Artists, I-P

Iradia Icaza

Born in Panama in 1952 and now lives and works in New York.She studied art history at Loyola University in Rome, received a bachelor’s degree with a major in Sociology and Film from the College of the Sacred Heart in Newton, Massachusetts in 1974, and also studied at the Film School at New York University. In 1980 Icaza received a degree in photography from the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, U.S.A. Her first solo exhibition of photographs was at the Panamanian Institute of Art in Panama City in 1978. She also has held individual shows in Panama, Santiago, and Tokyo, and was invited to present a solo exhibition at the 1999 Ibero-American Biennial in Lima. Icaza has been represented in group exhibitions including the Havana Biennial, and “Three Latin Photographers” at the Woods-Gerry Gallery in Providence, and was one of four photographers in a 1986 exhibition organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Panama in conjunction with a Henri Cartier-Bresson show. Her work has appeared in many commercial publications as well as prominent magazines, including the “New Yorker”. In 1995, Icaza was chosen as the official photographer of the Sara Lee Corporation Frontrunner Awards given to distinguished women in a variety of fields, among them Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, and Maya Lin, the architect of the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, D.C. Recently Icaza developed a series of three-dimensional works, one of which won the first special prize for sculpture at the fourth Biennial of Panama in 1998.

Ida Kar

Photographer, born in Tambov, near Moscow. Kar was influenced by the Paris avant-garde whilst studying there in 1928 and subsequently established her photographic practice ‘Idabel’ in Cairo with her first husband in 1933. She moved to London in 1945 with her second husband, the artist and critic Victor Musgrave. With the opening of Musgrave’s Gallery One in D’Arblay Street, Soho, Kar photographed and exhibited Forty Artists from Paris and London (1954), however the height of Kar’s success was her well-received Whitechapel Gallery one-person show in 1960.

Leon Kossoff

Leon Kossoff is one of the most important figurative painters at work today and is commonly assoictaed with a circle of School of London painters that includes Michael Andrews, Frank Auerbach, Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud and R.B. Kitaj.

English painter who evolved a method of painting that entailed the heavy reworking of thick impasto to try to provide a truthful rendering of people and places he knew well. Drawing is given primacy as an expression of his commitment and involvement with the subject, and painting itself is conceived as a form of drawing. 

Kossoff remained remarkably consistent in his methods and in his range of subject-matter, although he gradually moved away from the earth colours and thick encrusted surfaces towards a more sparing use of paint and a wider range of brighter colours. His figure paintings are often of close friends and family members; and his pictures of nudes are often of his wife, Rosalind, or of his long-standing model Fidelma. Autobiographical content is also foremost in his pictures of London, which are generally of areas where he lived, peopled by family and friends identifiable in many cases from studio portraits. His favoured urban subjects include railway bridges and sidings, churches and other imposing local buildings and building sites. Kossoff returned to favoured motifs, such as the booking hall at Kilburn underground station (from the mid 1970s), exploring changes not just in light but in emotion. He is sometimes classed as an Expressionist, although his references to the work of Old Masters such as Titian, Rembrandt and Rubens reveal him as a figurative painter with a strong sense of tradition. He perceived drawing fundamental to expressing his commitment and involvement with the subject, and painting itself is conceived as a form of drawing.

Marie-Rose Lortet

Born in Strasbourg in 1945, Marie-Rose Lortet began making collages of assembled artefacts from an early age. Having observed her mother and grandmother knitting clothes, she found the procedure came naturally, but she disregarded its practical uses in favour of creating ‘flexible images that could follow me wherever I went’.

At the age of sixteen, she was briefly employed in a couture house, but found herself unable to conform to the designer’s patterns, and instinctively began to make tiny clothes, their sleeves ‘more suited to the wings of angels than the arms of models’. She progressed to small pictures made of fabric before devoting her attention to colourful tightly-knitted figure compositions. They were generally scorned or ignored until, in 1967, she read a newspaper article investigating ‘unconventional’ creative activity.

Adam Lowe

 Artist, director and founder of Factum Arte was born in England in 1959. He studied the arts at he Ruskin school of Drawing in Oxford and at the Royal College of Art, London spending periods of time studying in Spain and at the Cite International des Arts in Paris.

His artistic work has been extensively exhibited and he has had large scale survey exhibitions in St Petersburg (Marble Palace, Russian State 1999) and Mexico DF (Museo National de Arte Grafica, 2004)

His latest works reflect his interest in mediation and surface and are concerned with the interconnected relationship between our understanding of reality and the diverse methods we use to represent it. An interest which has led him into close collaborations with sociologist Bruno Latour, philosophers Adrian Cussins and Brian Cantwell-Smith, the historian of science Simon Schaffer, and art historians Joseph Koerner and Dario Gamboni.

Adam Lowe is considered one of the leading innovators in the field of digital mediation and Factum Arte has become his obsession.

Michael the Cartographer

Michael the Cartographer’s date of birth is unknown. He lived in isolation and spent long periods of time making invented maps which he always eventually destroyed. These maps were inspired by the imagination and bore no relation to geography.

JB Murray

1910-1988

JB Murry never received any formal education and worked as a sharecropper and farm labourer until the age of sixty-five. He married in 1929 and raised a family of eleven children. In 1977 Murry suffered from a hip problem which was followed by a religious vision in which he was told to spread the word of God through the creation of a ‘spirit script’. While drawing he would find himself in a trance-like state which he believed gave him direct communication with God.  He would interpret his ‘script’ by looking through a bottle of holy water. Murry developed an expressive style of calligraphy, intermingled with images of ghostly figures and twisting scribbles. In his later pieces, black, red and blue feature predominantly.

Michel Nedjar

Michel Nedjar’s father was a Jewish tailor and naturally, throughout his childhood he was surrounded by sewing machines and clothes. As a young boy he recalls being fascinated by his sister’s dolls, especially their clothes. He left school at fourteen to become an apprentice tailor and qualified for a fashion diploma when he was eighteen. During his military service shortly after, Nedjar contracted tuberculosis which led to a spell in a sanatorium. After his recovery, he travelled extensively across Asia, Europe and Mexico where, he recalls, he: ‘…came across dolls which were truly magical … it was my first contact with High Magic’. In 1975, Nedjar returned to Paris to work at his grandmother’s stall in a flea market, and he began to stitch together rag dolls using a variety of materials. His first animals and dolls were playful toy-like objects. Over the years they have evolved into more sinister, monstrous creatures. More recently, Nedjar has constructed statuettes built over glass bottles using papier maché.

He continues to work in Paris.

Richard Nie

After leaving secondary school, Richard Nie took a job in an office, and he embarked on a series of part-time jobs; currently he works as a gardener. As a young adult he began to suffer from serious depression and rarely left the family home, spending his nights drawing and playing the guitar (music and drawing have a close relationship for him), and his days sleeping. In the early 1980s he was admitted to a therapeutic community, where he participated in art therapy. Low in self-esteem, he destroyed much of his artwork, believing that his drawings had no artistic value. Although Nie achieved recognition as an Outsider artist, this was a label with which he was not very comfortable. At first he described his work as ‘doodles’ ­ an umbrella under which many people shelter their work ­ and then as ‘extended doodles’. He was very encouraged by seeing the work of Paul Klee. In a letter of 1998 he wrote: ‘When I think of drawing, I associate it with, EXPRESSION; MEDITATION; METAMORPHOSIS: as in change that happens during a period drawing/as in the change of one’s feeling or mood, during a period of drawing.’ In the same letter he referred to drawing having been a ‘private language between myself and the pictures’; despite his misgivings about other people eavesdropping on this, he has accepted showing his more ‘finished’ work, while keeping many smaller drawings ‘in a much more ragged; RAW; unfinished state’ as a way of ‘compensating for all the drawings I have let go of’. ‘These’, he explained, ‘are heads, figures or faces emerging from some kind of automatic-calligraphy sort of action.’

Humphrey Ocean

Humphrey Ocean was born in Sussex in 1951 and went to art schools in Tunbridge Wells, Brighton and Canterbury. In 1984 he painted a portrait of Philip Larkin for the NPG, described by Nick Hornby as ‘unanswerable’. Exhibitions include ‘Double-Portrait’ at Tate Liverpool 1992, ‘urbasuburba’ with Jock McFadyen at The Whitworth Art Gallery 1997, and ‘The Painter’s Eye’ at the National Portrait Gallery 1999. His work is in the British Council Collection, The Whitworth Art Gallery, Imperial War Museum, Wolverhampton Art Gallery, National Portrait Gallery, National Maritime Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum. He lives and works in London.

 

Ana Maria Pacheco

Shadows of the Wanderer, 2008.

Polychromed wood, 250 x 550 x 400cm

(sculptor, painter and printmaker) Born in Brazil in 1943. Following Degrees in both Art and Music she came to England on a British Council Scholarship to the Slade School of Fine Art, London.

Following two significant group exhibitions – the ICA in 1980 (Women’s Images of Men) and the Hayward Annual Drawing Show in 1982 – her first important one person show took place at the Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, in 1983. Since 1983 she has exhibited widely, two UK tours taking her work to a number of venues including the Camden Arts Centre, London and the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford.
In 1996 Ana Maria Pacheco was invited to become the fourth Associate Artist at the National Gallery, London. She was both the first non-European and the first sculptor to take up this appointment (1997-2000).

Perifimou (Alexander Georgiou)

Alexander Georgiou adopted his father’s nickname Periaphimous (Perifimou), meaning ‘the famous one’, once he became an artist. He emigrated to London in 1935 and settled in Brixton. After serving in the second world war he developed a skin disease, which led to him working as a gallery assistant at Tate Britain. He began to draw at work, when he was fifty-nine. ‘At the Tate you have to sit in a room and watch people passing by’, he recalled, ‘obviously it gets monotonous to see there are no fights or people touching the pictures. So I started to draw. ‘He would begin by randomly doodling lines and shapes onto paper from which a distinct subject matter would emerge. Perifimou explained: ‘I am controlled by something. I don’t know what. When I begin work with my lines I am taken over’. He would often give his pieces poetic titles.