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The New Contemporary Art Magazine
Portugal-born muralist Sergio Odeith is known for dazzling with his optical illusions created on walls across the world. He first emerged as a practitioner in the graffiti movement in the 1990s, before turning his interest to toying with how his subjects can subvert expectations from viewers.
Pretty much every kid loves playing with cardboard boxes. Taiwanese photographer and graphic designer Sydney Sie never stopped playing with them. Her series "Unexpectable Boxes" captures the essence of our childhood pretending in surprising and surreal photographs. In bold candy colors, her images reveal her subjects' faces, fingers and feet peeking out of holes in artificial spaces built by Sie.
Op art works are abstract, and while mostly in black and white, UK artist Carl Cashman usually infuses his with clashing neon colors. Using geometry and optical illusion, his works depict hidden symbols and movement, as in bold patterns that appear to flex and warp. Cashman (covered here) enhances these qualities with a style that he calls "Neometry". Unlike completely abstracted art, which bears no trace of anything recognizable, Cashman's sees his art as a sort of biography. The inspiration behind his latest series of acrylic works, titled "An Edited Version of Life", references moments in his daily life.
There's a secret to looking at Dutch chalk artist Leon Keer's whimsical largescale drawings on the street. At ground level, one might mistake his puddle of melting gummy bears mourning their friend, ghosts chasing Pacman through a maze, or the excavation of a terracotta army of lego-men for abstract works of art. As in his latest piece created for the Malta Street Art Festival in July, which can only be seen from 10 meters high, you have to be in just the "right" spot.
Italian artist Luca Luce began his creative career as a designer, before eventually settling into the field of makeup art. The profession attracted him for its opportunities to create beauty and give other people a form of security. Now, turning the brush onto himself, Luce uses his creative skills to make optical illusions out of his left hand. Using well known cosmetic brands as his medium, he paints realistic pictures with a skewed perspective that can only be appreciated by the wearer. His illustrations portray things like small animals sleeping in the palm of his hand, pulled back skin to reveal electrical outlets, animated characters like Jack Skellington, and other combinations of fantasy and horror.
The shape of a church is indefinitely sketched into the landscape in the latest project by architecture duo, Gijs Van Vaerenbergh. Comprised of Belgian architects Pieterjan Gijs and Arnout Van Vaerenbergh, their series of see-through churches, "Reading Between the Lines," are not intended to be functional as shelter. They are more like sculptures that borrow design inspiration from local churches' architecture in the area. See more after the jump!
German street artist "1010" turns buildings into dreamy, bottomless pits of color with his murals. His two most recent, titled "Enter the Vortex", are part of the international street art festival Memorie Urbane in Fondi, Italy. They represent his signature style of layering colors two dimensionally to create a 3D optical illusion that tricks the eye. The result turns something beautiful and mesmerizing out of blank, unattractive spaces.
A couple of weeks ago, Pejac shared a simple window drawing on his Facebook profile, as a tribute to legendary French high-wire walker, Philippe Petit. The drawing was done using acrylic on a window glass to commemorate the 40th anniversary of Petit's walk between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City. This simple idea, captured on camera by his friend Silvia Guinovart Pujol, shows the riskiness and fragility of the art of tightrope and is a great example of the Spanish artist's style: simple, minimalist yet effective.
Meredith James is like a latter day Alice in Wonderland documenting what she sees in her journey down and through a contemporary rabbit hole. Her videos, installations, and sculptures play with scale and trompe l’oeil to create optical illusions that are as disruptive as they are funny. In "Day Shift", a short video, she plays a security guard who, having just left work, crawls into the backseat of her SUV and reemerges as a miniature figure in the building's security monitor. In Ames Landscape, an installation, two figures stand in a glade. A large mountain reaches skyward in the distance. The space is configured so that, though the space is logically consistent, one figure stands much taller than the other. In Hallway, another installation, a door opens onto stairs that lead down to the basement. The stairs, of course, go nowhere because the space is flat. The fact that the illusion is a dead ringer for the space's actual stairs that lead to a real basement is not even remotely coincidental.
Amsterdam based artist Jeroen Bisscheroux creates optical illusions that bend the mind. His installations over the past decade transcend the limitation of what is physically possible with imagination. In reality, his work exists on a flat plane, but from the right perspective is like a portal to another dimension. Jeroen’s inspiration is the urban space- taking the world around us and putting it into the context of interactive art with a humanitarian message.