Israeli artist Nir Hod once told Interview Magazine, his greatest discovery was that “it’s not easy getting older.” In his painting series “Genius,” Hod pulls at the tension between childhood and adulthood and breaks open a space in between innocence and inurement. His images are of young children smoking cigarettes and looking at the viewer with expressions of disdain, arrogance and suspicion. Though there is certainly an element of dark humor in dressing rosy-cheeked toddlers in rich fabrics and endowing them with sweeping hair, the paintings are disquieting for their ability to reflect one’s now-corrupted inner child back unto him.
The paintings hang together, creating a school of contemptuous children. However, their individual conceit produces a profound feeling of loneliness, of superiority and alienation. One cannot gaze at these paintings for long. The expressions of the children pain the viewer and undoubtedly isolate them from their other hanging peers.
For the past few decades, New York City-based painter 
British-Iranian artist Nikoo Bafti crafts vibrant scenes that represent Mother Nature, pulling inspiration from varying mythologies. The artist's background includes studies in illustration, with time spent animation development at Disney Channels in London before she embarked on a career in personal and freelance work.
It seems that everything Tempe, Arizona-based artist 
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.