Menu
The New Contemporary Art Magazine
In the late 1970s, celebrated muralist Kent Twitchell began his famous artists series, featured in Hi-Fructose Vol. 37, starting with notable Los Angeles artist Ed Ruscha. Measuring 70 feet tall on the side of a downtown building, Twitchell's full-length portrait of the artist in a red silk shirt and pleated slacks took almost 9 years to complete because it was self-funded and there were other projects that came to him during that time. Why did he choose Ruscha as his first artist? "It was a gut decision," he says. "He was and is unique and seemed to characterize the American Individualist to me as McQueen did in the film world."
Nicole Gordon paints landscapes that lean on the whimsical and somewhat grim, an expression of beauty met with the horrors of real world change and transformation. The Chicago based artist cites namely 16th century painters Pieter Bruegel and Hieronymus Bosch as her inspiration, whose works while dramatic and highly stylized, also offered expressions of the every day of their time. Similarly, Gordon describes her work as a combination of fantasy with darker truths: her use of bright colors and out of place objects create an imaginative view of reality.
English novelist Edward George Bulwer Lytton wrote: "The pen is mightier than the sword," a phrase that inspires artist Ravi Zupa, who believes that we achieve purpose better and more effectively through communication with art than by violence with weapons. From his mixed media sculptures and assemblages to taro-like drawings and paintings inspired by Japanese, German, and Indian styles of printmaking, Zupa has become known for is the variety in his work, where the weapon has been a recurring motif. It takes centerpiece in his current show "Strike Everywhere" at Black Book Gallery in Denver, Colorado.
Bonsai, the art of growing miniature trees, has a magic power to transport us to another world, a quality shared by Patrick Bergsma's "Landscape-Sculptures". Inspired by these miniature landscapes that have existed in Japanese culture for over a thousand years, the Dutch artist sought to create his own versions of the tiny lands. Many Japanese cultural characteristics, in particular the influence of Zen Buddhism, inform the bonsai tradition in Japan. However, this harmony is disturbed by Bergsma who incorporates mini "marooned people" into post-apocalyptic scenes.
Mexican born artist Laura Lucía Ferrer Zamudio, better known as "Kikyz 1313", takes grotesque and uncomfortable subjects and turns them into something exquisite. First featured on our blog here, Kikyz 1313's macabre drawings often depict children in a state of decay and rot, where their bodies and faces are dissected to a disturbingly beautiful extreme. "Why do we ignore the very intimate contents of our own bodies?" It is a question that the artist consistently contemplates as she creates her art.
For most of us growing up, playgrounds were more than a place for fun and games- they also provided a fast and hard lesson in how social structure works; they taught us how to be patience while we waited for our turn on the swing, while boys would chase and torment the new girl, and the nerdy kid would get bullied and left behind in sport games. In their surreal new series of photographs titled "The Playground Series", international artists Francisco Diaz and Deb Young illustrate the innocent complexity of playground society.
People complain a lot about Los Angeles: It's too big, too spread out, and the traffic is terrible. But local artist Susan Logoreci sees a different side of her city that she conveys in her large-scale mosaic-like colored pencil drawings. Her images of the urban sprawl are drawn by hand and without a ruler or projector, giving her work a hand-made or in her words, "elastic", quality that breaks the first rule of drawing architecture.
Artist Amy Sol has always had a special affinity for forests and nature. Though she now lives and works in the dry desert region of Las Vegas, she spent her childhood years in Korea, where the landscape is dotted with lush evergreen forests. In fact, it could be said that forests taught her how to paint- when Amy Sol was little, she would pause VHS tapes of Disney classics and copy the Tyrus Wong oil backgrounds in Bambi and Eyvind Earle's stylized landscapes in Sleeping Beauty.
Brooklyn based painter Beau Stanton has honed his artistic talent over the years with his mural works, adapting the techniques of his mandala-like nautical inspired paintings to his largescale mural works. Although he has painted in some of the most undoubtedly interesting places around the world, from the Berlin wall to the 12th century Crypt of Saint John the Baptist, featured here, his most recent mural presented a particularly unique challenge.
Decorative metalworking in Japan has a long history that began sometime in the fourth to fifth centuries with skills passed down through the generations. Tokyo based sculptor Taiichiro Yoshida conforms to century old traditions in his hot-metal treated sculptures of flower-encrusted animals. Snow monkeys, rabbits, cats, and birds like sparrows and doves are just a few of the animals that he represents in his work, coated with layers of intricate metal florals and feathers in various colors.
Gregory Euclide has always intertwined painting with nature-inspired elements; elaborately-rendered traditional, yet graphic landscapes, crumpled and scientifically sampled into otherworldly dioramas. First featured in Hi-Fructose Vol. 14 and here on our blog, Euclide's work has taken on several forms over the years, from his snow globe-like "bio-spherescapes" that seem to defy gravity and riverbeds 'growing' from spilled paint. He continues to challenge the typical "rules" for two and three-dimensional art, including his own.
Today, we live in a universe where astronauts can tweet us their selfies from orbit. It's hard to believe that not long ago, artists and scientists alike had to use their imagination to envision the starry yonder. Indianapolis artist Mab Graves has often looked to the glorious space illustrations of the 1930s to 1970s for the inspiration of her fantastical dreamland, an ever-expanding universe populated by big-eyed waifs and their animal friends. Featured here on our blog, her sweet and carefree characters have developed a wild streak, where in recent works, they daringly venture into the splendid and infinite cosmos. Graves' upcoming solo at Arch Enemy Arts in Philadelphia furthers her character's love for adventure in imaginative new images that blend science and fiction.
The crucifixion of Jesus has been depicted in religious art since the 4th century CE. World renown Scottish-born artist David Mach, famous for his stunning sculptures made out of wire coat hangers, turned heads with his own depiction of the Bible's most compelling event- his "Golgotha" sculpture first debuted in his 2011 exhibition titled "Previous Light", which opened in commemoration of the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible. The monumental piece is again provoking a strong reaction with its recent display within the 14th century walls of Chester Cathedral in England.
When French designer Emmanuelle Moureaux first arrived in Tokyo, she became fully fascinated by the colors overflowing on the street. She found that the city's overwhelming number of store signs, flying electrical cables, and flashes of blue sky framed by various volumes of buildings created three dimensional "layers". The flood of various colors that pervade the city streets are mirrored in her design installations, which build up a complex depth and intensity of space. These experiences of colors and layers are in the inspiration of Moureaux's latest project, "bunshi" (meaning "ramification"), which means to divide or spread out into branches- a rainbow-colored suspended forest made on 20,000 pieces of paper shaped like twigs in 100 shades of color.
Dreams are considered important, real, and public in some cultures, but absurd, irrational and personal in others. Japan has its own history of dreaming, and the importance of dreams has evolved through Japanese supernatural beliefs and art for centuries. "Dreams are like strange stories," says Tokyo based artist Atsuko Goto, who builds on her own visions of dreams in her other-worldly mixed media drawings. "I draw what comes up from our unconscious, like hidden feelings reflected in our dreams."
In his ongoing project "Cement Eclipses", Issac Cordal takes an unconventional approach to observing our behavior as a social mass. His alluring and surprising miniature cement figures placed in public locations, featured in our new issue and here on our blog over the years, reveal scenes that zoom in the routine tasks of the contemporary human being. The Spanish artist describes his work as "quickly opening doors to other worlds", often where the "unwelcome" or unfortunate are welcoming the viewer to consider the issues that face the real world.
When we think of beauty in nature, we immediately think of things that dazzle the senses- the prominence of a mountain, the expanse of the sea, the unfolding of the life of a flower. For Polish artist Aneta Regel, there is also a beauty in nature's unpredictability: it's ability to "sculpt" rock formations from weathering and erosion, or the dense arrangements of moss on a tree branch. The London based ceramist challenges our perceptions with her work and makes us interested in these overlooked transformations.
Brooklyn based painter Brian Willmont had mostly been making gouache on paper paintings for years and then began to reduce his work, pushing the narrative out of individual pieces. His paintings today share a graphic and theatrical quality with his references, citing obscure movies and novels, such as Suspiria and Blood and Guts in High School, among his inspirations. Today, he works in aspects of trompe l’oeil and airbrush into a unique style of graphic abstraction, using symbols like roses dotted with shining dew drops set against geometric patterns.
Known for his surrealistic portraits of elongated women with stretched oval faces and simplified features, self taught artist Troy Brooks once joked that, had he gone to art school, it would have "fixed" his work's most defining characteristic. "One thing that used to drive me crazy was that I always made the faces too long. It was something I used to have to go back and fix in my drawings. When I began creating my own characters I decided to just accentuate it," Brooks says.
In traditional Chinese landscape painting, the image not only served as a source of visual information, but also expressed philosophy and emotions. Though artist Evelyn Wong appreciates a careful study of nature, her drawings share in this very principle where she communicates nature's expressiveness. Withering plants like fruits, flowers and foliage are of particular interest to the South Carolina based artist, rendered in a style that she describes as "grunge", a reference to her materials like dirt, carbon, charcoal, and chalk pastel, on synthetic papers. Her ongoing series titled 'Finding Romanticism Among Grunge" consists of drawings inspired by her studies of botanicals.
The vivid oil paintings of Jenny Morgan capture an honesty about her subjects, drawn in a candid moment in the nude when they are at their most vulnerable. The Brooklyn based artist's electrifying figurative work, gracing the cover of Hi-Fructose Vol. 39, balances abstraction and realism, combining beautiful design aesthetics with her subject's unique complexion and emotion. Morgan herself has described her work as "psychological portraits", focused on presenting the sitter's psychological state.
Diana Al-Hadid once described her work as "impossible architecture", created by embracing her gut instinct and seeing where it takes her. The Brooklyn based, Syrian born artist's work can be difficult to describe, monumental and ethereal mixed media works with a myriad of references throughout art history: her captivating installations, sculptures and paintings feature elements of figures from the Renaissance and classical imagery, forms that appear to be disintegrating into a "dripping" tower.
Erin Anderson's paintings of figures on copper plates have a spiritual, almost supernatural, quality about them, but they are by no means idealized portraits. Preferring to capture the real essence of the nude men and women that she paints, her subjects become icons we can more easily relate to, linked together by their glimmering backgrounds. Anderson's art, previously featured here on our blog, employs a dichotomy between the oils and the etched patterns in the cooper, where these separate elements in the individual pieces creates a "system" or flow that unifies the works as a whole.
If you asked Korean artist Yeom Jihee to describe her art in one word, it would be "hysteria". Her monochromatic mixed media drawings feature a disorderly assemblage of figures and impossible objects, set in environments where the physical plane extends into a blank space of nothingness. Jihee uses these explorations of infinity, reflection, symmetry, and perspective to express her feelings of emotional conflict, or in her words, "a loss of self-control due to overwhelming fear."
It's magical ability to capture our imagination is as miraculous as the device itself. Elaborate wind-up machines called automata, or automatons, are mechanical marvels dating from a time as early as the 13th century. Tom Haney, the artist of these automata, has always been fascinated by mechanical movement. "The work I create today is a modern offshoot of the time-honored Old World tradition of automata," he says. Using carved wood and old objects as his main materials, his art brings new life into obsolete artifacts, literally.
Myths are of particular interest to Chie Yoshii, whose work is inspired by the analogy between mythological tales and human psychology. The Los Angeles based Japanese artist's lush paintings, previously featured here on our blog, depicts her subjects in color-saturated images that remove them from their historical identity and into a land of fancy: central figures of Ancient Greek art and literature rendered with a timeless beauty.
Jess Riva Cooper explores themes of reclamation and transformation in her ceramic sculptures where nature overwhelms and takes over her subjects. Particularly inspired by invasive plant species, the Toronto based artist, featured here on our blog, uses clay to express her fascination with chaos erupting into order.
Our vision depends on two things: having a healthy eye to receive visual information and having a healthy brain to interpret and process that information. This allows us to see a picture of the world. When London based artist Dene Leigh's grandfather suffered a stroke, it left him unable to recognize faces, objects and words- pieces to the puzzle of our vision that he puts back together again in his paintings and assemblages of objects.
It is in Keiichi Tanaami's personality to take even the darkest of his life's experiences and turn them into positive expressions. The Psychedelic Japanese artist's sensational paintings of crazy characters engaged in the chaos of war has made him a leading art figure not just in Japan, but all over the world. We recently featured Tanaami's intensely visual work in Hi-Fructose Vol. 38, where he shared with us the origins of his art, and the deep effect that his wartime experiences has had on his psyche. In this rare interview, Tanaami tells us more about his dark past and the myriad of international influences on his work to date.
Daniel Arsham toys with our notions of what to expect from various materials and media, transcending the boundaries between art, architecture and performance. In so doing, he explores what is natural, what is fabricated, what has come about by chance and what is planned. The Brooklyn based artist is best known for the wit of his sculptures and stage settings, created using materials like minerals, crushed glass and volcanic ash, previously featured here on our blog. His manner of creating works out of shattered, ruined material causes them to be reformed into what he describes as "objects with purpose."