3rd Wave of Inspiration
Since 2003
Salman Khoshroo, born 1983 in Iran, spent his childhood years in New York. After a few intermittent years in Iran he went to study in the Australian National University, where he received his degree in Digital Art. He currently lives and works in his studio in Tehran mainly with a large palette knife spreading oil colours directly on the canvas. Khoshroo’s paintings harness figurative abstraction to evince very concise figures of emotional tension.
Fashion label Comme des Garcons (@commedesgarcons) unveiled a colossal mural on the facade of Dover Street Market’s as a part of Dover Street Market’s 15th anniversary (@doverstreetmarketlondon). Designed by Rei Kawakubo and illustrated by Pokras Lampas, the monumental installation is the largest of a series of collaborations between Lampas and "Comme des Garçons" in Dover Street Market’s many international locations including Beijing, New York and Tokyo.
Kate MccGwire is an internationally renowned British sculptor whose practice probes the beauty inherent in duality, employing natural materials to explore the play of opposites at an aesthetic, intellectual and visceral level. Growing up on the Norfolk Broads her connection with nature and fascination with birds was nurtured from an early age, with avian subjects and materials a recurring theme in her artwork
Contemporary portraitist and surrealist painter, Loribelle Spirovski, is set to have her first Solo Exhibition in London at HOFA Gallery. Titled Love, Death and The Time I Knew You, this solo show will assemble select artwork from her most successful collections, showcasing her prolific talent and remarkable growth as a contemporary artist.
Born in the Philippines in 1990, this Australian artist has fascinated audiences at home and abroad with her distinctive style and approach to contemporary portraiture. Though admittedly intuitive, Loribelle's artistic style is also decidedly cerebral, rooted in the myths, music, literature, pop culture and experiences that inspire her and make her art resonate with viewers.
Her most recent works are surreal explorations of the relationship between people and the spaces they inhabit. Inspired by her experiences as a migrant to Australia, you can feel the claustrophobia emanate from the canvas. Employing disjointed bodies and hollow forms, she compels her viewers – who she describes as "meaning makers" to confront and contend with their own emotional abstractions.
You can enter at any given point and go whichever way you please. The circle has no
beginning and no end, no direction either. Too much freedom causes confusion, so people
have come up with their own notion of time that goes “clockwise”, following the hands of
time, on a growing scale. Increasing numbers, mounting years. Tic toc.
Death is transformation, like birth. Big events set the clock to zero again. Have you ever felt you’ve experienced a moment before? Relax, it’s because you have. In fact. Before. Or was it after.
In order to learn something, our previous self has to painfully shed the skin of previous
failed experiences to give our future self some advice for the road. No need to reject or
deny the feeling that sometimes you just know. In advance. For certain. Stuff that hasn’t
happened yet. Your inner feeling is correct. It’s possible to go there as well.
AVIVA is a circle of life in all its forms. Aviva as a palindrome; a word that moves both ways. A viva, as “up from the dead” in Latin; up from the dead, towards life, in the opposite
direction. Despite its static nature, the circle of “Aviva” is not a still life, nature morte, dead nature. The seemingly silent pictures aspire towards life, to light. A moment freezes and time will become nothing but an arbitrary construction, shackles we don’t need any longer.
You can enter at any given point and go whichever way you please
“Classic icon must be distorted when they’ve got through all the journey of time and culture. What I can do is that just assume the PAST filtered through these thick and blur lenses. So, What I paint would not be the icon itself but the surface of lens of time, which might be just stretched, or by which the image could be deformed or vaguer.”
Italian artist Elisabetta Benassi’s solo show, ‘The Sovereign Individual’ at Galerie Jousse Entreprise (@galeriejousseentreprise) in Paris (last year) presented a selection of the artist’s recent works, including two installations specially devised for the gallery space.
Elisabetta Benassi (Rome, 1966) is an Italian artist. In her work she critically observes the cultural, political and artistic legacy of modernity, as well as broader, often controversial political and cultural themes of our time. Using diverse media – installation, photography, video – she thus emotionally engages and questions the viewer while tracing troubled and contested timelines. From the background of her pieces emerges a questioning of contemporary identity and of the conditions of the present. Her work has been shown at several venues worldwide, including the Venice Biennale.
Guda Koster is a Dutch artist who creates living sculptures and performances, which the photographs are the results of. Koster’s works are created in parallels of time, space and textile. In her works Koster uses fabrics, colours and patterns that underline the codes and meanings our clothing conveys
Chinese artist 孙 影 (Sun Ying) shares her latest artworks on Behance
Sculptor Nazar Bilyk creates negative-space artworks leaving the viewer recreate the original shape while viewing it
Russian artist Irina Kruglova spent her summer at Mas els Igols art residence training her abstract expressionism muscles with new series afterwards called "Emotionalia"
“Colombian artist Otoniel Borda Garzon manipulates outdated volumes of maps, reference texts, and newspapers to form abstract sculptures. The multi-part artworks juxtapose the paper pages, carved into topographical shapes that allude to cliffs and mountains, with geometric wooden trusses and smooth, water-like glass channels.“ via @colossal
“My work has always been a time machine looking backwards across decades and centuries to arrive at some understanding of my “place” in the contemporary moment.”
Fons Americanus is a 13-metre tall working fountain inspired by the Victoria Memorial in front of Buckingham Palace, London. Created by artist Kara Walker for the 2019 Hyundai Commission, it is one of the most ambitious installations in Tate Modern's Turbine Hall to date.
Rather than a celebration of the British Empire, Walker’s fountain explores the interconnected histories of Africa, America and Europe. She uses water as a key theme, referring to the transatlantic slave trade and the ambitions, fates and tragedies of people from these three continents. Fantasy, fact and fiction meet at an epic scale.
Based in New York, Kara Walker is acclaimed for her candid explorations of race, sexuality and violence. She is best known for her use of black cut-paper silhouetted figures, referencing the history of slavery and the antebellum South in the US through provocative and elaborate installations.
Fons Americanus is on display at Tate Modern until 5 April 2020. You can explore the artwork in more detail on @tate
Rodrigo Chapa is a Mexican artist who has been working with photography for the past decade. “In his series “Ausentes” (Absents), he makes reference to abstract expressionism by composing images with color field backgrounds and a dancer as the subject. He captures the movement and improvisation of the dancers, in which the record of the physical manifestation of the subject becomes the work of art.” via @trendland
Italian artist Nima Tayebia creates dystopian portraits of someone who has lost a memory or was vanished from a timeline. Using chiaroscuro techniques inspired by Black Period of Goya and mixed with later El Greco these artworks won’t leave you for free. Scary but intriguing …
Canadian artist David Umemoto creates Escher-esque concrete miniature pieces that evoke temporary buildings or monuments standing on far-away lands.
“The images conveyed in the mind by these works are numerous. They refer to the archaic and the ephemeral, despite the solidity and the modernity of the medium. Appearing before our eyes are pre-Columbian rock dwellings, god statues from the Andes or Easter Island, steles deteriorated by rain, remnants of modern cities having survived a cataclysm, fragments of Babylonian cities, colonial settlements brought down to their foundations, cenotaphs abandoned in the jungle…”
Spanish artist David Moreno “draws” sculpture using steel rods creating "digital slit-scan” effect for his wall mounted “Floating Favelas” series
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Since 1995, Lars-Erik Fisk has reimagined familiar and common-place objects into spheres, which he considers a "basic form… that we can all understand, but is at the same time the least likely form for these subjects to assume.”
Transforming objects in this way engenders a fascination with the mundane and elevates otherwise unnoticed details of one’s everyday surroundings to works of art that demand attention.
Made primarily by hand in the artist’s Brooklyn studio, each circle is designed to engage ordinary elements from parking lots, subway tiles, car parts and pencil stubs. The eclectic material palette uses the components of these architectural and urban facets – namely steel, glass and asphalt – and turn them into perfect spheres; transforming the simple theory into a potent array of sculptures.
Working predominantly in sculpture and drawing, Paul Kaptein’s practice is informed by notions of Pneuma and Sunyata in exploring the fluid space between form and emptiness. Motivated by the energies that exist beneath the surface of things, his work is activated through glitches, warps, spaces, gaps, holes and fissures.
Exploring the body as the interface between quantum, relative, technological, spiritual, material, psychic and conscious states, my work collapses distinctions of internal and external binaries and linear temporalities to explore notions of identity and boundaries of self.
