Polish artist Jacek Yerka's paintings invite us into a world where things are not what they seem. Caves turn into gaping dragons' mouths, houses float above the clouds, and gardens become seemingly infinite puzzles of time and space. The artist blurs the boundaries between the biological and the mechanical, creating strange hybrids of animals, architecture, and geological formations. Yerka began his career making band posters in the 1970s and has been exhibiting his work in Poland for decades.
Polish artist Jacek Yerka’s paintings invite us into a world where things are not what they seem. Caves turn into gaping dragons’ mouths, houses float above the clouds, and gardens become seemingly infinite puzzles of time and space. The artist blurs the boundaries between the biological and the mechanical, creating strange hybrids of animals, architecture, and geological formations. Yerka began his career making band posters in the 1970s and has been exhibiting his work in Poland for decades.
Kazuki Takamatsu (HF Vol. 33 cover artist) paints layers of translucent, white gouache that appear to float over his matte, black backgrounds. His hologram-like, female characters look digitized, though they're executed entirely by hand. That's because the artist turns to depth mapping software for inspiration for his images and painstakingly renders his figures as if they were parceled into pixels. For his upcoming solo show "Even a Doll Can Do It," Takamatsu presents a new series of paintings centered around ghostly depictions of nymph-like girls floating in cyberspace. The exhibition opens February 14 at Dorothy Circus Gallery in Rome and will be on view through April 4.
Justin Fitzpatrick’s oil paintings blend influences from Art Nouveau, illuminated manuscripts from the Middle Ages, anatomical drawings, and elsewhere. The actual subjects in the works likewise move through time, from using the construction workers as visual motif to creatures of the natural world rendered with Victorian flavor.
(A collaboration with Celeste Byers) Aaron Glasson’s murals, though surreal and vibrant in an otherworldly sense, are firmly grounded in reality, often depicting real people and their personal journeys. The artist, born in New Zealand and living in the U.S., crafts murals across the world, in addition to work in illustration and gallery paintings. He cites his themes as “relationship to the natural environment, community empowerment and education, indigenous knowledge, the subconscious, and the unseen.” Several of his recent murals are collaborations with artist Celeste Byers.
