At the moment, it's this one by Maria Helena Vieira da Silva - Passage Des Miroirs (Passage of Mirrors) Oil on Canvas (1981)
I tend to like artworks that have an air of mystery, where it's not immediately clear what is going on, and it's possible to spend quite some time pondering on the meaning. For this reason I always liked "Cahill Expressway" by Australian artist Jeffrey Smart. There was actually an entire anthology of short stories, "Expressway" by various authors, with each story taking inspiration from this painting. The painting depicts an actual location in Sydney.
I like art too much to have one favorite painting, but my favorite painter was Salvador Dali. This one is an excellent representation of his style, combining surrealism, optical illusion, and homage to another important artist: Slave Market With The Disappearing Bust of Voltaire (1940)
^^ I can see the similarities between Smart's work and that of Chirico above, and other artists such as Magritte that people have mentioned, from the surrealist school. However Smart was not a surrealist, more a "hyper-realist", or "precisionist", as Wikipedia describes him. His paintings do not show impossible things or contradictory things in the manner of Magritte; objects do not appear bizarrely scaled in relation to one another. His paintings could be actual scenes. However there is usually some puzzling or disturbing feature in the painting. In "Cahill Expressway", for example, we wonder why the man is there, all by himself. Is he intending to try and cross the road? It looks a very dangerous place to do so. The absence of any other people, or of any traffic at all, in a location that's clearly built to accommodate large volumes of traffic, lends the piece a slightly sinister air.
I thought the exact same thing. I immediately thought of the painting, "Mystery and Melancholy of a Street". Even though they're quite different works, I think it was the solitary person and the use of colours that made me make a connection. On first glance, both paintings also seem quite straightforward, then have more intrigue.
Not exactly a "painting" in the traditional sense, but really getting into Hermann Nitsch's work again. It's quite hypnotising.
Well, I suppose that's true. But I don't enjoy that aspect. I just really find the main canvas works to be really hypnotising. Comes across as absurd, but the dense red imagery seems to put the mind in a good place.
This One: Mystery and Melancholy of a Street by Giorgio de Chirico And this one: The Jack Pine: Tom Thomson I've been to the site where Thompson got his inspiration for the painting in Algonquin Park.
Untitled Yves Tanguy at the Chicago Art Institute. It's a good thing they put it in storage — I've missed so much other fine work in the hours I've spent staring at this thing.
At the moment it would have to be Still Life 1957 by Endre Bálint. Every emotion is drawn to it equally and I just find it really intriguing and engaging.
