Mattia Moreni

"Mattia Moreni was born in Pavia in 1920 and died in Brisighella (where he had moved to in 1966) in 1999. From the mid-1930s, Moreni favoured a naturalistic vision of things, figures, houses and landscapes, and, towards the 1940s, also portraits. It was a language that had developed during his studies at the Albertina Academy of Fine Arts in Turin, where he proposed introspective images with expressionistic tones. His first solo exhibition dates from 1946, at Galleria La Bussola in Turin, with paintings and drawings from the period when his visionary expressionism and destabilizing images took on the semblance of close-up compositions of fruit or animals. Standing out in these studies are some important aspects for his following career: the inclination to propose totalizing images, with a shallow perspective crowded with the “enlarged presence of objects” and an expressionistic, deforming tremor which went “way beyond the dialectal and illustrative and folkloristic order” of local derivations of “Nordic or more precisely Flemish models”. As of the second half of the 1940s, Moreni opened up to a more international dialogue, fascinated by non-figurative neo-cubist stimuli. In 1948-49 his research took an abstract bent (Galleria del Milione, Milan, 1947 and 1949; Venice Biennale, 1950) and his language gained international recognition with his participation at the São Paulo Biennial in Brazil (1951) and Mostra Nazionale d’Arte Contemporanea in Milan (1952)...Between the mid-1980s and mid-1990s, the artist devoted himself to self-portraits, with a series of Autoritratti denouncing an evolution in themes and language, accompanied by handwritten scripts of the image with no chronological correspondence to the images (dealing with his past, but also a hypothetical future). In this phase, the force of expression, rather than identification of the actual psychosomatic features, continued to take precedence (XXIX Premio Campigna, Santa Sofia di Romagna, 1985; and again in the same place, 1991 and 1992). The relations between image, background and script would continue to be simplified, resulting in the essential Umanoidi (1993) figures, a vast series of works displayed in two solo shows in 1994-95 in which the features consist of a technological box, alluding to a computer, which replaces the person’s face and mind (Ravenna, 1996; Faenza, 1999). […] “Moreni paints the premonition that, on its way towards an electronic and digital future, art will never be the same again."(alleriailponte.com)

Laura Aguilar - Human Nature

Laura Aguilar ( 1959 –  2018) was an American photographer. She was born with auditory dyslexia and attributes her start in photography to her brother who showed her how to develop in dark rooms. She was mostly self-taught although she took some photography courses at East Los Angeles College where her second solo exhibition Laura Aguilar: Show and Tell was held. She is well known for her portraits, mostly of herself and also focused upon people in marginalized communities - Latino subjects and obese people.
"Her work has been included in many group exhibitions, including Sunshine et Noir: Art in L.A. at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark; Sexual Politics: Judy Chicago’s “Dinner Party” In Feminist Art History at the Armand Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; In a Different Light at the University of California, Berkeley; and Bad Girls at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York. She also participated in the Aperto Section of the 1993 Venice Biennale.
Photographer Laura Aguilar has investigated portraiture since she emerged in the late 1980s. Her stark black-and-white photographs document subjects whose images and stories are under-represented in mainstream culture—people of color, gays and lesbians and large people. Her portraits are known for their collaborative sensibility—the subjects are encouraged to investigate and negotiate with the artist from both sides of the lens. In the late 1990s, Aguilar turned the camera on herself, making dramatic nude self-portraits in which her body is contrasted with the rough terrain of the desert landscape and in which the body and landscape become one. The works continue her efforts to challenge societal assumptions about beauty, offering an alternative to the airbrushed, artificial depictions of women generated by advertising and media."(artpace.org/artists)

Photography

Salvatore Scarpitta

Salvatore Scarpitta (American, 1919–2007) is celebrated for his sculptural renderings of objects in motion.
"Italian-American artist Salvatore Scarpitta’s multimedia oeuvre remained on the fringes of most defined movements of his time, despite associations with both Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art. Scarpitta’s work employed a certain brand of Americana combined with an Arte Povera sensibility, resulting in paintings and sculptures that are emotive and overarchingly hopeful. For Scarpitta, the personal narrative was inseparable from the work, which could be classified in three distinct groups: wrap paintings, cars and sleds. The artist’s early bandage paintings begun in 1958 reveal a desire to heal and reconcile the horrors of WWII, while simultaneously expressing the contemporary ideals of redefining painting. His early racecars were inoperable simulacra, but later cars made in the 1980’s, with Castelli Gallery as sponsor, went from the studio, to the track, to the gallery—laying the groundwork for performance art, concurrently melding the Readymade and Futurism. Finally the sleds combine wrapping elements with elements of life from birthing gowns to funeral biers. For Scarpitta the cars and sleds were literal expressions of what he felt was embodied within all of his work: life, death, rebirth, and movement."(marianneboeskygallery)

Imre Bedocs

My work is mainly charcoal and pastel on paper. 

  Contact : jaybedocs@gmail.com

pastel drawing 11cm x 17cm - 500 USD

pastel drawing 11cm x 17cm - 300 USD

Greg Dorosh

Frozen River
13" x 20" Oil on canvas.
This is a scene of Canmore Alberta, Canada when I was there back in 2016. It was -20 degrees C which was cold enough to start creating ice on the surface of this fast flowing river. The time of the day provided a beautiful view of the sun just above the Rocky Mountains.

Link to this painting