Penny Davenport

via file magazine

‘That moment’, oil on canvas, Adrian Ghenie

Just like the work of Michaël Borremans that I discovered a few weeks ago, I find Adrian Ghenie’s scenes strangely erotic and always able to generate a conflicting range of emotions. Although the tableaux imply little movement, to me they all seem to foreshadow or follow a dramatic event.

Literature vs traffic, installation, Luzinterruptus

The Spanish art collective’s February 17th public installation saw them distribute 2000 books with lights interleaved amongst the pages across the roads and sidewalks of Water St, New York in the gentrified Dumbo district. The books were scattered in such a way that pedestrians could navigate their path through them undisturbed or interact with the books if they wished.

I’d have loved to leave work on the 17th and find myself an island in a starfield of story fragments.

via hookedblog

Thinking Cap, Corey Corcoran

Prolific paperback novel illustrator Bob Abbett’s gorgeous illustrations for Irving Wallace’s 1964 unintentionally pulp PolitComic “The Man” are the perfect visual accompaniment to a premise that, until relatively recently, might have seemed most appropriate between the covers of quick-fix literature:

In the bizarre event - possible even in fiction only through the confluence of extreme political circumstances and reactionary affirmative action - a black man should become U.S President, would the challenges of racism, intrigue and public backlash from minority communities and the mainstream alike prove too much to overcome?

By all accounts, the book is hardly crammed with blade-sharp insight, but it doesn’t stop me from desperately wanting a copy.

Apple, by Yehrin Tong

It seems like I’m in the mood for geometrically torturous illustrations, tessellations and typography at the moment, so here’s another….

Via itsnicethat

Experimental typography by Ashleigh Barron inspired by ‘Digital’, the last song ever performed live by Joy Division before the suicide of the band’s singer Ian Curtis.

‘A’ by Sarah A King of the Evening Tweed graphic design collective.

This is the third work I have come across organically by an artist involved with Nobrow magazine in some way since I leafed through their small press publications at the Alternative Press Fair earlier this month… The biannual illustration anthology is on its second issue, and definitely looks like one to watch.

Holger Lippmann, Schorfheide (3), 2008

via iheartmyart

Last tribe member, oil on paper, Marshall Arisman.

Henry Sutton’s recent Guardian feature on unreliable narrators in literature was a parade of my favourite authors and novels, and is definitely worth a read. Bret Easton Ellis was rightly among their number, and I made a note to excavate my copy of American Psycho and re-read the final chapter on an evening where weather, bank balance or hangover made my bedroom an attractive option.

On picking up my battered European edition tonight, I was struck by how powerful and appropriate the cover artwork is - just as I was when I first finished the book and performed the familiar closing ritual of savouring the story’s last word, thumbing despondently through the literary desert of empty pages that languish at the back of many trade paperbacks and, finally, turning the whole book over to look at the cover and title a last time before the story is put back to sleep on a shelf.

The commission must have been an easy one to make: Marshall Arisman specialises in distorted, tortured figures wracked with the darkest emotions and succumbing to violent transformation or scenes of carnage and their aftermath.