Manipulated Doll Faces

'Fusing a crazy creativity with a contemporary take on fairytales, Mi Lajki presented a new take on summer dressing at Stockholm Fashion Week. Borrowing from the aesthetic of popular models including Gemma Ward and Lily Cole, extreme manipulated doll faces featured porcelain finishes, exaggerated brows, and dramatic lips that were collages over the models’ features. Eerie and unsettling, the subverted beauty overshadowed the jewelry and clothing, creating an effective catwalk statement that was one of the highlights of the event.'

TrendHunter

As seen on TrendHunter

Typographic body painting

MAC Acrylic Paint Promo Showcases Type Design on Painted Models

'This MAC Acrylic Paint promo brought 22 MAC cosmetics artists together to showcase live typographic body painting. Type designs—a feature readers don’t always notice—were blown up and hand-drawn on nude models. The body painting gave artists a medium to showcase their meticulous makeup and painting skills, as onlookers enjoyed an entertaining performance exhibit.'

Trendhunter

As seen on Trendhunter

Skin - a story of our life so far

The exhibition 'Skin' re-evaluates the largest and probably most overlooked human organ, considering the changing importance of skin, from anatomical thought in the 16th century through to contemporary artistic exploration.

Covering four themes (Objects, Marks, Impressions and Afterlives), 'Skin' takes a philosophical approach. It begins by looking at the skin as a frontier between the inside and the outside of the body. Early anatomists saw it as having little value and sought to flay it to reveal the workings of the body beneath. The exhibition then moves to look at the skin as a living document: with tattoos, scars, wrinkles or various pathologies. Finally, the skin is considered as a sensory organ of touch and as a delicate threshold between life and death.

Skin Exhibition: audio slideshow

View more webinars from Wellcome Collection.

Lucy Shanahan, the Wellcome Collection Curator for 'Skin', comments on a selection of objects from the exhibition.

Skin - Wellcome Collection, London, 10 June-26 September 2010

Marilyn Minter - Art Lecture

"Beauty is a switching point..."

Marilyn Minter - Green Pink Caviar

The trailer for Marilyn Minter's video Green Pink Caviar.
http://www.greenpinkcaviar.com/

"I was shooting stills of models with long tongues swirling and sucking bakery products from under a pane of glass. I wanted to make enamel paintings along the idea of painting with my tongue. My makeup artist shot some short videos just to see how it would look. The low definition videos looked so good that later we made plans to do a professional high definition video. I have made both billboards and produced a commercial advertising a 1989 painting show so this made sense as a next step. Green Pink Caviar seems to have a life of its own."

Marilyn Minter

'The video was inspired by a photo shoot where Minter directed her models to lick brightly colored candies while she shot photos from underneath a glass plate. The models' tongues mixed the colorful sugar with saliva, slurping and pushing color across the glass surface to simulate painting. Driven by her fascination with the body, Green Pink Caviar sets the stage for chance to happen.'

Lovestoned

Laurent Champoussin

As seen on Acidolatte

Marilyn Minter - "Eventually everybody's make-up runs"

Marilyn Minter video portrait from KOVAROVA on Vimeo.

Painted Lady

Artist Kimiko Yoshida  has been transforming herself into various representations of herself and others in several series of self portraits (painting herself and then photographing it) since she began her career. She has turned herself into famous painters, brides from all over the world, blown glass letters and symbols and much much more. In fact she has created over 330 different self-portraits in the last decade.  While much of her work engages the viewer, it is her cosmetic application and consideration of colour line and tonality that reveals an incredible skill and a clear knowledge of the impact of cosmetic artifice.

Writing (Marrakech Henna).  Self Portrait. 2009

Writing (Tuareg Henna).  Self Portrait, 2009

Writing (Meknes Arabesque).  Self Portrait,  2009

Writing (Essaouiri Henna).  Self Portrait, 2009

Faking it

Giovanni Bortolani had been working in world of advertising for a while, a world where every picture must be processed in order to erase any little imperfection, where everything is glossy and unreal.  This concentration has given him the ability to focus on the human obsession with always appearing perfect, remaining forever young, the desire to construct a body with almost no flesh on it.  The subject of his work is the body, the frailty of appearance and the scars life generates.  Contradicting the myth of eternal beauty that survives the fight against time, the photographs for the FAKE TOO FAKE project debunk such conception and unveil the human fear behind the race.  

In discussing the aesthetic research behind his work he refers to the phrase "so beautiful it looks real" as a method of indicating a perfect artifact while manipulating the tiniest detail, and refuses to admire beauty for the sake of it.  His collaboration with hair and make-up artist Marcorea Malia  has transformed the appearance of the sitters into a cruel reality as evidence of this aesthetic concern.  As Malia works on the body, shapes the hair and paints the skin, suddenly a fig becomes an open wound on the chest, and boiled shrimps looks like entrails coming out of the body.  Later Bortolani manipulates the image so that the arm of one becomes someone else and infected scars look like a doodle.  Bortolani expresses this collaboration as catching ideas floating in the air to make them 'visible'.   To him, aesthetic is content.

 

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Marking out established territories

 Francisco Ben?tez

As seen on Behance.net.