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The New Contemporary Art Magazine
There’s a reason Hi-Fructose keeps tabs on Tokyo artist Shohei (aka Hakuchi) Otomo (featured in Hi-Fructose Vol. 20). The only son of great manga artist Katsuhiro Otomo, the acclaimed writer and director of the anime cult classic Akira, Hakuchi carries on his father’s legacy with his own graphic illustrations that combine Japanese iconography with a dark, retro-punk edge and a healthy dose of sardonic humor.
Setting soft and supple nudes against graphic patterns and textures, Brooklyn-based painter Sharon Sprung utilizes the tension between abstraction and realism to appease her own inner dichotomies and create art that expresses emotional complexities. But unlike many artists who muddle the polarities of figuration and abstraction into ambiguity, Sprung leaves them distinct, engendering a contrast that intensifies the impact of each.
Nguyen Xuan Huy’s paintings intermingle visions of standardized beauty with the instinctually repulsive to evoke precisely his desired response — the inability to look away however strong the impulse to do so.
Inspired in part by the Land Art movement of the late 1960s, Javier Riera’s “luminance interventions” — geometric patterns projected directly on natural landscapes — are there one moment and gone the next with the flip of a switch.
In the way a funhouse mirror warps the mundane into the absurd, Brazilian artist Rafael Silveira combines innocuous imagery with the vaguely grotesque to provide a disorienting sensory experience not unlike that of a carnival, where the cheery morphs in and out of the eerie until they are no longer distinguishable.
With his second successful solo show at New York's Marc Straus Gallery freshly under his belt, Croatian artist Zlatan Vehabović is back home in Zagreb, diligently at work on a new series of paintings that will continue to explore themes of home and habitat, and the many worlds within worlds we must navigate, whether self-created or bestowed upon us.