robert melee

Robert Melee (born 1966) is an artist based in NYC and Asbury Park, New Jersey.^[1]

Melee was born in New Jersey. He makes multimedia art – videos, installations, collages. - His work is often compared to that of John Waters and Andy Warhol due to its overt campness.^[2] He is also a painter.^[3]

He attended the School of Visual Arts in New York from 1986–1990.

Such conflation of high and low is not merely an end in itself, but awakens the mind and eye to the possibility of intense aesthetic potential in the suburban environment. In his sculptures, Melee often combines disparate found elements––audio speakers, mannequins, appliances, sections of wall––with painted plaster that appears to be draped like fabric. In some works the plaster elements take on a primary role, and even overtake the found objects altogether. Included in this group is a sculpture in which a mannequin is covered with plaster and paint; here the human form, and its psychological implications, can also be traced back to Melee’s earlier film works. Others pieces are wall-based, and seem to resemble sculptures of paintings, their plaster forms like lengths of canvas that have been bunched, rolled or pinned.

Melee’s formal experimentation finds its psychological analogues in the blurring of beauty and grotesquerie, nostalgia and critique. In so doing, Melee’s work suggests an underground or alternative narrative of how and why visual ideas develop; because Melee’s language draws in such a large part from the private realm of domestic environments, his work elicits emotional responses that are both uncannily familiar and disarmingly strang

chie aoki

Chie Aoki’s sculptures are very mysterious and so is the artist. There’s a complete loss of identity in the glistening black faceless forms. Aoki is an exception to the rule that an artist has to have information, a website, and gallery exhibitions that are available to peruse online, instead there is hardly a trace of the artist’s identity available the web. This unusual lack of a significant online presence seems to continue the underlying theme of these beautiful sculptures; that they are a mystery and the work speaks itself.

Ivan Alifan

Shinichi Maruyama

I tried to capture the beauty of both the human body’s figure and its motion. The figure in the image, which is formed into something similar to a sculpture, is created by combining 10,000 individual photographs of a dancer. By putting together uninterrupted individual moments, the resulting image as a whole will appear to be something different from what actually exists. With regard to these two viewpoints, a connection can be made to a human being’s perception of presence in life.

Ron MueckSpooning Couple 2005

Presenting a psychological drama is one of Mueck’s chief aims in creating his sculptures. This is nowhere better seen than in ‘Spooning Couple’. The figures are lying together on a low plinth so that we look down on them from a bird’s eye perspective. The man, naked from the waist down, and the woman, naked from the waist up, are lying together, almost in a foetal position, her body fitting into the hollow of his – like spoons. They may be ‘spooning’ in a literal way, but they are in anything but a warm, loving embrace. Their expressions show them to be deep in their own separate worlds. The man almost catches our gaze in complicit acknowledgement that the bond between them seems to have broken down.

Freud

Another painter than is often compared to Jenny Saville is Lucian Freud, who paintings honest images of people and flesh and paints them in a style similar to that of Jenny Saville

Jenny Saville

An extremely relevent artist to my project on flesh.