Making Art with Frances Morris: Sophie Calle

I recognise that I like to be in control. I often find it easier to respond to instructions or a set of restrictions than I do to be given complete free-reign. Within my art practice (as well as in life), I often devise my own set of rules to follow. For instance, only use the colour white, fill the entire frame with pattern, only use materials that are edible. 

https://www.culturewhisper.com/r/visual_arts/the_artist_dining_room_sophie_calle_supper_club/7618

It is these tendencies that initially introduced me to the work of Sophie Calle, an artist who is famously controlling and who devises and implements "rules of the game". 'Sophie works with real life experiences we can all relate to – the death of a parent, the end of a relationship. Her work resonates with her preoccupations - death, absence, the mourning of the passing of life. "Growth is a series of mournings."

Calle recently produced an album of songs by 40 international musicians, in memory of her dead cat Souris. There’s Jarvis Cocker, Juliette Armanet, Bono, Michael Stipe to name a few. She’s made work out of her mother dying or her boyfriend ditching her. She’s had a job as a stripper, made a crazy road movie called No Sex Last Night. She's contacted everyone in a lost address book she found on the street. She’s asked people to describe their most exquisite pain, invited strangers to attend the funeral of their secrets. She’s asked museum staff to remember stolen paintings, blind people to describe the most beautiful thing they’ve seen. And although the work seems apparently dry - images and texts, books - it's deeply personal for those involved, and for us - the viewer.

In this BBC Radio 4 programme, Frances Morris, Director of Tate Modern, meets French artist Sophie Calle in her studio in south west Paris.

Simon Morris - Pause paintings

Artist Simon Morris is interested in geometric abstraction. This covers object based paintings, installations and collaborations with other people. Within the context of the paintings, it allows him to think about how to make a geometric image in a way that allows him some opportunity to set the parameters of what these paintings are going to be but also let him make a painting where a system or formula helped him make decisions about what to do next.



He enjoys the unpredictable nature of this way of working. He uses black because it is a reductionist colour and focuses the attention on the pattern as opposed to the colours. I also enjoy working in this way - perhaps because I feel confident that I know that I am producing something even if I do not know what I am producing! Getting a balance between chaos and control is the challenge.



Pause 4.5 (2006) and Pause 5.5 (2006), are part of an ongoing series of paintings that have been produced by following a mathematical system.

Andrea Cohen at Walter Maciel Gallery

LOS ANGELES, CA.- Walter Maciel Gallery presents a new series of work by New York based artist Andrea Cohen. 

For her third solo show at the gallery, Cohen introduces a series of highly textured and patterned hydrocal sculptures cast from bubble wrap, Styrofoam, plastic and foil. In previous work, Cohen has used these materials as her medium to make concurrent references to nature and industry. Now, through the casting process, the legacy of these materials is imprinted on her new work. The liquidity of pigmented hydrocal allows for varying effects when it cures; for example, foil and plastic folds generate both stone-like and fleshy forms in contrast to bubble wrap which leaves behind bold yet mutable patterns suggestive of pock-marked landscapes and perforated architectures. 

Cohen continues to build her sculptures as assemblages, working with play, improvisation, and a deep curiosity in the physicality of her material. She pours, tints, blends, folds, squashes, models, fragments, and assembles the components of each piece and works with a painterly palette that is both quiet and cheerful. Some of the works have a relationship to her previous sculptures made from carved Styrofoam and inspired by Chinese scholar’s rocks. Overall, it is clear that the new forms continue Cohen’s interest in Chinese landscape while at the same time are also influenced by the textures in the sculptures of Jean Dubuffet, Franz West and Paul Soldner. Cohen’s latest forms and processes, like her previous mixed media work, continue a dialogue between binaries, including control and exuberance, humor and contemplation, product and experiment. 

Cohen received a BA from New York University in 1993 and her MFA from Tyler School of Art at Temple University in 1999. She currently teaches in the School of Design Strategies at Parsons New School for Design in New York City. Her large-scale sculptures were featured in the seminal exhibition, The Uncertainty of Objects and Ideas: Recent Sculpture at the Hirshhorn Museum of Art and Sculpture Garden in Washington DC in 2006-07. Cohen was featured as a Critic’s Pick in ARTnews magazine in the October 2006 issue. She has recently exhibited at Project 4 Gallery in Washington DC and the Guggenheim Gallery at Chapman University in Fullerton, CA. Cohen exhibited in group shows at Walter Maciel Gallery including Size Matters in 2012 and Political Draw in 2009 and at our auxiliary gallery in the Pacific Design Center, West Hollywood in 2010. Her work is included in many important private collections.