Stephen Romano will be exhibiting Historical and Cutting Edge International Contemporary Artists along with works by Self Taught Masters at PULSE New York Art Fair May 9 - 12 2013 at The Metropolitan Pavilion 125 West 18th Street Chelsea New York, NY 10011
In the fall of 1899, Charles A.A. Dellschau (1830–1923), a retired butcher from Houston, embarked on a project that would occupy him for more than twenty years. What began as an illustrated manuscript recounting his experiences in the California Gold Rush became an obsessive project resulting in twelve large, hand-bound books with more than 2,500 drawings related to airships and the development of flight. Dellschau’s designs resemble traditional hot air balloons augmented with fantastic visual details, collage and text. The hand-drawn “Aeros” were interspersed with collaged pages called “Press Blooms,” featuring thousands of newspaper clippings related to the political events and technological advances of the period.
After the artist’s death in 1923, the books were stored in the attic of the family home in Houston. In the aftermath of a fire in the 1960s, they were dumped on the sidewalk and salvaged by a junk dealer, and later owned, studied and preserved by a local artist who for twenty years was preoccupied with their mysteries. Eight books made their way into the collections of the San Antonio Museum of Art, the Witte Museum and the Menil Collection; the remainder were sold to a private collector, and made their way into the art world. Dellschau’s works have since been collected by numerous other museums including the American Folk Art Museum, the High Museum, the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Museum of Everything in London, and ABCD Foundation Paris all have major holdings of this artists works.. Like the eccentric outpourings of Adolf Wölfli, Henry Darger and Achilles Rizzoli, these private works were not created for the art world, but to satisfy a driving internal creative force. Dreamer, optimist and visionary, Charles Dellschau is one of the earliest documented self taught visionary artists known in America.
Recent articles on Charles Dellschau have included
, and
The first monograph on Charles Dellschau was released on April 15 2013 from DAP Artbooks and Marquand Books, with an introduction by founder of The Museum of Everything James Brett,
and essays by the late Thomas McEvilley, Smithsonian curator of Aerospace Thomas Crouch, Scholar and art critic Roger Cardinal, Dellschau Scholar Tracy Baker White, President of ABCD Art
Brut Paris Barbara Safarova and New York gallerist and writer Randall Morris.
Sonya Fu (Chinese name 傅敏兒 Fu Man Yi) is a self-taught artist based in Hong Kong. In 2011, she was endorsed by the international creative conference"Semi-Permanent" as a new and notable artist of Hong Kong and awarded by "Perspective Magazine" as one of the ‘40 creative talent under the age of 40’ in Asia. Fu has participated in many national and international art exhibitions. Her chosen medium is digital painting which encompasses an intricate and unique process. Fu’s work is inspired by dreams, music and the human condition filling her work with subtle messages leaving the viewer to develop their own interpretation. Sonya quotes “My art can be disturbing to the audience, but this is my interpretation of life and the perspective of the many aspects of my everyday encounters. If my work manages to scare, sadden, excite or inspire people, then I am doing the right thing as an artist – creating and conveying emotion.”
"The divinatory power of this androgynous being is more than just anticipating the future. It is as if to “say” could provoke the destiny, produce the event itself. This may be one of the essential qualities that the monstrous fairy shares with the artist himself. For Lima to draw is to trace a sacred space — to avoid being devoured? —, to ward off the invisible. His gesture of disseminating hermetic symbols by association becomes an operative phenomenon similar to geomancy, his way of accomplishing a process the aim of which is the transmutation of his own self." excepted from "Darcílio Lima’s Opus Magnum" by Barbara Safarova
William Mortensen (1897–1965) was an American Photographer, primarily known for his Hollywood portraits in the 1920s-1940s in the pictorialist style. Mortensen began his photographic career taking portraits of Hollywood actors and film stills. In 1931, Mortensen moved to the artist community of Laguna Beach, CA where he opened a studio and the William Mortensen School of Photography. He preferred the pictorialism style of manipulating photographs to produce romanticist painting-like effects. The style brought him criticism from straight photographers of the modern realist movement and, in particular, he carried on a prolonged written debate with Ansel Adams.
His arguments defending romanticism photography led him to be "ostracized from most authoritative canons of photographic history.In an essay, Larry Lytle wrote "Due to his approach—both technically and philosophically in opposition to straight or purist adherents — he is amongst the most problematic figures in photography in the twentieth-century... historians and critics have described his images as "...anecdotal, highly sentimental, mildly erotic hand-colored prints...", "...bowdlerized versions of garage calendar pin-ups and sadomasochist entertainments...", "...contrived set-ups and sappy facial expressions...", and finally he was described by Ansel Adams as alternately the "Devil", and "the anti-Christ".
Limor Gasko's works can best be described as golems. Adam was initially created as a golem (גולם) when his dust was "kneaded into a shapeless husk." Like Adam, all golems are created from mud. They were a creation of those who were very holy and close to God, and held powers of creation.. One of these powers was the creation of life. However, no matter how holy a person became, a being created by that person would be but a shadow of one created by God. Limor Gasko's painting of fake animals next to nature are her golems. Limor Gasko lives and works in Brooklyn New York, and has shown her work in several prominent galleries.Limor Gasko lives and works in Brooklyn New York, and has shown her work in several prominent galleries.
Rene Pierre Allain (b 1951, lives and works in Brooklyn NY)
René Pierre Allain constructs paintings in tightly organized compositions that examine other meanings of forms commonly associated with abstract art. They are primarily geometric, mostly reductive, often symmetrical and austere artworks that take their inspiration from architecture, heraldry, insignia, disruptive patterns and, most recently, rhythmic patterns.
The Tablets paintings are made by applying multiple layers of pigments and acrylics in a plaster mixture over panels and sanding the surface between each application. The luminous, though subdued colors, and the incidents of undercoating revealed through the sanding process are set in tension by a precise linear organization. The panels are set in or float on steel frames which act as formal and architectural extensions of the painting. Formally and metaphorically, the works are about a play of framing devices, sometimes defying the frame’s function, leading the viewer to experience a surface that is as seductive as it is defiant.
His work is included in collections at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the London Regional Art and HistoricalMuseum, the Wadsworth Atheneum, and the Sol Lewitt Collection, among others. Rene Pierre Allain is represented by the Ricco Maresca Gallery.
Michael Anderson (New York)
Artist’s Statement
"Advertising provides the material, appropriation is the mode of operation, and collage is the medium of my artistic creation/recycling. To create my collages, I use international street posters, taken from the streets of such far-flung places as Mexico City, Berlin, Amsterdam, London, Paris, Rome and, of course my hometown favorite, NYC. The fragments of thousands of posters are re-arranged in a painterly fashion to create the composition and imagery of an individual piece.
I attempt to balance abstraction and representation in composition to create a static/non-static effect in the over-all experience of the work. These collages develop non-linear narratives that capture the experience of contemporary life with dark humor. In taking posters from the street, which are super-saturated and obvious, I focus ideas together to create a collision of energy that allows for tremendous juxtaposition. When people see my work there is a pinprick of recognition, an unexplainable familiarity, that they’ve seen parts before, but never in that way. As a sort of puzzle map of the collective unconscious, I make art about the world we live in, a document to show what it’s like to be alive today."
Dan Barry and Jana Brike initially met as many creative people do these days - via social media. Their chance online meeting quickly evolved, however, into a true friendship and collaborative working relationship, the great distance between Austin, Texas and Riga, Latvia notwithstanding. For several years, Dan and Jana have been co-creating artworks, each adding touches in their own studios and then periodically sending the works-in-progress back and forth via the postal service. The result is a collection of emotionally charged, texturally beautiful pieces that intriguingly blend both artists’ idiosyncratic styles. As solo artists, Barry and Brike have each exhibited extensively in the United States and Europe. They will be showing their artworks along side of one another in June 2013 in Bangkok, Thailand.
Henry Darger was a reclusive American writer and artist who worked as a custodian in Chicago. He has become famous for his posthumously-discovered 15,000-page, single-spaced fantasy manuscript called
The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion.
as well as several hundred drawings and watercolor paintings illustrating the story.Darger's work has become one of the most celebrated examples of Self Taught Art .
For further information or visuals please contact Stephen Romano 646 709 4725 or romanostephen@gmail.com
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