Menu
The New Contemporary Art Magazine
He rose to fame as a fabulous illusionist of rock – ever changing, always outrageous and more bizarre by the moment. David Bowie made art out of life, from his music to his clothes, and he was a champion of fashion designers both world famous and relatively unknown. Fashion shaped the style chameleon’s belief in the importance of clothes to a performance. One of his most prolific collaborators was Kansai Yamamoto, whose designs are part of the traveling exhibition, ‘David Bowie is’, now on its last stop at the Brooklyn Museum in New York.
"When I started to work in three-dimensions, I became free," says artist Mariko Kusumoto. The Japanese multi-media artist, now based in Massachusetts, has found fantasy in the ordinary since she was a little girl, digging through her grandmother's dresser for treasures to play with. Today, she uses a transparent synthetic fabric to bring her imagination to life, creating wearable art that blurs the line between fashion and sculpture.
When asked about his main interest in photography, Ole Marius Joergensen once said that rather than capturing a version of reality, he loves to create illusions. The Oslo based photographer has a background in film that shows in his cinematic and atmospheric images, described as appearing almost unreal, or as Joergensen puts it, "a Norwegian strain of surrealism". This is especially true of his new series "Behind the Curtains," a surreal set of images shown through the eyes of his inquiring subjects, and catching them in moments of forbidden fascination.
Pittsburgh based artist David Burton's striking assemblages are made out of vintage toys and other found objects as he happens upon them, layered into puzzle-like creations. His near-obsessive layering of objects recalls the work of other assemblage artists, like Kris Kuksi, infused with a sense of playfulness despite their dark color. Sourced everywhere from local thrift shops to his walks on the beach, the objects that Burton features are also his main source of inspiration.
Olaf Breuning is a Swiss-born, New-York based artist known for his experimental multimedia works, spanning photographs, videos, drawings and installations, sometimes mixed together, that regularly make use of pop-culture imagery. Often described as "outlandish", his art also addresses ideas about consumerism, stereotypes, gender clichés, and analyzes the relationship between art and kitsch. Among these is his bizarre photo series "The Art Freaks", which originally debuted in 2011, and is being revisited in the artist's 15-year retrospective, "The Madness That We Call Reality".
Tracey Snelling is currently featured in our Turn the Page: The First Ten Years of Hi-Fructose exhibition at Virginia MOCA, Imagining Home at the Baltimore Museum of Art, and soon at Volta Basel, opening this week. We caught up with her to talk about her new works, which collectively offer psychedelic versions of places, as in her recreation of strip clubs, as well as her own criticisms, expressed in "Shoot It!", a commentary on gun rights in America.
As we are living in a digital age, it's safe to say that typewriters are an artifact of the past. But for Rachel Mulder, an artist living in Portland, Oregon, the classic typing machine still proves to be an important creative tool. With a meticulous eye, and even more patience, Mulder uses her typewriter as a way to "draw" from old photographs, keystroke by keystroke. "There is something so special in the error of the human hand," she says, "-that I enjoy while conversely and fretfully attempting to attain perfection."
Brooklyn, New York based artist Dan Witz, featured here, has been producing activist street art around the world since the seventies. His provocative interventions feature images that trick the eye and often, the majority of people don't notice them right away. He plans to take his art to London next with his latest project, "Breathing Room", an ambitious undertaking where he will install his signature-illusionistic paintings in the city's iconic red phone booths.
Japanese artist Motoi Yamamoto's incredible installations made out of salt are entrancing to look at with their repetitive and meticulous patterns. Yamaoto has expressed that, in viewing his zen-like designs, he hopes others may find some point in their meditation for a healing or resolution of thought. His pure white crystalline works have been installed all over the world, most recently at the French castle of Aigues-Mortes.
Michael Jackson is a British artist currently exploring the luminogram process to capture monochromatic, abstract displays of light. For those who aren't familiar, luminograms are images created by exposure of photosensitive materials to light without the intervention of an object. "No camera, no film, no objects - just light directed onto light sensitive paper in the darkroom," explains Jackson.
Tbilisi, Georgia based artist Tezi Gabunia's latest project not only invites you to go inside of an art gallery, but become the art, too. "Put Your Head into Gallery" features identical miniature sets of some of the world's most famous galleries such as the Louvre, the Tate Modern, Saatchi Gallery, and Gagosian, which he then places a model's head inside of and photographs. The result is a surreal series of images of giant human heads peering into galleries, recalling Eric White's miniature exhibits.
The Louvre's famous giant glass pyramid, designed by Chinese-American architect I.M. Pei, became a landmark of the city of Paris in 1989- until it was made invisible by French street artist JR last week. The artist's installation is a trick of the eye, a gigantic paper photograph of the Louvre Museum covering the pyramid as part of JR's "artist takeover". Featured here on our blog, JR is well known for monumental black and white pastings covering buildings all over the world.
Hebru Brantley (featured here) is well known for his pop-infused paintings and sculptures of child-like heroes inspired by Japanese anime and graffiti. Growing up in Chicago in the midst of gang culture, Brantley has expressed that "when all else failed, I could turn to art", turning his reality into a fantasy world. He is constantly looking to create imagery that evokes emotion and tells stories, particularly of youth. Having traveled all over the world to exhibit his art, he is now making his Pittsburgh debut with "I Wish I Knew How It Felt to Be Free".
British artist Abigail Reynolds does not take images at face value. Using the art of collage, she enhances the original picture by creating intricate assemblages out of repurposed vintage photographs, magazines, encyclopedias, atlases, and other materials she finds. "The act of folding one image into the other pushes them out into three dimensions in a bulging time ruffle," she says. Often, these feature rural England, architectural landmarks, and obscure landscapes, folded into three-dimensional geometric patterns.
Ghanaian artist Jeremiah Quarshie finds the inspiration for his paintings in his immediate environment. Living and working in Accra, the capital of Ghana, his highly realistic acrylic portraits depict models, typically ordinary women, in roles of beauty queens, businesswomen, and laborers alike. In his own words, the people in his portraits are characters representing the “foundations of society into pools of utter elegance", 21st century workers and fictional women.
The work of Brooklyn-based Aaron Li-Hill, who also goes by Li-Hill, is instantly recognizable for his dynamic portrayals of animals and figures, where his subjects appear suspended in motion, drawn frame-by-frame. Featured here on our blog, Li-Hill describes his art as a frenetic "storm of imagery and density", where beauty surfaces from various styles, inspired by his background in graffiti and cultural experiences. The artist just unveiled a new installation, in collaboration with the nonprofit JustKids, at the iconic Friedman-Mincer historic building in Fort Smith, Arkansas.
Katie Metz paints the city that is around her. Working and living out of Seattle, a city bustling with activity and nightlife, her landscapes express the immediacy of her experiences there. Though realistic depictions, Metz applies impressionistic brush strokes where scratched layers of paint make the picture quiver with life. Her individualistic style brings the viewer into a luminous, almost other worldly realm as it takes us past skyscrapers, through streets and overpasses.
Two weeks ago, Turn the Page: The First Ten Years of Hi-Fructose opened to a colorful audience at the Virginia MOCA. Reviewed here on our blog and in our upcoming issue Volume 40 (now available for pre-order!), this landmark retrospective highlights the visionaries that have appeared in the magazine for the past forty issues, three books, and thousands of pages. Today, we bring you a video recap, courtesy of our friends Kyle Maier and Amie Gibson at Kamio Media.
If you played with your food when you were a kid, then you might enjoy this set of wacky photographs by Benoit Jammes. The Paris based artist does just that in his playful series entitled "Skitchen" that explains "what's going on in your kitchen when you turn your back- the secret sporting life of our friends the fruits and vegetables."
Well known for his 3D-style pumpkin sculptures, Ray Villafane of Villafane Studios is not just skilled at pumpkin carving, but apparently he can also build a mean sand sculpture. Using wet sand as his medium, he piles and sculpts what was once a childhood pastime into unbelievable works of art. Among his creations includes "Chessie Trunkston", a whimsical full-scale depiction of an elephant playing chess with a mouse, and his towering recreation of the 14th century epic, "Dante's Inferno".
We first covered Caitlin Hackett's painstakingly detailed ball-point pen and watercolor paintings in Hi-Fructose Vol. 17, where she told us that her empathy for the natural world is the driving force behind her beautiful, yet morbid subject matter. Surrounded by her nature books and collections of bones in jars, from an early age, she has carried what she describes as "a profound sense of tragedy" for the destruction of nature.
When asked how to describe the human figure, artist Noah Buchanan has said: "The human figure is an anatomical event that houses the spirit of the human condition." His oil paintings perfectly illustrate what he means by this: an incredible display of the human body's physical elegance and prowess, while also expressing what we cannot see. His art has been praised as among the best of his generation, a fusion of contemporary and classical themes with a Caravaggio-like command of anatomy.
The multimedia work of New York based artist Craig LaRotonda depicts a world infused with macabre imagery and surreal characters, featured here on our blog. Though his work is highly stylized, featuring modern cyborgs and other iconoclastic creatures drawn in the iconic style of Renaissance and Byzantine Art, the artist pulls his inspiration from somewhere familiar to him. Often, his ideas come from his own psyche and our human existence, such as birth, growth, emotions, conflict, and mortality.
San Francisco based artist Lindsay Stripling usually works in watercolor to create her playful illustrations of dreamscapes dotted with simplistic human characters, animals, and objects. But for her new series, exhibiting this week at Flatcolor Gallery in Seattle, Stripling found herself painting in oils after an 8 year break from the medium. "It's my first real adventure with oils in 8 years and it was fun for sure," Stripling says, "trying to carry my looseness from my watercolors into these oil paintings."
Looking at the art of James Bullough is like looking at reality through the shards of a shattered mirror. The American born, Berlin based artist's paintings and murals, featured here on our blog, have become instantly recognizable for his mixture of realism and abstraction. Bullough describes his work as "altered reality", a style leaning towards photo-realism and working with a combination of materials including oil, acrylic, latex and spray paints.
A gigantic 20-foot tall inflatable refugee, which arrived in Copenhagen this week, is currently making headlines as it sails around the world. The sculpture is part of an effort by Belgian visual artist collective Schellekens & Peleman, who want to bring attention to the European refugee crisis- "a "symbol of the dehumanization of the refugee and the current refugee crisis happening in the world."
Jerome Lagarrigue has depicted many subjects throughout his career- boxers and supermodels to his multi-racial Brooklyn neighbors- but his focus has always been simply, "painting people". The French born artist traces his interest in portraiture to art school, where it was difficult to find a model and this encouraged him to study his own face. These introspective exercises on expression, color, and psyche continue to inform his oil paintings. He also practiced graffiti, influencing his manner of working in large scale with roughly defined areas.
New York based artist Jim McKenzie, who is also an accomplished animation director, once said that his dream is to rebuild Willy Wonka's chocolate factory. His upcoming debut solo show entitled "Lost Magic" comes pretty close. Opening on June 4th at Copro Gallery in Los Angeles, McKenzie's exhibit invites viewers to enter into his surreal imagination: new paintings and hand-painted resin sculptures of fun and playful characters that recall our favorite childhood fairy tales with a twist.
In painting the world around him, Argentinian artist Diego Cirulli is sensitive to the temporal nature of things. His large-scale oil paintings represent Circulli's unique experience of reality: a collage of the artist's memories and the people he is with, often with eyes closed or obscured entirely, as if to suggest that our vision is not a crucial component to our perception of life. "Imagery is the possibility of generating a crack in the surface of a given reality," Cirulli says.
Movement and expression are key characteristics in the work of North Carolina based painter Taylor White. Featured here on our blog, her paintings and murals are instantly recognizable for her chaotic portrayal of bodies which appear to break apart. White has said that she sees the human body as a fragile form, describing her work as an exploration of our emotions.