Louise Riley, an artist based in the London, began sewing because frankly, she was “too fast at painting.” She found that embroidery, in particular, gave her a chance to really immerse herself and understand what she was creating. And then one day, she tried a new experiment, using a mattress as her canvas.
“I began to sew people on found mattresses to give a corporeal and spiritual sense of their history and tried to put them in emotive situations to capture one moment of their lives in an almost, albeit abstract, diagrammatic way,” the artist says, in a statement. “As time would go by and I began travelling overseas for shows, dismantling sculptures for ease of travel, it was frustrating because they would get damaged and limited. I realised I could use this to my advantage and that they could become new sculptures, based on their new weaknesses and strengths.”
The results are portraits that give an intimate, vulnerable, and absorbing life to otherwise overlooked objects. Each of these works seem to carry a story, one that through time, changes and acquires new stains and trauma.
Beijing based artist DU Kun incorporates his passion for rock music into his new oil painting series titled "Revels of the Rock Gods". His works, which just debuted at Mizuma Gallery in Tokyo, Japan, are monumental portraits of rock musicians that appear carved out of mountains, cliffs, oceans, stones, trees and waterfalls. His first profession while he was in art school was as a rock musician himself, and has since frequently demonstrated his musical prowess. The artist began working on his "Gods of Rock Festival" series in 2014, creating the works out of his own experience with rock music.
German artist