Polish artist Leszek Kostuj paints fanciful worlds populated by otherworldly creatures. There is something playful, childlike, and naive about his work, with its simplified forms and friendly-looking characters. Throughout Kostuj's multi-dimentional compositions, his characters' eyes grab viewers' attention. He paints them in profile, evoking Ancient Egyptian wall paintings. The round, marble-like pupils draw us into his strange, storybook-like universe.
Polish artist Leszek Kostuj paints fanciful worlds populated by otherworldly creatures. There is something playful, childlike, and naive about his work, with its simplified forms and friendly-looking characters. Throughout Kostuj’s multi-dimentional compositions, his characters’ eyes grab viewers’ attention. He paints them in profile, evoking Ancient Egyptian wall paintings. The round, marble-like pupils draw us into his strange, storybook-like universe.
"All people- and nature itself- have distinctive layers," says Pittsburgh based painter Mara Light. Teetering between a classical sense of realism and abstraction, her textured oil paintings aim to explore the layers of ourselves that we show and the others we hide within. Her subject matter is almost always women, whose emotions permeate the surface of her work's repetitive layering, scrapes, tears and drips of turpentine over certain areas, a process she enjoys for its unpredictable nature. For her current series, titled "Beneath the Surface," she sees her artistic explorations as more than a way to add visual interest to her work, but also as a metaphor for her personal experiences.
Obesity is gaining legitimacy as a health epidemic, especially in America, the birthplace of the fast food chain. But it's not a new issue for Pop Surrealist painter Ron English. First featured in Hi-Fructose Vol. 12, his colorful anti-corporate and cartoon-inspired works have long addressed his interests in all things mass-produced, including food and our increasing tendency to over eat.
Michael Kvium’s strange, theatrical figures can rarely be confined to a single canvas or container. Taking a cynical eye toward political and social issues, the artist uses the grotesque and the unexpected to put a lens on the Western world. His newer works move between startling sculpture and multi-panel pieces.
Taking influence from Byzantine art and other eras of religious art, Aleksandar Todorovic renders contemporary tech figures as religious icons and social media symbols as sacred, in egg tempera and acrylic. Elsewhere, his painted and sculpture works look at consumerism and contemporary global politics. He recently displayed this works under the title “Religion Remastered.”
