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The New Contemporary Art Magazine
Barcelona based artist August Vilella frequently describes his oil paintings as images of "his past and future through the subconscious mind." The large central figures of his work are monstrous creatures with giant, protruding eyes drawn from his imagination. With their long, deformed and almost insect-like bodies that seem to dissipate into the air, we should feel repulsed by their appearance, and yet their big-eyed expressions evoke feelings of empathy; loneliness, despair, longing, and hope are all themes represented by Vilella's creatures.
Leilani Bustamante has always balanced a romantic beauty with the darker themes in her art. The San Francisco based artist, featured here on our blog, voices themes of mortality exploring elements of death, and rebirth, and her newer works explore the loveliness of the macabre. Ripe with symbolic elements, her paintings feature figures rendered with in the tradition of classical beauties that are arranged in abstract and darkly fantastical montages.
There is a magical simplicity about Brookyn based painter Alyssa Monk's oil portraits, where looking at her work is like looking into the reflection of a forest pool. Her images portray ghostly figures that take form at the surface, inbetween the reflection of other natural elements like tree branches and the sun shining peeking through their foliage. Her lush depictions are often described as a blend of the figurative and landscape.
Making art wasn't the only creative outlet for Penland based sculptor Dustin Farnsworth growing up. His high school drama program helped instill in him an affinity for the theatrical: his sculptures feature mixed media figures and life sized heads adorned with headdresses that resemble theaters and architectural spaces. Also the son of a carpenter, his father, who built marionettes and a medical illustrator, his mother, it would seem that his work is the perfect combination of his upbringing.
One of the leading ladies of Pop Surrealism, California based artist Marion Peck populates her dreamlike paintings with strange, cute creatures. As her magical landscapes unfold, an uneasy melancholy seems to fill the air. First featured on our blog and in print, Peck's work mines the depths of art history, popular culture with references ranging from Pieter Bruegel to Holly Hobbie.
In the year 1692, a shadow would fall over Salem, Massachusetts. What started with accusations by local girls quickly escalated into what has since been called a state of mass hysteria. Though named after the small town just north of Boston, the Salem witch trials spread across colonial America where people were executed for allegedly practicing witchcraft; 20 people were hanged, while countless others were tortured into madness. This sets the stage for "SALEM", a collective new body of work by Menton3, David Stoupakis, and New York Times bestselling author-turned-artist Damien Echols debuting this Saturday at Copro Gallery in Los Angeles.
Tiffany Bozic once said that she felt like she was born with a heightened sense that everything is connected. Some of her earliest childhood memories take place on her family's farm in Arkansas, where she grew up watching animals being born, and also killed in a slaughterhouse. It was a nurturing and also traumatizing experience that continues to affect her art. Bozic's dream-like paintings of animals at different stages of life have appeared in several Hi-Fructose issues, most recently Vol. 30, and soon our exhibition at Virgina MOCA. Her images are visual metaphors for human and nature's shared effort to live life fully.
Realism is more than a painting technique for some. When we look at Jeremy Lipking's realist oil paintings, we are looking at a faithful representation of life that has earned him comparisons to his art heroes like John Singer Sargent and Anders Zorn, but we are also looking at the artist himself: "I feel like throughout the duration of a painting, I can go through all the human emotions from start to finish," he says.
It's difficult to summarize the visual richness of Ellie Okamoto's paintings, a maelstrom of imagery teeming with rainbow-colored human figures, animals, and grotesque creatures. Her art is replete with Japanese folklore, tradition, and symbolism, while the influence of modern art and film like Hayao Miyazaki's Spirited Away is also evident- a title she borrowed for her debut solo show in 2010 that depicted children spirited off in the depth of the forest by packs of innumerable animals. For her current solo show at Mizuma Gallery in Tokyo, Okamoto converges characters throughout Japanese history into new paintings that convey her philosophy about life.
There is a magical quality to Brad Kunkle's paintings that is difficult to capture online and in print alone. The Brooklyn based painter combines oil painting with gold and silver leaf to create ethereal visions of women, often in a state of transcendence or as if they are on some spiritual quest. We first featured Brad Kunkle in Hi-Fructose Vol 25, who seeks to go beyond the limits of the ordinary human experience. Looking at his art requires a deepening of our perceptions, and to filmmaker Brennan Stasiewicz, it holds a humanizing power.
Oakland, California based painter Warner Williams has earned his fair share of success since beginning his career in the 1970s, but you won't find him on any lists of major Pop art players. Williams considers himself as an outsider of the contemporary movement: "I chose a 35,000 year-old tradition of painting as an alternative. I believe in sacred geometry, significant form, and the spirit resonance of color," he says, applying this philosophy to create brilliantly colored oil paintings that remix California's landscape.
Kelly Vivanco, previously featured here on our blog, counts a wide variety of artistic styles among her influences, ranging from Disney movies to Dutch master painters and artists from the Golden Age of illustration. Her study of classical fine art has contributed to her depiction of cartoony, boldly outlined characters in the rich colors that she chooses.
Growing up in a small town in Poland, graffiti wasn't a big part of artist Natalia Rak's childhood. But now that she is painting on walls, she's come to appreciate it. First featured on our blog here, her murals are instantly recognizable for their intensely vibrant color palette.
Interpretations of Lyon based Eric Lacombe's mixed media works and paintings have been varied and extreme: monstrous, melancholy, horrific, and even beautiful. Describing his art as "caricatures of the soul", the self-taught artist's images exaggerate and distort his characters' faces into haunting portrayals. Their faces look almost like masks, some painted without mouths or eyes, or given bird-like beaks, and yet their transfiguration is the most revealing thing about them. Each is a sort of reflection of the artist's own feelings, who likens his subjects' appearance to a deconstruction of their torment.
Often times, the paths we take in life are unexpected. Brooklyn based artist Hanna Jaeun first studied apparel design and it wasn't until she spent two years in a corporate job that she realized it wasn't the life she wanted. She decided to start over, picked up a paint brush and taught herself how to paint. Over time her art ventured into a dark place where hybrid figures and animals journey into the unknown, similar to the uncertain path Jaeun chose for herself. "The people in my paintings are either physically part-animal or longing to be animal... My animals bring to life my desire to tell a story," she says.
There's nothing traditional about Brooklyn based artist Erin M. Riley's woven tapestries. Through created on a loom using traditional techniques, her work features explicit in-your-face imagery that is beautiful and at times difficult to look at. Covered here on our blog and in Hi-Fructose Vol. 36, her tapestries take a screenshot of modern life, especially that of women, focusing on difficult images of drug addition, sex acts, violence, trauma, based on what she finds online and in her personal life.
When painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo portrayed figures made out of every objects, fruits, and vegetables, he presented the idea of life as living riddle or jigsaw puzzle. Living and working in Warsaw, Poland, Ewa Prończuk-Kuziak expresses a similar fascination with life in her paintings of figures in magical rearrangements. "My source of inspirations are fairy tales, dreams, my own experiences and stories from childhood," she says. Working primarily in oil paint, her ongoing "The Still Life Series" depicts rainbow-colored visions of animals that are made out of materials.
Barcelona based illustrator Joan Cornellà admits that he's had an unusual imagination since his early childhood. Labeled as the "king of absurd", though colorful and playful on the outside, his artwork intentionally oversteps boundaries on topics of race, gender, drugs, and every social taboo imaginable. His images are populated by funny and always happy figures that live in a twisted world of happiness, he says, and they have no time to be politically correct.
International Women's Day is celebrated on March 8th every year. In different regions, the focus of the celebrations ranges from general celebration of respect, appreciation, and love towards women for their economic, political, and social achievements. To mark the occasion, artist Olek joined forces with humanitarian NGO Maitri in a public art performance in New Delhi, India.
Though the clay works of Ronit Baranga, featured here on our blog, have been described as chill-inducing, frightening, and even repulsive, the Israeli artist doesn't see her work this way. Her sculptures animate every day objects such as dishes, tea cups, and saucers, offering them the ability to express the full spectrum of human emotions. Even her humanoid figures sprout new body parts as if their skin has a mind of its own.
Amsterdam based artist Daan Noppen brings a special dynamism to his pencil drawings of still life and portraits. His works are not only eye-catching for their precise layering of details, but also in their massive size that gives his subjects a more palpable presence. A closer look at each piece reveals mathematical equations in between the pencil lines that relate to our reality. More recent works express the artist's continued fascination with mathematics, geometry, and physics, as his figures appear to be gauged, dissipate, and intermingle in a void of empty vector space.
London based sculptor Rachel Kneebone is well known for her complex porcelain pieces that contain writhing groupings of human figures. Her work has been described as depicting an "erotic state of flux" and "celebrating forms of transgression, beauty and seduction," influenced by ancient Greek and Roman myths and also the modern human experience- you can find aspects of change, death, growth, renewal, and lust dissolved together in her individual pieces.
Czech artist Jan Uldrych questions reality in his fleshy and atmospheric paintings. Though the artist hesitates to provide any specific meaning for his work, we can find some clues in his titles; paintings like "Anatomy of memories" and "Mild decomposition landscapes" point to Uldrych's interests in the visceral and anatomical, which he abstracts into Rorschach test-like images.
Swiss artist Zoe Byland's art invites us into a haunting monochromatic world where her portrayals of young subjects defy our sense of space and time. They are equally timeless and futuristic, evoking vintage photographs of a mysterious, yet playful other-world where goldfish fly and people wear bubble shaped space helmets. In part inspired by 19th century family photographs, her characters have been described as apparitions or even supernatural, products of Byland's imagination, whose head is perpetually in the clouds.
Luxury plays a big role in Kukula's art and life, who once said of her subjects, "Who really knows who they are, anyway? Clothes help me decide." We first featured her elaborate paintings of fashion obsessed pale-skinned beauties in Hi-Fructose Vol. 7, and many times on our blog, where over the years she has committed her art to capturing the beauty of Rococo and modern grandeur.
When we interviewed Chilean painter Victor Castillo in Hi-Fructose Vol 23, he told us: "Today, to me, it is especially impossible not to be political because there are too many important things happening to live as if nothing is happening." Born in '73, which is also the title of his fourth major exhibition opening tomorrow at KP Projects, Los Angeles, the artist has often made historical and political references in his dark paintings of hollow-eyed children.
Ice cream and childhood memories go hand in hand. For San Francisco based artist Kelly Tunstall, some of her earliest memories often revolved around eating an ice cream cone or a popsicle. Her colorful illustrations of elongated sparkly-eyed girls and quirky characters, featured here on our blog, have always had a sugary-sweet palette of bright yellows, pinks, blues, and reds and other delicious shades. She once told us, "I have really innate reactions to color- I really fall in love deeply with colors for awhile but then there’s the basics. I always feel like I’m learning, but I really FEEL color." Her upcoming exhibition "Soft Serve" at Stranger Factory in New Mexico explores a world of colors inspired by her ice cream dreams and sugar's place in her happiest moments.
Brooklyn based artist Tara McPherson, first featured in our Collected 3 Edition, is constantly visiting and exploring new themes and iconography in her art. Though her playful and evocative characters first recalled issues from McPherson's childhood and adult life experience, they have since grown beyond that to incorporate themes from science and nature.
The word "wallflower" was first used in the early 1800s to refer to a woman without a partner at a dance, presumably sitting against the wall. Today, it represents any person who appears or feels shy and awkward. Southern California based artist Janine Brown captures the feeling of being a wallflower in her dream-like series of pinhole camera portraits, titled "The Wallflower Project."
German artist Monika Grzymala describes her art as being more like drawing than installation works, drawn with sticky tape which wraps and transforms the surrounding space. “Whenever I leave a work, I feel as if I leave a part of me, a part of my body behind,” she says, referring to the performative aspects of her work, where creating each piece requires a physical effort on her part. Her energy as the artist lends itself to the fluidity and dynamic appearance of the tape, which seems to explode from the walls with force.