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The New Contemporary Art Magazine
Internationally renowned Norwegian painter Odd Nerdrum has played the role of both national treasure and art-political rebel since the 1970s. As the founder of the Kitsch movement, he opposed the abstract and conceptual art that dominated Norway at the time in favor of honoring the old world traditions of Rembrandt and Caravaggio. His outspoken views against the modernist "art establishment" and socialist art programs in Norway has elicited backlash from his peers and, as he claims, negative attention from national authorities.
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.
Hollywood based artist Deirdre Sullivan-Beeman adds an enchanting, fairytale-like charm to her paintings made by a 14th century technique of oil paints and egg tempera. Her youthful images evoke the romance and luminosity of works by Old Master painters like Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci, combined with elements taken from religion, legends, and glyphs or pictograms, used to tell her stories. Her primary subject is often a little girl, sometimes wearing a pinafore dress, depicted wandering in a nonsensical realm with talking flowers and white rabbits, recalling images from Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. The main source of Beeman's unique mythology, however, comes from her own personal experiences and what she writes down in a dream journal that she has kept over the years.