Amazing photorealistic portraits made of bubble wrap injected with acrylic paint created by Bradley Hart. Very, very cool.

Check out this installation titled ‘Penetralia’ at the Gladstone Gallery by British artist Sarah Lucas. ‘Since the 1990s, Lucas has been developing a unique material vocabulary using everyday domestic items such as stockings, clothing hangers, lightbulbs, and beer cans to create objects that challenge our collectively inscribed codes of gender, sexual, and social normativity. In this exhibition Lucas uses the male genitalia as her muse, capturing the tension between the representational and the abstract, while retaining the insistent and underlying anxiety imbued in her particular mode of the abject. In this exhibition of new and older works, Lucas continues to explore the themes and ideas at play within her 2008 series of the same title, “Penetralia.” Employing similar strategies of production, such as cast concrete, plaster, and fiberglass, these works engage the figure of the phallus with an intense formal clarity and wit. While the symbolic power of the phallus allows Lucas to play with an overt level of content and signification, she is also equally attentive to the basic conditions of the sculptural object implied in composition, weight, balance, and materiality. These aesthetic details animate Lucas’ otherwise brute erections, rendering their contours, surface, and structure into an elegant and formal investigation of the phallus. Throughout her work, Lucas has both explicitly and suggestively conjured the image of the penis as both a controversial cultural icon as well as a banal human body part, remarking upon the male organ as the ideal stand-alone sculpture. In drawing parallels between the physicality of both the sculptural object and the male organ, Lucas slyly alludes to the shared history of power and preferences: verticality over horizonality, exterior versus interior, convex versus concave, visibility opposed to invisibility. Linguistic tropes and puns have consistently informed Lucas’ multivalent and at times evasive layering of meaning, perfectly exemplified in the title “Penetralia,” essentially defined as, “the innermost, the most private or secret parts.” This title cleverly conflates its two inter-related terms, the penetrated (the “innermost”) and the penetrator (the phallic object), by enacting a slippage in meaning between text and object.’

Matt Doust was born in 1984 in Santa Monica, California. He grew up in Perth, Australia. In July 2011, he moved back to Los Angeles where he now lives and works. Doust was named a finalist in 2011 for Australia’s prestigious Archibald Prize.

Bethany Krull is a ceramicist living in working in the Western New York region. She earned her Master’s of Fine Arts from the School for American Crafts at the Rochester Institute of Technology and her Bachelor’s of Fine Arts from the State University College at Buffalo. She is currently teaching at Buffalo State College in the design department. Her work has been exhibited regionally, nationally and internationally. Bethany Krull’s work explores human relationships with nature and the ways in which society requires nature to conform to human desires. Her works are humorous, playful, and often tongue-in-cheek. (via Burchfield Penney Art Center)

A cute dog sculpture wearing a traditional Japanese wedding costume at the National Art Center in 2010 by Ruriko Nonogaki.

Originally from Mexico City, Gabriel Dawe creates site-specific installations that explore the connection between fashion and architecture, and how they relate to the human need for shelter in all its shapes and forms. His work is centered in the exploration of textiles, aiming to examine the complicated construction of gender and identity in his native Mexico and attempting to subvert the notions of masculinity and machismo prevalent in the present day. His work has been exhibited in the US, Canada, Belgium, and the UK. After living in Montreal, Canada for 7 years, he moved to Dallas, Texas, where he obtained his MFA at the University of Texas at Dallas. For the final two years of his degree, he was an artist in residence at CentralTrak, the Artist in Residency program at UTD. His work has been featured in numerous publications around the world, including Sculpture magazine, the cover of the 12th edition of Art Fundamentals published by McGraw-Hill, and in author Tristan Manco’s book Raw + Material = Art . He is represented by Conduit Gallery in Dallas, and by Lot 10 Gallery in Brussels.

‘Transformation is the power of the artist Georg Herold. Taking found and discarded objects, often from the careless remnant heaps of hardware stores, Georg Herold wraps and binds the raw materials once meant to be discarded, and forms them into sculptures that seem to embody not only life but personality, desire and ambition. The ambition of wood to live, to move out of its intended rooted state into a state of movement and levity, Georg Herold’s figures push the envelope like double jointed acrobats celebrating their new found freedom.’ (via Perry Rubenstein Gallery)

Meet Max Fesl, a talented artist based in Munich, Germany. You can see some more of his work here.

Arne Quinze was born in 1971 in Belgium and lives and works in Sint-Martens-Latem, Belgium. In the eighties he began working as a graffiti artist but he never finished an official art education. Quinze creates large and small sculptures, drawings, paintings, and large-scale installations. Smaller works, sketches, and drawings are the basis and research for his large installations. Recurring fundamentals in his oeuvre are the use of multiple types of wood, including salvaged wood; electrical colors in fluorescent paint; and themes referring to social interaction, communication, and urbanism. Since a while he’s doing research towards large steel installations.

Johannes VanDerBeek examines notions of time, transformation, and dreams in his sculptures, installations, and 2-D works. VanDerBeek avoids a personal or “signature” style, instead using unconventional mixed-media and eclectic installations to create layered sequences of allegory that encourage viewers to consider (and re-consider) the ways in which material qualities can become condensed and distorted over time. (via Artsy)