Today, I keep coming across beautiful watercolors. Buy Some Damn Art, a favorite art buying site of mine run by Kate Singleton, just launched this week’s sale, and it’s a special one. You can purchase Yao Cheng‘s original works for $375 a piece, or if you’re a company, perhaps you can reach out for a branded collaboration. Cheng’s roots are in textile design (quite obviously) and her layouts are uniquely detailed, delicate and special.
This week’s artists are examining the bigger picture in their work.
* * *
1. Tom Wudl’s new work is inspired by the Avatamsaka Sutra (or Flower Ornament Sutra), the revered scripture of Huayan Buddhism. The sutra describes an interdependency of all phenomena within a cosmos of infinite realm at La Louver
2. Evalynn J. Alu’s work reflects her curiosity and emotional thoughts about the universe, in particular our own earth and the forces that are forever in action at OCCCA
3. In Secret Lives of Rainbows, Geoffrey Todd Smith deploys an array of colorful media to create vibrant paintings whose complex arrangements of shapes, intricate patterns, vacillating spaces, and scintillating surfaces recall the wonders of basic school age geometry and visual trickery at Luis De Jesus
4. Historically, Hindu deities have been depicted endlessly through painting and sculpture. Manjari Sharma’s project painstakingly portrays these Gods and Goddesses with photography at ClampArt
5. Sleeping Giants is a series by Eric Pedersen that considers states of consciousness. The work within this body is made at a very large scale and includes portraits of people that are depicted in various states of sleep. The artist represents his subjects in this way to evoke a slight state of anxiety in his viewers; for them to feel unsure of what this giant is capable of doing should it wake up at Katherine Cone Gallery
6. Catherine Nelson uses a repetitive globe form and creates seasonal images of the planet as if we are viewing the earth from a satellite. Wildlife and nature are represented in rich and fantastic ways to convey each environ simultaneously as both boundless and isolated at Saul Gallery
For beauty, music and art lovers, it’s been an interesting few months. All three have merged to form a trend that reared it’s head in early March. We labeled it expressive story telling and it’s managed to evolve from the art and photography worlds to the beauty, music and marketing arenas.
These images of Enya Bakunova, Lady Gaga, the goth models walking Vivienne Westwoods’s weekend fashion show, and Shu Umera’s recent print campaign all pay homage to Mario Testino’s 2001 portrait of Kate Moss.
This wave feels a bit more gothic though, more geisha, more painterly. The emphasis on the eyes, the lips and the cheekbones provide a sculpture-like interpretation to compliment Guim Tió Zarraluki’s abstract and piercing renditions. As we’ve said before, portraiture represents more than a moment- it’s the culmination of a mood, an outfit, a setting and a style. What do you think of this artistic execusion, is it effective?
The fine line between chaos and order reign in this week’s gallery picks.
* * *
1. Pavilion of the Blind is a freestanding structure that contains a colorful array of window blinds, panels and shades. Movement is triggered by a motion detector and controlled by a PLC (programmable logic controller) housed within the structure at Tierney Gardarin
2. Charline von Heyl’s paintings are not abstractions of objects or figures; rather, she is interested in creating abstract images that stand for themselves at Petzel
3. By physically and metaphorically cutting and bringing together disparate items and ideas in her paintings, drawings, and sculptures, Iva Gueorguieva’s works can be seen as assemblages of chaos and order, personal concerns and global issues at Acme Los Angeles
4. Growing up in Spain, with the hybridized eclectic sensibilities of Antoni Gaudi as a visual force in her early life, led to the collision in Susan Chrysler White’s work of nature, spiritual tendencies, and 3D form. The exploration of light, space, transparency, bilateral symmetry, and calligraphic drawing all play a part in her recent sculpture at Kim Foster Gallery
5. Omar Chacon’s most recent body of work continues to be influenced by the intricate patterns and weavings mirrored in the traditional folk art of South America at Fouladi Projects
6. Rosemarie Fiore uses the brightly colored smoke of live fireworks to create vibrant and bold abstract compositions. In this new body of work, Fiore introduces the use of rolling devices of her own creation to distribute the tinted smoke onto heavy paper.at Von Lintel Gallery
Bright colors and unexpected materials rule this week’s gallery picks.
* * *
1. With extraordinary delicacy, Tom Phillips has dissected his previously used, discarded plastic palettes and converted fragments of them into intricate oil collages mounted on panels at Flowers Gallery
2. Jacques Roch’s paintings tell a narrative that comes close to the edge of a nightmarish darkness, taking a last minute playful turn with sexual daydreams and humorous, childlike doodles at Kim Foster Gallery
3. Jason Roth’s newest series of paintings on shop rags are explosions of multicolored forms that possesses a bold graphic flavor and tough, matte surface at Masters Pelvin
4. Shane McAdams and Caroline Jane Harris experiment with unusual mediums – paper, ball-point pen ink, resin – taking nature and landscapes as a starting point but with very different results at Scream London
5. For Ati Maier, the first Moon Walk serves as both metaphor and unifying theme to her latest exhibition, The Map Is Not the Territory at Pierogi 2000
6. David Poppie’s amazing work with colored pencils at Pavel Zoubok
I don’t typically post work from art aliases, but I really love simplistic complexity in this collection. Devised and executed by the French artist BI67, these canvases, entitled, Prices, are made with stickers and the accompanying titles share the total sum of the canvas. To view more of his work, click here.