Takashi Murakami: Rare Prints Available

19/03/12 at 12:03:43 pm

Takashi Murakami is one of the most thoughtful and thought-provoking Japanese artists, his work ranges from cartoony paintings and prints, to quasi-minimalist sculptures. Many know Murakami for making a $2.6 million diamond-encrusted sculpture with Pharrell Williams, he has also collaborated with Louis Vuitton to produce best-selling handbags which are owned by Elizabeth Hurley and Reese Witherspoon.

We have a beautiful collection of signed lithographs by Takashi Murakami available including Flower Smile and Flower Ball (3-D) Red Cliff (pictured) both from an edition of 300 and priced from £1500.

Takashi Murakami’s art encompasses a wide range of mediums and his work has been noted for its use of colour, incorporation of motifs from Japanese traditional and popular culture, flat/glossy surfaces, and content that could be described at once as ‘cute,’ ‘psychedelic,’ or ‘satirical’. Among his most famous recurring motifs are smiling flowers, iconic characters, mushrooms, skulls, Buddhist iconography, and the sexual complexes of otaku culture. Takashi Murakami has also created his own pop icon, ‘Mr. DOB,’ which has developed into a form of self-portraiture, the first of several endlessly morphing and recurring motifs seen throughout his work.

In addition to his work as an artist, Takashi Murakami is a curator, entrepreneur, and a student of contemporary Japanese society. In 2000, Murakami curated an exhibition of Japanese art titled Superflat, which acknowledged a movement toward mass-produced entertainment and its effects on contemporary aesthetics. Murakami has also set up his own art production company called Kaikai Kiki through which he manages the careers of several younger artists and organises the biannual art fair GEISAI.

In 2002, at the invitation of designer Marc Jacobs, Murakami began his long-lasting collaboration with the fashion brand Louis Vuitton. He began by contributing artwork which was used in the design of a series of handbags. The series re-envisioned the fashion house’s signature monogram and was a huge commercial success. Though he had previously collaborated with fashion designers such as Issey Miyake Men by Naoki Takizawa, his work with Louis Vuitton won him widespread fame and notoriety as an artist who blurs the line between ‘high art’ and commercialism. It also elevated him to celebrity status in his home country of Japan.

In November, 2003, ArtNews reported Takashi Murakami’s work as being among the most desired in the world. Hiropon, a life-sized satirical sculpture of an anime character with gigantic lactating breasts, sold for $427,500 at Christie’s auction house in May, 2002. One year later a second sculpture, Miss Ko2, sold for $567,500. His work has continued to rise in value and in May 2008, My Lonesome Cowboy, an anime-inspired sculpture of a masturbating boy, sold for $15.2 million at Sotheby’s. In 2008, Takashi Murakami was named one of Time Magazine’s ‘100 Most Influential People’, the only visual artist included. Murakami also came in at 17 in Art Review’s 2009 Power 100 and is a regular each year on the list.

Takashi Murakami’s work has been exhibited in prestigious museums all over the world, including the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Gagosian Gallery, London and Rome, Museum of Modern Art, New York, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt, and the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain. In September, 2010 Takashi Murakami became the third contemporary artist, and first Japanese artist, to exhibit his works at the Palace of Versailles in France filling 15 rooms and the park with his sculptures, paintings, a decorative carpet, and lamps.

We offer a number of interest-free payment options, contact us for more information.

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Focus on Rob and Nick Carter

16/03/12 at 07:03:56 am

Rob and Nick Carter are a London-based husband and wife artistic duo, who have worked together for over 15 years. Having contributed significantly to the genre of Op Art, they continuously push the boundaries between photography, painting and sculpture.

Their work revolves around light, colour and form, exploring mediums including camera-less photography, painting, installation, neon and film.

Rob and Nick Carter’s Painting Photograph series, as in Painting Photograph Oil I, feaured here, has been created by using a large 10″ x 8″ camera to photograph tiny paintings measuring just 2cm. The resulting highly detailed photographic image is printed, and the original oil painting destroyed. As Rob and Nick state, ‘These photographic artworks make us think about the nature of paint and the process of painting more than a painting could ever do’.

Other works, such as Mag Light , Multi-Coloured VI featured here, can be described as photographs taken without a camera and paintings without brushes; instead Rob and Nick Carter work in complete darkness to ‘paint with light’ onto photo-sensitive cibachrome paper.

The resulting vibrant, high gloss colours and pop sensibility provoke an immediate visual response from the viewer – a roller coaster ride for the eye and perception.

Rob and Nick Carter are two of the most exciting names working in contemporary art today. Their work has been collected by a host of celebrity collectors, including Elton John, David and Victoria Beckham, Simon Fuller, Philip Treacy, Matthew Williamson, Stephen Fry, Kevin Spacey, Jude Law, David Walliams and Claudia Winkleman.

Corporate collectors include Virgin, Sainsbury’s, Reuters, EMI and The Groucho Club, and their work is held in the permanent collections of the V & A, London and the Museum of Neon Art, Los Angeles. They are available for commissions – please contact us for more information – and to date works have been commissioned by clients including Great Ormond Street Hospital, D2 Private, Land Securities and Sketch, London.

Rob and Nick Carter’s unique artworks have been featured in Art Review, The Independent, The Guardian, GQ Magazine, Time Out, Time, Elle Deco and ​The Scotsman, and the have also been shortlisted for the Sovereign Art Prize and the John Moores painting prize.

Rob and Nick Carter have exhibited internationally, with solo  exhibitins in London, New York, Los Angeles, Milan, Geneva, Zurich and Hong Kong.

We have a small collection of work available by Rob and Nick Carter; click here to view.

View Rob Carter’s solo Travelling Still series by clicking here.

Kim Baker: Flower Paintings

15/03/12 at 10:03:38 am

Kim Baker’s paintings are based on a Romantic attitude, drawing elements from traditional painterly values whilst communicating a unique expressive quality with an intuitive and spontaneous approach to her work. Kim Baker often works over a previous painting, adding then rubbing back layers of paint so that the underpainting can be seen in part, which gives a sense of history to the works.

Kim Baker’s recent body of work is drawn from the classical theme of Memento Mori; and uses motifs such as flowers, birds and insects, which, historically, are said to remind the viewer of their own mortality of the vanity of earthly glory and pleasure. The artist weaves flora and fauna into magical, jewel-like landscapes that are a continuation from her 2007 Dark Gardens series.

Baker graduated with a BA (Hons) Fine Art degree from Birmingham University. She has exhibited widely, including group and solo exhibitions and art fairs in London, Newcastle, Reykjavik and New York. Private and public collectors of Kim Baker’s paintings include Birmingham University, Whitbread Group plc, Bow Arts Trust and Midland Arts Centre, and she has recently been commissioned to create eight paintings for the Four Seasons Hotel in St. Petersburg. Her work has been featured in Art Monthly, Time Out and S Magazine.

We have three new pieces by Kim Baker available which are in oil on canvas. Flower Painting 1, Flower Painting 2 and Flower Painting 3 measure 12 x 16 inches and are priced from £800.

Alternatively UK collectors can buy these artworks using our interest-free credit facility; contact us for more information.

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Nick Walker: The Morning After – Empire State

14/03/12 at 06:03:32 am

Street artist Nick Walker is one of Britain’s graffiti pioneers and has been working out of Bristol for over twenty years. Walker’s work employs a good deal of wry humour, treating iconic figures with a refreshing irreverence such as his two images of the Mona Lisa and his print of the Houses of Parliament.

Nick Walker has been influenced by films like Blade Runner and the visions of 2000AD into developing his own dystopian science fiction imagery. Well known works by Nick Walker include Gods We Trust, Vandal, 38 Pigtails, The Morning After (TMA) and Mona Simpson.

Nick Walker has exhibited internationally including group and solo exhibitions in London, Washington DC, Bristol, Los Angeles, Berlin, Toronto, New York and San Francisco.

In 1992 Nick Walker began to combine stencils with freehand work which allowed him to juxtapose almost photographic imagery with the rawness which evolved from conventional graffiti styles. Stencils introduce an impact element to his work. The appeal of stencils is that they allow him to take an image from anywhere – dissect any part of life – and recreate it on any surface. Nick Walker tries to add an element of humour or irony to some paintings to add a little light relief to the walls.

Nick Walker was originally inspired by seeing NYC graffiti pioneer Dondi and in his early street-spraying days used the tag Ego. His style has attracted widespread attention and he has created spraypaint portraits of Krust, Roni Size and Carl Cox as well as a comic strip for Roni Size’s Dope Dragon label.

He has also been involved with the movie industry, painting sets for the director Stanley Kubrick and for Eyes Wide Shut, B-Monkey, Incognito, Hackers and Judge Dredd.

Nick Walker’s artworks have featured in The Independent, Daily Telegraph, Sunday Times, Evening Post, Dazed and Confused, Huck Magazine, Watch and the Observer. Walker’s artworks were also featured in the Black Eyed Peas I Gotta Feeling video.

We currently have two rare works by Walker available; Cans (Black on Black) and The Morning After (TMA) – Empire State which are priced from £800.

We offer a number of interest-free payment options including the Own Art scheme*, contact us for more information and to apply.

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Faile: Launch Tonight

13/03/12 at 09:03:57 am

Faile have become legends in the world of street art with their iconic pop culture images which are inspired by comic strips, book covers, fiction novels and even the Yellow Pages. Faile emphasise art making over indirect political statements or sloganeering, but their work often contains both passive and overt messages, usually cloaked in ambivalence.

Faile have exhibited widely including in New York, London, Copenhagen, Paris, Tokyo, Rome, Berlin, Los Angeles, Barcelona, Zurich and Shanghai.

We have one rare screenprint by Faile available called Launch Tonight which is from a signed limited edition of 100. This print measures 28 x 39 inches and is priced at £1200.

Faile are an international artist collective comprising Patrick McNeil, Patrick Miller and formerly Aiko Nahagowa. Their first project together had the title A Life, of which their name Faile is an anagram. Well known works by Faile include Faile Dog, Faile Bunny Girl, Faile Bunny Boy, Butterfly Girl, Bret the Hitman, Forbidden Love, Smoking Silence, Military Love, Sinful Pleasures, Launch Tonight, Save Stilettos and Happy Home.

Faile’s work involves playing around with images and layouts, ‘recycling’ images over and over again making both a social comment on the society that we live in and making ‘icons’ out of throwaway images.

Although Faile’s completed works are iconographically and stylistically distinctive, their process of creation owes much to chance, improvisation, and openness to outside source material. The visual elements of their work is continuously adapted to varied materials, from grocery store signs to wooden boxes and painted ceramics. Although they are not graffiti writers as such, their work originated in the streets, and their studio work bears the stylistic hallmarks of both wheatpasting/stencilling and the vernacular of the global urban environment.

Well known installations by Faile include Lost in Glimmering Shadows which occupied an ambiently-lit circular gallery space in which large-scale prints and paintings surrounded sculptural elements in an interior ring. Faile also collaborated with the artist Bast to produce an installation dubbed Deluxx Fluxx, comprising custom-made operational arcade games and a foosball table. Bedtime Stories comprised of twelve works created from several painted wooden blocks to come together as unified paintings. Faile also created Temple a full-scale church displayed in ruins in Praça dos Restauradores Square in Lisbon, Portugal.

Faile have produced several limited edition books including Orange, Death, Boredom, Lavender and Prints + Originals which surveys their career and explores Faile’s process, influences, and iconography.

We offer a number of interest-free payment options including the Own Art scheme*, where you can spread the cost of your order over 10 months, or defer payment for up to 12 months. Contact us for more information.

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Gary Hume: Psyche

12/03/12 at 11:03:35 am

Turner prize nominee Gary Hume is strongly identified with the YBA artists who came to prominence in the early 1990s. Gary Hume is renowned for paintings distinguished by a bright palette, reduced imagery and flat areas of seductive colour. While Hume’s paintings have always emphasised their luscious surfaces and simplified forms, many are infused with a melancholic beauty.

Some of Gary Hume’s best known works include Here’s Flowers and Snowman as well as his Door paintings life-size representations of hospital doors. These proved a critical success, being shown in Germany and the United States, as well as attracting the attention of collector Charles Saatchi.

Gary Hume abandoned doors in the mid-1990s, turning to paintings in household gloss paint on aluminium panel, for these often used appropriated images, including pictures of celebrities (e.g. DJ Tony Blackburn and Michael Jackson) and animals. Their forms and colours are dramatically simplified, with people being reduced to just two or three colours. At first, Gary Hume used mainly bright colours, but later pieces have used more muted tones.

We have only one Gary Hume print available, Psyche (pictured) is a two colour screenprint on anodised aluminium, measures 20 x 26 inches, from an edition of 400. Contact us for pricing information.

Gary Hume graduated from Goldsmiths College in 1988 and his work was included in both Freeze, an exhibition organized by Damien Hirst in 1988, and East Country Yard, a warehouse exhibition organized by Henry Bond and Sarah Lucas in 1990. His work was also included in Sensation, a touring show of the Charles Saatchi art collection at the Royal Academy in London. He represented Britain at the 1999 Venice Biennale, where he showed his Water series, a number of superimposed line drawings of women. Gary Hume was elected a Royal Academician in 2001.

Gary Hume has exhibited at the São Paulo Bienal, Venice Biennale, the National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh Fundação La Caixa, Barcelona (2000), Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, Kunsthaus Bregenz and the Kestnergesellschaft, Hannover. Group shows include Tate Britain, London, Louisiana Museum, Denmark, Kunsthalle Basel and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

We offer a number of interest-free payment options including the Own Art scheme*, where you can spread the cost of your order over 10 months, or defer payment for up to 12 months. Contact us for more information and to apply.

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Focus On Alex Hill

09/03/12 at 11:03:24 am

Photographic artist Alex Hill creates playful work that stems from ‘a geeky obsession with cartoons and model railways that has never really gone away’. He explores the spectacle, reality and representation through his photographs using advanced techniques and hyper real colour to reduce huge dioramas into what appear to be small plastic toys.

Alex Hill’s knack for creating visually intriguing images has taken him all over the world, from photographing throughout Cornwall whilst studying, to the Las Vegas strip, the French Alps and more recently on the road around the UK. With an aesthetic borrowed from a modern consumer palette his images both seduce and confuse the viewer.

At first glance Hill’s images show us a world that appears on a minute scale, people are reduced to figurines, surfaces appear plastic and landscapes, artificial. In Alex Hill’s world, the landscape has assumed the role of theme park, and he invites us to interrogate it both visually and theoretically. Challenging ideologies of consumption, the photographs contemplate a world that has become a product of the society it produced. Hill’s images consider an environment saturated in hyper reality and the resulting society as a simulacrum.

Alex Hill’s obsession with traditional photographic processes sees him using complex photographic techniques, most notably a 5×4 view camera which he uses to make the work.

Unlike modern tilt-shift lenses that have become popular in recent years, he prefers the unrivalled control obtained only with a plate camera. This cumbersome beast allows all manipulation to be done in camera using the Scheimpflug principal, allowing ultimate control over the plane of focus. The resulting image simulates the narrow depth of field often found in macro photography and this, combined with vivid colour and a touch of magic, gives the impression of artifice and the landscapes seem rendered in miniature.

Alex Hill graduated with a BA (Hons) with distinction from Falmouth College of Arts, Cornwall in 2003. He has exhibited widely, with group exhibitions and art fairs in London, New York, Germany, France and Brazil, and solo exhibitions in Paris and Brighton.

In 2008 Hill was a UK winner of the Magenta Foundation’s Flash Forward Emerging Photographers award. Alex Hill’s work is held in a number of corporate and private collections, including celebrity collector Dara O Briain. Alex Hill currently lives and works in Brighton.

We have a collection of digital C-type prints available from Alex Hill, including Construction London, featured. All prints are available in editions of 90, measuring 20 x 16 inches, and priced from £250. We also have a small collection of larger prints, from editions of just 6 and measuring a substantial 48 x 40 inches, priced from £2,500.

Click here to view the collection >

Hector de Gregorio: Il Musico

08/03/12 at 11:03:59 am

Castrati were the singing superstars of the 18th Century and they travelled around the courts and capitals of Europe, pulling the crowds wherever they performed. The brainwave to create castrati had first occurred in 17^th Century Rome, where the pope had banned women singing in churches or on the stage.

In 17^th and 18^th Century Italy it is estimated that around 4,000 boys were castrated each year, from the age of eight upwards, with the aim of them making a fortune as opera singers and soloists with choirs in churches and royal palaces. Most of the boys came from poor families who wanted their sons to become rich and famous musical stars and escape from the poverty they had been born into. Only a small amount of these boys however would become famous castrati, the rest would end up in the Church as they were forbidden to marry.

The castrato’s voice was prized for its combination of high pitch and power with the unbroken voice able to reach the high notes, but delivered with the strength of an adult male giving it a quality that was different from a woman, a boy or a male ‘falsetto’ voice.

The vulgarity of castration and the vulnerability of the castrati themselves who remained in a body constrained in a pubescent state was the inspiration behind this new work by Hector de Gregorio.

In Il Musico Hector de Gregorio wanted to show the character in the image before he went on stage to perform, he wanted to show the private and vulnerable character that the castrati were underneath.  De Gregorio decided against bright colours and decorative paraphernalia and instead chose for an overall flesh colour to represent the exposed character. The white collar and beads in the image refer to the castrati’s most valuable and forever preserved virtue – the whiteness of their voice.

The exhibitionism shown in Il Musico is the castrati’s strength but also his prison; he has become an engineered luxury object made for the abstract and divine.

Bestselling artist Hector de Gregorio has been described as ‘an unswervingly incendiary artist’, he is interested in seducing the viewer, and his deliciously dark photographic images certainly act as a visual lure. In his images nothing is sacred, containing as they do religious overtones and something beyond mere festishism.

De Gregorio graduated from London’s Royal College of Art in 2009, with a Master’s Degree in Printmaking, where he developed his labour-intensive way of working. Each image involves extensive research and costume making, photography, digital imaging and hand-finishing.

Hector de Gregorio has exhibited widely, with exhibitions in London, Berlin, Milan, New York, Miami and Chicago. His deliciously modern portraiture is held in the collections of Lady Victoria Conran, Mehmet Omer Koc and Theo Fennell.In November 2009 he won the prestigious annual Young Masters Art Prize for his inspiring contemporary portraiture.

View more available works by Hector de Gregorio >

Kim Baker: Garden 1

07/03/12 at 08:03:14 am

Kim Baker’s paintings are based on a Romantic attitude, drawing elements from traditional painterly values whilst communicating a unique expressive quality with an intuitive and spontaneous approach to her work.

Baker graduated with a BA (Hons) Fine Art degree from Birmingham University. She has exhibited widely, including group and solo exhibitions and art fairs in London, Newcastle, Reykjavik and New York.

Kim Baker’s recent body of work is drawn from the classical theme of Memento Mori; and uses motifs such as flowers, birds and insects, which, historically, are said to remind the viewer of their own mortality of the vanity of earthly glory and pleasure. The artist weaves flora and fauna into magical, jewel-like landscapes that are a continuation from her 2007 Dark Gardens series.

Her use of jewel-like colours against a sombre dark background gives the paintings a backlit quality, and the contrast of mark-making veers from subtle glazing techniques to broad, sweeping brushstrokes to create a dramatic stage set of landscapes and gardens.

In 2009 she completed a residency at the Signy and Olaf Willums Art Foundation in France. Private and public collectors of Kim Baker’s paintings include Birmingham University, Whitbread Group plc, Bow Arts Trust and Midland Arts Centre, and she has recently been commissioned to create eight paintings for the Four Seasons Hotel in St. Petersburg. Her work has been featured in Art Monthly, Time Out and S Magazine.

We have two new pieces by Baker available which are oil on paper including Garden 1 (pictured) and Garden 2, both measure 16 x 20 inches and are priced from £400.

We also have a number of works in oil on canvas, click here to view >

Alternatively UK collectors can buy these artworks using our interest-free credit facility; contact us for more information.

Click to buy >

Banksy: Weston Super Mare

06/03/12 at 12:03:29 pm

Banksy is an anonymous graffiti artist, political activist, film director, painter and print maker. His satirical street art and subversive epigrams combine irreverent dark humour with graffiti in a distinctive stencilling technique.

His grafitti art features in the streetscape of hometown Bristol as well as appearing in London, Los Angeles and many other cities around the world. Banksy’s work has attracted celebrity collectors such as Damien Hirst, Christina Aguilera, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie.

We have a rare Weston Super Mare print available which is signed and numbered by Banksy. This sought-after 2003 screenprint is from an edition of 750, although only 150 were signed, and measures 39 x 14 inches. This print is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity from Pest Control. Contact us for pricing information.

We have a number of other works by Banksy available, click here to view >

We offer a number of interest-free payment options, contact us for more information.

Contact us for pricing information >

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