Kumi Machida <-- Born in Takasaki, Gunma in 1970, graduated from Tama University of Arts, majored in Japanese style painting. She won the grand-prix at Maebashi Art Live Cometition '99 in 999, The 4th Jomo Art Award in 2007, and The Sovereign Asian Art Prize in 2007. She stayed in Denmark as an overseas art trainee of Agency for Cultural Affair. (via Kalonsnet)
Yuri Leonov <-- Born 1987, St Petersburg, Russia; Studied at School of Visual Arts, BFA (2011); Lives and works in New York City.
Ash Color Mountains by contemporary artist Makoto Aida is part of the “Bye Bye Kitty” exhibition that was shown at Japan Society in New York City last year. ‘Most of Aida’s themes revolve around sex, death, and politics, meshing iconic imagery into easily depicted commentaries on the world around him.’
Polly Morgan’s Still Birth is a series of preserved chicks, suspended by colored balloons kept with in bell jars.
New Zealand-based art director/illustrator Joseph Senior created tons of different Hello Kitty designs inspired by pop culture using that image editing program you’ve never heard of, Photoshop.
Marta Julia Piórko pushes out some eye-popping paintings over at her Saatchi Online portfolio page. She is full-time artist who lives and works in Poland. Check it out!
” Shredded paper sculptures, such as the Tax Files, reconfigure a mass of paper that has been grouped and saved due to written content, into slabs reminiscent of tree cross-sections where the climate of a given year, and the tree’s overall age are visible in a single slice. Historical information is revealed in the colors of deposit slips, pay stubs, receipts and tax forms. The cellular coils spiral outward, mimicking biological growth, as they are glued together into flat rounds, which suggest lichen, doilies or disease. The re-use of paper, as well as the attempted “repair” of the long-lost original tree, is an examination of feelings of despair about waste and unsustainability while simultaneously responding to the shadow impulse to hoard and keep what is no longer needed. The exercise of translating numbers back into a comprehensible, physical manifestation is also an attempt to develop a tool for managing overwhelmingly large tallies, such as those we encounter regularly in reports on war or climate change.” – Nava Lubelski
” I was incredibly inspired by the children book illustrations, by painting school of Russian realism, by incredible Soviet animation masters, by the subtle images of my devoutly Catholic granny’s religious postcards reproducing European Renaissance masters’ Biblical theme paintings etc. A prospect of being one of the people able to create such powerful visual imagery was equal to a prospect of being half-god myself.” – Jana Brike
Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen collaborate on playful sculptures: ordinary objects depicted in monumental scale. The artistic team of Coosje van Bruggen and Claes Oldenburg has to date executed more than forty large-scale projects, which have been sited in various urban surroundings in Europe, Asia, and the United States. Link here.
