Eric Fortune is an artist based out of Columbus, Ohio. Lyrical, haunting, yet poignant at the same time, Eric Fortune’s paintings make lasting impressions. These are characters who are neither out of place in the world, nor at home in it — they are characters wrapped in their own worlds. The emotionally complex metaphors Fortune paints are richly evocative. His imagery is quiet yet dynamic, and seasoned with a touch of surrealism that takes us to captivating places, beyond our everyday experience but filled with truth. Continue reading »
Unknown Artist
Aug 222010
Aug 162010
Erin Mulvehill is currently living in New York city (Brooklyn).
“My work aims to explore the human connections and subtle nuances that whisper into the ear of our every day. Much of my work is rooted in the ideas of mind, body, seamlessness and time. This is largely because my deepest beliefs lie in the principles of buddhism, the integration of art and life, and the preservation of beautiful moments. I am nomadic by nature and am inspired each day by the nothingness that resides in all things.” Continue reading »
Aug 152010
Amazing balloon sculptures by New York based artist Jason Hackenwerth. Continue reading »
Jun 212010
Ann Marshall grew up in Atlanta, Georgia and earned her BFA from School of Visual Arts in New York City. She has worked in a gallery, illustrated an award winning children’s book on the Holocaust, and traveled nationally and internationally as an ethnographer and consumer anthropologist . Her fine art work has been exhibited in New York City’s Gallery at Lincoln Center. She now works as a portrait and fine artist, working with a combination of traditional media and paper collage.
May 272010
Jill Greenberg’s latest work isn’t as controversial as her last snaps of crying babies or a bloody Senator John McCain, but it sure is beautiful. The photographer’s latest series Glass Ceiling is yet another example of her undeniable talents in digital surrealism and colour manipulation.
What ensues is a glorious lesson in the colourful, the soft, and the dreamlike, as well as every angelic colour under the sun. It’s also a lesson in holding your breath and flapping your arms around (Michael Hutchence not included). The series captures the world’s most oestrogen-heavy sport: synchronised swimming. Yep, chuck on your bathing caps, we’re going for a dip… in stilettos. And you thought that was just for ladies of good-breeding!
Apr 122010
Hong Chun Zhang’s descriptions of hair in charcoal are large and realistic portraits of Zhang and her twin sister, impressive in technique and imposing scale (each four by ten feet). And as the only representational drawings in Infinite Line, their content, and concepts enter with greater force. Zhang has a clear desire to establish these works contextually. Hair is unusual; while the rest of the visible body is built and destroyed vertically, layers sloughed and rebuilt, hair speaks in linear narrative, growth inscribing history. Zhang’s body of work is primarily dedicated to her own cultural history, family and ancestry, and these drawings are a frontispiece, working as resounding physical records.
Mar 292010
Born in England and raised in Canada, Jody Rogac currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She has been shooting professionally since obtaining her BFA in photography from the Emily Carr University of Art and Design in 2006. Focusing on portraiture, editorial and fashion photography with an unintrusive and unassuming approach, she explores the subtleties in human nature, representing people as they are.
Mar 252010
Copenhagen based fashion photographer Henrik Adamsen started out as a retoucher in the early 90s, before moving on to graphic design and art direction, and now photography. Henrik is inspired by the life around him, like colours and light, and when shooting he never plans poses as he likes to be inspired by the moment and the dialogue between him and the model.
Henrik is pretty much self-taught, but the experience from art direction and retouching gives him an advantage in knowing what he wants, what looks good, and what doesn’t look good.
Mar 192010
Original photo
Zhang Haiying’s Anti-Vice Series is based on Internet photographs of young women caught up in the Chinese government’s efforts to purge the city of prostitution and pornography. The highly publicized campaign to “eliminate vice and illegal publications” focuses on the apprehension and detention of young women such as these, who are among the most powerless of the country’s citizens. Victimized on one hand by gangs and threatened with fines and prison by authorities on the other, they are often paraded through streets to face insults and ridicule.
Zhang renders these scenes with a master’s craftsmanship. Hair, flesh, fabric, objects are constructed as self-contained elements, their individual treatment creating a sense of isolation and disunity in the collage effect. His super-pop sheen is exaggerated through painterly veracity: camera blurs, print bleeds, and flash bulb glares are faithfully replicated by brushwork which borders on abstraction. In Series 005 the night vision video effect is perfectly replicated by impassioned smears and smudges, simulating photo realism with intuitive spontaneity.
Behind each of these paintings is a complex story: of destitution, desperation, abuse and entrapment, side effects of economics, migration, and progress; the human costs of commodity culture. By recontextualising the way prostitution is represented and perceived, Zhang’s paintings strive to convey the human condition, with all its indignities and weaknesses, as a duplicitous victimisation of both the oppressed and oppressors.
Zhang Haiying was born 1972 in Shandong, China. Now lives and works in Beijing.
Mar 162010
The colours of her pictures have an intense, almost gaudy glow. Her images resemble stills of old 70s movies. In her new ‘Week-End’ series, Alex Prager presents “a world which simultaneously does and doesn’t exist”.
The photographer is convinced that every woman has the heart of an actress. Connections between her cinematic imagery and her Californian heritage seem clear-cut. The protagonists of the 18 new exhibits embody retro brought to life in their wigs and polyester blouses. Yet kitschy first impressions are quickly translated into ardent enthusiasm and fascination.
The fictional snap shots of just the other weekend take us on an emotional voyage through alienation, lust, fear, neglect and ambiguous, lunatic actions. The photographs go further than being mere colourful snap shots – each face, each expression tells part of the story.
Alex Prager was born 1979 in Los Angeles and started early when she took up a camera in her youth. She has no formal photography qualifications, but travelled the United States and Europe where she thrived on the many impressions she gained and a love of art. An exhibition by the pioneer of artistic colour photography, William Eggleston, provided the critical impulse to her work nowadays.
Mar 152010
Born 1971, Hamburg, Germany. Till Gerhard’s painting suggests his own microcosm in which the boundaries between reality and fiction dissolve and the fantastic invades the real world.
Gerhard’s large paintings tell the story of people who congregate and form a society to experience a specific moment. The visual space the painter creates lies beyond the rational and harmonious worlds, communicating a mysterious, unnerving mood. His figures turn their backs on the viewers, thereby marking the boundary between interior and exterior worlds. In the painting “Falscher Guru” (2006), the presented figures form a semicircle around a covered object in the centre, above which a ghost seems to hover. Gerhard’s visual world moves between figuration and abstraction. On closer observation the presented figures appear distorted or unfocussed, underlining how his figurative motifs also have remnants of abstraction within them.
Gerhard’s skill lies in his ambiguity. His visual world is mysterious and fantastic, thereby irritating and unsettling his viewers. The writer Tzvetan Todorov defines the fantastic as, “the indecisiveness a person feels through knowing only natural laws and facing an event that has a metaphysical appearance.”
Till Gerhard designs the sacred milieu of landscape with painterly mysticism. Bathed in blinding celestial light, his figures are haloed in ‘salvation’ and dwarfed by the majesty of their surrounds. Delicate spills of colour seduce with ethereal glow, while heavy brushwork stands in stark contrast to entrancing flourishes of drips, splashes and smears. Till Gerhard poses his vistas as simultaneously beautiful and foreboding: trees tower with imprisoning threat, and light is conceived as spectral hues, giving the canvases the illusion of radiating from within. The surfaces of Till Gerhard’s paintings are bespeckled with divine aura, infusing his scenes with a supernal ambience. Each beam of light has the effect of floating out of the canvas, embracing the viewer in its contaminated warmth.
Till Gerhard’s paintings explore the conflict between man and nature. Within his scenes is a recurring intrusion of unnatural entity: oil wells and tree forts exude an encroaching anxiety. Gerhard uses their odd presence as a departure into the surreal: a cabin nestled in the woods or a skyline dotted with refineries are both alien and comforting as their surrounding landscapes stretch, float and churn with hallucinatory disorientation. In this conflicted crusade for spiritual revelation and ideological orthodoxy, ghost-like figures mill about lost in their Thoreau-inspired quest for enlightenment.
Mar 152010
Deborah Turbeville is an original artist. Her unique personal vision colors her work and whether portrait, landscape, interiors or fashion, her signature is immediately apparent. Her latest book of photographs, Past Imperfect, may be puzzling to those who like their answers on a plate. The pictures breach the fine line between a commercial fashion shoot and a pictorial work of art, for one thing. In the scenarios depicted the female models are cast as players whose role is ambiguous. As well, the photographer has reproduced her original archive in which many of the prints were torn, scratched and superimposed with sticky tape. She and her publisher, Steidl, spent four and a half years on the book, which is an edited compilation of work done between 1974 and 1997. Continue reading »
Feb 142010
Figurative artist Tone (Francis Anthony) O’LEARY was born in England, and migrated to Melbourne, Australia in 1966 with his family. He exhibited successfully with Sandra Baker at ‘Studio 48’, Newcastle for the past few seasons. Continue reading »
Jan 292010
Gabriele Rigon readily admits to being one of the luckiest people alive. Unlike many artists, he has no desire to give up his day job ‘ he works as a helicopter pilot flying Hueys and CH47 Chinooks in the Italian army. Continue reading »
Marc van Dalen
Photography
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Jan 172010
Marc van Dalen works and lives in Hamburg and Berlin. Continue reading »
David Jay
Photography
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Jan 122010
Photography by David Jay (Australia). Continue reading »
