French artist Astro takes flat urban surfaces and creates passageways into the void. Using shadows and light, calligraphy-inspired designs and winding curves, the artist’s optical illusions are made for public consumption. And even when they’re not so obvious to some passers-by and cars on a quick route to work, Astro has many of us looking at the big picture.
Ben Howe’s arresting oil paintings offer hyperdetailed and eerie reflections on humanity. A new show at beinArt Gallery in Australia collects his newest paintings under the titled “Weave.” The new show tackles “themes of mortality, isolation, longing, melancholy and loss and sits somewhere between the physical constraints of reality and the anarchic realm of the subconscious.” Howe was last mentioned on HiFructose.com here.
Kitt Bennett’s stirring, graphical murals have a particular resonance on paved parking lots, sprawling across urban spaces. The sheer size of these works gives viewers the chance to examine the details of his murals on an intimate level. For the past few years, the Melbourne-based artist has built a reputation in both illustration and public art (and he held a a solo show in a public toilet in 2015).
John Bisbee, who welds and manipulates 12-inch spikes, has always operated under one mantra: "Only nails, always different." In recent pieces, his diverse output bends the nails into an enormous snake, a tree, and more abstract forms. Not only are the subjects depicted varying wildly, but the style in which the nails comprise them: sometimes rigid and geometric, elsewhere chaotic.