An Expansive New Volume Cultivates Our Global Love for Gardens

Ebony G. Patterson, “…below the crows, a blue purse sits between the blades, shoes among the petals, a cockerel comes to witness…” (2019), mixed media, 110 × 98 × 6 inches. Image courtesy of the artist, Monique Meloche Gallery, and Hales New York/London

Spanning more than four millennia of horticultural heritage, a forthcoming tome from Phaidon celebrates the diverse mediums, trends, and traditions of gardens around the globe. Brimming with more than 300 full-color illustrations, Garden: Exploring the Horticultural World encompasses how geography, time periods, and purpose influence myriad landscape designs and gardening culture, along with numerous other art forms.

Garden highlights a vast range of art and ephemera, including plans for historic royal properties, how-to guides, maps, and representations in pop culture. From a Japanese tea garden fashioned from LEGO to an 18th-century Mughal garden in India to Monsieur Plant’s hydroponic system inside an iMac, the expansive tome showcases the immense breadth and imagination in gardens of all shapes and sizes.

Pre-order your copy on Bookshop.

 

Casey Boyden, “Japanese Tea Garden” (2007), LEGO, 10 1/4 × 17 3/4 × 11 3/4 inches. Image courtesy of the artist

Hafiz Nurallah, “A View of Shalimar Bagh, Srinagar, from the Polier Album” (c.1780), opaque watercolor heightened with gold on paper, 9 ½ × 14 ½ inches. Image courtesy of Sotheby’s

Christophe Guinet (Monsieur Plant), “Plant Your Mac!” (2020), mixed media, 23 5/8 × 12 5/8 inches. Image © the artist

John Haynes, “The Physic Garden, Chelsea: A Plan View” (1751), engraving with watercolor, 24 ¼ × 18 ¾ inches. Image courtesy of the Wellcome Collection, London

Bernardino de Sahagún, “General History of the Things of New Spain: The Florentine Codex” (1577), ink on paper, each page 12 ¼ × 8 ¼ inches, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Florence. Image courtesy of Library of Congress, Rare Book and Special Collections Division

Claire Takacs, “Trompe l’oeil, Schwetzingen Palace, Mittelbau Schloss, Germany” (2016), photograph, dimensions variable. Image © the artist

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Warped Sculptures Suspend Novels, Guidebooks, and Other Print Objects in Borax Crystals

“Highway 1 California: The dream along the Pacific” (2021). All images © Alexis Arnold, shared with permission

For more than a decade, Alexis Arnold has been intrigued by the evolving nature of print. Her ongoing collection, titled Crystallized Books, transforms novels, guides, and maps into gleaming sculptures that consider how we value and use objects. “While I started the series in 2011 partly as a reaction to the vulnerability of printed media, it’s been nice to see a return to the cultural value of printed media while working on the series over the past 12 years. It’s also been interesting (and at times technically frustrating) to see the quality of book printing and binding decline as I’ve been working on the series,” she says.

To create the works, the Oakland-based artist (previously) submerges found volumes into a hot bath of water and borax. “When water boils, its molecules expand, and as the saturated water cools again, the molecules shrink and any excess borax crystallizes,” Arnold tells Colossal. Out of the pools come books coated with dense, translucent clusters that stabilize the objects as warped, crinkled mounds.

Because the crystals make the text difficult—or impossible—to parse, the books in the series become notable for their materiality. Many of the titles Arnold works with have cultural or personal importance, like To Kill a Mockingbird or A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, while others reference the waning relevance of print. Field guides and maps are often available online, for example, making a book less necessary but also more precious as a relic of times past.

Read more about Arnold’s practice and peruse an archive of her projects on her site and Instagram.

 

Detail of “Poems” (2023)

“Audubon rock and mineral field guide” (2019)

“A Tree Grows in Brooklyn” (2020)

“Smithsonian rock and mineral guide” (2019)

“To Kill a Mockingbird” (2021)

“Islamic Maps” (2022)

“Tai Pan” (2020)

“Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban” (2021)

“To Kill a Mockingbird” (2021)

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Anatomical Details Emerge From Found Coral and Shells in Gregory Halili’s Intricate Sculptures

Photos by Silverlens Gallery and Gregory Halili. All images © the artist, shared with permission

From a vast array of coral, shells, agates, and more, Gregory Halili (previously) shapes anatomical features and cosmic phenomena in intricate detail. The artist uses iridescent mother-of-pearl to accentuate round skulls or teardrops leaking from eyes, working with the inherent natural shapes and textures of materials he finds around his studio, located about an hour south of Manila.

Several years ago, Halili began carving lifelike miniature skulls into shells he found on beaches around the Philippines. He also uses oil paint to render minuscule details of individual eyes, painted on the reverse of transparent glass or crystal. Since then, his practice has evolved to include larger pieces that incorporate an array of smaller works and natural materials. He says:

I started to create these massive works filled with miniature paintings and objects. I’m a painter, but I learned to create sculptures, to weld, use cutting and power tools, and drill into stones and metals…My method and thinking process is still painterly, creating the works as layers, constructing and deconstructing them, and figuring out the forms and gestures as I create.

Halili’s Coments, a recent series of assemblages, expands on the ritual of searching for and recontextualizing found objects, ranging from metal to minerals to antiques. Each sculpture contains more than a hundred items found along beaches, at flea markets, and in antique stores. “These works are about renewal, return, and reincarnation,” he says, emphasizing how disused or abandoned objects find new life in his work.

Halili’s work is currently on view at the National Museum of the Philippines in Placuna placenta: Capis Shells and Windows to Indigenous Artistry. You can find more on Instagram.

 

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In Bursting Bonsai Sculptures, Patrick Bergsma Taps Into Nature and the Deep-Rooted History of Porcelain

“Royal White Pine” (2023). All images © Patrick Bergsma, shared with permission

Resisting the confines of porcelain vases, Dutch artist Patrick Bergsma’s vibrant bonsai sculptures illustrate the strength and resiliency of nature. Flowering branches, gnarled roots, and lush mosses rupture from shards of found pottery, capturing moments of transformation and growth.

Raised in a family of antique dealers, Bergsma was surrounded by art and historical objects, and as he developed his own practice, he was drawn to the collectibles that filled his parents’ shop and home. In his ongoing Expanding China Series,the artist references the rich, global history of porcelain.

“What we call typically Dutch, like Delft blue, was originally an attempt to imitate the very popular porcelain imported from China and Japan,” Bergsma says. “In this series, I often use these 17th-century ‘imitations’ combined with the natural elements like bonsai and ikebana.” The compositions also nod to the Japanese practice of kintsugi, replacing the metallic, mended pottery seams with dense mosses and clinging roots.

Bergsma initially used real bonsai trees that were either diseased or dead, incorporating them into broken vessels. Conscious of the possibility of reviving the diseased specimens, he began recreating lifelike versions using coconut fiber, polymers, kaolin, and quartz. A growing collection of bonsai trees in his studio garden provides a reference for choosing the right colors and materials for convincing replications.

Explore more on Bergsma’s website, and follow Instagram for updates.

 

“Abandoned Vase”

“Cracking Tulip Vase” (2020)

Left: “Falling Branch” (2022). Right: “Intertwined” (2020)

“Apple Blossom” (2021)

“Arita” (2022)

“Imari Blossom” (2023)

“Makkum Blues” (2023)

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $5 per month. The article In Bursting Bonsai Sculptures, Patrick Bergsma Taps Into Nature and the Deep-Rooted History of Porcelain appeared first on Colossal.

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A Major Exhibition Materializes Surrealist Artist Remedios Varo’s Alchemical Visions

“Creación de las aves (Creation of the Birds)” (1957), Museo de Arte Moderno, INBAL/Secretaría de Cultura. Photo by Rodrigo Chapa. All images © 2023 Remedios Varo, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VEGAP, Madrid, courtesy of the Art Institute of Chicago, shared with permission

Alchemy and the depths of the occult manifest within Remedios Varo’s practice. The Spanish surrealist (1908-1963), whose works are on view at the Art Institute of Chicago, was a researcher at heart with a vast, insatiable curiosity for discovering the unseen and underrecognized. Interested in scientific disciplines like astronomy and ecology along with psychology, tarot, and feminism, Varo was intent on expanding the limits of human perception. “I deliberately set out to make a mystical work, in the sense of revealing a mystery, or better, of expressing it through ways that do not always correspond to the logical order, but to an intuitive, divinatory, and irrational order,” she’s quoted as saying.

Born María de los Remedios Alicia y Rodriga Varo y Uranga in Catalonia, the artist was a natural polymath, having taken a childhood interest in her father’s work as a hydraulic engineer while reading the sci-fi novels of French author Jules Verne. Her early experiences and desire to learn informed what became her artistic practice and ushered her entrance into Surrealism. After a few years of living and working in Paris, Varo, like many of her contemporaries, fled Europe before World War II and relocated to Mexico City, where she lived until she had a heart attack and died at age 54.

 

“Armonía (Harmony)” (1956)

In Science Fictions, more than 60 of Varo’s paintings, sketches, and sculptures are on view at a U.S. museum for the first time in 23 years. The enchanting works evidence the artist’s esoteric affinities and are rife with unexpected magic. “Creation of the Birds,” for example, centers on a hybrid, owl-like character who appears to paint winged creatures that are brought to life by a stellar beam. Similarly, “Useless Science, or The Alchemist,” depicts a cloaked figure turning a crank that powers a towering apparatus of gears and pulleys, producing a pale green liquid at the base.

While Varo’s subject matter is often rooted in experimentation and discovery, so was her physical making process. She tended to produce cartoons, or full-scale preparatory drawings, that she would transfer to a panel or canvas. These renderings offered structural support to her more capricious techniques like blotting, scraping, and decalcomania, which involves pressing a painted material against another surface so that both are temporarily joined by a layer of wet paint. This creates organic, biomorphic planes when pulled apart. The vast quantity of textures adds to the cosmic, enchanting qualities of Varo’s works, which she produced layer by layer, sometimes embedding natural materials like mother-of-pearl within the compositions.

 

“Simpatía (La rabia del gato) (Sympathia)” (1955)

Although lesser known in the U.S., the artist is well-established in Latin America. Varo is part of a trio of artists dubbed “the three witches,” along with Leonora Carrington and photographer Kati Horna, and was active in Surrealist circles in Mexico. “Varo has been revered as a cult figure since the 1950s, her allure stemming from the enigmatic nature of her work, both in terms of its subject matter and technique,” said curator and art historian Tere Arcq, who helped organize the exhibition with Art Institute curator Caitlin Haskell. Presented in partnership with Museo de Arte Moderno, Science Fictions is widely lauded for recognizing and expanding access to Varo’s contributions to art history, both of which are long overdue.

Given her enduring search for transcendence and transformation, would Varo have considered the artworks themselves an act of alchemy? “That’s a fascinating question,” Haskell says. “She was certainly reading about alchemy, as we know from her library, and she was not alone among the artists in her circle to be thinking about analogies between art making and alchemy. In a metaphorical sense, yes.”

Remedios Varo: Science Fictions is on view through November 27.

 

“Ciencia inútil, o El alquimista (Useless Science, or The Alchemist)” (1955), Museo de Arte Moderno, INBAL / Secretaría de Cultura.

Detail of “Creación de las aves (Creation of the Birds)” (1957)

“La huida (The Escape)” (1961), Museo de Arte Moderno, INBAL/Secretaría de Cultura. Photo by Rodrigo Chapa

Detail of “Armonía (Harmony)” (1956)

“Tauro (Taurus)” (1962), Museo de Arte Moderno, INBAL/Secretaría de Cultura. Photo by Rodrigo Chapa

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Enormous Animals and Human Hybrids Interact in Enigmatic Landscapes by Bill Mayer

“Black Goldfish at the Cliffs.” All images © Bill Mayer, shared with permission

Reimagining European art historical genres with a special affinity for the Romanticists, artist and illustrator Bill Mayer’s wry and moody paintings (previously) merge fantastical figures with vast landscapes. From a haughty crow with insect companions to a giant goldfish overseeing a lone figure on the coast, the artist’s enigmatic scenes highlight hybrid creatures and unexpected relationships.

“The Bird-Woman” is currently part of Beinart Gallery’s Small Works 2023 exhibition, which runs September 16 through October 8 in Melbourne, and Mayer’s work will also be a part of a group show in December with Principle Gallery. Explore more on the artist’s website and Instagram.

 

“Old Crow”

“Afternoon Tea”

“The Bird-Woman”

“The Black Swan”

“La Caracol”

“Mantis”

“Ringo, the Beatle”

“The Monkey’s Paw”

“When Insects Rule the World (Beetle)”

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $5 per month. The article Enormous Animals and Human Hybrids Interact in Enigmatic Landscapes by Bill Mayer appeared first on Colossal.

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