Honor Fraser Gallery in Los Angeles is currently presenting Beaut-esque, an exhibition of new paintings by Queens-based artist Yi Chen. The artist’s process begins by culling images from popular advertisements and fashion magazines and selecting distinctive facial characteristics from both human and mammalian figures. He then rearranges these physical features to create a hybridized race, disregarding color, age, gender and even species. These composite figures are then painted with varying degrees of detail, and set in a background or landscape of solid color fields.

The artist’s paintings reflect the heterogeneity and interconnectedness of global culture. As stated in the press release, Chen’s “concept of hybridization and mutation formulate a tense balance in his work, combining enticing beauty and repelling grotesqueries that result in magnetic paintings.”

Chen attended the Affiliated Art High School of Central Art Academy in Beijing before receiving his B.F.A. from Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in 2000. He then completed his M.F.A. at Purchase College State University of New York in 2003. He has shown work at Marianne Boesky Gallery and Plum Blossoms Gallery in New York and will have a solo show later this year at Gallery Beijing Space in Beijing.

Currently on view at DiverseWorks in Houston, TX is a group show entitled Solution. Often, but not always, group exhibitions are classified within the hierarchy of the contemporary art world as, well, much less important/prestigious/notable– you pick the adjective– than solo shows, but sometimes a group show is actually an explosive culmination of nearly everything and everyone that keeps us interested in art. Such is the case with Solution. In its last week (on view until April 18th), Solution features the work of Nina Katchadourian, Jeffrey Gibson, Christopher K. Ho, the performance collective My Barbarian, Jeanine Oleson, Joseph Smolinski and Michael Waugh. Curated by Janet Phelps, whose resume includes conceiving the NADA Art Fair, the exhibition is a manifestation of work made by artists whom Phelps saw as investigators of progress throughout their varied bodies of work created over the years. This somewhat loose curatorial theme gave way for these artists to create or display work that is made in every medium imaginable and which speaks precisely and broadly to all manner of social, political, geographical, anthropologic and art historical ideas.

Christopher K. Ho is showing three works, including the split-screen projection Lesbian Mountains in Love, wherein he deals with “a closer look at temporality” creating a playful, yet heart-wrenching love affair between between Mount Rainier and El Popo (an active volcano in Mexico City). Ho gives voices to the two great natural wonders through texts borrowed from novels of Nicholas Sparks.

Jeanine Olsen’s work includes documentation from her recent public art project The Great New York Smudge, in which she attempts to “smudge”, or cleanse, the city of negative energy, by burning sage in historic proportion and waving it about.

Joseph Smolinski shows a new animated video and drawing entitled Taking Back the Jetty, based on pressure by oil companies who want to drill near Robert Smithson’s 1970 work Spiral Jetty in Utah’s Great Salt Lake.

Palestinian artist Nida Sinnokrot is currently exhibiting in this year’s Sharjah Biennial, which runs until May 16th throughout several venues in the Emirate. His powerful sculpture, Ka (JCB), seen above, is constructed of two symmetrical JCB backhoe arms. With this symbolic placement, the artist invokes the Egyptian concept of life force, or ka, signified in hieroglyphics by 2 raised arms with the palms stretched outward. This commanding work serves as both a monument to future peace and a comment on the construction boom taking place in the Middle East.

Of Flame and Splendour is the title of a new exhibition at Perry Rubenstein Gallery in New York City. The exhibition marks the debut solo exhibition for artist Kamrooz Aram at the gallery, featuring new paintings and drawings. The gallery states, “Aram explores such diverse themes as new age mysticism, the glorification of violence, and the idealization of revolutionary, religious and nationalist ideologies, most significantly through an investigation of contemporary Orientalism.” The artist’s work contains an iconography that is often centered on the concept of contemporary Orientalism, a term that refers to the generalization of the East as interpreted by the West, often resulting in a misunderstood cultural portrayal. The work, which somewhat abstracts any direct iconography associated with the East, features references to Persian miniatures and patterns, Christian and Islamic religious imagery, and includes elements from contemporary pop culture.

Aram is an Iranian-born artist that currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. The artist has participated in several major group exhibitions, with works included in the Busan Biennale and at the Orlando Museum of Art. The artist has also completed several solo exhibitions with works on view at Wilkinson Gallery in London, and Oliver Kamm/5BE Gallery in NYC.

Greta Waller, a current MFA graduate student at UCLA, is currently presenting her first Los Angeles-based solo exhibition with David Salow Gallery. Titled One Item Or Less, the exhibition features a large collection of modest still life paintings in oil on canvas. The artist’s reductive paintings are subtly steeped with art historical references, and willingly defiant of many current artistic trends. The artist’s seductively rendered paintings play up formal qualities of composition, texture, and color palette rather than placing an emphasis on content. The press release states, “Painting what is at hand, without too much deliberation or regard for subtext or grafted-on meaning, is a choice that intrinsically foregrounds technique, perhaps even at the expense of perceived prestige.” This statement indicates the artist’s willingness to move against current artistic trends, which can heavily focus on content and theory, in order to focus on the act of painting as a primary concern.

Greta Waller has completed one additional solo exhibition, Greta Waller: Contemporary Antiquarian at Umbrella Arts Gallery in New York. The artist has also participated in Water, Water, Everywhere at Washington Art Association in Washington, CT and ARTVIEW at The National City Museum of Washington D.C.

Currently on view at Jack the Pelican Presents in Brooklyn, NY are new paintings by Sholem Krishtalka in the exhibition titled, An Opera for Drella. The exhibition’s title is derivative of Lou Reed’s Songs for Drella, and refers to the fact that Andy Warhol adopted this name as a combination of Dracula and Cinderella. The resulting work is an investigation of possible scenarios that took place during Warhol’s lifetime, which resulted from his homosexuality. While no part of these stories were ever documented in pictures or on film, they do exist as prevalent gossip. The artist further blurs this narrative by substituting parts the historical fictional with personal experiences. The artist has stated, ” I am deeply interested in examining the intersection between personal and public histories. To put it another way, I wish to explode individual, personal narratives so that they achieve the scale and importance of grander social narratives.”

Sholem Krishtalka is based in Toronto, and received his MFA from York University in 2006. The artist has completed several solo exhibitions in Canada, including Wish You Were Here at Paul Petro Multiples and Small Works and Idiot Sketches at Lennox Contemporary Art Gallery and Zsa Zsa Gallery in Toronto. The artist is also a frequent contributor to Xtra! Magazine.

Opening tonight at Deitch Projects‘ 76 Grand Street, New York City space is Pictures of Women, new works by Matt Greene. In his second solo exhibition with the gallery, Greene will present, as the title suggests, representational images of women. The large scale works blend formal concerns such as surface, color and abstracted space, with what the press release states as, “…investigations into the connections between sexual fetish of the female figure, and forms of nature.”

Physically, the works begin as paper collage. The artist then builds the surface through paint and subsequent layers of collage, which are peeled back to reveal earlier incarnations of the work.

The artist has been included in countless international and museum-based exhibitions. Recently, his works were included in Mannerfantasien 2 at COMA in Berlin, Eden’s Edge at the UCLA Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, Fractured Figure at the Deste Foundation in Athens, and Dream Trauma at Kunstalle Vienna.