In an upcoming solo show at Jason Vass Gallery, Mark Dean Veca offers works crafted during the past nine years. “The Troubled Teens (Work of a Decade),” running Jan. 26 through March 9, features acrylic works like “Back Off,” crafting Yosemite Sam in Veca fashion. All of the paintings bring Veca’s stylized pattern-making and textures to reconstruct pop cultural and political symbols. Veca was last mentioned on HiFructose.com here.
“Like every conscious citizen, Veca’s attentions have been diverted to the thorny political climate, with a special insight into the layer where the ‘medium is the message’ plays out in our visual culture,” the gallery says. “By confronting the art historical context, we see in these works a late-Empire decadence, a corpulent excess bespeaking a new Rococo — which is not necessarily, Veca seems to warn, a good thing.”
See more works from the artist below.
Japanese artist Shintaro Ohata places sculptures in front of paintings to create wondrous scenes inspired by childhood. They play out every day encounters between his child subjects, their pets and imaginary friends with the world around them. While their lives may seem ordinary for the most part, Ohata's playful and impressionistic style make them feel like fantasies. They are sculpted from polystyrene which are then painted to perfectly match their traditional 2D acrylic backgrounds.
