Pattern Pulp

Holiday Gift Guide for Pattern Lovers




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We always put a little patterned guide together come holiday season and today’s post features our most recent edit. Happy shopping!

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December 10, 2015 | By: Shayna Kulik

Marketing Men's Camo




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Camouflage is a seasonal staple – especially in men’s fashion. Whether colors, textures or materials are being swapped, it’s an adaptable pattern that’s assimilated with pop culture trends (far beyond military aggression).

Here are a few outerwear items from Valentino and Coach. The campaigns are similar in vibe and feel, from the model choice, pose and faux outdoor scenery. For better or worse, it seems like Juergen Teller and Terry Richardson still have a grasp on the photographic direction in play…as we’re still seeing head-on flash photography in a rough-around-the-edges kind of way. It is refreshing though, to see pops of color softening the set and scenery – the tulips in the Valentino spread add a lot of oomph to the storytelling.

 

December 9, 2015 | By: Shayna Kulik

Tuesday's Gallery Picks




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This week’s artists examine the psyche and culture’s impact on how we see the world.

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1. Parastou Forouhar’s practice examines the power structures within certain authoritarian political systems, with particular attention to how they block oppositional discourse from entering the public sphere and the partial invisibility of women through veiling. Through her work, she processes very real experiences of loss, pain, and state-sanctioned violence through animations, wallpapers, flip-books, and drawings at Pi Artworks
2. Stefanie Gutheil has delved deep into the recesses of her imagination and emerged with a phantasmagoric stable of characters à la a secularized and hallucinatory version of Noah’s Arc. With this herd of misfit creatures, Gutheil has left normality at the door and transformed the gallery into a sanctuary of the bizarre – a surreal, utopic landscape of chromatic and psychological vibrancy. In their peculiar features and with their hearts on their sleeves, Gutheil’s oddballs all emit a vaguely familiar sense of the folkloric, as if the artist unraveled them from traditional fables and stitched together her own at Mike Weiss Gallery
3. Brian Ulrich’s new body of work that reveals the excesses of luxury consumerism and America’s love affair with perception of wealth at Robert Koch Gallery
4. Characterized by her exquisite use of light, formal elegance, and palpable psychological tension, Helen Van Meene’s depictions of girls and boys on the cusp of adulthood demonstrate a clear aesthetic lineage to seventeenth-century Dutch paintingat Yancey Richardson
5. A prolific artist who lived between New York and London, Ellen Cantor combined ready-made materials with diaristic notes and drawings to probe her perceptions and experiences of personal desire and institutional violence at The Watts Institute
6. Lisa Pressman believes her paintings embody a visual synthesis of stored memory – a metaphorical representation of the passage between human vibrancy and entropy at Causey Contemporary

December 8, 2015 | By: Shayna Kulik

Color, Memory + Culture




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Everyone from the 80’s can remember this design and it’s symbolism. It represented a momentary pause in programming – one that accompanied a noise I don’t think I’ll ever forget. As with all things nostalgic these days, both the art and media worlds have harnessed this iconography to convey new messaging.

Francis Alÿs’s painting is part of a 40 work show in London titled, The Gap: Selected Abstract Art from Belgium. Curated by Luc Tuymans, the pieces focus on geometric abstraction and constructivism from the 20th century. The works touch upon cross-generational ties as well as distinct color fields.

In other more commercial realms, this Apple TV ad is a clever and simple throw back to a recognizable image associated with TV culture. Brilliantly, they’ve reclaimed the irony of the meaning. I wonder what millennials think when they see it.

 

December 7, 2015 | By: Shayna Kulik

Friday Quick Links!




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1. Martina Paukova’s bright and busy world via Trendland
2. Svenja Deininger’s beautiful abstract paintings via Art Hound
3. Love Sarah Smith’s embedded resin bracelets via Colossal
4. Some adorable goodies for little ones via Miss Moss
5. Furniture modeled after self-healing trees via design-milk
6. Charming wood folk by Taiwan based artist Yan Ruilin via Present & Correct
7. Andrew Hayes’ awesome book sculptures via iGNANT
8. Adorable DIY papier-mâché fruit ornaments via design*sponge
9. Digging Frank Chimero’s Colorfield series of prints via Design Crush
10. Make a paper flower wreath via Poppytalk
11. Love the colors in Leah Bartholomew’s paintings via The Design Files
12. Anastasia Savinova’s fascinating collages via The Jealous Curator

Contributed by Emily Gup

December 4, 2015 | By: Shayna Kulik

Tuesday's Gallery Picks




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This week’s artists hone and reinterpret techniques in order to explore the landscapes around them.

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1. Simon Hantaï: Blancs highlights the artist’s groundbreaking series of multi-colored paintings from 1973-1974. His signature method of the pliage technique involved folding the unstretched canvas, painting the exterior and then unfolding the canvas, resulted in a composition imbued with both painterly control and serendipity at Paul Kasmin Gallery
2. Laura McPhee’s The Home and the World: A View of Calcutta presents images that are less an overview of this city of 15 million than a glimps into its complex, often conflicted soul. The photographs gauge both the history of personal spaces and impart a sense of intimacy and calm that often belies the maelstrom that can be found in the external world at Benrubi Gallery
3. Teresita Fernández’s newest body of work continues her exploration and interest in scale as an elastic concept, and the correlation between the immense and the intimate; the vast and the miniature; the macro and the micro. Shrinking the viewpoint in order to amplify what we see, Fernández worked with malachite mineral rocks, using imaging techniques to look at their interiors. What initiated Fernández’s interest in exploring the inside of these heavy, earth-bound materials was their uncanny likeness to the actual full-sized landscape of the Viñales Valley, an iconic and surreal landscape in rural Cuba at Lehmann Maupin
4. Ryan Mrozowski’s Open, Other, End duplicates, repeats, and inverts the most commonplace of imagery (oranges, polka dots, birds, flowers, grass) in endless variations. These items, broken into their constituent parts and stripped of specific or personal context, reveal the uncanny and absurd appearance of a world subject to excessive cataloguing and archivingat On Stellar Rays
5. In this new and intertwined bodies of work on view, Meghann Riepenhoff continues to explore themes of landscape, time, and impermanence and subjects of rain, ocean, and shoreline at SF Camerawork
6. Ryan McGinley’s Winter photographs portray his nude figures in frozen landscapes at Team (gallery, inc.)

 

December 1, 2015 | By: Shayna Kulik

Tracking Repetitive + Awesome.
On Instagram.