Artists
Gerhard Ricther
He said: “The problem is now that all of nature, everything, is captured in photographs, so there is nothing to paint. This, for me, puts some fantasy back into it.” In the overpainted photograph series, Richter uses a simple but impressive way to present the contrast between the flat objectiveness of a photograph and the tactility of paint applied by the artist’s hand. In Richter's ‘4900 Colour’, he reveals the fundamental element (pixels) of digital images. When the pixel image is reproduced on the plane, it brings up an awareness to reconsider the definition of image in this particular visual experience.
Dan Hays
His paintings have an optical illusion effect, when I see the painting, I will instantly notice the patterns are the one on our digital screen. It raises an ambiguous feeling when I saw the digitalised landscape in a physical format. His painting also illustrates our current social phenomenon, that a new filter is created to see the world.
‘There is a parallel between the way computers compress images with “JPEG” and the way that the Impressionists or Cézanne strove to reduce the amount of painted information to aid in the speed of production and capture, yet also to reveal the essence of a scene’ (Dan Hays: Paintings, p.30) The connection between the impressionist and Dan Hays' work is very interesting as well, the impressionist are trying to catch the light and shadow and Hays paint the pixels (the essence of a scene in our screen life).
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Michael Manning
Manning tries to eliminate the boundaries between the virtual and the physical world. I like the way he uses to physicalize his digital paintings and raised the brushstrokes up on a flat surface. However, his work brings up a concern in my mind. Mobile phone turns art into something that is easy to reach. We can now draw anytime, anywhere, even without pen and paper. We can make pencil drawings, watercolours, and even oil paintings. There are more and more artists work on their drawing App. (David Hockney's iPad's painting) I am not sure whether it changed the quality of the painting, but it definitely reduced the sensual effect on an artist, including the interaction between the body and mind.
Madiha Siraj
The artist creates a space that could transform the recognition of everyday objects and trying to take the participants into a pixelized reality. Her most famous installation pieces involve thousands of paint swatches from Lowe's. The arrangement of the squares breaks up the linearity and planarity of the grid and changed the white gallery space into somewhere between the physical and digital world. Siraj's works are influenced by the Islam culture. In Islamic art, repeated shapes represent the perfect design of our world by the god. The handmade patterns express the idea about the human natural essence, artists attempt to imitate the perfection but eventually cannot come true due to the human error. This concept inspired Siraj's practice to present the inevitable imperfection by a human hand.
Arno Beck
Arno Beck is working in a more conceptual aspect, his works involves digital aesthetics, traditional Windows system and language of digital culture. His work also explores our relationship with different perceptual realities that is surrounding by us everyday. In his early works, Arno uses an old fashioned manual typewriter to do his works. The glitchy arithmetic digital images are combining by the typewriter's index of letters and symbols. The typewriter drawings present the transformation of digital imagery to a physical pictorial space through a typewriter. In the artist statement from his website, he claims that "I am driven by the search for an analog translation of digital imagery. I utilise this printing method as a means of producing paintings in a wider sense." This is one of the ways to bring the digital image into the physical world by transforming a physical object into a digital icon (where Arno uses a digital cloud in his work).
Vija Celmins
Vija Celmins is well known for her photo-based drawings and paintings of nature. The way to know more about the physical world is to understand human consciousness in relation to the lived experience. She said: “There aren't really rules for painting, but there's certain facts and fictions about painting. Part of what I do is document another surface and sort of translate it. They're like translations, and then part of it is fiction, which is invention.” (ART21 Magazine) When she is drawing, she is also experiencing her memory of the sky, the sea, the cosmos... Do they look different to a photograph? Will you respond or perceive the drawing in a different way? (compare to those documentary photographs) What make it so different?
Tom Friedman
Friedman pay a lot of effort to present the sketches on his sketchbook pages and use coloured pencils and watercolors to reproduce them in a photorealistic detailed style. The large-scale drawings of his sketchbook images really brought up my interested, I like the way he values his sketches and transformed it as a piece of completed artwork. He argues the original function of a sketch as a preparatory drawing, and also, his drawings question the standard to judge the value or the quality of an image.
David Ariel Szauder
Davis Szauder is an artist who believe that human memory and computer memory are similar. He considers human can only remember the details of an image in a short period of time. In the long term, we tend to forget those details and remain the lost fragments. We will use self- generated memory to fill the gaps and becomes memory fragments. (Szauder, 2018)
In Szauder ‘Failed Memories’ series, he deconstructs the identical part of the main character on a photograph and adds a short description below each of them. It would allow the viewer to understand why the image will deformed in this way. He uses glitch as a metaphor to assert his questions about the possibility to recall a piece of memory, how our memory fails us, and how our mind reconstructs long-term memories.
Roy Lichtenstein
Roy Lichtenstein's brushstrokes inspired me to bring the brushstrokes into my drawings. I am interested in the way he used a comic style to reappear a brushstroke. In this series of work, the "logo" of abstract expressionism changed into a depersonalised symbol.
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Charles Gaines
Charles Gaines is a conceptual artist, his drawings, works on paper and photographs include grids and numbers. The formulas and systems addresses the relationship between objective and the subjective perspective and uses them to construct the experiences of aesthetics, politics and language and questions the ways of representation. Compare to the other conceptual artists who are very careful about the excess of language in their artwork, he is especially interested in the excess of language. The works present how the logical element combines with the numbers (mathematic methods) and the exploration about the rational and the irrational.
Mathieu St-Pierre
Mathieu St-Pierre is an experimental visual artist, who specialises in glitch art. In his Melting Ice Cream series, he experimented on a video editing program, Sony Vegas. He uses his digital video from the past. By arbitrarily changing different parameters in the editing program, he generates various glitch images which are completely abstract and vibrant. This process of video manipulation in Melting Ice Cream can be seen as an analogy to manual painting. These imperfect images and corrupted files are considered as an exploration of new possibilities of the digital canvas. (Sotiraki, V. Glitch Art Narrative, 2014: 26) He uses a video containing his old memory to start with, and operates different computer programs to repeatedly generates different glitch images from this old memory. He considers this kind of abstract presentation would help him to explore a new way to narrate his old memories and uses the glitch characteristic to present the process of fading memory.
Mustafa Hulusi
I am attracted by the way he put abstraction and realism together, to express our perception in a more complete way. Influenced by Op art and photo-realism, the abstract part represent what he felt and the photo-realistic part resemble of what he saw. "A sense of unease pervades the paintings; there are nostalgic images and express loss. They are an attempt to remember, not just a particular moment of intensity and aliveness, but also self-awareness."(fair for saatchi)