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The New Contemporary Art Magazine
Portrait artist Mary Jane Ansell may dress up her female subjects in the traditional European fashions of men, but they evoke a strong femininity. Her near-hyper realistic oil paintings portray young girls who step into the roles of regents and soldiers, roles that women were not eligible for. Their clothing, such as the red coat, also takes on a modern connotation in fashion as being punk and fashionably forward. However, her subjects' personalities are more refined than tomboyish, with a delicate beauty in the way she draws eyes and features. Ansell's newer works mix such political elements with those of nature, such as flowers and animal skulls. Take a look at new latest paintings for "Liberty's Arc," after the jump.
The Winnipeg Art Gallery (WAG) in Canada is currently exhibiting some of hyperrealist sculptor Ron Mueck's most poignant works to date. The Australia born artist, recently featured in HF Vol. 30, is well known for his larger-than-life fiberglass portrait sculptures of life's key stages. This new exhibition, named "NGC@WAG: Ron Mueck" for its cooperation with the National Gallery of Canada, offers attendees a rare look at the process behind Mueck's work, including his original maquettes and studies.
In our current issue, we highlight Contemporary hyperrealist sculptor, Kazuhiro Tsuji, including his larger than life piece titled “Portrait of Abraham Lincoln". Starting on Tuesday, June 2nd, DAX Gallery in Costa Mesa, CA will showcase the piece for public viewing. In anticipation of the event, DAX has offered us an exclusive look behind the scenes of Tsuji's process and preparation. See more after the jump!
One of South Korea's eminent realist painters, Kwang-Ho Lee's "Touch" series brings out the tactile qualities of exotic cacti. The desert plants blossom in oblong shapes in Lee's large-scale works, inviting viewers to examine their thorns, fluff, and smooth skin. Some coiled and others upright and phallic-looking, each plant takes on its own personality. Lee's paintings are easy to mistake for photographs at a first glance, but his stylized compositions take his work beyond straightforward documentation.
San Francisco based artist Joel Daniel Phillips examines the characters living in his neighborhood in larger than life-sized drawings. His subjects include street vendors and the homeless, each with a unique personality that Phillips captures in hyper-realistic detail. His ongoing series explores themes like how these individuals use objects to retain a sense of home, and promotes social justice.
Italian artist Marco Grassi applies his hyperrealist painting chops to portraits that are slightly unconventional. While he paints mostly young, beautiful female subjects in traditional studio settings, his work becomes remarkable for the surreal accoutrements with which he adorns his characters. In one piece, a model's back becomes porous with a carved, baroque design — her body hollow like a doll's. In other paintings, he experiments with colorful body paint, tattoos, fabrics, and even a translucent, shield-like piece of futuristic jewelry. Throughout his portrait series, Grassi uses his skills with oils to create convincing illusions that make it easy for viewers to suspend disbelief.
Kip Omolade's "Diovadiova Chrome" portrait series brings out the striking qualities of the human face. The artist takes inspiration from African folk art forms such as the ivory masks of Benin and the Ife bronze heads of Nigeria. He considers his work a contemporary exploration of the mask as a conduit between mankind and the spirit world. For his updated take on this timeworn subject matter, Omilade makes plaster casts of models' faces and uses them to create resin sculptures, which he coats with chrome and embellishes with fake eyelashes. The masks serve as reference material for Omolade's hyperrealist oil paintings, which pay homage to African cultural traditions in a novel way.
Kevin Peterson's subjects exist somewhere between a wintery city and sunny Houston, where the artist is currently based. Do a web search on his art, and the response is polarizing. Hyperrealism has become a controversial art form- most admire the excruciating detail, while others disagree with copying tags or photographs. Without question, Petersons' portraits of children in a graffiti-colored world are emotional and ironic. His current show at Thinkspace gallery, "Remnants", portrays his own fantasy-urban jungle.
Images of an infant’s face marked with a plastic surgeon’s pen and an elderly woman with wrinkled skin that glows green under the light of a tanning bed are just some of the deeply disturbing images that will be displayed at Gusford Gallery as part of Oliver Jones's solo exhibition, “Love the Skin You’re In,” opening September 12.
The hyper-realistic oil paintings of Joshua Suda will make you question whether you’re looking at a painting or a photograph as he recreates the features of the human face with stunning accuracy. Going beyond replicating life, many of Suda’s pieces also have elements of surrealism. Bizarre compositions, mixed with Suda’s impressive attention to detail, result in uncanny contortions of the human face. He often breaks the fourth wall, playing with the foreground and background to make it appear that the subject is bursting through the surface of the piece. In other works, he paints to mimic other media, replicating the detail of everything from pencil drawings to old photographs and contrasting them with how the subjects might appear to the human eye.
Fluffy, soft and vulnerable, the bunny may be the ultimate metaphor for the naiveté of childhood. New Orleans-based artist Alex Podesta creates mannequin-like sculptures of men dressed in bunny suits, often playing with stuffed rabbits, as an examination of early childhood development and the formation of self-awareness. Presented as doppelgangers or gangs of identical multiples, Podesta's characters follow the trails of their curiosity, playing and experimenting with the limits of the world around them. "In all of my recent work I have culled the rich fantasies, daydreams, misconceptions and experiences of childhood and re-contextualized them through the filters of adulthood, experience and education," wrote Podesta in his artist statement. Simultaneously unsettling and endearing, the adult characters in his work shed the pretensions of seriousness and masculinity, engaging in free-form play that often becomes lost as one comes of age.
New York-based artist Edie Nadelhaft has an interest in exploring the several different dimensions of varying biological surfaces. In her recent series, "Flesh," the artist paints and draws her own hands. Working with a hyperrealist technique that almost breaks down into abstraction, the artist portrays the surfaces of her extremities with a detailed yet distorted perspective.