Menu
The New Contemporary Art Magazine

David Jien Returns With ‘All Is Not Lost’

Rendered in colored pencil and graphite, the new works of David Jien expand his wild worlds in a show at Richard Heller Gallery. "All Is Not Lost," running through Nov. 2 at the Santa Monica space, moves between his strange scenes and shelves of curiosities. Jien was last featured on our site here.

Rendered in colored pencil and graphite, the new works of David Jien expand his wild worlds in a show at Richard Heller Gallery. “All Is Not Lost,” running through Nov. 2 at the Santa Monica space, moves between his strange scenes and shelves of curiosities. Jien was last featured on our site here.

“This recent body of work is an expansion of the overarching narrative of Jien’s mythology within the context of his previous two exhibitions with the gallery,” the gallery says. “The drawings in the show push the storyline forward, while at the same time shed light onto the origins and backgrounds of certain characters. Dots that connect with other dots that reveal more dots within Jien’s meta-verse. As with Jien’s previous work, the drawings are delicately and meticulously rendered with color pencils and graphite.”

See more works on the gallery’s page and Jien’s website.

Meta
Share
Facebook
Reddit
Pinterest
Email
Related Articles
Italian artist Alessia Iannetti has a unique fascination for what is mysterious and unknown which she carries into her dark and romantic drawings. Previously featured on our blog, her works are primarily drawn in graphite with painted touches of bright colors and golden hues. Her subjects of natural beauties and young children are in constant touch with their surroundings, enveloped by flowering shrubs, hummingbirds, and butterflies. Some say that looking at Iannetti's art feels like coming under a spell or enchantment. This seems to perfectly describe her upcoming exhibit at La Luz de Jesus gallery in Los Angeles, "In the Footsteps of my Shadow".
Carl Krull's drawings have a visceral appeal. Each of his works is composed of horizontal lines that start out parallel and wrinkle somewhere in the middle, yielding figures as if out of some primordial mass. Sometimes the forms he draws are hardly distinguishable from one other. The eye attempts to untangle his orgiastic cacophony of limbs and biomorphic shapes as if they were some strange riddle. On September 27, Krull debuted his solo show "Seismic" at V1 Gallery in Copenhagen. The pieces evoke both the smooth grooves of cliff sides and the monochromatic markings of seismographs. By setting restrictions on his process (he seems to refuse to take the charcoal off the paper until it has crossed from one side to the other), Krull captures the quality of geological formations and invokes themes of creation and mythology.
British artist Joe Fenton infuses his immensely detailed graphite and mixed-media drawings of interplanetary iconography with inspiration from religious artifacts from centuries past — the ornate frames of gilded Orthodox icons, Tibetan Buddhist altars with their elaborate wood carvings. East and West come together in these large, fantastical works. Fenton is an award-winning children’s book author and illustrator, but his personal work tackles heavier topics. The artist says that much of his drawings explore the idea of death, namely the fear of death — an anxiety many appease through religion and spirituality. Fenton’s baroque, intense scenes are cramped with hellish visions and strange spirits, densely filling each page with deities and demons from a fantasy belief system rife with occult symbols.
Austrian artist David Leitner’s stirring work takes him across the world, whether it’s in murals, illustrations, or stirring drawings that react to his surroundings. In his black, graphical line drawings, the artist’s cascading figures make use of neighboring contours and abstractions.

Subscribe to the Hi-Fructose Mailing List