33 CONTEMPORARY Featured in American Art Collector

Our Common Humanity

33 Contemporary presents a new exhibition about humanity and the concept of liberation.

Anew exhibition with 33 Contemporary, curated by Didi Menendez and Sergio Gomez, showcases artwork of the human form across a variety of genres and styles. Liberating the Flesh is an exhibition of figurative-focused paintings, drawings and sculptures exploring various interpretations of the figure from realism to abstraction,” says Gomez, artist and director of 33 Contemporary. “Artists were invited to think about the idea of liberation and to respond to the theme from any particular point of view. Therefore, presenting the viewer with a wide gamut of ways of seeing our common humanity.” 

Liberating the Flesh will be held from July 15 to September 2. Among the artists’ whose works will be featured in the exhibition are Brianna Lee, Victor Gadino, Hilary Swingle and Kelly Birkenruth, among others. 

A woman faces a tempestuous ocean, her back to the viewers, in Lee’s Tempest. As she lifts her arms and slightly tilts her torso, the muscular forms of her back are accentuated. “What pulled me to create Tempest was the idea of facing overwhelming circumstances and how isolated we feel when we endure these moments in our lives…She stands isolated yet unwavering facing the unforgiving elements that surround her. Civilization seems a distant harbor in this storm, but it too is under threat,” says Lee. “A break in the storm illuminates her figure against the tempestuous sea because she is a beacon of hope and strength amidst chaos and uncertainty.”

Junyi Liu | Chinese, b. 1995 | No One Else Will Love You, 2022 | Oil on linen | 30 × 40 in | PURCHASE @ARTSY

Killing Me Softly

33 Contemporary hosts a new series of work by figurative painter Junyi Liu.

For the month of August, 33 Contemporary Gallery, located on the fourth floor of the Zhou B Art Center in Chicago, will feature the new, emotionally driven series by Junyi Liu titled Killing Me Softly. The artist presents a unique look at what it’s like to exist in a toxic relationship, a theme that hits close to home for Liu, as it does for many others. In approximately 14 oil paintings, Liu projects her own image into scenes involving candy and food, and each piece is paired with a title that reflects words often stated in toxic relationships.

Vicki Sullivan | Australian, b. 1961 | Young Love, 2022 | Oil on linen | 22 × 17 7/10 in | PURCHASE @ARTSY

Enduring Techniques

Vicki Sullivan was the Third Prize Winner in International Artist magazine’s Challenge No. 128, Favorite Subjects.

On the Mornington Peninsula of Victoria, Australia, contemporary realist Vicki Sullivan is surrounded by the inspiration of the Southern Ocean on one side and Port Phillip Bay on the other. A life changing experience, she studied art in Italy at the Angel Academy of Art, where she learned the skills the Old Masters employed hundreds of years ago. “It was incredibly fulfilling and absorbing,” says the artist.  

Alessandro Tomassetti | Canadian, b. 1970 | Spellbound, 2022 | Oil on linen | 14 × 18 in | PURCHASE @ARTSY

In Perpetuity

Artwork in the annual Painting the Figure Now exhibition captures and preserves the human experience.

By Alyssa M. Tidwell

Every year Painting the Figure Now presents a new body of figurative art created by some of the most esteemed artists working today. These pieces capture sentiments, themes and emotions as vast and complex as the human experience itself. But that singular concept of personhood is what each work of art has in common—portraying that ephemeral glimpse into what it means to be a person.

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.

Devon Rodriguez (@devonrodriguezart) has created a short video on TikTok with music Coffee for Your Head. | Another day, another soul #drawing #nycsubway #fyp #foryoupage | Drawing a stranger on the NYC subway | Tap the + to watch me draw one everyday

“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. ”

— Devon Rodriguez

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.

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GO WILD! Curated by Conor Walton

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.

Rachel Linnemeier | Camera Click | oil on aluminum | 16x20 | 2018

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.

Dana Hawk | Wildlife | oil on panel | 6 x 6 | 2018

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.

Painting by Denise Fulton

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.

Adam Miller | Diana and Accteon | oil and tempera on panel | 36x50 | 2018

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.

Luke Hillestad | Medusa | oil on canvas

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.

Martin Wittfooth | As above so below | 30 inches | 2019

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.