Menu
The New Contemporary Art Magazine
New Zealand based artist Sarah Dolby recently shared with us her new series of paintings, some of her most personal to date. Featured in Hi-Fructose Vol. 26 and on our blog, Dolby's whimsical narrative turns more dark here as she explores the emotionally turbulent world that lies within her Victorian-styled girls. Titled "Creatures of Habit", the series consists of six oil on aluminum panel paintings where she introduces new subjects: The Collector of Worries, whose collection brings her both comfort and anxiety, The White Rabbit, a reinterpretation of the character from Alice in Wonderland, and a young girl who is a prisoner of her own thoughts.
Chrystal Chan's heroines are of two worlds. You could say they exist in alternate dimensions, as they are inspired by Chan's belief in the supernatural. She can be a bibilical figure, as in her "Protector" carrying a swan, a shepard of a wolf pack, or a little girl back at home in her bedroom. They are often accompanied by the animals she saw growing up in San Francisco. While these images can be calming, there is also an unsettling darkness that surrounds her work.
This weekend, Richard Heller gallery in Los Angeles will present a much anticipated new series of paintings by Japanese artist Hideaki Kawashima. The show title "Back and Forth" refers to the artist's interests in change, both in life and stylistically. His signature portraits of boys and girls have always employed a light and secular imagery. In other words, uniform ghost-like beings with only subtle inidivuality. Here, Kawashima elevates his subjects to what he calls 'symbolic images', with more color and details than before.
Jenny Morgan's (featured in HF Vol. 21) paintings reveal beauty in simplicity. She often depicts nude figures with poignant expressions, stylizing their bodies to fit her sunrise-hued palette in lieu of focusing on minuscule details like hairs and wrinkles. The simplification of her subjects gives her work a glossed-over effect that pushes it from objective realism into surreal territory. For her latest exhibition "The Golden Hour" at Plus Gallery in Denver, Morgan explored notions of spirituality and the cycle of life. While her major focus has always been faces, often using herself as a subject, her exhibition features a substantial amount of paintings of skulls, alluding to the fading nature of youth and the ephemerality of the body. Take a look at the work in the show below and check out "The Golden Hour" on view through October 18.