Happy Halloween
The nights are drawing in and Halloween is nearly upon us! To celebrate, here are four artists who explore the spooky, kooky or downright gruesome:
In 1990, Rachel Whiteread produced a labour intensive artwork called Ghost. An extension of her practice in which she was casting smaller objects in plaster, Ghost is a cast of a whole room in an abandoned building in North London. The project took 3 months to complete and involved covering the interior walls of the room with several plaster moulds. When the plaster dried she peeled the moulds off the walls and put them back together on a steel frame. This was a fragile environment to cast; the walls had been plastered originally using a traditional method of applying horse hair and a material called lathe, meaning Whiteread essentially had to repair the walls as she worked. Whiteread’s intention was to ‘mummify the air in the room.’ She has built an inside-out room, an un-enterable room, with a door that doesn’t open and a window we can’t see through. We all have a relationship with the rooms we inhabit, whether they feel spacious or inescapable.
Diane Arbus is known for her insightful and empathic portrait photography of a wide range of people during the 1950’s and 60s, including those who were considered at the time to be outsiders and were brutally treated as such by mainstream society. She was skilled at capturing the moment when her subjects dropped their guard, ditching their socially acceptable posture and revealing their true selves, for example in this fabulous photograph, Child with a toy hand grenade in Central Park, N.Y.C. (1962). In the early 1960’s she moved from using 35mm film, which produced rectangular photographs with a grainy effect, to medium format film, which resulted in square photographs with much more visual clarity.
As a child in Brooklyn, New York, Jean-Michel Basquiat was knocked down by a car and his mother gave him a copy of illustrated medical encyclopaedia Gray’s Anatomy to read. Basquiat became fascinated by the drawings and later included skulls and body parts in the personal compendium of motifs he applied to his paintings. Though he never attended art school, he was inspired by the jazz music his father played and learned about art by wandering around New York art galleries. Aged 17, he collaborated with a friend under the name SAMO© and together they scrawled lyrical, provocative text onto the walls of Lower Manhattan in a distinctive font. Basquiat used this project as a career launching pad and was working full time as an artist from the age of 21. Of mixed heritage himself, Basquiat’s works often referred to race relations and marginalised figures. Basquiat worked in a semi-improvised way, applying oil stick, crayon, spray paint and pencil onto reclaimed canvas. He would spread out books and paper ephemera on the floor around him, copying phrases and reappropriating images, cast open the windows to take in the sounds of New York city and blast out jazz music to create high colour paintings bubbling with energy. Kids can create an expressive self portrait in the style of Basquiat by following this online tutorial.
Swiss artist Dieter Roth made work in a range of media including sculptures in organic materials that naturally decomposed. He said: “Works of art should age like man himself, grow old and die.” His Chocolate Bust (1968) was a self-portrait made from chocolate and covered in birdseed that he situated outside to attract birds and vermin. Pocket Room (1982) is a slice of banana on an ink-stamped print of a table contained in a plastic case the size of a deck of cards. Roth produced this work in multiples and sold them to collectors. He also made pieces from meat and cheese, even animal excrement…!
We have two Halloween themed workshops running at Globe, get booked in here.
