Menu
The New Contemporary Art Magazine

The Surreal Paintings of Chris Austin

In Chris Austin's surreal paintings, the overlooked giants of the ocean make their way across landscapes and suburban settings. His recent show with Antler Gallery, titled “Unfamiliar,” offered new work from the artist, who often focuses on the elegance and plight of nature and its inhabitants.

In Chris Austin’s surreal paintings, the overlooked giants of the ocean make their way across landscapes and suburban settings. His recent show with Antler Gallery, titled “Unfamiliar,” offered new work from the artist, who often focuses on the elegance and plight of nature and its inhabitants.

https://www.instagram.com/p/B3K8n6nDrtn/

“His work utilizes a surrealist vision of the natural world to tell stories about significant encounters and incidents. A little girl in a yellow rain slicker stands in for the viewer in several works, bearing witness to levitating sharks and orcas as they move through the woods. The inexplicable nature of these scenes draws us into a world out of kilter, its central figures displaced, and ask us to reflect on our own assumptions about the natural order of things.”

Find more on the gallery’s site and the artist’s Instagram page.

https://www.instagram.com/p/B4dWBgaD0uv/

Meta
Share
Facebook
Reddit
Pinterest
Email
Related Articles
John Guy Petruzzi uses watercolor and acrylics on synthetic paper for his vivid explorations on ecological disaster. The vibrant pops across these scenes from the natural world may be intriguing, but they tell a story far more ugly. As fellow painters Lauren Marx and Tiffany Bozic explore the dire consequences of our actions in meditations on life and death, Petruzzi also adds to this conversation a clashing and blending of textures and materials.
Earlier today, we brought you photos from Saturday night's opening of Turn the Page: The First Ten Years of Hi-Fructose, a bi-coastal collaboration between the magazine and Virginia MOCA. Now, we'd like to give you a closer look at the art and see what it's like to walk through the halls of this unprecedented group of 51 new contemporary artists from all genres and corners of the world.
Those who have been to a drag club (or caught an episode of RuPaul's Drag Race) know that campiness and kitsch are staples of drag culture. By inverting the gender stereotypes and taking them to the extreme, queens mock the conventions of gender and the consumer society that enforces them. Peter Shmelzer takes cues from this type of satirical play with his over-the-top paintings, where gender boundaries are broken and erotic acts become contorted into bizarre, uncomfortable displays.
Oil painter Aldo Sergio uses traditional tools to create “glitches” on classical still-life and portrait works. Sergio’s work follows other artists utilizing mix of contemporary distortion and centuries-old influences, yet his work stands apart in his convincing rendering of both aspects and his specific concepts arising out of this approach.

Subscribe to the Hi-Fructose Mailing List