Steven Black
What:
Steven Black
Where:
Neon Parc, Lvl 1, 53 Bourke St, Melbourne
When:
Exhibition runs until Nov 28
Contact:
9663 0911
Regardless of whether it's fashionable or not, portraiture is the form of visual art that makes the most sense to me. Art is, after all, the expression of what it is to be human, so what better way to articulate that? Geodesic domes?
Steven Black is an Australian born artist living in Berlin. His cohorts in the New Leipzig school make beautifully detailed figurative pictures about the wall crumbling and war and stuff, but Steven's from Australia, so what does he care about all that business? He just wants to paint his mates.
Black gets his friends to read him epic stories as they sit for him, which I imagine lends them an appropriately serious expression, as well as avoiding those awkward, my-mate-is-painting-me-naked silences. The faces are worked up over a series of months with so much paint and detail that they literally stand out from the canvas. It's done in such a way that looks like an utter mess close up, but from a few steps back emerges like a magic eye puzzle. Meanwhile, he strips the backgrounds almost bare, focusing your eye towards the face, which is, after all, all that really matters.
Medium: Painting
Drink: Whatever's in your fridge
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