When painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo portrayed figures made out of every objects, fruits, and vegetables, he presented the idea of life as living riddle or jigsaw puzzle. Living and working in Warsaw, Poland, Ewa Prończuk-Kuziak expresses a similar fascination with life in her paintings of figures in magical rearrangements. “My source of inspirations are fairy tales, dreams, my own experiences and stories from childhood,” she says. Working primarily in oil paint, her ongoing “The Still Life Series” depicts rainbow-colored visions of animals that are made out of materials.
Appearing to be woven out of thread and decorative fabrics, Ewa’s animals are a combination of still life, nature, and fantasy. They are an extension of her earlier works that featured portraits of women dissipating into a spectrum of ribbons and foliage. Her works employ intensely saturated colors that illustrate the vibrancy of the world that her characters inhabit: In one image, a fox leaps into mid air, his body dissolving to reveal a brightly colored rabbit inside of his stomach, leaping with him. In another, we can make out a starry sky between strips of fabric that make up a rabbit’s body. Rabbits, herons, foxes, deer, and even insects like honey bees and scorpions are all rendered in this surrealistic depiction of the artist’s imagination.
At once lush and eerie, Sarah Slappey's oil paintings offer vague limbs and organs against natural environments. Of her distinct visual language, she’s said “I wanted to build a world from the bottom up.” The South Carolina native, now residing in Brooklyn, New York, has recently shown these scenes at venues in New York City and Switzerland.
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.