razvan boar Razvan Boar’s paintings are wonderful works of art that range between semi abstraction and near photorealism, his images appropriated, from newspapers and magazines perhaps, who knows? What makes them especially appealing to me is his use of muted colours, his palette of black and white with the odd use of judicious colour. With it Boar is somehow able to create an unsettling and unstable mood in his work that draws you in, wants you to know more about his subjects who seem deeply involved in some activity, a sport or something troubling, intangible. Boar, despite his mature paintings is still young – he’s only 30 – and is seen as one of the most promising talents emerging from a new generation of painters in Romania. It has been said about Boar and his work: Superlative painting skills – borne of the same communist era emphasis on traditional techniques that propelled Germany’s Leipzig School to fame – are the hallmark of several recently acclaimed Romanian painters. Razvan Boar seems set to become another. Aside from the obvious virtuosity of his work, Boar’s practice is distinguished by various distancing devices, most of them typical of recent Romanian painting, and each seeking to disrupt the anticipation of narrative raised by keenly observed figuration.

The Collaborative Art of Cara Thayer & Louie Van Patten

Berlinde De Bruyckere

It is not because you never see a head that it looks like it has been cut off. It is, rather, that I no longer think the presence of a head is necessary. The figure as a whole is a mental state. The presence or absence of a head is irrelevant. Berlinde de Bruyckere 
Marthe (2008) shows a body in duality, disgusting but still half-human, a hand found in its twig-like limbs reminiscent of Ovidian-style transformation; it too, despite its lifelike physicality, is sexless, headless, inert, a re-imagined object. “It is not because you never see a head that it looks like it has been cut off. It is, rather, that I no longer think the presence of a head is necessary. The figure as a whole is a mental state. The presence or absence of a head is irrelevant.”

Berndnaut Smilde

Tadao Cern

Ryan Scully

John ross

Francis Bacon “My painting is not violent, it’s life that is violent. Even within the most beautiful landscape, in the trees, under the leaves, the insects are eating each other; violence is a part of life. We are born with a scream; we come into life with a scream and maybe love is a mosquito net between the fear of living and the fear of death.” Francis Bacon

stephen edwards

christy lee rogers

tamara lichtenstein

dario puggioni

Born 29 November 1977 in Brunei, Dario Puggioni takes a figurative approach to the human body. In his work there is a refined aesthetic research, which expresses an inability to break the unconscious barrier of emotional pain. The relationship between his multilayered images and the canvas heightens this feeling of torture and decay. The livid colors and misty hues complement the content of the work. Puggioni offers a personal view of the present, characterized by suffering caused by poverty, uncertainty for the future, inability to communicate, and an alienation immersed in the mass and desperate loneliness of the human race. He currently lives in Berlin.

alyssa monks

Born 1977 in Ridgewood, New Jersey, Alyssa Monks began oil painting as a child. She studied at The New School in New York and Montclair State University and earned her B.A. from Boston College in 1999. During this time she studied painting at Lorenzo de’Medici in Florence. She went on to earn her M.F.A from the New York Academy of Art, Graduate School of Figurative Art in 2001. She completed an artist in residency at Fullerton College in 2006 and has lectured at universities and institution nation wide. She has taught Flesh Painting at the New York Academy of Art, as well as Montclair State University and the Lyme Academy College of Fine Arts. 

"Using filters such as glass, vinyl, water, and steam, I distort the body in shallow painted spaces. These filters allow for large areas of abstract design - islands of color with activated surfaces - while bits of the human form peak through. In a contemporary take on the traditional bathing women, my subjects are pushing against the glass “window”, distorting their own body, aware of and commanding the proverbial male gaze. Thick paint strokes in delicate color relationships are pushed and pulled to imitate glass, steam, water and flesh from a distance. However, up close, the delicious physical properties of oil paint are apparent. Thus sustaining the moment when abstract paint strokes become something else." 

"When I began painting the human body, I was obsessed with it and needed to create as much realism as possible. I chased realism until it began to unravel and deconstruct itself,” Alyssa states, “I am exploring the possibility and potential where representational painting and abstraction meet - if both can coexist in the same moment."

Monks's paintings have been the subject of numerous solo and group exhibitions including "Intimacy" at the Kunst Museum in Ahlen, Germany and "Reconfiguring the Body in American Art, 1820–2009" at the National Academy Museum of Fine Arts, New York. Her work is represented in public and private collections, including the Savannah College of Arts, the Somerset Art Association and the collections of Howard Tullman, Danielle Steele and Eric Fischl.

Alyssa has been awarded the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant for Painting three times and is a member of the New York Academy of Art's Board of Trustees. She is currently represented by David Klein Gallery in Birmingham, Michigan. Alyssa currently lives and paints in Brooklyn, New York.

I never use models that I don’t know or have a relationship with. When I am painting someone I am having a conversation with them. If I don’t know them, they become more of an object, less of an active subject. For this series it was important that these women were active subjects. There is this long tradition of bathers as coy and unaware — there is a voyeurism in it [the tradition]. Degas’s bathers are these blank-slated women, it was important to me that these were real women. They are not just objects of the male gaze.

Part of the challenge is to figure out what to use from the photo and what to invent.

I was using water as a filter, and it made me wonder what other filters I could come up with. First I covered myself with Vaseline and water. Then I used a vinyl shower curtain, and the shower doors were next. Some of the shower doors create this mosaic effect and some of them are flat; it seemed like the next natural evolution.

Creating a filter really spoke to me as a way to draw the viewer in. Putting a barrier in between the viewer and the subject invites the viewer to work a little harder. The glass also a reference to the windowpane that traditionally leads into another world. It talks about the surface of the painting itself, speaking directly about the tension between illusion and abstraction.

The glass also goes back to this idea of having these women be involved with conversation. They are confident enough to confront the viewers.

robert melee

Robert Melee (born 1966) is an artist based in NYC and Asbury Park, New Jersey.^[1]

Melee was born in New Jersey. He makes multimedia art – videos, installations, collages. - His work is often compared to that of John Waters and Andy Warhol due to its overt campness.^[2] He is also a painter.^[3]

He attended the School of Visual Arts in New York from 1986–1990.

Such conflation of high and low is not merely an end in itself, but awakens the mind and eye to the possibility of intense aesthetic potential in the suburban environment. In his sculptures, Melee often combines disparate found elements––audio speakers, mannequins, appliances, sections of wall––with painted plaster that appears to be draped like fabric. In some works the plaster elements take on a primary role, and even overtake the found objects altogether. Included in this group is a sculpture in which a mannequin is covered with plaster and paint; here the human form, and its psychological implications, can also be traced back to Melee’s earlier film works. Others pieces are wall-based, and seem to resemble sculptures of paintings, their plaster forms like lengths of canvas that have been bunched, rolled or pinned.

Melee’s formal experimentation finds its psychological analogues in the blurring of beauty and grotesquerie, nostalgia and critique. In so doing, Melee’s work suggests an underground or alternative narrative of how and why visual ideas develop; because Melee’s language draws in such a large part from the private realm of domestic environments, his work elicits emotional responses that are both uncannily familiar and disarmingly strang

chie aoki

Chie Aoki’s sculptures are very mysterious and so is the artist. There’s a complete loss of identity in the glistening black faceless forms. Aoki is an exception to the rule that an artist has to have information, a website, and gallery exhibitions that are available to peruse online, instead there is hardly a trace of the artist’s identity available the web. This unusual lack of a significant online presence seems to continue the underlying theme of these beautiful sculptures; that they are a mystery and the work speaks itself.

Ivan Alifan

Shinichi Maruyama

I tried to capture the beauty of both the human body’s figure and its motion. The figure in the image, which is formed into something similar to a sculpture, is created by combining 10,000 individual photographs of a dancer. By putting together uninterrupted individual moments, the resulting image as a whole will appear to be something different from what actually exists. With regard to these two viewpoints, a connection can be made to a human being’s perception of presence in life.