Young Polish photographer and pixel manipulator Jan Kriwol’s images defy reality and trick your senses to create dynamic images influenced by Kriwol’s urban surroundings.
Author Archives: Russ Crest
Izziyana Suhaimi’s Embroidered Drawings
Izziyana Suhaimi blends pared down drawings with ornate embroidery in her seductive illustrations. Using craft based techniques, she is attracted to the evidence of the hand and its time-consuming aspect, which runs counter to the instant gratification and mass-production centered age of today. (via)
Constance Mallinson’s Nature People
Constance Mallinson‘s large-scale paintings merge the man-made world and nature literally by constructing figures from images of leaves, twigs, and decaying organic material. They are grotesque meditations on both the mortality of humans and the world in which they live. Her full-figured “nature people” reference both the works of Giuseppe Arcimboldo, the 16th-century Italian known for paintings in which still life objects are used to form surreal portraits, and famous paintings, such as Edouard Manet’s 1863 seminal painting “Olympia.”
In examining her recent paintings created from decaying matter, L.A. Times critic Christopher Knight wrote that “after painting savvy landscapes for more than twenty five years”… the current “imagery suggests the way in which we project ourselves on conceptions of nature, creating the natural world even as we go about assuring its destruction.”
See Constance’s work from now until July 28th at Culver Center of The Arts in Riverside, CA.
Jan Manski Creates Mankinds Most Despicable Modern Habits
Onania is an infected universe that has been accumulating character and detail since Jan Manski’s MA at Central Saint Martins in 2010. Onania’s development has been unrelentingly pervasive of Manski’s practice, appropriate to its nature as a diseased scourge.
Manski’s meticulous and total attention to minute detail has borne a product encased in the methodologies of this eminently inviting and hostile environment. Onania hosts an alternate reality and fertile breeding ground for mankind’s most despicable modern habits. Narcissism bred from frantic consumer culture is shown at its most destructive, with Onania’s inhabitants seeking its prime offering – unadulterated and uninterrupted pleasure.
The Awkward Tension And Beauty Of Natalie Krick’s Mother
Powerful photographs by Natalie Krick of her mother.
“The colorful seductive nature of cosmetics act to mask, conceal and deceive while drawing attention to the surface and the superficial. By emphasizing both the facade of glamour and the physicality of the body I am interested in what can be revealed through these surfaces.
In this collection of photographs of my mother she performs certain tropes used to visualize female beauty and sexuality. This act is further complicated as her appearance and gestures fluctuate between my overt stylized ideals and her own physical body. These photographs expose an awkwardness and tension in being looked at and scrutinized while also implying a longing to be seen as desirable and beautiful. By creating images that can be perceived as both garish and seductive, I question the fantasy of idealized beauty and what culture designates as flattering and desirable.” (via)
Dismantling Stereotypes of Beauty and femininity
The relationships of women to themselves and their environment fuel the narratives of Jennifer Nehrbass’ paintings and are formed from the binary oppositions between the images. By dismantling the roles and stereotypes of beauty and femininity Nehrbass examines the psychology that leads women to go to extremes to maintain beauty and style.
The Conversation: An Artist Podcast
If you’re like me you probably listen to podcast’s in your studio while you make work. Until now there has only been a handful of comedy and news related podcast’s to listen to but I’m happy to say that The Conversation: An Artist Podcast is here to entertain you and help pass the time while you make work in solitude. Started by Michael Shaw, The Conversation is an intimate one-on-one interview between Shaw and artists working in every medium imaginable. From painters such as Charles Irvin (pictured above) to photographers such as Lilly McElroy the podcast focuses on emerging and mid-career artists working internationally. Void of the usual heavy handed art speak that you’d find in some art publications, The Conversation feels like an informal chat between two creative people about the good, the bad, and the ugly side of being an artist. We at Beautiful/Decay are extremely excited to have a quality podcast out there focusing on art and we hope you are too. So make sure to visit their site, subscribe on iTunes, and maybe donate a buck or two!
ECKART HAHN’s ANCIENT LIGHT
Right on the thin line of what appears “real”, as in realistically painted, and an imaginary world of unrealistic things painted against expectation (with a subversive materiality), is where Eckart Hahn resides. An object becomes the representation of the object, at the moment Hahn departs so realistically from the tactile world as we understand it, and a tension forms there in the vacuum left by Hahn’s desertion of the “actual”. Because of this schism of realistic unreality the paintings are activated, bringing a heightened awareness to the question of what the meaning might be, while still not unsealing the hermetic narratives with in. Very much in the surrealist tradition, as Hahn comes by his image through a kind of directed automatism, (a strategy that seeks to short circuit the rigors and restrictions of scientific reason and Newtonian conclusions), the viewer receives the image somewhere in the unconscious while simultaneously seeking to interpret the paintings with the analytical mind. And there we are caught in between, in a liminal space of possibility.
See Hahn’s solo show at Pablo’s Birthday in NYC through June 16th.
