Contemporary Art and Culture
Featured Artist
Multi-disciplinary artist Kahori Kamiya uses in her sculptures a wide range of materials and techniques to explore oppositions like suffering and healing, beauty and grotesque. Her current sculptures focus on motherhood, especially on breastfeeding.
SHIM Art Network is an arts exhibition service network that provides resources to artists, curators, galleries and non profit organizations through their Exhibitor Groups. Peter Hopkins, co-founder and Chief Executive of the organization elaborates on its premise, ongoing activities, and future plans..
An epic show of portraiture opened in Beacon NY on October 24th. The artists roster reads as a “who’s who” in contemporary art with works from Gerhard Richter, Cindy Sherman, Ai Wei Wei, Yayoi Kusama, Yigal Ozeri, and Jac Lahav. Curated by Ethan Cohen and Ysabel Pinyol Blasi this epic show of over 50 artists explores the nature of portraiture as a springboard for what art can achieve. We sat down with curator Ysabel Pinyol Blasi and artist Jac Lahav to discuss the exhibit.
Johanna Strobel’s mind-bending multi-media sculptural installations at GiG Munich resonate with an urgent longing for an orderly system while a sense of entropy surfaces simultaneously. Plug going into socket, red and blue lights turning on and off—hint at an unstable world where information is lost through failing USB cables and unreliable mnemonic devices.
High + Low: D. Dominick Lombardi Retrospective at the Marie Walsh Sharpe Gallery in Colorado Springs, features 20 distinct chapters of Lombardi’s career, with artworks spanning nearly five decades. Curated by T. Michael Martin, Director of the Clara M. Eagle Gallery at Murray State University in Kentucky, the exhibition highlights the common thread throughout Lombardi’s work—an interest in blending qualities of highbrow and lowbrow art, through experimentation with various media. Lombardi’s life-long journey began with his exposure to modern art when he first saw a reproduction of Picasso’s Guernica (1939) at a very young age and continued with his introduction to the seductive world of Zap Comix in 1968. Curator T. Michael Martin says, “Lombardi’s masterful mix of high and low culture is as current as the day it was created, showing how little the aesthetics of human behavior have changed. In some ways, Lombardi’s distortions are a more truthful look at society than our daily facade of polite policy and political correctness, especially in the way we prompt contention, as Lombardi offers a much-needed change and disruption through his unique sense of humor.”
The group show Nice to See you Again at Underdonk features work by ten artists whose paintings, sculptures, and photographs address the loaded meaning of the outdoors during the pandemic—a shared sense of longing for the openness of the outdoors while simultaneously also craving for the warmth of the indoors. The show is organized by Leonora Loeb and Keisha P:rioleau-Martin and runs from October 30 th through November 20 th , 2021.
The two-person show Where We Met Ourselves at Yi Gallery’s new space in Brooklyn’s Industry City, features abstract paintings and works on paper by Debra Ramsay and GJ Kimsunken. Both artists share a minimalist sensibility to painting and each of them explores in their own way notions of transcendent spaces through form and color. Although they both use reduced color palettes to create elegant and restrained abstractions which are subtle and luminous, their work is grounded in different traditions.
In her solo exhibition at the Lemmerman Gallery in NJCU curated by Doris Cacoilo, Amanda Thackray presents her handmade paper installations, prints and sculpture which altogether comment on plastic pollution and the fragility of marine environment. The artist creates an allegorical environment which both reflects and distorts an aquatic world.
Installation view, Jim Condron (front), Ilse Sorensen Murdock (back)
At first glance, Jim Condron’s whimsical sculptures and Sørensen Murdock’s landscape paintings are an unexpected match for a two-person exhibition. Yet, in Toss, the current show at Platform Project Space, artist and curator Elizabeth Hazan made it into an engaging duet. The show runs the gamut from landscape paintings on canvas to paintings and sculptures made of scavenged materials, but regardless of the used media, both artists prioritize color, texture, and composition.
The Hanover based artist Franziska Warzog makes textile sculptures characterized by bold shapes and vivid colors reminiscent of patterns in nature. As a daughter of two visual artists, she was introduced to design principles since early on.