Menu
The New Contemporary Art Magazine
Vanna Bowles is a visual artist who creates sculptures, drawings, and installations with people and nature as her central subjects. The artist is fond of combining her pencil work with mixed media to create a three-dimensional, illusory effect, with pieces extending from the surface of her canvas and into the viewer's surrounding space. Bowles has exhibited her work at the Lars Bohman Gallery in Stockholm, Malmö Art Museum and the Stenersen Museum in Oslo.
Amsterdam based artist Daan Noppen brings a special dynamism to his pencil drawings of still life and portraits. His works are not only eye-catching for their precise layering of details, but also in their massive size that gives his subjects a more palpable presence. A closer look at each piece reveals mathematical equations in between the pencil lines that relate to our reality. More recent works express the artist's continued fascination with mathematics, geometry, and physics, as his figures appear to be gauged, dissipate, and intermingle in a void of empty vector space.
Paris, France based artist Amandine Urruty has always overflowed her whimsical drawings with fantastical characters. First featured on our blog here, Urruty is unique in her near exclusive use of the pencil medium. There is something about a pencil's 'primitive' and simple nature that initially attracted her to it. Her illustrations exhibit a remarkable control of the medium, and despite its easy use, she says, she is able to embellish her work with detail and varied palette. Most recently, her palette is almost entirely monochromatic black and white.
Four years have passed since the Great East Japan Earthquake which continues to have a significant impact on the nation of Japan and its artists. On March 11th, the anniversary of the disaster, Mizuma Art Gallery presented "Howl", an exhibition of elaborate pencil drawings by Mikiko Kumazawa. Kumazawa's latest works reflect on the past four years, and her own personal emotional interpretation of the event. Collectively, here is an image of human nature's strength and weakness in the face of uncontrollable forces. Take a look at "Howl" after the jump!
Jacob Dahlgren treats stacks of pencils like blocks of wood in his sculpture series, "Subject of Art." With each unit sharpened to a different length, the pencils stack on top of one another to create playful, geometric shapes with an Op Art element. Though the forms are quite simple, Dahlgren's choice of medium makes the series a whimsical exploration of how one can reconfigure basic shapes to creates something new.