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.
While most people's experiences with animals involve encountering the domesticated or captive sort, DALeast depicts an animal world far from the civilized, cute and cuddly version we humans like to imagine in his current solo show, "The Laten Photon," at New York City's Jonathan LeVine Gallery. With his abstracted, high-contrast paintings, the Chinese-born, South African-based artist presents a high-intensity drama of predators and prey. Known for his monochromatic street art, in which gleaming, ribbon-like black lines coalesce into expressionistic animal silhouettes, DAL departed from his typical color palette and worked with rich hues of eggplant, indigo and burgundy in addition to his signature tea-stained linen. The title of the exhibition comes from quantum physics, where the photon is defined as a particle that creates light and makes matter visible to the human eye. The title speaks to DAL's continual interest in transformation and evolution.
Chilean artist Alvaro Tapia finds something sinister even in his most innocent subjects. His portrait illustrations feature friends, famous people, artists and others he admires. What lurks beneath the surface in these subjects — something grotesque and often evil — is what most attracts the artist. The end result, however, is far from ugly. Bursting with color and life, his portraits are high-impact. Tapia arranges contrasting colors, vector lines and geometric shapes so that they vibrate off one another. His subjects not only seem alive but ready to jump off the page right at the viewer’s throat.
In Michael Tole's paintings, such as "Diana and Actaeon: Backwards and in Stiletto Boots," the painter recasts mythological scenes through a contemporary lens. In this effort, Tole touches on gender and other cultural issues. The artist says that wardrobe pieces in the above painting are taken from the 2018 Moschino spring/summer line.
In Taylor Schultek’s riveting oil paintings, an urban structure is as much a character as his human subjects. The connection between humanity and environment is often at play, with the art of graffiti often in progress. The artist's own history in graffiti and graphic design seem to converge in building believable backdrops.
