Alex Grey – { feuilleton }

The art of Shinji Horimura

Lagrimas del Mar (2016).

The gay artists archive continues to be the most popular destination on these pages which makes me feel I ought to add to it more often than I do. Not all of Shinji Horimura’s art is homoerotic but these drawings from his WAH series certainly are. In these and other works Horimura renders the male body with broken outlines that fragment into abstract patterns. In the black-and-white drawings these might be read as tattoos but in his colour art they suggest the hallucinatory revelations of Alex Grey’s paintings. There’s more to see on the artist’s Coroflot pages.

Loosen (2016).

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Art that transcends

Late last year, US design magazine Communication Arts asked me to write a piece about psychedelic art, past and present. The resulting feature has been out for a couple of weeks in the May/June issue (no. 56) but I hadn’t seen it in print until a copy turned up today. Attempting to wrangle discussion of a very wide-ranging and amorphous field into 1500 words isn’t an easy task but I managed to sketch a history of psychedelic art beginning with Aldous Huxley and Humphrey Osmond’s mescaline experiments in the 1950s. Art that can be considered psychedelic goes back into prehistory but Huxley’s The Doors of Perception (1954) is the first book that considered art in general from a psychedelic viewpoint. That book, and the later Heaven and Hell (1956), are still valuable for their aesthetic meditations however much Huxley’s optimism may have been tainted by the ferment of the 1960s.

Primitive And Deadly (2014) by Earth. Art by Samantha Muljat.

The psychedelic art of the 60s isn’t exactly overlooked so I paid more attention to tracing the influence of the psychedelic style, and also mentioning painters such as Ernst Fuchs, Alex Grey, Martina Hoffmann and Mati Klarwein. Among the more recent artists, I was pleased that Samantha Muljat‘s album cover for Earth was featured. I’ve been listening to this album a great deal over the past few months, and loved that cover as soon as I saw it. One of the other contemporary names, Brazilian artist Duda Lanna, works in a very different style: bold, vivid, and often abstract. There seems to be a lot of this kind of work around at the moment, so much so that I kept spotting new examples after the article had been delivered. It’s difficult to say whether this is a developing trend or simply a case of there being more of everything around these days. I’ll play safe and suggest it’s probably a bit of both although, as I say at the end of the article, if the movement to legalise drugs gains momentum we can expect to see a lot more psychedelic art.

Garden of Psychedelic Delights by Duda Lanna.

Hive Culture and Shamanic Illuminations

Apiphobia (2011) by Anonda Bell.

A couple of exhibitions opening this week for those in the New York area. Hive Culture: Captivated by the Honeybee is at the Glyndor Gallery at Wave Hill where 18 artists present works inspired by our favourite pollinating insects:

Painting, prints, sculpture, photography and video are featured, by artists Jennifer Angus, Anonda Bell, Deborah Davidovits, Anda Dubinskis, Cara Enteles, Rose-Lynn Fisher, Sally Gall, Hope Ginsburg, Talia Greene, Judi Harvest, Rob Keller, Andrea Lilienthal, Holly Lynton, Lenore Malen, Julia Oldham, Michelle Rozic, Jeanne Silverthorne and Draga Šušanj.

This isn’t solely an art exhibition. In October Wave Hill will be staging a series of bee- and honey-related events, details of which can be found on their press release (PDF).

El Encanto de las Piedras by Pablo Amaringo.

Over at the ACA Galleries, Shamanic Illuminations which opens on Thursday will feature the art of Pablo Amaringo, Alex Grey and Mieshiel. There’s little detail at the moment on their website but they have a preview of the paintings including a number of Amaringo’s vivid, ayahuasca-inspired works which are psychedelic in every sense of the word. Shamanic Illuminations runs from September 15 to October 22. Via Phantasmaphile.