Guest Curator Alexandra Steinacker Highlights The Works Of Natalia Millman, Kotaro Machiyama & Nicholas Sims
Alexandra Steinacker. Art historian, curator and writer.About Alexandra Steinacker Clark
Alexandra Steinacker Clark (AUT/USA), is an American-Austrian art historian, curator and writer. She lives and works in London, UK. She obtained her BA in History of Art at University College London and has completed her MA in Arts Administration and Cultural Policy at Goldsmiths University.
Her specializations include contemporary art, specifically feminism, technology, and artificial intelligence in artistic practice. She currently works at Sotheby’s auction house, is an Ambassador for MTArt Agency, co-founded C/20 Association for International Curatorial Practice and is the founder and host of the ‘All About Art’ podcast.
Upcoming Projects
Co-curator of The Female Landscape: Rethinking the Body through the Photographic Image and Beyond at the VBKÖ for FOTOWIEN Festival Vienna, March 2022 with C/20 Association for International Curatorial Practice.
Co-curator of Sexualisierung & Selbstbestimmung at PARALLEL Vienna, September 2021 with C/20 Association for International Curatorial Practice.
Continuous launch of episodes of the All About Art Podcast with prominent artists and art professionals as special guest speakers, as well as a broad range of other informative and engaging subjects.
Selected Artworks
Natalia Millman
Kotaro Machiyama
Nicholas SimsNatalia Millman
From reflecting on personal experiences, Millman creates works that speak to viewers through her concepts of ageing, dementia, and death. She embodies these within her artistic practice through her sculptural and mixed media works, one of them being ‘Lonely’.
She creates with dedication, inserting her own personal experiences of loss and tragedy into each piece. As an artistic practice but also a therapeutic one, Millman communicates her lived experience to viewers while abstracting it.
This results in her works being personal to her while simultaneously being relatable to a wider audience, incorporating aspects that are connected to the human body and the act of ageing. Her works and concepts ignite an awareness of uncomfortable realities we as humans must face.
They only facilitate an education on the human body and mind and how it can change, but Millman also communicates through her practice that we are not alone in this, thus what accompanies uncomfortable realities are also feelings of comfort and sympathy.
Kotaro Machiyama
Bright. Geometric. Layered.
All of these describe Kotaro Machiyama’s works and an attempt at depicting positive human emotions and experiences. The artist references feelings of beauty, courage, confidence, as well as how we as viewers experience different moments in time.
The funky acrylic on canvas paintings have colors overlapping and cutting into one another, creating a dynamic composition that catches the eye. Some pieces have large blocks of color from corner to corner, and some contain negative space through whiteness covering the majority of the canvas with only small amounts of colors and shapes. From more minimal pieces to larger, busier ones filled with varying shapes, the Tokyo-based artist brings color in to each work of art.
Nicholas Sims
How does one depict a personal human essence? Portraitist Nicholas Sims uses pencil to allow for spontaneity and instantaneous rendering of scenes, be it of strangers or people he knows. Often without much of a detailed background or specific surroundings, the artist allows for a complete focus on the subject and the subject alone.
In this way, he places great value on the qualities of the sitter’s face, their identity and feelings embodied through their expression and well as through the pencil in the artist’s hand. However, sometimes minute details serve as welcome additions to his portraits, facilitating a form of contextualization or further personalization of each piece.
When viewing the portraits, it creates a sense of question of how the viewer themselves would be depicted, what details would be in focus, how does the world see them? The answer could be embodied within the artist’s creation.