Masks-making could also be one in every of humanity’s oldest artwork kinds. Within the twentieth and twenty first centuries, tremendous artwork and mask-making have collided to create new artforms and potent mixtures of acquainted genres.
What follows is a quick survey of how masks and mask-making has intersected with the artwork world over the past 100 or so years. Be at liberty to click on round to be taught extra about completely different eras.
For extra style guides like this, take a look at our submit A Tough Information to Each Digital Artwork Style We Might Assume Of
Masks and twentieth Century Artwork
Pablo Picasso and Cubism
Within the early twentieth century, Pablo Picasso was influenced by African masks, resulting in the event of Cubism. His work, comparable to Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, displays this affect by breaking from conventional kinds to discover new views.
Surrealism and Man Ray
Surrealists, like Man Ray in Noire et Blanche, used masks to discover the unconscious, contrasting the animate with the inanimate and questioning actuality.
Sidney Nolan and Ned Kelly
Sidney Nolan’s collection on Ned Kelly makes use of Kelly’s metallic masks to represent rise up and mythologize the Australian outlaw.
Guerrilla Women
The Guerrilla Women used gorilla masks to hide their identities whereas protesting sexism and racism within the artwork world, turning anonymity into an emblem of resistance and empowerment.
Cindy Sherman
Cindy Sherman’s self-portraits use masks and disguises to problem stereotypes and discover identification fluidity, critiquing societal norms.
Rebecca Horn
Rebecca Horn’s wearable sculptures, like Pencil Masks and Cockatoo Masks, alter interactions and discover intimacy and identification boundaries.
Christo and Jeanne-Claude
Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s wrapped installations, such because the wrapped Reichstag, remodel acquainted constructions into mysterious kinds, difficult perceptions.
Francis Bacon
Francis Bacon’s works typically characteristic grotesque, mask-like figures to convey existential ache and human vulnerability.
Gillian Carrying
Gillian Carrying’s Confess All On Video. Don’t Fear You Will Be in Disguise makes use of masks to encourage topics to disclose secrets and techniques, exploring identification and societal masks.
Masks and twenty first Century Artwork
Christoph Hefti
Christoph Hefti’s World Masks is a surprising fusion of conventional and modern artwork. This wool and silk rug, hand-knotted in Nepal, combines parts from African, Tibetan, Guatemalan, and Mexican masks right into a single hybrid face, reflecting a globalized world, the place cultural boundaries blur and various traditions merge into new types of expression.
Gauri Gill
Gauri Gill’s Acts of Look collection makes use of masks to discover rural life in India. Collaborating with native artists, she creates masks that depict on a regular basis individuals and animals. These masks remodel mundane scenes into surreal tableaux, highlighting the intersection of custom and modernity in rural India.
Edson Chagas
Edson Chagas’ OIKONOMOS collection critiques modern client tradition by changing masks with luggage protecting the artist’s face to represent the erosion of individuality in a consumer-driven world.
Kader Attia
Kader Attia’s installations typically discover the idea of restore and reconstruction. In The Restore from Occident to Further-Occidental Cultures, he makes use of masks for instance how completely different cultures tackle trauma and therapeutic. The masks, juxtaposed with prosthetics, problem viewers to think about how societies mend each bodily and psychological wounds.
Aneta Grzeszykowska
Aneta Grzeszykowska’s Selfie collection makes use of masks to problem the digital tradition of self-representation. By creating mutilated-looking masks of her personal face, she critiques the obsession with self-image and the facade of social media and raises questions on authenticity and the character of self-portraiture within the digital age.
Masks and On-Chain Artwork
Foodmasku
Antonius Oki Wiriadjaja, also called Foodmasku, is a New York Metropolis-based artist and activist started the Foodmasku mission in April 2020, throughout the peak of the pandemic.
A former Fulbright Scholar in Indonesia, Wiriadjaja has turned his every day meals into an artwork type, crafting intricate masks and headpieces from edible objects. His work explores themes of identification, consumption, and the interaction between artwork and on a regular basis life. Foodmasku has garnered vital consideration, being chosen as one of many New York Instances’s high Instagram artwork accounts and increasing into web3 along with his connoisseur masks.
Wiriadjaja’s Foodmasku mission is each aesthetically modern and pleasant whereas additionally serving as a medium for expressing pandemic-related nervousness and confusion. By means of every day images and performances, he turned private trauma and social challenges into a novel inventive imaginative and prescient, mixing humor, creativity, and social commentary. And it’s additionally been an effective way for him to learn to prepare dinner.
Brian Cattelle
Brian Cattelle’s Corrupted Cognition is a collection of grotesque black-and-white collage masks utilizing cut-outs from outsized printed portraits to create otherworldly weirdos.
Cattelle’s said intention is to reveal viewers to precisely the sort of factor they instinctively don’t wish to see, and — relatively than desensitize by way of shock or disgust — invite these put-off viewers to rethink their unconscious repulsion as the one really undesirable trait in play.
It’s telling that Cattelle — historically a black-and-white photographer — selected masks because the medium for this message as a result of, if there’s any artwork type that prompts embodiment of an idea, it could be the masks. The characters of Corrupted Cognition should not 2D freaks and geeks however invites to see in area and to insert your self into the consciousness of the opposite, distorting your present default programming in favor of a widened worldview.
David Henry No person Jr.
If Cindy Sherman had been born in a circus, she would possibly’ve turned out like David Henry No person Jr., a efficiency and video artist recognized for his provocative and infrequently surreal artwork. His hilarious, visceral reside and recorded performances-as-self-portraits use his physique as a canvas for putting and typically disturbing photos.
Utilizing numerous media comparable to images, video, sculpture, costume, and make-up, he explores a variety of themes, typically critiquing society, consumerism, and identification by way of potent visible puns. His appears to be a medium and method all his personal, and one wherein he’s equal components prolific and profound.
Karen Jerzyk
Karen Jerzyk, a New Hampshire-based photographer since 2003, started her profession in live performance images earlier than transitioning to portraiture. Her various inventive pursuits have expanded into sculpting, portray, set design, and wardrobe design, demonstrating her multifaceted inventive talents. Jerzyk’s work is characterised by a novel mix of surrealism and narrative depth.
In the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, she tailored ingeniously, utilizing mannequins and sculpted masks to proceed her conceptual photographic work.
