Selected Works by Contemporary Artists and Photographers
Super Future Kid will be displaying some her latest whimsical and luscious paintings at London’s The Other Art Fair with the Jester Jacques Gallery. The Other Art Fair located in Marylebone Road, brings art lovers and collectors directly with emerging artists. Find out more about Super Future Kid in our Q&A.
25th April to 28th April 2013
I did these illustrations for a small project based on films I like and wanted to illustrate, as my love of portraiture is one of the main aspects to my work. I wanted these portraits to deal with a likeness but also had a playful feeling too. As well as recognizing the characters, I wanted the viewer to bring their own memories and thoughts about the films to the drawings.
See more from Ryan Humphrey
20 April – 16 June 2013
Taking its title from critic John Ruskin’s third volume of Modern Painters Thomas’ latest series of paintings linger on the Romantic sublime and quote from a historical obsession with the End of the World. Whilst these works reference the essence of the sublime they also suggest that perhaps modern Man has conquered all of nature apart from his own. With a Utopian quest fueled by a para-religious pursuit of technological advancement perhaps it is the machines that will win.
Thomas continues to explore the fictions man has created in order to deal with his existential predicament and the attempt to fill, as Jung described it, ‘the God-shaped hole’. These timeless landscapes are silent and menacing with mysterious crystalline growths. Devoid of human presence yet witnessed by surveillance cameras, the only company in this desolation is a space ship or homing beacon. The glitches in the representation of the skies seem to betray the unreliability of reality. Located simultaneously between Romanticism and science fiction Thomas’ paintings describe unstable worlds that fuse past, present and future.
Have a read of our interview with Lex Thomas here.
Arhat, which derives its name from the ancient language of Sanskrit, translates to ‘a being who has achieved a state of enlightenment.’ On show will be large paintings, whose source imagery is drawn from an ancient tale of Buddhist monks confronting decay and death. Demonic monsters and decrepit monks in traditional robes and paraphernalia wander psychedelic landscapes. Standing tall and center amongst these large paintings will be a monumental new sculpture depicting a massive skull enveloped in flames, whose antecedents can be found in Buddhist statuary located in temples throughout Japan. The show also contains Murakami’s optimistic and bright, smiling flower faces with his dark and brooding skull imagery and self-portraits featuring Murakami and his beloved dog ‘Pom’.
Via Hi-Fructose
Lucky, Oil on canvas, 3 panels, 230 x 390 cm, 2010
This painting hints at the darker side of nature with 3 potential predators preying on a mouse in front of an atomic night sky. Seductive, garish flowers attract the viewer but once drawn in one finds oneself the victim of the owls’ gaze.There is a certain ambiguity in this painting and a tension, despite 3 oversize predators looming in the background, the mouse has a glint in its eye is distanced from its pursuers by a screen of sweet-peas and Dahlias. Quite often we find ourselves using beauty to mask fears. Who’s the lucky one then?
See more from Boudicca Collins
Whiteread’s sculpture is predicated on casting procedures, and the traces left on the sacrificial objects and spaces from which the final inverse form is derived. She casts from everyday objects as well as from the space beneath or around furniture and architecture, using single materials such as rubber, dental plaster, and resin to record every nuance. Detached 1, Detached 2, and Detached 3 (2012) render the empty interior of a garden shed in concrete and steel. Cast from generic wooden sheds, the large-scale sculptures render negative space into solid form, and the prosaic into something fantastically disquieting.
On show at the Gagosian until May 25th 2013
Trolley Tower was a sculpture I made for an exhibition in Motorcade/FlashParade in Bristol. What I found worked really well in the making of this piece was that I was able to work on site. I spent several days in Bristol accumulating objects from the surrounding area and building upwards. Often with these pieces there isn’t the opportunity to make the work in the gallery, ‘Trolley Tower’ is therefore a result of working under the most suitable conditions for the ceramic works and remains one of my favorites of this series.
See more of Anna’s Sculptures here
Lex Thomas, born in 1972, gained a BA degree in Social Science at the University of Greenwich before studying Fine Art for three years at the University of the West of England followed by a Postgraduate Diploma at Chelsea Collage of Art. She has been shortlisted for the Lynn Painter-Stainers Prize, the Rising Stars Prize and won third place at the Woolgather Art Prize.
Is the medium you use more important than the subject matter/message?
I’m open to a multidisciplinary approach as there are various ways to explore the same themes, but paint is, for me, an endlessly fascinating medium. I find the glossy buttery substance of paint very beguiling and the origin of pigments and the alchemical recipes and processes involved a kind of wonder. I like getting my hands dirty; grinding resin, making glaze. But ideally I’m interested in a marriage of ideas and process. I find it interesting to draw attention to both the painting as representation as well as its physicality and the act of painting. These ideas are integral to my work. I like the Bacon quote: ‘the paint is the image and the image is the paint’. You can’t avoid acknowledging the history of painting, whether it’s embedded in the work or tackled head on. It’s another of its appealing complexities. Continue reading “Q&A with Lex Thomas”
April 12th to May 4th 2013
Travis Louie’s hypnotic “portraiture” is compelling for its blend of the hyper realistic with the blatantly unreal. Fantastical creatures gaze out from paintings so technically refined (using transparent layers of acrylic paint over a tight graphite drawing on a smooth flat surface) that they look uncannily like old photographs. Adding to the discomfiting presence these animal/monster like chimeras have are the human expressions- even if the creature in the paintings looks a bit bizarre, it also looks spookily familiar as well. Often in his work Louie seeks to create mythological ancestors…long-lost “relatives” captured in Victorian cabinet card/ tint type images.
His own interest in Noir imagery, German Expressionism, personal dream imagery, (not to mention B movie monsters!) as well as his recent discovery of old photographs of “human oddities” that were not from sideshow photographs, but rather photographs that documented that person’s “normal life” (i.e. the famous photo of John Merrick (The Elephant Man) dressed in formal evening wear for a night at the theater) all combined in this latest series of works to create an incredible series of portraits that you may just recognize elements of your own family members in!
For more info please visit Roq La Rue Gallery
11th April – 28th April 2013
Tom Howse’s paintings are a mythological investigation into the sources of understanding and the quests we take to comprehend. He sees a distinct gulf between the world’s knowledge and his own understanding – the paintings being products of absurd and inadequate attempts to make sense of the world. Howse monumentalises figures or objects to bestow them with a greater power, for example in the ‘Big Faces’ works his figures act not only as a surrogate omnipotence but also as a self-admonishing reconciliation for his perceived inadequacies. Howse’s paintings evolve on the canvas provoking questions and uncertainty. Colour and paint work as a language to evolve an image beyond a physical depiction to produce exciting, mysterious, raw and primal work.
For more info please visit the High House Gallery.
Copyright © 2024 The Art Circus