Eckart Hahn <-- Born in 1971; He graduated from the Johannes Gutenberg School in specialty graphic design. He lives in the city of Reutlingen in Baden-Württemberg, Germany.

I surprised I haven’t posted anything by Takashi Murakami here on Sweet Station yet. I guess I just assumed everyone knows about his work. Here’s a six metre high, blow up self-portrait sculpture of Takashi at the Museum of Islamic Art (Doha, Qatar).

Lui Liu was born in March 1957 in North China and came to Canada in 1991. Speaking both Chinese and English fluently, Lui Liu possesses superb painterly techniques, his unique language that finds a wide range of audience around the world. His acquisition of techniques started during China’s Cultural Revolution when he was a young boy painting posters on the streets and continued in the most prestigious Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. Through his paintings, Lui Liu creates a surreal world that transcends cultures and spaces. Growing up in China and living in the west give him a dual role of being an insider and outsider of both worlds and afford him to “stand alone facing east and west, as he chooses,” wrote Barry Callaghan, a renown Canadian writer.

” Ledger sheets are traditionally used to record the financial transactions of a business or an individual. These papers host the data necessary for accounting information to be compiled, and for analysis in determining profit and loss. They are the material of economics. In an attempt to understand our need to quantify our transactions, I employ this paper. I use a drafting knife to individually remove tens of thousands of boxes from this paper, leaving behind the lattice of the grid intended to separate the boxes. The skeletal pages drape and accumulate, demarcate the time cost for their creation, and become the buildings for which they have laid the groundwork. With each piece, the notion of “value” is called into question – be it the value of our quotidian pursuits, the relative value of labor, or the implicit values of economic advancement.” – Jill Sylvias

Lilian Bourgeat (born 1970, lives and works in Dijon) creates installations composed of oversized items from everyday life. Thus deprived of their usual and familiar character, they gain new autonomy by changing scale ratios. These objects are surreal and unsettling experience singular to the public. The interaction between the work and the viewer, who is invited to use it as a street furniture is an important feature of the work of the artist.

” My ‘arrival’ at painting has been a slightly unusual one, in the sense that I purposely set out to study a skills based 3D Design course, where I specialized in ceramics. My rationale for this being that I have always loved the ‘making process’ and I am very interested in the three dimensional and textural quality of objects and spaces. I worked in clay for some years after leaving Art College, whilst starting to get commissions for paintings (mainly watercolours at the time). The painting evolved from this and eventually took up all my time. Drawing and making are still at the core of the work, but painting allows me to invent other spaces and ideas with no physical constraints.” – Miriam Escofet

Felice Varini is a Swiss artist who was nominated for the 2000/2001 Marcel Duchamp Prize, known for his geometric perspective-localized paintings in rooms and other spaces, using projector-stencil techniques. According to mathematics professor and art critic Joël Koskas, “A work of Varini is an anti-Mona Lisa.” Felice paints on architectural and urban spaces, such as buildings, walls and streets. The paintings are characterized by one vantage point from which the viewer can see the complete painting (usually a simple geometric shape such as circle, square, line), while from other view points the viewer will see ‘broken’ fragmented shapes. Varini argues that the work exists as a whole – with its complete shape as well as the fragments. “My concern,” he says “is what happens outside the vantage point of view.”

Don Brown <--born in 1962 in Norfolk, England, studied at the Central School of Art, London (1983-5) followed by the Royal College of Art, London (1985-8). He has been the subject of solo exhibitions across Great Britain and Europe, including at Le Consortium, Dijon (2007). Don Brown’s work has been included in significant group shows, including SNAP: Art at the Aldeburgh Festival at Snape Maltings, Suffolk, UK (2011), Crucible at Gloucester Cathedral, Gloucester, UK (2010), In the darkest hour there may be a light at the Serpentine Gallery, London (2006) as well as The Naked Portrait, 1900-2007 at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh (2007). In 2012 his work will be exhibited alongside Degas’s Little Dancer Aged Fourteen (1880-81) in Presence: the Art of the Sculpted Portrait at the Holburne Museum, Bath, UK. His works are held in prominent collections, both public and private, including the Tate, London; the Museum of Realist Art Schering, Spanbroek, Netherlands; the Olbricht Collection, Berlin and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. He currently lives and works in Suffolk, England.

Cajsa von Zeipel, born 1983, graduated from the Royal Art Academy in Stockholm 2010. She has earned critical acclaim and public attention through a number of sculptures in monumental formats such as Pretty Vacant at MOOD in Stockholm and Seconds of Ecstasy, an 8-meter high sculpture from her degree show, now in the collections of the Gothenburg Art Museum.

These are just some of the many fantastic watercolor paintings you’ll find over at the website of artist Conrad Ruiz.