 |
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
| ||||
 |
||||
 |
||||
 |
||||
 |
||||
showcase your art to thousands
|
|
|
|
| W. K. Lyhne | |
| Click to enlarge images (if larger image has been loaded) |
|
Stepping in the Stream, Part I
2007 |
)
|
Stepping in the Stream, Part II
2008 |
)
|
Stepping in the Stream, Part III
2008 |
)
|
Bottom of the Stream
2008 |
)
|
The Stream
2007 |
)
|
The Postcard
2007 |
)
|
Reflection in the Stream
2007 |
)
|
Fabric Study I
2007 |
)
|
Fabric Study II
2007 |
)
|
Fabric Study III
2007 |
)
|
Foot Study
2007 |
)
|
Nell's Stream
2007 |
)
|
The Secret
2008 |
)
|
| Education and biography | |
| "The pain of being alive... You can't fall into it...without dirtying up your hands. It takes muscle and guts. " - John Osbourne (Look back in anger) It's the privilege - and the duty - of art to shock. A privilege often abused in our age of shock for shock's sake. But here, in this series of paintings inspired by Rembrandt's Hendrickje Stepping in the Stream at the National Gallery in London the shock of art regains all its force and substance. Hendrickje is such a captivating image that we forget how shocking it must have looked to Rembrandt's contemporaries. Not that the seventeenth-century Dutch were prudes by any means, but their eroticism was encoded in visual signs - pipes, women's slippers, the proffered openings of jugs and tankards - that have about as much relevance to real sex, as opposed to fantasized sex, as schoolboy graffiti. Hendrickje, the subject of Lyhne's obsession, was the woman the artist was said to be living with in "whoredom," steps into the stream of life, of desire, that is about to claim her body. Her shift is pulled up to the very top of her thighs, and her gaze is fixed on the reflection of her naked legs in the water, which shimmers with the finish that had come into vogue in the years when Rembrandt was falling out of fashion. But the brushwork on her knees, her garment, her hands - the same quick, slashing strokes we see in The Slaughtered Ox, painted the next year, 1655 - they're shouting that painting isn't glassiness. It isn't polite. It sometimes has the sour reek of a body needing a bath. W. K. Lyhne's paintings are charged with that rawness and vitality - and the pungency - that the ageing Rembrandt flung in the face of his contemporaries. They are oils, very obviously and substantially oils, in an age when "oil" and "oily" are becoming dirty words. They drag down the "noble" medium of oil painting to the level of oil spills, yet they express the slithery iridescence of soiled motor oil as sumptuously as they once whispered satin and silk. The sump oil that sheathes the artist's legs - for these are manifestly autobiographical paintings, glimpses in the bevelled mirror of a piece of furniture rich with private meaning - emphasizes their nakedness the way silk stockings do when they have a seam at the back. The shock of easily soiled linen and bare skin stained with a substance notoriously difficult to clean summons other shocking images: fouled birds, polluted seas, viscous pools in Nigeria and the Amazon - all those nightmarish reflections of the ordinary folly of our fossil fuel-driven economy. Look closer: in the muck at the artist's feet her blonde features are undergoing a transformation into the haunting negative of one of those wraith-like creatures that clutch the heart as we catch a glimpse of them in documentaries about Third-World poverty. But when all is said and done, it's the artist's hand and feet that arrest us and bring us back to the sheer presence of these paintings. Those blunt, spread toes, which look like they're accustomed to travelling barefoot, and those veined, hands that clutch the folds of her garment, tugging it up from the encroaching oil, or, on the contrary, plunging into a mess of oily fabric - they're real. Real and vigorous as the artist's brushstrokes and as her vision of beauty verging on repulsiveness. These works are powerful and suggestive and, yes, they do step into that stream that Hendrickje waded in but they stand on their own, very definitely. "You cannot step twice into the same river. . . ." To be sure, but the stream Hendrickje stepped into three and a half centuries ago is still flowing. Lyhne shows us that it has lost none of its power. - Michael Taylor Author of Rembrandt's Nose, Distributed Art Publishers. (London, August 2008) "Rembrandt's 'Woman Stepping in the Stream' in the National Gallery became an obsessional focus for W.K.Lyhne. Oil, the medium of the painter, literally became the subject for the work of the painter. Gallons of sump oil, rendered dark by being through engines, was hauled to her studio on an industrial dolly so it could be spread, dipped into, allowed to coat arms, legs and hands, studied to observe the extraordinary colours, textures and smell of the sticky black liquid, that isn't really black at all, but turns red in certain lights and changes shape and viscosity according to temperature. These are not easy pictures to study. The subtext is of course that oil is the stuff of life and like life one has to wade through it. It is ardent and carnal, urgent and necessary but leaves one coated and dirty but also excited, gleaming and alive. Huge oily fingers reach out from the canvas almost as if they were about to pull you in, to the revolting and fascinating, brutally enveloping, seductive blackness. The work is also unsettlingly ambiguous: is the oil overwhelming or embracing her? A forceful hybrid. But there's consistently a secret sensuality and hidden pleasure and the work stays just on the side of sensual and captivating lusciousness, the viewer a partial voyeur, observing a stolen moment, like in the Rembrandt. The vulnerable white linen of the night dress is lifted above the oil to reveal nothing and everything, from the figure who stands thigh deep with her hands peeling up her chemise, losing the battle to keep the delicately rendered fabric clear of the soaking oil, with a detail and a sense of texture that makes me want to look again and again. 'The Stream Series' is an autobiographical portrait. Passionate, ebullient, sharp of gaze, tongue and wit, always watching, usually laughing and sometimes crying, she is beautiful, sexy. Night and day, dark and light, secure yet afraid and her life is magical, shiny, but with dark places that she is not afraid to explore. She is a dramatic mass of contradictions. It is all painted intuitively; I wonder if she knows. I long to make the woman in 'The Stream' come alive and see her walk through Richard Wilson's 20.50 installation at the Saatchi Gallery. I wonder what would happen if the extraordinary stillness, beauty and serenity of his oil were to collide with her beauty, her magic and her demons should she choose to go for a swim..... She would probably get arrested; I think it would be worth it." - Julie Lynn Evans (London, May 2008) |
|
| Website: www.wklyhne.com | |
| IF YOU ARE INTERESTED IN CONTACTING THIS ARTIST, CLICK HERE | |
CLICK HERE TO SEND THIS PROFILE TO YOUR FRIENDS |
|
next artist
Copyright 2003-2010 © The Saatchi Gallery : London Contemporary Art Gallery
|
|
SHOWDOWN ARTWORKS GO HEAD-TO-HEAD FOR VISITORS' VOTES... 
CRITS Present your work for comments by other artists STREET ART Photos & Videos of Graffiti, Murals, Perform- -ance, Found Works... |
||
|
|||
|
STUDIO
Where you can make and display art online |
|||
|
|||
|
SAATCHI ONLINE... WHERE ALL ARTISTS CAN SHOW THEIR WORK AND CREATE THEIR OWN PROFILE PAGE |
|||
|
|||
|
SAATCHI ONLINE ART STUDENTS... WHERE STUDENTS CAN SHOW THEIR WORK AND CREATE THEIR OWN NETWORK PAGE |
|||
|
|||
|
SAATCHI ONLINE... WHERE ALL VIDEO ARTISTS CAN SHOW THEIR FILMS AND CREATE THEIR OWN PROFILE PAGE |
|||
|
|||
|
SAATCHI ONLINE... Where all photo- graphers can show their work AND CREATE THEIR OWN PROFILE PAGE |
|||
|
|
|||
|
SAATCHI ONLINE... Where all illust- rators can show their work AND CREATE THEIR OWN PROFILE PAGE |
|||
|
|
|||
| saatchi online... chat Live to other people who like art |
|||
|
|||
| saatchi online... Forum for debates on art online |
|||
|
|||
| saatchi online... meet other people who like art |
|||
|
|||
| art
and music magazine online |
|||
|
|||
|
|||
