Yahoo Hortal
Yahoo Hortal
https://yagohortal.com/
Most artists actually think in terms of light and dark, and not so much color. But, Yago, you’re a colorist too" Peter Halley
Yago Hortal (Barcelona, 1983), studied Fine Arts at the University of Barcelona and the University of Seville. In 2007, one year after graduating, he wins the 49th Prize for Young Painters. The following year, at only 25 years of age, he began to exhibit not only in Spain but also in the rest of Europe and the United States. His paintings maintain a tight relationship between the work of art and action painting itself. The canvas forms part of a performance in which the artist consciously creates spontaneous color forms in an infinite gamma, expressing passion and vibrancy. The painting seems to come out of the canvas, causing a desire to touch it and creating textural sensations.
Yago Hortal paints in vivid, sometimes fluorescent acrylics, smearing, marbling, and splattering the material in thick, abstract brushstrokes onto large-scale white canvases that pop with color. Hortal works on several paintings simultaneously, responding to the colors both impulsively and with premeditation, and often letting the paint drip down the canvas.
“I look for a balance between chaos and order,” he has said, “something like a combination between a chess game and a boxing match.”
Z85, 2024
Acrylic on linen23
3/5 × 19 7/10 in | 60 × 50 cm
Giant, sweeping waves and splashes of thick paint flood our souls in vibrant colour. Inspired by Abstract Expressionism, the art of Yago Hortal has a direct connection with the viewer, creating sensations that balance between chaos and order. The contemporary artist paints with spontaneous yet also planned action. Brushstrokes that smear, marble, and splatter, recreate the face and personality of colour in our contemporary age.
Yago Hortal was born and raised in the city of Barcelona. He uses industrial colors and materials that reference an urban experience. Within his studio, he listens to different music genres that mould his emotional state before painting. As energy flows onto the canvas, it is captured and preserved as a physical signature.
“What matters to me is that the rhythm of each brushstroke can be reflected in a single gesture…each brushstroke acting as a reflection of the moment it was made. That’s why all my paintings are also a kind of personal diary.” - Yago Hortal
characterized by its intense and vibrant chromaticism.
“ I am known for very gestural artwork, very liquid, with a very marked gesture, very clear, as well as a very thick density and exuberant color.”
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Water Lilies painted by Claude Monet (1840 - 1926)
Alice baber
“When I first conceive of a painting, I must feel it, I hear it, I taste it, and I want to eat it. I start from the driving force of color (color hunger); then comes to a second color to provide light, luminous light. It will be the glow to reinforce the first color. I then discover the need of one, two, three, or more colors which will indicate and make movement, establish the psychodynamic balance in midair, allow freedom to take place, add weight at the top and bottom of painting, and create mythical whirlpools between larger forms.”
Alice Baber, Color, 1972
Alice Baber (1928-1982) was an American abstract expressionist painter, best known for the organic, biomorphic forms she painted using a staining technique which allowed her to explore pure color and elicit a sense of radiant light.
Baber’s stylistic development during the period between 1958 and the mid-1970s is characterized by a series of experiments with color and technique. Having turned to abstraction in 1958, she began exploring a monochromatic approach to painting, primarily using shades of red. By 1960 Baber came to add yellows, greens, and lavender to her work. She gradually incorporated a growing variety of colors into her canvases, a process that reached its hiatus by the mid 1970s when she finally introduced black to her work, achieving a new range of effects and subtleties.
Her evolving approach to painting is also characterized by her choice of materials. In the first half of the 1950s she worked primarily in oil, but soon began to dilute her paint in order to emphasize the different shades of color, eventually expanding her practice to include also acrylic on canvas and watercolors on paper as alternatives to oil. Watercolors in particular lent themselves more easily to her growing interest in transparency and luminosity, as well as her interests in joining light and color in a kinetic fusion. Baber also worked with acrylic. Working in both mediums in parallel led to discoveries that altered the course of Baber’s painting, a method of ‘sinking’ (or ‘staining’) and ‘lifting’ to create abstract, organic forms – a visual style that has since become her signature. Color would remain central to the artist’s practice throughout her career, a theme on which she wrote at length in several publications, and which became the subject of exhibitions the artist curated, including Color Forum, a large-scale group exhibition held at the University of Texas, Austin, 1972.
Post-war feminist artist and lithographer Alice Baber produced brilliantly colored abstract expressionist oil and watercolor paintings by staining her canvases with rounded biomorphic forms. Using a technique of pouringdiluted oil paint onto a canvas in layers, she sometimes experimented with variations of a single hue and at other times created a purposeful interplay of different tones, as in The Song of the Wind (1977). Baber referred to her attempts to relay feelings through color as a “color hunger,” and exploration of “the infinite range of possibilities.” A member of the cooperative March Gallery in downtown New York, where she held her first solo exhibition in 1958, Baber was married to noted Abstract Expressionist painter Paul Jenkins. Baber’s work can be found in the collections of the Met, the Whitney, the Guggenheim, and the National Museum of Women in the Arts.
Wheel of Jaguar, 1982
Watercolor on Paper 12 × 11 in | 30.5 × 27.9 cm
The Light Inside the Mountain, 1978
Oil on canvas 33 × 55 in | 83.8 × 139.7 cm
Just Arrived, 1962
Oil on canvas 57 × 44 in | 144.8 × 111.8 cm
UNTITLED
watercolor on paper, 22 x 30 IN unframed, 33.5 x 41.5 IN unframed
Alice Baber
Hughie O'Donoghue
Born in Manchester, Hughie O’Donoghue now lives and works in rural Ireland. O’Donoghue has internationally since 1982 and is considered one of the leading painters of his generation. His work is represented in public collections, including the National Gallery, London, the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester and the Arts Council of England. The solo exhibition ‘Hughie O’Donoghue: Recent Paintings and Selected Works from the American Ireland Fund Donation’ was held at IMMA in 2009
Laocoon, 2003
Medium: Oil on linen canvas in 3 panels
Dimensions: Unframed, 305 x 468 cm
O’Donoghue uses figuration and abstraction to explore themes of human identity, memory, and experience; and draws on history, mythology, and personal records to create works that resonate with emotional intensity.
Fallen Elm (Kilfane) Oil on board, 71 x 122cm (28 x 48") Signed, inscribed and dated 2007/'8 verso
Evening Kilfane, Co. Kilkenny Oil on canvas, 68 x 104cm (26¾ x 41") Signed; signed inscribed and dated 2007 verso
His work is abstract in style, presenting the human body as distorted and blurred forms, drawn in thick and heavy brushstrokes. He often applies numerous layers of paint, or includes photographs or documentary sources within the canvas, covered in more paint.
The surfaces of his canvas are full of texture, in which the material takes paramount importance
This process of layering reflects O'Donoghue's interest in engaging with historical narratives, often personal in nature, so that he can express the serial form of experience and memory.
"painting is archaeology in reverse"
“The colours in my paintings are also intense, but in my work there’s never only one reason for why something is the way it is. I suppose I deliberately court the intensity of colour to mirror the intensity of feeling that comes with memory.
fascinated by the passing of time
For him, painting is a form of both archaeology and remembrance
Issy Wilson
https://www.instagram.com/iwilson.art/?hl=en
Issy Wilson is a London-based artist originally from Chicago. Her practice is deeply rooted in the natural world, with a focus on drawing, painting, textiles, and research. She gathers inspiration by observing her surroundings from the seemingly mundane to the extraordinary: noticing water stains on pavement and moss in the cracks of city bricks to the breathtaking views of the national parks and ancient forests.
Her work explores the structures of roots, trees, mycelium, lichen, and mosses, examining how they mirror blood vessels, neurons, rivers, and mountains in their search to form strong organic connections. Her art studio has become an ecosystem of its own, with pieces evolving symbiotically.
Materials: ink, tea, emulsion, cheese cloth, acrylic, pea, canvas, pastels.
Ecdysis
ink, tea, and emulsion on canvas, 186x300cm, 2024
Ecdysis detail
Limestone I
ink and emulsion on canvas, 150x250cm, 2024
Limestone II,
ink and emulsion on canvas, 150x150cm, 2024
Dorothea Rockburne, "D" Study for Scalar, (chipboard, crude oil, paper and nails), 1970 [Craig Starr Gallery, New York, NY. © Dorothea Rockburne / ARS, New York]
Exhibition: Dorothea Rockburne: Works 1967-1972, September 7 – October 20, 2012
Paul Jenkins
The paintings of Paul Jenkins have come to represent the spirit, vitality, and invention of post World War II American abstraction. Employing an unorthodox approach to paint application, Jenkins is as much identified with the process of controlled paint-pouring and canvas manipulation as with the gem-like veils of transparent and translucent color which have characterized his work since the late 1950s. Born and raised in Kansas City, Missouri in 1923, Jenkins later moved to Youngstown, Ohio. Drawn to New York, he became a student of Yasuo Kuniyoshi at the Art Students League and ultimately became associated with the Abstract Expressionists, inspired in part by the "cataclysmic challenge of Pollock and the total metaphysical consumption of Mark Tobey." An ongoing interest in Eastern religions and philosophy, the study of the I Ching, along with the writings of Carl Gustav Jung prompted Jenkins' turn toward inward reflection and mysticism which have dominated his aesthetic as well as his life.
Paul Jenkins (b. 1923, Kansas City, Missouri, d. 2012, New York, New York) was an American painter who is celebrated for his dynamic abstractions in oil, acrylic, and enamel. His paintings are characterised by their masterfully controlled, multilayered washes of pigment that meet on canvas in oceanic pools and eddies. While the artist’s work was initially received in the terms of American Abstract Expressionism, his sustained, rigorous inquiries into the physiological and spiritual aspects of colour, what the artist termed its “phenomena,” opened it to new avenues of expression that would outlast numerous movements throughout his six-decade career.
Coming to artistic maturity in New York at Abstract Expressionism’s height, Jenkins befriended many of the movement’s leading figures before decamping to Paris, which would serve as his second base of operations for the rest of his life. In Paris the painter established the conditions for his now-celebrated process, in which pigments are coaxed along the surface of a canvas that has been primed and buffed to a silken plane. By manipulating the angle of the surface on which paints traveled and by guiding their movements with an ivory knife, Jenkins produced a body of work that is striking for the singularity of its maker’s conviction while evidencing his spiritual restlessness and continual seeking.
Phenomena Umbra
1982
Watercolour on paper
31 ¼ x 43 ¼ in. (79.4 x 109.9 cm)
Framed: 33 x 45 ½ in. (83.8 x 115.6 cm)
Phenomena Noh Veil
1969
Acrylic on canvas
39 ⅛ x 39 ⅛ in. (99.1 x 99.1 cm)
Paul Jenkins (1923-2012) is a major artist in post-war abstraction whose work is recognized for its luminous flows of color combining opacity and transparency to both emanate and reflect light. An early pioneer of poured paint, Jenkins worked on paper and primed canvas. His paintings have achieved prominence for the fluidity of their forms as well as their gem-like veils of color which have characterized his work since the 1950s. Full of verve with a profoundly spiritual aspect, his paintings have a natural feeling to them, with rarely any trace of the artist’s hand. “A painting” he said, “should be a world not a thing.”
Jenkins made his vibrant compositions by pouring paint directly onto the canvas, then tilting it so the paint dripped, bled, and pooled into fluid, diaphanous washes that resembled ceramic glazes.
His palettes and methodologies can evoke the experiments of fellow abstract titan Helen Frankenthaler.
Phenomena Emanation of Host,,
1989
Watercolour on paper
43 3/10 × 31 in | 110 × 78.7 cm
Phenomena Set the Compass,
1994
Watercolour on paper
43 3/10 × 31 1/10 in | 110 × 79 cm
“It is a presumption on my part but after all, that is one of the expanding possibilities of Abstract painting: that which makes something felt which is not explicitly seen.”
Alice Baber - Ladder Sun Dance
to create energetic ridges and furrows of pigment that can be read as extreme close-ups of a painterly brushstroke, drawing attention to the action and materiality of painting itself. His works are structurally varied, ranging from a thin glaze through which the metal ground gleams to sculptural reliefs with overlapping ridges and furrows. In the context of Martin's notion that landscape painting and abstraction are intertwined, his work becomes an imaginary space, a mental landscape, an abstracted and mesmeric focal point for contemplation.
Works on paper allow the artist to experiment with movement and colour before turning to larger-scale formats in oil. The fluidity of the cold process dye he employs enables him to explore the interaction between pigments, as he lets himself be guided by the merging tints of emerald green and ultramarine blue, yellow and ruby red.
