Zach Brown, a 27-year-old Pittsburgh painter, creates paintings teeming with mythological and spiritual references. He accomplishes this with a blend of both metallic and subdued hues, focusing on the human form and injecting it into surreal situations. Influences seem to range from William Blake to Paul Gauguin.
When Local Pittsburgh asked the artist about the themes in his work, he offered this: “Bodies… Stillness is a big theme. There isn’t a lot of movement in my paintings. I’m really into the idea of thinking of my paintings as totems or zero-relief sculptures. That’s a big reason I work life-size or larger. I don’t really want them to be scenes but things all their own. Russian icons are really good at being objects with representational elements.”
The artist is currently part of the Palette show running at Abend Gallery. Brown received his BFA from Rhode Island School of Design and his MFA from New York Academy of Art.
Lee Jinju's riveting scenes, with cascading planes and perspectives, offer both intimate symbology and an invitation to draw your own associations. In some works, solitary figures inhabit these geometric confinements; elsewhere, the artist renders just enough objects to draw a viewer into its orbit.
Michael Reeder offers his largest collection of work yet in "The OtheRealm," his new show at Thinkspace Projects. Reeder toys with depth and color, finding an expanse of possibilities within repeated shapes and motifs. He accomplishes this with a blend of oils, acrylics, and spraypaint, shifting between styles, and at the gallery, given site-specific flourishes. The show runs through Aug. 24.