Anastassia Zamaraeva ceramics
Canada-raised Manchester-based artist Anastassia Zamaraeva has been into clay sculpture since her childhood and even changing the profession to architect does not make an effect as she got back to turntable
Street artist JR reveals "The Wound" in Florence
One of the world's most famous contemporary artists JR reveals his new piece of artwork on the façade of the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence. Symbolically entitled "The Wound," it is a reflection on the current and profound difficulties faced by the arts sector in a time of government-mandated restrictions on cultural activities due to Covid-19.
Duality by Ash Keating
Melbourne-based visual artist Ash Keating creates larger-than-life site-specific murals with paint-filled fire extinguishers. He has been painting explosively overseas and across Australia since 2003 - having exhibiting extensively in galleries as well as creating numerous large-scale, site-responsive outdoor projects.
Titled Duality, Keating’s latest works are a series of textural paintings which need to be seen in person to be fully appreciated.
On the view at Linden New Art Gallery with the title show “Duality” through 16 May 2021
Katsuyo Aoki Ceramic Sculpture
Katsuyo Aoki is best known for her ceramic sculptures that apply delicate, swirling forms to dark subject matter. Aoki trained first as a painter before taking up ceramic as her primary medium, though she sometimes creates abstracted images on her ceramic surfaces using glazes in monochromatic palettes.
Aoki is best known for her works in relief or in the round, and an ornate style that draws from a range of decorative styles. Her works often look radically different from varying perspectives. Frequently used motifs and forms include the skull, the crown, and dismembered parts of animals—allusions to historic narratives and mythologies.
Soft Sculpture by Sergio Roger
Sergio Roger’s work is born from his constant search for inspiration in the ancient artistic representations of beauty. The artist reinterprets iconic elements of art history and decorative arts to break away with preconceived ideas by creating unique and elaborated textile sculptures.
Each of Sergio Roger’s works is Unique and is created from antique fabric remnants. The artist himself carefully selects these materials from antique collector stores. He chooses fabrics such as old linens and velvets, which carry the passing of time and bring soul to the work. For example, in his series of linen busts, he brings a new vision on this subject by replacing stone or marble with delicate pieces of antique linen. With this gesture, the artist wants to reflect on the idea of permanence and majesty that we associate with this traditional art form.
Jordi Diaz Alama Art
Artist and director of Barcelona Academy of Art Jordi Diaz Alamá has a vast relationships with academic and abstract ways of painting.
“Alamà offers through this series of saturated, vivid and imposing reds, a privileged peek inside the universe of the painter’s studio, the practice of working with life models and the vast plurality in sensuality. Red Studio synthesises the many layers of technical research the artist has acquired over the last decade. Academicism and abstraction coexist again on the canvas: a new aesthetic chapter carried out by an overwhelming expressive force in the form of a dance between the measured and the vigorous brushstroke.”
“Red Studio has been developed in parallel with another of Alamàs’s ambitious series of paintings illustrating scenes of Hell in Dante’s Divine Comedy. Both series have grown in the same space – the artist’s studio – a place that can too often become hell in itself. The fire of the Dantesque Hell seems to crawl into these classical anatomical studies and envelop the figures with an abrasive red enamel, the main unifying thread of the series. Similarly, the works from the #ClásicosDesollados series also make an appearance, engulfed in flames and hung at the bottom of the Red Studio‘s works.” - words by Albert Navales
Beeple: The First 5000 Days
Being a pioneer of digital art promotion - Designcollector is always looking for the breakaway artists whose intuition way ahead of the main peloton. Groundbreaking digital artist Mike Winkelmann known as Beeple is one of them. Since 2007 Mike has created 5,000+ digital artworks by following a simple rule: one image per day. The diligence paid off when the rise of NFT trading burst like a fresh wave onto the digital art scene just at the moment of another lockdown after another lockdown during 2020. Beeple played a huge role in reinforcing beliefs in quite an ephemeral way of selling unique artworks for cryptocurrency by imprinting them “forever” into Ethereum blockchain.
His January’s drop of a dozen phygital artworks (non-fungible token JPG + physical collectible including a certificate “signed” by artist’s hair in a capsule) rocketed the NFT scene by a one week auction on Nifty Gateways platform.
And here come Christie’s what means art institutions started to look (if not late) onto the opportunity to catch an NFT wave by putting Beeple’s EVERYDAYS: THE FIRST 5000 DAYS - a huge stitched image featuring all images he created over 13 years. Organised in loose chronological order, zooming in on individual pieces reveals abstract, fantastical, grotesque, and absurd pictures, alongside current events and deeply personal moments. The NFT is minted on another platform Makersplace and is available for bidding on Christie’s website
“The notable difference between the pictures from Day 1 (1 May, 2007) and Day 5,000 (7 January, 2021) reveals Beeple’s immense evolution as an artist. At the project’s inception, Everydays consisted of basic drawings. Once Beeple started working in 3D, they took on abstract themes, colour, form, and repetition. In the last five years, however, his digital pictures have became increasingly timely, often reacting to current events.” says Christie’s in its groundbreaking article
“Art should be everywhere and everyone should live like an artist and create their dreams. In a decentralized world, this is possible.”
Follow up our affair with NFT scene on Twitter @designcollector
Edgar Invoker
Saint-Petersburg, Russia based artist Edgar Invoker creates quite surreal and experimental artworks by mixing digital tools with airbrush, monotype, liquid acrylic, masking. Practicing techniques contributing to lucid dreaming, he fixes the experience and understanding in the form of paintings. The main technique is to create an abstract form in the form of a blot or a paint print, followed by a "manifestation" of a specific image using a set of techniques.
VENUS VICTRIX HODIE by Marco Battaglini
Artist Marco Battaglini known for juxtaposing graffiti and classic art released a full-body sculpture of The New Contemporary Venus “VENUS VICTRIX HODIE” in collaboration with Kylie Jenner
“In coherence with the same artistic theme that I have been developing, I wanted to show the contrast of aesthetic ideals, how the concept of beauty has changed and shaped society.
As always I enjoy playing the game representing the contrast between the classical ideals of beauty and the contemporary ‘anti-aesthetic’ of the world of urban hip-hop and graffiti culture.”
Magic Landscapes by Benjamin Everett
Mixed media artist Benjamin Everett started out as a graphic designer and landscape painter before taking up photography. He transforms real places into surreal landscapes that inspire us to dream.
In 2018, he won the renowned Hasselblad Masters Award in the landscape category.
City In The Sky by Elmgreen & Dragset
Artists Elmgreen & Dragset’s share The Hive, a new and permanent installation affixed to the ceiling of Moynihan Train Hall in New York City’s Pennsylvania Station, the busiest transportation hub in North America. The work is based on “City In The Sky” installation on the view at Gallery Perrotin.
Both City In The Sky and The Hive — produced only one year apart — manifest an imaginary city in the form of a scaled model, installed upside-down. With technological precision, this cityscape captures the multiplicity and synergy of the world’s metropolises. It is a kaleidoscopic installation, consisting of a dense network of illuminated skyscrapers and modern tower buildings, both real and fictional.
Tung Ming-Chin Wooden Sculpture
“"Sculptor Tung Ming-Chin carves wood into figurative shapes that seem to press against the surface of the finished work. In “Inner Turmoil” a face and hands are trapped inside a hunk of wood that has the smooth, stretched appearance of fabric, and in “Breath”, the rounded spine and feet of a crouched figure expand outside the confines of a stiff white box. Tung was born in Changhua, Taiwan, and received both his BFA and MFA from Taipei National University of the Arts.”
Cobi Moules Art
The works of Cobi Moules reminds us the scenes from “Lord of Flies” book of William Golding but with a deeper self-exploration
Hendrik Kerstens
“Hendrik Kerstens did not train formally as an artist. however, he wished to devote himself to a more creative profession and in 1995, at the age of forty, he left the business world and took up photography. His wife Anna worked full time to support this change of direction. in a reversal of more traditional roles, Kerstens cared for their young daughter Paula, while also studying photography during the day. Having a child left a deep impression on Kerstens. Through photography, he explored the accompanying feelings of responsibility, vulnerability and love he felt towards his daughter, starting with documentary family snapshots.
As Paula physically and psychologically grew, Kerstens searched for an artistic manifestation of these changes, leading to his interpretations of the great dutch master painters of the 17th century with Paula as his muse”
Art of Jung-Yeon Min
“Paris-based artist Jung-Yeon Min paints fantastic, dreamlike landscapes that are both beautiful and intriguingly grotesque. Playing with form, space, perspective, and scale, the Korean-born artist uses acrylic on canvas to create surreal scenes filled with warped expanses of land, towering organic life, and fleshy appendages that sprawl and twine like vines or tentacles. Min's paintings, which blend Western and Eastern aesthetics, invite the viewer to explore a world as alluring as it is frightening.”
Art of Selva Aparicio
Selva Aparicio is an interdisciplinary artist working across installation, sculpture, and performance to create artwork that digs deeper into ideas of memory, death, intimacy and mourning.
“Childhood Memories” (2017), hand-carved rug into utility oak wood floor
“Velo de luto (Mourning veil)” (2020), magicicada wings, sewn with hair, 32 x 47 x 2 inches
“Hysteria” (2020), thorn branches woven with ligature and Hamilton obstetric table from 1931, 9 x 4 x 6 feet
Art of Anders Krisár
The subject of numerous museum shows, Anders Krisár’s work, often focuses on the human body. Krisár’s sculptures often features or makes reference to the human form, exhibiting a preoccupation with formal rigor and abstraction. Using this exacting approach, he employs precision of form to create intensely personal, psychological landscapes. Krisár’s sculptures – immaculately produced, and often bear a deliberate blemish that is itself impeccably rendered – are discomfiting, objects of simultaneous horror and beauty
The sculptures are uncanny because of the meticulousness with which they are executed; according to Krisár, “I’m a perfectionist because I have to be, it’s not really a choice. And it’s not a striving for satisfaction, it’s rather to avoid pain.”
Marina de Wit floral fine art photography
Auckland based fine art photographer Marine de Wit uses camera as both paintbrush and paint working with natural light, blur and gorgeous textures
Tech Art by Sebastian Errazuriz
There is no doubts Science, Art and Technology are the Three Whales on whom the 21 Century Rests: here why the body of Sebastian Errazuriz work is an illustration of this. Sebastian is a designer, artist, entrepreneur and activist based in New York. He is known or a diverse body of work that demands reconsideration of familiar objects. These works often challenge viewers perceptions of how things are, and blur the boundaries between contemporary art, design, and craft.
