Gregory Jacobsen’s unsettling, vivid oil paintings offer portraits, scenes, and bizarre explorations of the most unflattering aspects of our anatomy. The Chicago-based artist sometimes abandon the figurative, instead offering a vague, writhing mash-up of organic materials. All are rooted in the artist’s fixations and sense of humor.
“I paint figures, focusing on the little bits that obsess me…a little flab hanging over a waistband, ill-fitting shoes, overbites, noses, teeth, and flesh,” the artist says, in a statement. “Either through portraiture or busy tableaux, I create a world and vocabulary of characters that live and embrace their so-called faults. Over the years, this work has developed into piles that are corpulent and visceral stand-ins for characters. Meat, junk, pasties, and genital-like fruit and vegetables are constructed into heroic yet pathetic towers. These piles also act as a sort of forensic evidence and cataloging of awkward sex, gross gluttony, ridiculous masturbation rituals, and endless humiliation and failure.”
See more work from Jacobsen below.
Spanish artist Ivana Flores crafts pop-surrealist oil paintings with both a childlike sense of whimsy and 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.”
Hyper-realist painter 
In his debut show at Jonathan LeVine Projects, Lynyrd Paras offers a set of oil paintings that explore the primal and emotional feelings stemming from total bombardment. “Attack of the Wounded Surface" is on view online through Dec. 31. Paras, a Philippines-based artist, has previously seen his work featured in shows throughout Asia.