We recently caught up with the two recent grads as they were dipping a toe into the contemporary art world and looking for new studio space. The two work at an increasingly trafficked intersection where photography, styling, art and design meet, which allows creators to control both the product and the way it's presented - both the input and the output, as it were, which is where their clever studio name comes from.
SURREALISM WARPED REALITY SERIES
In some ways, the work of the Danish-Swiss duo Putput could be considered a response to sites like this one: If we're constantly bombarded by scrolls of images, the two designers seem to ask, how can we be convinced to reconsider objects that at first glance seem so quaintly familiar? Projects like their Popsicle series (above), which found the icy treats replaced by scrubbing sponges, or Inflorescence - for which the two employed the visual language of still life to depict cleaning implements as potted plants - play with subverting our expectations in a way that could seem cliché if the resulting images weren't so exceedingly lovely. Which is exactly the kind of self-referential bizarreness I really need right now. There’s even an image below that creates an entirely new “sculpture” out of a photo of an artist sculpting clay.
Its as though he can peer into different dimensions. Yet there’s actually more going on in Hauser’s images than just a poetic manipulation of classical sculptures in a confusing digital age. He’s making artifacts look like contemporary art, but he’s also making contemporary art look like artifacts - one piece, for example, being a Viktor and Rolf runway dress rendered as crumbling stone - as well as photographing clay sculptures he himself has made that are based on those artifacts and non-artifacts. Sachin Teng - If youre looking for a contemporary spin on surrealist artwork, Sachin Teng is your man. And I liked it not only because it was weird and disorienting, but because I had rarely seen that kind of digital technique deployed to such beautiful results. When I first discovered the Dutch artist Koen Hauser, and his Skulptura series in particular, that’s how I viewed the work - as moments of disrupted reality, primarily in the form of warps and swirls edited into photos of artworks and artifacts taken from old books and museum archives.
SURREALISM WARPED REALITY TV
Some do that through self-care, others through TV binges for me, it’s been a gravitation towards the strange and surreal, and finding funny little moments of disrupted reality to distract me from actual reality. His father was a pharmacist, and his mother was generally supportive of young Hans Ruedi’s work, even though he spent his teen years sketching pornography for his friends.With the state of the world the way it is right now, being present and aware is especially important, but so is finding moments of escape. If the man had grown up locked in a cage, or if his earliest memory was of the Joker killing his parents, then the great Gothic surrealism of his later work would make a kind of sense.Īctually, his childhood in the small Swiss town of Chur couldn’t have been more ordinary. Giger slipped and fell in May 2014, and died from complications in the hospital in Zurich shortly after.Ī body of work like Giger’s cries out for some kind of explanation. Several books followed, as did at least two “Giger bars” built around his designs, which must be a lot of fun to drink around. HR Giger’s work on the film won an Oscar as well as an appreciative international following. His 1977 work, Necronom IV, caught the attention of director Ridley Scott and earned him a job as set designer for the 1980 film Alien.
SURREALISM WARPED REALITY MOVIE
For over 40 years, from his first solo exhibition in 1966 to his 2011 death, Giger warped reality for audiences in art galleries and movie theaters around the world. If the purpose of art is to hold a mirror up to reality and encourage us to look at the world in new and different ways, then Hans Rudolf Giger was one of the most successful artists of the 20th century.