Displaying items by tag: appropriation

These are two appropriation paintings based on compositions by Piet Mondrian and three famous paintings from Francisco Goya: Saturn devouring his son (I have "used" this painting again in one of my political sketches), Colossus and the 3rd of May.

I was reluctant at first to make (and publish) these works due to the twisting of the ideas of Mondrian (I used green instead of the primary yellow and of course there are the faded paintings of Goya over the colors). To give an explanation for the green color I was inspired by the colors of the palestinian flag.

For the first painting (not so much for the second version) I was inspired by the resemblance of the black lines with a cage. I wanted to use three paintings -two with similar meaning (oppression, tyrany, giants against people, etc) and on the other hand, on the red color, a painting symbolizing resistance. I enjoyed the idea of a modern (art) cage for old traditional artworks and the implications of such a combination.

Published in Reproductions

Che

This is one of my favourite appropriation works. It combines many of the themes that interested me in painting (appropriation, (pseydo)cubistic landscape, mannequin figures).

The work behind it belongs to Caravaggio and is called The Entombment of Christ (1602–1603). After watching a photograph of Che Guevara a few moments after being murdered, I was amazed by the great resemblance of his face and the face of Christ in Caravaggio's painting. That was the starting point. The second inspiration was my journey in Cuba, the spring of 2008. Afterwards, my ideas cleared a lot about the general meaning I was hoping to achieve and it was inevitable to carry on with the painting.

Apart from the face of Che I changed the whole upper segment of the painting (the group of people holding him and their background). I gave military clothes to the two persons holding Che (one of them reminds Fidel) and behind them I used mannequins with a shift from a Picasso-like face to a oval face like the ones Dali used to create and then another transformation to more cubical forms to match with the geometrical dismantling background of Cuba on top. I added a spanish ship (like the one Colombus used when he discovered Cuba) approaching the island and the Monument of Revolution with the statue of Martin X ready to confront it.

Published in Reproductions

It's an appropriation work based on the painting Personage Throwing a Stone at a Bird by Juan Miro (1926). I haven't made so many changes: the yellow land is made gold, the eye of the figure is painted red, the figure is throwing a heart, the ball is changed into a bomb and the arrow-curvce into the symbol of euro. Above them there is a wooden sign hanging outside the painting. The sign is painted white and carries the word Feeling with fading black letters. It' s an erotic painting.

Published in Reproductions

These are two different paintings of Caravaggio, that I decided to combine. The first one is called Sich Bacchus (and many scholars believe that is a self prortrait of the artist). The second one is a detail of Mary Magdalene crying in the painting The death of the Virgin. My only change is that the boy at the left doesn't carry flowers but guns and explosives giving another meaning to the weeping of the young girl next to him.

Published in Reproductions

This was one of my first appropriation works (copies of known paintings with deliberate changes in order to produce a new meaning). 

The base for this painting was The Kiss by Gustav Klimt. I left the painting unfinished, with almost no color (there is only a dark and dirty grey background in place of the shining gold Klimt used). Especially the kissing couple remain mostly as a sketch, two disappearing figures on a colorless background.

I suppose this painting gives (or tries to give with its colorlessness, its uncertainty, its unfulfilness) the opposite kind of feelings than the Klimt work.

Published in Reproductions

These works were made a period I was studying art history and at the same time I was influenced by conceptual art. They were made firstly as copies, in order to improve myself on sketch and color. However I tried to give them a meaning of my own. In order of appearance in the gallery below:

Conceptual Art

In this painting I took the painted wooden frame of the 1646 Rembrandt's painting called The Holy Family and placed inside instead of the holy family, a definition like those Kosuth a famous conceptual artist used to exhibit. Only in this case the definition is for the conceptual art itself and it’s painted (not printed). Somehow this painting express my mixed feelings about conceptual art. You could say that most of the paintings here (including of course this one) were influenced by conceptual movement, but however I cannot hide that in some point I believe that many conceptual artists betrayed their former revolutionary attitude and created works that ended up inside galleries having lost completely this freshness and radical character of the first years. (1m x 70 cm)

Thoughts

Based on a painting called The Soothsayer's Recompense (1913), by Giorgio de Chirico. The large yellow surfaces of the ground are covered with newspapers referring to the war of Iraq while two airplanes are heading towards the tower of the railway station. The hours have changed into a binary code (0 and 1, black and white, good and bad) while the girl, a sleeping statue, is thinking but remains still. (65 x 50 cm)

Alogo

Based on a painting called Whistlejacket by George Stubbs. Apart from the more yellow background there is only one major change in this painting: the inscription "My kingdom for a horse" in greek, referring to the horse of the painting and playing with the meaning of the word "alogo" in greek (horse, but also without logic, sense). Somehow I think I had the whole art of painting in my head for this work. And I must admit that I enjoyed a lot creating / copying the horse. (50 x 60 cm)

Rape

This is a painting that was inspired by one of the numerous female figures of Pablo Picasso. There are only two significant changes here both small enough for me to question whether I should put the painting in the copies section. However, because they were deliberate and at least in my opinion they give another meaning (s) to the original work it was placed here. These changes are the bleeding breast and the bomb-like head. (47 x 60 cm)

Conceptual Painting

This is a work based on the work The Cross in the Mountains (1808) created by Gaspar Friedrich. It's more of an exercise than a complete work, and it has a quite satirical concept. It implies that the art of painting needs help immediately (the help of Batman, a comic, non-existent hero, an impossible situation). Back then as I was a student it felt more right than it does now. (50 x 52 cm)

Published in Paintings Sketches

Now in Bookstores

We Want Everything

the publications of colleagues, Nov. 2021

Summer of 1969, Italy. A year after May '68, FIAT workers began a dynamic and unmediated strike against their powerful boss. Their struggle marked the beginning of a decade of workers' and students' mobilizations and the rise of the Autonomy movement. It was characterized by many as the last invasion of the working class into the sky. Last ... let's hope until the next one ...

read more...

frontVogliamoTutti

become a patron button

2019 Kyriakos Mauridis
Free Joomla! templates by AgeThemes