German painter Alpay Efe portrays a contemporary beauty in his works, but he isn’t interested in perfection. His paintings of still life, nudes, and modern figures focus instead on the ever so slight smile or the way light touches a form as he sees it. Influenced by Zeitgeist art and pop culture, he paints figuratively and realistically, using primarily oil paint on wood panel. The background in many of Efe’s paintings shows his art studio in Oberhausen, Germany. His studio is what you might expect- towels on the easel, cups of coffee and half-eaten doughnuts, and there is a certain attitude and specificity to the way he captures it. For example, he will attach objects to ropes to make them float and create an interesting shadow. To break the spell of its realism, he adds strips of white masking tape to the piece, bringing the scene to a more tangible realm. “It looks exactly the scene in the studio, as I see it or have seen, and not what the viewer should see them reality,” Efe says. “For what can be seen later in the image shows neither what happened nor what needs to do or go through an artist to make the picture complete. But those same thoughts I find very interesting, and I remember this duality, in which the image shows the working process.”
Iranian painter Ali Esmaeillou reveals haunting parallel universes beneath the pleasant facades of everyday life. In each series of paintings, Esmaeillou explores the psyche of specific archetypes, such as warriors, or digs into the personalities of the characters that compose a particular story, like the great 10th century Persian epic, the Shahnameh.
Berlin-based American artist 
In painting the world around him, Argentinian artist