Heartfelt (Human-Scale Anatomical Heart) by Sarah Mandell on Etsy. Happy Valentine’s Day everyone!

Damián Ortega (b. 1967, Mexico City) currently lives and works in Berlin. His work explores specific economic, aesthetic and cultural situations and in particular how regional culture affects commodity consumption. He began his career as a political cartoonist, and his art has the intellectual rigour and sense of playfulness often associated with his previous occupation. He creates sculptures, installations, videos and actions inspired by a wide range of mundane objects, from golf balls and pickaxes to bricks, rubbish bins and even tortillas, all subjected to what has been described as Ortega’s characteristically “mischievous process of transformation and dysfunction.”

The installation Too beautiful to be true by Meike Harde ‘was developed on the occasion of the exhibition Fine Arts in Saarbrücken, Germany. Masks which picture the eye- and mouth area correspond to the current ideal of beauty. When put on, however, they cause a contortion of the face. This is meant to show that artificially produced beauty is not always beautiful; instead it can evoke the very opposite. The pictures with the masks should be allegorical for effect of artifically produced beauty. Link here.

Diana Al-Hadid is a contemporary artist. She was born, and lived in Aleppo, Syria, in 1981 and lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. The work of Diana Al-Hadid is, in many ways, about architecture. Her sculptures often recall built structures—cathedrals, pipe organs, towers, labyrinths, cities—yet are made of simple, often delicate or fragile materials, such as polymer gypsum, plaster, fiberglass, wood, polystyrene, cardboard, wax, and paint, commonly found in art and industrial supply shops. Notes Nasher Sculpture Center Director Jeremy Strick: “Diana Al-Hadid creates breathtaking sculptures that surprise us by their unusual forms, unconventional use of materials, and distinctive range of reference and allusion. Her innovative work opens up new ground for the form and meaning of sculpture.” The sculptures have the appearance of unfinished buildings or archeological remains, and it is often difficult to discern if they are in the process of construction or collapse. Ranging in scale from the human to the architectural, her work references a diverse set of interests, including Arab and Greek mythology, Gothic and Middle Eastern architecture, cosmology and physics. (via)

These are designed by award winning London based architect Julian Hakes.

Paula Rego is a painter, illustrator and printmaker who was has been described by the art critic Robert Hughes as the ‘best painter of women’s experience alive today’. Rego was born in Lisbon in 1935 and went to finishing school in England before attending the Slade School of Art, where she met her husband Victor Willing. Rego and Willing divided their time between Portugal and England until 1975, when they moved to England permanently following the 1974 ‘carnation revolution’ in Portugal where Salazar’s dictatorship was ousted by Maoist insurrectionists. Back in London, Rego taught at the Slade and was able to continue painting with the assistance of grants from the Gulbenkian Foundation. (via Artbank)

” ..I am an artist from Indianapolis, Indiana, currently living at home making a new body of work. My work is photographic at its base but has now expanded into the many diverse sections you can see throughout this site. Currently I am exploring the potential of high-powered magnets to create sculptures that break through glass and could be installed in any window in just a few seconds.” – Tasha Lewis

Janaina Tschäpe is a visual artist working with video and photography for her installations. She was born in Munich, Germany but grew up in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. She has studied in New York, at the School of Visual Arts and in Hamburg, at the Hochschule fur Bildende Kuenste. (via Hilda Magazine)

Mexican wrestling Luchador Bottle Openers were designed by Ariel Rojo and Andres Lhima for the Kikkerland Mexico Design Challenge. Available in assorted colors and style.

” For me, painting is the same as building. You have basic blocks and the superstructure that is behind every picture. I like the idea that you can see inside things. You can see the structure and all the individual parts. Painting is a good tool to bring up stuff that you don’t normally see, or you see but don’t understand. For me this is the basic idea of surreal picture: something quite normal becomes something exiting and intriguing. This surreal world sleeps inside everything. My recent pictures feature animals. I use them as a metaphor for variety of themes: love, death, longing, desire. Animals tend to have very strong symbolic meanings. I use these existing meanings, sometimes break them and invent new ones.” – Samuli Heimonen