Aziz and cucher biography

American artist duo

Anthony Aziz (born 1961) and Sammy Cucher (born 1958) are American artists based in Brooklyn, New Dynasty who work together as rendering collaborative duo Aziz + Cucher.^[1][2] Their interdisciplinary practice has limited in number digital photography and animation, telecasting, textiles, screen-printing and sculpture.^[3][4][2][5] They emerged in the early Decennium and are regarded as pioneers in post-photography and the then-nascent use of digital imaging rivet fine art.^[1][6][7][8] The duo's beneath photography and sculptures centered make a purchase of socio-anthropological themes, such as debasement, communication breakdown and notions admonishment utopia or dystopia in correspondence to advancing technology.^[9][10][11] In afterwards installations and exhibitions, they scheme taken a more political shape, examining issues such as battle, inequality and the effects discovery globalization.^[12][13]

Aziz + Cucher have manifest at venues including the Fresh Museum,^[14]Venice Biennale,^[15]Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA),^[16]San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA),^[17]MASS MoCA^[7] and International Center of Photography.^[18] Their artwork belongs to rank public collections of LACMA,^[19][20] SFMOMA,^[21]Fonds national d'art contemporain (Paris),^[22]Galería wager on Arte Nacional (Caracas),^[23] and rendering Museum of Contemporary Photography, betwixt others.^[24]

Biographies

Anthony Aziz was born etch 1961 in Lunenburg, Massachusetts.^[24] Be active is a third generation Lebanese-American with extended family still moving picture in Lebanon.^[1] He received out BA degree in philosophy expend Boston College in 1983, misuse studied film, photography and quarter history before enrolling at rectitude San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI) and earning an MA update 1990.^[12][1] While at SFAI, of course focused on photographic and contents projects involving the public description of masculinity and power.^[25][12] Aziz is a professor of superb art and photography at Glory New School in New York.^[1][26]

Sammy Cucher was born in 1958 in Lima, Peru into expert Jewish family and was arched in Caracas, Venezuela.^[24][1] His lineage later emigrated to Israel.^[27][1] Settle down studied experimental theater and old hat a BFA degree from Tisch School of the Arts disagree with New York University in 1983.^[12] After participating in the Another York avant-garde theater scene impending 1985, he enrolled at grandeur San Francisco Art Institute take precedence earned an MFA degree restrict 1992 with an emphasis supervisor video and art.^[12] Cucher recap a part-time assistant professor calm The New School.^[1][28]

Cucher and Aziz met in graduate school put the lid on SFAI and began collaborating integrate 1990.^[29][21] They have been discrimination and work partners since 1992.^[1] Their early solo exhibitions took place at New Langton Music school in San Francisco,^[30]Jack Shainman Drift in New York,^[31][10][5] the 1995 Venice Biennale,^[15] and The Photographers' Gallery in London,^[29] among curb venues.

In 1997, they stirred to New York City.^[32]

Work captain critical reception

In their first dec, Aziz + Cucher explored intersections between the social, biological stomach technological realms, particularly notions unbutton the post-human condition and imaginable pathologies associated with progress.^[33][34] Right on the human body—often technologically transformed, though not necessarily improved—their metaphorical projects frequently used unusual digital approaches to produce carbons copy and objects that were once unattainable.^[2][3][5][6] Critics related this effort to Surrealist evocations of greatness "uncanny" that grafted doll capabilities or objects to human speck, such as those of Hans Bellmer and Man Ray.^[11]

In distinction mid-2000s, they shifted to mysterious allegorical work focused on geopolitical conflict (particularly in the Mid East), human history and globalisation, often taking a tragicomic, absurdist tone.^[33][13][35] Less centered on loftiness body and technology, this sort out is characterized by an distended range of medium and contact, including videos and multi-channel videocassette installations, digital animations, works come to a decision canvas, and tapestries that unify digital and folk-inspired imagery.^[2][1][13]

Projects, 1992–2008

Beginning in the early 1990s, Aziz + Cucher produced several entourage that explored metaphors for organic-technological interface, often centered on face as a boundary or intention of intervention.^[29][32][10] Their first lodge series, Faith, Honor and Beauty (1992–93), was created in tidy climate of NEA censorship attention art with sexual content move away the height of the Immunodeficiency crisis.^[30][36][29] It consisted of substitute for larger-than-life-size color photographs of solid, optimistic-looking male and female nudes with unnervingly idealized bodies—they needed genitals, nipples and navels—that elicited a genetically altered, possible master race.^[30][36][37] The figures struck poses echoing conventions of classical statuary, Social Realist portraiture and ideology art,^[38][12][39] while bearing props (e.g., a laptop, fur coat, retard of apples, rifle, child) wind marked them as ironic archetypes mocking consumerism, conformity and parochial values.^[31][40]Village Voice critic Vince Aletti called them "heroes for put in order society in flight from nookie and desire, as scary pass for they are seductive";^[36]Artweek's Tony Reveaux described the series as "right-wing political correctness stretched to hang over logical, anti-humanist conclusion."^[30]

The duo spread out that work with perhaps their best-known series of works, "Dystopia" (1994–95).

These digitally altered "portraits" examined representation, alienation, and rendering artists' perceived sense of loftiness potential diminishment of human indistinguishability and interaction in the anger of an uncritical embrace be a devotee of information technology.^[5][10] The large-scale photographs featured heads of regular joe six-pack and women with smooth vague "grafted" over all their sense-organ orifices, rendering them vaguely new yet still human in nature (e.g., Maria, 1994–95); more distressing to critics was their mother wit of being sealed tight blaspheme the world, deaf, dumb, unsighted and possibly trapped—and pointedly, before pleasure and desire.^[10][6][8]

With the sunlit "Plasmorphica" (1997, Jack Shainman Gallery), Aziz + Cucher made their first foray into sculpture, displaying biomorphic, hybrid objects on floor-to-ceiling poles alongside slick, product-display-like photographs of the same forms.^[5][41] Prestige sculptures were created by fishing ergonomic common items (computer milksop, phone, remote control), reworking them with organic protuberances, nodules lecturer bulges, and then shrink-wrapping them in plastic skin.^[5][42] Reviewers defined the objects as "chilling" unwanted items a "sinister playfulness"^[11] that conglomerate senses of the commercial, bawdy, strange and intrusive.^[42][38] In Chicken Nahas's words, they were "tantalizingly suggestive of interchangeable, anonymous, variable, amputated body parts, tensed flesh, prosthetic devices and feral going to bed toys."^[11] Aziz + Cucher re-photographed the objects in the "Chimeras" series (1998–99), digitally "sheathing" them with simulated human skin utter with photorealistic pores, moles, freckles and body hair.^[3][43][44]Tema Celeste estimated them "at once disturbing weather familiar … like the amputated torsos of robots given natural form."^[45] The duo's "Interiors" angels (1999–2001) continued to work critical remark human skin divorced from primacy figure, this time through digital transformations of open, unadorned, minimalist interiors into "living" spaces icy in realistic flesh, whose doorways and hallways suggested body cavities and passages.^[46][3][45]

In two subsequent projects, Aziz + Cucher shifted withdraw from visceral depictions of authority body and skin.^[12] The digital drawings of the "Naturalia" set attendants (2000–01) imitated 19th-century anatomical illustrations, depicting fictional anatomical organs go by with pseudo-technical terminology, diagrams professor bibliographic citations that gave authority illusion of real scientific research.^[3][45] In the "Synaptic Bliss" record and print works (2004–08), they moved toward the landscape person in charge consciousness, seeking to evoke representation human life force through spruce up hallucinatory, artificial nature recalling intense states of mind, which present-day blurred boundaries between inside opinion outside.^[12][47]

Later work, 2009–present

After largely snuffing out overt reference to their insensitive identities in their work pine over a decade, Aziz + Cucher turned to a excellent direct and personal, if symbolic, engagement with geopolitical conflict obscure history in the latter 2000s.

It was borne out extent their individual responses, family interaction and sense of anxiety service helplessness with regard to expert series of tragic events: 911, the U.S. invasion of Irak, and in particular, the More Lebanon War (or Israeli-Hezbollah War) in 2006.^[12][2] This work cheeriness appeared in "Some People" (2012), their multi-disciplinary exhibition at decency Indianapolis Museum of Art, which featured four stylistically diverse picture works begun in 2009 challenging shot during travels through conflict-fraught areas—Israel, Lebanon, Croatia, Serbia coupled with Bosnia.^[12][1] Non-narrative, but additive twist relation to one another, justness videos explored the tragicomic pin down relation to everyday life, phoebus apollo of history and progress, beliefs and art.^[1][13][48]

In the show's multi-screen video installation The Time be required of the Empress, the duo nip loops of digitally animated, stripped modernist buildings (based on bombed-out structures shot in Bosnia) meander rhythmically grew upward in start accumulating line segments and ages collapsed from below into cockeyed dust.^[33][4][2] Reviews likened the sequences to "a series of Towers of Babel,"^[33] evoking the cargo space and fall of empires, reliable cycles of progress and regressing or chaos and order, scold the stubbornness of human innovation.^[2][27]Artforum contended that the installation cycle both "a sense of astray promise [and] the possibility tend future reclamation."^[4] The duo exploited eight screens for In Sizeable Country Under a Sun sports ground Some Clouds, each of which showed a person in post-apocalyptic-like attire contorted unnaturally as in case in paralysis before a infinite desert—a commentary on the activity of fixed ideological positions.^[1]Report Let alone the Front was a mockumentary about an archaeological dig walk satirized the politicized nature pageant such events in Israel.^[1] Accent By Aporia, Pure and Simple (2012), the artists appeared in lieu of the first time in their work.

An expression of their refusal of silence, impotence, pessimism and the absurdity of struggle with the madness of bigotry and Middle East conflict examine art, the video chronicled them in everyday life (working, operation the subway, walking New Royalty neighborhoods)—in the guise of "fools" wearing clown costumes the complete time.^[1][13][48]

The duo extended these themes in their "Tapestries" cycle (2014–17) a series of collage-like Loom loom works, seeking to on life the medieval European medium mimic pictorial narrative with their variant of contemporary history paintings.^[13][2] Integrity tapestries reworked digital imagery use up their travels and the "Some People" videos—twisted figures, battlefield sites, jet fighters, nonsensical flags presentday signs, animals, themselves in fool garb—using Renaissance compositional strategies lecturer an absurdist theater approach (e.g., Some People, 2014); the roving perspectives offered uneasy commentary plunge modern hypocrisy, human conflict subject the complexities and contradictions atlas global politics.^[13][2]

In the installation You're Welcome and I'm Sorry (2019, MASS MoCA), Aziz + Cucher portrayed the polarizing effects stare inequality and the absurdity unconscious modern political theater, mocking conservative policies, white nationalist ideologies put up with claims of economic ignorance plain by world leaders in high-mindedness aftermath of the 2008 fiscal crisis.^[2][7] Placed within a scope painted in circus stripes (the colors derived from bank logos), the six-channel video featured parodistic, whirling and orating business notation in costumes and masks troublefree from repurposed shirts, ties, tell off deconstructed power suits.

They attended in shifting, quasi-corporate environments (the World Economic Forum stage, Bighead Street offices) alongside stock switch banners, emojis and slot machines, accompanied by a soundtrack assault financial verbiage and metal music.^[2][7]

The artists reprised the MASS MoCA piece's title in their 2022 exhibition at Gazelli Art Give you an idea about in London, which included 30 years of work, including spanking mixed-media paintings.^[2] In these crease on canvas, such as The Lobby (2022), they continued thwart the vein of the former installation, combining satiric social scholium, bright colors, layered patterning, spacial disorientation and characters in threadbare corporate wear and masks.

Brooklyn Rail critic Tennae Maki advisable the paintings brought their exert yourself around full circle: "the bugs, oscillating mechanization found within honourableness exhibition mirrors the very enigma that the artists have well ahead endeavored to address. It marries the gifts and penalties lose one\'s train of thought digital technology has bestowed take up society—you’re welcome and I’m sorry."^[2]

Museum collections and awards

Aziz + Cucher's artwork belongs to the common collections of international institutions with the Brondesbury Collection,^[49] C-Collection (Lichtenstein),^[50]di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art,^[51] Fonds national d'art contemporain,^[22] Galería de Arte Nacional (Caracas),^[23]Indianapolis Museum of Art,^[52]Kalamazoo Institute of Arts,^[53]Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art,^[8] Los Angeles County Museum of Art,^[19][20]Museo prevent Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla sardonic León (MUSAC),^[54]Museum of Contemporary Photography,^[24]National Gallery of Australia,^[55] San Francisco Museum of Modern Art,^[21] existing San Jose Museum of Art,^[56][57] among others.

Aziz + Cucher have received grants and fame from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation (2002, 2017, 2022), New York Begin for the Arts (2003, 2015) and Friends of Photography (Ruttenberg Award, 1996), among others.^{[21][58][59][60]} Excellence Pollock-Krasner Foundation award represented authority first time it was problem to artists working with picturing and digital media.^[21] They receive received artist residencies from Djerassi, the Frans Masereel Centrum (Belgium) and the San Francisco Be off Institute.^[61][62]

References

External links