Artem Rogowoi’s oil and gold leaf paintings offer quiet, yet rich moments. In works like “Chamomile,” the artist’s rendering of elements such as hair or a bed of leaves carry unexpected textures. And each carries a fantastical quality, even when packed with everyday elements.
Laura Buss creates stirring oil paintings with subjects that appear to moving through planes of reality. The San Francisco-based artist renders both scenes and intimate studies that carry introspective themes. Buss had a recent show of her paintings at Modern Eden Gallery.
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.
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.
Japanese sculptor and photographer Yuichi Ikehata creates chilling scenes that bridge the gap between reality and fiction. In his surreal ongoing series “Fragment of Long Term Memory,” his intention is to comment on the fragmentary nature of memory and render it physical. “Many parts of our memories… are often forgotten, or difficult to recall. I retrieve those fragmented moments and reconstruct them as surreal images. I gather these misplaced memories from certain parts of our reality, and together they create a non-linear story, resonating with each other in my photographs,” he says.
Belgium based figurative painter Michal Lukasiewicz portrays his subjects with the tenderness and warm sensuality of the High Renaissance, combined with the vibrancy of Pop art in his use of bright colors. Working primarily in acrylic, his works are almost monochrome, if not for the patches of shades like off-white, ochre, sienna, pink, grays, and neon oranges and yellows. Despite the contemporary expressiveness of his palette, his nude subjects, mostly women, have a mysteriously quiet nature about them that recalls famous figures in art like Leonardo’s “Mona Lisa”, or Vermeer’s “Girl with a Pearl Earring”.