All in Contemporary Art
Where do you get your inspiration from?
I’ve had the pleasure to live and visit several countries throughout my life. I usually love to stay somewhere calm with a beautiful setting that inspires me to paint. So often while at home, I explore through my mind and the juxtaposition of my memories and feelings help to unveil the concepts for my art pieces. I would paint instinctively without detailed sketches and only rely on pure intuitions.
Franco-Iranian artist Sassan Behnam-Bakhtiar’s oil paintings are well-known for exploring his visionary and philosophical views on life and humanity, derived from the artist’s personal life experience of post-revolution Iran, including the Iran-Iraq war, a two-decade experience in an uncertain place and sensitive time of the artist's life.
How would you describe yourself and your artwork?
In beginning of my art career, I tried to separate the characters of my revolutionary personality but I totally failed in that you can say my artworks whether if they were paintings or photography works from the first sight you will not like it because it's got nothing to do with anything that people used to see in paintings or photography works but after they will fall in love with it.
Polish painter and film-maker Wilhelm Sasnal is renowned for his incongruous and quietly unsettling portrayal of our collective surroundings and history. Drawing on found images from newspapers and magazines, the Internet, billboards or his personal surroundings, Sasnal’s paintings act as an archive to the mass of sprawling images that flood contemporary society
Could you please introduce yourself and tell us how you started in the arts? and your first experience in art making?
Art was always part of myself. It was a way to express and communicate with the world without words. For me, is my artistic sensibility related to some life situation that I went trough my young age. It was my way to connect and understand the world.
Sève Favre is a contemporary Swiss artist and an art historian. For several years now, Sève Favre has focused the main part of her artistic work on abolishing the classic frontier between a work of art and a spectator. She explores fields covering both abstraction and coloured sensations, figurative themes or the musicality of words to increase the sensorial experiences and reflections generated by art.
Fatinha Ramos is a Antwerp-based illustrator and visual artist originally from Portugal. After her graduation as a graphic designer in Porto, she moved to Belgium. Twelve years later after working in art direction and design, she made a switch on her career following the old dream of becoming a full-time illustrator, and to work on different artistic projects.
Focusing on the implications of colours, Letain’s vivid compositions feature dissonant yet harmonious lines and geometric structures that explore themes of logic, system and shape.
Chantal Joffe brings a combination of insight and integrity, as well as psychological and emotional force, to the genre of figurative art. Hers is a deceptively casual brushstroke. Whether in images a few inches square or ten feet high, fluidity combined with a pragmatic approach to representation seduces and disarms.
Al Mefer is a visual artist based in Alicante, Spain.
A new addition to TASCHEN’s art catalog is a massive 500-page edition that showcases the life and works of Jean-Michel Basquiat.
Where do you get your inspiration from?
In the past work style, I need to be creative every day. My head has been trained to produce in a short period of time. However, art is a perceptual thinking, and it depends on the brewing, precipitation, rumbling, and presentation of the heart. It takes more time, and later discovers that travel is an excellent model that allows art to think through the tempering of time, creating an intriguing and eternal viewing.
Known for his multi-disciplinary practice whose work employs a wide range of media to explore themes of craft, ritual, beauty, spirituality, identity and its relationship to art history and the institution
Vorja Sánchez combines imaginative interpretations of birds, wolves, and hybrid creatures into surreal paintings and mixed media works that are diverse in both style and form.
Lyuben Petrov’s approach to painting is characterized by expressive painting representation, clear intensity and energetic paste-like spreads of color or distinctive plasticity. His fantastic and grotesque subjects are often tinged with satirical aesthetics and comical hyperboles. The Bulgarian painter, often deals with themes of the relationship between people and nature as well as the cycle of life and death, often with apocalyptic undertones.
Yago Hortal is a contemporary Spanish painter known for his vibrant paintings inspired by Abstract Expressionism.
Martine Johanna's work is largely autobiographical. Using color, form, and composition as language, she investigates the role of women within a patriarchal culture, beauty, adolescence, oppression, inner worlds and dualism are themes recurring in her wordless communication with both figurative and abstract elements.
Kris Knight is a Canadian artist whose paintings puncture the membrane between dream and reality, historical and contemporary, light and dark. Within their apparent ambiguity, Knight’s sensitive character based paintings and portraits of queer men are an evocative combination of romanticism and nostalgia, exploring notions of performance in both an everyday and theatrical dimension.
Utah-based artist Stephanie K. Clark considers herself a painter, but the works she creates are not made with a traditional painterly medium. Using embroidery techniques and strands of floss in a spectrum of colors, Clark paints little houses, landscapes, and other scenes that look as if they exist in the natural world and are being lit by the moon or sun.
Daniel Bilmes is a contemporary painter, working in Los Angeles. His approach is characterized by deep personal exploration, combining realism with elements of symbolism and abstraction. Through tactile textures and delicate expressions, his paintings weave together the magical and mundane. His work is at once hopeful and brooding. Realistic and symbolic. Somewhere between the vitality of the Russian circus and the gravitas of a Churchill speech.
