Lukas Moll is a queer artist based in Cologne, Germany. His work is deeply rooted in the experiences and struggles of the LGBTQ+ community, aiming to bring visibility to themes like isolation, discrimination, and resilience. He also explores topics such as sexual violence and abuse, using art as a medium for healing and advocacy.
Read moreBIOPIC | Viktoria Savenkova →
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Viktoria Savenkova is a talented artist known for her evocative and psychological portraits. Her work often explores themes of inner turmoil, human emotions, and societal expectations. She uses her art to delve into the complexities of the human experience, creating pieces that invite deep reflection and conversation.
Savenkova portrays the tension between an individual's inner thoughts and outward expressions. Her paintings often reflect the struggle between personal desires and societal expectations.
Many of her works highlight the fragility of human emotions. She captures raw, unfiltered moments of vulnerability, allowing viewers to connect on a deeply emotional level.
A recurring motif in her art is the metaphorical "mask" that people wear to conform or protect themselves. This idea symbolizes the dissonance between one's true self and the personas they project to the world.
Her work explores feelings of solitude and the longing for genuine human connection. Through her evocative use of colors and composition, she conveys both the pain of isolation and the hope for understanding.
Some of her artworks critique social behavior and collective norms, inviting reflection on how societal pressures shape individual lives.
Savenkova's art often uses contrasting elements--such as light and shadow or sharp and soft textures--to symbolize the complexity of these themes. Her ability to convey profound meaning through visual storytelling makes her work resonate deeply with viewers.
Like Savenkova, many contemporary artists explore themes of personal and collective identity, including race, gender, and cultural heritage. However, Savenkova's focus on the psychological depth of individual emotions sets her apart from artists who emphasize broader social narratives.
Savenkova's art resonates with universal themes but stands out for its deeply personal and emotional perspective.
33PA Showroom | Tim Okamura →
Tim Okamura investigates identity, the urban environment, metaphor, and cultural iconography through a unique method of painting. Urban life and hip-hop has greatly influenced Okamura's subject matter in his paintings - he often blends classical techniques of oil painting with the spontaneity of spray painted graffiti, combining the academic "realism" of his portrait and figure painting with modern graphics set in contemporary urban environments. The juxtaposition of the rawness and urgency of street art and academic ideals has created a visual language that acknowledges a traditional form of story-telling through portraiture, while infusing the work with resonant contemporary motifs.
Okamura has had several solo exhibitions in New York and Canada. His work has been shown in several prominent group exhibitions, including After Matisse/Picasso at the MOMA PS.1 in Queens, New York, as well as the BP Portrait Awards Exhibition at London's National Portrait Gallery. Okamura was invited to The White House in 2015 to honor artists whose work addresses issues of social justice, and received a letter of commendation from President Joe Biden. His 2020 portrait of Toni Morrison was chosen for the cover of Time Magazine and his portrait of Dr. Anthony Fauci was acquired by the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC. In 2021, the New York Historical Society acquired his 2021 painting Nurse Tracey, which was featured in the exhibition Dreaming Together.
Okamura - a recipient of the 2004 Fellowship in Painting from the New York Foundation for the Arts – has also had his paintings featured in several films including Pieces of April (InDiGent), School of Rock (Paramount), Jersey Girl (Miramax), and most prominently in Prime (Universal), a romantic comedy about a young New York painter starring Uma Thurman and Meryl Streep. Okamura's work is also notable in Ethan Hawke’s The Hottest State.
Aidamaris Román Tejera | Forgotten Hearts →
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One of a Kind BJD Dolls are made using the finest and silkiest porcelain. Fully articulated body with leather lining on every joint for a smoother rotation, extensive movement and posing. They feature delicate and detailed expressive hands. Industrial carbon steel springs mechanism. Doll is painted with permanent china colors and her body is all polished and blushed with the same paints that are used in ceramics and porcelains that resist scratches and will not fade. Hand painted face features detailed down to individual eyelashes and eyebrows. Includes a hand made candy like clear stand and hand made box.
Aidamaris Román Tejera creates works of art that blend realism and fantasy, exploring spirituality and emotional depth through luminous and ethereal imagery.
Pippa Hale-Lynch | Submerged Figures
Pippa Hale-Lynch’s paintings use figures and portraits to capture intimate moments of solitude and grief. She is a contemporary figurative realism artist working primarily with oils. Her works incorporating figures suspended within water capture beauty in fleeting moments of solitude.
More recently she is exploring the theme of grief, stemming from her mother's tragic and untimely death when she was 20. At first glance, the playful use of the sugary jam can be mistaken for blood, a visual representation of the wounds left by the destruction of grief experienced by the sitter.
Pippa uses techniques learned over 12+ years of practice and training in traditional representational drawing and painting. She uses herself, her family, and loved ones as sitters to best reflect the intimacy of the work.
Amy Ordoveza
Amy Ordoveza is a contemporary realist artist who creates detailed, imaginative still-life paintings. She carefully crafts and arranges the delicate cut-paper plants, animals, and architectural elements that she depicts in her oil paintings. The fragility of the paper objects suggests impermanence while Ordoveza’s close observation and meticulous handling of paint hint at their significance. Her compositions evoke a sense of beauty and mystery in ordinary surroundings.
Ordoveza received her MFA from the New York Academy of Art and her BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art. Her historical influences include 17th century Dutch still life painters including Rachel Ruysch and Jan Davidsz de Heem as well as surrealists such as Kay Sage and René Magritte. Ordoveza’s work is included in the Lunar Codex and the Nova Scotia Art Bank and has been featured in publications and websites including American Art Collector, PoetsArtists, and Booooooom!
Pauline Aubey
Paulina Aubey’s LEGO portraits ingeniously merge popular form with popular content in order to question our relationship to celebrity. Having begun her artistic career working with pastels, Aubey’s passion for pop culture inspired her to try her hand with a more popular medium: LEGO bricks. She has elevated this unusual medium to the status of fine art, creating expressive portrayals of contemporary icons and the idols of her 1980s childhood. Her portraits of religious figures, movie characters, and pop stars—including David Bowie and Marilyn Monroe—blur the distinction between figurative and abstract art. They appear highly detailed from a distance and become pixelated upon closer inspection; this viewing experience prompts audiences to reflect on how much we can ever truly understand our idols. In order to create her portraits, Aubey chooses a digital image of her subject and manipulates it to create the desired expression and color scheme before selecting appropriate blocks of LEGO to build the work.
Gemma Di Grazia | 10 QUESTIONS
1. What is different from your art work than other artists in contemporary realism?
Unlike still life, landscape painting or botanicals, my flowers are my live models. They have personality, express emotion and have a narrative. The story of my flowers is a dialog between color and the shapes they create; and the conversations can be harmonious, complementary, or energetic.
2. How important is process versus the end product?
The process of painting provides such joy. I love the fluidity of the oil paint, and the satisfying control of my brush. The discovery of the palette as it reveals itself is like watching an engrossing movie. Time doesn’t exist when I’m painting, I’m simply in a zone, a headspace of hundreds of intentional decisions flowing from my mind. The end product is, as some say, “when I stop painting.” To conclude a painting is to finish a good book: resolved and better for the experience.
3. What is your goal when creating contemporary realism?
My goal is to sell my work, so I may afford to continue painting! I heard Audry Flack say recently that art is healing; that can be for the artist and the viewer. Flowers are life-affirming, and beautiful. Beauty itself is healing, whether creating or appreciating it.
4. What do you like best about your work?
My new series of floral paintings fuse representational florals with elements of design. It is exciting and hopeful to make work with the goal of expressing beauty.
5. What do you like least about your work?
I have many more ideas than I can paint. Editing is crucial. My painting process takes time, so I never have enough.
6. Why contemporary realism?
I enjoy painting what I see, then putting it through my filter and express the beauty.
7. Which are your greatest influences?
My parents, who were artists.
8. What is your background?
A family of artists contributed to my early interest in art. My grandmother, mother and father all attended Cooper Union for art. My mother was a painter and my father, Thomas Di Grazia was a published illustrator and painter. I attended LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and then earned a B.F.A. from Hunter College. I also studied at S.V.A., Parsons, and the Art Students League of New York.
9. Name 3 artists you’d like to be compared to in the history books:
Instead of artists from history, I’d rather be along side the many artist friends whose work I admire.
10. Which is your favorite contemporary realism artwork today?
It is difficult to choose just one particular favorite contemporary realism painting, but some of my favorite contemporary artists are: Xenia Hausner, Hope Gangloff, Audry Flack, and Janet Fish.
Di Grazia’s representational paintings are a celebration of color, light and form. Her compositions exhibit formal aesthetic elements, whether using soft pastels or oil paints, she uses a luminous and vibrant color palette that transform the formal foundation into something exciting and dynamic. Her work seeks to evoke the life-affirming beauty inherent in the natural world, and reveal what is extraordinary in the familiar. Ultimately, it’s not the subject matter that interests Gemma, it’s the tone, the gesture, color, light, scale and composition, that continue to absorb and inspire her.
Featured
Vicki Sullivan | 2022 Year in Review
What were some of the highlights in your art career?
My painting The Stolen Songline of Miss Roselands 2 year Old, was selected as a Finalist in the Kennedy Prize for Beauty. The Salon des Refusés is the S.H. Ervin Gallery’s ‘alternative’ selection from works entered into the annual Archibald and Wynne Prizes & was also a Semi-finalist in the Doug Moran prize for Portraiture.
My work was also included for a fourth time in an Exhibition at the MEAM Museum in Barcelona.
I was given the commission to paint the retiring Principle of Mentone Grammar School, Mal Cater and also Former Judge Alan Smith for the Riverhead Court, in New York.
Did your art sell?
I sold quite a lot of paintings, heading all over the world and was included in some great collections.
Were you published in any art magazines or periodicals?
My work was published in International Artist magazine and American Art Collector magazine as a Third Prize winner of their competition “Favourite subjects” and had three paintings featured in Fine Art Connoisseur magazine. I was also published in the Sydney Morning Herald, the Age Newspaper and the Herald Sun Newspaper, all huge broadsheet newspapers.
What were some of the pitfalls?
My pitfall this year was a literal one, I fell over while plein air painting on the beach and broke my foot, so I spent time on crutches and in a moon boot but I am thankfully recovering now.
How has social media affected your daily practice?
Social Media has been great this year with quite a few paintings finding new homes from me posting them on social Media.
What are you looking forward to in 2023?
In 2023 I am looking forward to travelling to the USA where I have been invited to film a portrait demonstration video with Streamline and I am looking forward to meeting Eric Rhodes and being interviewed by him. Then, a friend and I will be travelling to New York and Boston to visit art galleries and crawl our way around some of the best paintings in the USA.
All in all a lot has been happening this year and next year will be a fun adventure.
Vicki Sullivan’s paintings draw from a deep appreciation of beauty. Sullivan is a contemporary classical realist combining the aesthetics of the old masters with a modern edge. Finding her inspiration in people and nature Sullivan chooses oil paint as her medium. Her love of vibrant and opulent colour often requires employing many layers of paint to make her colour lavish and glowing as if from the inside. Chiaroscuro brings drama to her work, which often uses symbolism while exploring the universality of myth and emotional memories. Her work aims to stir the imagination and create an emotional connection with her viewer.
Elizabeth Barden two figurative realism paintings chosen for Astrobotic lunar landing
Painting by Elizabeth Barden exhibited at Flinders Lane Gallery in Australia, February 2020.
Key points:
About 5,000 digitized works are being sent in various payloads to the moon.
Barden is among a handful of Australian artists selected for the Peregrine Collection.
The project is funded by Canada-based physicist and philanthropist Dr Samuel Peralta.
Many of the artworks were contributed from PoetsArtists’ publications courtesy of Didi Menendez.
Far North Queensland artist Elizabeth Barden has exhibited all over the world. Now her work is heading to the Moon.
Ms Barden is one of a handful of Australian women chosen for the Artists On The Moon Project.
About 1200 artists from across the globe have been selected to contribute to two collections — the Peregrine Collection and the Nova Collection — that will make their debuts on the Moon this year.
"I just woke up to a crazy email one day that I was to be included in this collection of artists who, in effect, are representing planet Earth," Barden said.
"That is something quite unique and a bit whimsical to me … literally out of this world."
Barden's works were selected as part of the Peregrine Collection of contemporary works of figurative realism.
By Didi Menendez in Peregrine Collection
38 pages, published 2/2/2020
Publication of works curated by Dr. Elaine Melotti Schmidt and Didi Menendez.
THE PEREGRINE COLLECTION
Viktoria Savenkova | Experience, 2018 | Oil on Canvas | 39 2/5 × 23 3/5 in | 100 × 60 cm
Yunior Hurtado Torres CIVILIZATION, 2020 | Oil on canvas | 71 × 71 in | 180.3 × 180.3 cm
Vicki Sullivan | Moon Goddess, 2019 | Oil on linen | 17 7/10 × 13 in | 45 × 33 cm
Irvin Rodriguez | Woman In Black, 2015 | Oil on linen | 40 × 30 × 1 in
News Release : On a Time Capsule to the Moon with 1200 Artists and One A.I.
TORONTO, ONTARIO (March 11, 2021) – The Peregrine Collection – an assembly of thousands of creative works by over 1200 creative artists and one A.I. – is headed for the Moon.
Coordinated by Dr. Samuel Peralta, the Artists on the Moon (AOTM) project is joining NASA’s scientific payloads on Astrobotic’s Peregrine Mission One, the first commercial launch in history, on a United Launch Alliance (ULA) rocket to Lacus Mortis on the lunar surface. Dr. Peralta, a physicist and entrepreneur, is also an author, whose fiction has hit the Wall Street Journal and USA Today bestseller lists, and whose poetry has won awards worldwide.
“I was fourteen on my first launch, an Antares model rocket kit by powered by an Estes solid-propellant engine the size of my thumb,” said Dr. Peralta. “Now we’re on Astrobotic’s lunar lander on a ULA Vulcan Centaur rocket headed for the Moon. Wow.”
The centerpieces of Dr. Peralta’s payload are the 21 volumes of his own Future Chronicles anthologies, all Amazon bestsellers, and 15 PoetsArtists art magazines and exhibition catalogs, one of which he helmed as guest curator for publisher and art curator Didi Menendez. Each individual volume provided scores of curated contemporary art and short stories for the time capsule.
Together with other art books, anthologies, novels, music, and screenplays - including for the short film Real Artists, which won an Emmy® Award in 2019 - he and his colleagues have digitized literally thousands of art and fiction for the trip to the Moon.
Dr. Peralta noted that between AOTM and its sister project, the Writers on the Moon group coordinated by fellow author Dr. Susan Kaye Quinn, several thousand creative artists and writers are now represented for the lunar journey.
“Our hope is that future travelers who find this capsule will discover some of the richness of our world today,” Dr. Peralta said. “It speaks to the idea that, despite wars and pandemics and climate upheaval, humankind found time to dream, time to create art.”
The Peregrine Collection represents creative artists from all over the globe, including from Canada, the US, the U.K., Ireland, Belgium, Australia, Sri Lanka, Singapore, and the Philippines. It includes a collaborative human-AI work of poetry between Dr. Peralta and OSUN, an OpenAI-based machine programmed by Sri Lankan author and researcher Yudhanjaya Wijeratne.
The Peregrine Collection is among the most diverse collections of contemporary cultural work assembled for launch into space, and is believed to be the first-ever project to place the work of women artists on the Moon.
The digitized artwork and literature files are contained in two microSD cards, encapsulated in DHL MoonBox capsules. Delivery is by Astrobotic’s Peregrine Lunar Lander, through NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program.
Launch is scheduled in July 2021 from Cape Canaveral, Florida, and the lander will touch down in the Lacus Mortis region of the Moon, marking Earth’s return, and the first mission carrying commercial payloads, to the lunar surface.
About The Peregrine Collection:
The Peregrine Collection brings together the work of 1200 creative artists, and one A.I., on a time capsule to the Moon, via Astrobotic’s Peregrine Lunar Lander. Digitizing thousands of artworks, stories, and more, it leverages the Astrobotic/DHL MoonBox initiative to bring one of the most expansive cultural collections to space. A project of Incandence under its Artists on the Moon initiative, The Peregrine Collection is headed by payload coordinator and curator Dr. Samuel Peralta.
Website: peregrinecollection.com
About Samuel Peralta:
Physicist, entrepreneur, and storyteller, Samuel Peralta's fiction has hit the Wall Street Journal and USA Today bestseller lists, and his poetry has won awards worldwide, including from the BBC, the UK Poetry Society, and the League of Canadian Poets.
Acclaimed for his Future Chronicles anthologies, he is an art curator, an award-winning composer, and a producer of independent films, including The Fencer, nominated for a Golden Globe®, and Real Artists, winner of an Emmy® Award.
With a Ph.D. in physics and an expansive career, Samuel serves on the board of directors of several firms, and mentors start-ups at the University of Toronto’s ICUBE accelerator.
About the Publications:
The majority of the artworks being digitized and being sent to the moon are from the publications made possible from PoetsArtists creator Didi Menendez. The publishing house is GOSS183. The designers for these are April Carter Grant and/or Didi Menendez. The publications are available to download from www.iartistas.com or buy in print from Amazon, Blurb, and Magcloud.
Covid Subway Drawings by Devon Rodriguez
Devon Rodriguez is known for his subway oil paintings of unsuspecting subjects. He is now taken to drawing live while on the subway. Here is a TikTok showing his process.
“My work is about documenting the world around me, typically on the NYC Subway. My job is not to direct reality, but to let reality direct me. I like to remain hyper aware to what’s going on around me. I try not to disturb my subject in any way. The last thing I’d do is ask someone to allow me to photograph them for a painting. I like to be patient, and just hope that the world around me will reward me with deep and soulful incidents and characters. Painting what I see helps me understand the world around me.
I often like to paint big works. To me, this makes the image feel very familiar and normal, as if you’re sitting in front of the subject in your everyday life. Sometimes my paintings are interpreted as invasive, but it doesn’t stop my admiration for people, sometimes very unusual people. ”
The drawings are available to buy right from his website and they are $500 each. They are selling out so hurry.
Devon’s artwork is currently exhibiting in the Smithsonian and his Subway paintings have been featured throughout New York subways and been featured in numerous publications including The New York Times.
Interview with an art collector #4
Explain your process for collecting art. My mother was a figurative and then an abstract artist, and my father was an art critic, so I have a broad appreciation for different kinds of art. That being said, any work that I collect has to have a spark, a personal connection to me.
My process starts with being aware of art around me everyday. I’m online, or in galleries, or reading magazines, always looking for pieces that sing to me. When they do, I answer.
I buy from galleries both in person and online, through online sites such as Artsy, Auctionata, Saatchi, and have participated in auctions such as those run by Bassenge, Bonhams, Christie, Heffel, Philips, Sotheby, and more.
I’ve bought from American galleries from coast to coast, as well as from Europe and Asia, factoring the cost of shipping into my perceived value of a piece.
I have a personal collection, which includes gifts from friends, with an eclectic theme. But the significant collection is one curated jointly by myself and my partner, which is built around a broad theme of magic realism with a strong narrative subtext.
What was the first artwork you collected and why? The first artwork I ever purchased was a small gouache landscape by a local artist, that I bought in my first year of university. Previous to that I’d declared pieces of my mother’s work as “mine”.
For this first purchase, I used some of the funds from a scholarship I’d won. Instead of scolding me, my parents were proud of me – and, thankfully, said they’d make up the funds I’d used instead of paying tuition.
Have you bought work which was in a publication and if so which ones? Print publications – ARTnews, ArtReview, frieze, Juxtapoz, KIOSK, Wallpaper – tend to point me towards artists. Digital publications and sites – Artsy, Auctionata, Combustus, PoetsArtists, Saatchi – point me towards specific pieces. I also subscribe to the newsletters of several galleries and auction houses.
I’ve bought many pieces because of digital publications – mostly featured pieces on sale, but sometimes a piece on the artist’s website linked to from the publication.
For example, because of PoetsArtists I have both small and large pieces from Ivonne Bess, Erica Elan Ciganek, Susannah Martin, Didi Menendez, Nadine Robbins, Jessica Smith, and Aron Wiesenfeld.
Which is your most cherished piece? This would be a piece painted by my mother, a large oil called “Gathering”.
Apart from that, it would be the most recent piece that I acquire at any time.
Do you buy multiple images from artists or try to just stay with one? I tend to look at an artist from the perspective of career consistency, so if I find one piece that connects with me, I tend to collect multiple pieces from that artist. I have as many as twenty pieces, for example, from several artists.
However, if a single piece speaks to me, while standing out from the rest of the artist’s portfolio, there’s still a good chance I’ll collect it.
Do you have a budget in mind when buying art? I have a notional annual budget, and as long as the aggregate purchases are below that, I can continue to buy what I like. In 2016, I acquired pieces that ranged from $100 to $10K. I’ve seriously considered single pieces of up to $50K but have not gone beyond $20K for a single piece to date.
Do you buy art because you think it is a good investment? Never buy art because you think it’s a good investment. You’ll likely be disappointed. Buy it because you fall in love with it.
Value appreciation is a side effect. Art has turned out to be a good investment for me – but I’ve only bought one piece specifically for investment. It was a lithograph from a limited edition set I already have an example of. The piece was bought from an auction in Germany, and I decided to patriate it to the artist’s home country, where the value would be higher.
We will probably never sell the collection. We’re talking with galleries now, beginning negotiations for a donation.
Who are some of artists are in your collection? Classic artists in my collection include Henri Matisse, Marc Chagall, Joan Miró, and Henry Moore (one of which I gifted to my mother). I have been outbid on works I wanted from Giorgio de Chirico, Pablo Picasso, and René Magritte.
More well-known contemporary artists in the collection include Damien Hirst, Shepard Fairey, Tracey Emin, Wim Wenders, Mat Collishaw, Jenny Holzer, Isaac Julien, Tim Noble & Sue Webster, Alex Colville, and Elmgreen & Dragset.
Besides the PoetsArtists names I listed above, I also collect Eloise Fornieles, Liu Ye, Noritoshi Hirakawa, Ryoichi Kuraokawa, Marion Tampon Lajarriette, Jeremy Smith, Mercedes Helnwein, Christopher Pratt, Alan Smutylo, Annie Morris, David Blackwood, Heather Horton, Sean William Randall, Paul Roorda, Christina Sealey, James Nye, Johnny Kilabuk, Sarah Jane Gorlitz, and Jean Paul Lemieux.
I have multiple works from many of the artists above.
GO WILD! Curated by Conor Walton
Painting by Susannah Martin
There’s no blank spots on the map anymore, anywhere on earth. If you want a blank spot on the map, you gotta leave the map behind. ― Jon Krakauer
Inside all of us is… A Wild Thing. ― Maurice Sendak
Straight after I agreed to curate this exhibition, I sat down to dinner with my children and asked if they could think of a good title for a show. The first thing my thirteen-year-old son Daniel suggested was 'GO WILD!' and I thought “Wow! That's it!” As a title and a theme, ‘GO WILD!’ provides a context tight enough to offer coherence, yet loose enough to give the artists freedom to do what they do best. You can interpret it as targeting Nature in its broadest sense, or simply as an exhortation to take a risk; to unleash one's talent, express the Dionysian aspect of our natures. Both of these themes (and many more) came through in the work I have been offered, so I am delighted: overall, I think a bit of the zeitgeist comes through in this show.
In many of these paintings our relationship with Nature is obviously an underlying issue, but one which presents itself in many forms. In Rachel Linnemeier’s Camera Click it takes the form of ironical detachment. The subject of the painting stands heroically, camera in hand, apparently seeking Nature and ready to ‘capture the scene’, and yet the Nature he seeks already appears reduced, processed, flattened. The painting seems to comment upon the way so much of our experience of the world is now packaged and mechanically mediated. There is humour in this painting, but also melancholy; a sense of lost directness and authenticity in our relationships, both with that which is ‘other’ and with our inner selves.
Childhood is a recurring theme, which for many of us appears to stand for a time when we were closer to Nature, more spontaneous and whole, and wilder. Dana Hawk Heimbach’s Wildlife “is about being a kid immersed and one with nature.” Serena Potter’s Night-timers are adults escaping into an infantile world of spontaneous fun and irresponsibility. For Linda Tracey Brandon in Capture the Flag, childhood represents “that brief juncture where fantasy and innocence intersect with the wild, reckless freedom of living in the present moment.” These words are also appropriate for the child in Cynthia Sitton’s She Delighted in Them: living in her fantasy, unaware of the approaching storm behind her, it is, according to Sitton, “a love letter to my ill daughter”, and infused with a wistful sense of adult suffering and regret.
Some of the artists have used the nude as a way of articulating our animal natures. Susannah Martin's provocative image Schmetterling (‘Butterfly’) is the quintessence of Dionysiac rapture. In Tina Garret’s Baptism, a female bather evokes the pleasure of skinny-dipping; momentarily shedding inhibitions and finding peace through immersion in watery nature. In Denise Fulton’s Camouflage, the woman hides in plain sight, her form broken up by dramatic shadows. She eyes the viewer like a wild animal (though it’s not clear whether she is metaphorically prey, or predator waiting in ambush). Sarah Lacey’s exquisite drawing Cygnus finds analogies in human and animal form, in this case between human and swan. As she says:
Organic form - the way nature grows and shapes itself - is deeply playful and fractal, and shapes repeat, mirror and metamorphize across forms and species. My model’s bone structure, particularly in the shape of her collarbones, reminded me of the curve of a swan’s outstretched wings. I wanted to bring those shapes to life as a physical manifestation: her daemon, her familiar, an extension of her spirit and power. She is the swan and the swan is her. We are not separate from Nature, we are Nature.
In exploring the contested borderlands between human and animal, ‘civilised’ and ‘primitive’, several of the artists in this show have rediscovered the power of mythology. Adam Miller's reworking of ancient mythological themes of violence and transgression, suffering and rapture, seem intent on reconnecting us with our deepest natures. For the hunter Actaeon (whose punishment for seeing the Goddess naked is to be turned into a stag and torn apart by his hounds) insight comes at a terrible price.
An inevitable consequence of reinvigorating of the mythopoeic imagination appears to be the rediscovery of Tragedy, all too apt for the coming age. Indeed, my wager on our dawning epoch is that (contra the superficial optimism of our ‘official’ culture) only a sublimely tragic art will do it justice. In these works, I see its first awakening.
Like Miller, Luke Hillestad brings continuity of human and natural form in a mythological direction. His Medusa, half-animal, appears not as an object of terror but of pathos and desire: in its way it too speaks of our situation in which wild Nature appears less fearsome and monstrous than beautiful and suffering. This Medusa stands like an endangered species; the carrier of an intuitive, poetic wisdom entirely at odds with the technocratic logic of our civilisation.
Molly Judd | Raskolnikov | 140x150 cm | 2019
Molly Judd is a young Irish artist snapping at her elders' heels with whom I seem to have an unwitting relationship of common themes. When I first saw her Raskolnikov I was so happy she hadn't called it Flogging a Dead Horse, because I am working on a painting of this title, and close enough in theme to hers (which I take to be ecocidal guilt, shame at our criminal treatment of Nature) in Molly's case raised to the level of sublime metaphor.
I’ve long been fascinated by Martin Wittfooth's depiction of a post-apocalyptic, post-human world in which a degraded, mutant nature recovers amongst the ruins of our civilisation. Wittfooth’s imagery is striking for its anti-humanism: ostensibly the human image is banished from his art and animal nature reigns supreme. Yet the physical or metaphorical detritus of our culture is everywhere in his world and the satirical force of his work is clearly premised on our species’ collective insanity: Wittfooth’s imagination is wounded, angry and feral.
Both directly and indirectly, many of these paintings bear witness to the planetary catastrophe unfolding around us, and the need to recover a sense of human identity in which Culture isn't opposed to Nature but unfolds within it. This is, I think, what gives some of the best contemporary figurative art - naturalistic in technique but using dream, fantasy, metaphor to plumb our psychic depths - its current impetus and urgency.
All these artists combine old-master virtuoso techniques with a contemporary sensibility to produce paintings that, in sum, tackle almost every subject, from the painfully or joyfully private to the great public issues of our day: politics, ecology, the fate of our civilization and our planet. If an artist's job is to give us images through which we can better understand ourselves and the world, this is exactly what these artists are doing. I think there's a huge appetite today, particularly among the young (and in the context of an often shallow, consumerist pop culture) for an art that isn't simply brash or slick or clever, but that speaks to our deepest desires and needs: for truth and beauty, and above all, for meaning.
There are many treasures to be found in this little collection of works, for those with eyes to find them! Expect to be provoked, teased, caressed with beauty, troubled with insight. You deserve nothing less.
Lukas Moll is a queer artist based in Cologne, Germany. His work is deeply rooted in the experiences and struggles of the LGBTQ+ community, aiming to bring visibility to themes like isolation, discrimination, and resilience. He also explores topics such as sexual violence and abuse, using art as a medium for healing and advocacy.