Spanish artist Ivana Flores crafts pop-surrealist oil paintings with both a childlike sense of whimsy and at times, ominous undertones. At grand sizes, the works carry an absorbing quality that pulls you into her worlds. Her work has been described as “reality, dream, everyday life and imagination merge at a turning point of boundless consciousness of self-image and world.”
“Taking cue from the epic grandeur of historical painting, Flores constructs her body of work as a timeless primeval story with archetypes –both anthropomorphic and zoomorphic, juxtaposing eras and configurations,” a statement says. “Her critical realism, inflected with magic, blurs the thin line between the representable and the imaginable, expanding artistic practice to direct utterances directed at the viewer, by means of reducing the visual distance.”
Flores is currently based in Barcelona, and she’s had solo everywhere from her native Spain to Dubai.
Sarah Ball's oil paintings, subtle in their complexity, are intended for the viewer to encounter the portrait's subject intimately. The practice of physiognomy, or judging the character of a person just from their facial features or expressions, has long been a subject of fascination for the artist. In efforts like her current Anima Mundi show "Themself," she culls her subjects from historic photographic archives, social media, and beyond. "These source images become a starting point for a methodical process of understanding, assumption and translation, where the aesthetic ‘mask' and what lies beneath become the focus of engagement,” the gallery says.
