Rosemarie Beck

 

Rosemarie Beck (1923–2003) emerged from the second generation of Abstract Expressionists, though her tenure as an abstract painter was brief. By 1958, she had moved completely away from non-objective painting into figuration, a decision that would alter the course of her career."Rosemarie Beck’s work was first and foremost formal. Always forming, constantly composing, she respected the whole.  Every stroke or spot changed and challenged what had gone before. Choosing as themes the great classical narratives, she remade them as contemporary dramas of color and light." /Martha Hayden, The Rosemarie Beck Foundation/'Beck's determination to keep "everything moving to and through everything" enabled her to orchestrate large and spatially complex compositions while keeping a vitality of stroke and play of light rippling over the entire surface. In this way she has become one of the few painters of recent years to treat grand themes in ambitious multi-figure compositions while satisfying a need both for abstract structure and for an execution that embodies energy without being gratuitous."/Martica Sawin in "Never Form, But Forming" (2001) /rosemariebeck.org/

Hayden Minor

 

"Hayden Minor -  is a young abstract artist and photographer from the Chicago suburbs. Beginning his art career taking photos as a young teenager, he was taking as many pictures as he could on any camera he could find. Soon, however, Hayden found his second passion: painting.
With the love and support from his mother, he began creating paintings, sometimes amounting to two or three a day. Channelling his inner child, Hayden displays grim topics such as drug addiction, violence, and political turmoil in his paintings through an abstract, jeuvenile art style. The purpose of this is to help break down these complex societal issues and display them in a basic, simple view. This, he hopes, will help in perspective and understanding among people.
Hayden is now in the process of creating an online artist coalition through his newly created HARM Gallery, an online gallery which promotes accepted artists. There, they are able to sell and display their work for free. In addition to this project, he hopes to place his own art in a gallery somewhere in the Midwest and make a living selling his paintings. "

More works by the artist

 

Mary Abbott - American Abstract Expressionism

Mary Abbott (1921 –2019) was a prolific painter, an active figure in the New York School, and one of three female members of the Artist’s Club in New York, alongside Perle Fine and Elaine de Kooning. Abbott declared that her life’s work was “using the medium, paint, color and line  the poetry of living space.” She studied painting with Eugene Weiss and George Grosz, who remembered her “serious demeanor.” Her work was characterized by sweeping and energetic brushwork, as well as a use of vibrant color derived from her mood or her surroundings. Abbott’s influences ranged from her peers like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, to Old Masters like Cimabue and Tintoretto. She was also a former model for Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, as well as a distant relative of Samuel Adams.

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