Tattoo artist, painter, and sculptor Fred Laverne has a dark surrealist sensibility, blending in odes to pop culture and pulp tropes into his work. The artist resides in Menton, France, and has garnered a reputation in both tattooing and fine arts, practices he keeps in parallel.
Telmo Miel, the artist duo consisting of Telmo Pieper and Miel Krutzmann, brings their surreal, distinct collaborative work to Thinkspace Projects with a new show. "Encounters," opening on February 1, offers several pieces created over the past year.
Reza Bahmani's oil paintings, with each's distinctive texture and scale, carry a distinct intimacy. In his recent show at Saless Gallery an accompanying score that required the use of headphones further beckoned viewers to focus on the massive portraits.
Luca Ledda’s surreal works deal with both our conception of the world and our consumption of its resources. The Turin artist offers these scenes in murals and gallery work across the globe. Recent projects include pieces in Belgium, Mexico, Bosnia, and beyond.
Shozy's illusionary murals use subtle techniques that enhance the life of a work. For instance, with the pieces above, packing bikes into a “hole” in the structure, uses reflective chrome paint that will change hues with the sky of the day.
For more than a decade, Jan Vormann has used LEGOs to craft “dispatchwork” for centuries-old structures, public spaces across the globe, and other eroded areas. Within these pieces, which take hours and hours to create, he hides passageways and windows that ignite the imagination. The multi-colored blocks can sometimes have a glitch-like effect, when activating otherwise everyday spaces. These projects have appeared in Korea, various parts of the U.S., his native Berlin, and beyond.
With "Scatter My Ashes on Foreign Lands," Amir H. Fallah's largest solo museum exhibition is currently on display at MOCA Tucson. Exploring identity and the immigrant experience, his vibrant portraits of veiled subjects, botanical paintings examining classical Dutch work, and a new series of autobiographical pieces are included in the exhibition. Fallah was last featured on our site here.
With Leon Keer's recent output, the painter continues to craft illusionary gallery work, murals, and installations that play with depth and nostalgia. A recent piece for Thinkspace's anniversary show, titled "Addicted" (below), also saw the artist toying with lenticular painting. On his Instagram page, Keer has also been sharing his anamorphic rooms, in which he moves in and out of the scenes to show their actual planes.