Ian Tweedy

Born 1982, Hahn, Germany. Lives in Brooklyn.

After beginning his artistic life as a graffiti tagger, Tweedy turned to painting on found canvases, photos, maps, book covers, and other items that can suggest a story. He recently moved to a larger studio and has been taking advantage of its size by experimenting with newer platforms, as well as “amplifying my research a bit, or rather updating it,” he says. “Recently the subject matter is becoming more theatrical, both in light and in concept, probably from painting on the backs of other painters’ forgotten or discarded canvases, exposing the raw canvas and bare wood frame that acts as a shadowy stage of sorts. But I’m still expanding on this concept — for example, with the idea that the background or support I paint on functions as an actual place or a temporary location that can harbor characters and their contexts.” His paintings, he says, will accept no labels, “neither Pop nor ironic nor abstract. But the colors are bold and dry. Utopia and dystopia, immigration, confrontation, and, most of all, adaptation are a few of the threads connecting my work at the moment.” Currently Tweedy is finishing a site-specific video for Museion, in Bolzano, Italy, and working on Crisis, a forthcoming artist’s book produced with Rome’s Cura magazine.

Emre Huner

Born 1977, Istanbul. Lives in Berlin and Istanbul.

The extensive list of subjects that interest Turkish artist Emre Huner includes such ideas as travel in space-time, the rise and fall of civilizations, and the cyclical nature of time. His storytelling installations often bring together original reference material, drawings, sculptures, and found objects. Huner, says his compatriot Ali Kazma, “is doing a very relevant body of work on the aftermath of the modern and what happens when utopias turn sour.” For instance, Fordlândia, 2010, considers the now abandoned eponymous industrial town on the Amazon River in Brazil, founded in the 1920s by Henry Ford, who intended to grow rubber there for the tires on Ford cars. And in the installation A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe, 2012, recently exhibited in Manifesta 9, Huner interposes fossils and rocks with remnants of modernity, alluding to a moment in the future when contemporary society will be a distant history too. Huner will have a solo show at Rodeo Gallery, in Istanbul, in March, 2013. 

This article was published in the December 2012 issue of Modern Painters and appears on ARTINFO in two parts.