Conveying elapsed time and bombastic energy, Mitchell Villa’s process involves long strokes and motions that use his entire body. The self-taught painter depicts scenes that range from Biblical allusions to horror to intimate domestic portraits. Works like the triptych “Dinner Party” show the artist’s penchant for controlled cacophony.
“Villa’s style could be described as a form of subjective realism,” a statement says. “It is representational, but of emotional exposure rather than photographic surface. The spontaneity in this exposure is earned through foundational preparation. Villa renders his work from photo references to the point of close resemblance. This becomes the jumping point for deconstruction, stripping away, and abstracting upon the image towards its inner energy.”
Find more of Villa’s work on his site.
For his most recent exhibition, Those Bloody Colours, presented at Galerie Eigen + Art in Berlin, Martin Eder featured lifelike paintings of women in a medieval time warp. Eder's artworks are scaled true to life and rendered in vivid tones, imbuing them with a tactile and emotive quality with which one immediately connects. Gazing at the eyes of the women, cast downward as if in humble contemplation after battle, one desires the warriors to look up and out.
Painter