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 »
Aug 222010
Jun 142010
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 242010
Gao Zhen 1956 Born in Ji’nan, China
Gao Qiang 1962 Born in Ji’nan, China
The Gao Brothers are a pair of artist brothers based in Beijing and authors of several published works, including“How Far Can You Walk in One Day in Beijingâ€, “The Current State Of Chinese Avant-Garde Art†and “The Report Of Art Environmentâ€, They have been collaborating on installation, performance, sculpture, photography works and writing since the mid1980s. Some of their works were published in “A History Of China Modern Artâ€, †China Avant-garde Photographyâ€, “The Best Photography Of Chinaâ€, etc, and is held in private and museums collections, such like He Xiangning Art Museum, Centre Georges Pompidou, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, etc, in China and across the world.
The Gao brothers’ most extensive work is both explicit and critical, seeking to recast Chairman Mao — a figure in China who is simultaneously capable of arousing deep emotions of pain and despair, as well as admiration, love, and pride — as a flawed figure.
Mar 192010
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 172010
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 112010
Artworks by Otilia Cadar
Illustrations, Painting
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Jan 302010
Diary Windows is a reflexive visual journal. It’s a way of introspection and discovery rising from the need to uncover the hidden world of my inner self. The study of this work started with two questions: Does this diary helps in any way to denounce ourselves and excavate our deep inner self? How sincerely and accurately could a vision or a memory be reproduced?
The pages of the diary are the actual paintings, the canvas, expressing my feelings, my moods and reaction to happenings, before and during the work on this project. I transfer all these through various colours, characters and symbolic objects, giving birth to an inside monologue illustrated in relation to my environment.
The project contains 7 paintings, a sequence of my prominent moods and feelings. These moods create only a sketch of the diary, being completed through it. They are but fractions of ideas that make an impression and then haunt me. I see them as either singular or repeating pictures, imaginary or real.
I use colours with a powerful symbolism, unveiling my inner state. Throughout the project’s works one will find elements and symbols that keep repeating, helping to understand the substance and “story†behind each work.
Jan 252010
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Francesco Sessa è nato a San Severo nel 1949, ha studiato disegno e pittura con il prof. Luigi Schingo, si è laureato in architettura presso la università di Roma ed ha insegnato Costruzioni presso l’istituto tecnico per geometriâ€Vittorio Emanuele III†di Lucera.
Il Trabucco di Peschici
Exhibition, Painting, Unknown
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Jan 252010
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Nei mesi di luglio ed agosto 2008 si terrà , presso il ristorante di Peschici “Al Trabucco da Mimìâ€, una mostra di opere grafiche di Francesco Sessa.
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Francesco Sessa è nato a San Severo nel 1949, ha studiato disegno e pittura con il prof. Luigi Schingo, si è laureato in architettura presso la università di Roma ed ha insegnato Costruzioni presso l’istituto tecnico per geometriâ€Vittorio Emanuele III†di Lucera.Â
Le opere esposte sono stampe su carta Fabriano del formato 50X70 e rappresentano uno dei trabucchi più belli del Gargano.Â
Il “trabucco†è una costruzione in legno, fatta di sottili pali e di snelle travi, fissata a terra da cavi di acciaio che viene usata per la pesca con le reti: i pescatori, al momento del passaggio dei pesci, sollevavano rapidamente e in gran trambusto le reti che avevano calato in mare.
Accanto al trabucco, la famiglia di Mimì, fiero pescatore di 74 anni, vive e continua il lavoro iniziato con la cottura del pesce che veniva pescato al momento e offerto agli occasionali visitatori.Â
Il trabucco, detto “Da Mimìâ€, è stato salvato dall’incendio dell’estate 2007 dalla famiglia del proprietario che ha impedito, rischiando la vita, che le fiamme si propagassero alla costruzione.Â
Attualmente, il ristorante è uno dei luoghi maggiormente visitato dai turisti del Gargano ed offre anche serate jazz, apprezzate nelle serate estive dai clienti più raffinati ed esigenti.Â
Le opere esposte costituiscono un omaggio, che l’autore ha voluto realizzare nei confronti di una delle costruzioni più affascinanti del Gargano.
Il trabucco ha già ispirato artisti famosi, come il pittore istriano Romano Conversano, uno dei primi a scoprire il fascino di Peschici, quando, lontano dalle principali vie di comunicazione, appariva al turista come un paese antico e remoto.
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Kris Lewis
Oil Paintings, Painting
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Dec 202009
Kris Lewis began dreaming and flailing atop this lovely carnival ride in 1978, in the great surround of the Jersey shore. After studying Illustration at The University of the Arts in Philadelphia, Kris eventually found himself living and working in Los Angeles, where he still resides and has yet to fully explore. Continue reading »
Heiko Müller
Drawing, Mixed Media, Painting
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Nov 182009
Heiko Müller is based in Hamburg, Germany. Outside his native country his paintings and drawings have been shown in Estonia, New York, Paris, Basel, Seattle and Los Angeles. Much of his art is about the dark goings-on behind nature and animal kingdom. Continue reading »
Nov 052009
Cornelia Renz, born in 1966 in Kaufbeuren, Germany, is a Berlin-based artist who draws large, provocative cartoon images of chubby, exotically costumed young girls with adult characteristics of sexuality and aggression, and imagery reminiscent of Italian Renaissance masterpieces by Botticelli, Bronzino, and others. Ms. Renz draws with felt-tip markers on both sides of big sheets of acrylic glass as well as on underlying white panels, creating much linear complexity. And she encloses her pictures appropriately in clinical white plastic frames of her own devising. Continue reading »
