E.V. Day architectural clothing sculptures

Posted on 03/05/2010 by W&V

Bride fight is an already older but still very unique and interesting installation by American artist E.V. Day (1967, New York). She Used heavy-duty fishing line and hardware to reassembled clothing items which where untangled into small pieces.

Taking as her subject an eruption in the traditional social fabric the idea of two “glowing” brides locked in mortal combat E.V. Day touches something dark in the American social unconscious. Her work does link to reality television shows about brides-to-be, like Bridezilla, where tension gets to a boiling-point because of all the planning and frustration. But although E.V. Day’s piece may trigger such fetishistic responses it is a work primarily characterized by the humor and anxiety that accompanies a transformation of tradition. Fierce but nonetheless liberating, Bride Fight feels more like the jouissance of exploded boundaries than the pathology of confined ones.

The bride fight installation developed from a series of installations called Exploding Couture, begun in 1999, in which Day suspended women’s dresses in space. For example, in Bombshell (1999), exhibited at the 2000 Whitney Biennial, Day took a piece of iconic attire (Marilyn Monroe’s white halter dress) and arranged it to feel as if the forces of the implied figure are so powerful that the garment literally blows off, as if outgrowing its stereotype.

The visual result of the works are extremely light sculptures with architectural features.

Photos: E.V. Day | Lever House, New York

Baptiste Debombourg: Turbo

Posted on 14/04/2010 by W&V

The turbo wave of the 80′s left its mark on the industry and on the whole cultural situation in Western Europe. The sound effect gives sensation of real physical power. This music genre, which originated in the Balkans, and its impact are the inspiration for the work of Serbian artist Baptiste Debombourg. The music becomes a conceptual model of behaviour and is translated into wall deformed by the power of a musical wave. This installation is melted with the architecture of the surrounding space and so becomes part of it.

Photos: Baptiste Debombourg | Patricia Dorfmann Gallery Paris | Galerie HO Marseilles | Galerija10m2 Sarajevo

Spencer Tunick major installations

Posted on 03/03/2010 by W&V

The monumental installations created by ,the New York based artist, Spencer Tunick are an inspiring and interesting dialogue between the naked human body and the public spaces they are placed in. But, at the same time, they are also a dialogue between the individual human and the larger group. By taking pictures of hundreds and sometimes thousands of naked bodies at specific locations he transforms human individuals to sculptural objects. By doing this he shows and opens a new point of view or perception of humans, nature and architecture.

In his early work he focussed more on individual nude bodies or small groups. This made these works more intimate compared to the massive installations for which he is now known. His work can be considered as a crossover between an installation and a performance.

Spencer Tunick:
“A body is a living entity. It represents life, freedom, sensuality, and it is a mechanism to carry out our thoughts. A body is always beautiful to me. It depends on the individual work and what I do with it and what kind of idea lies behind it — if age matters or not. But in my group works, the only difference is how far people can go if it rains, snows etc.”

On March 1st, 2010 he created his latest work. Tunick set up a series of installations titled “The Base” on the Sydney Opera House Forecourt and inside the Opera House. These installations were carried out as part of the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras and were Tunick’s first large-scale installation in Sydney, with over 5,200 participants.

In the below video by Ralph Goertz, Spencer Tunick was followed by the Institut für Kunstdokumentation und Szenografie during the creation of his installation at the Museum Kunst Palast, Düsseldorf in 2006.

Photos top Spencer Tunick | Photo centre Reuters | Photo bottom Wood/Getty | Video by Ralph Goertz, Institut für Kunstdokumentation und Szenografie

Frederic Geurts architectural, monumental, dialogue and balance

Posted on 15/02/2010 by W&V

The work of the Belgian artist Frederic Geurts consists of monumental, but very fragile architectural structures, in which the artist goes to the extreme in exploring the boundaries of the force of gravity and the materiality of the structures.

Frederic Geurts: “I cannot act in a vacuum. I need context. I would like to play and interact with the environment. Both the spatial architectural aspects as well as the meaning of a place are important. In that sense, I am more a designer. Like for example an architect who starts creating after he has received a package of demands given by his client. I create such a demands program for myself.”

In the below, Dutch spoken, video Frederic Geurts gives a few days before the opening of his most recent exhibition called (un)balanced a tour to Jan Boelen the artistic director of the Z33 art centre.

Photos: Frederic Geurts (un)balanced |

Erika Hock conceptual objects and pressure

Posted on 05/02/2010 by W&V

“Weil ich es sage” (Because I say so) is an installation by the German artist Erika Hock. The title of the work reminds one of the conceptual writing piece by Robert Rauschenberg ( This is a portrait of Iris Clert if I say so). But ,looking at the other works and their titles in the series (how to love a bomb, gebeugt, es musste sein), Hock links more to the fact that she is challenging the resistance of a “strong, seemingly unmovable obstacle or barrier”,physical as well as mental. She increases the pressure with a belt on a “virtual” solid wall or block to a point where it bends and breaks, she drops a large solid cube so it damages by the impact but also under its own weight. The rigidness object reveals its weakness, its smooth skin cracks, it’s authority flows away and it becomes fragile. The clean and sharp geometry gets affected, distorted and damaged. Forged by pressure, a concept which also can be seen in and linked to the Imploded Sculptures by Ewerdt Hilgemann. In these sculptures Hilgemann used also external pressure, in his case created by a vacuum inside the object, to reshape large stainless steel geometric bodies. But where Hilgemann uses these real rigid materials for his objects, Hock basically creates the illusion of a rigid objects by using wood, gypsum cardboard, latex foam and adhesive polishing plaster. This fact adds yet another layer to the conceptual content and meaning of her works.

Hock has made a strong statement with this series of interesting conceptual pieces.