This month we spoke to Marco Galvan, AucArt’s in house curator, to select his favourite artists from AucArt. Eight of our most promising artists showcase their work in a range of mediums from paint, sculpture and design.
Peter Doyle (b. 1992, Irish) is a mixed-media artist known for his distinctly vibrant, acrylic figurative paintings. Doyle’s paintings possess a charming intimacy in their formal naivity driven by a voyeuristic restlessness to interpret the quick observations of everyday life whilst demonstrating his love of humdrum. Doyle see himself as a curious outsider, who takes pleasure in capturing rare instances of quiet or the daily mundane of his subjects – finding beauty and inspiration by the ways in which someone is sitting on the bus, on a chair or waiting in line. Peter lives and works in London, UK.
Joseph Justus (b. 1982, USA) is a contemporary American artist whose works reimagine the physical and conceptual landscapes that make up the city. Drawing inspiration from the urban fabric and the human body, his paintings experiment with surfaces that act as lenses or x-rays steadily moving in and out of plane. Joseph lives and works in Los Angeles.
Jonathan Small (b.1994, USA) explores through his current artistic practice a reimagined image of the folded fan through modern techniques found in practices of sculpture, drawing and engraving. Referencing his Japanese heritage, Jonathan depicts scenarios of desire, love and violence through his works that are often otherwise difficult to express. Used to convey hidden messages within their designs, ancient Japanese fans represent devices of communication to hide one’s true emotion from society. Once opened, the fan becomes a motif of deception, a marker of a human instinct to oscillate between hiding and revealing our own image. By reimagining the form and function of folding fans, Jonathan challenges their associative qualities as delicate or flamboyant items and re-establishes them as weapons of defence. His works behave differently dependent on their surroundings and implicate their audience in a self-reflective environment. Jonathan lives and works in LA, USA.
View Marco’s full interview with AucArt where he tells us about growing up in Italy, the exhibition that changed the course of his career and finally his latest guilty pleasure.
I think it’s very important for a curator to have an interest for what he/she may not understand. To transform a moment of ignorance or fear into excitement and curiosity, a willingness to learn, let's say.
British artist Alba Hodsoll (b.1990, UK) explores sexuality as the forefront in her graphic works. Her use of paint and ink, where crisp lines and restrained colour palettes combine with the negative space of the canvas produce a distinctive vision of feminine physicality. Opening up a space of interaction between ‘nakedness’ and ‘nudity’ just as she plots a delicate course between the figurative and the abstract, Hodsoll poses questions about the synthetic and the bodily. Alba Hodsoll lives and works in London, UK.
Luc Paradis (b. 1979, Canada) is a contemporary artist who borrows imagery from the historical avant-garde, translated into popular local language. His references to the artistic canon are often humorous, preferring to identify with subcultures and dreamworlds. The work of Luc Paradis moves in and out of various media at a rhythmic and steady pace. This multifaceted practice includes painting, sculpture and drawing. Collage serves as a guiding principle, appearing both independently as individual works and as the preface to the assemblage and installation of the various elements of his oeuvre. Paradis’ interest in collage suggests the Bauhausian axiom of the total work of art – where design, craft and fine art meet and the distinctions between various creative endeavours are blurred. Luc lives and works in Québec, Canada.
Louise Reynolds (b.1998, Scotland) is a Contemporary visual artist whose works conceptually explore the masculinist tropes seen throughout the history painting. Painters who constructed the grand narrative works which are presented as fact were never physically present for the events they were paid by a biased commissioner to illustrate. Louise sees through her own work a revised edition of history painting, poignantly in the era of fake news, but without an actual commissioner. This is substituted with the bewildering oversaturation of news items which proliferate her online existence. Louise habitually reads the news, informing her large scale oil paintings, recontextualising prevailing and fad narratives into dystopic visions of the present and future. Louise lives and works in South Lanarkshire, Scotland.
Mattia Barbieri (b.1985, Italy) is an Italian visual artist whose works explore the traditions of art history through a contemporary lens. While relatively small in size, Mattia’s works are loaded with layers upon layers of visual information. The aftermath is a picture so dense with reference that it cannot hold onto a single idea or message for very long, presented by elements and symbols that are disconnected and compete with each other. Mattia offers insight on human experience in a digital world where fragmented and ever-changing computer screens are forming our perceptions of reality and each other. Mattia lives and works in Milan, Italy.
Khaleb Brooks (b.1991, USA) is a multi- disciplinary artist and researcher exploring blackness, transness and collective memory. Through painting, performance and video his latest works blur the lines between history and futures in an attempt to explore the possibilities inherent in liminal spaces. A liminal space is in between worlds, dislocation, without rights, non- being. Meshing the black queer figure with surreal environments in paintings and entering transcendental states in performance he forces his audience to confront the literal and social death of black trans people globally. Khaleb is currently an artist in residence at the Tate Modern. Khaleb lives and works in London, UK.
