Jaroslaw Modzelewski – Balcony [2005]

Jaroslaw Modzelewski is a Polish painter, illustrator, and educator. Modzelewski was born in Warsaw on October 8, 1955, and currently resides in Warsaw. In the early years of his creative career, Modzelewski used abstract signs and ideograms to construct his paintings, though these were soon superseded by simplified, multiplied stencil motifs. Between 1986 and 1989 he produced figurative paintings whose forms (colour, modelling, and perspective) corresponded with those characteristic of realism, which were unusually aggravating for their depiction of figures and especially the situations represented.

[Egg distemper on canvas, 120 x 180 cm]

Frederick Childe Hassam – The Sonata [1893]

A native of Boston, Massachusetts, Childe Hassam (American, 1859-1935) was a leading American Impressionist throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The Sonata is one of his most stunning canvases. Like many of his paintings it combines brilliant colour and brushwork with academic drawing. Clues to the meaning of the painting can be found in the woman’s appearance, the music she is playing and the rose in a bowl on the piano.

The figure of a woman in white was often used by 19th-century painters to symbolize innocence, purity and the nobility of art. One of Hassam’s alternative titles for the painting identifies the music the woman is playing as Beethoven’s Appassionata sonata. Another title ‘The Marechal Niel Rose’ identifies the specific flower that is depicted, a kind of climbing rose with a stem too weak to support its large bloom. Taken together, the beautiful yet fragile-looking woman, the passionate music and the beautiful but vulnerable rose evoke not only passion and exhilaration, but also the emotional hazards of aesthetic experiences.

Budi Ubrux – Happy Tea Time [2008]

Budi Ubrux (born Yogyakarta, Indonesia, 1968) graduated in painting from Sekolah Menengah Seni Rupa Yogyakarta (SMSR) / Yogyakarta Fine Arts High School. He received awards as the first winner of the Philip Morris Indonesia Art Awards and a finalist for the Philip Morris ASEAN Art Award in Singapore (2000) and Indofood Art Award, Jakarta (2002). He had his solo exhibition in Semarang in 2002 and Singapore in 2008, and has participated in group exhibitions in Indonesia and Russia.

[Oil on canvas, 150 x 203 cm]

Gareth Morgan – Masks [2009]

Gareth Morgan was born in Kettering, United Kingdom in 1978; he lives and works in Bishops Stortford. He was educated during 1997-2000 at Goldsmith’s College, University of London (Fine Art BA Hons).

“My work tells stories through comic strips and paintings. It deals with themes of alienation and loneliness, and the fantasy this breeds. My most recent pieces are populated by characters wearing homemade masks, and crude cardboard and parcel taped bodies – as if inhabiting an imaginary space when in the safety of their own homes. Adopting a technique used in traditional cell-animation, I paint on the back of clear sheet Perspex. My style is deliberately simple and un-expressive to highlight the stories being told and their emotional power.”

See: http://www.garethrobot.com/

[Acrylic on Plexiglas, 205 x 155 cm]

John Sloan – Sunday, Women Drying Their Hair [1912]

Sloan’s painting features working women grooming themselves on a city rooftop. Rather than engaging in polite rituals in the elegant or exotic private habitats that American academics and Impressionists preferred to portray, these lightly clad Three Graces exhibit an easy camaraderie and a forthright relationship to the viewer. They display their chests and bare arms as they perform their toilette, and their hair is freed from the decorous buns, “psyche knots,” and other coiffures required for appropriate appearance in public. Sloan (American, 1871 – 1951) later described these women as unselfconscious performers in “another of the human comedies which were regularly staged for my enjoyment by the humble roof-top players of Cornelia Street,” referring to the view from his studio on Sixth Avenue at West Fourth Street.

[Oil on canvas, 66.4 x 81.6 cm]

Cesar Biojo – Alejandra [2008]

Cesar Biojo is a Colombian artist who has recently finishing a masters program at the University of Barcelona. Mainly a painter, he graduated in art history and fine arts at Florida State University in 2005. Existentialism powers all his works. He is interested in the way we humans perceive ourselves as a part of the universe. His work focuses on the emotions that we consider as negative in our moral system, since, he believes, they confront our human nature making it more latent and visible. “The proof of a moment is its death.”

See: http://www.cesarbiojo.com/ and http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/

[Oil on wood, 90 x 130 cm]

Gabi Trinkaus – Unknown Title

Austrian artist Gabi Trinkaus calls herself a media thief. She cuts up glossy magazines into small pieces, using them to make collages of portraits that make reference to the aesthetics of advertising and the media.

Israel Zohar – Nude at the Window

Israel Zohar is a painter born in Kazakhstan on February 7, 1945. He spent the first several years of his life travelling between various countries of Eastern Europe in what is now the former Soviet Bloc. At around the age of three he and his parents settled in Nesher, a small village in the north of Israel. He grew up with an interest in chess and Classical music, cultural phenomena that were foreign to his little village. As a teenager he began to express interest in art, and participated seriously in athletics and basketball. He was not allowed to finish high school, for reasons that are historically unclear. At the age of 18 he went to the Army, and narrowly escaped court-marshal after some military maps of Syria and Lebanon disappeared from his patrol jeep. In 1967 he fought in the Six Day War.

Boris Deutsch – The Tailor [1927]

Born in Lithuania, Boris Deutsch (Krasnagorka, Russia, 1892 – Los Angeles, California, 1978) deserted from the Russian army at the beginning of World War I and fled the country. He studied art briefly in Latvia and for three years in various Berlin academies before immigrating to Seattle in 1916. Three years later he made his way to Los Angeles, where he became a successful commercial artist and worked for Paramount Pictures in the special effects department. He also taught advanced painting at Otis Art Institute for about six years. During the early part of the Depression he worked for the federal Resettlement Project, travelling to various states to sketch workers being resettled onto farms. That controversial program only lasted a year and a half. In 1939 he won a commission for a New Mexico post office mural through the prestigious national 48-State Competition sponsored by the U.S. Treasury Department. In 1941 he did another post office mural in Reedley, California.

[Oil on canvas, 76.0 x 101.6 cm]

Braldt Bralds – Eggs [2007]

Braldt Bralds was born in the Netherlands and attended the Grafische School. He spent two months in the summer of 1978 in New York, where his first job was painting a cover for Time magazine. That work gave him a “feeling of good fortune,” so he decided to live in the United States. Once he was established in his new home, his fanciful yet realistic style attracted many fans and collectors. Since that time, Bralds’ career has been one success after another. His work has appeared in such prestigious publications as Time, Newsweek, Omni, TV Guide, Rolling Stone and National Geographic, among many others. He has illustrated book covers for such publishers as Avon, Simon & Schuster and Warner Books. He has lectured and held workshops in cities all over the world, including Brussels, Tokyo and Seoul. Among his awards are three gold medals, three silver medals, and the Hamilton King Award from the Society of Illustrators. In addition to his art career, Bralds is proud of his contribution to education. He has taught at New York’s School of Visual Arts and was an independent student counsellor for their Masters Program. He now serves on the International Advisory Board of the Art Institutes International, which established a Braldt Bralds Illustration Scholarship in 1993.

[Oil on wood panel, 24 x 20 inches]