Contemporary Art and Culture
Imagine nature got hacked. If it could rewrite its own DNA—absorbing industrial waste, pixels, and plastic—what would it become? Welcome to Biophilia. This six-artist exhibition at the Flinn Gallery in Greenwich, CT, curated by Ellen Hawley, doesn’t just depict nature—it reimagines and reconstructs it. The organic and the artificial no longer exist as opposites. Featuring Carol Bouyoucos, Julie Evans, Loren Eiferman, Christina Massey, Heide Follin, and Sui Park, Biophilia brings together artists who push past nostalgia for an untouched Eden to present nature as something restless, resilient, and constantly evolving. The result is a visual feast—bold, kinetic, and utterly alive. This is no polite, whisper-in-the-gallery experience. It lunges, sprawls, and twists. It pulses with energy, daring you to chase its shifting forms.
Continue reading “Biophilia: Nature Hacked, Art Rewired”
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.
Continue reading “Franziska Warzog: The Joy of Tactility”
Dee Shapiro’s paintings have evolved over decades of a rigorous thematic and formal search—how colors and shapes can express the intricate relationship between pattern, geometry, and nature through a two- dimensional form? With what appears to be a strong impetus to constantly re-invent her painterly vocabulary, Dee Shapiro’s work keeps us on our toes with each of her series of work, which she sees overall as evoking an alternate reality with absurd connection. From her early Fibonacci progression color coded on graph paper, to her later representational Bathers series–Shapiro’s paintings assert themselves with a life of their own, without a need for any explanation.
Continue reading “Dee Shapiro – From Fibonacci to Bathers”In Dialogue with Natalie Westbrook
The Pittsburgh based painter Natalie Westbrook’s solo show at Freight + Volume in Tribeca features her recent body of bold and highly energetic paintings ranging from monochromes to vivid colors. Jeffrey Grunthaner writes in his essay for the show that Westbrook’s works “confront the limits of what painting makes possible.” The show runs from May 21st to June 26th, 2021.
Continue reading “Natalie Westbrook: Surface Tension at Freight + Volume”
Jacqueline Shatz‘s ceramic based wall sculptures depict biomorphic forms, mostly referring to animals and humans as a single entity. An abstracted silhouette of an agile swimmer, a whimsical hybrid of horse and baby snake, a queen’s bent head fully covered by flowing hair spilling downward – each evokes a mystery associated with ancient civilizations, archetypes, and mythologies or what the artist describes as “states of being and permeable nature of time.” Jacqueline Shatz shares with Art Spiel some thoughts on her work and work process.
Continue reading “Jacqueline Shatz – Overcoming Gravity”During the Coronavirus pandemic, Art Spiel is reaching out to artists to learn how they are coping.
Renee Robbins is a Chicago-based visual artist who layers biomorphic forms to create detailed otherworldly environments. She has been awarded public art commissions with Chicago Public Art Group, Wabash Arts Corridor, and Illinois’ Art-In-Architecture program. She has exhibited widely, including exhibitions at Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum, Chicago, IL; Lois Lambert Gallery, Santa Monica, CA; Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, Batavia, IL; Firecat Projects, Chicago, IL; and the Alden B Dow Museum of Science and Art, Midland, MI. Her work has been featured in the Chicago Gallery News, PBS WTTW, and Ahtcast. Robbins has been working in Chicago for over a decade.
Continue reading “Artists on Coping: Renee Robbins”
Karen Margolis’s intricate wall pieces and sculptures featured in her current solo show In the Precipice at Foley resemble topographic mindscapes or cosmic maps. The sum of her dense cell-like circular shapes in some works create a sense of condensing inward, and in others exploding outward. Close up it is like taking a journey through a complex network of neurons, galaxies or emotional states of mind. It is enjoyable to identify recognizable fragments such as remnants of old maps with readable places, trace the multiple burnt holes and biomorphic shapes created with a soldering iron, focus on the hypnotizing miniscule dots of paint on circular clusters painted with watercolor or gouache, and then follow a complex net of crisscrossing dark linear threads which create an engaging tension with the curvy forms.
Continue reading “In the Precipice – Karen Margolis at Foley”
“The stream of sap in the trees varies according to the phases of the moon.”
-Theodor Schwenk, Sensitive Chaos
Sandra Chamberlin’s sculptural installations invites the viewer to enter a three-dimensional drawing of alternate life-forms. Lines made of wood float off the walls, hover in the air, or balance on the ground, altogether creating a sense of abstracted life-forms. These linear sculptures are deeply rooted in the artist’s intriguing relationship to materials and processes which overall tie into her intricate perception of nature. Since the early eighties, Chamberlin has been making out of wood abstracted shapes through meticulous manual and mechanical processes she has perfected over these years.
Continue reading “Sandra Chamberlin, on Breathing Underwater”
