New Contemporary Art

Lorena Kloosterboer - "I’m a Dutch-Argentine artist (born in the Netherlands, 1962) painting contemporary realist and hyperrealist still lifes. I seek to capture the fascinating interactions between colors, light, shadows, textures and reflections, and unite them in visual poetry. Highly inspired by the still lifes of the Dutch Golden Age, I depict a variety of subject matter striving for an elegant, timeless yet contemporary look. Over time I’ve adapted classical skill-based methods to suit painting in acrylics. After four decades as a professional artist, I’ve developed a highly recognizable signature style, especially in regards to composition and creative content. My paintings are based on symbolism which conveys my thoughts about life through metaphors and symbolic meaning universally ascribed to my subject matter. This symbolism—representing higher ideals, such as wisdom, awareness, and growth—may not be immediately obvious, yet I believe these messages reach the consciousness of those open to them."

Kenny Nguyen - "My work explores the concept of cultural identity, integration, and displacement. My studio practice is influenced by Vietnamese cultural heritage and background in fashion design. I use silk, a cultural-rich material, as a metaphor for my personal identity. Silk has an important role in Vietnamese culture as well as the traditional art. After I’ve moved to the U.S, my research has shifted from traditional silk painting techniques to deconstruction and reconstruction of the textile itself. I used the material as a medium to paint and build a new structure for each installation.  It's a repeated process of destroying and recreating. Cutting, tearing, beating, sanding. Sewing, weaving, attaching, layering. Silk has become the connector that ties both cultures together. "

Martine Johanna is an artist known for her vivid paintings with both figurative and abstract elements. Her autobiographical works, seemingly lighthearted, explore the duality between youthful naivety and anxiety-riddled adulthood. The figures, fierce but fragile, crowd the compositions and occupy the majority of the space gazing distractedly into the beyond. Each of Johanna’s delicately rendered figures convey a sense of immersion within their own “internal psychic landscape.” The work is imbued with a mysterious narrative and sensation of knowing that each character in the work has a full and complex history that the viewer can never completely comprehend. The paintings have a signature prismatic palette, visually stimulating and playful while expressing an underlying sense of uncertainty and unrest.

Steve Latta - I work to explore the meeting point between mystical vision and material reality. My practice is shaped by altered states of consciousness, contemplative mysticism, philosophy of mind, and the natural sciences—fields that each, in their own way, seek to reveal the truth.

Eamon Ore-Giron combines motifs and symbols drawn from sources that span geographies and time: the stylized geometry of Incan jewelry, Brazilian Neo-Concretism, Italian Futurism, and the spatial arrangements of Russian Suprematism. His richly colored compositions draw on vocabularies of architecture, textiles, maps, hieroglyphics, and astral charts to arrive at a visual language that is uniquely his own.

Jason Boyd Kinsella is a portraitist not much interested in what people look like. His have no people in them at all, in fact, or at least not the way we’re accustomed to seeing ourselves. Kinsella understands portraits can do one of two things: they can capture the likeness of their subject—the contours of a face, their jowliness, their creases and crags; or they can distill something truer, where likeness is secondary to affect. This is the difference between what someone looks like to others, and what they look like to themselves. Good portraits are always psychological portraits.

Jonas Noël Niedermann attributes his precise eye for shapes and dimensions to the mighty Swiss mountain ranges he grew up in. Working with those who devoted their entire lives to glass art, he developed a unique appreciation for the intricacies of glass, studying everything from the big picture to the smallest details. As a result he has an artistic voice that is strongly individual while echoing the works of historical greats.

Cayce Zavaglia is a fiber artist who embroiders portraits of the people closest to her. “What gives me encouragement to continue to use my family as inspiration is that, if you look back in history, the famous portraits that Van Gogh did are portraits of people he knew, the postman or his friends. Intimate friends that, once you get that distance of time, you don’t think, ‘Well, this is someone he knew and that’s kind of boring. It’s portrait, in and of itself.”

Amanda Greive's hyper-realistic compositions reference both classical and contemporary symbolism and iconography. While the primary motivation behind her work is to tease out the nuanced emotions embedded within the human condition and to confront isolation and anxiety born of gender-based stereotypes, she also looks to comment on the contradiction between creating realistic imagery and portraying emotional rawness, as well as the uncompromised truth in the imagery portrayed versus it’s symbolic ambiguity. Amanda’s most recent work includes paintings of women in a variety of positions with flowers coming out of their backs, balancing on their foreheads, or covering their faces. She aims to address the emotional and societal pressure to conform to a certain ideal that women face, as well as her interest in the symbolic duality of flowers as fragile, beautiful and sexual but also strong, persistent and adaptable.

Selections from Curiot Tlapazotl's Muictlicos Collection

Jean-Pierre Roy’s futuristic painted landscapes combine hyper-realistic details and surrealism. His canvases look like they were taken from our own present and also like transmissions from a sci-fi reality set millions of years in the future. In Roy’s paintings, trash fires burn in city streets, metallic skeletons rot in desert wastes, and multicolored tendrils sprout from the earth as humans battle wielding bulbous neon light weaponry. For Roy, the appeal of science fiction resides in its ability to convey the existential unease that comes from a glimpse into a world just adjacent to yet apart from our own.

Michelle Avery Konczyk (aka Velvet Mush) explores the beauty of the macabre through tightly rendered, naturalistic paintings. Working primarily in watercolor, Konczyk employs bold black backgrounds that contrast with the lightness of her medium to achieve a beautiful sense of volume, a chiaroscuro effect she enhances by mounting her paintings onto elegantly cut wood panels, into found objects, and boxes. Her work is dark, romantic, psychological, and often incorporates vaguely autobiographical elements through nuanced layers of meaning. 

Ryoko Rio is an US based ceramic artist who grew up in Japan. Growing up in the city near a traditional pottery village gave her the opportunity to familiarize herself with clay at an early age. Her current works are mainly inspired by animals, especially dogs and cats, often mixed with elements that are influenced by Japanese folktales and her favorite books from childhood.

Balloon Art by Masayoshi Matsumoto AKA Isopresso Balloon

Ewa Pronczuk-Kuziak is a Polish contemporary artist who lives and works in Warsaw, Poland. Ewa’s oil paintings are a combination of still life, nature and fantasy. She creates rainbow-colored visions of animals that are made of materials, as if woven out of thread and decorative fabrics. Building on contrast, they are full of life, energy, and fantasy, always idealized in their complicated nature and continuous transformation. In her works, Ewa uses intensely saturated colors, which illustrate the vibrancy of the world her characters inhabit.

Omar Rayyan enjoys looking to the past for inspiration and guidance from the great oil painters of the Northern Renaissance and the Romantic and Symbolist painters of the 19th century. In the past, he created illustrations for many publishers, including Simon & Schuster, Random House and Hyperion/Disney. Nowadays, Omar is concentrating more on doing personal works and commissions for collectors. Paintings of whim and fantasy made to indulge his own personal tastes and humors and to hopefully entertain and please the viewing public.

Vivian Greven’s suggestive paintings pair classical forms with digital-age aesthetics. The artist renders her subjects with soft, smooth brushstrokes and pastel hues. As she draws a connection between the idealized forms of Greco-Roman sculpture and the performative images on social media, Greven investigates the timeless pursuit of beauty and its attendant disappointments.