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The New Contemporary Art Magazine
Somedays you just need to destroy a city with your ridiculous dance moves. Today is that day. See more of Boston's infamous Kaiju Big Battel Kaiju Big Battel in HF volume one, the Collected Edition Box Set and below.
Though several of Dan Lydersen’s oil paintings are contemporary in content, the engine that fuels these works consists of timeless bouts with spirituality, nature, and materiality. There's a surreal quality some; a somber realism in others. Yet, in each piece, Lydersen’s knack for evoking introspection carries. The backdrops move between suburbia, rural America, and more scenic, wild settings in which the ordinary Western experience (like kids on a bounce house) is extracted and dispatched.
Taiwan may not be the first place to come to mind when you think about street art, but Hawaiian arts organization Pow! Wow! recently made Taipei its second home. For the last week, about 40 international and Taiwanese artists scaled buildings and crossed below highways to bring their fresh paint styles to Taipei. Just a few months ago, the Pow! Wow! team was in Hawaii revamping the walls of Honolulu for the fourth edition of street art festival Pow! Wow! Hawaii. Now, they’ve hopped 5,000 miles across the Pacific for the first ever Pow! Wow! Taiwan.
Taylor White's vibrant, mixed-media explorations of form and movement evolve in the artist’s newest show, "Physical Phenomena,” running through June 30 at ABV Gallery in Atlanta. White says her latest work “builds upon the universally recognizable visual language of movement” and that she is inspired by the dance community of the North Carolina cities Raleigh and Durham. White was last mentioned on HiFructose.com here.
Mark Mulroney’s acrylics paintings humor and unsettle in their comic-inspired style and surreal sensibilities. These vibrant works pull from Pop and art history, which in many cases, carry near-aggressive results. In a show at Mrs. Gallery in New York, "The Dangers of Eden," new pieces by the artists are shown.
Public art and murals add an imaginative dimension to the daily humdrum of city life — a cause public art project Forest For The Trees is championing in Portland at Hellion Gallery. The gallery is currently hosting a two-week pop-up fundraiser show for FFTT, which is gearing up for a mural series in late August featuring the likes of Blaine Fontana, DAL, Faith47, Know Hope, Mary Iverson and many other international and Portland-based artists. The current group show at Hellion Gallery features works from a small selection of artworks from some of the participants: an assemblage by Fontana, psychedelic paintings by Brendan Monroe, a landscape collage by Mary Iverson and more. The exhibition is on view through May 30. Stay tuned for news about the Forest For The Trees mural series later this summer.
Berlin-based French artist Jaybo Monk (covered here) creates visual collages where figures and their surroundings become one, a place that he calls "nowhere." He then mixes unexpected elements into this nonsensical space, an experimentation Jaybo also carries into his sculptural works. "I want to disobey in my paintings; disobey the symmetry, the techniques and the narratives system. I am interested in nonsense, the only space for me where freedom is real. I use tools like chance and mistakes to evaluate my craft. I flirt with the impossible. I need to go to places I`ve never been before." We visited with Jaybo in his Berlin studio, where he is now working on a new series inspired by immigration.Hi-Fructose is proud to present our 5th Anniversary group show March 13, 2010
Featuring work by a select group of outstanding artists:
Chris Mars, Jeff Soto, Kevin Cyr, Kris Kuksi, Jonathan Viner, Martin Witfooth, Lori Earley, Mark Ryden, Thomas Doyle, Scott Musgrove, Victor Castillo, Amy Sol, Audrey Kawasaki, Brendan Danielsson, Brian Dettmer, Candice Tripp, Jesse Hazlip, Greg "Craola" Simkins, Harma Heikens, Attaboy, Alex Pardee, James Jean, Scott Hove, Sas Christian, Colin Christian, Yoko D'Holbachie, Travis Lampe, Junko Mizuno, Brandt Peters, Mia, Chet Zar, Kathie Olivas, Johnny "KMNDZ" Rodriguez, Sam Gibbons, Annie Owens, Yosuke Ueno, Skinner, Ewelina Ferruso
Copro Gallery, Santa Monica
Show opens March 13th 2010
Closes April 4th 2010
Additional details coming soon...
Adam Kiyoshi Fujita’s spraypainted murals appear as neon lights on walls across the world. Though a 25-year veteran of crafting work in public spaces, this specific style, evoking neon tube lighting evolved in response to the current presidential administration. In this past, his work has also responded to issues around police violence, gender issues, and other social topics.
Levalet’s site-specific public drawings use the contours and restrictions of a space to create the unexpected. His absurdist humor appears inside and outside a variety of structures, dangling above passers-by or using objects in disarray to his advantage. Recent pieces have popped up in France and Italy.
João Ruas, a painter based in São Paulo, Brazil, crafts ghostly, surreal scenes that blend mythology, warfare, and nature. Even his most peaceful works carry a mystery and sense of recent danger. In a new show at Jonathan Levine Gallery, titled "Geist," the artist evolves these themes and process. The show kicks off May 13 and runs through June 10.
Edinburg based artist Sarah Muirhead (covered here) portrays every day people in her mottled, figurative acrylic paintings. The watercolor-like quality of her art lends to her keen observations of the body and skin tones. Muirhead elaborates on her style choice in her artist statement: "The quality of flesh, its contrasting textures and tensions, the density and potential of muscle and the irregularity and dimples in fatty tissue are important in the way I want to describe any given subject. I want the bodies I paint to be a strange mixture of lurid, glistening attraction and true empathic realism avoiding elegant cliches." She continues her unique exploration of the figure in "Bonded," which opens today at Leyden Gallery in London. 
Uninspired by the lack of public art in their home town of Aalborg, a mid-sized Danish city, Lars Bonde and Mads Mulvad curated We AArt, the first art festival focused exclusively on murals in Denmark. The fest brought out many diverse talents from different corners of Europe. In our first update, you'll find a large-scale mural by Aryz, who is known for expressing his illustrative style on monumental walls. Also hailing from Spain, Kenor created an abstract wall alive with neon colors and Escif painted a mural with neatly compartmentalized depictions of people and objects that evoke's a traveler's sketchbook. Stay tuned for more murals from Interesni Kazki, Alexis Diaz, Don John and Jaz, whose walls are still in progress as we speak.
Both based in Berlin by way of Australia, Two One and Reka (see our recent studio visit here) are exhibiting together at StolenSpace Gallery in London in two concurrent solo shows: Reka's "Trip the Light" and Two One's "The Hunted Hunter's Head." Inspired by the graceful movements of dancers from a young age, Reka (whose mother was a ballerina) presents a series of paintings that pay homage to the fluid, abstract shapes the body can make. His Cubist-inspired paintings might have one imagining a toe-tapping soundtrack of jazz or even the swell of a symphony, but Reka tempers these allusions to older, more traditional art forms with gritty paint textures that evoke his graffiti roots.