Currently Browsing: Elisa Shoenberger
Spanish-born painter Remedios Varo would have appreciated the synchronicity of it all.
Earlier this year, I read Claire McMillan’s wonderful new novel Alchemy of a Blackbird (about Remedios Varo’s relationship with her fellow artist Leonora Carrington). Tarot cards feature strongly in Claire’s text as Remedios learns how to read them, so it had to be the perfect alignment of stars and planets when, during my subsequent interview with Claire for FF2 Media, she told me that the Art Institute of Chicago – my hometown art museum – would be opening an exhibition on Remedios Varo the very next month.… read more.
When most people think of women and surrealism, they inevitably think of Mexican artist Frida Kahlo. But Frida wasn’t the only female artist working in dreamscapes (or nightmare escapes) in Mexico. Spanish painter Remedios Varo and English artist Leonora Carrington also found refuge in Mexico after running from the Nazis in Vichy-occupied France.… read more.
The idea of infinity used to scare me. The idea that things just keep going—without stopping and without meaning—brought out a little bit of nihilism in me. Then I saw the work of Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama. Her aptly named “Infinity Rooms” moved me to wonder and joy.
Yayoi fills a mirror-walled room with some kind of sculpture (whether it is her iconic yellow and black polka-dotted pumpkin, or sometimes just strings of lights).… read more.
Yan Ge’s fictional book Strange Beasts of China is making waves. The English translation by Jeremy Tiang came out last year, and the book was heralded as one of the New York Times Editors’ Choice and a Notable Book of 2021 and Washington Post’s Best Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror of 2021.
Strange Beasts of China is comprised of a series of interconnected stories about different “beasts” that the narrator encounters and researches in the fictional Chinese city of Yong’an.… read more.
Many people, when they see a single-paneled cartoon with a one-line caption underneath, automatically think of the cartoons in The New Yorker magazine with their pungent critiques of daily life. But how does a cartoonist actually get her work into this famous publication?
After chortling over a cartoon I saw in the 10/4/21 issue of The New Yorker (see below for the link to “It’s all significantly less impressive once you realize…”), I reached out to artist Caitlin Cass to request an interview.… read more.
