Originally from Armenia, artist Ana Bagayan studied illustration at California’s Art Center College of Design. Her many paintings and drawings are populated with doll-like youths and human-alien hybrids, showcasing the artist’s special interest in the metaphysical. In particular, many of her hybrid creatures were inspired by the stories told by avowed alien abductees while under hypnosis. Bagayan’s drawings and paintings have been displayed in galleries across the US, including most recently at Thinkspace Gallery in Culver City, California. Take a look at more metaphysical marvels after the jump.

Pepa Prieto’s work represents a private world of invented characters and imagined environments. For Pepa, this is the equivalent of a visual diary where she can freely explore the world of relationships and their consequences. In order to do this, she creates circumstances and fictional landscapes that take both the viewer and the inhabitants of her paintings on challenging and diverse journeys.

The formal aspects of her works are intuitive and are reflected most clearly in the areas that she paints with a playful, lose gesture. She balance’s the compositions in her work by combining these painterly areas with more abstract geometrical forms.  In Pepa’s work, she seeks to create an inner, personal conversation with the hope inspiring reflection on the part of the viewer as well.

Until recently I was unfamiliar with the artist Alex Ebstein, but I am glad to have rectified my lack of awareness.  There is an honesty to Ebstein’s work that I find readily engaging.  The use of yarn or string in an artist’s practice can often shift the aesthetic towards a decidedly crafty end result, but Ebstein manages to use the material with such purpose that it might as well be a drawn line in an architectural blue print.  The effectiveness of the work hinges on her ability to merge direct compositional tactics with a more playful approach to the selected materials.  Ebstein’s use of string also elevates the intentionality of her mark marking, and then quickly reasserts itself as a method of creating illusory depth in what would otherwise be relatively flat pieces.  Taught angular moments combined with purposefully relaxed textures start a visual conversation that I am more than happy to participate in.

I could have just included the ‘eye chart’ pieces because I found them extremely aesthetically pleasing, but the back-story provides a bit of insight that I think most would enjoy.  Think of it as a ‘Director’s Commentary’ for the work.  Courtesy of Miss Ebstein, “…then for the eye chart pieces. They are more of a weird reflection on (and obsession with) eyesight and my existing eye problems that force me to visit the doctor every month. I’ve had four eye surgeries in three years… I am always nervously checking my vision against things, one eye at a time, so these drawings were kind of my own dark humored joke about being an artist and constantly worrying about my vision.”  I am of the belief that ‘going blind’ is one of (if not) the most terrifying things any artist could imagine, and I appreciate the candor with which she addresses what could be an immobilizing reality to those with a more pessimistic outlook on life.  Ebstein will be starting grad school this fall, and I am eager to see how this focused environment will affect her work.  I also encourage anyone interested in contemporary art to check out the consistently interesting programming at Nudashank – a gallery she co-runs with Seth Adelsberger in the Baltimore area.

Jamie Vasta’s  masterfully accomplished paintings may look like traditional chiaroscuro but they are in fact covered in shiny, shimmering glitter. Vasta has taken the painterly arts to new altitudes with her paintings in glitter. Her insouciant medium is fine-tuned to accentuate narrative.

Here series After Caravaggio, a contemporary reframing of Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio‘s historic paintings in homage to the great master on the 400th anniversary of his death, (1573 – 1610). Vasta gathers friends and colleagues as muse for her ambitious recasting of Caravaggio’s famous paintings. In rethinking such paintings as Giuditte e Oloferne, 1599, and Deposizione, 1602, Vasta composed her coterie with the props of today, turning gender, dress, and environment on end. The intention of the original comes forward, no heraldry of aristocracy, but an emancipation of the peasantry, under hot theater lights of course.

Two of my favorite upcoming artists, Timothy Bergstrom & Denise Kupferschmidt recently opened up solo shows respectively @ Halsey McKay in East Hapmton. Tim brings a new suite of his gluey material paintings that visually imitate sounds, while Kupferschmidt shows a series of studies surrounding a sculptural installation, as well as a lovely mural. Good stuff, more after the jump.

They’re the reason flowers smell so nice

Martin Eder is a German artist based in Berlin, whose nightmarish and perverse paintings abound with contradicting romantic cliches and infantile desires; his work displays lolitas in pornographic poses that are montaged with skycaps, warm bedroom interiors, and saccharine, girly kitsch that includes oversized crying kittens, giant candy, songbirds, fluffy poodles, puffy clouds, and cuddly white bunnies. Eder works exclusively from photographic references, making full use of high contrast and flat shadows and edging subjects with cyan and magenta. His paintings look imperfect and rushed in places, as if he works on his paintings only until they seem convincingly realistic enough. This slightly unpolished quality facilitates the paintings’ exploitative, creepy aesthetic and especially affects his female subjects, making them feel nondescript; the consequences of this purposeful lack of care in turn references the faceless and aggregative nature of pornography. A recurrent aura of seediness and the slightly distorted proportions of Eder’s subjects are reminiscent of the work of German Expressionist Otto Dix, although the anonymity of Eder’s subjects is a theme not reflected in those of Dix.

Edger is represented by Eigen + Art Gallery and Hauser + Wirth. In addition to being a painter, he plays in his own experimental rock band under the name Richard Ruin ed Les Demoniaques.

You may remember our popular post last year about the gorgeous crochet portraits of Jo Hamilton. Well the artist decided to document the process of creation via stop motion animation. Watch as an abstract tangle of yarn gets transformed into a portrait through the power of 300 photographs and a lot of patience!

“This is a stop motion video I made to document my process of crocheting one of my larger than life portraits in yarn from start to finish. In my work I use a traditional basic crochet technique taught to me at an early age by my Gran. I work one knot at a time, from the inside out, row by row. In making the crochet portraits I always begin in the middle with the eyes and work out from there until the piece is completed. I work directly from photographs, using no sketches, graphs or computer imaging. Each piece is handmade, labor-intensive, instinctively composed. Nothing is planned ahead; I make it up as I go along. I spend a lot of time simply looking, unraveling, and reworking until I get it right. To make this video I photographed the work after each new yarn color or two was added, and edited the photos into a sequence. This 30 second sequence contains over 300 photos of the work in progress. The portrait is of my dear friend Arthur Cheesman, who is sadly no longer with us.”

Beautiful/Decay is proud to present B/D Cover Artist Alumni and talented artist Aaron Nobel’s newest mural and exhibit in Los Angeles. Known for his comic book reconstructions, Aaron’s newest mural in the hip Melrose and Heliotrope intersection of Los Angeles measures at the over 30 x 50 feet!

To celebrate the unveiling of the mural Synchronicity Space (directly across the street from the mural) will be holding a three day exhibition of drawings and paintings by Aaron. The show and mural unveiling kicks off on May 24th from 6-10pm with a set by DJ BlackRainbow and refreshments.  Read more about the mural and see an assortment of Aaron’s work after the jump.

As is normal for Noble’s work, the mural is a highly energized semi-abstraction welded together from familiar-seeming comic book parts. As Noble explains,

“The title, Mojado, has a double reference. First the work is literally painted ‘wet’, with color and texture created partly through long drips of color poured down the wall, and secondly the title alludes to the theme of border crossing (‘mojado’ is the more polite Spanish translation of the English slur ‘wetback’). Since the piece is on the back wall of Eric Berg’s Early California Antiques I thought it should have an aged patina, like the stuff he sells. I also wanted to pay tribute, in my science-fictional way, to REALLY early California, pre-Colombian California, so I’ve embedded a design based on the Nahuatl pictographs for ‘River’, ‘Motion’, and ‘Drum’.  It looks like a pattern etched onto an alien spacecraft. One way to read the work is to imagine that it depicts an entity that is somehow crossing into our dimension from the past and the future simultaneously.”

Synchronicity Space Los Angeles
713 N. Heliotrope
Los Angeles, CA 90029

Thursday May 24^th from 6-10pm featuring a set by DJ BlackRainbow

Exhibition hours (Three Days Only!): 1pm to 7pm Thurs-Sat, May 24-26

Beautiful/Decay Issue: N featuring cover artwork and exclusive article with Aaron Noble. Available here.