or the gay Jewish modernist designer Jean Michel Frank, ostracised from the boy's club that was architecture. In 2007, she actually tracked down the now 100-year-old Laverrière, inviting her to collaborate on a project for the Berlin Biennial. A highlight of the event, it put both women firmly on the international art map and marked the beginning of a series of joint projects that have continued to this day.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2009/dec/09/artist-nairy-baghramian


Deserted Frame

Janette Laverrière / Nairy Baghramian / Carlo Mollino, Entre deux actes II (Loge des Comédiennes), reconstruction of the installation 'Entre deux actes'

Class Reunion

Richard Rezac

Richard Rezac was born and raised in Lincoln, Nebraska. Early in his life he already planned to become an artist. He later attended the Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland, Oregon in order to pursue his undergraduate degree. After college Rezac spent six years travelling around the country to visit museums and study art on his own. After these six years were up, Rezac attended graduate school at the Maryland Institute in Baltimore. It was here that Rezac's first three-dimensional works were created. Before this time, Rezac's work had consisted of paintings and charcoal drawings in which he tried to prefigure his sculptural concerns of the precise, quasi-geometric form in isolated space.

"Balance" is the constant and final word in any descriptions of Rezac's work and seeking balance is what Rezac describes as a primary motivation in his work. The balance of materials, formal qualities, emotional expressiveness, size, weight, placement- all of which are further brought out in the installations he designs. Rezac's works tend to leave people with a sort of old-fashioned feeling of "rightness".

(http://richardrezac.com/templatePages/bibImView.php?id=1&view=image)

Wenceslaus, 2003

Painted Wood and Steel

Lancaster, 2004

Painted Wood, Steel, and Aluminum

Glisan, 2006

Painted Wood and Aluminum

Photos/Information: http://richardrezac.com

Leandro Erlich

Leandro Erlich was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1973. At age 20, he won a grant from the Antorchas Foundation to take an advanced sculpture and installation workshop under the direction of Luis F. Benedit and Pablo Suárez. Between 1998 and 1999 he took part in the Core Program, an artist-in-residence program in Houston, Texas, U.S.
In 1999 he moved to New York and presented his first exhibition in a commercial New York gallery. Over the next two years he participated in the Whitney Biennial and represented Argentina at the 49th Venice Biennale (2001).
Since 1997, Erlich has participated in a number of group exhibitions and art biennials, including the 1st Bienal do Mercosul (1997), the 7th Havana Biennale (2000), the 7th Istanbul Biennial (2001), the 3rd Shanghai Biennale (2002), the 1st Busan Biennale, Korea (2002), the 26th Bienal de São Paulo (2004), la Nuit Blanche de Paris (2004), the 51st Venice Biennale (2005), the Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennial, Japan (2006), and the exhibition "Notre histoire" at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris, in 2006, among others.
Erlich has had solo exhibitions at venues such as the Centre d'Art Santa Mònica, Barcelona (2003), MACRO Museo d'Arte Contemporanea Roma (2006), Le Grand Café - Centre D'art Contemporain de Saint-Nazaire, France (2005), and Albion Gallery, London (2005). In 2001, Erlich presented a major architectural installation entitled "Neighbors: An Installation by Leandro Erlich" at the El Museo del Barrio, New York.
Erlich's works are in several private and public collections including the Museum of Modern Art, Buenos Aires; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Tate Modern, London; Musee d'Art moderne, Paris; 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Japan; MACRO, Rome; and The Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Fonds national d'art contemporain (FNAC), Paris.

Erlich lives and works in Paris, France, and Buenos Aires, Argentina.

(website: http://www.skny.com/artists/leandro-erlich/bio/)

Smoking Room, 2006

Window and Ladder- Too Late For Help, 2008

Metal ladder, underground hidden metal structure, aluminium frames, and fiberglass brick wall

14 3/4 ft x 5 1/4 ft

Swimming Pool, 2008

masonry, swimming pool ladder, laminated glass, and water

600 x 280 x 300cm

Leigh Pennebaker

Leigh Pennebaker was born and raised in Star, Mississippi. As a child she would create fantastical fashion illustrations. At the age of fourteen she began taking figure drawing classes and a couple of years later was hired to work as a caricature artist in the local mall. Following her college graduation in 2001, Leigh moved to Manhattan to further pursue her love of art and fashion.

Leigh describes her work beautifully in her artist's statement. She says, "My sculpture deals with my lifelong fascination with fashion, women, and beauty. I view my work as three-dimensional caricature through which I channels the spirits of southern belles, divas, vixens, and ingénues. To me, style is about so much more than fabric or fashion. It's about how something is worn, and even more importantly, why. With each wire dress I explore the presence of the female form and gesture without sculpting representations of actual body parts. Instead I allude to physical bearing, spirit, and impulse through sculpted clothing. I use jagged industrial fencing and rebar tie-wire to construct to the sculpture. I am intrigued by the contrast that the materials create with the subject matter. The connotations of entrapment and bondage are juxtaposed with that of iconic feminine beauty. I also rely on the process of meticulously cutting, tying, knotting, weaving and twisting the wire to connect my art to the long tradition of womanly craftsmanship and domestic arts. Ultimately, the sharp linear quality of the wire is perfect for an expression which is both elegant and raw, whimsical yet edgy. "

(http://www.leighpennebaker.com)

Carmen

Wire and Fencing

Audrey

Wire and Fencing

Bridget

Wire and Fencing

Photos/Information: http://www.stylehive.com/tag/stylogy, http://raidersofthelostart.org/2010/11/30/leigh-pennebaker/, http://www.leighpennebaker.com, and http://www.dressaday.com/2007/03/index.html