Rania Matar

Rania Matar, Richard Levy Gallery

Rania Matar (b. 1964) explores issues of personal and collective identity is her series SHE. Photographs of female adolescence and womanhood are captured in the United States and the Middle East where the artist has resided. She focuses on notions of identity and individuality, within the context of the underlying universality.

Her photographs are in permanent collections worldwide, including the Broad Museum of Art, Lansing MI; The Guggenheim Foundation, New York, NY; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Los Angeles CA; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; National Museum of Women in the Arts, the Portland Art Museum, Portland OR; the Worcester Museum of Art, Worcester, MA; and the deCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, Lincoln, MA among many others. A mid-career retrospective of her work was recently on view at the Cleveland Museum of Art, and at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art: In Her Image: Photographs by Rania Matar and at the American University of Beirut Museum in An Image and Her Women. She was born and raised in Lebanon and currently lives in Boston where she teaches at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design.

“My work addresses the states of ‘Becoming’– the fraught beauty and the vulnerability of growing up –in the context of the visceral relationships to our physical environment and universal humanity. By collaborating with women in the United States and in the Middle East ‐ and while still looking to reveal the individuality of each young woman ‐ I focus on our essence, our physicality and the commonalities that make us human, ultimately highlighting how female subjectivity develops in parallel forms across cultural lines”. – Rania Matar

Rania Matar

Hombrés | Kristin Moore

Kristin Moore, The Public Trust

Kristin Moore, a native Texan, completed her MFA at Otis College of Art & Design in Los Angeles in 2016. Her work explores the landscapes of California, Texas, and the highways in between. Influenced by artists such as Ed Ruscha, Moore explores Americana, pop culture, and nostalgia through the lens of architecture and cityscapes. As a homage to Hollywood, Moore also finds inspiration in the world of film from visionaries such as Ridley Scott, Sophia Coppola, Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, and more.

 

She has been named one of Saatchi Art’s 20 Artists to Watch in 2020, and a top 10 finalist in the New Western Talent juried exhibition currently on view with Western Gallery in Dallas. Moore’s paintings can be found in collections across the U.S. and Europe. Her work has been exhibited at The Other Art Fair in Dallas, and in group exhibitions with Jonathan Ferrara Gallery in New Orleans, the Bolsky Gallery in Los Angeles, and the Yards Collective in New York, among others. She has had solo exhibitions in Los Angeles and Austin. Moore currently lives and works in Dallas, TX, and is a studio artist at The Cedars Union.

https://www.trustthepublic.com/ 

featured image

Artist Arno Elias, Markowicz Fine Art

Arno Elias was born in Paris, France. He is a multi-talented musician, painter, and photographer. Arno Elias is known for his compositions of the globally renowned Buddha Bar music. Through his involvement with UNICEF, Arno composed the music for their worldwide campaign with Latin recording artist, Shakira. In his early music career, as a songwriter and singer in France, Arno is the only artist in the history of Buddha Bar to have composed and produced the first original Buddha Bar album titled, “BUDDHA BAR Nature.” Buddha Bar sold millions of his albums worldwide. From 2001 to 2009, Arno produced and composed some of the most significant Buddha Bar classic hits, such as Amor Amor, El Corazon, and Guide Me. Arno Elias was chosen by Brigitte Bardot to compose special music for her Animal Rights “Brigitte Bardot Foundation”, which was created to help protect animals from abuse. His creative talents did not stop at his prodigious musical career that began at an early age, but continued to his artistic career, leading him into the world of painting and photography.

 

Studying the European contemporary artists from the 60’s and 70’s and the American pop art movement inspired Arno. Working alongside Jean Paul Gaultier and Mario Testino in the fashion industry further influenced and informed his creative direction. To date, Arno has exhibited in Miami, Atlanta, Chicago, Paris, New York, Las Vegas, Basel, and Los Angeles. His work has been reviewed in The New York Times, PBS Television, U.S.A. Today, NBC, the Miami Herald, Miami Magazine, Florida International, Haute Living, and the Chicago Tribune. His paintings and photographs have been featured in art fairs throughout North America to include Scope Miami, Scope Basel, Art Chicago, San Francisco Art Mrkt, ART MIAMI, as well as the prestigious Art Basel Switzerland.

 

He was recently commissioned by the St. Regis Hotel in New York City to create two unique works of art for the hotel’s permanent collection. One of which, a mixed media photographic painting of the founder, John Jacob Astor IV, will be prominently featured in the lobby of the prestigious hotel. His artistic sophistication, sense of color and dramatic expression can be seen in his diverse spectrum of artistic creations. In 2007, Arno Elias debuted his contemporary painting collection in the United States in a solo show at Art Features Gallery in the Wynwood District in Miami, Florida and continued shows there for the next few years. PBS produced a documentary piece about Arno that same year showcasing his paintings, his life, and his future plans for solo photographic journeys.

 

Arno was exhibited from 2008 through 2011 in Miami with several solo shows being mounted for Art Basel Miami. Galerie Protee in Paris on the Rue Seine exhibited his work in 2010 alongside French Masters Soulage and Mathieu. During the same time, Keszler Gallery in New York City showed Arno with Banksy and Peter Beard. He then was also seen at the Besharat Gallery in Atlanta in 2010 through 2011 and Lichtfeld Gallery exhibited Arno Elias’ art during Art Basel in Switzerland in June 2011. His work is also exhibited at Markowicz Fine Art in the Design District in Miami.

https://markowiczfineart.com/

Bubba Green Shirt by Jamie Adams

Artist Jamie Adams, Zolla / Lieberman Gallery

“My work functions as a kind of personal memoir, drawing from memory, desire, and dreaming. It’s my response to life, to bear witness, while operating somewhere between private confession and public entertainment. I borrow images from my own personal stash—images of family and friends, cinematic/TV culture from the 1950s and 60s, or other paintings, photos, vintage books. For the last decade in particular the work has mixed aspects of painting with cinema—its personae, projective nature or use of montage, etc… as a way to suggest some kind of complication or disturbance.”

Jamie often gives himself projects. He works similar to how a director works by hiring actors, a crew, etc. His most recent work, Niagara Series, draws from an array of sources including American Luminist and The Technicolor films of the 1950s. He draws aspects of his favorite films from that period into his work, such as Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows, Hathaway’s Niagara, and Leone’s Once Upon A Time in the West. From a contemporary perspective Technicolor’s overly saturated color in those films seems to embody the anxieties of postwar trauma, and societies striving for conformity, prosperity, peace. In Hathaway’s film Niagara, he essentially takes the ‘Honeymoon Capital of the World’ and turns it into a crime scene. Niagara Falls, recognized as one of the grand, natural wonders on the American landscape, and elevated to iconic status through a multitude of luminous American paintings by Church, Bierstadt, Inness, and others, is transformed into what Adams believes to be the ‘monster’ in the film—the American equivalent to Japan’s Godzilla– a more sublime sense of catastrophe or dread…much more palatable for an American audience.

The earlier jeannie series (2005-2012), was a group of black and white paintings based on a black and white film– Jean-Luc Godard’s French new wave films, Breathless, released around 1960. “I was initially drawn to Jean Seberg’s character in the film, and the wonderful ambient light in her bedroom apartment where monochromatic folds of flesh, and bed sheets and cotton clothing merged into one continuous surface. Jeannie kept changing though. For a while she was everything to me—the reason to make the next painting. It’s because she seemed an empty vessel that I thought I could fill with my own ideas, memories, wishes. And she could play any role–the surrogate, model-mother, furtive lover, ephebic male, the muse, youth…the artist. At the time I wanted to belong to this filmic space; to settle down, set up shop and make something. Initially the painting’s black and white surfaces were suggestive of early film technologies or a painting’s under layer of grisaille. The painted figures, with their curvaceous volumes, additionally began to take on the appearance of Neo-Classical sculpture, semblances of marble statuary.”

Jamie creates paintings based on what he wants to see. For him, it is always a negotiation between idea, the visual experience, and manipulating paint matter. While many of his paintings begin in an organized fashion, they usually slip into chaos. Some characters that begin as one gender sometimes end up burlesquing another; others added are eliminated; scenes come and go. Characters are made to ‘fit’ into the painting. “I construct them in relation to the frame and other elements within it, and as a story reveals itself.  And certain aspects of the body may become accentuated in order to highlight particular qualities: a torque of the hip, iridescence of flesh, a hand gesture, attenuation of the sternal notch or canopy of the chin, etc…I suppose this is my theatrical experiences coming into play….How the painting at a certain point needs to assert itself, make its own demands, project to its own audience. One move affects the need for another and then another and so on.”

https://www.zollaliebermangallery.com/

Muriel Guepin Gallery - Isabelle-Menin_Rome-ou-la-tentation

Artist Isabelle Menin, Muriel Guepin Gallery NYC

Belgian photographer Isabelle Menin creates portraits of flowers that are not only gorgeous in form and color, but also uniquely expressive. Fresh blossoms and withering blooms melt into each other in dreamy washes of color and hazy drips and swirls. Hues and flowers are reflected in pools of water, as forms disintegrate and reappear in trickles and indistinct glimmers of light. The resulting images are breathtaking interplays of light and shadow, form and reflections, and breathtaking colors and textures.

 

Looking at Menin’s vibrant and organic work, it isn’t surprising to learn that she has a background in painting. After exploring working with paint while developing a career as a graphic designer for over a decade, the artist turned to digital photography. Taking pictures, scanning pieces of nature, she constantly plays with textures and colors, transforming them, mixing them, in order to give shape to a fictional nature, dense and flamboyant at the same time. With rich colors, bold textures, and a stunning abstract quality, her creations look more like masterful illustrations and paintings than conventional photographs.

 

The complex outcome of every artwork is due to the digital manipulation that Menin loves using to transform and blend her images in order to create her beautifully moody works. As she explains: “Going digital allowed me to push back my limits, to find a much wider sphere of activity where things tied up fluidly and were reversible. I create a space that unfolds through the depth I get by accumulating layers, by light, by transparency and opacity; I put elements together that create a kind of fake landscape, I photograph and then manipulate them in order to twist them and show the sometimes hidden sides.”

 

Menin calls her work “inland photographs and disordered landscapes” in reference to the strange complexity of nature, which reminds her of human complexity. She says, “The uncontrolled forces, the shapes’ complexity, the inter-weavings and the synergy of the elements, they all look to me like a mirror of human spirit. We are not straight lines, we are like nature, a very large network of interferences that work together to produce something which sometimes looks accomplished and then gets destroyed in a perpetual coming and going between order and disorder.”

 

In the past five years, Isabelle Menin has had numerous exhibitions in Europe and internationally, both at art fairs and museums. Isabelle Menin lives and works in Brussels, Belgium, and is represented by the Muriel Guépin Gallery.

http://www.murielguepingallery.com/artists/isabelle-menin