Well, it’s never too late. Identify our mystery artist and win this drawing by artcritical’s publisher/editor David Cohen.
No one will say our mystery artist had his or her fifteen minutes. His/her 2011 New York show consisted of a single and singular piece that was nothing if not timely according to artcritical’s review.
Forename clue: “unless presented in the present […] art is dead.”
For an acrostic of the mystery artist’s family name, assemble letters from the clues below. All the clues relate to articles you could have read here in 2011.
HINT: The first letter of their family name is shared by our mystery artist and the artist transcribed in Cohen’s drawing.
SECOND HINT: If curiosity or the desire to win gets the better of you, use artcritical’s search box to send you to the articles from which our quotes are culled—and don’t worry, thusly “cheating” helps our visitor stats!
CLUES:
first letter of the family names of the following artists:
Insect Immigrants consists of a collection of found white doilies, each hand embroidered with a different insect and displayed to face the wall, making visible the painstaking production of each loop and knot.
One mottled, stony white figure seems part Casper the Friendly Ghost, part Ken Price sculpture… Rifling through the last 100 years of painting with indexical panache, [these] biomorphs also nod to Picasso’s 1930’s beach bathers, Miró, Arp, Richard Lindner and Elizabeth Murray but function together as if [the artist] snapped a shot at the right moment at a party. There is an interesting tension between what is guided and what is a more randomized gesture.
[the artist’s] “efforts at attaining an art free from form and style was dirty and laborious business. These deeply emotional canvases present bewilderingly dense surfaces in which energy feels trapped, pulsing beneath craggy mountains and cavernous pools of oil paint… There is a sense of a slow, forceful swirling motion, like a maelstrom gathering energy
”The artist’s speed of production mirrors [his/her] interest in the rate at which new technologies reach obsolescence, a theme central to his practice. Equal parts hacker and historiographer, X’s meditations on authenticity, access, and authorship speak to [his/her] politics of open source culture: the exhibition “catalogue” is a downloadable PDF and the artist encourages the viewer to reproduce [his/her] works at home.
[painting] “uses color and stain to denote distance and differentiate the play of light and mist on receding hills with the polite subtly of a watercolor, despite its nine feet width and its being acrylic on canvas.”
first letter of this artist’s forename:
“The projecting and hanging rock formations, partly body, partly landscape, bring to mind venerable traditions of Chinese art: landscape painting, certainly, with rocky heights floating among clouds, seemingly disconnected from the earth, but more specifically the miniature rock formations that became popular during the T’ang Dynasty.”
first letter of the author’s forename and of the mental condition cited
If you’re prone to fits of [mental condition], the 25th floor of the John Hancock Center may not strike you as the ideal location for an art gallery. But staying abreast of the latest shows in Chicagoland requires precarious treks across neighborhoods, dizzying sprints up skyscrapers, and even trips across time-zones, all while maintaining your balance. On rare occasions, it means facing your fears.
Use the comments box below to submit your answer. The prize cannot be won by employees of artcritical LLC though they are welcome to play.
AND THE WINNER IS…
Congratulations, Juan Manuel Bocca, on being the first reader to identify the mystery artist. Jim Walsh and Erika Schneider got it right the next day and will receive runners up prizes. Everyone else, please continue to play and a sketch might finds its way to you, too!
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