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The New Contemporary Art Magazine
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.
Many of us brought our toys to the kitchen table and played with our food, much to our parents' dismay. Although toys were designed to entertain and inspire us in our youth, many artists continue to look back at these childhood artifacts for inspiration. Miami based sculptor and photographer Pablo Dona often refers to his memories of playtime in his art. His installations of hand-crafted miniature people interacting with commonplace items take the innocence of play and create a surreal new reality.
The word "mythological" is often used to describe the work of Mexican artist Curiot (real name Favio Martinez). Featured in Hi-Fructose Vol. 29, Curiot doesn't apply a specific myth to the images that he paints, strongly inspired by his Mexican heritage which he hopes to uphold in his art. "The mythological creatures represent the forces of nature, the energy that flows in the universe and their relationship with the world- I like to believe they come from the spirit realm," he told us.
David Rice fuses the natural and the man-made in his paintings, representing the possibility of a peaceful balance between the two. Featured here on our blog, and in our current issue of Hi-Fructose Vol. 39, his wildlife-filled works address themes like cohabitation, where people and animals are combined to create hybrid beings, often wrapped in colorful textiles. The Portland based painter is about to debut a new series, entitled "High Alpine", his largest body of work to date.
Scott G. Brooks, featured here on our blog, paints offbeat portraits, often expressing a surreal narrative inspired by children's books and his own psyche. Described as twisted, sentimental, and disturbing, his portraits are characterized by his use of wit and the distorted version of reality they present. "Using a language that is easily understood, I tell stories. I weave figures, symbols, and elements together to create a narrative to share with an audience," he says.
Yayoi Kusama's art is in London this month as part of a new exhibition at the Victoria Miro gallery. Her internationally known work is obsessive and overwhelming, presenting the world as a polka-dotted dream land, featured in Hi-Fructose Vol 25. The word "extraordinary" is overused in writing about contemporary art but we can make an exception for Kusama, who has been selected as one of TIME Magazine's World's 100 Most Influential People for conquering both the art and fashion world. "Dots are a symbol of the world, the cosmos; the earth is a dot. The sun, the moon, the stars are all made up of dots. You and me, we are dots," she once said.
In painting nature, artist David Kroll evokes a classical sense of beauty and fragility. He combines elements of naturalist painting and still life in his portrayal of animals like elegant egrets and koi which perch and swim around delicate objects. Though remarkably detailed and inspired by early landscape painting, Kroll has said that he wants to paint a version of the wild that is romantic, and not necessarily realistic. "I paint refuges, places to go to for solace. I want my paintings to be destinations of quiet and calm," he says. "However, this world is fragile."
San Francisco based artist Alexis Arnold has found a way to preserve her favorite old books as timeless treasures. Her crystallized book series 'freezes' books into stunning, mystical sculptures using an unlikely recipe: "I primarily use the laundry detergent, Twenty Mule Team Borax, to grow crystals on the various objects, but there are many household products that can be used to grow different types of crystals," Arnold explains. Featured here on our blog, she has said that the reaction to her work varies, but often the growth of the crystals evokes nostalgia as many of her pieces preserve works of children's fiction.
It's a warning sign at art galleries and museums around the world: "Don't touch the artwork." But one artist based in Laguna Beach, California wants you to do just that. Andrew Myers creates mixed media works with screws, oil paint, charcoal, bronze, cement, and found objects. "Distinct", "expressive" and "tactile" are words he uses to describe his portraits made of thousands of screws (a single piece can use up to 10,000 or more), where touch is important to experiencing the work as it brings the subjects to life with volume and texture.
Earlier today, we brought you photos from Saturday night's opening of Turn the Page: The First Ten Years of Hi-Fructose, a bi-coastal collaboration between the magazine and Virginia MOCA. Now, we'd like to give you a closer look at the art and see what it's like to walk through the halls of this unprecedented group of 51 new contemporary artists from all genres and corners of the world.
Turn the Page: The First Ten Years of Hi-Fructose was born as a bi-coastal collaboration between contemporary art magazine Hi-Fructose based in San Francisco and the Virginia MOCA. Several years in the making, this exhibition celebrated the magazine's first ten years on Saturday night by bringing highlights of some of today's foremost contemporary artists who have appeared in its pages to Virginia Beach.
In October 2015, Hi-Fructose Vol. 29 featured artist Olek visited the Virginia MOCA for a special workshop with community members and to plan a large-scale public artwork on site that will raise awareness about the waters near Virginia Beach. Over the weekend, the New York-based artist's project was unveiled at the opening of Turn the Page: The First Ten Years of Hi-Fructose - a larger than life future New York Times article covering the facade of the museum entrance. Olek's mural, crocheted in a photo-realistic style, imagines our Earth Day headline news in 2020.
Hi-Fructose Vol. 23 featured artist Mark Dean Veca's colorful, dynamic paintings pop off the page in bright red, orange, and turquoise hues, with curvaceous lines inspired by the underground comic world. His work incorporates everything from pop culture references like Tony the Tiger and Scrooge McDuck to Americana elements like the Lincoln Memorial to the American Flag, to religious iconography including skulls, Buddhas, and Ganeshas - all filtered through his own gaze. The Los Angeles based artist is now in Virginia, where we've invited him to create special installation for the Turn the Page: The First Ten Years of Hi-Fructose, opening tonight at Virginia MOCA.
The expressionist work of British artist Antony Micallef layers the figure to the point of total distortion. His style of painting misshapen figures against soft backdrops is an amalgamation of influences from Francis Bacon, to old masters like Caravaggio and Velázquez, to more modern contemporary photographers and graphic artists- leading to the nickname "Caravaggio meets Manga" in the media. Featured here on our blog, he describes his art as "like watching a Disney movie which slowly turns into violent pornography- the trouble with pop imagery is that it doesn't really go deeper than the surface, you have to drag it down and challenge it to make it interesting."
Argentinian artist known as Hyuro's art makes use of negative space through a series of repeating figures, where the location of her work is integral to how we perceive it. Featured here on our blog, this has usually taken place in the streets. But whether she is mural painting, building installations, or showing her paintings in a gallery, Hyuro is making observations about life: framed by an empty white background, the people in her work demonstrate our relationships and how we interact with one another.
Those who have seen Jon MacNair's work might be surprised to learn that he is greatly inspired by popular children's literature, fairytales, and Renaissance art. The Portland based artist is well known for his fantastical, quirky ink drawings, often labeled as "dark", and we don't mean his monochromatic palette. "Some of my most distinct memories as a kid were of looking at picture books and being entranced by the images," he says. "Even though most of these books were for kids, there were some pretty dark undertones in the illustrations that stuck with me." These eventually led to his current body of work which turns classically ominous imagery on its head.
When we try to recall old memories, they usually come back in bit and pieces: faces of loved ones, favorite objects, and sometimes our mind fills in the gaps with things that never were. In painting her own memories, Lacey Bryant couples strangeness with a romantic nostalgia, like an incoherent dream. Throughout the Bay area artist's work there is a sense of alienation or escape from modern life. Suitcase in hand, her subjects navigate a pretty landscape that can suddenly turn dark, from flowery pink blooms and stately Victorian mansions to fields of abandoned vehicles catching fire.
Italian artist Cristiano Menchini relies on a combination of his memory and imagination and observation to recreate nature in his work. Working in acrylic and watercolor or pen on paper, the artist creates highly stylistic interpretations of overgrown vegetation where small animals like birds and beetles make their home. Elements like blades of grass criss-cross into natural, messy patterns appearing almost abstract, set against dark shadows that lift them from the page. They are not quite reality. "I see my work as immersed in a timeless dimension, unreal state, crystallized. There is a detachment from reality in what I represent," he says.
Eric Green's meticulously detailed drawings replicate life beautifully- but there is something off about them. "When you really begin to understand life, everything changes completely all the time. Nothing is ever the same again," he says. Working primarily in colored pencil, Green draws images that are meant to change our perceptions by illustrating the subtleties between moments as light changes and objects are mysteriously moved by unseen occupants.
Scott Musgrove's art has always been connected to conservation or extinction. Featured here on our blog and in issues 2, 8 and 24, his paintings feature lush, highly detailed landscapes and up-close encounters with all manner of strange and beautiful creatures. When he paints animals, he brings them back to life and preserves them into their pristine, natural environment. His new work, a magnificent 40" x 50" oil portrait of the rhino "Nola" is more than just a preservation of her image, it's also an homage to the memory of her species.
Hongmin Lee is best known as one third of the Korean art team Goo For Brothers, an increasingly popular collective that Lee founded with his friends and fellow artists Seungchul Oh and Jaejung Beck. They have been creating art together since the early 2000s, working in various media from illustration, fine art, graffiti, comics and graphic novels, and animation. Their work shares a common love for kaiju and experimental imagery, and though Lee has enjoyed collaboration in a group, he's recently focused on building his solo career as a painter and graphic novelist.
Hi-Fructose Vol. 14 cover artist Greg "Craola" Simkins, featured here on our blog, pulls ideas from his childhood- his favorite cartoons, old comics, and vintage packaging- and ties it all together to create art that gives a feeling of being a kid again. The Los Angeles based artist has said that his journey to being an artist began with drawing on the wall after everyone would go to sleep, and his dreams of things that go bump in the night continue to inform his surrealistic works.
Seattle based sculptor Mike Leavitt is well known for his brand of satire in various media. Featured here on our blog, he is widely recognized for his "Art Army" series depicting other famous visual artists, musicians, actors and politicians, and just recently, made headlines for his action figure of Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders. This month, he debuted a new series entitled "King Kuts", in the artist's words, the "16 best film directors ever carved in wood".
A new public art installation at Bristol University in England is garnering attention for its captivating use of wood samples from more than 10,000 tree species. Titled "Hollow", the installation is a collaboration by architects Zeller & Moye and artist Katie Paterson, who were inspired by the natural design of a forest canopy. Meant to represent the varying heights of trees in a forest, "Hollow" has an almost Tetris-like appearance, where the trees' different sizes, colors and textures come together to form a shape like a puzzle- in the artist's words, "a microcosmos of all the world's trees".
Andrew Schoultz's art is filled with chaotic imagery, expressing a rather dystopian vision through a variety of techniques, from sculpture to collage, street art to installations to paintings. Featured here on our blog, his eclectic work cultivates an arsenal of personal symbolism: fragments of dollar bills, fractured Grecian urns, ripped American flags, war horses, and slave ships are just a few of the symbols he uses to juxtapose Western culture with allusions to conflict and exploitation.
New York based painter Walton Ford, featured here on our blog, is well known for his monumental watercolors of animals. From his tongue-in-cheek depictions of King Kong, to mythical 60 foot serpents, and epic battles between beasts, his works take the visual aesthetic of traditional natural history painting and apply it to an often bizarre and fantastical narrative. Ford recently debuted six new paintings at Paul Kasmin's booth at Frieze New York, an homage to the incredible journey of a black panther.
Rebecca Mason Adams's moody acrylic paintings have an edge of realism that makes them look incredibly like black and white photographs. This is because the Providence, RI based artist, currently moving to Los Angeles, first studied photography and since then, has expressed an interested in black and white portraiture, "referencing stylized and graphic photography and film." She transitioned into painting after school, utilizing her skills in photography and lighting to create her subjects, mostly women.
Henrik Uldalen is a London based artist well known for his emotionally-charged oil paintings of figures, often appearing weightless and diminishing into the background."My work is based on abstract ideas of existentialism and nihilism, and on loneliness and numbness," he says. "They’re fairly loose ideas, as they’re a direct translation of my changing emotional states." We first featured Uldalen on the cover of Hi-Fructose Vol. 24, and here on our blog, where we've seen the artist progress from a more realistic, yet ethereal style to experimenting with abstraction.
Memphis based artist Josh Breeden, who goes by the moniker "St Francis Elevator Ride", works in a variety of mediums, digital and hand-drawn, including collage, print and web media. If his quirky name is any indication, his personality and humor come through in his art: chaotic assemblages that mash-up sexy vintage images with a Pop art aesthetic that are both minimal and psychedelic.