Banner image: Marguerita!

"Blue Experiment", by Marguerita Bornstein (2008)

Marguerita Bornstein – an artist who has in the past been so well known that her first name sufficed to identify her to millions – is the kind of person whose need to create, and whose talent for it, causes her to work across a range of forms. Illustrator, animator, painter, sculptor, and mixed media artist, she has been lauded for drawings that have graced the covers of major magazines and for her contributions to post-modern art exhibitions. “One of the strongest and most sexual works in the show,” wrote a reviewer of 1997’s Sex/Industry (Stefan Stux Gallery, New York), “the mixed media work by Marguerita uses a metal box, an old gourd, and a coconut to create a piece more honestly sexual and arousing than most of the anatomically correct phalluses and cartoon animal jokes in the main gallery.” Alas, I can offer no pictures to match this intriguing description.

Banner image: Henrik Håkansson

A detail from Henrik Håkansson‘s Broken Forest (2006). Håkansson is a Swedish artist (he’s based in both Berlin and London) who has a rather interesting relationship with nature: he’s mounted a concert for an English songbird, has caused stick insects to cross a tightrope, has allowed frogs to relax to ambient techno music, and has sought to express the psychic state of plants. Håkansson’s 35mm film, Monarch – The Eternal (a title referring to butterflies, not kings), can be seen at Toronto’s Power Plant gallery from June 12 to August 30, 2009, as part of its Universal Code exhibition.

"Broken Forest", by Henrik Håkansson (2006)

Banner art

A detail from Jackson Pollock’s Out of the Web: Number 7 (1949)

The method of painting is the natural growth out of a need. I want to express my feelings rather than illustrate them. Technique is just a means of arriving at a statement…. I can control the flow of paint: there is no accident, just as there is no beginning and no end.

— Jackson Pollock, 1960