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The New Contemporary Art Magazine
The technicolor work of Miami-based digital collage artist Dana Fortune combines futuristic environments with vintage models to suggest continuity between the past and future. Rainbows are featured prominently in each of her collages, bringing levity and optimism, or perhaps just a veneer of optimism, to each piece.
In his most recent series, paper artist Charles Clary, previously featured on Hi-Fructose, nods to the power of nostalgia by creating over 200 individual VHS slipcase sculptures. The series took over a year to complete and marks a turn towards the personal in Clary’s art. This series is a response to his parents’ deaths and a nostalgia for childhood: “The idea behind the more recent work using retro pop culture from my childhood is of order from chaos, beauty from destruction, and hope for more joyous times.”
Specializing in the Japanese art form of paper architecture, Amsterdam-based artist Ingrid Siliakus creates incredibly detailed architectural masterpieces from single pieces of paper. In order to achieve a final result with the complexity and beauty that she intends, Siliakus may produce anywhere from 20 to over 30 prototypes: “Paper architecture does not bare haste, it is its enemy,” she says. “One moment of loss of concentration can lead to failure of a piece.”
Creating minimalistic sculptures out of wooden sticks and hot glue, Polish artist Janusz Grünspek’s series “Drawings in Space” reduces everyday objects to their most simplified states: their outlines. He makes use of negative space to suggest a transparency where opacity is expected- each of his creations is life-sized and Grünspek’s precision tempts the viewer to use them as if they were the real things.
San Francisco-based artist John Vochatzer channels Hieronymus Bosch in his dynamic and complex collages that utilize both religious iconography and natural imagery to shock and inspire. Vochatzer initially delved into surrealism as a teenaged oil painter “fruitlessly trying to emulate Salvador Dali”- since then, he has only further pursued “bizarre and fantastical” aesthetics, which converge powerfully in his works.
San Francisco-based collage artist Travis Bedel aka Bedelgeuse creates astounding anatomical collages that splice together bones, tendons, and organs with flora and fauna. His collage work, mostly a hybrid of analog and digital techniques, takes on a surrealist quality as human anatomy seamlessly intertwines with crystals, flowers, and feathers. Deeply moved by the mysteries and potentialities of the human body, Bedelgeuse’s work revels in the relationship between humanity and nature.
Nigerian artist Oresegun Olumide goes beyond realism with his meticulously detailed oil paintings that could easily be mistaken for photographs. Notoriously difficult to capture in fine art, water plays a central role in his portraits: each figure is unclothed, allowing Olumide to explore the distinct texture and aesthetic quality of water-on-skin.
Self-taught Romanian collage artists Silviu and Irina Székley consider their works to be “conceptual spontaneities” that distort familiar images into new, transfigured realities. The duo takes traditional images, especially 19th century masterpieces and shatters our expectations through unorthodox manipulation. As the artists say themselves, “Our approach to art is very naïve, ludic and hazardous.”
You have probably seen the work of Lithuanian artist Karolis Strautniekas- he has worked with Audi, Mini Cooper, The New York Times, among many other global enterprises; while his personal projects are lesser known, they powerfully convey Strautniekas’ aptitude for color and composition. “Portraits from Behind,” one of his ongoing personal projects, takes an unconventional perspective when approaching portraiture. This voyeuristic series of illustrations focuses on those intimate moments when our backs are turned.
Collage artist Maja Egli creates surreal portraits by manipulating various images of women to work together as complex unities. Her work can be read both as a feminist statement and as a larger comment on humanity: on one level, she suggests that women are complex beings (a quality that is often denied to them in much of mainstream art), while on the other, Egli’s collages imply that we as human beings are composed of disparate and assorted influences. Most of her figures are incomplete, lacking some fullness of form; the few full figures that we do get are faceless.
Japanese sculptor and photographer Yuichi Ikehata creates chilling scenes that bridge the gap between reality and fiction. In his surreal ongoing series “Fragment of Long Term Memory," his intention is to comment on the fragmentary nature of memory and render it physical. "Many parts of our memories… are often forgotten, or difficult to recall. I retrieve those fragmented moments and reconstruct them as surreal images. I gather these misplaced memories from certain parts of our reality, and together they create a non-linear story, resonating with each other in my photographs," he says.
In his clever photographs of landscapes, Paris based photographer Guillaume Amat visually explores the meaning of continuity. His recent and ongoing series titled “Open Fields” features images of empty scenes occupied by a fixed, centered mirror to give a window into all that is missing or, perhaps, all that is present. Amat's images are striking and profound, sincere in their depictions of reality yet simultaneously contrived. One gets a sense of seeing more deeply into the moment than a typical photograph can provide.
A master of contrast, Filippo Minelli sets off vibrant, billowing clouds of colored smoke in empty, enigmatic spaces. Initially inspired by the silencing effect of smokebombs on urban protests, Minelli “got the impression that the smoke itself was the silence arriving to the scene.” To convey the impression of silence, he re-contextualized them in landscapes—in a sense, Minelli solidifies silence in smoke.
The intricate abstract works of Miertje Skidmore internalize and transform the environmental extremes of the Australian landscape. Her paintings suggest the otherworldly- each abstraction could be a birds-eye-view of a multicolored planet. Her palette makes use of mineral and elemental colors that wouldn’t be out of place in some of the most rare enclaves of nature.
Known for his provocative installations that bend both reality and perception, Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson (previously featured on Hi-Fructose) aims to emphasize the relativity of reality. In his latest of many ambitious projects, he situates his works in the stunning baroque space of the Viennese Winter Palace of Prince Eugene of Savoy in an aptly titled exhibition, "Baroque Baroque". While the relationship between his contemporary work and the extravagant exhibition space might not be clear at first, it comes into focus as both the art and its setting reflect a “prolific process of constant reformulation.” The double title emphasizes how the exhibition is a reformulation of a reformulation- a space of altered expectations and aesthetics.
Known for their imaginative and expansive urban murals, Polish street art duo Etam Cru (HF Vol. 32), made up of individual artists Sainer and Bezt, has crossed over into the exhibition scene. Usually working together on blank walls as tall as ten stories with cherry pickers, scaffolding, and paint-rollers, the works currently on display at Thinkspace Gallery in Los Angeles are smaller but no less ambitious; on their own canvases, Sainer and Bezt reveal the nuances of their own styles that blend together so seamlessly in their murals. While the artists themselves have noted that Sainer’s style is more photo-realistic while Bezt focuses on the cartoonish, “graffiti” aspects of their collaborations, both artists cross over into the other’s territory with ease and skill in their exhibition “Galimatias”.