Month: December 2021

John Knuth’s creative conjurings challenge traditional notions of art making, even in this millennium. His paintings force extreme tension between the sacred and the profane, creating stunning works by way of indelicate techniques. Knuth’s mission is to take something traditionally regarded as base, and to make it into something magnificent, where the materials feel secondary to the radical result. Knuth’s approach is alchemical. Like an art world diviner, he conjures the elements, from making burn paintings with distress flares and metallic space blankets to using fly regurgitation to make the most incandescent, shimmering paintings. He has perfected his process using flyspeck, which can be said to fall within the art historical continuum that includes the Pre-Raphaelites’ Mummy Brown or Chris Ofili’s elephant dung.

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Paul Feiler was a German-born artist who was a prominent member of the St Ives School of art: he has pictures hanging in major art galleries across the world.

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Dame Elisabeth Jean Frink CH DBE RA was an English sculptor and printmaker. Her Times obituary noted the three essential themes in her work as “the nature of Man; the ‘horseness’ of horses; and the divine in human form”.

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Thierry Noir is a French artist and muralist based in Berlin. He is considered the first artist to paint the Berlin Wall in the 1980s.

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John McAllister’s luminous, luxurious oil paintings of interiors, landscapes, and still lifes reflect the artist’s ongoing explorations of light. Inspired by the work of Pierre Bonnard, Georges Braque, and Henri Matisse, McAllister works from a seductive palette of vibrant hues, typically limited to warm reds, purples, oranges, and pinks. With their dark backgrounds and ghostly foregrounds, his canvases can suggest the coloration of film negatives—one of many nods to photography throughout the artist’s practice, along with a frequent use of off-kilter framing. McAllister has made witty paintings of images of paintings, and of overlapping images, playing the roles of both artist and viewer. McAllister has exhibited in London, Los Angeles, New York, Berlin, Brussels, Tokyo, and beyond.

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Billy Childish is an English painter, author, poet, photographer, film maker, singer and guitarist. Since the late 1970s, Childish has been prolific in creating music, writing and visual art.

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Alex Jones is an artist based in Brighton, East Sussex. His work is primarily concerned with systems of language as methods of construction. Through both painting and drawing on canvas and paper, he utilises our understanding of how language is applied to create formal structures made of language and the space around it.

He applies more rigid parameters that are loosely applied, enjoying the relationship between formal rules and an apathy towards their adherence. The painterly quality is both highly considered and ordered but with a slack looseness, a casual application to what could be strict rules. His use of language as a building tool rather than one of communication renders any descriptive or narrative imagery depicted perfunctory, the words are there for how they sit, not what they say.

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Sulette van der Merwe (b. 1982) lives and works in Cape Town, South Africa. She enjoys philosophy and art history, and recent works explore the theme of Heterotopia, a concept used to describe spaces that have more layers of meaning than the immediately obvious. Pop art, surrealism and digital culture also feature prominently in her paintings and video animations.

“I am interested in the narrative abstractions that arise when information from disparate spaces such as illustration, internet sourced images and photography are combined. It is an intuitive and conceptually playful experience to observe the cross chatter between the physicality of painting and the ephemeral nature of the online experience.”

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Tafadzwa Masudi (b. 1988) started painting at an early age in Harare while assisting a family friend who introduced him to the visual arts. 

In 2010 he moved to South Africa and started working in a clothing factory until 2020 when he was laid off. He saw this as an opportunity to paint full-time and soon his work started featuring in group exhibitions at galleries in Cape Town. 

His brightly coloured paintings depict scenes filled with balloons, people and patterns. Observed through the lens of a migrant person existing in a world that is not his own, the works reflect on optimism and the pursuit of a better future. 

“The balloons are not just masks of optimism or celebration, they also represent the composed pressure under which some of us are. A balloon can pop any moment, yet it represents happiness and celebration. That balloon is me staying calm under difficult circumstances while chasing the dream of a bright future”. 

2021 is proving to be an eventful year with his first solo exhibition and participation in the Turbine Art Fair in Johannesburg and Art X Lagos in Nigeria lined up. 

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Since the 1980s, when he rose to prominence alongside artists including Julian Schnabel, David Salle, and Jean-Michel Basquiat, Neo-Expressionist Eric Fischl has painted voyeuristic, large-scale paintings of American suburbia. Inspired by his own middle-class upbringing on Long Island, the artist captures both the mundane and the taboo; in bright, gestural strokes, he depicts scenes of grief, inequality, adolescent sexuality, and political malaise. Fischl imbues his subjects, from beachgoers to poolside families, with a sense of gravity and foreboding as he manipulates light and shadow. In recent years, he has also painted deadpan scenes of art fairs. Fischl has exhibited widely in New York, Los Angeles, London, Paris, and beyond. His work has fetched seven-figure prices at auction and been acquired for the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, among others.

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