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The New Contemporary Art Magazine
Russian-born artist Sergei Isupov investigates binaries in human relationships — male and female, good and evil, beautiful and grotesque. Using clay as both a material for three-dimensional expression and as a canvas for his illustrations, Isupov capitalizes on all properties of what he finds to be the most open medium. He sculpts human and animal figures, and then adds illustrations in glaze. The paintings diffuse into the clay’s surface, like tattoos on his sculptures’ skin. Taken together, the two- and three-dimensional elements of his work establish a compacted but powerful scene of emotions and narratives.
After years of practicing realistic portraiture, Korean-born artist Shin Young An decided it was time for a change. Her work was once focused on depicting her subject as faithfully and realistically as possible. She now moves beyond the surface and aims to engage politically with the viewer and motivate introspection, even action.
Chilean artist Alvaro Tapia finds something sinister even in his most innocent subjects. His portrait illustrations feature friends, famous people, artists and others he admires. What lurks beneath the surface in these subjects — something grotesque and often evil — is what most attracts the artist. The end result, however, is far from ugly. Bursting with color and life, his portraits are high-impact. Tapia arranges contrasting colors, vector lines and geometric shapes so that they vibrate off one another. His subjects not only seem alive but ready to jump off the page right at the viewer’s throat.
What happens when you give 40 street artists hundreds of cans of spray paint and let them loose in Taipei? As the Pow! Wow! team took over the Taiwanese capital, the cityscape was covered with murals by artists visiting from around the world alongside those based there.
Taiwan may not be the first place to come to mind when you think about street art, but Hawaiian arts organization Pow! Wow! recently made Taipei its second home. For the last week, about 40 international and Taiwanese artists scaled buildings and crossed below highways to bring their fresh paint styles to Taipei. Just a few months ago, the Pow! Wow! team was in Hawaii revamping the walls of Honolulu for the fourth edition of street art festival Pow! Wow! Hawaii. Now, they’ve hopped 5,000 miles across the Pacific for the first ever Pow! Wow! Taiwan.
Last week, the art world descended upon Hong Kong's sweltering streets and alleyways for a week full of openings, art parties, and Art Basel Hong Kong. Only in its second year, Art Basel Hong Kong represents an important shift in focus to the Western art market's new frontier. The fair served as anchor for a week packed with art happenings in the city known as the gateway to Asia, Hong Kong.
The female busts in Jess Riva Cooper’s “Viral Series” recall sculpture from Classical antiquity. The glazed white ceramic is cold and smooth like marble, and the features are perfectly contoured like the depictions of Greek or Roman goddesses. Cooper, however, twists the ideal into a new archetype of beauty. On faces that might otherwise seem lifeless, the Toronto-based artist has painted overgrown flora. Life in the form of ivy, flowers, and insects literally creep out of their noses and ears.
Peer into the photographs of South Korean artist JeeYoung Lee, and you are inevitably drawn into her surreal, psychedelic world. In images that are equal parts unsettling and beautiful, giant water lilies sprout from the ground; an ocean of yellow paper clips ripple through a room; one hundred white rats scurry in a dining room set for one. Read more after the jump.
Whether in Buenos Aires, Bogota, Baton Rouge, or his hometown, Brisbane, Fintan Magee’s massive murals have been popping up on abandoned walls all over the world. The Aussie street artist finds space that is often hidden or vacated, otherwise unnoticeable — walls that are slowly wearing away, cluttered with broken-down furniture and abandoned plywood — and transforms them into giant narrative murals.