User:Drobi92/António Ole

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Born in the Angolan Capital of Luanda in 1951, Antonio Ole is an internationally renowned artist who works in installation and interactive art. Ole's influence range as far from East Asian printing styles to recognizable symbols of both North African Culture and traditional Americana. Ole works to represent the postcolonial landscape of Angola, often using found objects to create vividly colored and textured wall arrangements.

Early Life:

Antonio Ole's artistic journey began when he was just a child. In highschool, various teachers noticed his strong connection to art and praise his work, such as his On Taking The Pill collage which received critical acclaim and recognition despite Ole being only 17 years old. He shared his first exhibitions that would be the start to his career. At the start of Angola's independence, he began working for a television station in Luanda which cultivated his love and knowledge for film. Wanting to learn more about the world of cinema, Ole traveled to the United States for study. "I was admitted to one of the best film schools in the USA, The American Film Institute's Centre for Advanced Film Studies. Studying there was fantastic because I was able to work with professional actors, producers and directors and it was a unique experience for me" (https://www.sothebys.com/en/articles/antonio-ole-angola-beyond)

Art Style:

Ole's works often consist of massive, wall-scaling surfaces

Reception and Impact:

António Ole achieved international acclaim in the 1990s for a series of site-specific installations made of locally found materials. He transformed a wall in Chicago with an assemblage of gilded moldings, windows, a picket fence and other unlikely items.

Career:

Ole's higher education predisposed him for a strong artistic career, as he studied African-American Culture and Cinema at the University of California in Los Angeles and later also studied film at the American Film Institute. Ole is known for his versatility as an artist, creating in many different mediums such as photography, cinema, painting, sculpture, and installation. This multifaceted approach emerged both as a result of popular late-twentieth century retrospectives of mixed media practices in the first half of the century, as well as the turbulence and chaos perpetrated by the Angolan Civil War lasting intermittently from 1975 until 2002.

The early works of Ole's career were often flat, surrealist-inspired gauche and pencil collages depicting interiors and bizarre landscapes. This early period is marked by Ole's usage of vibrant colors and abstracted patterns that invoke comic strips and television screens, such as in the "Domestic Landscapes" series from 1974 that positioned everyday objects against abstract and colorful backgrounds. Following the outbreak of the Civil War in 1975, Ole's work began to take a more grounded and realist tone in response to nationwide tragedies, as he moved back into the photography and filmmaking of his youth. Until the end of the decade, Ole worked almost exclusively in black and white, both in his continued painting and drawing works as well as his photography, which set out to capture the faces and identities of Angolans living out their lives in the midst of the war. Nevertheless

The last twenty years of the twentieth century were the most prolific and diverse period of Ole's creative output, as he engaged in a variety of styles and mediums, ranging from massive found-object sculptures to oil paintings to paper collages. Ole's works in the 80s largely consisted of many acrylic and oil paintings that used psychedelic imagery and colors to depict contemporary landscapes, much like his earlier, pre-war work. Notably, Ole distinguished these new works from the early 70s works through greater experimentations in subject arrangement and patterns that moved the compositions further away from realism. Ole's choice of subjects also delved deeper into a cultural history of Luanda, as several works attempt to capture "Mythologies" or the animal imagery that is imbued in Angolan culture.

He is inspired by traditional art as a stimulus to develop a contemporary discourse suited to his time and circumstances. Elements in his work evoke the colonial period, slavery, war, destruction, poverty, human nature, the ability to resist and survive



= António Ole =


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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia António Ole (born 1951) is an Angolan artist, among the best known in the country. He represented Angola at the 2017 Venice Biennale.

Ole's first international exhibition was in 1984 at the Los Angeles Museum of African American Art. He showed work at the Havana Biennial and Johannesburg Biennial. Ole participated in the African delegation to the 1992 International Exhibition of Seville. In addition to painting and other visual mediums, Ole also works in photography and videography. His photographs were displayed at the 2015 Venice Biennale and the following Biennale showed several of his films: Carnaval da Vitória (short film on Angola's post-independence carnival), Ritmo do N'Gola Ritmos (documentary on an Angolan band), No Caminho das Estrelas (documentary on Angolan president António Agostinho Neto), Conceição Tchiambula Um dia, Uma vida (documentary about a peasant), and Sem Título(poetic, ecological essay).

Early life[edit]
Antonio Ole's artistic journey began when he was just a child. In highschool, various teachers noticed his strong connection to art and praise his work. He shared his first exhibitions that would be the start to his career. At the start of Angola's independence, he began working for a television station in Luanda which cultivated his love and knowledge for film. Wanting to learn more about the world of cinema, Ole traveled to the United States for study. "I was admitted to one of the best film schools in the USA, The American Film Institute's Centre for Advanced Film Studies. Studying there was fantastic because I was able to work with professional actors, producers and directors and it was a unique experience for me".

Career[edit]
Antonio Ole's higher education predisposed him for a strong artistic career, as he studied African-American Culture and Cinema at the University of California in Los Angeles and later also studied film at the American Film Institute. Ole is known for his versatility as an artist, creating in many different mediums such as photography, cinema, painting, sculpture, and installation. This multifaceted approach emerged both as a result of popular late-twentieth century retrospectives of mixed media practices in the first half of the century, as well as the turbulence and chaos perpetrated by the Angolan Civil War lasting intermittently from 1975 until 2002.

Early Period: 1969 - 1979[edit]
The early works of Ole's career were often flat, surrealist-inspired gauche and pencil collages depicting interiors and bizarre landscapes. This early period is marked by Ole's usage of vibrant colors and abstracted patterns that invoke comic strips and television screens, such as in the "Domestic Landscapes" series from 1974 that positioned everyday objects against abstract and colorful backgrounds.

Following the outbreak of the Civil War in 1975, Ole's work began to take a more grounded and realist tone in response to nationwide tragedies, as he moved back into the photography and filmmaking of his youth. Until the end of the decade, Ole worked almost exclusively in black and white, both in his continued painting and drawing works as well as his photography, which set out to capture the faces and identities of Angolans living out their lives in the midst of the war. Nevertheless, Ole was a supporter of the independence cause, documenting and romanticizing the social efforts against colonial influence in his acclaimed films Railway Workers and Rhythm of N'Gola Rhythms from 1975 and 1978 respectively.

Works: Installation

Allegory of Construction I (2009), mixed media site-specific installation, National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian is the initial series of the mixed media series site specific installations that Antonio Ole originally installed in the 1990s in Chicago, Düsseldorf, Germany, and Washington DC. With his Düsseldorf installation, Ole incorporated German street signs, corrugate metal sheets with the addition of bright colors. As mentioned before, in his Chicago installation he used "an assemblage of gilded moldings, windows, a picket fence," etc. https://africa.si.edu/exhibits/dialogue09/allegory.html

Allegory of Construction II (2009),mixed media site-specific installation, National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian is his second of the mixed media series site specific installations. In this series, he used materials intended to represent the musseques-shanty towns-in his hometown of Luanda. In this installation, he used "cast-off doors, corrugated sheet metal, and other discarded papers and objects." He spent years photographing the deteriorating buildings and structures before assembling this installation. https://africa.si.edu/exhibits/dialogue09/allegory2.html

On the Margins of the Borderlands (1994-1995), mixed media installation, collection of the artist.

Exhibited in three different continents, this is the first of Ole's installations.

Works: Photography

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Reception and Impact: Critical and Commercial reception of his work