Polish artist Jacek Yerka's paintings invite us into a world where things are not what they seem. Caves turn into gaping dragons' mouths, houses float above the clouds, and gardens become seemingly infinite puzzles of time and space. The artist blurs the boundaries between the biological and the mechanical, creating strange hybrids of animals, architecture, and geological formations. Yerka began his career making band posters in the 1970s and has been exhibiting his work in Poland for decades.
Polish artist Jacek Yerka’s paintings invite us into a world where things are not what they seem. Caves turn into gaping dragons’ mouths, houses float above the clouds, and gardens become seemingly infinite puzzles of time and space. The artist blurs the boundaries between the biological and the mechanical, creating strange hybrids of animals, architecture, and geological formations. Yerka began his career making band posters in the 1970s and has been exhibiting his work in Poland for decades.
Maja Ruznic’s ghostly oil paintings dwell on memory and ritual. These scenes, at various scales, contain figures wrestling and enacting cerebral themes, each’s softly conveyed narratives seemingly belonging to us all. Her most recent series softens the hues she's used in previous work for more earthly tones.
A skilled hyperrealist painter, Eloy Morales creates large-scale portraits that play with the expressiveness of the human face. Often using himself as a subject, his mural-scale paintings immerse his viewers in the hairs and wrinkles of his subjects. With each face towering over the viewer, the details becomes much more apparent than what we see in our day-to-day interactions with others. Morales often uses the face as a sort of canvas, as well. For many of his self-portraits, he lathers himself in paint to create an interplay of textures. In other pieces, he covers his sitters' visages with props like googly eyes and butterflies. If you find Morales's skills impressive, he frequently teaches painting workshops in Madrid, where he is based.
Javier Arres, an illustrator and graphic designer living in Madrid, Spain, crafts animated GIFs that often depict hyperdetailed, fantastical machines. The artist has his own moniker for these animations: “visual toys.” Whether it’s a wild coffee-maker or a roving entertainment bus, the artist builds GIFs that require dozens of loops to fully comprehend.
Berlin-based illustrator Kaethe Butcher draws girls with fiercely unique personalities. Written words are dropped onto her drawings, revealing the internal thoughts of young women figuring out the complexities of love and life. Her quirky characters are the kind of girls who smoke cigarettes in bath tubs while contemplating their existence in a chaotic world. Many of Butcher's sweet, sensuous drawings border on erotica. Butcher's women waver between losing themselves in passionate throws and drawing away in jealous suspicion. They question their lovers just as they question themselves. The combination of exacting body language, block text and a monotone color palette reinforce her character's inner world as opposed to her physical actions or being.
