Chinese artist Zhou Fan creates whimsical depictions of natural growths gone amuck: fungi, weeds and fluorescent drippings of alien goo stack upon characters’ heads and faces like strange, invasive species. Fan says that the inspiration for these colorful paintings came from a dream he had in which jellyfish fell from the sky and became mushrooms. The human characters appear to be overtaken by these extraterrestrial entities as they lodge themselves onto their faces and limbs. Fan’s paintings have a flat, illustrative quality that evokes Japanese Pop Art and animation (Miyazaki and Murakami come to mind when viewing his imaginative works). Fan described that in one piece, a little boy is crying because he doesn’t want his dream to end, perhaps a reflection of the artist’s own penchant for daydreaming and fantasizing.
In Jillian Denby’s voyeuristic, yet expansive paintings, people engage in both everyday activity as well as the unexpected. When viewed as a whole, her scenes offer a connectedness between its parties that each likely couldn’t see themselves. With works like "Genius of the River Chases Away The Frenzy of Art," the reality of what’s human and what’s art itself is blurred. “Nature can be overwhelming and landscape a little removed. With that in mind and viewing it directly, I try to acknowledge its presence, while conceptualizing a fragile observational dialogue,” the artist has said.
For his most recent exhibition, Those Bloody Colours, presented at Galerie Eigen + Art in Berlin, Martin Eder featured lifelike paintings of women in a medieval time warp. Eder's artworks are scaled true to life and rendered in vivid tones, imbuing them with a tactile and emotive quality with which one immediately connects. Gazing at the eyes of the women, cast downward as if in humble contemplation after battle, one desires the warriors to look up and out.