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Surreal art by contemporary artists

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Ryota Matsumoto – Variable Phase Opacities

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Artist Statement

Matsumoto’s artwork reflects the morphological transformations of our ever-evolving ecological milieus that are attributed to a multitude of spatio-temporal phenomena influenced by socioeconomic and built environments. They are created as visual commentaries on speculative changes in notions of societies, cultures and ecosystems in the transient nature of shifting topography and geology.
The artwork explores the hybrid technique combining both traditional media (ink, acrylic, graphite, and photo collage) and digital media, manifesting the collective recognition of a multiplicity of epistemological viewpoints in all cognitive dimensions of spatiality.
The varying scale, juxtaposition of biomorphic forms, intertwined textures, oblique projections and visual metamorphoses are employed as the multi-layered drawing methodologies to question and investigate the ubiquitous nature of urban meta-morphology, the eco-political reality of the Anthropocene epoch, the advancement of biomaterial technologies and their visual representation in the context of non-Euclidean configuration. Furthermore, the application of these techniques allow the work to transcend the boundaries between analog and digital media as well as between two- and multi-dimensional domains.
His compositional techniques imbue the work with what we see as the very essence of our socio-cultural environments beyond the conventional protocols of architectural and artistic formalities, and that they conjure up the synthetic possibilities within which the spatial and temporal variations of existing spatial semiotics emerge as the potential products of alchemical procedures.

Biography

Ryota Matsumoto is a principal and founder of an award-winning interdisciplinary design office, Ryota Matsumoto Studio. He is an artist, designer and urban planner. Born in Tokyo, he was raised in Hong Kong and Japan. He received a Master of Architecture degree from University of Pennsylvania in 2007 after his studies at Architectural Association in London and Mackintosh School of Architecture, Glasgow School of Art in early 90’s. Matsumoto has previously collaborated with a cofounder of the Metabolist Movement, Kisho Kurokawa, and with Arata Isozaki, Cesar Pelli, MIT Media Lab and Nihon Sekkei Inc. before establishing his office.
He presented his work for the 5th symposium of the Imaginaries of the Future at Cornell University in 2017 and currently serves as an adjunct lecturer of Transart institute, University of Plymouth.
His current interest gravitates around the embodiment of cultural possibilities in art, ecology, and urban topography.

http://www.ryotamatsumoto.com
https://www.facebook.com/ryota.matsumoto.718

Christopher R. Mindle Pop Surrealism and Fantasy

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Artist Statement

I’ve been creating art most of my life. I started painting seriously about ten years ago, showing my pieces at various local shows in the Allston, MA, area where I was living at the time. Six years ago, I made the decision to get serious and go back to school, graduating in 2015 from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

I’m interested in decay, distressed or worn and used objects, dark humor, emotions, and the underlying stories often overlooked. I love Surrealism, Pop Surrealism, Fantasy and Lowbrow, but don’t strictly define my work in any of those genres because often I stray outside of them.

My preferred mediums are oil and occasionally acrylic. I use traditional methods such as the Flemish seven layer method to build dense, rich backgrounds, and these days often mix accidental/abstract components with realism to create my fantasy landscapes and scenes.

Many of my images and ideas come from my dreams and early fantasies. As a child, I had a very active imagination and I’m still working with some of my thoughts and stories from my past. I’m influenced by fantasy, horror, science fiction, my life experiences and what I see around me in the world today. Some of my themes are completely imaginative and brightly whimsical, others more political and intensely disturbing. To all of this I sometimes add a lowbrow twist, often with dark humor.

http://www.crmindlegallery.com/
https://www.facebook.com/chrismindle/

Chris Boyko Abstract Surrealism

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Chris Boyko paints bizarre, strange, and unusual works. Each painting represents a hidden reality from the artist’s subconscious. These representations skirt the boundaries of surrealism and abstraction. Form and shape emerge from the paint. Nearly recognizable and figurative, yet remaining alien, beyond reach, ambiguous. Shapes or sculptures resemble figures or images found in wisps of smoke or clouds in the sky.

In Boyko’s worlds, weird alien figures (like goop) reach out and clasp each other. Are these are psychic, metaphorical structures? Crystalized memories? Microscopic organisms? Or alien landscapes? The viewer’s mind stumbles for answers… but finds weird ambiguity, and their own subconscious revelations reflected back at them.

 

Artist Statement

The subconscious is constructed like a giant web, which as a whole creates an individual. If one were to examine each individual piece, they would realize it’s composed of multiple ideas, memories, and feelings which are constantly shifting. It’s this shift within our subconscious that changes our perception of reality. It’s why each of us can respond differently to a multitude of situations.

Using automatic painting techniques, my mind enters a meditative state. As I begin to follow the strings of the subconscious web, the organic forms develop within the painting. One form leads to another, like a trail of thoughts. It’s as if my mind and the paint are in sync with each other. As I explore my own mind, gaining an understanding of myself; I’m also gaining an understanding of the forms.

boykoart.com
instagram.com/boykoart

Fine Art by Ruben Cukier

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Oils by Argentinean artist Ruben Cukier

About Ruben Cukier

Born and raised in Buenos Aires in 1964, Cukier chooses colors and shades that reveal a yearning for a less superficial, less deceptive reality. The forms, dimensions and colors give shape to dreams and nightmares, and even allude to a notion of hope. Humor is used to reflect fears, habits and desires that most of us deny and suppress deep within.

The dictionary defines surrealism , as a style of art and literature, stressing the subconscious or non rational significance of imagery arrived at by automatism or the exploitation of chance effects and unexpected juxtapositions.
Ruben Cukier, surrealist painter, born and raised in politically violent Buenos Aires, is a member of an illustrious roster of artists who’s vivid imagination and fantasy informed their art making.
Visual artists from Salvador Dali, Fernando Botero , Dorothea Tanning and writers such as Jose Saramago, Carlos Fuentes and Franz Kafka, to name a very few, have mined the rich subconscious for imagery.

Unexpected juxtapositions that, at first, are baffling and thought provoking but when considered more closely, produce a frisson of recognition. The recognition of dreams , fears or thoughts that we ourselves may have experienced at one time or another. That is why, I feel, his paintings are so appealing . Ruben Cukiers paintings depict images and ideas that are ,not only pleasing and visually stunning, but also somehow universal and timeless.

– Lydia Schrufer, BFA.
rubencukierart.com

Nikolina Petolas – Surreal Art

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Biography

Nikolina Petolas is a Croatian based photographer and digital artist.

Petolas is fascinated by industrial and fantasy environments, and these form the backdrop of the mysterious worlds in her work. She creates her images using photography and digital techniques.
With over 10 years experience in photography with experience in portrait, still lifes, landscapes, and macro photography, Petolas is now intensely involved in creating complex, surrealistic photomontages.

Petolas feels a profound fascination with human behavior: with her work she attempts to highlight the psychological and social aspects of human identity. Petolas explores multiple personalities, dream-like landscapes and strange, surrealist dark creatures and environments. Her observations of inner conflict and what must be so for it to occur, inform her deeply psychological work. She is interested in the complexity of human emotion and this drives the narratives in her figurative, surrealist artwork.

Her work has been featured in numerous publications has participated in multiple group exhibitions across Europe.

Artist Statement

Flying fish, women that rise inside an insect lair, giants pears, monstrous creatures, the world after an apocalypse… these are the images that flicker in my mind. Although these worlds may seem strange and unreachable, they contain my hopes and dreams, of people around me, their urges and desires, of new revelations and repeating disappointments, of life with its twists and turns.

My motives are sometimes dark and gloomy and often present dreamlike ambients and strange beings.
I am inspired by my surroundings and I see potential in various everyday things and relations, people, nature, architecture, even food. I see them sometimes as fragments of my work. Most of the time they remain fragments, and sometimes they become unified into a whole and therefore start to exist as a part of my sceneries.

By using real life photographs and textures I give my work a feel of realism, although the themes are far from being realistic…

Insects, animals, skeletons, strange creatures, and self-portraits guide us through these imaginary worlds.
Mostly these are leftovers of something that once lived and had its purpose. By implementing them in my environments, those odd, and often dead things and creatures tell their own story. They start to live as part of something new and in some other form.

I create surreal worlds from real life situations. These strange worlds are the flickering imagery and symbols encoded in my experiences of life, emotions, sexuality and relationships, human behavior.

Through my art I attempt to develop my personal mythology and archetypes, to make real my visions and dreams.

nikolinapetolas.com