Artist: Alberto Cerriteño

Alberto Cerriteño is a Mexican illustrator & designer who has lived in America; Portland for nearly four years now. Strongly inspired by urban vinyl toys, alternative cartoons, and the pop surrealism movement, Alberto Cerriteño has developed his own very personal technique and style, having always present a delicate hints of traditional Mexican artistic influences in his management of rich textures and decorative patterns. These contrast strikingly with the blending of desaturated colors and ink, sometimes featuring a vintage coffee finish.

http://www.albertocerriteno.com/gallery01.html

Artist: Jen Lobo

Click to enlarge

http://www.gelaskins.com/artists/Jen_Lobo

Artist: Ray Caesar

Roundabout (2006)

14 x 14 inches
EDITION OF 1

Varnished Ultrachrome on Panel

Silent Partner (2009)

30 x 40
EDITION OF 20

http://www.raycaesar.com/

Artist: Yoshitomo Nara

The Little Star Dweller

White Kitty

Cosmic Girl - Eyes Wide Open & Eyes Closed

Sprout the Ambassador

Nara first came to the fore of the art world during Japan’s Pop artpastel-hued children and animals drawn with confident, cartoonish lines) with little or no background. But these children, who appear at first to be cute and even vulnerable, sometimes brandish weapons like knives and saws. Their wide eyes often hold accusatory looks that could be sleepy-eyed irritation at being awoken from a nap—or that could be undiluted expressions of hate.

Takashi Murakami at Rockefeller Center: Reversed Double Helix

Takashi Murakami - Mr. Pointy at Rockefeller Center

New York City's most famous plaza has been transformed into a fantastical pop cityscape. Takashi Murakami at Rockefeller Center: Reversed Double Helix, a major outdoor art exhibition organized by the Public Art Fund on behalf of Tishman Speyer Properties and presented by Target Stores.

This all-encompassing installation-Murakami's most ambitious U.S. solo show to date features all new work including a large freestanding sculpture, two giant floating balloons, and a forest of mushroom seating. Tongari-kun (Japanese for "Mr. Pointy") as he is known in Murakami's universe of characters, is flanked by four smaller figures. Low-lying mushrooms, a familiar motif in Murakami's artwork, surround the central sculpture and serve as seating areas for visitors. Surveying this scene are two gigantic "eyeball" balloons, each 30 feet in diameter, floating 60 feet in the air above the Rockefeller Center Ice Rink. Murakami also designed the flags surrounding Rockefeller Center in order to complete the aesthetic transformation.

Takashi Murakami: Reversed Double Helix

The exhibition subtitle, Reversed Double Helix, refers to the twisted spirals of DNA strands and plays upon Murakami's universe of mutant cartoon characters, where wide-eyed mushrooms coexist with multi-armed giants, happy flowers, and elfin creatures. Characterized by horizontality, bright acrylic patterns and flat unblemished surfaces, Murakami's works are an inspired mix of tradition and modernity, as Japanese Nihon-ga paintings of the 19th century meld with pop culture influences like Andy Warhol's Factory and Walt Disney animation. With its formal sophistication and ever-gleeful cast of characters, Murakami's art appeals on a purely visual level even as it references religion, subcultures, and art history.

Murakami is also internationally recognized for his recent collaboration with designer Marc Jacobs to create handbags and other products for the Louis Vuitton fashion house. Takashi Murakami's highly publicized $2 million art installation at Rockefeller Center is on view for only one month. The 30-foot-tall, polychromed plastic, 20-armed Buddha-like sculpture, Mr. Pointy, has been acquired by France's Francois Pinault, the owner of FNAC, Christies and assorted luxury goods concerns. Pinault bought the installation during his visit to the Venice Biennale in June.

Heather McGill The Last Time I Saw Richard

Heather McGill
The Last Time I Saw Richard
EUCLID AVENUE GALLERY
[Artist's Statement]

Heather McGill's The Last Time I Saw Richard dances across the gallery as a riotous installation of wall sculpture and air brushed painting, spinning suspended stars, and laser cut snake charmers, vultures, and the ambiguous words "I Believe." McGill's artwork, built up of layer upon layer of lacquer "candies" on various three dimensional substrates and of superimposed air brushed colored papers, surreptitiously presents layer upon layer of illusions and allusions - social, political, and physical.

On one long wall of the gallery is an 8 x 6 foot wall piece, el Farol, intricately shaped aluminum painted a strident pink and purple plaid with multiple coats of “candies,” a lacquer based automotive paint favored by hot rodders. Below the WWII bomber wing-shaped metal is a wall painting of a complex interconnected pattern of enormous pink roses, blue forget-me-nots, and discrete black silhouettes of strippers and cheerleaders, all concluding in a lantern on a chain. On the opposite wall is a grid-like arrangement of McGill’s “thinnest sculptures” of laser-cut and hand painted overlaid sheets of paper filled with intricate layers of patterning and plaids that swirl around vultures, snake charmers, and the word “Believe.” The center of the gallery is filled floor to ceiling with chains of hundreds of laser-cut and spray painted paper stars.

Heather McGill writes about her work:
My sculpture makes visual reference to automotive customizing and mass production and is predicated on understanding form as defined by light and color. I use automotive paints to finish the surfaces of my sculpture; in particular lacquer based paints called candies. Invented in the 1950's, candies are luscious, transparent colors sprayed over reflective base coats to highlight, define and optically restructure the forms they are applied to. These surfaces are meant to seduce, triggering the viewer's non-verbal, instinctive attraction to color. The candies suggest a deeper space beyond the physical surface and create complex illusions that are revealed through the viewer's different angles of observation.

Heather McGill The Last Time I Saw Richard, 2010 Acrylic, aluminum, and lacquer; archival inkjet printed and laser cut paper; cut paper and pigment (framed) 11 ft. 6 in. x 30 ft. x 4 in. Photo: Andrew LaMoreaux Studio, courtesy of the artist

Heather McGill The Cost of Living, 2010 Cut paper and pigment 16 x 16 in. Image courtesy of the artist	Heather McGill The Last Time I Saw Richard, 2010 (detail) Archival inkjet printed and laser cut paper; acrylic, cut paper and pigment (framed) Photo: Andrew LaMoreaux Studio, courtesy of the artist

about the artist
Heather McGill is Artist-in-Residence and Head of the Sculpture Department at the Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, MI.. She studied at the University of California at Davis and received her M.F.A. from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1984. Prior to becoming Artist-in-Residence at Cranbrook, McGill taught at the University of California at Berkeley and at the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University.

McGill has received grants for both permanent and temporary installations from the National Endowment for the Arts, LEF Foundation, Ford Foundation, California Arts Council, and the San Francisco Arts Commission. As a two-year Artist-in-Residence at the Exploratorium in San Francisco, she designed a piece that became part of the permanent collection after traveling through Europe. In 1999, she received the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award. She has lectured and served as a panelist at many universities and conferences in the United States, and recently as a peer reviewer for the Fulbright Fellowship applicants in 2001-03.

A former California resident, McGill created installations throughout the West Coast exploring the historical, environmental, and cultural systems specific to each site. Outdoor permanent sculpture includes works in the city of San Rafael and for the State of California at the Elkhorn Slough National Estuarine Sanctuary. Her work is included in the public collections of Sprint, Albright-Knox Gallery, Fidelity Investments, Compuware, Daimler, and the Detroit Institute of the Arts.

In the past few years, McGill has participated in group and one-person shows at the Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo, New York; Dwight Hackett Projects, Santa Fe, New Mexico; Miller/Block Gallery, Boston, Massachusetts; The Tang Teaching Museum, Saratoga Springs, New York; Cranbrook Art Museum, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan; Knoedler & Company, New York, New York; L.A. Louver, Venice, California; TZ’ Art & Company, New York, New York; The Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, Michigan; Espace Lyonnais d’Art Contemporain, France; Serpentine Gallery, London; Palais des Beaux Arts, Brussels; Seville Museum, Seville, Spain; William Traver Gallery, Seattle, Washington; The Queens Museum of Art, Queens, New York; Whatcom Museum, Bellingham, Washington; Madison Art Center, Madison, Wisconsin; and San Jose Museum, San Jose, California.

Artist: Naoto Hattori - MIND GARDEN SPECIAL EDITION PRINTS

LIMITED EDITION PRINT

MIND GARDEN SPECIAL EDITION PRINTS
Set of 12 Giclee Prints on Fine Art Paper
Signed and Numbered Edition of 100

Pioneer, 8 x10 inches
Walking 02, 9 x10 inches
Cubent, 4 x6 inches
Searcher, 4 x6 inches
Seeker, 4 x6 inches
Bunny B, 4 x6 inches
Long neck Gazelle, 4 x10 inches
Shroomhead Bear, 8 x10 inches
Long neck Panda, 4 x10 inches
Devil Monkeycrab, 6 x7 inches
Tree 04, 6 x7 inches
Shroom Ju, 6 x7 inches

From: http://naotohattori.com/home.html

Artist: Mark Ryden - New York Times Magazine Article

Meat Lover | Mark Ryden’s Cool Cuts By CHRISTINE MUHLKE - April 30, 2010, 4:42 pm

Mark Ryden/Courtesy of Paul Kasmin Gallery

Attention amateur butchers, meat lovers and hungry aesthetes: At the Paul Kasmin Gallery, the artist Mark Ryden is doing wonders with off cuts at his new show, “The Gay ’90s: Olde Tyme Art Show.” The paintings of a Gibson girl riding a bicycle built for two with Jesus and a brooding beauty in period finery are spooky and lovely, but it’s his meatier images that steal the show — a wispy girl in a gown of hams, hindquarters and sausages, or Abraham Lincoln grinding fresh chuck for a tea-drinking demoiselle. Surreally delicious.

The Moment caught up with Ryden at his studio in Sierra Madre, Calif., before the opening and learned why meat was such a joy to paint and why there were no good butchers.

Q. What’s the idea behind the “Olde Tyme Art Show”?
A. “The Gay 90s” refers to the 1890s era of barbershop quartets and bicycles built for two. I am interested in exploring the line between attraction to and repulsion from kitsch. I find the “Gay 90s” to be a thematic genre that pushes sentimentality and kitsch to its utmost limits.

Q. What’s the idea behind depicting a beautiful girl wearing sausages?

A. That painting is called “Incarnation,” which literally translates from the Latin to “in the meat.” I think it is more important for an image to maintain some mystery. I leave it to the viewer to interpret the images how they will.

Q. Why does meat factor into your work? You did a “Meat Show” in ‘98.

A. There seems to be a complete disconnect between meat as food and the living, breathing creature it comes from. I suppose it is this contradiction that brings me to return to meat in my art. It surprises many people to learn that I am actually not a vegetarian. I don’t think it is morally wrong to eat meat. What I do personally is to try to remain aware of what I am eating and where it came from. I am not trying to preach a moral stance on anything in my art, but I find that juxtaposition of imagery can create a kind of distance and then an ensuing heightening of awareness.

Q. What’s the hardest thing about painting it?

A. Meat is a joy to paint. The wonderful variety of textures and patterns in the marbling of meat is sumptuous. Subtle pinks gently swirl around with rich vermilions and fatty yellow ochers. A representational painting of meat easily becomes an exercise in abstraction. I find myself playing with the paint, smearing, scraping, staining and doing things I wouldn’t be so inclined to with other representations.

Q. What’s your favorite meat dish in Manhattan?

A. I am on the hunt, and open to suggestions

Q. Who’s your butcher?

A. That is a funny question, as there is really no such thing as a butcher anymore, is there? Since Reagan, the meat industry has been consolidated (like so many other industries) into just two or three gigantic corporations whose myopic interest is profit. The result is that the animals we use as food live a life of indescribable torture, because this generates a tiny slice more profit for these corporations. Our daily diet is tainted with this torture, and it really doesn’t have to be that way.

http://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/04/30/meat-lover-mark-rydens-cool-cuts/

Artist: Paintings by Deedee Cheriel

From Juxtapoz Magazine - September 30, 2010

Opening Reception: October 9, 2010 (8 - 11pm)
Merry Karnowsky Gallery / 170 S. La Brea Ave. Los Angeles, CA 90036

In her satirical and playful work, animal and human hybrids engage with each other and their environment, a familiar yet surreal world in which bird-headed women riding fish seem perfectly natural. Cheriel's works are meditations on the tedious dramas of her real-life Los Angeles social circle where boyfriend stealing friends, narcissistic hippies, do-gooders, and intellectuals are anthropomorphized into a surreal world of random theatre. Her paintings are the alchemy that transform pettiness into visual treasures.

“Cheriel's vibrant, gestural work beautifully juxtaposes humans, plants, and animals, connecting species figuratively and literally. Her pieces are whimsical, but profound in their ability to shift the viewer's perspective to value all life equally. Deedee's work demonstrates a powerful tension between the design elements of stripes, patterns, and color fields, with lyrical illustration. Deedee's work is idiosyncratic in the most ideal way... it is a reflection of her unique personality.”
- SHEPARD FAIREY

Referring to the magic of transforming societal ailments into beauty is the source for the title of the show, "Abracadabra" the incantation chosen by magicians and mystics to heal the seemingly incurable. The word was originally used by a Roman physician in the 2nd Century who prescribed disease sufferers to wear an amulet containing the word “Abracadabra” written in the form of a triangle. Combining elements from nature, urban landscapes, history, and pop culture, the paintings delve into the universal human need to find commonalities between ourselves and the world around us.

Using acrylic paint on wood and paper in a combination of textile-like patterns, delicate lines, haphazard drips, and fragile expressions, the artist transforms personal dramas into a commentary on humanity’s heroic quest for love and connection. In one painting a cult-like group of horse-headed women kneel before a bear-headed shaman who growls sharply in brightly colored patterns resembling native weaving. The horse-women, while cultish and beautiful, can also be seen as vain and unpredictable, as referenced in Chinese, Celtic, and Greco-Roman symbolism.
With influences (East Indian temple imagery, folk art, feminist punk rock, mysticism,

and the naturalistic environments of her Pacific Northwest childhood) derived from her diverse background, Cheriel’s work explores narratives that recognize the urgency and continuing conflict in our attempts to connect to the world and each other.

Cheriel began her art career creating record covers and T-shirts for the Oregon music scene in the early '90s. She played in several all-girl bands and co- created the semi-autobiographical film Dow n and Out with the Dolls. Her artwork has shown in galleries in Los Angeles, New York, Miami, San Francisco, Chicago, Portland, London, and Melbourne, Australia. She currently lives and works in Los An geles, CA.