Barbara Rossi (b. 1940, lives and works Chicago IL)
Barbara Rossi is known for meticulous, schematic paintings in which figurative images (bodies, architecture or interiors) are reconstrued and amalgamated into sinuous and protean configurations. Her works often equally evoke crisply-drawn cartoons and the elaborate conceits of art nouveau or Rococo. Rossi was prominent among the Chicago Imagists of the 1960s and 70s, who rebelled against the dominant abstraction of that era in their resumption of figurative styles and subjects.
Helen Johnson (b. 1979, Melbourne)
Australian painter Helen Johnson makes work that is referential, historically agglomerative and acutely self-reflexive. She has explained that “the approaches I take seek an understanding of painting as a loaded medium operating on new terms in a post-medium condition […] Painting is an interesting vehicle for me because it is loaded, neurotic, problematised, a market force, scattered, essentialised and recomplexified, loathed, able to operate simultaneously within and beyond itself, able to be beautiful and horrible at the same time.” Critic Andrew Berardini has noted that “the paths and patterns, textures and tones of all her disparate sources come together with a lissom wrist and soft-hued palette that makes its own meaning”.
Jonathan Gardner (b. 1982 Lexington, KY)
A graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Jonathan Gardner draws on art historical styles—from late modernism and Surrealism to Chicago Imagism—to depict figures oftentimes relaxing in disjointed environments. His pictorial style rests somewhere between realism and abstraction, with an attention to idiosyncratic detail. Gardner’s titles occasionally reference Modernist masterpieces, and a sense of collusion pervades his portrayals of contemporary life.
Sylvia Sleigh (1916-2010, Llandudno, Gwynedd, Wales)
Born in Wales, Sylvia Sleigh trained at Brighton School of Art before moving to New York in the early 1960s, where her realist, figurative paintings found prominence in New York’s feminist art scene. This portrait of artist Felicity Rainnie vividly reflects Sleigh’s harnessing of an art-historical trope (the reclining female nude) to a highly personal context, in a portrait of her friend ‘Flip’. The picture was painted in Sleigh’s bedroom, and presents its subject through a combination of intimacy and crisply decorative stylisation. The patterned bedspread, which extends almost seamlessly across the wallpaper to create a swirling yet flattened backdrop, is a William Morris design of the kind that acquired cult popularity in the 1970s – an effusion of cornflowers and green tendrils. Against this Victorian revivalist imagery, conveying a mood of bohemian domesticity, the image of the naked girl is immediate and unflinching, with the clear depiction of the girl’s tanlines running against any sense of the idealised female nude.
Pieter Schoolwerth (b. 1970, St. Louis, MO)
Pieter Schoolwerth explores the ways in which the ever-changing forces of abstraction in the world affect the task of representing the human body. He is interested in depicting the figure grounded in the ubiquitous glowing screens of digital technology, and the way in which this mediated reality affects our sense of space, time and attention span. Schoolwerth has developed a highly idiosyncratic process using photography and image-processing that results in woven compositions of human- object hybridity printed out on canvas. A final layer of painterly interruptions is applied on top of this pixelated surface, activating the canvas print by reiterating its inherent materiality. He studied at the California Institute of the Arts and lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
Ryan Mosley (b. Chesterfield, UK, 1980)
Ryan Mosley trained at the University of Huddersfield and Royal College of Art, London. Imbued with a sense of the carnivalesque, Mosley’s canvases conjure a surreal realm of imaginary characters and enigmatic rituals that speak dually of prehistory and science fiction. Mosley has stated that his works “exude the feeling that the characters are having a conversation, or are on stage during a performance. The process is quite organic: sometimes it starts with an idea for narrative, then sometimes, according to the process of the painting, the narrative arrives.”
Mernet Larsen (b. 1940, Houghton, MI)
Mernet Larsen lives and works in Tampa, Florida, and New York. Her precise geometric compositions translate everyday scenes into an uncanny aesthetic that simultaneously evokes the faceted or compartmentalized space of Cubist painting, folded origami models, and primitive computer graphics. Traditional perspective is parodied and problematized in her works, in scenes that hint at unknowable narratives or events. Larsen has held over thirty solo exhibitions including a three decade retrospective at Deland Museum of Art, Deland, FL.
Ahmed Alsoudani (b. 1975, Baghdad)
The paintings of Ahmed Alsoudani often obliquely address the subject of war, reimagining scenes of conflict through art-historical lenses as disparate as Goya and George Grosz. As a child, the artist fled to Syria; and his art interweaves his personal experiences with more general references to international conflicts and crises. His paintings’ complex, metamorphic accumulations of imagery border regularly on the phantasmagorical, conjuring myriad associations. Alsoudani graduated from Yale School of Art in 2008. A solo exhibition of his work took place in 2013 at the Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix, and the Portland Museum of Art in Portland, Maine. His work has also been featured in the Iraq Pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale in 2011 and at the 2007 Gwangju Biennale. Alsoudani lives and works in New York.
Nicole Eisenman (b. 1965, Verdun, France)
American Nicole Eisenman’s figurative oil paintings toy with themes of sexuality, comedy and caricature. Their compositions often compress multiple layers of history, or art history, into dense multi-figure tableaux reminiscent of history paintings. In this new work from 2015, they translates the luminous colours and flattened design of cartoons or animations into the language of Modernist painting. Banal reality is also succinctly and wryly encapsulated in the charging phone that sits beside the figure’s bed in sleek two-dimensional profile, almost reduced to a pictogram. Eisenman graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1987. With A.L. Steiner, they are the co-founder of the queer/feminist curatorial initiative Ridykeulous.
Yamashita Kikuji (1919-1986, Tokushima, Shikoku Island)
Yamashita Kikuji came to prominence in Japan as a painter, printmaker, collagist and teacher. He graduated from the Kagawa Prefectural Technical School in 1937, and later studied under the Surrealist painter Ichiro Fukuzawa in Tokyo. In 1939 he was drafted into the Japanese Imperial military to fight in China, and memories of what he saw and did as a soldier there, including killing a Chinese prisoner, indelibly informed his later artistic production. The artist recalled of his Second World War experiences: “I had become an animal masquerading as a human being, capable of committing savage acts, but unable to see my own savagery”. Kikuji was committed to using his art to depict social injustices, and his work became emblematic of the Reportage style of painting, in which young artists expressed Socialist concerns in a style combining Social Realism and Surrealism.
Jana Euler (b. 1982, Friedberg, Germany)
Jana Euler’s art revolves around the concept of identity as a fragile and mutable construct. Her paintings employ symbolism and translucent layering to encode multiple meanings. Mediating between and conflating figurative and abstract idioms, Euler’s work evinces recurring formal and conceptual concerns – specifically the interface between contemporary technology and art history. Euler was born in 1982 in Friedberg, Germany. She studied at the Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste— Städelschule, Frankfurt, from 2002 to 2008, and at the Glasgow School of Art in 2007. Euler lives and works in Brussels.
Co Westerik (b. 1924, The Hague)
Co Westerik studied at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague, where he also taught life drawing from 1958 to1971. An expert on the human form, his poetic compositions of everyday situations are conveyed through lyrical, delicate brushstrokes, and evoke a sensibility of loneliness and sorrow. The flattened, distorted and truncated anatomies transport explicit episodes of everyday life into a dreamlike narrative realm. The sexualized body – a naked figure outdoors, or a naked woman lying on a bare mattress – is mapped onto a decorative plane, its contours or orifices reimagined in strangely lyrical terms. The evocatively-subdued coloration and distorted anatomies of Westerick’s scenes invoke the quixotic imagery of Edmund Dulac or other Symbolist painters, investing ‘kitchen sink’ realism (as epitomised by Sickert) with a contrary quality of magical realism. Making work in his nineties, Westerik lives alternately in Rotterdam and the South of France.
Rodel Tapaya (b. 1980, Rodriguez, Rizal, Philippines)
Tapaya has come to prominence in recent years for ambitious and complex paintings that harness folk narratives and the aesthetic of ‘exoticism’ to contemporary reality. Employing various media and eclectic styles, his large-scale compositions evoke traditional decorative arts while forming elaborate allegories of time, history and the imagination: “My works are inspired by the folk narratives series that are very rich in colour, figure, motifs and patterns. What I will do next is to incorporate the use of negative space as a symbolic and visual device”.
Hayv Kahraman (b. 1981, Baghdad)
The art of Hayv Kahraman encompasses drawing, painting and sculpture. Drawing influence from both arcane and everyday sources, she dramatizes issues surrounding female identity – especially the effects of war on women – while also testing the decorative and expressive potential of her medium. Stylistic points of reference include Persian miniatures, art nouveau, and Arabic calligraphy. Kahraman lives and works in San Francisco.
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