Decoding Images: Stuart Hawkins

Stuart Hawkins says she was never any good at drawing. Upon deciding she to be an artist in the first grade, she arranged toys and stuffed animals, even creating scenes from wrinkles in a bedsheet. Her photographs now, the most recent of which are on view at Zach Feuer, contrast the raw and neglected landscape of Kolkata, India with brightly-colored handmade props assembled from construction paper, tape, and found objects. The artist explains that
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Fact Sheet: Adolf Dietrich

Adolf Dietrich (1877–1957), one of the most reknowned Swiss artists of the 20th Century, focused his work on his own surroundings, rendering rural landscapes, portraits, animals, and still lives, with an extreme amount of precision and detail, strong use of color, and a striking sense of materiality. Dietrich's largest audience during his lifetime was in Germany, and he was included in exhibitions of New Romanticism and New Objectivity there as well as in France and Switzerland. Yet, with the rise of National Socialism, Dietrich's market, and thus his fame, became more localized to Switzerland. In his ongoing interest in the contructions of art history, and in homage to the techniques he admires, Richard Phillips curated the elder painted into a recent show at the Swiss Institute, called "Painting and Misappropriation." Here are the facts on Dietrich, with invaluable help from Phillips:
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Fact Sheet: R Crumb

Cartoon artist R Crumb (b. 1943, Philadelphia)is best known for his scatalogical ink drawings for mainstream magazines like Rolling Stone to accompany the work of Hunter S Thompson, and the seminal journal he founded, Zap. So his latest project, a fully illustrated comic-style rendering of the Book of Genesis, comprised of 207 individual works in pen and ink,might surprise you. Currently on view at David Zwirner (through April 17), the illustrations have taken Crumb five years to complete. Here are the facts on Crumb.

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Fact Sheet: Hunter Cross

Transparency Now, Hunter Cross' debut New York solo show, was recently on view at the Abrons Art Center on the Lower East Side. It captured, the artist said, an aesthetic, "similar to what you might see under a microscope, if that microscope happened to be rendered out by Adobe Illustrator." At the age of 29, Cross is at the forefront of a generation of artists formed by the Internet and ideas of collective production and consumption. Cross floats seamlessly between the many vocations he claims—artist, web developer, entrepreneur, and musician—and makes the roles seem like natural corollaries. Here are the facts on Cross:
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