DANA SCHUTZ

Born in 1976, Livonia, MI 
Lives and works in Brooklyn, NY 

Dana Schutz's work has been described as ‘teetering on the edge of tradition and innovation'. 'My paintings are loosely based on metanarratives. The pictures float in and out of pictorial genres. Still lifes become personified, portraits become events and landscapes become constructions. I embrace the area between which the subject is composed and decomposing, formed and formless, inanimate and alive. Recently I have been making paintings of sculptural goddesses, transitory still lifes, people who make things, people who are made and people who have the ability to eat themselves. Although the paintings themselves are not specifically narrative, I often invent imaginative systems and situations to generate information. These situations usually delineate a site where making is a necessity, audiences potentially don't exist, objects transcend their function and reality is malleable

JEFFAR KHALD

Born in 1964, Lebanon 
Lives and works in Dubai, UAE

Khaldi doesn’t consider himself to be a political artist; the themes in his work evolve from his own experiences and ideas and thus provide the most powerful material for making art. In his canvases, harsh realities become mixed with imagined scenes, confusing fact and fiction with a sense of nostalgia or dreams. His tableaux are equally beautiful and uncertain. In Frozen, a man is rendered midfall, his position beatific and Christ-like. In the distance encampments of tents line the landscape, reminiscent of Palestine’s occupation.

Khaldi’s paintings convey theatricality in their portrayed subject matter and in their physical construction. Alongside modern influences such as the German Expressionists, Khaldi cites Persian miniatures as an interest in developing his work. His large-scale canvases evoke similarity to this ancient tradition in their geometrically balanced compositions, overwhelming detail, and flattened sense of space. In The Infinite And Beyond the image becomes almost secondary to the spectacle of its making. The landscape is rendered with luscious mimetic sensibility: water created from thin liquidy washes, sky rendered with breezy-smoggy strokes, earth with dirty fields, and trees as shady patterns cut through with spindly twig-like gestures. The wall and building in the distance seem conspicuously solid in relation to their organic surroundings. The figure in the foreground is an almost ghostly apparition, his facial features duplicated, and arms heavily outlined in white suggest movement.

Mao Yanyang Mao Yanyang was born in Hunan, China in 1980. In 2002, he obtained his Bachelor's Degree of Fine Art from the Oil Painting Department of one of the most elite art academies in China, the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts. He was one of the very few top students selected to participate in the Sichuan Academy's Master's Degree Programme, which he completed in 2005.  In 2005, Mao participated in his first important museum show at the He Xiangning Museum in Shenzhen, China. And in 2006, he was selected to participate in his first international exhibition in Pusan, South Korea.  In 2007, Mao Yanyang was selected as one of the top 25 emerging Chinese artists (out of over 1,000 applicants) at the Chinese Art Prize 2007. He was then selected as the Chinese Art Prize (CAP) 2008 Gold Prize winner by the Director of Art Cologne, Gerard Goodrow, the Curator of the Asian Art Museum, Jeff Kelley, and a prestigious panel of jurors. The Chinese Art Prize recognised Mao Yanyang as one of the top Chinese contemporary artist talents. In 2007, Mao's work was exhibited at the Zhu Qizhan and Duolun Museums in Shanghai andat the BS1 Contemporary Art Museum in Beijing. He has since exhibited in Europe, at Art Cologne, as well as in New York. In 2008, Mao Yanyang was selected to participate in the Asian Triennial in Manchester, UK. He was also awarded a scholarship to study at the Chinese Arts Centre in Manchester, United Kingdom.

Pilar Mehlis

Artist Statement

Paul Bennett

My creative process for figurative paintings begins initially from found images (magazines, Internet), which are used as a base from which I begin to sketch out the composition. It’s important to my work that the initial reference images are from a mass produced source for a couple of reasons. The first is that the paintings I want to create are completely removed from the polished magazine shoots and plastic people portrayed from which I am referencing. The bombardment from advertising and the media of immaculate people has for many years become the normal way that we absorb our visual life. The act of taking the person out of the context of material advertising is a way in which what is left can be open to scrutiny and reinterpreted. The flat and empty backgrounds I use help enhance this. The second reason why I favour the use of the found image is that there is less of a connection with the subject and in some ways it is similar to painting a still life. The subject is removed as a person (to some extent). This then gives me more freedom to reinvent and create the painting in a more expressionist way and break free from a photorealist portrayal of the subject. The very act of painting something which has already been produced many thousands of times already becomes a completely different entity when it is then used to create a one off and unique original piece of work. The intention is that the end result be a million times removed from the person who at some point posed in front of the camera.

The right found image is also hard to come by and can take a long time to find. Finding an image where the subject is not looking directly out of the canvas, in most cases, seems to work best. It helps as it puts an extra barrier between the subject and the viewer; the slight gesture of looking away hints at some kind of emotion and re-establishes a connection on a more subtle level.

I like the paintings to have an unfinished feel about them and to communicate being incomplete when compared to what we are normally presented in our everyday relationship with mass produced visuals. Using the combination of oil paint, graphite and letting the paint freely drip and also the use of distinctive mark making all helps in achieving this. However, it is still one of my aims to maintain the slightest hint that there was once glamour.