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The New Contemporary Art Magazine
Tattoo artist, painter, and sculptor Fred Laverne has a dark surrealist sensibility, blending in odes to pop culture and pulp tropes into his work. The artist resides in Menton, France, and has garnered a reputation in both tattooing and fine arts, practices he keeps in parallel.
The illustrations and personal work of artist Jay Torres have a dark surrealist edge. The El Paso-raised artist, now based in Pasadena, moves between analogue and digital tools to craft his creations.
The solitary figurative sculptures of Frode Bolhuis are untethered to any one specific culture or frame of mind, existing at the convergence of generations and experiences. His use of textiles brings a more visceral connections to each of the subjects, and the vibrancy within each extends past the artist’s chosen hues.
Artfucker’s recent body of work, displayed in the exhibition “Smoke Show,” meditates on just how accustomed viewers are to the omnipresence of marketing efforts. The New York artist’s practice is a blend of mixed-media and photography, with their identity still unknown to the public despite widely seen work.
The work of Sean Landers has long examined the relationship between artists and their own work, including the adventures of the character Plankboy. In a recent show at Rodolphe Janssen Gallery, he shared new paintings featuring Plankboy, many taking on mythological narratives. Landers was last featured on our site here.
Sam Gainsborough's film "Facing It" cleverly combines live-action actors and mixed-media stop motion. With heads made from plasticine, the artist told Directors Notes that he "shot the film in live action and pixelation and then separately shot the character’s faces in the studio against a green-screen, almost rotoscoping the footage we had already shot." This required Gainsborough to match the faces to the actors frame by frame.
In Amy Brener's "Omni-Kit" sculpture series, everyday objects and imagery are reprocessed into totem-like sculptures that speak to ritual and memory. These works are highlighted in a new show at Jack Barrett Gallery titled "Consolarium," a word the artist created for the place where these objects and figures across time collide into these single objects. Materials include urethane resin and foam, silicone, pigment, and more. The show runs through Dec. 20.
Combining melted paraffin wax and pigments, Dylan Gebbia-Richards crafts luminous and otherworldly landscapes. In a recent show at Unit London, he offered new works and installations that represented his latest experimentations, the artist noting that he created specific tools to craft these pieces. In the end, however, there’s an aspect of his practice that will always be unpredictable.
Simphiwe Ndzube’s startling mixture of sculpture, painting, and installation both transport us to new worlds and examine our own mythologies. Recent pieces, blending, resin, spraypaint, collage, and found objects, feature figures that appear to emerge from traditional confines inside galleries. 
In his recent show at The Hall in Brooklyn, Aaron Li-Hill tackles climate change in his visceral mixed-media works. "Perils of a New World" collects both handheld pieces and massive new installations from the Canadian artist. The show also features works fro ma collaborative photographic series with Mathais Wasik.
Francesco Barocco's sculptures reconsider art history through conflicting modes, pairing elegant 2-dimensional forms with malformed sculptural material that would have once held the subject's likeness. The effect is both striking and eeries, as the ancient figures appear contemplative in some works, and in agony in others.
Orion Martin applies a startling ability to play with textures, shifting planes, and focus to an unexpected assortment of objects and characters. His shifting between mediums adds to the guessing game of looking at a particular piece and attempting to dissect each element’s nature. He's often been linked to the representational artists under the Chicago Imagists moniker.
Lari Pittman's distinct visual language is given a comprehensive treatment in his current retrospective at Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. "Lari Pittman: Declaration of Independence" represents four decades of progression for the mixed-media artist. The exhibition runs through Jan. 5, 2020, at the space.
With his distinct thin brushstrokes in acrylics and Indian ink, Glenn Brown’s swirling portraits offer both art-historical reverence and his own distinctive sensibility. Elsewhere, in his work in oils have a particularly unsettling quality, the textured faces of his subjects melting into different hues.
Keiichi Tanaami’s wild sculptures and mixed-media works currently inhabit Jeffrey Deitch's New York location, as an extension of its "Tokyo Pop Underground" group show. The Hi-Fructose Vol. 38 cover artist is featured at the space until Nov. 2. We last mentioned Tanaami on our site here, in a story on his collaboration with artist Oliver Payne.
Super Future Kid’s candy-colored paintings and sculptures fill Gallery Poulsen later this month with her new show, "Smells Like Teenage Armpit.” The artist says that all of the dimension-hopping paintings, crafted in acrylics and spraypaint, “started out as ideas I had just before falling asleep in my bed.” The show kicks off on Oct. 26 and runs through Nov. 16.
Sue Williams A’Court’s graphite portals into lush environments grace unexpected surfaces, with the artist’s aim to conjure a state of mindfulness rather than any specific terrain. Her work often blends painting, collage, and of course, graphite drawing. Blending both a loose style and hyperdetailed sensibility, the tension in her work brings the viewer to another place, entirely.
Richard W. James was recently named a recipient of the James Renwick Alliance 2019 Chrysalis Award. The Texas-based mixed-media sculptor is known for his surreal figures, crafted in found objects and earthenware. Those who receive the honor get $5,000, unrestricted. James was last featured on HiFructose.com here.
Serge Gay Jr. offers a love letter to resort city Palm Springs in his new show, "P.S. I Love You," at Voss Gallery. Bathed in sunshine and a Mid-Century Modern sensibility, the works are a stirring blend of acrylics and graphite. “Popularized in the 1930s as a fashionable getaway for the Hollywood elite, the human-built utopia has become a haven for creatives lured to the vast desert as an artistic escape and source for inspiration,” the gallery says. The show, which begins on Oct. 11, runs through Nov. 2 at the San Francisco space.
Deirdre Sullivan-Beeman's "Heavy Water" brings new paintings from the surrealist to La Luz de Jesus Gallery, inspired by the substance created from tap water for nuclear energy research in the 1930s. Using oil and egg tempera on aluminum panel, the artist’s works have a particular glow, implementing centuries-old techniques for the effect. The show runs Oct. 4-27 at the space.
In his current show at Honor Fraser in Los Angeles, Kenny Scharf shares wild new works that include new mixed-media paintings, sculptures, assemblages, and more. “Optimistically Melting!” takes over the space through Nov. 16, and in it, viewers find an veteran artist who maintains his graffiti sensibilities yet constantly pushes his interests into new arenas.
For his new show at Sies + Höke in Düsseldorf, Germany, Marcel Dzama created a massive wall drawing to accompany his several new mixed-media drawings, sculptures, and 2-channel video. "Be good little Beuys and Dada might buy you a Bauhaus," opening this week, marks the 20th anniversary of collaboration between the Canadian artist and the gallery. The show runs through Oct. 26.
With "Burn With Me" at Arch Enemy Arts, Michael Reedy offers new mixed-media works that examine themes of birth and death. Kicking off on Sept. 6, the show follows the artist's 2016 show at the Philadelphia gallery, "Dust & Moonshine." The title "Burn With Me" is inspired by a Banana Yoshimoto short story with the line, ”I bet I go to hell when I die ... ” Reedy was last mentioned on our site here.
Michael Reeder offers his largest collection of work yet in "The OtheRealm," his new show at Thinkspace Projects. Reeder toys with depth and color, finding an expanse of possibilities within repeated shapes and motifs. He accomplishes this with a blend of oils, acrylics, and spraypaint, shifting between styles, and at the gallery, given site-specific flourishes. The show runs through Aug. 24.
Layering acrylic on transparent sheets, the ghostly work of David Spriggs towers over viewers. The artist places painted subjects inside these creations, from from varying figures to more celestial bodies. A view from behind works such as “In Utero II” shows how the illusionary quality of the installations carries to different perspectives.
Combining oils, charcoal, and paper mounted on panel, Paul Cristina crafts riveting and disconcerting figurative portraits. Though he uses drawing as his foundational practice, the process of creating these works is one of both deconstruction and reconstruction. The above work is currently featured in a group show at Booth Gallery.
Photographer Henrik Isaksson Garnell “sculpts” his imagery with natural elements such as bones and plant matter, manmade objects, digital effects, and electronic ephemera. The result includes his new series “In Treatment,” a meditation on psychotherapy. The work moves between the cerebral and the surreal.
Examining the theme of survival, the floral figures of Sage Vaughn's recent body of work carry elegance and provocation. Recent work shown at Unit London, rendered in acrylic, ink, oil, and vellum on canvas, show an artist reflecting on the power and harshness of nature. Vaughn was featured in Hi-Fructose Vol. 26.
Slinkachu
The acrylic and mixed-media paintings of Hernan Bas carry a coming-of-age quality, pulling from varying periods. His influences, among several other mediums, have a particular consideration of “the Aesthetic and Decadent writers of the 19th century, in particular Oscar Wilde, Charles Baudelaire and Joris-Karl Huysman,” a statement says. Film, poetry, and art history itself also have an impact on his contemplative works.