Zin Lim paints sculpted bodies and faces with twinkling eyes before wiping them away with textured paint strokes. While the San Francisco-based artist began his career painting classical nude figures, his work has grown increasingly abstract over the years. Lim leaves just enough figurative details in each piece to give viewers a relatable entry point into the image. The human characters' presence guides us through the expressionistic markings the dominate the rest of the canvas.
Zin Lim paints sculpted bodies and faces with twinkling eyes before wiping them away with textured paint strokes. While the San Francisco-based artist began his career painting classical nude figures, his work has grown increasingly abstract over the years. Lim leaves just enough figurative details in each piece to give viewers a relatable entry point into the image. The human characters’ presence guides us through the expressionistic markings the dominate the rest of the canvas.
Fred Tomaselli's psychedelic painting/collage hybrids have mind-altering tendencies in more ways than one. Over his career, the artist has earned a reputation for blending psychotropic substances with cut-out photos of animals and human parts to create his surreal works of art. Newer pieces shift the focus to more conventional photo collage and acrylic, yet are no less mesmerizing. Colorful and imaginative, Tomaselli's works are like portals to an alternate universe, where his "inquiry into utopia/dystopia - framed by artifice but motivated by the desire for the real - has turned out to be the primary subject".
Manic characters grin wildly in Aaron Johnson's over-the-top, explosive paintings. The Brooklyn-based artist's work overflows with gross-out humor and in-your-face sexuality, which he renders in a color palette of hyperactive, neon acrylics. While paintings on fabric comprise the majority of his work, Johnson has an ongoing series of sculptural sock paintings (made from used, donated socks from his social media followers, mind you) that evoke both assemblages and D.I.Y. puppetry. Darkly funny, Johnson's gag-filled work nods to the over-saturation of violent and sexual imagery in our media culture with its blatant absurdity.
With “A Volta,” Allouche Gallery looks at the evolution of the legendary b-boy and street artist Doze Green through paintings and drawings. In the show, viewers find an artist who influenced a generation and a transformative moment in his practice upon moving to Brazil. Green was most recently featured in Hi-Fructose's print magazine with Volume 35.
