Kiran Manandhar is a pioneer who transformed Nepali contemporary art expression while staying true to his cultural roots. His work explores reflection, love and beauty in an explosion of vibrant, harmonious colour.
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Chinese jueban woodblock prints are no ordinary woodblocks. They are created using a “suicide technique” where each subsequent step destroys the previous one, making it impossible to go back and fix mistakes.
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I was intrigued as much by the Dutch artist Doortje van Ginneken’s art as by her confidence, so far as I could surmise the latter from the printed word.
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Balinese artist Nyoman Wirdana’s mystical artworks draw inspiration from the cosmos, nature, and mythology.
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Sometimes people ask why this artist and not another? Is it the right gallery, right place and time, luck? I’m sure a bit of all can’t hurt. But all I know is that before I knew who the Ghanaian artist Amoako Boafo was, my eyes immediately went to that one painting in the room. His.
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Recently I had a conversation with friends about whether AI generated art is “art”. Putting aside for the moment the obvious issues of disruption, if an artwork genuinely moves you, is it “art” whether or not it is generated by a human hand?
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Black and white or so it seems. The genius of Levan Lagidze is that each pattern or hue brings a new one to the fore in a seemingly endless game of discovery, pulling you inside a deeply satisfying universe.
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Victoria Semykina’s playful illustrations reconnect with a lightness, a childhood feeling of wonder and expectation that is so often forgotten amidst the vast and varied experiences of adulthood.
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Dmitri Prigov’s marvellous monsters live in the gap of all that is logical.
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Living just past her 100th birthday, Bessarabian artist Valentina Rusu-Ciobanu had seen the world twist and turn and change for a full century.
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Each artwork is a story. Having missed last week’s post doing much the same thing in 2024 as the fine gentlemen in Alfons Walde’s 1927 “The Ascent of Skiers”, I took a super quick amateur look at the evolution of skiing through art.
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And now for something different. Some time ago I started writing (very) short stories inspired by art from the artists that I represent. This is one of them - inspired by the “Old Warrior” by Mamuka Dideba.
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With titles like “Inside the Brain of a Bird” and “Drowning in the Tulip”, Lebanese-born artist Ihab Ahmad fires the imagination with enigmatic works populated by a myriad of colourful details. It feels almost like receiving a set of vibrant Lego pieces that you can form into a fantastic tale governed only by the further reaches of your imagination.
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One of my favourite themes in the work of Iranian artist Reza Derakshani is the Hunt - a concept central to traditional Persian culture and one which on Derakshani’s canvases becomes a hunt for eloquence, or for colour, or even for the hunter.
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Islamic Art had enchanted and captivated me for quite some time - a passion shared with Paul Gauguin who once explained to his friends that the facial features of his 1888 self-portrait, Les Misérables, are directly inspired by floral designs in Persian carpets.
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There is magic in a winter landscape. The stillness; the soft sounds muffled by the snow, the light reflecting off the myriad of sparkling snowflakes interwoven into a blanket of white. Everything feels more - more luminescent, more colourful, the best version of itself. Here is how various artists over the years perceived the winter wonderland - arranged day to night rather than chronologically.
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The unique trajectory of Valentino Monticello’s fascinating life story is far beyond the 1-min read parameters of this blog, but here’s a glimpse.
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In the sunshine or the moonlight, overlapping the last burnt-orange bursts of autumn or accentuating the colours all around it, fresh snow envelopes us in a muffled cocoon of joyful, wondrous, irresistible beauty. The striking archival pigment prints by Detroit-native Jef Bourgeau capture the joy, colours, and stillness of these moments.
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