Issue 18 by artmazemag

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Summer Editio n, Is

18 , 2020

ArtMaze Magazine is an independent artist-run and ad-free international print and online publication dedicated to showcasing and promoting experimental and progressive contemporary art, which reflects modern society and its environment, provokes conversation and action; and fosters innovation and diversity of mediums which make today’s art scene so intriguing and versatile.

SUBMIT FOR PRINT AND DIGITAL PUBLICATIONS

SUBMIT FOR ONLINE PUBLICATIONS

We invite guest curators from internationally renowned galleries as well as independent art professionals to select works for each issue. We try to give spotlight to artists and engage with our readers and followers every day through our social media, website and print and digital issues.

If you wish to submit to our online blog, you are welcome to fill in the application form on our website.

Artists are welcome to submit works in any medium: painting, drawing, sculpture, ceramics, printmaking, photography, textile, installation, mixed media, digital etc. Artists or any art organisations on behalf of artists from all countries are welcome to submit.

WRITERS

Please visit our website for more details on how to apply for print publications: www.artmazemag.com/call-for-art/ or see p. 11 Artists are welcome to submit works to our online blog. This opportunity also provides a chance to be published in print issues.

FIND US ONLINE www.artmazemag.com facebook.com/artmazemag instagram.com/artmazemag

GENERAL ENQUIRIES: info@artmazemag.com

Featured image: ASMA Agua dura mdf, forton mg, hydrostone, fiber glass, dry pastels, cast metal nails with silver bath 40 x 50 cm more on p. 98-99

ArtMaze Magazine is printed in London, UK, five times a year by Park Communications Ltd.

For more details on blog submissions please visit our website: artmazemag.com/submit-for-blog-feature/

You are welcome to submit an article, review or interview for consideration for online or print publications. Please send us an email to info@artmazemag.com

ISSUES Please visit our website to find out where to purchase print and digital copies of ArtMaze Mag: www.artmazemag.com/shop

FRONT COVER: Vika Prokopaviciute Chewing Gum Painting Stretching oil on linen 130 x 200 cm more on p. 64 BACK COVER: Holly Mills Thoughts in a room carbon and watercolour on gesso on board 11 x 8 cm more on p. 108

Registered office address: ArtMaze Magazine Ltd. G06, Binnacle House 10 Cobblestone Square E1W 3AR, London United Kingdom

® ArtMaze Magazine is a registered trademark

SUBMIT FOR PRINT AND DIGITAL PUBLICATIONS

SUBMIT FOR ONLINE PUBLICATIONS

If you wish to submit to our online blog, you are welcome to fill in the application form on our website.

WRITERS

FIND US ONLINE www.artmazemag.com facebook.com/artmazemag instagram.com/artmazemag

GENERAL ENQUIRIES: info@artmazemag.com

Featured image: ASMA Agua dura mdf, forton mg, hydrostone, fiber glass, dry pastels, cast metal nails with silver bath 40 x 50 cm more on p. 98-99

ArtMaze Magazine is printed in London, UK, five times a year by Park Communications Ltd.

For more details on blog submissions please visit our website: artmazemag.com/submit-for-blog-feature/

You are welcome to submit an article, review or interview for consideration for online or print publications. Please send us an email to info@artmazemag.com

ISSUES Please visit our website to find out where to purchase print and digital copies of ArtMaze Mag: www.artmazemag.com/shop

Registered office address: ArtMaze Magazine Ltd. G06, Binnacle House 10 Cobblestone Square E1W 3AR, London United Kingdom

® ArtMaze Magazine is a registered trademark

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interviewed

call for art

curated selection of works

editorial selection of works

T he inte rs e ct ion b et we e n exte r nal and i nte r nal: In c onve rs at ion w it h K i mo Nels on .................................... ................ 14

Autu mn E d itio n 19 .................................................... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 1

Juli a Pei nt ner . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 4 Nika Fontaine ...........................................................................56 Bly the Cain ...............................................................................58 Miriam Naeh .............................................................................59 Kristina Schuldt .......................................................................60 Galina Dimitrova ......................................................................62 Vika Prokop avic i ute .. .. .. .. ... .. .. .. .. .. .. ... .. .. .. .. .. .. ... .. .. .. .. .. .. .. ... .. .. .. 64 Danny Leyland ..........................................................................65 Paulina Semkowicz ..................................................................66 Ellie Hunter & Anastasia Sosunova ............................................68 Daniel Kuge ..............................................................................70 Mor it z Z eller . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72 M atea s Pares . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74 Ian Caleb Molina Zoller .............................................................76 Phi li p Hi nge . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78 A n na Hofm an n . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80 Yuko Soi . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81 Pi a Fer m . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82 Grégor y Sugnaux ......................................................................84 Umu t Ya sat . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 86 Chr i st i ne Rebhuhn . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88 Siggi Seki ra . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89 Lau ra Fran z m an n . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 0 Lena G rewen ig . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 2 Mona B roschár . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 4 Sarah B echter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 5 Lau ra Sachs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 6 ASM A . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 8

Kr i st i an B r uc e . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 2 Amanda Smith .........................................................................104 Georg Wilson ..........................................................................106 Amélie Peace ...........................................................................107 Holly M i lls . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 8 Ella Walker .............................................................................109 Witalij Frese ............................................................................110 Momo G ordon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 1 1 Len nar t Fopp e . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 1 2 Cec i li a Ch ar lton . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 14 Tyler Lafreniere ......................................................................116 Joshua Hagler ..........................................................................118 Rae Hicks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 20 B rad St u mpf . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 22 Margot Bird .............................................................................124 Li nd sey Ki rcher . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 26 Ryan O rme ...............................................................................127 Matthew Zaccari .....................................................................128 George Eksts ...........................................................................130

Unc ove r ing t he f luidit y of t he hu m an ani m al: the sh i f t i ng st ate s and wor lds of K i nga Bar t i s ’s p ai nt i ngs ............. 30 D el ive r ing art to a no n- exclu sive audie nce t hrou gh freely ac c e s si ble cu rate d conte nt at KubaPar i s ............... ................ 46

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Contents

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curated selection of works

editorial selection of works

T he inte rs e ct ion b et we e n exte r nal and i nte r nal: In c onve rs at ion w it h K i mo Nels on .................................... ................ 14

Autu mn E d itio n 19 .................................................... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 1

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from the editor In these challenging times we finally celebrate the release of our new Summer Edition 18! Having collaborated with Nora Cristea and Saskia Höfler-Hohengarten, head curators and directors of contemporary art platform KubaParis, we have embarked on a remarkable journey showcased by the variety of mediums and refined quality of works in this curated selection comprising of twenty-eight up-and-coming artists worldwide (see p.52-99). Having had an extensive experience of working with art submissions, the duo behind KubaParis have nurtured a keen eye and sophisticated vision on contemporary works of emerging makers and, in their own words, explain their approach to selecting work: “…we are very intuitive in our selection. The work has to be somehow engaging. But “engaging” is pretty hard to characterise as personal taste plays a huge role prima facie. Luckily those taste buds are diversely formed and developed over the years by a lot of input, realisations and discourse. Naturally re-reviewing is inevitable. If you want to grow you have to take time to think and rethink information that seems hard to understand and classify at first sight”. This insight into their curatorial practice is discussed in-depth in our recent interview on p.46-51. We thank Nora and Saskia for taking up the role of guest-curators for this issue and for sharing their story and vision with us. In this edition’s Interviewed section (p.12-51) we have been exploring further the work of featured artists in our previous editions: Kimo Nelson and Kinga Bartis. Kimo Nelson works on interpreting landscape through his substantial experiences of spending time in the wilderness and transcribing the powerful message of the fragility of nature and the importance of its protection as well as the revelation experience that we all encounter whilst coming close with the wild environment. The mythic and folkloric work of Kinga Bartis takes roots in the Transylvanian landscape and history with which she has close connection as a native. She focuses her narratives on female subjects exploring themes of gender, sexuality, passion and “dismantling that male gaze”. For our next Autumn Edition curated selection we’ve teamed up with the talented trio behind Projet Pangée gallery based in Montreal, Canada: Julie Côté, founder and head curator; and Sophie Latouche and Michelle Bui—gallery associates and curators. We’ve been drawn to this particular curatorial team because of their fresh and unique approach to selecting work and putting together insightful exhibitions aimed at evolving conversations within the aesthetic and theoretical dialogues. We look forward to seeing how this next edition will shape up and excited to hear about their journey in the upcoming interview! If you are interested in submitting your work and appearing on ArtMaze’s pages, please feel free to check out our website for more information (www.artmazemag.com) and hopefully we’ll be able to work together in the near future. Yours truly, Editor and Founder Maria Zemtsova

Featured image: Julia Peintner Flash Dance acrylic and spray paint on wooden board 35 x 35 cm more on p. 54-55

p.52-99 curated selection of works

p.100-130 editorial selection of works

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Autumn Edition 19

call for art DEADLINE: August 13th, 2020 Guest Curators: Projet Pangée gallery (Montreal, Canada): Julie Côté, founder and head curator Sophie Latouche and Michelle Bui, gallery associates and curators

Submit your work for a chance to be published in print and digital issues, as well as online on our website and social media. ELIGIBILITY: The competition is open to all artists, both national and international, working in all visual mediums. Artists are welcome to submit works in any medium: painting, drawing, sculpture, ceramics, printmaking, photography, textile, installation, mixed media, digital, film etc. DISTRIBUTION: ArtMaze Magazine is an independent international publication which is distributed both nationally and internationally via book shops, galleries and museums, art events and via the online store: artmazemag.com/shop HOW TO APPLY: please visit our website for more details and fill in the online form via the following link: artmazemag.com/call-for-art OTHER OPPORTUNITIES: Artists are welcome to submit their works to our online blog. Please visit our website for more information: www.artmazemag.com or contact us at info@artmazemag.com

Featured image: Cecilia Charlton Water Matter (Earth series) hand-embroidered wool on canvas over panel with gold leaf 80 x 120 cm more on p. 114-115

Autumn Edition 19

Featured image: Cecilia Charlton Water Matter (Earth series) hand-embroidered wool on canvas over panel with gold leaf 80 x 120 cm more on p. 114-115

interviewed:

Kimo Nelson Kinga Bartis KubaParis

interviewed:

Kimo Nelson Kinga Bartis KubaParis

www.kimonelson.com

The intersection between external and internal: In conversation with Kimo Nelson Landscape art, once chiefly the domain of the picturesque, has gained a new urgency and political charge in recent times as the world grapples with the escalating climate crisis. Now, this previously benign classical subject matter has become loaded with new meanings and metaphor. For New York based artist Kimo Nelson, wild places and the great outdoors offer a doorway into himself. Spending time in nature is for him akin to a form of meditation and reflection, which through his art, he hopes to invite others to share and experience. The landscapes in Kimo’s work, while meticulously executed, are more than representational ‘windows on the world’. Through his paintings, Kimo aims to evoke the sensory experience of being outdoors and in nature—the awe we experienced in places of natural beauty. His colours are vivid, almost psychedelic, challenging the viewer to look again, open their mind, be receptive to the sheer wonder of the natural world. Without personifying the landscape, Kimo hopes his art will convey some of the preciousness of nature and therefore the importance of caring and protecting it. Kimo’s luminous and detailed paintings resemble topographical maps, where layers of paint are built up, like sediment in a landscape, to create the composition. Using a process that resembles screen printing, Kimo deconstructs the elements of a landscape and reassembles them layer by layer, colour by colour, building the composition gradually, much like the geological process of erosion and formation itself. Kimo spends a lot of time outdoors, particularly in the Pacific Northwest and Grand Canyon National Park. On trips he makes drawings, takes photos and records the environment to take back to his studio. Then begins the process of sifting and sorting the source material, looking for clues to the start of the next work.

interview by Layla Leiman

Featured image: Kimo Nelson Untitled (K-14) pastel on paper 12 x 9 inches

www.kimonelson.com

interview by Layla Leiman

Featured image: Kimo Nelson Untitled (K-14) pastel on paper 12 x 9 inches

AMM: Hi Kimo! Your art is very much focused on the natural world; are there any parallels for you between your understanding or approach to the role of painter and ecologist? KN: My focus comes from personal experience in wilderness, and the importance I place on spending time in the natural world. In that context I think of these two perspectives as, not so much parallel, but as a duality and I am most interested in where I can find a point of intersection. The perspective of an ecologist is more analytical and objective. This mindset drives the act of collecting and recording when I am out in the field. I make archives of these trips consisting of drawings, photos, audio recordings and found objects when appropriate. The painter is much more reliant on intuition, spontaneity and experimentation. When I am back in the studio and processing what I’ve collected I become more subjective with the material. As I am sifting through my archive I’m looking for a point of departure, usually something seen and experienced. It tends to be something as innocuous as a single observation. It’s usually those details that stimulate the intuitive mindset and I begin the process of making work. AMM: What are the broad ideas and themes that you explore in your work? KN: I’ve always been interested in the dynamic aspects of landscape and the larger system of nature that are at work. I don’t anthropomorphize the landscape. I think about its affect on the psyche. I’m interested in how the external space affects the internal space and I try to paint where that intersection is. From that broader mindset and intention each series reveals different themes. For this Canyon series I was most interested in the actions of accumulation and erosion, which speaks to themes of change and flux. There is a constant process of additive and subtractive forces at work that shape the landscape in a geologic sense. There is a connection there with my working process, which we can talk about in more detail. I also thought about that in relation to this push and pull of collected data versus memory, and where there was overlap in what I could see objectively and where there was invention in my memory. Landscape and direct connection to nature can feel like a mirror in the sense that how you experience it and what you remember speaks to where your mind is at that moment. The recent canyon series also started from a personal connection, so my focus became how an individual is having a direct experience by being immersed in a wilderness landscape. The vertical aspect of the compositions, the single point perspective of the viewer, and the portraiture format came out of thinking about that connection. AMM: What are you currently thinking about in relation to your work?

KN: This is an interesting question in light of current events. I’m constantly thinking about issues around protected wilderness and other current environmental concerns. Much of the protections around public lands are being retracted or removed with the current administration. I’ve also been interested with the resurgence and re-examination of esoteric thought within modern and contemporary art, first with the Hilma af Klint show at the Guggenheim which had a massive response, followed by the Agnes Pelton show which I saw at the Phoenix Art Museum and is currently at the Whitney. This comes out of my interest in internal space and dynamic energy as it relates to the external landscape. However with the current pandemic and the disruption it has caused I think everyone is in a moment of examination and re-evaluation. For artists, I think that means how we look at the work we’ve made might change and most certainly how we make work moving forward will change. Trying to come to grips with that when everything is evolving day by day has been challenging to say the least. AMM: Please tell us about your process or working. Are you quite structured and meticulous or do you follow a more spontaneous approach? KN: I work to find a balance between the two. I always start with drawing. As the drawings move into paintings each body of work develops its own process or structure within which moments of experimentation and spontaneity occur. When I first moved to New York, about eight years ago, I was making abstract paintings that relied much more on chance to make work that felt flat but topographical. I would make layers of paint skins that I would transfer or collage onto a painting. The chance accumulation of paint dictated the final composition. Representational elements started to come into that working process as I started to use more specific pictorial elements to make the paint skin layers. I made a big transition about three years ago by embracing the image and representation but retaining the working process of the transfer and collage. This current body of paintings started with drawings and photographs taken on sight. I used litho crayons and china markers to do quick sketches that I continued to work on back in the studio with the aid of the photographs. From these drawings I would separate out different layers of information much like you would with a screen print. Each layer would be its own paint skin or collage element. In that sense the process for this series has a very specific structure. Within production of each layer I allow myself the freedom of spontaneity and quickness. Depending on the image there tends to be a good deal of material collaged onto the surface, under, between or on top of the paint skin layers. Figuring out how to stack the layers or weave them together is where I get to experiment the most with acrylic mediums and materials. photo by Brad Ogbonna, used with permission from the Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 18, Interviewed: Kimo Nelson

AMM: What’s on your easel right now? What’s working about the picture and what’s causing a challenge? KN: As I write this I have begun a new body of work with the volcanic landscape of Hawaii, where I was born, that starts with an expanded idea of what kind of collected material goes into this archive. That is still in the drawing and research stage. I am still deep in that part of the process so what is on the easel is actually a blank canvas that I am not sure how to start. This is a moment of being invested in the drawings and letting them dictate a way forward into the paintings. The challenge for me in these moments is not getting overexcited and trying to push things into production mode before I’ve grasped what this body of work is going to be. That doesn’t mean not working, and waiting for inspiration to strike, I don’t really believe in that. It means trusting this stage of the process and working through it to come to something new, challenging, and unexpected. AMM: While you’re not necessarily able to paint en plein air, gathering imagery first-hand and making sketches of scenes is an important part of your process. Please tell us about your relationship with nature and the scenes in your art. KN: My relationship with the Southwest landscape is significant. In addition to studying painting I have a background in Environmental Studies. I also used to work as a professional river guide. Most of my guiding career was based in the Colorado Plateau, a geologic distinction for an area that covers most of Southern Utah, Northern Arizona, Southwestern Colorado, and Northwestern New Mexico. More specifically I guided in Grand Canyon National Park, also in and around Canyonlands National Park. It is important to also recognize and acknowledge these lands as the traditional lands of the Hopi, Havasupai, Hualapai, Southern Paiute, Pueblos, Dine and Ute tribes. This area is part of the Colorado River basin, which includes the Colorado, the Green, and the San Juan Rivers. I spent fifteen years living and working in this area so I feel a very personal connection to this place. I’ve also spent some time doing river expeditions in SE Alaska, and around the Pacific Northwest, where I did my undergraduate education. I recognize the significance of having a unique level of access and experience with these places, which is why I keep coming back to it as source material. AMM: You use really vivid and saturated colour palettes in your paintings that lend the scenes an almost surrealness. Can you tell us more about colour in your work, how you develop the palettes and also what you aim to achieve with these choices? KN: Coming back to the idea of personal experience in the landscape, the color palette evolved out of a sense of trying to reconcile

the feeling and impact of being in a landscape with the tactile, visceral experience you have viewing a painting. I wanted to avoid illustrating

“I think one of the greatest gifts wild places provide is how they function as sites of contemplation. Being in these places strips us bare of whatever we are holding onto psychologically and gives us the space to examine and decide what we want to leave behind and what we want to move forward with. It’s not a coincidence that every major religious or spiritual tradition has a story or myth describing a long period in the wilderness followed by a significant transformation or evolution. This is an important part of our shared human culture and experience.” - Kimo Nelson the landscape or illustrating a statement about the landscape and started to think instead about how do you make a painting that approaches what it feels like psychologically

and emotionally to be in those places. I feel I am at a disadvantage in the sense that being in a landscape is a full body experience where all five of your senses are engaged and shaping your understanding of the place. However, I take that disadvantage as a challenge and an interesting problem to solve. It becomes an obstruction that helps dictate how the working process comes together and evolves. Being removed from that landscape and trying to get back to that experience vis à vis the painting, I started to play with color relationships and material tactility as a way to evoke that visceral experience. Each painting has a color palette related specifically to the record or the memory of that place. In most cases I start with the local color, the light, or the weather of that day in that place, and in every case the final color palette for each painting ends up somewhere new and unexpected. I also work with a limited palette and mix all my colors from three or four base pigments. No matter how far afield each painting gets color wise the color relationships resonate with each other and avoid getting too muddy. AMM: Your art doesn’t put forward an overt ecological statement, yet within a time of widespread environmental degradation, landscape painting becomes politically charged. Is this the case for your art? Please share some thoughts about landscape painting in a time of environmental crises. KN: I don’t put forth an overt statement because if I were to start with a statement I think I would fall into trying to illustrate it pretty quickly, which is not a path I’m interested in personally. Having said that any kind of landscape painting today is viewed as political and I welcome that. I actually struggled with embracing the landscape and representation initially. I didn’t see a way forward that didn’t feel like a cliché. It took our last presidential election and the feeling that the value of public land and wilderness in the US was now under fierce threat for me to realize I couldn’t ignore the impulse to return to the landscape as subject. Another reason I avoid an overt statement is that I feel like they are easily dismissed, you see the political statement and you either agree or disagree and we end up with that polarization that is so hard to work through at the moment. I started to think about what was missing from that conversation. Where I ended up was thinking about why we need to value wilderness as individuals, what they do for us personally and how they affect us. Once we feel the value in that perspective my hope is that it becomes easier to connect and have the larger conversations around the politics and the climate crisis. AMM: What can nature teach us? What have you learnt about yourself, and your art, from spending time in wild places?

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 18, Interviewed: Kimo Nelson

the feeling and impact of being in a landscape with the tactile, visceral experience you have viewing a painting. I wanted to avoid illustrating

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 18, Interviewed: Kimo Nelson

KN: The answer to what it can teach us will vary depending on the individual, what they are going through and what they need at the moment. I think one of the greatest gifts wild places provide is how they function as sites of contemplation. Being in these places strips us bare of whatever we are holding onto psychologically and gives us the space to examine and decide what we want to leave behind and what we want to move forward with. It’s not a coincidence that every major religious or spiritual tradition has a story or myth describing a long period in the wilderness followed by a significant transformation or evolution. This is an important part of our shared human culture and experience.

also taken up long distance running as a new passion. I didn’t grow up running and just started jogging when I first moved to New York. About four years ago I acquired a copy of Haruki Murakami’s memoir, What I Talk About When I talk About Running, and was inspired by the connections he made to training, the running mindset and his writing process. In the past few years I’ve worked my way up to distance running and doing longer races. I ran my first marathon in Hawaii last December and am looking forward to doing more. The wilderness trips have a direct connection to the work where the running is not so direct, but I consider both to be very integral to my working process. I also like cooking when I can find the time.

Personally I had a very unstable childhood in the sense that I grew up in a foreignservice family where we moved every year or two depending on the assignments. By the time I was eleven, I had lived in six different countries. I also grew up between two cultures and two religions, my father being from Utah and raised Mormon, and my mother being from the Philippines and Catholic. My own experience with wilderness was coming to Utah for high school and having the opportunity to begin working as a wilderness guide. Through this experience I found the space to examine myself as an individual and build up an interstitial identity that speaks to all parts of my background. I think this is why I also avoid making too strong a statement in the work, I see a value in making something that is suggestive of beauty or political statement but also allows a viewer the space to become aware of what they are bringing to the experience.

AMM: What keeps you awake at night? KN: Covid-19 related anxiety keeps me fully awake every other night for some reason at the moment. We will get through it, but not knowing when and what the other side of this looks like is particularly nerve-wracking. Otherwise anxiety about climate change and the future of the world in general are also present. AMM: Do you have any exciting projects coming up? What’s next for you? KN: I’m answering this in the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic so upcoming projects have been postponed for the time being. I’m registered for the New York Marathon this fall, however it is happening now only as a virtual event meaning I’ll be running on my own.

AMM: How does living and working in Brooklyn, New York, influence you and the art you make? KN: As much as I value being in and around wilderness, I also value the distance from that experience in terms of thinking about how to communicate those experiences to an audience who may not have the inclination or the luxury of getting there themselves. I’m also a painter who finds great value in the community of New York and being influenced by a wide variety of artists and processes. AMM: When you’re not making art, what are some of the things you like to spend time doing? Featured image (p.32):

Featured image (p.34-35):

Kimo Nelson Untitled (K-1) pastel on paper 12 x 9 inches

Kimo Nelson Untitled (K-9) pastel on paper 9 x 12 inches

KN: I try to get out of the City and go back West as much as possible. Anytime I’m back there I try to do some kind of extended activity that gets me back into nature, river trips ideally, or long hikes in the deserts and mountains otherwise. In recent years I have

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 18, Interviewed: Kimo Nelson

Featured image (p.34-35):

Kimo Nelson Untitled (K-1) pastel on paper 12 x 9 inches

Kimo Nelson Untitled (K-9) pastel on paper 9 x 12 inches

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 18, Interviewed: Kimo Nelson

Kimo Nelson Untitled (K-13) pastel on paper 9 x 12 inches

Kimo Nelson Untitled (K-13) pastel on paper 8 x 10 inches

Kimo Nelson Untitled (K-13) pastel on paper 9 x 12 inches

Kimo Nelson Untitled (K-13) pastel on paper 8 x 10 inches

Kimo Nelson Untitled (GC-10) acrylic, flashe on canvas 36 x 30 inches

Kimo Nelson Untitled (GC-25) acrylic, pine needles on canvas 36 x 32 inches

Kimo Nelson Untitled (GC-10) acrylic, flashe on canvas 36 x 30 inches

Kimo Nelson Untitled (GC-25) acrylic, pine needles on canvas 36 x 32 inches

Kimo Nelson Untitled (K-3) pastel on paper 12 x 9 inches

Kimo Nelson Untitled (K-4) pastel on paper 12 x 9 inches

Kimo Nelson Untitled (K-3) pastel on paper 12 x 9 inches

Kimo Nelson Untitled (K-4) pastel on paper 12 x 9 inches

Kimo Nelson Untitled (K-15) pastel on paper 12 x 9 inches

Kimo Nelson Untitled (K-8) pastel on paper 9 x 12 inches

Kimo Nelson Untitled (K-15) pastel on paper 12 x 9 inches

Kimo Nelson Untitled (K-8) pastel on paper 9 x 12 inches

www.kingabartis.com

Uncovering the fluidity of the human animal: the shifting states and worlds of Kinga Bartis’ paintings Hungarian Transylvanian-born artist Kinga Bartis creates vivid, dreamlike landscapes inhabited by figures both ethereal and carnal. Having initially set out to study social science and communication in Hungary’s capital, Kinga decided to move to Copenhagen to practise visual art at The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. Still living and working in Copenhagen, Kinga participates in numerous artist-led initiatives and collectives, as well as continuing to develop her own practice and exhibit her work across Copenhagen and wider Europe. The world of Kinga’s paintings is one that is in constant flux, containing multiple perspectives and visions of reality. Over all lies a veil of mysticism that carries its own sheen of the mythic and folkloric; thorned, bulbous flowers bloom from between long-nailed hands; faces, bodies and flowing hair emerge from luminous expanses of landscape and water, leaf-shaped eyes droop from trees, animal and human limbs become entangled and fused, bodies melt together, multiple pairs of eyes spill down the cheeks of languid figures. The mythic atmosphere of Kinga’s paintings comes in part, she tells us, from her encounters with magical folk tales set in the Transylvanian landscape, told to her by her grandparents. While the folkloric has a hand in shaping the sense of timelessness that pervades the mood and imagery of Kinga’s paintings, contemporary references appear elsewhere that ground her art in her own specific reality and experience. Titles such as ‘Try to Put a Ring On It’, ‘The Benefits of an Existential Crisis’ and ‘Charcoal Mask Treatment’ have a distinctly contemporary feel that propels Kinga’s mythic images into a juxtaposing world of pop culture, self-help articles and beauty manuals, which in turn is offset by Kinga’s unwavering challenge aimed at “a deeply traditional, patriarchal upbringing with very fixed norms and gender roles”. Throughout her art, Kinga is committed to exploring sexuality and desire, as well as the relationships between bodies and landscapes, bodies and other bodies—be they human or animal—not through the conventions of art history or a prescribed ‘male gaze’, nor through imposed beauty standards and gender norms, nor, in fact, through any system or mode of understanding that glosses over the infinite and ever-shifting complexities of selfhood and identity. What Kinga’s paintings show us is that the human animal cannot be circumscribed within confines that are fixed and unmoving; it needs room to grow, to transform, to unfurl its limbs. Bearing the current global health crisis by continuing to paint and produce artworks for future exhibitions, Kinga hopes to develop her practice by participating in artist residencies and experimenting with different mediums. She speaks to us here about her experience of living, studying and working in different countries, the growth of her paintings from sketch to finished work, and her symbiotic relationship with her materials.

interview by Rebecca Irvin

Featured image: Kinga Bartis Soft exorcist, A Spitting Woman oil on linen 46 x 54 cm

www.kingabartis.com

interview by Rebecca Irvin

Featured image: Kinga Bartis Soft exorcist, A Spitting Woman oil on linen 46 x 54 cm

AMM: Hi Kinga! To start with, can you tell us a bit about your background and how you came to pursue visual art as your profession? KB: I was born in a small town in Transylvania, Romania. Like many ethnic Hungarians in Romania, my family moved to Hungary right after the revolution in 1990. After finishing high school in a small Hungarian town, I moved to Budapest where I studied social science and communication. While I was working on my thesis on corruption I had to admit that actually I would never be a social scientist, so I relocated to Copenhagen to try my luck getting into The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, where I received my masters in 2018. I still live and work in Copenhagen. AMM: Was there a particular person or mentor who was formative to the development of your creative practice and who has influenced the way you work today? KB: My professor Anette Abrahamsson made a big impact on me throughout my studies at the art academy and afterwards. She encouraged me to explore exactly those sides of my practice that made me feel uncomfortable or uneasy, maybe not really accepted. After all that moving between different countries and being a foreigner with an accent in all languages I speak, she made me realise how important it is to develop your own language through painting. AMM: What was the most significant or most surprising way in which your art and approach changed over the course of your studies? KB: It started during my exchange semester in Umeå, Sweden. There I realised how much more work I needed to put in so as to be able to fulfil my expectations towards being an artist. By this I mean being able to formulate my thoughts, keep up a stable work flow, take responsibility for the works I make and still maintain a distance from them so I don’t end up in a loop. I was the most surprised when I bought my yoga pass for 6 months in advance and started to nerd on books and art theory. It didn’t take long to reflect on how the driving force and the thoughts behind my works stem from my personal background, and how the constant wish to fit into diverse social structures is actually a result of homogenisation and normalisation. It’s funny. While studying capitalism, the mechanism of control, society and power, I never saw myself as part of it, as one of the subjects, I was a scientist. It was painting that made me realise this and act on it. AMM: What are the mediums you prefer to work with? We see you’ve worked with drypoint as well as painting. How does your choice of medium affect the way in which you work, or the content of your pieces? KB: I really enjoy painting. I love everything about it. Although we don’t always fit together.

Using a medium depends on my energy. I usually try to sense the mental space within and then according to this energy, choosing

“I focus on female subjects as this is what I have access to: my body, my subjectivity—which is sadly a product of our time, defined by a deeply traditional, patriarchal upbringing with very fixed norms and gender roles. Knowing this allows me to keep exploring what is learned or forced upon us and what is desired, wished for, fantasised about. I am exploring how my sexuality is changing, how I am ageing, what I am passionate about, how I love and how I fight. Through painting I am also looking for alliance, others who are also on an explorative journey, sharing the interest of not only dismantling that male gaze etc. but to contribute to something that is not built on domination, exploitation and domestication.” - Kinga Bartis

the medium that can best accommodate it. So when oil is not working I switch to drawing. The ground depends on how much material I have and want to load on the surface: canvas can receive more than a piece of paper.

Usually I am very rough with the material; I paint on the floor, on the wall, moving my works around in the studio. Things can sometimes get too rough or get out of hand. Drawing can slow things down, so I use it to detoxify or cleanse. Drawing on a fragile piece of paper for days, treating it carefully, is something that I need to do in order to be able to return to painting. Drawing makes me grounded after I’ve been drifting away with painting. So it’s not so much the subject matter that affects my choice of medium but the energy and the focus I have. I have tried drypoint and various graphic techniques while I had access to a workshop and I would love to make some prints again soon. AMM: How would you describe the world of your paintings? Do you think of it as a singular space that you are revealing a little more of with each painting or are there multiple worlds? KB: I see it as an ambiguous space that language cannot fully rationalise—a mental landscape that I am mapping out. Through social science I learned to think in structures and categories, various divisions and relations. In painting I am trying to disrupt these constructions through the subject matter, the material and the procedure. To keep it in flux. Because everything is changing, moving; I am an observer and also the observed but this changes with time. There is some share of personal experience but this personality, identity or body is put out in the world and the world is put in the body. Resonating among all these states and worlds loosens the impression of a static state. I guess this is also a way of coping with change, between life and decay. AMM: A lot of your work focuses on the female subject. In what ways do your paintings think about gender politics and notions of femininity, particularly in relation to the traditionally ‘male’ gaze and heterosexual perspective that is presupposed in depictions of women and specifically the female body in art history? KB: As a child I often drew mermaids, horses and princesses from my imagination. But then, because they didn’t resemble ‘reality’, I was encouraged to copy other pictures and paintings, to help me get better at it. Copying. That is how my dreams got swapped for another’s reality – reproducing some else’s gaze. Challenging this, disrupting that order which polices conventions, is where I see painting’s power. Everything is in constant change and we are deeply connected to each other and the world. Our bodies are ageing and our subjectivities are in flux. Paying attention to that is what generates my practice. Resonating with the world, putting myself in it then stepping back, putting the world in me. Gender roles carved in stone are static elements, giving the impression of something never changing, a universal normal. We choose a side (or actually, someone chooses instead of us) then we are told we have to stick to it. According to this view of things, we are supposed to be able to control our bodies and

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 18, Interviewed: Kinga Bartis

Using a medium depends on my energy. I usually try to sense the mental space within and then according to this energy, choosing

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 18, Interviewed: Kinga Bartis

keep things straight, keep things in order, obey, behave. I focus on female subjects as this is what I have access to: my body, my subjectivity—which is sadly a product of our time, defined by a deeply traditional, patriarchal upbringing with very fixed norms and gender roles. Knowing this allows me to keep exploring what is learned or forced upon us and what is desired, wished for, fantasised about. I am exploring how my sexuality is changing, how I am ageing, what I am passionate about, how I love and how I fight. Through painting I am also looking for alliance, others who are also on an explorative journey, sharing the interest of not only dismantling that male gaze etc. but to contribute to something that is not built on domination, exploitation and domestication. AMM: There is a certain mythic mysticism to your paintings that makes them seem almost allegorical. Do you draw on the conventions of myth in your work? KB: The first tales I can remember, and those which set my mood for how I imagine worlds and scenarios, are the traditional Transylvanian folk legends. Nature in Transylvania is very mystical—deep forests with wildlife and amazing formations of mountains. My grandparents used to tell legends about the origins of these magical landscapes. Usually the story started with a girl and a boy, their tragic love story and how they ended up haunting certain lakes, rivers or castles. So I guess that plays a big part in how I describe some elements within the mood and tempo of my paintings. These work as mystical elements. Then I try to plant some contemporary seeds here and there, in terms of titles, and other details. AMM: Is there usually a narrative behind your paintings or do you think of them as more ambiguous and symbolic? KB: Usually the starting point is a narrative which becomes transformed through the process of depiction. The story or experience is altered through the sketches and paintings, contextualised through readings that lead to more nuances and a level of greater ambiguity. I consider this like digging down beyond language and structure. In painting I don’t need to choose sides, I can be all, outside and inside as well. AMM: How does scale come into your practice? Do you prefer to work big or small? KB: I have my comfort formats in size S, M, L. Usually I start from a matchbox size sketch. It has to go really fast when something pops up in my head so that is just very practical. Then, depending on the motif, I make one or more paintings with the same elements, always learning from the previous piece, maybe going up in scale if the motif benefits from it. It’s because I don’t like to overpaint, so I’d rather finish a piece and start a new one with the experience from the previous one. Through this

process the matchbox size sketch could end up as a large painting. Working on a big painting just generates so much energy, and a small one a lot of intimacy. AMM: Each of your works seems to have its own chromatic theme, in the sense that there is a resonance and harmony of colour between the different forms and elements that make up each painting.

mood and concept. For example, I had a very feverish winter (feelings and mixed energy) when I started using the reds. Time passed in slow motion and the sky was hidden with a grey veil. Each day was a copy of the previous one and I lost my sense of time. It seemed like everything was on standby, nothing changing, but it was exactly what generated the feverish red paintings. The fever has passed and I can’t feel those reds at the moment.

How do you think about the function of colour in your painting? Do you consider it as integral to conveying a particular subject or mood?

AMM: How much does your work seek to convey your own experience? Do you tend to incorporate personal elements?

KB: Yes, I am very attracted to colours and they are very significant in the process. I love looking at paint tubes—smelling them, arranging them, holding them in my palm and

KB: Yes, though not the narrative—it’s more about the sensations or how certain experiences can feel. Since I work without external visual references, it is a lot about evaluating and sensing what feels right to my eyes. As if I am feeling or touching with my vision.

“My art is not for validating my subjectivity, claiming space with broad arm movements through wild brushstrokes, but it is about sharing a methodology of challenging classical narratives, the constructed hierarchy, unlearning certain traditions and of course as a challenge to the male gaze.” - Kinga Bartis

feeling their different weights. I think a lot in colours and often I know the colour scale even before the motif is completely worked out. I give a lot of space and pay close attention to the colour to allow it to decide for itself and the composition. The works balance between transparency and opacity as I work with thin layers over the top of each other, building the space up, avoiding covering the canvas with colours placed next to each other. Rather, they are rubbed into the canvas, while still leaving space for the layer underneath. I find it really difficult to hide the canvas’s texture with paint. As if I would suffocate it if I did. I use sienna as an underpaint that functions as a source of light; that comes through in almost all of my works. Then I try to combine the characteristic of the colours with the

The most interesting part to me in painting is exploring and articulating how it feels when life happens. Meaning, for instance, how it feels to be powerless, when you are grieving, when you are feeling rootless or rejected. When you are crushing someone with your love or when someone crushes you with their lack of love. When you are a killjoy, or life happens too fast and you can’t keep up. We all have a different reality, we share some parts of it but mostly it differs according to age, gender, race, class etc. My art is not for validating my subjectivity, claiming space with broad arm movements through wild brushstrokes, but it is about sharing a methodology of challenging classical narratives, the constructed hierarchy, unlearning certain traditions and of course as a challenge to the male gaze. AMM: What inspires you beyond visual art—do you draw on music, books, philosophy, politics? KB: If I lived in the middle of nowhere I would love to listen to the world but since that’s not the case I need music to tune in and slow down. My playlists are very eclectic. I have gong sound shower, hip hop, trance, pop, you name it. I love to listen to jazz when I draw and trance when I’m struggling with a painting. Usually I try to choose music without lyrics as I find language very powerful and it would move my focus when working. I love books of all kinds. Right now I’m catching up with queer theory, looking at artists whose practice is based on queer as a strategy or tactic, as a tool for questioning the ordinary. My class consciousness always craves for political insights so I’m reading about white privilege, intersectionality and solidarity. Then Ursula K. Le Guin is challenging my earthly logic through her fantastic book The Left Hand of Darkness. At home I have my plants that I play music to and watch them grow. It’s very rewarding.

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 18, Interviewed: Kinga Bartis

How do you think about the function of colour in your painting? Do you consider it as integral to conveying a particular subject or mood?

AMM: How much does your work seek to convey your own experience? Do you tend to incorporate personal elements?

KB: Yes, I am very attracted to colours and they are very significant in the process. I love looking at paint tubes—smelling them, arranging them, holding them in my palm and

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 18, Interviewed: Kinga Bartis

AMM: When you set out to make a painting, how do you start? Do you make sketches, write, plan it out beforehand? KB: I start from a tiny sketch. But the origin of that image can be various. Sometimes I have glimpses of images after meditation or before falling asleep. I don’t consider them visions or anything like that. More like how I interpret life and bodily sensations. On the other hand I can also work conceptually. It is not a research-based practice I have, reading and looking at images are food to the brain, and these experiences can trigger a personal resonance, then I start digging into it and there it is, a painting. And each painting leads to the next one. If I don’t have any idea how to approach these glimpses, I usually draw them so that I learn more about the composition and texture and hopefully after that it will be possible to translate it into a painting. AMM: Are there any particular artworks or artists that have been a sustained influence on your work throughout your artistic career? KB: Miriam Cahn’s and Marlene Dumas’ art practice. The way they incorporate the world in their subjective universe, weaving the private and the political together, their unique painterly voice and engagement with the material is very powerful. It makes me want to paint every time I come across their paintings. I am also very touched by Ana Mendieta’s works, mostly for the same reasons as I mentioned above. AMM: What is the artistic scene like in Copenhagen? Do you have many opportunities for collaboration or do you prefer to conduct a solitary practice?

Featured image (p.32):

Featured image (p.34):

Featured image (p.36-37):

Kinga Bartis Waves, Did Not Want To Be Rode On oil on canvas 130 x 100 cm

Kinga Bartis Try To Put a Ring on It oil on board 33.5 x 25cm

Kinga Bartis Waterbed oil on linen 20 x40 cm

they are mostly visual artists and writers. It is very interesting to see the difference and the similarities between the ways in which people from diverse disciplines approach language. I am also very happy to be able to exhibit with my dear friend Coline Marotta in June—in an artist-run exhibition space called OK Corral in Copenhagen. AMM: What is your workspace like? Do you have any studio rituals or particular ways of working? KB: My studio in Copenhagen is basically my home, except that I don’t sleep there. Tuning in to work starts in the morning with meditation and some exercise so by the time I get in I am ready to work. I need a lot of time to really find focus so I listen to music all day. My need for social contact varies a lot but the beginning of a process is generally easier with less interaction. I am trying to find the silver linings as life can get pretty boring in my own company. AMM: How do you envision your practice developing? Do you have any plans for upcoming projects that you can share with us? KB: I would like to continue painting as much as I can, gain a bit more experience with the material, maybe find a graphic workshop and do some prints. I would love to be able to meet people and discuss, be a part of a community, share knowledge and collaborate in various forms. I would like to participate in residencies and travel a bit. Relocating can be very beneficial to the practice. I was planning to participate in the PADA Residency in Lisbon to prepare for my solo show scheduled in Copenhagen for November and a duo show with Coline Marotta in June. It is really difficult to foresee the rest of the year because of Covid, but I am working in the studio as always, hoping to be able to show the works at some point in the future.

KB: I consider myself very lucky to have been able to settle in Copenhagen and maintain an artistic practice. It is a small scene and sometimes it can get a bit tight. Collaboration and collectivity is a crucial in an art practice. The city has different kinds of artist-run venues and exhibition spaces and there is a very supportive system for artists so there is fertile soil for collaboration. A solitary practice is very difficult for me to imagine. Intellectually I’m very dependent on my colleagues’ input and knowledge and I find them very inspiring. I am a member of a group where we read our own texts and discuss them. The members have various backgrounds but

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 18, Interviewed: Kinga Bartis

Featured image (p.32):

Featured image (p.34):

Featured image (p.36-37):

Kinga Bartis Waves, Did Not Want To Be Rode On oil on canvas 130 x 100 cm

Kinga Bartis Try To Put a Ring on It oil on board 33.5 x 25cm

Kinga Bartis Waterbed oil on linen 20 x40 cm

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 18, Interviewed: Kinga Bartis

Kinga Bartis Heartless Tree Moons Slow Moo oil on canvas 185 x 140 cm

Kinga Bartis Shelters from Light oil on canvas 35 x 40 cm

Kinga Bartis Heartless Tree Moons Slow Moo oil on canvas 185 x 140 cm

Kinga Bartis Shelters from Light oil on canvas 35 x 40 cm

Kinga Bartis Here, where we part charcoal on paper 42 x 59.4 cm

Kinga Bartis hEYE Hopes charcoal on paper 59.4 x 42 cm

Kinga Bartis Here, where we part charcoal on paper 42 x 59.4 cm

Kinga Bartis hEYE Hopes charcoal on paper 59.4 x 42 cm

Kinga Bartis No Rider, But wave counter oil on canvas 50 x 40 cm

Kinga Bartis Smudged Coco Rouge oil on canvas 50 x 40 cm

Kinga Bartis No Rider, But wave counter oil on canvas 50 x 40 cm

Kinga Bartis Smudged Coco Rouge oil on canvas 50 x 40 cm

Kinga Bartis I’ll Lend you my Guru oil on canvas 45 x 30 cm

Kinga Bartis Techno Tears oil on canvas 36 x 40 cm

Kinga Bartis I’ll Lend you my Guru oil on canvas 45 x 30 cm

Kinga Bartis Techno Tears oil on canvas 36 x 40 cm

www.kubaparis.com

Delivering art to a non-exclusive audience through freely accessible curated content at KubaParis Berlin and Bonn-based curatorial duo Nora Cristea and Saskia Höfler-Hohengarten run KubaParis, an artistic platform and creative space within which contemporary artists are invited to showcase and sell their work, as well as connecting with a community of fellow artists. Within the often restricted structures of the contemporary art world, Nora and Saskia seek to counter this exclusivity and to promote work made by emerging artists. Having both undertaken university studies in design, the two are invested in applying the design concepts of communication to uplift the voices of young artists so that they might access a network of art practitioners and investors and thus further their creative careers. Another key facet of the work that Nora and Saskia do is, in their words, “making art more accessible to people who are not connoisseurs”—delivering art to a non-exclusive audience through freely accessible digital content, as well as offering affordable editions of artworks from the KubaParis artistic community. As designers, Nora and Saskia are the founders of their own design studio, preggnant agency. Through the agency, the pair not only provide the creative direction and design work for KubaParis, but also deliver virtual and physical tools and platforms for artists institutions, such as website and print designs, digital media and creative strategy. In terms of their approach to discovering and engaging with visual art, Nora and Saskia’s emphasis is on work that is progressive, that “captures the zeitgeist”, or perhaps subverts it. Having spent much time drawing while growing up, Nora in particular is keen to uphold the process of making art as integral to the final artwork. Ultimately, the pair behind KubaParis aim to implement their design expertise as a way of challenging the conception that art is only accessible to the few, the moneyed, the privileged. Nora and Saskia’s answer to this is a space that is open, that encourages the makers of art to grow their practice in both a creative and entrepreneurial capacity, that fosters community and that is not aloof from or condescending to its audience. Nora and Saskia speak to ArtMaze here about their respective approaches to curatorial and design work, the background of their professional collaboration and what draws them to particular artists, as well as offering some key points of advice to young, emerging artists when it comes to cultivating their practice.

interview by Rebecca Irvin

Featured image: Hannah Sophie Dunkelberg Alibi PS, Lack 32 x 24 x 4 cm by KubaParis Shop

www.kubaparis.com

interview by Rebecca Irvin

Featured image: Hannah Sophie Dunkelberg Alibi PS, Lack 32 x 24 x 4 cm by KubaParis Shop

“We believe that appreciation and comprehension of art is taking place when your whole consciousness is stimulated. Exclusively decorative art is not able to perform in that way. Unconsciously or not, some sort of a narrative has to be perceived. It might not be immediately decryptable or incredibly poignant, but communicating to humans needs some sort of exchange in addition to the purely visual one.” - KubaParis AMM: Hi Saskia and Nora! Let’s start off by talking a bit about your respective backgrounds, studies, previous professions and what inspired your interests in visual art. Has art always held an important place in your lives? KP: We both studied design, at the same university, in the same city and at the same time. Funnily enough though our approach to visual art is very much unlike the other. During our studies Saskia moved to Berlin and got in touch with the local contemporary art scene pretty quickly. She started collaborating with young artists creating catalogues, establishing an art book publishing house and increasingly worked on ideas to create different means for communicating their work and giving it a larger audience. Nora grew up in an art enthusiast’s household, which led her to start drawing at an early age, something that is still important to her— her caricatures can be found hidden on the KubaParis webpage. Thus, her approach to

visual art is very based on recognising and appreciating the process of making art. As a team we believe in our ability to detect art that is not only exceptional to us, but also captures the zeitgeist or even pushes further in some way or another. AMM: Can you talk us through the history of your collaboration together? KP: Sometimes you have the best friend and business partner existing next to you for years without even noticing. It took us nine years, two diplomas and a cat to finally get together. Saskia moved to Berlin while still studying in Karlsruhe. Soon after, she founded KubaParis together with Amelie gr. Darrelmann in 2014. With news that Nora also moved to Berlin and in dire need of a cat sitter, she contacted her old fellow student. One thing led to another: first we founded our design studio preggnant agency which delivers all of the design, art direction and programming work for KubaParis, alongside creating catalogues, webpages or other useful means for emerging artists, galleries and art institutions. In 2018 Saskia continued KubaParis without Amelie as editor-in-chief. This year she expanded online editorial content by collaborating with various photographers and artists. She is also mainly responsible for the curating of our daily posts. After Saskia moved to Bonn, Nora got more and more involved in the magazine’s content, while still being responsible for technical endeavours like programming the awesome new webpage, which we also designed together!

the position to constantly receive such a multitude of submissions from all around the globe means a lot to us. We find it difficult that we can’t respond to all, but nonetheless we feel we were and are able to support artists, galleries and institutions through our work. Frankly that is a huge motivator. AMM: Alongside your submission guidelines, you write, “KubaParis is a platform of trying-thingsout and growing together”. What have been your most significant learning curves and challenges over the course of developing your platform and “trying-things-out”? KP: The business part! It might be unromantic for some but, yes, we want to make a living with this. Both of us are far away from businesswomen, TED talkers or accountants. Numbers make us dizzy! The “hustle“ didn’t come naturally to us, which can be pretty taxing (and shows up in a hilarious learning curve). What helps us grow into these larger roles is being aware of our strengths and weaknesses every step of the way. Especially weaknesses! Sometimes “trying-things-out“ led us to the realisation that it is indeed quite useful to invest in people who can absolve certain tasks better than us. AMM: It’s fantastic that the submission process for your blog and Instagram is so open and accessible— you must get an enormous quantity of submissions! How do you select which works and artists to showcase? What qualities do you look for?

Almost five years later, here we are! The kitty lives with Nora’s family now.

KP: This might be the hardest question, because we are very intuitive in our selection. The work has to be somehow engaging. But “engaging“ is pretty hard to characterise as personal taste plays a huge role prima facie. Luckily those taste buds are diversely formed and developed over the years by a lot of input, realisations and discourse. Naturally re-reviewing is inevitable. If you want to grow you have to take time to think and rethink information that seems hard to understand and classify at first sight.

AMM: How would you describe your roles as curators and directors, and what do these roles require of you?

AMM: Do you think that ‘good art’ requires a poignant or potent concept and message to drive it? Or can art just be something that’s nice to look at?

KP: Next to going through tons of submissions, we are constantly on the lookout for progressive contemporary art. Sometimes on Instagram, sometimes in real life at exhibitions, at graduation shows or other events.

KP: Usually something nice-to-look-at is nice to look at because of a second layer underneath. We believe that appreciation and comprehension of art is taking place when your whole consciousness is stimulated. Exclusively decorative art is not able to perform in that way. Unconsciously or not, some sort of a narrative has to be perceived. It might not be immediately decryptable or incredibly poignant, but communicating to humans needs some sort of exchange in addition to the purely visual one.

Our newest baby is our artists’ edition shop offering young emerging art at an affordable price.

In the last decade it became possible to consume a lot of content in a short amount of time. If you aren’t careful, the utter mass of input might shrink your attention span tremendously. Curating and directing nowadays means the process of searching and recognising has to be accompanied by heavy filtering and especially staying focused! But having the opportunity of being in

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 18, Interviewed: KubaParis

AMM: What do you think about the role of social media in the contemporary art world? What do you think the advantages and disadvantages of

social media are for emerging artists looking to promote their practices?

connectedness? What work still needs to be done to open up spaces and opportunities?

KP: Independence is an important benefit! Artists can control and decide how they present their work—and who responds to it. This gives an artist the possibility to create his own network, regardless of a gallery and opinions of various art critics. And in a very introverted way, if so chosen.

KP: The “Art World“ is pretty hard to grasp to begin with. There are so many layers and communities, ways of showing, seeing and buying art that we cannot completely understand it in its entirety.

But, seemingly a place free from unwanted interaction, social media is not a safe space for your mental health. Working towards various algorithms puts a whole other form of performance pressure on you. No patron, gallery or supporter expects you to produce works daily, but the algorithms do. Not only that but your content has to be engaging in some form too. Some artists might interpret the low engagement on their art posts as indirect critics or people being uninterested. Some might start rating the worth of their work based on if the post is failing or not. This and constant comparison with other output can result in a focus shift and may have a negative impact on an artist forming and developing their own language. Yes, social media is a productive medium to share, keep people updated and network. But it is no indicator for value or quality in any form! AMM: It’s great that you have the KubaParis calendar as a way for artists and events organisers to share exhibitions, shows, talks and performances with your audience! You must get a very interesting range of events submitted—do you get good feedback from people or collectives who have used this online diary system? And do you use the calendar yourselves to seek out new creative talent? KP: The tool is quite new and not frequently used. We hope to have more submissions in the future. AMM: What, for you, are the factors that go into making an exhibition or art event successful? KP: For us it’s solely art that forms an event. And for that to be possible, space is important. Like a 2D layout in a catalogue, the wall or the room need to let the art communicate to its audience as directly as possible. That’s why we prefer solo exhibitions—more space for one artist to let the work be perceived. After this unhindered observation, a good old, healthy dialogue with the artist, curator and other appreciating observer should be possible and is needed. For that, some drinks are always welcome :D AMM: With the global reach of digital platforms like your own that showcase artists and create networks of practitioners, curators, writers and buyers, it seems like the worldwide artistic community has never been more connected. Do you think that the art world has become more accessible and inclusive by virtue of this greater

Especially places where the big money floats are pretty restricted. We hope that our influence in those areas exists—especially by promoting young and emerging artists. But the bottom line is we are no part of the blue chip market, with little insight and fewer chips. We don’t think this space will open up soon. But these structures are not unbreakable! What we try to do is grow with and help to grow a new generation who continue to support each other to create a new powerful way to make art more profitable for more people. Meaning people can make a living, normal people can buy art and hopefully everything is less based on that exaggerated monetary aspect. That also includes making art more accessible to people who are not connoisseurs. Here in Germany the phrase “I don’t get art“ is used pretty often. A sad and unnecessary statement (with a truthful double meaning), which is a reaction to the often exclusive and elitist behavior in the art world. We hope we can modify that, at least a little bit, through our platform and our affordable art editions. AMM: What is the most important piece of artwork that you have encountered in recent years? Or one that has particularly stuck with you? Saskia: One exhibition that I particularly remember is Martin Belou’s “Objects, Love and Patterns“ at Ciap. The materiality and tenderness of those art pieces touched me. I am also impressed by the work of Gertrude Abercrombie and Sanya Kantarovsky. Nora: I tend to have a new favorite every week. However, what shaped me as a child and woke my interest in art was “Hommage a Goya” by Odilon Redon. This work satisfies my wish to expand my little earthbound consciousness with strange compositions and weird narratives. AMM: How does the way in which you approach print differ from the way you approach your digital platform? Does the print medium alter your processes of selecting and curating? KP: The digital space gives us the opportunity to react much faster. We can present exhibitions and showcase artists to a large public within a few minutes. This leads to different forms of direct interaction. A follower might change his plans and maybe decide to visit a featured exhibition the day they saw it in our feed. Possibilities of publishing online are pretty much unlimited, which also changes the

“...seemingly a place free from unwanted interaction, social media is not a safe space for your mental health. Working towards various algorithms puts a whole other form of performance pressure on you. No patron, gallery or supporter expects you to produce works daily, but the algorithms do. Not only that but your content has to be engaging in some form too. Some artists might interpret the low engagement on their art posts as indirect critics or people being uninterested. Some might start rating the worth of their work based on if the post is failing or not. This and constant comparison with other output can result in a focus shift and may have a negative impact on an artist forming and developing their own language.” - KubaParis selection to a wider range. But we still curate each of our postings thoughtfully! Since a print medium is more limited by the number of pages our selection is very condensed and thought-out. Mainly it is more focused on the artist and their work. AMM: How do you sustain and nurture your relationships with artists? KP: Fortunately, due to both our business locations, we are able to be present at two main areas in the cultural landscape

photo courtesy of the artist

Almost five years later, here we are! The kitty lives with Nora’s family now.

AMM: How would you describe your roles as curators and directors, and what do these roles require of you?

AMM: Do you think that ‘good art’ requires a poignant or potent concept and message to drive it? Or can art just be something that’s nice to look at?

Our newest baby is our artists’ edition shop offering young emerging art at an affordable price.

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 18, Interviewed: KubaParis

AMM: What do you think about the role of social media in the contemporary art world? What do you think the advantages and disadvantages of

social media are for emerging artists looking to promote their practices?

connectedness? What work still needs to be done to open up spaces and opportunities?

photo courtesy of the artist

in Germany. This gives us the privilege to directly meet artists at openings, venues or during cosy studio visits. It is important to us to keep in touch with as many artists as possible outside of regular reporting. This exchange takes place at eye level and we are happy that we can grow together. AMM: What is the most rewarding part of the work that you do? KP: Positive feedback in every aspect. Also there are quite a few artists we have accompanied on their way from art school to the museum. Seeing someone’s art gain support or an artist emerge over the year is very gratifying. Especially if we were able to boost that process with our support. Selling art editions is also surprisingly very pleasing! AMM: How do you work with artists to create editions for sale on your webshop? KP: We contact artists whose work we have followed and admired for a longer time. Thankfully the feeling is always mutual. As we try to keep the process beneficial for both parties, we attempt to find balance between keeping the price low, while creating a new way of representing emerging artists by creating editions that capture the essence of their contemporary work. AMM: You also run a creative agency, preggnant— in what ways does this and your other ventures intersect with your work for KubaParis? How do you balance these multiple projects? KP: With preggnant we offer artists and cultural institutions various additional services in addition to the platform. We design and supervise artist catalogues, program websites for artists or galleries or create print products for events in the art field. Considering balancing all those things we cannot give you a straight answer. We try to manage our time wisely, but since we are both mothers this remains an ongoing challenge! AMM: You are based in Berlin and Bonn—what is the creative scene like in these cities? KP: Our separate locations are primarily for individual reasons. But we made a virtue out of this necessity. In Germany, the Rhineland and Berlin are hubs for art, culture and design. Both offer great art schools attracting all kinds of creative people. Being in both locations gives us access to play both fields at the same time. The exchange between those cities is pretty lively and it is hard to point a finger at the differences. Berlin seems busier being international; meanwhile the Rhineland

creates more economic venues for art. AMM: We see that you are currently offering digital exhibition spaces to exhibitors whose current shows have been affected by the Covid-19 pandemic. How has the role of your platform changed in response to the pandemic and what kind of engagement have you had from artists and from your audience? Have you noticed an increase in the amount of people accessing the platform? KP: We are fully aware that there is no real appreciative experience created by showcasing art digitally. Many, but not all, works need space. The digital space offers communication not experience. This doesn’t lower the worth of digital art spaces. Communication is the way to the experience in the first place anyways. We tried to create— compared to the blog—a less busy more spacious online space to work against art vanishing into oblivion. Especially in trying times we need art! Depiction of reality in art is infinite in its possibilities. It can be an exact copy, an allegorical reference, or an un-decodable abstraction. A mean reminder and memory escapism at the same time. Depending on where our mental place of retreat is, we tend to get drawn to the image that meets us with the desired head nod towards our anxiety. We hope our platform can give a little of that catharsis. Which, next to the obvious ones, might be one of the most desired substances of 2020. AMM: What is the main piece of advice you would give to a young, emerging artist looking to develop, expand and establish their practice? KP: We strongly believe in painful selfawareness! You should always keep in check with your strengths and weaknesses! Concerning your artwork: find your essence. That doesn’t mean look or style, this changes very often with growth. But we believe that every human has a main interior resource that is there to plunder. This is the true treasure hunt, because for some it takes many years of trial and error to find!

But be humble and keep asking for advice from professionals, teachers and people with more experience, who can support you. AMM: What do you envision for the future of KubaParis? KP: We hope to grow as a team and offer a safe, stable, creative working space. With room for self-fulfillment, family and without any form of existential fears. We also want to be able to provide more editorial content and host events. Create more possibilities for artists and art workers to connect. And maybe be a reliable and less exclusive space to buy and offer art.

“Here in Germany the phrase “I don’t get art“ is used pretty often. A sad and unnecessary statement (with a truthful double meaning), which is a reaction to the often exclusive and elitist behavior in the art world. We hope we can modify that, at least a little bit, through our platform and our affordable art editions.” - KubaParis

Be aware and accept all the phases. A painful learning phase means a lot because we truly believe that no great skill comes easy. So be patient and keep trying. Exterior influence is important for the mind but not for your style. And in the end a very practical tip: communicate—offer what makes you special! Showcase your work on a professional website, with good documentation of your output. If possible create catalogues or smaller print products (in collaboration with preggnant of course!). Don’t be shy—network!

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 18, Interviewed: KubaParis

Saskia Höfler-Hohengarten (left) and Nora Cristea (right) Photo by Neven Allgeier

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 18, Interviewed: KubaParis

Saskia Höfler-Hohengarten (left) and Nora Cristea (right) Photo by Neven Allgeier

curated selection of works by Nora Cristea and Saskia Höfler-Hohengarten, head curators and directors of contemporary art platform KubaParis, based in Berlin, Germany

Featured image: Sarah Bechter Untitled (the unloved painting) oil on canvas 170 x 150 cm more on p. 95

curated selection of works by Nora Cristea and Saskia Höfler-Hohengarten, head curators and directors of contemporary art platform KubaParis, based in Berlin, Germany

Featured image: Sarah Bechter Untitled (the unloved painting) oil on canvas 170 x 150 cm more on p. 95

J u l i a P e i n t n e r

Julia Peintner graduated from Central Saint Martins in 2015 and has since been working as a printmaker and painter in London. She has exhibited in the UK and US as well as in Japan after being a resident at Studio Kura residency in 2015 and in 2017 with a focus on Japanese printmaking. Peintner has been working for Blackbird Editions and as Eileen Cooper’s studio assistant since 2016. Printmaking, drawing and painting equally coexist in her practice. Her figurative images show universal experiences and symbolic motifs, often drawing from the imaginary by using everyday observations and archival images, giving the work a sense of the surreal and mystical. The work depicts figures in moments of motion, characterised by strong, fluid silhouettes, capturing movement in afixed yetexplosivestate.

www.juliapeintner.com

Image:

Water engraving Edition of 5 E. V. 35 x 29 cm

Wind pencil on paper 32 x 25 cm

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 18: curated selection

J u l i a P e i n t n e r

www.juliapeintner.com

Image:

Water engraving Edition of 5 E. V. 35 x 29 cm

Wind pencil on paper 32 x 25 cm

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 18: curated selection

N i k a

F o n t a i n e

My work depicts the invisible and intangible. Through craftsmanship, I spiritualize matter and materialize the metaphysical in works that express concepts of mindfulness and emancipation. I source my inspiration primarily in antique and modern spiritual philosophies & techniques which I study and practice such as Kabbalah, Hermetism, lucid dreaming, Vipassana meditation, 12 steps fellowships, Kundalini yoga and Kung Fu. The timelessness and abilities to break behavior patterns of judgment and self/destruction are what make these philosophies relevant nowadays. This quest for the sublime results in a proactive celebration of the body, mind, and soul manifested for the essential fulfillment of all. I aim at creating artworks that can heal and teach while enchanting the viewer through poetic and engaging esthetics. My art should be used as a vehicle to grow and transport oneself to new realms of understanding and sensorial acuteness. I like to consider my path as a parent of alchemical endeavors and witness of an initiatic way. Banishing fears, 2020 When false evidence appears real, when we live in a possible future which our ego-mind constructed, when we disconnect from our true essence, the now and the infinite field of pure potentiality, we surrender to fear. The western alchemical path to enlightenment is composed of seven stages of mental transmutation which should by three folds be repeated. The first step, calcination, consists of casting the light on our opponent/ ego by which fears shall be banished from our hearts. This ego once calcinated gives birth to the phoenix within which emerge in its brazing light of the first day of Genesis. The breath of fire exercise in Kundalini yoga aims at achieving similar outcomes. Shadow work and the first three steps of the 12 steps fellowships are as well aligned with this ancient tradition of mental transmutation. The series is composed of stoneware sculptures, metal embossings, oil on canvas and fusing glass paintings.

www.nikafontaine.com Image (left): Image: Calcination stoneware glaze with terra sigilatta 88 x 65 x 65 cm

Banishing death embossed aluminium 29 x 18.5 cm

Image (right): Death of the ego embossed aluminium 29 x 18.5 cm

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 18: curated selection

N i k a

F o n t a i n e

www.nikafontaine.com Image (left): Image: Calcination stoneware glaze with terra sigilatta 88 x 65 x 65 cm

Banishing death embossed aluminium 29 x 18.5 cm

Image (right): Death of the ego embossed aluminium 29 x 18.5 cm

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 18: curated selection

B l y t h e

C a i n

M i r i a m

N a e h

www.blythecain.com

www.miriamnaeh.com

My work focuses on hallucinogenic ideologies within outdated systemic capitalist structures in the displaced violent fun house of westernized aesthetics. The mirror is anthropomorphism. What is our living reflection of the defunct power dynamics found in the aesthetics of the long strung out terms, Patriarchy and Capitalism? How do we pick these splayed topics up off the floor and transcend through the prison of aesthetics. In this hot house of western ideology—does the visual or material excrement of any decade that upholds these racist-sexists values hold us prisoner, on repeat for all eternity. DEFINE US. Radical individualism vs. the commonal experience rock together side by side—waging, waxing, waning. What is this image looking back towards us in this mirror, taking life and president over our priorities, directing us—decorating us? When aesthetics are resurrected from the archive of nostalgia, what are the solutions out of this or-DEAL?

Miriam Naeh is a London-based multi-disciplinary artist working in installation, sculpture ‎and ‎video. ‎Her ‎works stem from ‎stories and associations; some are personal, while others ‎are ‎gathered, ‎stolen, or perhaps overheard in passing. Reshuffling ‎visual ‎elements ‎drawn from life, she ‎translates them into a new set of meanings, ‎abstracting reality to a ‎degree ‎of absurdness.‎ Miriam’s ‎works ‎employ ‎different dichotomies and combinations through which these narratives are layered and retold; such as juxtaposing familiar materials with estranged ‎ones, coupling hand-made and ‎found objects, ‎playing with scale, and blurring the lines between cute and repulsive‎.

A possible solution are my guided Studio Visions found in my most recent group publication “Death As Decoration(©)” written with Rafael Perez Evans And Darya Diamond. This handbook touches on the aesthetics of Death As Decoration as an attempt to anti- aesthetics. A vomiting of aesthetics. Aesthetics gone wrong. With D-A-D comes hallucinations of anorexic productivity. The resurrected beast is called upon for help. A final plea. The world gets too thin in resources as the desire to consume dissolves into the murky waters of capitalism’s priority before life itself. JUST so the world can fit into the party dress. Death as the decorator uses abandonment to block the perversion of hyper productivity. The demand to perform in our capital arranged marriage to the hyper violent western modernity of the Sight Unseen.

Naeh holds an MFA in Fine Arts from Goldsmiths University, London (2018) and BA from Musrara ‎School of Art, Jerusalem (2014). She has exhibited internationally, with her most recent shows ‎including MoBY: Museums of Bat Yam, Israel; Dora House, Castor ‎Gallery, Chalton Gallery, Safehouse, Tenderpixel Gallery, and Peter von Kant Gallery in London; ‎DE: FORMAL in New York; Binyamin Gallery, The Edmond de Rothschild Center and Indie Gallery ‎in Tel-Aviv. Naeh has won the Gilbert Bayes ‎Award from the Royal Society of Sculptors in 2019 and the Tiffany & Co. x Outset Studiomakers ‎Prize in 2018. She has been featured in Vogue, i-D Vice, ‎Harper’s Bazaar, and the Evening Standard, among others.‎

My sculptures and paintings resurrect the performative shift of these ideological questions with no real answer. These are physical observations in response to systemics, transforming into BEING(s). Sculptures are in their house, paintings hang in the background. Beings on display. Abadonarre. Left to die, instead become their own experiments. These zombies of ideology reclaim the cannibalized hysterical fem-bot rainbow that leads out into the open body of water reborn into the possibility of a sustained Horizon.

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 18: curated selection

Image:

Dolphin Gurlz 4 Ever metal, body wax, resin, hand blown glass 6 x 2 x 3 feet

Stinky Souls, Soles and Holes sculptural installation with 3 ch. video and sound dimensions variable

B l y t h e

C a i n

M i r i a m

N a e h

www.blythecain.com

www.miriamnaeh.com

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 18: curated selection

Image:

Dolphin Gurlz 4 Ever metal, body wax, resin, hand blown glass 6 x 2 x 3 feet

Stinky Souls, Soles and Holes sculptural installation with 3 ch. video and sound dimensions variable

K r i s t i n a

S c h u l d t

I was born in Moskau in 1982. Three years later I moved to Germany and then I started studiying at the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig in 2002. Until 2012 I was a Master student under Professor Neo Rauch. I still live and work in Leipzig. In 2013 I began a collaboration with Eigen+Art Gallery. In my paintings faceless, or unreasoning women’s bodies lie, fall, loll languorously, or bend themselves, as two-dimensional tubes. I make use of the pictorial forms of Classic Modernism, but try to create my own new pictorial language, for example from the wavy hair of a Fernand Léger painting and powerful, schematized bodies that recall the avant-garde pictures of the 1920s. Painting feels like a field of infinite possibilities. I simply turn the picture around and can look at things from a different perspective. And the best thing is: Nothing has to be right!

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 18: curated selection

www.instagram.com/kristinaschuldt

Image:

Study oil and egg tempera on canvas 100 x 90 cm

sweet porridge oil and egg tempera on canvas 220 x 180 cm

K r i s t i n a

S c h u l d t

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 18: curated selection

www.instagram.com/kristinaschuldt

Image:

Study oil and egg tempera on canvas 100 x 90 cm

sweet porridge oil and egg tempera on canvas 220 x 180 cm

G a l i n a D i m i t r o v a

Galina Dimitrova was born in Sofia, Bulgaria. She finished in 2004 at the National School of Fine Arts “Ilia Petrov“ in Sofia. Her main class was painting. After that she moved to Germany to begin from 2006 her art studies at the Art Academy Düsseldorf in the class of Prof. Mark Lüpertz and Prof. Tal R. In 2014 she graduated with a degree at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf with the video installation “The Dream House“ and in the same year she became a Master’s degree student with Tal R. She exhibited in Maschinenhaus in Essen, Jagla Gallery in Cologne, W139 in Amsterdam and in 2014 was in the finalist selection “The paper in Contemporary Art“, Jordan Parushev Foundation Award. In the last years she has taken part in group exhibitions in CFA Gallery, Berlin; Priska Pasquer Gallery, Cologne; Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen; Urban Gallery Rosenheim; Michael Horbach Foundation Cologne, and Gallery Bodenseekreis, Neues Schloss Meersburg. She lives and works in Düsseldorf Germany. I am interested in the fascination of drawing. Its beginnings can be traced far back in history when the first people carved their world through lines on the walls of hell and that was the beginning of art. Today there is a wide range of art movements and techniques, and despite its widespread use, drawing still stands as a secondary technique that has often been viewed as sketch. Nevertheless, I find it charming from the well-known lines, which experience many metamorphoses, to create a work that gives the drawing a new life and steals it in a different light. The drawing migrates to different materials and promotes a different shape, adapts to the surface and still retains its own style and character. My works are two-columned and create two polarities that cross the lines, find balance and unite. On the one hand the fine lines, which flow like music and bow in a naive and romantic way, contrast with the image and message that they produce, which is often frightening, sad or repulsive. The pictures are my own inner knowledge, memories, quotes from books that left a scratch in my heart and in my memory, which I give shape to and thus escape from oblivion. The writing completes the drawing and is used as a title like a kind of tarot card to complete as in the entire picture.

www.galina-dimitrova-galinsky.com

Image: Bang bang baby bang bang pen on canvas 90 x 60 cm

Image (left): Beauty are you sleeping pen on canvas 90 x 60 cm

Image (middle): The wrong way to think about me pen on canvas 90 x 60 cm

Image (right): It is over only when you give up pen on canvas 90 x 60 cm

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 18: curated selection

G a l i n a D i m i t r o v a

www.galina-dimitrova-galinsky.com

Image: Bang bang baby bang bang pen on canvas 90 x 60 cm

Image (left): Beauty are you sleeping pen on canvas 90 x 60 cm

Image (middle): The wrong way to think about me pen on canvas 90 x 60 cm

Image (right): It is over only when you give up pen on canvas 90 x 60 cm

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 18: curated selection

V i k a

P r o k o p a v i c i u t e

D a n n y

L e y l a n d

www.prokopaviciute.com

www.dannyleyland.com

Vika Prokopaviciute (b. Vilnius, Lithuania, 1983) lives and works in Vienna. She recently exhibited at Mauve, Vienna; Skulpturinstitut, Vienna; Heiligenkreuzerhof, Vienna; Kunstverein Eisenstadt, Eisenstadt; Pilot, Vienna. She graduated from the University of Applied Arts, Vienna and the Samara University of Architecture and Engineering, Russia.

Like the chimpanzees who pick fleas from one other’s backs, we humans “knit” our societies together through touch, through action. The flint knapper in this painting is, similarly, making their world into being through action. Toc, toc, toc: the stones are brought together and, through an act of destruction, something new is made: an axe, an edge, an arrowhead. Such has been the beat of all our lives from the earliest lives ever to have been lived. Think of all the grain that’s been ground, the dough kneaded, the rushes woven, the wool spun: uncounted lives lived in the shadow of our labours, like the mason in Basil Bunting’s poem Briggflatts who ‘times his mallet to a lark’s twitter’.

How to generate the next painting? What if it would be science, something like mathematics or grammar, where you out of the curiosity and out of the wish to understand how it works (and in this case out of the urge to justify yourself) observe and create a very flexible system which is constantly changing, like a never-ending chain of events? One painting is generating the next one.

Danny Leyland (b. 1994) makes work with a visual language informed by a reading of comparative mythology, folklore, mediaeval romance, and archaeology. Sometimes narrative-led, at other times process-led, his work moves cross disciplines between painting, printmaking, sculpture, performance and writing. Since graduating from Edinburgh College of Art in 2016 (BA Painting), Danny has exhibited internationally in London, Oxford, Edinburgh, and Thiruvananthapuram, India, with highlights including RSA New Contemporaries (2017), Hospitalfields Graduate Residency (2017), an EMBASSY off-site project Digging (2018), and his first solo show Debris Dance at Arusha Gallery (2020). Alongside producing his own work, Danny directed Vine Box Poetry, a poetry-led event platform in Edinburgh, with funding from the Hope Scott Trust and Scottish Book Trust. Danny is also a co-member of Cave Collective, with the sculptor Connie Hurley, a collective driven by a shared research interest in folk culture. Danny now lives and works in Cambridge, where he teaches Foundation Art & Design at a Sixth Form College.

Image:

Sticky Quattro oil on linen 130 x 200 cm

Flint Knapper oil on canvas 102 x 67 cm

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 18: curated selection

V i k a

P r o k o p a v i c i u t e

D a n n y

L e y l a n d

www.prokopaviciute.com

www.dannyleyland.com

Image:

Sticky Quattro oil on linen 130 x 200 cm

Flint Knapper oil on canvas 102 x 67 cm

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 18: curated selection

P a u l i n a S e m k o w i c z

www.paulinasemkowicz.tumblr.com

Image (left):

Image (right):

Mermaid acrylic on canvas 40 x 30 cm

Splash acrylic on canvas 40 x 30 cm

I was born in Krakow, Poland and I am currently based in Vienna. I graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków where I studied painting and scenography. My work has been exhibited in various art spaces in Vienna, Leipzig, Rome, and Warsaw. I took part in many international projects and besides my own practice I have made several collaborations with other artists. I am a painter but my interest in other mediums has been broadened throughout the time. Influenced by my experience of working as a scenic artist in the theatre I started to create settings for my paintings. I have incorporated objects of various dimensions and materials like large canvas backdrops, wooden construction, small ceramic pieces, and wall painting. This way of working allows me to create a dialogue between different pieces in space. Formally differentiated, the works balance between the abstract and figurative motives, between nostalgia and irony, between purely aesthetic and symbolic. I like when images occupy the space between presence and withdrawal. I attempt to deal with the immersive state of mind. In my works I offer an invitation for each viewer to join me in a collective mode of suspended thought. Constant feeling of being torn, longing for something that is elusive in a daily rush makes me want to freeze the moment. But I manage to capture and preserve only a part of it—an afterimage that stays on the canvas. “According to Paulina Semkowicz, the objects have a spirit: they are esoteric characters putting in question objecthood and personhood as an authentic artistic concept. (...) Paulina Semkowicz’s practice and her peculiar aura tell us stories; she creates narratives rocked by her inner imagination. Situations are fantasies, mystical and surreal.”— excerpt from the text by Laetitia Gorsy accompanying the exhibition “Bathing Suit and Surroundings” at She BAM! gallery, Leipzig, 2019, translated by Eléonore Gros. Image (left):

Image (right):

Camouflage acrylic on canvas 65 x 45 cm

Red Suit acrylic on canvas 65 x 45 cm

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 18: curated selection

P a u l i n a S e m k o w i c z

www.paulinasemkowicz.tumblr.com

Image (left):

Image (right):

Mermaid acrylic on canvas 40 x 30 cm

Splash acrylic on canvas 40 x 30 cm

Image (right):

Camouflage acrylic on canvas 65 x 45 cm

Red Suit acrylic on canvas 65 x 45 cm

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 18: curated selection

E l l i e &

H u n t e r

A n a s t a s i a

S o s u n o v a

‘Shadow Tongues’ is a collaborative, 2-channel video by artists Anastasia Sosunova and Ellie Hunter. The story interweaves the lives of Purple and Green, two small people living between great powers. Each protagonist turns to language as a source of protection: Green collects tongues and languages, relishing in the overabundance and trying to ensure that no language is lost in all of the chaos. Purple, on the other hand, attempts to distance herself from codified ways of speaking. She moves to a city where she doesn’t understand anyone and begins assigning new names to the objects she interacts with. When Purple goes to sleep, Green wakes up, and eventually they come face to face with one another. ‘Shadow Tongues’ is narrated in a hybridised vernacular that only the two characters speak.⁣ ‘Shadow Tongues’ is based on real and fictional stories, metaphors from the lexicon novel ‘The Dictionary of Khazars’ and personal collaboration experience of Anastasia Sosunova and Ellie Hunter working on this piece together and communicating virtually while adjusting to Vilnius and New York time zones—alternately asleep and awake in the world.⁣

www.anastasiasosunova.com www.elliehunter.com

Ellie Hunter (b. 1989) is a visual artist based in NYC. Hunter locates her work inside spaces where bodies are heavily scrutinized. Her practice explores the ways in which the pathologizing ethics of clinical institutions are absorbed into our everyday lives and anxieties, and can merge with spaces of fiction and fantasy. Hunter has recently shown work at Cordova (Spain), Like A Little Disaster (Italy), and the CAC Vilnius. She is the co-founder of The Sunroom, a gallery and publishing platform, and is a board member of Wide Rainbow, a non-profits arts education initiative in New York. Anastasia Sosunova (b. 1993) is a visual artist living in Vilnius. Sosunova has a Bachelor’s degree in Graphic art and a Master’s degree in Sculpture from the Vilnius Academy of Arts, and uses a variety of media such as sculpture, video, installation, graphic art and writing in her practice. Has recently shown her work at Editorial and the National Gallery (Lithuania), Cubitt (UK), I: project space (China) and The Sunroom (US).

Image:

‘Shadow Tongues’ (installation view 1) 2-channel HD video with sound www.vimeo.com/420533084

‘Shadow Tongues’ (installation view 2) dried fish painted with acrylic, wire, headphones dimensions variable www.vimeo.com/420533084

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 18: curated selection

E l l i e &

H u n t e r

A n a s t a s i a

S o s u n o v a

www.anastasiasosunova.com www.elliehunter.com

Image:

‘Shadow Tongues’ (installation view 1) 2-channel HD video with sound www.vimeo.com/420533084

‘Shadow Tongues’ (installation view 2) dried fish painted with acrylic, wire, headphones dimensions variable www.vimeo.com/420533084

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 18: curated selection

D a n i e l

K u g e

www.danielkuge.de

Despite their hermetic, serious and technoid appearance, Daniel Kuge’s artistic works speak a lot about us as humans and our handling of what surrounds us: what are our legacies and how are they interpreted? Analogies in archaic times, the industrialized anthropocene and an indefinite future are captured and explored; The archetypal mixes with the technological. His works (painting, object, photography, video, sound) become relics that tell about the enigmatic nature of the world which mankind shapes with its decisions. The relationship between humans and their objects is reflected on its smooth and monochrome surfaces. Although the works are so precise and sharp, they cannot unambiguously be assigned and identified. Swaying and oscillating occurs between the profane and the sacred, between the material and the virtual, between utopia and dystopia. Daniel Kuge graduated with Diplom degress in Visual Communication from the Peter Behrens School of Arts Düsseldorf and in Fine Art from the Braunschweig University of Art. In 2017, he was awarded the advancement award of DIE GROSSE Kunstausstellung NRW and was included in the shortlist for the Kunstpreis Junger Westen in the same year. He took part in art residency programs in Germany and Switzerland and has exhibited his works in several national and international museums and exhibtion spaces such as the Museum Kunstpalast Düsseldorf, Temporary Gallery Cologne, Shoot the Lobster in New York City, Kunstverein Braunschweig, Verein der Düsseldorfer Künstler, Museum Mönchehaus Goslar, Kunsthalle Recklinghausen and Herzog Anton Ullrich Museum Braunschweig. Kuge’s works are also represented in private art collections.

Image (left):

Image (right):

BMV1-G3UR1G-18 mixed media 25 x 19 x 20 cm

SB2-TG12-16 mixed media 26 x 19 x 11.5 cm

Image: SM2-KM12-20 mixed media 50 x 35 cm

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 18: curated selection

D a n i e l

K u g e

www.danielkuge.de

Image (left):

Image (right):

BMV1-G3UR1G-18 mixed media 25 x 19 x 20 cm

SB2-TG12-16 mixed media 26 x 19 x 11.5 cm

Image: SM2-KM12-20 mixed media 50 x 35 cm

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 18: curated selection

M o r i t z

Z e l l e r

www.moritzzeller.de

Moritz Zeller was born 1987 in Bremen. From 2009—2013 he studied at New School for Photography Berlin. After his graduation he continued his photography studies at the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig, since 2015 in the class of Joachim Brohm. In 2019 he finished his studies with a diploma in visual arts. Moritz participated in various exhibitions over the last years, especially to mention »Inn Situ« at FO.KU.S in Innsbruck. Another part of his artistic practice is the development of artworks that work especially as an artist’s book. “I’m experiencing my environment. What does that mean? I’m surrounded by things—Some of them are inconspicuous, easy to miss, too normal to notice. I’m interested in the small phenomena, the things, that can easily be overlooked. Recognizing the potential of these objects often happens in passing. Imagination helps me creating my own approach, which often goes along with a humorous, self-ironic view on the world. My work deals with my own perception in which reality and imagination merge in a sensitive, funny and sometimes provocative way. By combining different media like photography, painting, sculpture and performance, I’m creating some kind of hybrid. In this way I want to give the viewer an access to my own associative world and to challenge his perception sustainably. Our consciousness is the constant interplay between external perceptions and internal emotions, between our body and his surrounding. Our body is made of matter, the type of composition is extremely complex— and from a certain level of complexity something new is created. Images (p. 72-73): Der Berg Analog polystyrene hard foam, epoxy resin, quartz sand, lacquer various sizes

Transforming observations and ideas into something new is a big challenge that keeps me going.” -Moritz Zeller

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 18: curated selection

M o r i t z

Z e l l e r

www.moritzzeller.de

Transforming observations and ideas into something new is a big challenge that keeps me going.” -Moritz Zeller

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 18: curated selection

M a t e a s

P a r e s

In works of narrative, such as films and books, conflict is defined as the challenge main characters need to overcome in order to achieve their goals. In real life, according to studies, if there are no problems or conflicts, our brains start inventing them. In fiction as well as in real life, it seems as if we can’t move forward without conflicts. In my practice I force sculptures and canvas together. I do this to create different conflicts between the two. It is as if the sculptures are trying to overcome a challenge, which has taken the form of the canvas. I use this way of working as a vehicle to confront our relationship with the idea of conflict being an essential element in our narrative, both as individuals and as a society, when moving through life and time. Mateas Pares (b. 1973) studied graphic design and commercial arts at Beckmans College of Design and Bergh’s School of Communication in the late 1990s and moved abroad shortly thereafter. Although he’d been awarded Cannes Grand Prix and other notable awards for his work, he found himself drifting aimlessly as an advertising creative and graphic designer between London, Amsterdam, Paris, Hong Kong, and Stockholm, which he has described as a “sisyphean attempt to try to find creative meaning and happiness in a business I was never really comfortable with, but ended up in because of my laziness, cowardice, and greed”. In 2012 Pares committed full time as an artist. Pares currently lives and works in Stockholm.

www.mateaspares.com

Image: Hour 231 635 human teeth, bronze coating, polymer putty, teared canvas 135 x 200 cm

Image (left):

Image (right):

Hour 100 340 black patinated bronze coating, polymer putty, torn and fringed canvas 62 cm x 140 cm

Hour 216 704 human teeth, bronze coating, polymer putty, teared canvas 125 cm x 206 cm

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 18: curated selection

M a t e a s

P a r e s

www.mateaspares.com

Image: Hour 231 635 human teeth, bronze coating, polymer putty, teared canvas 135 x 200 cm

Image (left):

Image (right):

Hour 100 340 black patinated bronze coating, polymer putty, torn and fringed canvas 62 cm x 140 cm

Hour 216 704 human teeth, bronze coating, polymer putty, teared canvas 125 cm x 206 cm

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 18: curated selection

I a n

C a l e b

M o l i n a

Z o l l e r

Ian lives and works in Argentina and received his BFA from IUPA in 2016. Since then he has participated in collective and solo shows with drawings, ceramics, sculptures and installation inside and outside the country. In 2019 he became a part of a group exhibition curated by Eve Leibe Gallery at Gallery 46 in London ‘I hope this finds you well’ showing some of the ‘New Bodies’ series drawings. Most recent works are available in Good Naked Gallery (Brooklyn) Peter Estey Fine Art (Toronto) and online FlatFile PaperView Auction. I am currently working on a series of blue inks and drawings that started coming out so obsessively during our mandatory isolation. They are focused to generate spectral views of dreams and memories from my connection with nature, patterns, animality and objects. In this time I decided to avoid any human presence (sometimes even mine) and allow the orography, plants and bodies of water to sing their own voice, let me become a quiet messenger for them.

www.iancalebmz.com

Image (left):

Image (right):

qin.dom IV graphite on paper 21 x 28 cm

qin.dom V graphite on paper 21 x 28 cm

Image (left):

Image (right):

qin.dom e blue ink on paper 17 x 25 cm

qin.dom x blue ink on paper 32 x 39 cm

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 18: curated selection

I a n

C a l e b

M o l i n a

Z o l l e r

www.iancalebmz.com

Image (left):

Image (right):

qin.dom IV graphite on paper 21 x 28 cm

qin.dom V graphite on paper 21 x 28 cm

Image (left):

Image (right):

qin.dom e blue ink on paper 17 x 25 cm

qin.dom x blue ink on paper 32 x 39 cm

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 18: curated selection

Philip Hinge (b. 1988, Seattle WA) received his MFA in Painting from Virginia Commonwealth University and his BFA from Maryland Institute College of Art.

P h i l i p

H i n g e

Hinge has shown his work at a variety of venues, including; Freddy (Baltimore, MD), Brennan & Griffin (NY, NY), The Breeder (Athens, Greece), Peter Blum Gallery (NY, NY), Marinaro (NY, NY) Connersmith (Washington DC) Ungefähr 5 (Cologne, Germany), Plague (Krasnador, RU) Felix (Los Angeles, CA), Context: Art Miami, and GCA (Brooklyn, NY). In February 2017 he launched a project space/gallery named, Catbox Contemporary, in his apartment in Ridgewood, NY. Catbox Contemporary has held exhibitions locally and internationally, with an upcoming installation at Atlanta Contemporary (Atlanta, Georgia). In 2019 Hinge started, darkZone, in his childhood home’s basement in New Jersey. In May, Hinge opened A.D. in lower Manhattan, NY with Nick Irzyk and Nicholas Sullivan. Hinge has upcoming solo shows at Final Hot Desert in Utah and 427 Gallery in Lativia. Hinge lives and works in Ridgewood, NY.

www.philiphinge.com

Image:

in my dreams i could die acrylic on canvas 48 x 32 inches

lost in the woods all alone acrylic on canvas 48 x 32 inches

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 18: curated selection

Philip Hinge (b. 1988, Seattle WA) received his MFA in Painting from Virginia Commonwealth University and his BFA from Maryland Institute College of Art.

P h i l i p

H i n g e

www.philiphinge.com

Image:

in my dreams i could die acrylic on canvas 48 x 32 inches

lost in the woods all alone acrylic on canvas 48 x 32 inches

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 18: curated selection

A n n a

H o f m a n n

Y u k o

S o i

www.yukosoi.com www.hofmannanna.com

Anna is currently studying at HfG in Offenbach. Her work focuses on illustration as well as animations and sculptures. Anna’s latest exhibition, alongside a colleague, was shown in Athens where they both studied a semester abroad. With the onset of lockdown, the exhibition then continued in Frankfurt. The body of work Anna has chosen for ArtMaze Mag encompasses some of her favorite drawings, utilising airbrush. The drawings illustrate some of her naive thoughts: lovely pets, or organisms without gender in a soft and dreamy habitat.

Yuko Soi was born in Shizuoka-ken, Japan in 1985. She has been involved in numerous solo, group and art fair exhibitions worldwide. One of the biggest themes that I am working on is life. The other would be feelings of thinking about someone. I am constantly wondering if it is possible to express the thoughts and feelings of a lifetime on a single sheet of paper. I like the gentle and beautiful colors of color pencils. Each artwork takes around one and a half months to complete, and I’ve been drawing with colored pencils now for 13 years. The process of sitting in front of the canvas and drawing for 8 hours every day can impact the work little by little, the colors can change depending on how I’m feeling, the hand pressure of the day and the weather outside.

Image:

Cats Picture with Hearts airbrush on paper 21 x 29.70 cm

It can’t be helped colored pencils on paper 72 × 60 cm

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 18: curated selection

A n n a

H o f m a n n

Y u k o

S o i

www.yukosoi.com www.hofmannanna.com

Image:

Cats Picture with Hearts airbrush on paper 21 x 29.70 cm

It can’t be helped colored pencils on paper 72 × 60 cm

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 18: curated selection

P i a F e r m

When I think about how to describe my work in a way that could include all parts of my practice in a fair way I keep coming back to the plain word images. But images in a very wide meaning, where it could also include a three dimensional sign or pictogram. I want my objects to balance on the edge between being themselves and describing themselves. Like hieroglyphs having left their walls or a drawing turned into a sculpture-not the motif of the drawing—but the drawing itself as turned into a sculpture. In relation to my weavings and tufted works I would explain it as despite the fact that they may be flirting with a painterly sphere, they are much more close to drawings, collages or traditional printmaking in their expression. And in their finished state more like sculptures of these: a sculpture of a drawing and its paper, or an object where both lines and blank fields are represented thru a textile body. I also want to point out the slight misuse of the word image in relation to my work and the association to painting. An object containing or showing an image—without it being a photograph—does not automatically make it an object aspiring on being considered a painting. If image by default would equal painting, the logic would imply that a tapestry, a drawing, a collage, or a print can be nothing but a blueprint for a painting or a mere painting-wannabe-object. —Instead of being read as an image in its own right. It falls on its own impossibility since we know that this is not the case and in the era of (digital) images I think we should tune our perception and our language to correspond and reflect the multitude in the meaning of this word.

www.piaferm.se

This is also why I like the German word Bildhauerin so much. It corresponds very well with what I would claim to be, as in the female conjunction of what strictly would be translated as “image carver” or “image cutter”. Even though I actually only carve away material when I work with stone, I still have a distinct feeling that I am doing something that resembles a slow out-chiselling and uncovering of an image. It’s also a physical output for my gaze, an offer to others to share my viewpoint and engagement and pair it with their own. It does not necessarily have to make sense, or even be intellectually decipherable, since I reason around art as an untranslatable medium where the paradox is that I can still communicate freely: I can understand and I can be understood. The previous step of my work will give the next and thru this I can build a grammar to contain my practice. —Or create a framework from where I can take off, onwards. I also like the word’s old fashioned connotations that inhibit a time-insisting dimension.

Image:

Jonny woven tapestry; linen, cotton and woolen yarns on linen warp, metal hanger 40 x 32 cm

Loop woven tapestry; cotton and woolen yarns on linen warp, metal hanger 40 x 27 cm

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 18: curated selection

P i a F e r m

www.piaferm.se

Image:

Jonny woven tapestry; linen, cotton and woolen yarns on linen warp, metal hanger 40 x 32 cm

Loop woven tapestry; cotton and woolen yarns on linen warp, metal hanger 40 x 27 cm

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 18: curated selection

G r é g o r y

S u g n a u x

Grégory Sugnaux lives and works between Paris and Fribourg. After a residency at the art school La Cambre in Brussels, he obtained a Bachelor’s degree from the art school in Valais (ECAV) in 2013 and a Master’s degree in Bern (HKB) in 2017. In 2015, he received the Kiefer Hablitzel prize and won an artistic residency the following year in Berlin. The City of Fribourg granted him a residency at the Jean Tinguely Atelier of the Cité internationale des Arts in Paris, from September 2019. He has exhibited in many independent art spaces, notably in Lokal-int, Bienne (2019), in Kunsthalle Marcel Duchamp, Cully (2018), and in the group exhibitions Fribi White Card, Fri Art, Fribourg, and Jeunes Pousses, Centre d’Art Contemporain d’Yverdon-les-bains in 2017. In 2020 he is selected for the Swiss Art Award in Basel. His work focuses on the status of the painted image through the mediation of the exhibition system. By displacing existing pictorial codes, he replayed a certain heritage of values from the history of painting and tried to elaborate alternative systems. Grégory Sugnaux’s involvement in an independent art space, WallRiss, in parallel with his practice, also investigates the conditions of showing art exhibitions through other practices. Grégory Sugnaux questions the personal and geographical relations between his work as an artist, co-curator (WallRiss art space), and the city. His work addresses the friction between physical and imaginary spaces, between that of painting, which defines its own framework, and the subjection of painting to its framework. The paintings are based on an improvised collection of children’s drawings in chalk. The artist finds them on the ground during outings and then photographs them. The drawings, spontaneously created on the asphalt, are reproduced on canvases with deliberate chromatic relationships. There is a shift of surface plan and medium; from the horizontality of the street drawings to the verticality of paintings hung in the exhibition space. The ground, generally associated with a certain triviality, is raised to the level of the eyes. The images are validated by means of a gesture opposing the durability of a work to the more unstable nature of a hopscotch drawing erased at first rainfall. While retaining the distorted perspective of the intermediate image taken by the artist (photographs from above), the paintings bring the visitor face to face with the memory of an awkward universe, that disobeys usual laws. The scale respects the ratio of 1:1, immediately perverting it in other canvases, forming grotesque disproportion. In the same way, heaven and earth, the real and the imaginary, are intertwined in an indeterminate relationship. This series questions the often individual practice of artists. Grégory Sugnaux brings himself into dialogue with the traces of a community, that of children who, together, invent in order to amuse themselves. Paintings that evoke these social bonds in turn create communities, but in a deferred space and temporality, artificially. Physical or virtual networks are built and deconstructed by means of an exhibition or during a vernissage, when facing a work.

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 18: curated selection

www.gregorysugnaux.ch

Image:

Fiction Zero acrylic on canvas 190 x 210 cm

Train of Thought acrylic on canvas 240 x 180 cm

G r é g o r y

S u g n a u x

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 18: curated selection

www.gregorysugnaux.ch

Image:

Fiction Zero acrylic on canvas 190 x 210 cm

Train of Thought acrylic on canvas 240 x 180 cm

U m u t

Y a s a t

www.umutyasat.de

I live and work in Karlsruhe, Germany. Between 2009 and 2015 I studied in the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Karlsruhe with Gustav Kluge, Jonas Burgert and Marcel van Eeden. I started to work on Der Stapel in 2014. At first this process encompassed tiding all of my previous works together but later it evolved into the agglomeration of not only works of art but several everyday objects—both meaningful and trivial. I work on these sculptures until they reach my own height. This is a self-imposed limit to an endless process, since, if it were possible, there would be only one, incredibly high Der Stapel. As a vertical chronological line Der Stapel is a materialization and a way to visualize my time.

Image:

Der Stapel 36 aluminum, steel, stainless steel, iron, copper, plastic, glass, cotton, foam, felt, paper, cardboard, air, leather, wood, pencil, ink, felt-tip pen, crayon, tobacco 175 x 65 x 65 cm

Der Stapel 34 wood, plastic, iron, copper, steel, stainless steel, foam, cotton, crayon, felt-tip pen, oil pastel, leather, felt, glass, glue, paper, cardboard, ink, acrylic, hemp, tobacco, clay, aluminum 175 x 47 x 41 cm

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 18: curated selection

U m u t

Y a s a t

www.umutyasat.de

Image:

Der Stapel 36 aluminum, steel, stainless steel, iron, copper, plastic, glass, cotton, foam, felt, paper, cardboard, air, leather, wood, pencil, ink, felt-tip pen, crayon, tobacco 175 x 65 x 65 cm

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 18: curated selection

C h r i s t i n e

R e b h u h n

S i g g i S e k i r a

www.siggisekira.com

www.christinerebhuhn.com

Christine Rebhuhn is sculptor based in New York City. She received an MFA in Ceramics from Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2015, and a BA in Psychology and Studio Art from Kalamazoo College in 2011. Rebhuhn has had solo exhibitions at NARS Foundation in Brooklyn, NY, Soo Visual Arts Center in Minneapolis, MN, and at Makeshift in Kalamazoo, MI. Her work has been included in group shows at Tiger Strikes Asteroid, New York, the Boiler in Brooklyn, NY and at Stove Works in Chattanooga, TN and she exhibited at the 2015 Gyeonggi International Ceramics Biennale in Icheon, Korea. She has been an artist-in-residence at the Vermont Studio Center (VT), Elsewhere (NC), NARS Foundation (NY), and Makeshift (MI). She was hosted as a guest critic by Sarah Lawrence College and the New York Critique Club. My work in the studio is guided by a deep interest in inexplicable alignments, and a hunch that objects and images will settle into an uncanny order when mapped on human experience. This might be enough reason to place two objects of the same shape next to each other, knowing there is more than resemblance; the pairing is an initial step toward exposing the likeness and difference between things and to reveal other secrets. I am drawn to objects that are bare and neutral, as well as those that are direct and full of cultural charge. The challenge for me is to find ways of weaving together the whole thing, to pull focus on the qualities that make them intersect.

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 18: curated selection

Siggi Sekira was born in 1987, in Odessa, Ukraine. Lives and works in Vienna, Austria. Since 2015—Academy of Fine Arts Vienna (MFA) as well as a visiting student at the ceramic studio department at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. Recent exhibitions include “Rhizome—Images of Thought” at Galerie Kandlhofer, Vienna, “Fever Dream” at Gianni Manhattan, Vienna, and a duo show “Bilingual” at SOYUZ in Pescara, Italy. In her work, Siggi Sekira reinterprets Slavic mythology and investigates the coexistence of paganism and Christianity in rural, post-Soviet Ukraine. Pottery is exemplary of Ukrainian folk traditions and a form of cultural expression of the working class. With her sculptures, Sekira creates her own worlds alongside our present-day society. The ongoing series of glazed blue ceramics from the series “The Eve of Nymphs” are based on the Slavic fertility ritual of Ivan Kupala. On the other hand, the series of black ceramics center around the mythical Sirens’ Song, where the focus lies on the expressions and lives of the sirens themselves rather than on the act of seducing men, which traditionally acted as a mere plot device.

Image:

Bridge wood, paint, plexiglass, Playboy Magazine, digital print 60 x 52 x 42.5 inches

Nine Little Murmurs glazed ceramics 33 x 13 x 31 cm

C h r i s t i n e

R e b h u h n

S i g g i S e k i r a

www.siggisekira.com

www.christinerebhuhn.com

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 18: curated selection

Image:

Bridge wood, paint, plexiglass, Playboy Magazine, digital print 60 x 52 x 42.5 inches

Nine Little Murmurs glazed ceramics 33 x 13 x 31 cm

Laura Franzmann considers sculpture and drawing as entangled fields of representations used to question the boundaries of the self, which emerge in private and in cultural perspectives. The investigation of cultural-historical objects in relation to their interconnection to the body, and the associated imprinting of the subject, is at the center of her interest. Designed bodies or objects that are created as a counterpart to our self make one‘s own construction conscious. In her installations and sculptures, this construction is explored through the materiality that animates contemplations of touch and physical closeness. The intimacy and fusion between different selfimages is explored in her work, for example, using quilted ornaments. The process of the sewing becomes the metaphor for the connection between the self-image influenced by culture and technology and its relation to the physical body. In her sculptures, objects and drawings, the apparent polarities of technologically data-based capture of the body, and various traditions of ritual body supplements or extensions merge. Although added to the body, outwardly, they also always contain a psycho-mental inside. Laura Franzmann, born in Wismar, Germany in 1990, studied fine arts at HFBK Hamburg with Matt Mullican, Nick Mauss and Hanne Loreck, where she graduated in 2017 with a Master of Fine Arts. As part of the Art School Alliance scholarship, she also studied at Goldsmiths University London with Verina Gfader and Simon Bedwell in 2016. She received various grants among them the DAAD Travel Grant.

L a u r a

F r a n z m a n n

www.laurafranzmann.com

Image:

Waning and Waxing-Crescent-Stola (Chest Fragment) quilted leatherette 145 x 35 cm

Setting-Sun-Pelerine quilted leatherette 162 x 76 cm

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 18: curated selection

L a u r a

F r a n z m a n n

www.laurafranzmann.com

Image:

Waning and Waxing-Crescent-Stola (Chest Fragment) quilted leatherette 145 x 35 cm

Setting-Sun-Pelerine quilted leatherette 162 x 76 cm

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 18: curated selection

Born in 1988, Bassum, I started to study fine arts in Kassel (examination with distinction). During my first year in Kassel, I figured out how interesting Prof. Christa Näher was as an artist and started to study under her (Städelschule, class of Monika Baer, master student of Christa Näher 2009-2014).Two years later I developed a certain interest for jewellery and started to mix that with my art as a side project from time to time. So there are many fields that I’m working in, but painting stays always the main issue. In the past, I had a residence at the CCA Andratx, took part in exhibitions and currently I am planning my show at the Opelvillen, Schleuse in Rüsselsheim. Time and time again—as though by magic—it is the physicality which takes centre stage in my works. Cotton fabrics, like layers of skin on top of each other wound on a canvas frame, allow the colours to shimmer through at different levels, rather like a scar—hardly recognizable in itself—yet narrating previous experiences and injuries. In the process I often use earth and stone pigments which I have gathered on various sojourns. I capture other places and times and have a materiality of paths well-trodden yet forgotten and buried. A veritable physicality of space and time.

www.lena-grewenig.de

L e n a

G r e w e n i g

In my early works the figuratively concrete motives appear blurred as a result of the enveloping cotton, fuzzy-like memories, and they appear like objects thrown from the cosmos which have come to rest on a surface. On my latest pictures the covering and masking have been removed. The body—my body—is freed from the obscuring layers and it is important to “de-cover” them. However, in its nakedness it develops characteristics of commodities, the constituent parts of the body become fetish and even its own trademark. Foot, hand, mouth, eye etc. assume new contextualizations as a result of their fragmentation and, therefore, assume a new and possibly a more ennobling reality in the consciousness of the viewer. In its very creation it transcends itself and becomes a thought, a pattern of behaviour, a feeling. In short, real emotion. The reification of the body becomes clear, the objective, as we experience it in its alienated state in advertising and pornography, subsumes a purely symbolic quality when it is banished to the two-dimensional surface of a display. Indeed, it is in this way that back, buttocks and breasts become defragmented as though by their own actions. They twine with each other, struggle against each other and are rearranged in strange connections which in turn produces a new sign— likeness and creates a type of physical thinking.

Image:

What I didn’t want to tell you oil on canvas 100 x 80 cm

The acoustically invasion of never heard nightmares oil on canvas 35 x 20 cm

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 18: curated selection

www.lena-grewenig.de

L e n a

G r e w e n i g

Image:

What I didn’t want to tell you oil on canvas 100 x 80 cm

The acoustically invasion of never heard nightmares oil on canvas 35 x 20 cm

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 18: curated selection

M o n a

B r o s c h á r

S a r a h

B e c h t e r

www.monabroschar.com

www.sarahbechter.at

I received an education in painting and printmaking at the Academy of Visual Arts in Leipzig and the Camberwell College of Arts in London. During my studies, I became more and more fascinated by portraits and still-life paintings both from art-history and within contemporary art. It is the detailed focus on everyday encounters, which seem irrelevant but are for me full of magic. The sensuality of things is what I am trying to experience in my work. With every picture I pursue my enthusiasm for the motif and its narrative structures.

The conditions and ambivalences of artistic production lie at the center of Sarah Bechter‘s practice. Blurring the lines between the private and the public, work and leisure, surface and line, Bechter‘s canvases exist as individual subjects, rather than surfaces of projection, and seem entangled in a vivid debate among themselves. The artist uses a wide range of techniques and references to interrogate the validity of the images she creates, and of painting itself. Furthermore, Bechter invites the viewer to a game of hide-and-seek by often only hinting at protagonists and objects, infusing her works with a mysterious, dreamy atmosphere.

In my paintings I mix the categories of still-life and portraits. I put the solitary focus on the subject of the painting. I remove all superfluous elements, which helps me focus on the essential expressiveness of my subject and fortify stereotypes and analogies. I spend a lot of time on the texture of the painting surface and the tension of the bodies I am portraying, both of which are comprised of many paint layers. An important part of my work is the exaggeration of contrasting attributes such as tasty and disgusting, cute and zany, soft and solid, sexy and unsexy, limp and bulging, dark and bright. Consequently, my paintings deal simultaneously with perfection and decay and refer even in their illustrated climax to their own decline.

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 18: curated selection

Sarah Bechter (*1989) lives and works in Vienna. She studied painting at the University of Applied Arts Vienna and has participated in exhibitions at Krinzinger Projekte (Vienna); Haus Wittgenstein (Vienna); Magyar Mühely Galeria (Budapest); summer art picnic, sort (Vienna); and Spazi Aperti (Rome.), among others. Her works are represented in several public collections such as Artothekt des Bundes, 21er Haus Vienna; City of Vienna, Wien Museum; State of Vorarlberg, Hypo Landesbank, Illwerke AG.

Image:

Asymmetrie acrylic and oil on canvas 100 x 80 cm

Untitled (getting chummy with interior) oil on canvas 60 x 51 cm

M o n a

B r o s c h á r

S a r a h

B e c h t e r

www.monabroschar.com

www.sarahbechter.at

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 18: curated selection

Image:

Asymmetrie acrylic and oil on canvas 100 x 80 cm

Untitled (getting chummy with interior) oil on canvas 60 x 51 cm

L a u r a

S a c h s

I was born and raised in Darmstadt, Germany. In Frankfurt a. M. I’ve studied art and philosophy at Goethe University. Right after my graduation I moved to Düsseldorf to study at the Art Academy Düsseldorf in the classes of Prof. Hubert Kiecol and Prof. Gregor Schneider. Berlin is where I live and work now. Laura Sachs’ paintings assert themselves as multi-perspective objects in space. Accentuated with metal strips or completely enclosed in aluminium frames, her work provides clues to the underlying work process, questioning the relationship between object and painting and its materiality. What becomes important is not only the frontal view, but also the sides, the edges, and even what is actually hidden from the viewer’s gaze. In the “Noon” series of works for example, oil paint is pushed through the canvas in a first step. The fabric is then detached several times until it is finally restretched with its original backside facing the front. In a kind of frottage process, paint particles and dust are also removed from the studio floor. In the “Sidenote” works, a grid is first painted with different layers, which only becomes subtly visible, when a black monochrome colour surface is applied. Between the canvas and the aluminium frame surrounding it, a piece of white fabric is inserted, which gives the work a compositional structure, similar in function to the metal strips.

www.laura-sachs.de

A certain element of coincidence is always present. Laura Sachs reacts to changes occurring during the painting process with considered interventions and settings. In this way of working between control and chance, dialogues repeatedly arise within the spectrum of forms, colours and materials, which ultimately lead to clear formulations and balanced compositions.

Image:

Noon 01612I oil, dust and metal on canvas 160 x 120 cm

Ice ink and metal on canvas 140 x 100 cm

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 18: curated selection

L a u r a

S a c h s

www.laura-sachs.de

Image:

Noon 01612I oil, dust and metal on canvas 160 x 120 cm

Ice ink and metal on canvas 140 x 100 cm

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 18: curated selection

A S M A

ASMA is an artist duo formed by the Ecuadorian artist Matias Armendaris (b. 1990) and the Mexican artist Hanya Beliá (b. 1994) based in Mexico City, with an interest in fusing opposites, seeking plurality of understandings. The duo focuses on developing work produced exclusively through active collaboration, in the way that a Venn diagram illustrates—the collision of two different universes that generates an intersectional area of exchange and syncretism. It emerges in this thin membrane which separates two things, a third living space that integrates them. ASMA inhabits this space actively in the production process, where there is a constant practice of democracy, difference, and mutability.

www.asmaasma.com

They hold an MFA in the Painting and Drawing Department from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago with a full merit scholarship (The New Artist Scholarship Award) and a BFA in drawing and printmaking from Emily Carr University with both an entrance merit scholarship and The Christopher Foundation Scholarship, as well as a BFA in Visual Arts from the Facultad de Artes y Diseño de la Universidad Autónoma de México (FAD - UNAM). The duo has exhibited internationally including The Chicago Artist Coalition (CHI), Embajada (PR), Galería Sancovsky (SP), The Gallery-Museum of Lendava (SVN), Centro de Arte Contemporaneo de Quito (EC), XIV Bienal de Cuenca (EC), Mx Gallery (NY), Diablo Rosso Gallery (PAN), Galería CURRO (MX), Access Gallery (CA), PEANA (MX), Make Room (LA). They received the Premio Brasil Awards to do a Residency at Pivô Arte e Pesquisa in São Paulo.

Image:

Encuentro del tercer tipo white paraffin wax, encaustic paint 53 x 40 x 5 cm

La gran esfinge morada (The great purple sphinx) white paraffin wax, encaustic paint, mdf 37 x 27 x 4 cm

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 18: curated selection

A S M A

www.asmaasma.com

Image:

Encuentro del tercer tipo white paraffin wax, encaustic paint 53 x 40 x 5 cm

La gran esfinge morada (The great purple sphinx) white paraffin wax, encaustic paint, mdf 37 x 27 x 4 cm

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 18: curated selection

editorial selection of works Featured image: Momo Gordon twin flame graphite on handmade paper 3 x 6 inches more on p. 111

K r i s t i a n

B r u c e

Recently, I’ve been combining multiple canvases or imageries as a single work of art, but without the single homogenized field and size that has historically dictated the practice of diptychs and triptychs. These groupings of paintings are a relationship of parts that refer back to my interest in the inherent separation of language. By having a word or label for something, it becomes separated from everything else. Individual elements or canvases become parts of a larger whole, like a word in a sentence, in that their interpreted meaning is altered or determined by placement and context. The meaning of one section is not contained in itself but comes from the interconnectedness of various components and associations that are spread-out and jumbled across multiple fields. Fragments of speech, or writing, are coupled with visual signs to create connections and conflicts that relate to dissonance, discernibility, and disappearing. The result is a denial of the familiar; to present an experience of the readily known for the first time or to add something new to what is already ostensibly understood. The differences between the visual and the verbal disappear as images act like words and words act like images in their communicative practices and potentials. The concept or cliché of a word/image/sign becomes an island in a chain of interconnected islands and language becomes a retrospective place—subject to construction, memory, and erasure.

www.kristianalansonbruce.com

Image:

Letters Between the Toes oil on canvas 59 x 78 inches

Announce, That Something Happens, Still oil on canvas in three parts 96 x 50 inches

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K r i s t i a n

B r u c e

www.kristianalansonbruce.com

Image:

Letters Between the Toes oil on canvas 59 x 78 inches

Announce, That Something Happens, Still oil on canvas in three parts 96 x 50 inches

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Amanda M. Smith received a BFA in Ceramics from Bowling Green State University and an MFA and Secondary Education teaching credential from San Jose State University. She currently lives and works in Provo, Utah with her husband, and fellow artist, Casey Jex Smith, their 9 year old daughter Gemma, and 5 year old son, Ari. Her work has been included in exhibitions at the Spring Break Art Show, Andrew Edlin Gallery, Halle Saint Pierre, Jack Fischer Gallery, ADA Gallery, 0-0 LA, Roberts & Tilton, and Allegra LaViola Gallery. Her work has been featured in Frankie Magazine, Uppercase Magazine, Creative Block, HEY! 4, Liberation France, Time Out Paris, SF Weekly, KQED Gallery Crawl, and Ceramics Monthly.

A m a n d a

S m i t h

My work is a series of illustrated fables. I am interested in questions of sociology, and particularly in social hierarchies. The little girls that inhabit these pieces are the product of my experience growing up in an ultra-fem household with my mom and three sisters. I have a penchant for flat painting and stylization which comes from my love of historic religious narrative painting the world over, most notably Persian, and Mughal manuscript and miniature paintings. Part of my working process includes appropriating decorative elements from these various art historical sources and adapting them to suit my own aesthetic sensibilities. Painting with ceramic mediums has allowed me to make archival, singular, handmade art objects. This has become increasingly important to me as everything from communication to clothing in contemporary culture is mass-produced and/or disposable.

www.amandamichellesmith.com

Image:

Tree of Social Mobility ceramic and oil paint 15 x 12 x .5 inches

When Trauma Comes to Town ceramic and oil paint 12 x 16 x .5 inches

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A m a n d a

S m i t h

www.amandamichellesmith.com

Image:

Tree of Social Mobility ceramic and oil paint 15 x 12 x .5 inches

When Trauma Comes to Town ceramic and oil paint 12 x 16 x .5 inches

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G e o r g

W i l s o n

A m é l i e

P e a c e

www.georgwilson.com

www.ameliepeace.com Georg Wilson, b.1998, is a London-based painter and co-founder of artist-led All Mouth Gallery. Wilson completed her Foundation Year at the Royal Drawing School and in October, she will begin the MA Painting course at the Royal College of Art. My paintings are inspired by myths and fairy tales, ranging from Christina Rossetti’s ‘Goblin Market’ to the Brothers Grimm’s collection, ‘The Juniper Tree’. My practice interrogates the gendered roles found in European folklore, by humorously inverting or distorting their narratives. My most recent paintings tease out strange,playful moments enacted by sulky, awkward characters who clumsily dominate the compositions—I call them my ‘goblins’.

Amélie Peace is a French London based artist that works both in painting and printmaking. Her practice encompasses a number of themes surrounding the human experience and perception of touch. Dealing with the complexities of togetherness, she examines people’s need for kinetic connection and how body language influences the way we manoeuvre within our social construct. Peace’s work is centred around the interactions that take place between people and the endless perceptions possible within multifaceted relationships. The way the figures in her paintings intertwine seems almost theatrical: composed of distorted limbs and gazes at once challenging and comforting, they often include the viewer in their interaction. Their cyclical dance within the canvas frame creates a push and pull, confined within a space, trying to escape. A constant in Peace’s work is her fascination with hands. As forms that touch and feel, as creators, as well as the heightened significance they hold within this distant digital age. The roles they play in the paintings enhance the uncanny ambience Peace portrays in her pursuit to depict human emotion.

Image: Squeezed and squeezed him oil on card 30 x 21 cm

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 18: editorial selection

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Image: Pink thumb, flip-flop, river mixed media on canvas 92 x 73 cm

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G e o r g

W i l s o n

A m é l i e

P e a c e

www.georgwilson.com

Image: Squeezed and squeezed him oil on card 30 x 21 cm

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 18: editorial selection

106

Image: Pink thumb, flip-flop, river mixed media on canvas 92 x 73 cm

107

H o l l y

M i l l s

E l l a

W a l k e r

www.hollymills.org.uk

www.ellawalker.me

Holly Mills (b. 1990, London) lives and works in London. Mills graduated from The Drawing Year in 2018 and had previously studied at Camberwell College of Arts, winning the V&A Student Illustrator of the Year award in 2012. Selected exhibitions include Best of the Drawing Year (Christie’s, London), Tickle Torture and Contemporary Visions VII (Beers, London) and The Pictionary Individual (Real Pain Fine Arts, Los Angeles)

Ella Walker (b1993) lives and works in London. Inspired by medieval narrative and iconography, Walker’s works explore myth making through costume and roleplay. The artist interweaves imagined narratives with reconstructed scenes from medieval and early modern paintings, along with other mediated and found imagery, moving freely between historical and contemporary sources. She collapses subject, object, time and place into dramatic and resplendent images.

Working across painting, drawing and printmaking Holly’s work is a visceral reaction to both text and lived experience. A desire to explore the mystery of memory and to use this to weave new narratives permeates much of her work. Mills is interested in how the act of reproducing a memory pushes the original further into fiction. It is this meeting point of imagination and reality that Mills explores through making.

Walker is interested in performative spaces, both public and private, and her compositions look to rituals of procession and pilgrimage and yet are alive with a rich and hedonistic carnival atmosphere. Walker’s paintings recast female subjects from both literary and art historical sources into new environments, and are given both agency and power in the reclamation of their stories. Harnessing the viewer’s gaze, Walker’s protagonists are in turn confrontational, seductive and playful. Each canvas is thick with reference as well as individual tension and emotion. Walker invites her viewer to enter a series of twisted and transfigured narratives that, although related to her own associations about history and society, are left open to interpretation. A pointedly clothed jester grins at a seductress under the eyes of Santa Maria; whilst blood drips from the tip of a toe, and red socks glow from beneath a closed curtain; the artist harks back to medieval history, image making and tradition.

Ambiguous in-between spaces give form to quiet thoughts and summon the sensations of places that Mills has visited. Flattened picture planes are divided up, multiple moments happening at once. Recurring symbols and leaning figures, blurred in movement, create an almost dreamlike visual language. Recent works recall walks in Scottish hills, an exploration of sensory memory, where body and landscape become one.

Walker received her BA hons in Fine Art, Painting and Printmaking at Glasgow School of Art in 2015. In 2018, she completed the Drawing Year Postgraduate Programme at the Royal Drawing School (London, UK). She has recently shown her work at Huxley-Parlour gallery (London, UK); Palazzo Monti (Brescia, Italy); Christie’s (London UK); and EMBASSY,(Edinburgh, UK).

Image:

Out and in and carbon and watercolour on book cover 23 x 15 cm

Saint Sebastian acrylic and oil on canvas 16 1/4 x 12 1/4 inches

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H o l l y

M i l l s

E l l a

W a l k e r

www.hollymills.org.uk

www.ellawalker.me

Image:

Out and in and carbon and watercolour on book cover 23 x 15 cm

Saint Sebastian acrylic and oil on canvas 16 1/4 x 12 1/4 inches

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W i t a l i j

F r e s e

M o m o

G o r d o n

www.witalijfrese.com

I was born in Russia in 1992 and immigrated to Germany as a child. I graduated from the Berlin University of the Arts in summer 2019, where I was in a class for painting. I also love to do ceramics! In my work I deal with the body. The hollow shape of a vase reminds me of a shell, skin or a mask, as the boundary between the inside and the outside. So for me they are bodies too. Overall there is of course a reference to the ancient or classical antiquity (the revival of the past and the tradition of art history always find meaning in my work). But it was more about idealized bodies and unrealistic beauty—I am more concerned with deformation and fragility of the body. So I want to break up the illusion, that there is something like a stable identity, which is shown through the body. I want to say that everything is fluid, everything is changing or will change. It’s about uncertainty and opportunities. I am also interested in topics such as gender, sexuality, intimacy and anonymity, tradition and present, pride and shame. And I am also interested in the relationship between design and art. It’s the constant question: when does art start and when does design end?

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 18: editorial selection

www.instagram.com/slippypeach

Momo Gordon self-taught artist based in Portland, OR, USA (b. 1992 Wiesbaden, Hessen, Germany). Momo is an artist focused on the emotional landscape. Working heavily with graphite and handmade paper her work explores sexuality through urban planning and lived space.

Image:

Unsicher/Unsteady glazed ceramics 46 x 30 x 25 cm

mirror graphite on handmade paper 10 x 12 inches

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W i t a l i j

F r e s e

M o m o

G o r d o n

www.witalijfrese.com

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 18: editorial selection

www.instagram.com/slippypeach

Image:

Unsicher/Unsteady glazed ceramics 46 x 30 x 25 cm

mirror graphite on handmade paper 10 x 12 inches

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L e n n a r t

F o p p e

Lennart Foppe was born in 1991 in Lingen and is currently living in Muenster; his work varies between a wide range of paintings and installations. The aesthetic vocabulary of Foppe, who studied Illustration and Fine Arts at the Muenster School of Design, incorporates large scale Installations with every Day Objects, making references to seemingly autonomous working apparatuses and biological forms. They are to be seen as an abstract closed system, which is following its own set of regulations. Foppe’s biological based installations and paintings are reminiscent of biospheres, where every period is connected to processual timing.

www.lennartfoppe.de

Running stages of bacteria processing to cell division. Other organisms seeking reproduction as part of a larger cell cycle. At the intersection point of the bustling organic periods his work reveals a closer look to the origin of human existence. A Snapshot of biological surfaces and primeval forms supplemented by a set of technical notes and gadgets. A formally reduced representation of the processes allows the viewer to look from a non-scientific point of view. As a consequence the installation “tunicata prokaryote“ and “a gathering breaks” tries to evoke a world of biological forms by displaying several scientific Moments in a spatial experience. The objects, which are made of synthetics such as foam rubber, polyester or latex are somehow connected to different periods of intercellular activity. On further inspection the objects also seem to have a human technical aspect. Spontaneously placed little Microcosms where the function is somehow abstract and impenetrable to the viewer.

Image:

Virus acrylic on polystyrene, silicone, PVC, wood, rivets, foil, powder, wax, steel, expanding foam, spray paint 53 cm x 40 cm

Alternative endeavors of the unknown acrylic on polystyrene, silicone, PVC, wood, rivets, foil, powder, wax, steel, expanding foam, spray paint various dimensions

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L e n n a r t

F o p p e

www.lennartfoppe.de

Image:

Virus acrylic on polystyrene, silicone, PVC, wood, rivets, foil, powder, wax, steel, expanding foam, spray paint 53 cm x 40 cm

Alternative endeavors of the unknown acrylic on polystyrene, silicone, PVC, wood, rivets, foil, powder, wax, steel, expanding foam, spray paint various dimensions

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C e c i l i a

C h a r l t o n

www.ceciliacharlton.com

Cecilia Charlton’s work stems from her passion for textiles. Within her universe, she hops between the planets of craft, abstraction, painting, and folk art to create vibrant, highlypatterned textile works that complicate traditional notions of the medium. Shape-shifting like an octopus—her spirit animal—her works appear with a visual flickering as the forms simultaneously complete and confuse, and the colours confound and complement. Building on a varied and adventurous personal history, she explores the outer reaches of formalism while also investigating topics that are deeply personal such as mortality, drug use, sexuality, family relationships, and mental health.

Image:

Triple-layer gather-gusset [pink-grey northern lights] hand-embroidered silk on lace 15 x 15 cm

Triple-layer gather-gusset series hand-embroidered silk on lace over panel 15.2 x 15.2 cm

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C e c i l i a

C h a r l t o n

www.ceciliacharlton.com

Image:

Triple-layer gather-gusset [pink-grey northern lights] hand-embroidered silk on lace 15 x 15 cm

Triple-layer gather-gusset series hand-embroidered silk on lace over panel 15.2 x 15.2 cm

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T y l e r

L a f r e n i e r e

Tyler Lafreniere’s work probes the contemporary masculine identity by interpreting this “male” persona through the recreation of cultural imagery. The precision in the rendering and graphical layout of the silk screened and painted elements give them an equality of weight and purpose, complicating their original semiotic codes. The work denies the obvious narratives of masculinity as the interactions between the subjects shift from comical to disconcerting, ultimately settling deeper into the collective pit of the stomach. Lafreniere is a visual artist based in Queens, NY. In 2006, he earned his BA in Fine Art from Hampshire College in Amherst, MA. During his undergraduate studies, he also concentrated in Printmaking at Goldsmiths University in London. He has shown in various venues in New York and around the United States.

www.tylerlafreniere.com

Image: Ring Tan silkscreen with hand painted elements on paper, cast silver ring engraved with “Forever” 18 x 25 inches

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Image (left): Firemen silkscreen with hand painted elements on paper 18 x 25 inches

Image (middle): Phone Home silkscreen with gold leaf elements on paper 18 x 25 inches

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Image (right): Streets of Laredo silkscreen on paper 18 x 25 inches

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 18 : editorial selection

T y l e r

L a f r e n i e r e

www.tylerlafreniere.com

Image: Ring Tan silkscreen with hand painted elements on paper, cast silver ring engraved with “Forever” 18 x 25 inches

116

Image (left): Firemen silkscreen with hand painted elements on paper 18 x 25 inches

Image (middle): Phone Home silkscreen with gold leaf elements on paper 18 x 25 inches

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Image (right): Streets of Laredo silkscreen on paper 18 x 25 inches

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 18 : editorial selection

J o s h u a

H a g l e r

Joshua Hagler lived and worked in San Francisco and then Los Angeles for fifteen years before moving to Roswell, New Mexico in 2018 as a grant recipient of the year-long Roswell Artist in Residence Program.He and his wife have since made New Mexico home and are expecting their first child in July, a daughter. Hagler was born at Mountain Home Air Force Base in Idaho and is a first-generation college graduate with a visual communications degree from the University of Arizona in Tucson. 2018 saw two museum shows at the Brand Library and Art Center in Los Angeles and the Roswell Museum and Art Center in New Mexico entitled “The River Lethe” and “Love Letters to the Poorly Regarded” respectively. 2019 marked his first U.K. solo exhibition entitled “Chimera,” at Unit London. He has exhibited paintings, sculpture, video, and animation in galleries and museums in North and South America, Europe, and Australia including a long list of solo exhibitions. Reviews and features about the work, as well as his own poems and essays, have appeared in a variety of publications and media outlets in the U.S. and other parts of the world.

www.joshuahagler.com

“I began pulling loose planks out of the cellar hole, the right corner at the front. They were splintery and full of snaggled nails, but I pulled them out and tossed them onto the ground behind me, for all the world as if I had some real purpose or intention. It was difficult work, but I have often noticed that it is almost intolerable to be looked at, to be watched, when one is idle. When one is idle and alone, the embarrassments of loneliness are almost endlessly compounded. So I worked till my hair was damp and my hands were galled and tender, with what must have seemed wild hope, or desperation. I began to imagine myself a rescuer. Children had been sleeping in this fallen house. Soon I would uncover the rain-stiffened hems of their nightshirts, and their small, bone feet, the toes all fallen like petals. Perhaps it was already too late to help. They had lain under the snow through far too many winters, and that was the pity. But to cease to hope would be the final betrayal.” -Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping

Image:

A Door in the Darkness mixed media on burlap 120 x 72 inches

Holy Mother mixed media on canvas 102 x 96 inches

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J o s h u a

H a g l e r

www.joshuahagler.com

Image:

A Door in the Darkness mixed media on burlap 120 x 72 inches

Holy Mother mixed media on canvas 102 x 96 inches

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R a e

H i c k s

www.raehicks.net

Born London 1988. ‘18 RCA MA Painting ‘12 Goldsmiths BA Fine Art Each work constitutes a play with basic and ‘essential’ shapes, which are arranged and rearranged until they establish a composition which gives identities to the forms. An almost-narrative then unfolds in the work, describing a situation.

Image: Forest oil pastel on paper 42 x 32 cm

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 18: editorial selection

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Image: Sentinel oil pastel on paper 30 x 21 cm

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R a e

H i c k s

www.raehicks.net

Image: Forest oil pastel on paper 42 x 32 cm

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 18: editorial selection

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Image: Sentinel oil pastel on paper 30 x 21 cm

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B r a d

S t u m p f

Brad Stumpf is a Chicago-based interdisciplinary artist from St. Louis, Missouri. He attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 2015.

www.bradstumpf.com

Stumpf is currently making still-life paintings that function like miniature stage sets; they are small in scale and consist of arrangements of handmade objects organized, atop his bedside table, to depict lust, love, and expectation with visual poetry. The handmade objects within his paintings consist of paper birds, butterflies, drawings, and notes that add an additional layer of encapsulated thought.

Image: Image: Dancing With You oil on panel 22 x 13 inches

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Our Secret Known As oil on panel 18 x 14 inches

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ArtMaze Magazine Issue 18: editorial selection

B r a d

S t u m p f

Brad Stumpf is a Chicago-based interdisciplinary artist from St. Louis, Missouri. He attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 2015.

www.bradstumpf.com

Image: Image: Dancing With You oil on panel 22 x 13 inches

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Our Secret Known As oil on panel 18 x 14 inches

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ArtMaze Magazine Issue 18: editorial selection

M a r g o t

B i r d

My work is pleasing to the eye and has an enjoyable presence. I delight in making it humorous, strange, and also elegant. Common themes are poodles, gold chains, kittens, snakes, aliens, and flowers. These subjects come from things I am immediately affected by, whether it be positively or negatively, and they are often portrayed as a decorative-like painting or object, not making a statement but giving the mind a creative taste of a visual delicacy. Furthermore, it is important to me that my work remains humorous, which I do by positioning my subjects into silly, bizarre, or unexpected situations.

www.margot-bird.com

I currently have a solo exhibition presented by Sidel & McElwreath, accessible now through their online viewing room. I’ve held a solo exhibition at Sargent’s Daughters (New York) and have been included in group exhibitions at Hauser & Wirth (New York), Ladrón Galería (Mexico City), Wassaic Project (Wassaic, NY), 123 Astronaut Gallery (Los Angeles), and many others. I am currently living and working in Brooklyn, New York.

Image:

Sandwich acrylic on canvas 12 x 12 inches

Pizza acrylic on canvas 12 x 12 inches

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M a r g o t

B i r d

www.margot-bird.com

Image:

Sandwich acrylic on canvas 12 x 12 inches

Pizza acrylic on canvas 12 x 12 inches

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L i n d s e y

K i r c h e r

R y a n

O r m e

www.lindseykircher.com

Originally from Northern Virginia, Lindsey Kircher graduated Magna Cum Laude with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Drawing and Painting from the Schreyer Honors College at the Pennsylvania State University in May 2019. She was recognized with the Creative Achievement Award for the College of Arts and Architecture at Penn State in 2019, and the Kara D. Berggren Award recognizing the most “outstanding piece of artwork” in the undergraduate juried show in spring 2019. Lindsey was nominated and selected to attend the Yale Norfolk School of Art in summer 2018. She has also attended the Open Wabi artist residency in Fredericktown, Ohio in August 2019, and the Atlantic Center for the Arts Residency in New Smyrna Beach, Florida this February 2020. In my work, I portray resilient female protagonists empowered by the landscape that they inhabit. The women in my work embark on a thrilling and terrifying journey to forge their own reality and seek the truth about themselves and their world. Fearless of setbacks they may encounter, they transcend limitations of body and gender to engage in self-reliance and bravery. Through the use of intense lighting, I refer to ancient ritual and mysticism, creating the impression that these women are deeply intertwined with nature and the primordial origins of the world. The thick limbs and sturdy bodies of the figures emphasize their strength and capability as dismantlers of pre-conceived truths. Further, the landscape serves an essential role in this work as it engulfs and protects these women, while simultaneously propelling them forward on an endeavor of discovery. In the process of pushing the limits of their awareness, the women in this work awaken unto all that they are and liberate the next stage of who they can become.

www.ryanorme.com

Ryan Orme is a London based artist working across drawing, painting and sculpture. He studied sculpture (MFA) at the Slade 2019 and was selected for Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2019. My work explores the relationship between internal and external landscapes, and the role geographies have in shaping who we are. I’m often drawn to subjects that I find confusing or contradictory, things that I try to reconcile through the process of making. My current body of work reflects on my time in Hong Kong during a residency (HKBU 2019), the work explores how our individual experiences find a place among the rest of human activity. I often come back to a feeling of scale, or distance; how we fit into a much larger picture. Through an intuitive approach to making that leads me through a range of processes, and subject matter, I hope to create art that is as much felt as it is understood.

Image: A Long Way From Home oil on canvas 20 x 16 inches

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Image: Nightshift (Kai Tak) ink and oil on cotton 18 x 24 cm

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L i n d s e y

K i r c h e r

R y a n

O r m e

www.lindseykircher.com

www.ryanorme.com

Image: A Long Way From Home oil on canvas 20 x 16 inches

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Image: Nightshift (Kai Tak) ink and oil on cotton 18 x 24 cm

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M a t t h e w

Z a c c a r i

www.matthewzaccari.com

My paintings and collages are observations of still life, landscape, and portraiture that are cropped to reference social media and television. How we exchange our intimate moments within the culture is emphasized by ‘looking’ and/or ‘watching’. Still life is more relevant in the grocery store, portraiture exists in an icon, we look at our landscapes from the couch. My paintings establish a modern visual space for observation to exist in.

Image:

Green Beans, Eggplant, Zucchini oil on canvas 16 x 20 inches

In the Park fabric and inkjet print 40 x 40 inches

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M a t t h e w

Z a c c a r i

www.matthewzaccari.com

Image:

Green Beans, Eggplant, Zucchini oil on canvas 16 x 20 inches

In the Park fabric and inkjet print 40 x 40 inches

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G e o r g e

E k s t s

www.cargocollective.com/eksts

Using animation, CGI, drawing and collage, George Eksts explores ideas of progress, completion, and potential. The common ground shared by all his works is a possibility for infinite extension; structures that loop and circle back, that have no beginning or end, have been a constant in his practice. A project that Eksts undertook with Animate Projects in 2015 opened up the possibilities of using digital space. Working with a choreographer and dancer to perform, record and then animate the human body, Eksts’s choice of placing this figure within a digitally created ‘white cube’ gallery led to a new way of working. For the 2018 Whitechapel Open, Eksts invited other artists in the exhibition to position their work in a video he made entitled ‘Rehearsal’ which was then included in the show. Eksts subsequently set up Slow Install, an online collaborative project space that has no physical or commercial aspect, showing real and propositional artworks by contemporary and classical artists. George Eksts lives and works in London. Recent shows include: Serious String, Mansions of the Future, Lincoln; London Open 2018, Whitechapel Gallery, London; Casual Cursive, Sidney Cooper Gallery, Canterbury, 2016; Yaw, Pitch, Roll, Toulouse International Art Festival, France, 2013; Incredible Utility, Hayward Gallery Concrete, London 2013; Metamorphose(s), Centre d’Art Contemporain Walter Benjamin, Perpignan, France 2013; Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2012, Liverpool Biennale and ICA London; Infinials Tintype, London 2012. Residencies include PLOP, London, 2019; Artist-in-Residence program at the Bemis, Omaha, Nebraska, USA, 2014; Digital Print Fellowship at the Royal Academy Schools, London, 2011-2013; Studio Residency, Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris.

Image: Hot Reading acrylic and graphite on panel, screenprinted paper, steel rod 77.5 x 68.5 cm

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 18: editorial selection

We are looking to help more emerging artists to publish and promote their work If you would like your work to be featured in our upcoming issues, please find out more details on how to apply to be considered. See p. 11 or visit our website: www.artmazemag.com We have an open call for art for the next print issue which provides publishing opportunities, as well as the ongoing open call for online blog. For any questions, please feel free to get in touch with us at info@artmazemag.com

G e o r g e

E k s t s

www.cargocollective.com/eksts

Image: Hot Reading acrylic and graphite on panel, screenprinted paper, steel rod 77.5 x 68.5 cm

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