Kirsten Deirup, a New York-based artist, crafts surreal, sometimes unsettling paintings that toy with perspective and expectations. At times, the viewer may be unsure of what the creatures or objects at the center of her works are in truth. Yet, the engrossing quality to her works carries through.
The New York City-based Nicelle Beauchene Gallery once offered this on the artist’s mysterious pieces: “Kirsten Deirup’s paintings explore a territory where theater, religious reverie and dystopia comingle. Accentuating uneasy relationships between reality, the subconscious and artifice, Deirup renders disjointed stage sets as portraiture that remain void of direct figuration. Playing upon the ineluctable flatness of the surfaces, Deirup’s irrational portraits invite confusion as she oscillates between the uses of two- and three-dimensional space.”
Even as the artist’s work has since evolved, she still seems to use both real and emulated material to construct beings and worlds that move beyond explanation.
In the La Merced neighborhood in San Cristóbal de las Casas in Chiapas, Mexico, costumed characters hit the streets to welcome the feast day of Our Lady of La Merced and reflect the sins of the wearer. In Diego Moreno’s photo series “Guardians of Memory,” he navigates this tradition in his old neighborhood and explores converging cultures by placing these monsters in domestic situations.
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.
In his current show at Honor Fraser in Los Angeles, Kenny Scharf shares wild new works that include new mixed-media paintings, sculptures, assemblages, and more. “Optimistically Melting!” takes over the space through Nov. 16, and in it, viewers find an veteran artist who maintains his graffiti sensibilities yet constantly pushes his interests into new arenas.