The Grace of the Sun

Grace of the Sun was a lighted installation by artist Robert Montgomery (previously here) shown at COP 26 in Glasgow, Scotland, 2021.

https://www.robertmontgomery.org/

BEAUTY: Site Specific Art--Steve Messam

The whimsical, very large scale site-specific pieces of English artist Steve Messam may seem random and zany but there is a wonderful, thoughtful method to his approach. Each piece is situated in an historic spot to call attention to some aspect of English culture, whether it might be an abandoned stone cottage in the forest for his Architecture of Ruins series, a thousand year old church spire, WWII bunkers on the coast, or even a 1960s Brutalist footbridge. The most interesting part of his oeuvre is that he sews the inflatable pieces himself!

Take a look at his website where he explains his inspiration for these pieces and more, along with some wonderful videos of the process.
https://www.stevemessam.co.uk/

BEAUTY: Painting--Juan Rivas

The meta artworks of Spanish artist Juan Rivas are delightful: he paints landscapes on a piece of the landscape itself (wooden utility poles, metal signs, cement posts, etc.). Funny but also thought provoking... and these site-specific works offer a new way to view familiar places.

BEAUTY: Installation--Ian Strange

Ian Strange uses light to interrupt reality. His most recent iteration of Light Intersection just closed in Sydney, Australia. The artist says:

Commissioned by the City of Sydney, LIGHT INTERSECTIONS II inserts beams of light through the facade of a late 19th century Victorian terrace home. Appearing to puncture the building across two perspective planes, the lines of light are drawn from the building's perspective lines, abstracted and inserted back into the architecture. The series explores the hand-drawn line in the landscape. In particular, perspective lines and their relationship to art and architecture as a way of understanding, interpreting and affecting landscape.

https://ianstrange.com/

BEAUTY: Installation--Fabian Knecht

Usually artists like to create installations within gallery or museum spaces, recreating man made or natural places, or sometimes creating places that exist solely in one's imagination. But Fabian Knecht turns this conceptual trop on its head by installing a white, fluorescent-lit gallery space in a forest!

Located in Buckow, Märkische Schweiz National Park, Germany, Knecht titled his piece Isolation (52°33’44.1”N 14°03’12.8”E). Without having seen the structure from the outside, viewers were blindfolded and led into the space for them to experience this sense of uncanny displacement.

http://www.fabianknecht.de/

"The Last Person On Earth"

The latest site specific public art installation from the amazingly clever and always poignant Michael Pederson a.k.a. Miguel Marquez Outside (previously here).

http://miguelmarquezoutside.com/

"The End Of The World Rehearsal Club" by Michael Pederson

Yup. This seems necessary these days...we must be prepared
See you there this Wednesday at 4PM, then?

From the delightful, pithy, thought-provoking Michael Pederson, previously here.
http://miguelmarquezoutside.com/

BEAUTY: Installation--Katharina Grosse

German artist Katharina Grosse doesn't paint images of the world, she paints the world itself. Her most recent installation which was on view through last December 3rd at South London Gallery was entitled This Drove my Mother up the Wall. Grosse said of the piece, "It’s about the reactions that you might have to other people’s actions. What might be interesting to you might transgress somebody else’s limits of acceptance and enjoyment. It’s this steady confrontation between individuals. Within family life you often have to negotiate how you live and how you accept one another. It’s a saying in English, isn’t it? To drive your mother up the wall. It’s also what children do with felt pens, to make little drawings or notes on the wall. For me, painting can appear anywhere in our world. It doesn’t have to be on a canvas or the space above the sofa....In the middle of the installation is a glaring white void, created using a Styrofoam stencil, that can only be reached by walking across the painted edges of the room."

Yet at the center a cut out in the stencil allowed paint to create a little triangle.

http://www.katharinagrosse.com/