Malled

McCahon wouldn’t be much use. Nor would Mrkusich. Albrecht, nah, and you can forget Walters. But an early Binney or a Dashper work on velvet? Now you’re talking. Welcome to the world of 3D printing and, in this case, printing paintings. 

The Observer points out this is now a reality and in Amsterdam poor old Van Gogh, always a market leader when it comes to art museums trying to shill money out of art, is one of the first on the block. For $44,000 you can take your pick. Want a 3D reproduction of Van Gogh’s Almond Blossom or a late 1880s Sunflowers? Perhaps The Harvest or even Wheatfield under Thunderclouds is the one for you. Then there is always Boulevard de Clichy (they even reproduce the frame) waiting for your cash on the nail. If you are a VG expert it might pay not to peer too closely, but for anyone who is likely to pony up that sort of cash for a 3D repro these will probably pass muster.

But please, don’t go into the Van Gogh Museum expecting to buy one of the masterpieces from their collection in three dimensions. They are far too classy (#strategic) for that. Even though each of the 260 edition ‘art works’ are numbered and approved by a VG museum curator, when the series was put to market in Hong Kong recently the curators wisely chose to flog them in a shopping mall. 

Other museums are said to be panting at the thought of getting works in their collections out into this lucrative market.  Don McLean got it “But I could have told you Vincent / This world was never meant for one as beautiful as you.”
Image: showing Walters  (left) and Binney (right) as 3D reproductions. (simulation only)

Ceci n'est pas un video game

LEGO artists no longer have the monopoly on reproducing artworks in their games and entertainments. We've already posted on the art galleries on Second Life but how about these Super Mario / Magritte mash ups? Mix Koopa (the turtle) Troopa with René Magritte’s Unexpected answer 1933 or Mario nemesis Bullet Bill with  Magritte’s famous 1938 painting Time transfixed or even the artist's name Racoonda for Magritte’s signature work Golconda of 1953.
 
Regrettably these images haven’t made it into their own game yet and are simply stored on Tumblr but if they did, watch out for Super Mario's lawyers to step in.

In Auckland's St Kevins Arcade

We were thinking about Peter Robinson

Paper plus

Wallpaper has become a favoured tool of many artists. There are examples of Andy Warhol’s early foray into it as a medium at Te Papa right now and artists like Thomas Demand, Urs Fischer and Takashi Murakami use it as a way to get major coverage fast. But who’d have guessed Ralph Hotere would get into the act, albeit posthumously? In fact we’re being perhaps ingenuous here calling it wallpaper (it’s not actually stuck on the wall) but it’s a strange lookalike story, and besides we wanted to attract your attention.

Back when The Hocken Library in Dunedin was housed in the Richardson building, Hotere’s three part banner work Rain (the words were by poet Hone Tuwhare) hung in the foyer. Not the best place for it as it turned out as the wind and sun did their bit to damage the paint. It was then removed and restored and now hangs in the new Hocken library foyer. “But hey, (suspend your disbelief, this is the Richardson building calling out in dismay) what about me? You can’t just leave a bloody empty wall!” And they didn’t. Enter a full-size colour photograph of Rain installed as a replacement. Well not a replacement exactly as it’s a photograph and on paper. A lookalike. Strange, but true.

Image: Top: a ‘wallpaper’ version of Rain hangs where no painting dares, followed by wallpaper works by Andy Warhol, Takashi Maurakami, Thomas  Demand and Urs Fischer.

Lookalike

Images: left Robert Motherwell Patterson’s oatcakes 1967 and right Don Driver Assemblage 1978

In Berlin...

...thinking about Kate Newby

Lookalike

An Étant donnés tableau moment in Malta

In Malta

We're thinking about Luke Willis Thompson

The duck Christo problem

When Dutch artist Florentijn Hofman’s inflatable sculpture Rubber duck was reduced to a puddle in Hong Kong harbour, it gave OTN the opportunity to combine two favoured themes - the big and the lookalike.  Hofman has created a number of his 15-meter ducks. One was recently floating in Sydney harbour and is now in storage waiting for a return gig next summer. As the Hong Kong Duck is down for maintenance we can match it up with Christo’s 1983 Biscayne Bay installation Surrounded islands. Hofman also attracted OTN ‘s attention when he made not one but two giant rabbit sculptures.

Images: Top left, Rubber duck deflated in Hong Kong and right, one of Christo’s Surrounded islands. Bottom, the Hofman duck in Sydney

One of our Senators is missing.

A reader sent us a pic of a Fomison painting that’s in an exhibition at the Gow Langsford Gallery that opened yesterday. Fomison has titled his painting The Risen Christ Appearing to Three Senators by Tintoretto and it is one of a series of ‘copy’ paintings inspired by his travels in Europe in the late sixties. But hang on a minute, as our reader says, where’s the third Senator? It seems the third man was a victim of composition, a Fomison whim or maybe even canvas size. The original painting by Tintoretto hangs in the Venetian Academy where Fomison would no doubt have either purchased the postcard or recorded it in one of the notebooks he always had to hand. The Fomison version was probably painted later during a stint he had in an English hospital before returning to New Zealand. Not that the dumped politico is big loss. The real drama of the original is the Christ figure making his spectacular cloud-parting arrival. Fomison picked up on the calm indifference of Tintoretto’s senators to this amazing event and pushed it some. The two of them seem more bemused by us their audience than the sudden appearance of Christ.

Images: Top, Tony Fomison’s The Risen Christ Appearing to Three Senators by Tintoretto and bottom, Tintoretto’s The Risen Christ Appearing to Three Senators. (Thanks L)

What’s the point?

Over the years we have featured a number of versions of well-known paintings and sculptures. They make them big, they make them small, they form them from trees and carve them out of ice. Here, following up on the recent Seurat post, is A Sunday afternoon on La Grande Jatte subjected to the full gamut of copycat and lookalikeism. Not so sure Seurat would be amused - he was very clear on the copycat / lookalike issue, “originality depends only on the character of the drawing and the vision peculiar to each artist.” Still, it’s a chance for us to show off our past achievements in this field.

Images top to bottom: The Office cast on the bank, topiary in the city of Columbus, Ohio, weird statue version in Davenport, Mississippi, Babar Seurat, a wedding party does the Seurat thing and folk in the city of city of Beloit do a recreation in situ.

Previously on OTN:

Medusa madness

Last supper? I don't think so

Shady

 
It’s a bit like visual proof reading. How many people immediately notice that all the trees have been removed from Seurat’s famous painting Sunday afternoon on the Island of Grande Jatte? Conservationist Iain Woodhouse was responsible for this and a couple of other vegetative subtractions as part of a serious don't-muck-about-with-nature statement. You can see more of his art landscape modifications here.

Redeemer

Is this a lookalike or someone channeling McCahon from beyond the grave? Whatever, the style of Caltex’s giveaway promotion at the very least strongly echoes the proposal drawings McCahon made for a mural for Caltex. It was 1963 and Caltex was moving its head office in Auckland’s Fanshaw Street. A mural was called for. McCahon's design was not accepted, apparently because a name change was in the offing. In fact that didn’t happen for another three years and only affected the corporate name changing to Caltex Petroleum Corp. 

Images: Top, Caltex campaign and bottom, McCahon Caltex painting reproduced in the Les and Milly Paris auction catalogue. Also showing as a bonus is Milan Mrkusich’s Golden passive element. (Thanks S. Thanks again, that cap is on its way… really.)

Snap

Rounding a corner in the copy painting village of Da Fen in southern China, we saw a startlingly familiar image. A copy from a postcard was being made of Picasso's Pitcher, candle, and casserole, but our jolt of recognition connected to an early Colin McCahon painting A candle in a dark room that we had first seen in the late seventies.

One of the advantages of being in New Zealand is the easy access you have to most parts of the art world. And that was how, thanks to being in the public art museum business and writing the text for a book on contemporary artists, we got to meet Colin McCahon a couple of times. He was very welcoming and happy to talk with a couple of people who were pretty junior in the scheme of things. At one stage he said, “You two are from Wellington, I’ll show you something from my first Wellington exhibition. It’s under the bed” and dived out of the room. The painting he brought back was a little worn but spruced up it is now on loan to the Auckland Art Gallery, presumably by the McCahon family.

Although the date is unclear on the painting itself, it was recorded as 1947 and listed as entry number 37 in the catalogue sheet when it was shown in an exhibition of McCahon's paintings by Ron O’Reilly in the newspaper room of the Wellington Public Library the following year.  This date makes the 1945 Picasso painting almost certainly a key influence. You can see the black triangular shape at the edge of Picasso’s candle flame is enlarged and repeated in the McCahon work, the colour range is startlingly similar and the candle and holder are obvious soul mates. It certainly lit us up there on the streets of Da Fen.

Image: Left, a Da Fen painter’s copy of Picasso’s Pitcher, candle, and casserole (the Picasso original is in the collection of the Musée National d'Art Moderne in Paris) and right, Colin McCahon’s A candle in a dark room currently on loan to the Auckland Art Gallery.

In Shanghai

We were thinking about Weta Workshop’s foray into public sculpture in Wellington.

Colour me Driver

In Bangladesh we were thinking about Don Driver.

Lookalike

Images: Left, topiary by an anonymous photographer. Right, artist John Reynolds

Tied up

A Christo lookalike hanging out in Newtown

Lookalike

A reader (thanks G) sent us this Kate Newby lookalike

Lookalike

Another sector of the arts in Auckland goes for the AAG treatment. Thanks P