BTS is TIME’s 2020 Entertainer of the Year. Between releasing multiple albums and breaking every type of record in 2020, the Korean pop band ascended to the zenith of pop stardom. In an era marked by so much anguish and cynicism, BTS has stayed true to their message of kindness, connection and self-acceptance. Tune in for a special performance from BTS tonight at 10/9c on NBC.
BTS, also known as the Bangtan Boys, is a seven-member South Korean boy band that began formation in 2010 and debuted in 2013 under Big Hit Entertainment. The septet—composed of RM, Jin, Suga, J-Hope, Jimin, V, and Jungkook—co-writes and co-produces much of their own output.
Walking down Mare Street, vibrant even in these days of restrictions, it’s hard to reconcile today’s Hackney with pictures from the past. Shop-lined roads were once babbling streams, pubs were market gardens and this bastion of hip, edgy, urban creativity was a remote village where people retreated for a taste of idyllic countryside. But then, few places have changed more over time than this corner of East London.
According to local lore, the small settlement that sprung up along the Roman roads to Lincoln and Colchester owes its name to a Danish chief called Hacon, whose eye — islet—this was. No trace remains of this early history, but some medieval records indicate that the Knights Templars owned about 110 acres in the Hackney Marshes and built some mills on the River Lea — hence today’s Temple Mills. The village’s first parish church, St Augustine, was named after the Templars’ patron saint.
My main fascination lies within the manipulation of fibres and textiles as an expressive art form. Taking the rural environment as my inspiration,I explore long-term interests of texture, colour, layering and process to create contemplative and ethereal artworks.
My primary technique is wet felting; a traditional craft technique using wool tops, hot water, soapsuds and friction to interlock the fibres together. The making is muscular and rhythmic as I lay, pour, roll and squeeze again and again. It seems repetition nudges me into a semi-meditative space – it invites me to trust myself, and let the haptic connections sinuously paint a new space for the viewer to contemplate.
The compositions are built in layers, hinting at what may lie beneath, and use translucency and light to create absorbing moods. These are highly textured felt pieces in which cloth is embedded, prints disguised, and threads unravelled as a painter with her brush. The analogy with painting is significant throughout, making the viewing inquisitive, and challenging people’s perception.
Brought up in France and French Polynesia, I originally came to the UK to study textile design and am now a widely exhibited artist working and living in West Yorkshire. In 2015, I was awarded the Embroidery Magazine’s Best Emerging Textile Artist at SIT Select Showcase, as well as Best Picture in Show at theGreat North Art Show.
Contemporary artist Sam Szafran created truly dizzying perspectives in all of his art. In this episode of Expert Voices, discover how his extensive oeuvre often featured the same themes focusing on staircases, his studios and plants. ‘Staircase with a Blue Window’ and ‘Plants with Skylights’ perfectly depict his skill at capturing vertiginous aspects and ‘Atelier de la rue de Crussol’ shows a multitude of hidden details in this captivating work.
Sam Szafran (19 November 1934 – 14 September 2019) was a French artist. He has been buried in the cimetière parisien de Bagneux.
What Bofill creates with exceptional mastery are spaces or the sense of space. He describes this ability, probably jokingly, as being an escape from the claustrophobia of his childhood in Barcelona, living in bourgeois apartments crammed floor to ceiling with decorative objects.
Postmodernity in the work of Bofill does not have to be the abolishing of rules or the death of history. In his own words, postmodernity “breaks with cultural hegemony to adapt models to different cultures, considering the place and its history.” It is more of a reaction against the uniformity of modern architecture.
Ricardo Bofill was born on December 5, 1939, in Barcelona. The son of a contractor, in the dullest hours of the Franco regime. As he explains himself, the feeling of being, not in the middle of the world but the outskirts, in a periphery—a Catalonia that was not just physically isolated from the cultural capitals but also far from national, political decision-making—sparked dreams of freedom and faraway lands, and was probably what later inspired his nomadic lifestyle. The importance of the vernacular, it’s engagement with classicism, Bofill’s sense of atemporal elegance—all find their roots in this early period.
Jo Applin gives an insight into both Lee Lozano’s life and her work, contextualizing her practice and highlighting her response to the constraints of constitutional systems, gender dynamics, power, money, and politics.
Created in 1962–1963, the early paintings and drawings on view at Hauser & Wirth Somerset use airplanes as a central image and can be considered as examples of the artist’s passionate exploration of creative energy in its purist form. This focused body of early work exposes a complex and deeply intimate inner life grappling with one-sided gender and societal dichotomies, while other works display a form of ferocious humour and playfulness, exploiting the rhetoric of exaggeration to its most cogent effect.
Her raw expressionist brush strokes create powerful works imbued with a very personal iconography, including genitals, religious symbols, tools and body parts. Lozano’s short lived but influential career remains a source of fascination, lauded by Lucy Lippard as the foremost female conceptual artist of her era in New York. Jo Applin is author of ‘Lee Lozano: Not Working’ and ‘Eccentric Objects: Rethinking Sculpture.’ She teaches modern and contemporary art at The Courtauld Institute of Art in London.
The 1960s were a turning point for Master Chinese Artist Chu Teh-Chun. In this latest Sotheby’s video, discover how he abandoned his traditional figurative style of painting in favour of abstraction. Learn how his painting ‘Composition’, created in 1961, perfectly executes the concept of Chinese painting whilst meeting the style of Western abstraction.
Chu Teh-Chun or Zhu Dequn was a Chinese-French abstract painter acclaimed for his pioneering style integrating traditional Chinese painting techniques with Western abstract art. Chu Teh-Chun enrolled in the National School of Fine Arts, where he studied under Fang Ganmin and Wu Dayu.
Joseph Mallord William Turner RA, known contemporarily as William Turner, was an English Romantic painter, printmaker and watercolourist. He is known for his expressive colourisations, imaginative landscapes and turbulent, often violent marine paintings.
Actor-director George Clooney returns to the world of sci-fi with his latest futuristic drama, the post-apocalyptic thriller “The Midnight Sky,” He talks with correspondent Tracy Smith about shooting in Iceland; how marriage and fatherhood has changed his perspective; and does he really cut his own hair?
George Timothy Clooney is an American actor, film director, producer, and screenwriter. He is the recipient of three Golden Globe Awards and two Academy Awards, one for acting in Syriana and the other for co-producing Argo. In 2018, he was the recipient of the AFI Lifetime Achievement Award.
In 1938 architect and designer Charlotte Perriand (1903-1999) designed a mountain shelter able to withstand the harsh elements of any mountaintop yet still light enough to be carried by hand.
The “Refuge Tonneau” (“barrel shelter”), her piece of nomadic architecture designed with Pierre Jeanneret, consists of just 12 main prefabricated panels light enough to be manually transported. Once on location, the panels lock together to resist wind, snow, and cold. The tiny barrel-shaped structure sleeps up to 10 people and while it was never constructed in Perriand’s lifetime it was just one of her many designs created for the masses.
In 1934, after 7 years working with Le Corbusier, Perriand began a five-year study of minimal shelters, like the prefab aluminum Bivouac refuge and the affordable, elegant prefab “House at the Water’s Edge”. Hoping to improve upon her easily-transportable, aluminum Bivouac shelter she found inspiration in the merry-go-round. Counting on the dodecagon shape’s ability to withstand strong centrifugal loads (and high winds), she made it the basis for her Refuge Tonneau.
All her tiny shelters were works of studied elimination. “Her mission was to eliminate anything unnecessary,” explains her daughter Pernette Perriand-Barsac, “but always to concentrate on the flow of light and air. Then you can live in the smallest of spaces.” Sébastien Cherruet gave us a tour of Perriand’s minimal structures and apartment design at the Louis Vuitton Foundation’s exhibit he curated: “Charlotte Perriand: Inventing a New World”.
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