Joseph Loughborough is a British artist currently based in Berlin. His haunting figurative works, made with charcoal and gold leaf on paper, draw inspiration from philosophers Albert Camus and Søren Kierkegaard to explore notions of struggle, isolation, and absurdist belief as they relate to the human condition. Check out more of his work on his Tumblr and Flickr.
The hyperrealistic work of Nick Napoletano, a Charlotte, N.C.-based oil painter, is rooted in a classical approach, allegory, and the narratives of today. In a show at Jerald Melberg Gallery in Charlotte, Two to Watch, his newest body of work is a conversation between different periods of art history and modern narratives. He’s joined by sculptor Matthew Steele in the show, which runs through Sept. 10. Napoletano can be found on Instagram here, and in explaining much of the content of Two to Watch, Napoletano starts at the beginning.
It’s not hard to become absorbed in Cristi Rinklin’s otherworldly paintings. The artist creates seamless layers of billowing, amorphous forms and sharply defined lines to depict post-human landscapes that appear to hover weightless in space. These worlds, which take the form of both paintings and installations, are influenced by digital technologies while channeling a grand tradition of illusion in painting. “It is my desire to create paintings and installations that seduce the viewer into believing that the impossible spaces that are presented within them can potentially exist,” the artist says.
American artist Joel Morrison creates contemporary composite sculptures by transforming ordinary objects into shiny, new pieces of art. The artist encases shopping carts, balloons, anvils, clothing, bullets, and other items in stainless steel, giving them new life in their smooth and highly polished forms. His creations, which the artist describes as “a collage of scenarios”, exist somewhere between the realms of pop, surrealism and classicism, playing with different visual tropes of art history and engaging in conversation with a range of artists and genres within the Western art canon.
San Diego-based painter Jasmine Worth blends gloomy surrealism and religious iconography in her oil paintings. In her newest show at La Luz De Jesus in Los Angeles, the artist evolves this mix, with works that move between meditations on symbology and females of the cloth. Worth was last featured on HiFructose.com here, and you can find the artist on Instagram here. The show runs through Aug. 28.
When studying Anne Lemanski‘s sculptures, the artist’s choice in medium becomes just as intriguing as the subject depicted. Working from her extensive personal collection, the artist uses a variety of materials – from vinyl and book pages to textiles and vintage photos – to create life-size sculptures of animals and objects. While some pieces are more open to interpretation, others not-so-subtly address the social, political and environmental issues we face in modern times.