Category: Art

Based in Los Angeles, Swedish artist Pontus Willfors examines aspects of nature that are viewed by society as a product, manipulating natural materials into organic shapes like trees and everyday items.

His exhibition named ‘Homeland’ at Ed Cella Art & Architecture Gallery in Culver City shows commonplace domestic objects, re-created with intricately cut wood and barbed wire. Willfors replaced a mop’s coarse strings with razor wire, while another art work depicts a wired curtain, featuring clusters of short, sharp spikes. The most attention receives the art object titled ‘Chair’ which is lifted from the ground by undulating, spindly wooden branches and roots that reach out like lanky fingers, appearing to defy gravity. Through his work, Willfors analyzes the concept of our own home, how it shapes us and reflects our psyches. He explores the concept of a home as a safe haven, spotting that sometimes one’s shelter can become a frightening, inescapable cage.

Miami-based Aybar Gallery‘s curator Francisco Polo has been collaborating with various designers to launch the unique installations of the finest contemporary design and art.

Called ‘GLOBE’, the exhibition will be on view until the end of February 2017. The minimalist installation contains unique, one-of-a-kind pieces commissioned by the gallery. Each artwork is available in limited edition. Some of them come in new material, like bioplastic revolve bottles by Talia Mukmel or ‘Ziggy’ cabinet by Leonardo Di Caprio, inspired by indigenous Brazilian jewelry. Among the works shown in Aybar there are also hand-knitted ‘Flux’ carpet by Marre Moerel and experimental project by Francesca Gotti, called ‘Inaccessible Perfume Installation.’ Lastly, GLOBE Exhibition showcases early works by Richard Hutten, Claesson Koivisto Rune and the acclaimed project ‘Botanica‘ by Studio Formafantasma.

The uncompromising work of LA-based self-taught painter Danny Fox is full of abstract motifs, conversations and possible translations.

The title of his latest series of paintings, called ‘A Spoon With The Bread Knife’, is a reference to English rhyming slang where the bread knife translates to wife and spoon to cuddle. Fox continually puts reoccurring elements in this body of work – strong women, classic fruit bowls, men riding horses being among them. But it is humanity, for better of worse, that he makes the main theme of his art. From the tough women of Down Town Los Angeles to the history of Europe as a raging colonizing colossus, Fox’s work is informed by profound observations.

Brooklyn-based artist Joanne Leah creates photo-based images examining the relationship between the human form and conventional objects, materials and substances.

Leah’s photographs portray parts of the human bodies arranged as design elements that are juxtaposed with ordinary yet highly staged props. Using different color palettes, such as yellow, green, red or violet, the artist constructs a narrative that takes the beholder on a mysterious trip through her surreal intellectual world. Her image contents are all inspired by her own childhood memories, exploring themes of isolation, detachment and identity. Leah’s work is based on experiences with LSD she took on techno raves and visits to Catholic mass on sundays while she was still hallucinating. Staging body parts as design elements, she entombs her subjects in mysterious materials and substances, transforming them into something beyond human. Appearing ritualistic and violent, each concept, object and subject is well chosen attuned to her subconscious vision.

Spanish illustrator Sonia Alins Miguel created the surreal and overwhelming series ‘Water women’ and ‘Into The water’. Miguel’s two-part series of drawings show women floating in undefined fluid. Looking at her art works you literally become the observer. It feels like watching struggles for survival, incapable of doing anything.

Naked female bodies are swimming in something, supposedly water, as the title of Miguel’s drawings suggests. However, the liquid appears to keep a secret. As if guided by an invisible hand, the women seem to be pulled down, slipping deeper and deeper into the liquid. Whereas the body parts on the surface are drawn with clear lines, the parts under water are blurred. Females that are fully possessed by the fluid are deprived of their individuality and cannot be distinguished from each other. On the faces of the sketched nudes you can recognize fear and agony. These feelings correspond with the ominous fluid because both are intangible as well as irrational. While the nature of the fluid is kept hidden, the origin and the cause of those emotions stays untold, too.