Brooklyn-based painter Jay Davis is currently exhibiting a new series of paintings with the Shoshana Wayne Gallery in Santa Monica, Calif. Davis creates large acrylic paintings on vinyl that distort reality and space by flattening images and overlaying the painting with geometric patterns. Each painting is meticulously rendered with layers of mysterious symbols and forms, some of which are more ambiguous than others. Davis was[…..]
New York-based artist Chris Gentile creates sculptures for the sole purpose of photographing them. The artist exhibits each work as a large photographic C-print, thus distancing the actual object from the viewer. His images promote a conceptual space relation and deception of reality through the ambiguity of form. The artist constructs the objects specifically for the photograph, creating a co-dependency between object and image. Chris[…..]
Chinese artist Shen Shaomin creates new hybrid creatures by reconfiguring and combining the bones of several different animals. Using real bone, the artist is able to produce natural history museum-quality exhibitions that are as interesting scientifically as they are artistically. Each piece represents fables, folklore and mythology, while simultaneously referencing contemporary issues of genetic modification and hyper experimentation in science. His creatures in death reveal[…..]
Opening this month at DreamBagsJaguarShoes (MySpace) in London is an exhibition by the influential Bristol-based artist Mudwig Dans. Dans has developed a reputation as an innovative yet elusive underground artist. Infusing an aesthetic rooted in 20th-century propaganda posters, illustrations and animation, Dans daringly juxtaposes found photographic imagery with experimental computer-based alterations. The subversive images contained in the work reference forms often found in Disney and[…..]
Iranian artist Shirin Neshat addresses the role of women in Islamic society through compelling photo and video work. Her early work consisted of photos of veil-covered women in extremely compromised or uncomfortable positions with writing across their hands or faces. Her more recent work deals primarily with the transition between art and cinema, allowing for a narrative to create particular characters. By basing her video[…..]
In a recent exhibition with the Stephen Wirtz Gallery, artist Ulrike Palmbach created a series of materially rich and ambiguous sculptures that employ a sense of dark humor and illusion. The artist often renders common objects by hand in materials such as felt, muslin, wood and stains. At a distance, each piece is seemingly normal, but, upon further inspection, one can see that each exhibited[…..]
The late Ian Hamilton Finlay is a modernist artist whose work is fundamentally carried through poetry. This month on the one-year anniversary of the artist’s death Victoria Miro Gallery in London will present “The Sonnet is a Sewing-Machine for the Monostich,” which will be the largest exhibition of the artist’s neon works to date. For the length of Finlay’s career, almost 40 years, he created[…..]
