Japanese photographer Muga Miyahara’s “Tokonoma” refers to a built-in space in a typical Japanese house that is decorated with a calligraphic scroll and an Ikebana flower arrangement. Although every bit as serene and zen-like, Miyahara’s versions are all related to war and violence.
H. Craig Hanna is an American painter who lives and works in Paris. As a struggling artist in New York he used to work as a model to supplement his earnings. It was during a pause on a fashion shoot that Hanna was spotted sketching by a Bergdorf Goodman department store executive who, on the strength of his sketches, offered him an exhibition at The Gallery at Bergdorf Goodman.
His diptych formats allow Hanna to play off his subjects and mediums. Figures are juxtaposed with landscape, wood grain with textural paint, portraits with abstract forms. This juxtaposition allows him to site two very different artists – Whistler and Rothko – as his artistic heroes.
Source: The Cynthia Corbett Gallery
Mielle Riggi is an American glass artist. On her choice for medium she states: “I work with glass because it is very strong but simultaneously imparts a sense of fragility and light. These seemingly competing forces make glass captivating and also reflect the tensions of daily life. I would like viewers of my work to feel the contrasting, internal and external, forces contained within our surroundings. I want to celebrate awe-inspiring forms of nature and commiserate on the tragedies and triumphs of being human in a time when we cannot help but be increasingly cognizant of our impact on any environment.
Source: Objetos con vidrio
French artist Valentin van der Meulen starts of by painting a detailed portrait – mostly representing a person in distress – after which he partially erases the created image, so as to demonstrate “what was” and “what remains”.
Japanese installation artist Chiharu Shiota lives and works in Berlin. She uses various everyday objects such as beds, windows, dresses, shoes and suitcases in her work so as to explore the relationship between past and present, living and dying, and memories of people implanted into objects. To these she adds intricate, web-like threads of black and red.
Source: Wikipedia
Born in Taiyuan in 1961, Lin Tianmiao is one of the first female artists from China to achieve international recognition. Early in her career, she worked as a successful textile designer, later translating her experience along with the crafts of weaving, sewing, and embroidery into her practice as a visual artist. Much of her work addresses women’s issues. Conceptual and obsessed with the intricately hand-made, Lin’s work operates within numerous dichotomies such as the private vs. public, personal vs. cultural, male vs. female, natural vs. unnatural, remembered past vs. lived present.
Source: Gallery Lelong
Here or there, Mixed materials, 2002
Focus, C-print on canvas, embroidered hair and thread, 2001
Seeing Shadow, C-print on canvas, Silk and cotton threads, 2005-2008
The same (must be the same), Embroidery, linen, cotton and silk cloth, slick thread and polyurea, 2011
Mothers (broken), Polyurea 2008, Silk cloth, Silk and cotton thread
“Nude” is a series of nude dancers abstracted by time and motion created by Japanese photographer Shinichi Maruyama in collaboration with choreographer Jessica Lang in 2012. Maruyama created each image by combining 10,000 individual photographs of the dancers to compose a single shot.
“Because of the technology we have today, I was able to use a camera that let me take about 2,000 images per second.”
Swiss born, Neuwiller-based (France) artist Christophe Hohler (1961) paints figures. Men, women, fascinatingly dynamic, colourless and colourful.
Adrian Negenborn’s abstract expressionism is characterized by oscillating, from visceral to analytic, spontaneous to meditated, he responds to the initial flurry of marks laid on the canvas.
“I am always trying to make something from nothing, to dig something out of the mass of gestures. I never fully know when a painting is done until it feels right; it reaches an in between state somewhere amidst harmony and disharmony.”
Jetske Visser uses her work to reveal the things that lie beneath the surface. Her “Forgotten memory” installation is a 120 piece set of tea pots & cups from wax that serves a metaphor for people suffering from dementia.
“I wonder how daily things look like from the view of a demented person. How do they experience their environment? What is a teapot if you don’t know what a teapot is?”
Japanese artist Hideki Tokushige makes beautiful flowers (“Honebana”) out of mice and rat bones; a ceremonial process that honours the cycle of death, decay, and rebirth.
Lisa Golightly’s studied photography, the influence of which can be seen in her paintings. Much of her work explores the memory of childhood.
Isabelle Menin explored painting for ten years whilst working in graphic design and illustration, before focusing on digital photography.
“I call my work inland photographs and disordered landscapes in reference to nature’s strange complexity. The uncontrolled forces, the interweavings and the synergy of the elements, they all look to me like a mirror of human spirit.”
André Schmucki is a Swiss fine artist. Upon first glance his work seems to mirror the surrealists fascination with the subconscious and collective memories. However, he transcends the initial surrealists strategies by consciously choosing subject matter loaded with cultural connotation.
Paris-born London-based Yesenia Thibault-Picazo is a designer who was initially trained as a traditional weaver and now strives to challenge the boundaries of craft, defining herself as a ‘material teller’.
Hypersurfaces is a series of garments that explore the believes claiming that the world is governed by invisible forces. If we were to consider the energies that emanate from bodies, they would be wrapped in a subtle layer and their limits would be dissolved.
Alienation of our body in this rationalised world is the theme in Dutch photographer Marlous van der Sloot’s work. Her aim is to create images that raise awareness of our senses.
As part of his National Service, South Korean artist Jaeyeol Han was sent to Haiti to assist in the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake. Amidst the devastation he was struck by the dignity of everyone he encountered, and the huge impact this made on him led to a series of abstract portraits.
Via Saatchi Art
Ann Gale is an American figurative painter based in Seattle. She is known for her portrait paintings, which consist of an accumulation of small colour patches expressing the changing light and the shifting position of her models over time. Some of her main influences include Lucian Freud, Alberto Giacometti and Antonio López García.
Source: Wikipedia
Brazilian artist Henrique Oliveira is known for his spatial, organic wooden pieces. He uses
old plywood, fencing and PVC as his medium.
“What first caught my attention on deteriorated plywood was its pictorial aspect.
The textures, the colors and the different tones that were organized in layers, reminded
me of a painting surface.”
