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Surreal art by contemporary artists

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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

Robert Deyber Painting

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“My ongoing body of work involves the visual interpretation of cliches, euphemisms, and idioms. There has been a fascination for me going back years involving various formations within the English language. There are so many peculiar and quirky phrases which have been calling out to be put into visual form. In many cases, I can be motivated by a single word.

In creating these works the challenge is to take whimsical imagery and attempt to render it in a contemplative and elegant manner without being obtuse. My goal is also to take something common and elevate it to the uncommon and create theater, an unfamiliar and unexplored scene.

Each phrase depicted is singularly allegorical and embraces the intrinsic beauty and waggish imaginings found within the various forms of language we all use on a daily basis.”
~ Robert Deyber

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instagram.com/robertdeyber
facebook.com/RobertDeyberArt

Christie Neptune Surreal Video Art: An Afro-Surrealist Sci-fi Future

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Christie Neptune’s “She Fell from Normalcy” Stills

Shadow of Self Series
Shadow of Self Series

Note On Surrealism, Past and Present

Followers of contemporary surreal art, and perhaps this blog, may forget that surrealism (and it’s precursor, Dada) were politically inspired art movements. Dada’s “anti-philosophy” developed in reaction to World War I. Surrealism became notorious for many reasons. One of these was affiliating itself with the Communist Party, and taking its time in distancing itself from this position after the realities of the Communist Party in Russia became apparent.

But a cursory look at this blog or the Surreal Art Tumblr might get the impression that contemporary surrealism is mainly eye-candy, fantasy, and escapism. Pop Surrealist Mark Ryden’s Meat Show being a glorious exception.

Christie Neptune’s Surreal Video Art

Today we’re pleased to present work by contemporary artist Christie Neptune. Neptune’s video art (below) uses surrealist techniques to explore issues of race, gender, class, and mental health. We’re excited when contemporary artists use the language of surrealism to look at complex issues. Neptune’s work doesn’t oversimplify, or fall into “bumper sticker slogan” or “refrigerator magnet” traps as political art sometimes does. No, that’s the currency of the 24-hour news cycle and the political machines: enticing us with easy answers to difficult problems, and infinitely repeating talking points. Neptune explores complex dynamics in this elegant, inspired, surrealistic video art and exhibition.

She Fell From Normalcy

In She Fell From Normalcy, Christie Neptune uses sound, installation, original writing and video throughout the gallery to build a world stripped of the limitations of race, gender and class. As subject, Neptune employs two females trapped in a sterile, white environment in which they are controlled by an unseen presence; it is only after a cataclysmic break in the system that the females are granted clarity and self-recognition.

Via Hamilton Gallery

She Fell from Normalcy continues through July 30 at Hamiltonian Gallery. For more information, click here.

In 1984, the author and Black feminist, Audre Lorde penned the essay, “Age, Race, Class and Sex: Women Redefining Difference,” where a “mythical norm” was defined as “white, thin, male, young, heterosexual, Christian, and financially secure.” Lorde wrote that anyone that exists outside of that identity lives on the margins of “the trappings of power.” In the exhibition She Fell from Normalcy,  artist Christie Neptune, counters those hegemonic idealizations described by Lorde through a sci-fi fantasy that centers around blackness, femininity, and a struggle with depression.

Neptune tells The Creators Project, “I deal with depression and it’s my attempt to reconcile that period. I developed this series of work that validates that experience in the African-American female. Depression is typically stigmatized in communities of color. It’s me speaking out and pulling away at those labels that limit my experience.” She adds, “You always hear this thing, ‘black people don’t get depressed that’s some white people shit.’ I decided to build up a mythical norm that is queued to Audre Lorde’s essay, where she describes how we are trying to live up to standards.”

Via Vice
Christie Neptune