Al Saralis

Summer Breeze- 21st Century Contemporary Figure Painting

2023

Anna Maria Vargiu Had to tell you 180 x 180 cm oil on canvas Anna Maria Vargiu can be called a great talent with her just 30 years. This paintings she made together with four other...

Daniela Astone Couple #4 50 x 40 cm Oil on wood Daniela Astone works and lives in Florence. For years she was a teacher on the famous Florence Art Academy. Since 2022 she fulltime works as a painter. Her works are all around the world in great collections. For our exhibition 'A Female Gaze' Daniela Astone made a series of paintings where the female aspect of her life is the main subject. This series contains a series of seven paintings where you see a dancing couple. Female- male couples and male-male/ female-female couples. The Currator of Galerie Bonnard says about the paintings by Daniela Astone: The classical structure and narrative paintings show a technique that is special. Her style is virtuoso and her subjects narrative. The keys are loose and subtle. For this artist, standing in front of a painting means...

The Dutch multidisciplinary artist, Ger Doornink, specialises in painting, illustration and photography. Time spent living in Tokyo, Milan and currently Amsterdam, has heavily influe...

Victor Wang's subject is a female seemingly caught in a contemplative moment yet a war rages behind her. She dons a hat shaped as a boat and carries and oar as if to "Dream Away" these other thoughts. Wang uses a blend of luminous colors and buttery textures to evoke these enigmatic moments of meditation. Influence by the Renaissance Masters Titian and Rembrandt for their glazing and layering techniques respectively, the artist builds the surface using heavy paint, swirling and mixing the color on the canvas. The end result is a poetic and emotionally powerful representation of the human form. Victor Wang Dreaming Away, 2017 oil on canvas 42h x 56w in 106.68h x 142.24w cm VWG009 My path through life has been adventurous, exciting, and dream-like. My experience of settling into America in search of better opportunities has been both challenging and inspiring. I use the human face as a vehicle to paint human experiences - worry and wonder, sadness and pleasure - which reflect the emotional stage directly tied to my immigration experiences. I grew up amongst the sunflower fields in northern China. In my childhood years, I played under the bright, yellow sunflowers with my brothers everyday. China’s Cultural Revolution played an important part in my life. During that time, sunflowers were used as political allegories to depict how citizens of China should follow Mao who represented the sun, since sunflowers follow the sun’s movements. People eventually inferred the deception that this symbol masked. After graduating from high school, I was sent to a labor camp in the country for ‘reeducation’ during China’s Cultural Revolution. There, I was subject to grueling farm work. Often, I worked in corn and sunflower fields from sunrise to sunset. Thus, for me, sunflowers evoke both personal joy and sadness. Therefore, to deliver my complex feelings, I use sunflowers as a metaphor to connote my background and emotional stage. My incorporation of collages of figures from China’s Tang Dynasty represents my Chinese heritage and is a constant reminder of where I came from. The texture and earthiness on the canvas’s surface are inspired by the texture of the soil on the farm where I worked in China. Although I often gain great pleasure from the process of painting, it is most important to unfold expressively those feelings within myself. Wang belongs to a generation of immigrant painters from China, whose artistic background was defined by socialist realism but took advantage of their skills and broke away from that tradition to create new subjects in the U.S. “When I was a student during Cultural Revolution, Soviet realism art was among the dominant source of influence and it grabbed us like lightening rod...