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The New Contemporary Art Magazine
Today we bring you an exclusive preview of the latest collaborative works of Mars-1, Oliver Vernon and Damon Soule, collectively known as Furtherrr, in advance of their upcoming exhibition “Momentum." This exhibition, opening at Space Gallery in Denver, CO on November 7 (through December 2, 2014), will showcase the latest evolution of the artists’ collaborative and individual works.
United by their psychedelic imagery, members of the Furtherrr collective frequently collaborate on walls and paintings. Mars-1 (featured in Hi-Fructose Vol. 26), Damon Soule and Oliver Vernon (Hi-Fructose Vol. 17 cover artist) completed a huge, hallucinatory landscape on a wall in Denver co-curated by Furtherrr and Brian Chambers. Nearby, their friends and colleagues Justin Lovato, Joe Hengst and NoMe Edonna worked on a separate piece. Filled with starkly contrasting colors, Mars-1, Soule and Vernon's mural looks as if it's emitting neon light from its black background. An electric blue, glowing beam cuts across the wall horizontally while radiating forms explode from their centers on different parts of the plane. One can trace parts of each artist's signature motifs — Mars's dotted orbs, Soule's ray-like stripes, Vernon's expressionistic marks tamed into geometric shapes — but the collaboration is almost seamless.
When astronauts went to the moon in 1968 with the dream of discovering new worlds, something unexpected happened. They looked back, and for the first time, gazed upon the Earth. These otherworldly paintings by Slovakian painter Patricia Koysova capture the same sense of wonder in simplicity and scale. Her colorful images inspired by science blow natural environments out of context and proportion to admire their raw beauty. It’s as if Koysova has taken our most recognizable landmarks and placed them under a microscope. Her massive works zoom into icebergs until they become dramatic shades of bright blues, while the evolution of a star starts to look like entrails. Through their abstraction, we’re able to focus on the commonality of these seemingly different things. Read more after the jump!
Mars-1's (featured in HF Vol. 26) large-scale paintings are filled with color and movement that seems to evolve slowly yet powerfully. It's as if each piece contains something like a Big Bang playing out in slow motion for viewers to observe. His current exhibition "Toward A Distant Dawn" opened at Martha Otero Gallery in LA on June 7, featuring several monumental paintings as well as bronze sculptures and installation elements. In the center piece of the show, a mural-sized work exploding with color, Mars-1 expertly layers pigments, making them appear saturated yet slightly translucent. The geometric forms gently pulse in some pieces and fly, as if in a fiery explosion, in others — a visual translation of metaphysical and spiritual concepts that lie beyond the realm of Earthly existence.