Internationally-acclaimed artist Takashi Murakami recently opened a solo show, “Flowers & Skulls,” at Hong Kong’s Gagosian Gallery. Bright and sunny, the works in the show juxtapose conflicting images — flowers, which represent life and growth, and skulls, which can reference death and decay — to speak to the artist’s personal struggle with post-war Japanese society and his personal success as an artist. “What is Art? For those of us born in Asia, it remains an ever important question. The reason is that what we today define as Art represents the path followed by Western art history and yet here in the East, we have our own history,” said Murakami. “To survive as artists, we must learn to resolve the collision of these two cultures. My own personal position is drawn from how well I can arrange the unique flowers of Asia, moreover the ever strange blossoms that have bloomed in the madness of the defeated culture of postwar Japan, into work that will live within the confines of Western art history.”
MORE: http://hifructose.com/2012/12/05/takashi-murakamis-flowers-skulls-at-gagosian-gallery/
Click this picture above to see the complete Stop Motion Short
Netherlands based designer Rogier Wieland (previously) has just completed an impressive stop motion ad for Moleskin that relies almost entirely on notebooks to create nearly every aspect of the animation including the precisely cut typography.
The making-of video is almost more impressive!
via colossal
The Erudition presents a lunar-esque looking landscape with holographic trees blowing in fictional wind. Video here.
via luzinterruptus
As a photographer, Alejandro Maestre Gasteazi‘s expertise lies in the realm of lighting and digital post-production. These two skills are flexed to the utmost in the latest portrait series of his good friend Julián. Beautifully sculptural and built up like a motion picture, Alejandro focuses on the understanding of the body, leaving each frame as a simple vision of not-quite-dry concrete floating against a basic white backdrop.
“Julián is a good friend who I deeply respect; he is a multidisciplinary and complete artist. He is, at the same time, film director, sculptor, painter, photographer and writer. He suggested time ago the idea of doing a portrait of him that could describe his capacity of creating and his constant search to understand his body and spirit. All these made me think about his work and helped me to develop the idea of this work.
Therefore, with this photograph series I intend to show an artist fighting to get to know and shape himself and turn into a better human being.”
via trendland
Corn
Corn
Broccoli
Broccoli
Andy Ellison works at the BU medical school in Boston where he frequently works with a research-only MRI scanner. Over the past few months he’s been sharing some fantastic animated gifs of his calibration and quality control scans using assorted fruits, vegetables and other plants.
Check out his blog, Inside Insides, for many more scans and hi-res images.
via colossal
High-Speed Photography Turns Water Droplets Into Liquid Sculptures
Markus Reugels has elevated a hobby into an obsession, documenting the fluid poses of colliding drops of water.
via fastcodesign
Multidisciplinary artist Guy Laramee has worked as a stage writer, director, composer, a fabricator of musical instruments, a singer, sculptor, painter and writer.
Among his sculptural works are two incredible series of carved book landscapes and structures entitled Biblios and The Great Wall, where the dense pages of old books are excavated to reveal serene mountains, plateaus, and ancient structures. Of these works he says:
So I carve landscapes out of books and I paint Romantic landscapes. Mountains of disused knowledge return to what they really are: mountains. They erode a bit more and they become hills. Then they flatten and become fields where apparently nothing is happening. Piles of obsolete encyclopedias return to that which does not need to say anything, that which simply IS. Fogs and clouds erase everything we know, everything we think we are.
VIA COLOSSAL
