Emerging artist Lauren Marx explores the intricate process of decay with her surreal and often grotesque drawings and paintings. Animals become enmeshed in each other's flesh as tendons and sinew rip apart, exposing their innards. While the subject matter often triggers an initial reaction of repulsion, Marx's ornate line work and graceful compositions are pleasing to the eye. Take a look at some of her latest work below.
Emerging artist Lauren Marx explores the intricate process of decay with her surreal and often grotesque drawings and paintings. Animals become enmeshed in each other’s flesh as tendons and sinew rip apart, exposing their innards. While the subject matter often triggers an initial reaction of repulsion, Marx’s ornate line work and graceful compositions are pleasing to the eye. Take a look at some of her latest work below.
In her studio in Cardedeu, a small town near Barcelona, Spain, Cinta Vidal Agulló is busy creating complex acrylic paintings on wood panels that reflect how our external realities often do not reflect our internal natures. Vidal Agulló sees her work as a metaphor for the ways in which we shape our world – the impossibility of completely understanding those around us, yet the personal ability to navigate the maze of life that we all inhabit.
Dasha Pliska's pencil drawings carry drama and ghostly grace. The Ukraine illustrator works primarily in monochromatic modes, elegantly moving between skin tones and billowing forms moving across the page. And recent personal projects, such as "repletion," show the artist's knack for utilizing negative space.
Brooklyn based artist Allison Sommers mixes elements that are grotesque with natural beauty in her organic mixed media portrayals of animals and figures. Yet despite their disproportions and seemingly exposed internal organs, up close, her works reveal a certain charm and expressiveness. Featured on our blog over the years, she once told us, "I was always trying to draw existing animals as best I could, and once I knew I could draw them, they would start getting a little less realistic", describing them as naughty creatures, tired beasts, delicious sausages, and exotic feasts. Opening on January 23rd at Last Rites Gallery in New York, Sommers will exhibit a new series of graphite on paper and gouache with mixed media on paper work in "What Passing Bells".
In Gary McMillan’s “Galapagos” series, the painter guides us into alien ecosystems, inviting viewers along as explorers to make any observations they can from the creatures and activity there. The work is rooted in the artist’s interest in both science and art. And McMillan says he is “interested in how one makes sense of new things through remembered experience of the familiar.”
