Nicola Samori is an Italian artist whose dark, dreary paintings explore the nature of fear. Working in a style influenced by Baroque portraiture—for example, the rich colors and heavy shadows—Samori intensifies the emotion and drama by mutilating his subjects. Faces are painted over or ripped apart, exposing an abstraction of bloody insides; torsos hover omniously […]
Category: Painting
Between Presence and Absence: Paintings by Istvan Sandorfi
Istvan Sandorfi was a Hungarian surrealist painter who died in 2007 at the age of 59. Not many people seem to know of his work today (he himself had a modest opinion of his ability, claiming “I never had the impression that I really knew how to paint”), but his mind-bending experiments depicting the simultaneous […]
Artists Who Use Their Sketchbook as Handheld Galleries
The sketchbook is a special place for an artist. It’s like a playground—a place where they can try out new techniques, imagery, and generate new ideas and ways of working. The pages can even offer a place to emotionally heal. The work done in a sketchbook is often incorporated into an artist’s larger, more finalized […]
Delicate Rot: Animal Paintings and Drawings by Hannah Ward
Hannah Ward draws and paints animals in opposing states of birth and decay, power and surrender, healing and infection. Deer, foxes, chipmunks, and other woodland creatures are painted in pastel colors that mix with the deep reds and blues of exposed viscera, suspended on the page in a symbolic purgatory that shows both their materiality […]
Lost Innocence, Enduring Resistance: An Interview with Gottfried Helnwein
In a world fractured by the war machines of capitalism and exploitation, it is all-too-easy to feel distant from the stories of violence that pervade our media and political histories. However, as the renowned artist Gottfried Helnwein has shown in his courageous and provocative work, it is extremely difficult to ignore the suffering of a […]
Stunning Animal–Machine Hybrids by Heidi Taillefer
Nature and technology collide in the beautifully bizarre paintings of Heidi Taillefer, a Montreal-based artist who has been showing her work for more than twenty years. Her colorful style is informed by the early twentieth-century surrealists, summoning a broad range of figurative traditions, from the drama of baroque portraiture to whimsical steampunk imagery. Taillefer’s themes […]
Modern Anxieties: Grotesque, Hyperrealistic Paintings by Beau White
Australian artist Beau White paints surreal, hyperrealistic images that take a magnifying glass to human fallacies and anxieties. Among his absurd and grotesque imagery are large parasitic worms that feast on people and pomegranates—the latter of which, when split open, resemble an eviscerated body, playing with our discomforts surrounding death and decay. The fetal “Chickenpig” […]
Nychos’ Trademark Dissection of Idols and Creatures
Graffiti artist Nychos grew up in the forested state of Styria in Austria. His dad and grandfather were both hunters; smelly animal corpses, guts and bones were commonly in sight and part of the artist’s everyday life. He once killed a fox, but it was the first and last time, as Nychos was not destined […]
Drawings and Paintings of Opposing Forces by Christina Mrozik
Years ago, artist Christina Mrozik had a stomach disease in which she couldn’t digest or absorb the nutrients from food. “After becoming rail thin and suffering through daily nightmares and being racked with pain for months on end,” she described, “I became very connected with a deeper part of myself.” Death, among other things, became […]
Declining Horizons: Dark Urban Landscapes by Brian Mashburn
Brian Mashburn is an American artist who paints hazy, apocalyptic visions with oil on linen. Driven by what he deems “the soul of a hopeless romantic and the dark humour of a cynic,” he depicts unearthly, desolate worlds at the edge of collapse. In the background, towers, bridges, and cables lay half-obscured with fog, while […]