Issue 22

Edition 22, 2

02 1

Featured image: Seo Kim Meeting on Jimmy Mountain pastel and colored pencil 11 x 14 inches more on p. 71

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.

HOW WE WORK

Artists or any art organisations on behalf of artists from all countries are welcome to submit.

ArtMaze Magazine is published five times per year and announces a competition-based curated call for art for each issue every 2-3 months. We invite guest curators from internationally renowned galleries as well as independent art professionals and artists to select works for each issue’s curated section of works.

We accept works to be sent to us for consideration only via our annual competition-based calls for art for print publications. Please visit our website for more details: www.artmazemag.com/call-for-art or see p. 11

ArtMaze print editions offer its readers a continuous art experience which includes interviews with our guest curators and featured artists from recently published issues; as well as our carefully curated selections of artworks which offer an insight to the inspiring progress and success of an extraordinary amount of emerging contemporary artists from all over the world who have been applying to our competition-based curated calls.

HOW TO SUBMIT YOUR WORK Artists are welcome to submit works in any medium: painting, drawing, sculpture, ceramics, printmaking, photography, textile, installation, digital, film, performance, any mixed media etc.

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

Each individual submitting work to ArtMaze Magazine opportunities is provided with a fair and equal chance.

Incoming submissions are following a very specific and unique process via Submittable platform, therefore each competition-based call for art has a transparent policy.

ISSUES All issues of ArtMaze Magazine are stored in the UK in the British Library (London), Bodleian Library (Oxford University), Cambridge University Library, National Library of Scotland, National Library of Wales and Trinity College (Dublin).

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

FRONT COVER:

Business information:

Mariana Garibay Raeke Torso acrylic on wood panel 61 x 47 cm more on p. 46

© 2021 print ISSN No. 2399-892X

GENERAL ENQUIRIES:

online ISSN No. 2399-8938

info@artmazemag.com

BACK COVER:

® ArtMaze Magazine is a registered trademark

Please do not subscribe our working email address to your newsletter without our consent. We receive extraordinary amounts of unsolicited emails everyday which makes it diffucult for us to focus on things that are important to us.

Ramiro Hernandez Dream Attack oil on canvas 24 x 18 inches more on p. 47

ArtMaze Magazine is printed in the United Kingdom

by Park Lane Press Ltd.

13

11

interviewed

call for art

Celeb rat ing b od ily int i m acy and de si re : K r z ys z tof St rzele ck i’s ce ram ic v i sion s of a gay u top i a .... .................14 (c o nt ain s expl ic it imager y)

E d itio n 24 .................................................................. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 1

“ Pre - c olon is at ion Car i bbe an lu xu r y”: B o ny Ram i re z ’s mult i modal ar t wor k s draw on t he opule nce of tradit ional p or t rait u re to exalt u nde r rep re s e nte d nar ratives .........26

11

26

Contents

38

90

curated selection of works

editorial selection of works

Elizabeth Shull .........................................................................40 Andersen Woof .........................................................................42 Jon Joan i s . . . . . . ..........................................................................44 M ar iana G ari b ay Raeke ..........................................................46 Ram i ro He rnande z ..................................................................47 H i roya Ku rat a ......................................................... ................48 Nell Brook f ield ....................................................... ................49 D ie go L oz ano . ..........................................................................50 T h ale i a Karp ou z i ................................................... .................51 Clai re Part ington ................................................... ................52 A n ne L indb e rg .........................................................................54 H aley D ar ya Pars a ................................................... ................55 M ikey Yate s . . ........................................................... ................56 Je s sic a A laz rak i ......................................................................57 Pallavi S i ngh ...........................................................................58 Jonat hon C ioffi .......................................................................60 Yuko S oi . . . . . . . . .......................................................... ................62 Ph i lo Cohe n . . ..........................................................................63 M inyou ng Kim ......................................................... ................64 I s ab el Cave ne c i a .....................................................................66 M ar ysia G ac ek ........................................................ ................68 H an nah Cos ac Nai f y ............................................... ................69 Je n n ife r Je an M aw by .............................................. ................70 S e o Ki m . . . . . . . . . ...........................................................................71 Pe on ia Vázquez - D ’Am ico ........................................................72 Lu z Carab año ..........................................................................74 M ike Nudelm an ....................................................... ................76 Travis M ac D onald ...................................................................77 Kie re n Je ane . . .......................................................... ................78 Kevi n Mos c a . ...........................................................................79 A nton io Fab oz z i ..................................................... ................8 0 Be n jam i n St ye r ........................................................................8 1 M ike O u sley . . ........................................................... ................8 2 Bird ie H all . . . . ...........................................................................8 3 C illi an Moyn ih an ...................................................................8 4 M ich ael Fant a .........................................................................8 6 A lic ia Reye s McNam ara .........................................................8 8 Kat he ri ne Col bor n .................................................................89

Franziska Güttler .................................................. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 2 Vicente B lanco ....................................................... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 4 Amy B ravo .............................................................. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 6 Zuzana Svatik ........................................................ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 7 Megan Rea ............................................................. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 8 And rew O rlo ski ...................................................... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 0 Amba S ayal -B ennett .............................................. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102 Hannah Hughes ...................................................... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103 Al ina B irkner ......................................................... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104 Al ia Ah mad ............................................................. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106 Yan Copell i .............................................................. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 108 Joh anna S eidel ........................................................ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109 Will iam S ch aeuble ................................................. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 10 Jo cely n Toffic .......................................................... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 1 2 Lian Zh ang ............................................................. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 14 Oleg Tsy ba .............................................................. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 16 Paul B o oth .............................................................. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 1 8 Car y Hul bert ........................................................... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 1 9 Sung Hwa Kim ......................................................... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 2 0 Matthew B ainbridge ............................................. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 2 2 Masaru Suyama ...................................................... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 24 Mau ra S appilo ........................................................ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 2 6 Lieke Ro meij n ......................................................... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 2 7 Co rey Ruecker ......................................................... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 2 8 Jill ian Dolan ........................................................... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 3 0 Melanie B arnett ..................................................... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 3 1 B rian S cott Campbell .............................................. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 3 2 Keenan Derby .......................................................... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 3 4 Flo ra McLachlan .................................................... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 3 6 Sylvia Fernández .................................................... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 3 8 O riele Steiner ......................................................... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 0 Lyd ia B aker ............................................................ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 1 Tallulah King ......................................................... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 2 E r y n Lougheed ...................................................... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 3 Maria S erga ............................................................ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 4 B rad Stu mpf ........................................................... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 6 N ina E l izabeth ....................................................... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 148

64 119

Featured image: Isabel Cavenecia Amazonian Bath graphite on paper 42 x 37 cm more on p. 66-67

from the editor We are pleased to be releasing our new and long-awaited Issue 22; it is our biggest so far with seventy-seven artists featured this time around!

First of all, we would like to extend huge thanks to our guest-curators, Fabiola Alondra and Jane Harmon from Fortnight Institute. It has been a very stimulating and fruitful experience to collaborate with such professionals and to witness the effort and thought applied when selecting works from the incoming submissions. As usual, this process is very challenging and takes a significant amount of time to be processed and finalised, but it was a pleasure to team up with such like-minded individuals who are so passionate about the discovery and nurture of emerging talents. Fabiola and Jane have developed an unmistakably distinct curatorial vision, which reflects so much in all of the exhibitions and shows they have been putting together for years, and displays their skill and sharp eye for a striking yet subtle aesthetic that permeates their work. We applaud them for choosing work in such a sincere and thought-provoking manner whilst holding true to their unique visionary senses. We hope you will enjoy Fabiola’s and Jane’s curated selection as much as we do! (p. 38-89).

Our editorial selection (p. 90-148) is an extension of our appreciation and recognition of groundbreaking talent outside of a specialised curated section. A lot of great work gets noted by either our guest curators or editorial team during the process of consideration. We are passionate to promote as many artists as we possibly can in each of our editions, therefore, we select a further group of artists whose work we admire and wish to promote outside of the curated selection. Not all great work can make it into the curated ‘cut’ due to specification, personal curatorial visions, overall feel of the selected group and many other factors that are key in such a profound process.

We have been tirelessly working to bring to your attention a broader group of artists whose making skills are acute, narratives are compelling and altogether their works hold fascinating messages, stories and ideas that are eye catching, and of course, to be followed and supported in their further development.

For this edition’s Interviewed section (p. 13-37), we have selected two of our previously published artists, Krzysztof Strzelecki and Bony Ramirez, whose works have shown incredible progress and sparked widespread interest. Both of them, drawing inspiration from famous historical masterpieces, are trying to adjust and diversify the painterly narratives which made many existing stories, communities and cultures invisible in history. Their contemporary practices are challenging those misrepresentations and enlightening their personal backgrounds and experiences.

Look out for our new call for art opportunity for future issue 24 which is to be guest-curated by Harper Levine, founder of Harper’s (gallery and bookstore) in New York. We are ecstatic to be working together with Harper, who has so much passion for showcasing and promoting emerging and mid-career artists as well as printed art editions. We look forward to seeing how that issue will shape up!

If you are interested in submitting your work to be seen and considered by our guest curators and the editorial team of ArtMaze, and would like a chance for your work to be published in our print editions and promoted online, 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. We would love to have you as part of our community!

Yours truly, Editor and Founder Maria Zemtsova

p.38-89 curated selection of works

40

42

44

46

47

48

49

50

51

52

54

55

56

57

58

60

62

63

64

66

68

69

70

71

72

74

76

77

78

79

80

81

82

83

84

86

88

89

p.90-148 editorial selection of works

92

94

96

97

98

100

102

103

104

106

108

109

110

112

114

116

118

119

120

122

124

126

127

128

130

131

132

134

136

138

140

141

142

143

144

146

148

Edition 24:

call for art DEADLINE: August 5th, 2021 Guest Curator: Harper Levine founder of Harper’s www.harpersbooks.com New York

Submit your work for a chance to be published in print and digital issues, as well as online.

ELIGIBILITY: This competition is open to all artists, both national and international, working in all visual mediums: painting, drawing, sculpture, ceramics, printmaking, photography, textile, installation, digital, performance, film, any mixed media etc.

DISTRIBUTION: ArtMaze Magazine is an independent international publication which is distributed worldwide via select book shops, and via our online store: www.artmazemag.com/shop HOW TO APPLY: Please visit our website for more details and fill in the online form via the following link: www.artmazemag.com/call-for-art You are welcome to read more information o our website: www.artmazemag.com or contact us at info@artmazemag.com

Featured image: Tallulah King Whole and Smiling oil on wood 15 x 20 inches more on p. 142

inte

erviewed:

Krzysztof Strzelecki Bony Ramirez

www.krzysztofstrzelecki.com

Celebrating bodily intimacy and desire: Krzysztof Strzelecki’s ceramic visions of a gay utopia Artist Krzysztof Strzelecki works across a vast array of mediums—photography, installation, painting and ceramics, all of which intersect and blend with one another through his artistic practice. Krzysztof studied fine art photography in London and his photographic work remains integral to his art. In his photographs, for which he often uses his own body as the subject, the human figure is seen interacting with space and landscape, either to alter it or to merge with it. His series ‘Alone in the Wilderness’ presents the human body as an agency and subjectivity moving through the landscape, and yet simultaneously as a feature of its environment—the landscape itself is as much the subject of the photograph as the human presence.

Since moving back to his hometown of Świdnica, Poland, where he has a pottery studio, Krzysztof has focused primarily on his ceramics practice. His ongoing project, ‘Cruising Fantasies’, presents a series of vases depicting, in Krzysztof’s words, “gay men enjoying every imaginable coupling”. The images painted onto the flat faces of the vases are brightly-coloured, exuberant, unapologetic and uninhibited. Men recline naked together on beaches, engage in sexual activity, dance, kiss, sunbathe and swim. As in Krzysztof’s photographs, the human figures in his ceramics inhabit natural landscapes presented as Eden-esque utopias. In this, he is envisioning a “perfect gay world” in which gay men are unconstrained by discrimination and bigotry, free instead to display tenderness and intimacy, to love and make love openly. Against the erasure of queer love throughout much of art history, many of Krzysztof’s ‘cruising’ vases draw on famous paintings by well-known artists such as Georges Seurat, Henri Matisse and Hokusai. His reworkings of such paintings around homoerotic couplings and gay fantasies intervene in the heteronormative narratives that dominate art history. In this way, the vases are an assertion of queer visibility in a world that has repeatedly rendered gay people invisible. The figures in Krzysztof’s work are given the space simply to exist, to revel in their bodies, sexualities and relationships.

interview by Rebecca Irvin Featured image: Krzysztof Strzelecki Hampstead heath (Cruising fantasies series) glazed ceramic 56.5 x 51 x 15 cm

AMM: Hello Krzysztof! Can you tell us a bit about yourself and your background? For instance, was creativity a big part of your upbringing?

KS: Hello! I am originally from Świdnica, Poland. From 2014 I lived in the UK, starting my journey in Edinburgh and moving to London a few years later to study BA (Hons) fine art photography at University of the Arts London (UAL), Camberwell. I came back to my hometown during the Covid-19 pandemic because it’s where I have my ceramic studio.

Art was always an important aspect of my life. As a child I was always creative, loved to paint, scrawling on paper or the walls in my bedroom, playing with salt dough. My two older sisters were painting at this time too, so I definitely grew up in a home where creativity was encouraged.

AMM: We’re interested to see that you studied Fine Art Photography—this of course remains key to your practice but we’re wondering when and what it was that made you branch into ceramics?

KS: It took me a long time to find the medium in which I could fully express myself and it’s only recently that I developed my technique.

During my first year at UAL, I was studying painting but I could not settle on one style– I was experimenting with classic painting, abstraction, combining different techniques.

I think I wanted to try everything and it just didn’t work out. On the other hand, I was doing more photography at this time.

Moving to London had a big impact on my choice of medium because painting is slow and requires a studio. My space was restricted and transporting paintings on the tube was a challenge so I became less and less interested in painting. Photography was more attentiongrabbing for me and fitted into a metropolitan lifestyle. Commuting on TFL every day for two, sometimes three hours allowed me to edit my photographs, and I did not need a lot of space—just a desk. Taking pictures allowed me to visit places, meet new people; the energy of taking pictures suited the intensity of London.

My first ceramics experience was in 2011 in Warsaw where I took a course; I remember I really liked all the possibilities of working in clay. After that I was travelling and unfortunately never had an opportunity to work with clay again until summer 2019 when I was visiting Japan for the first time. My experiences in Tokyo and Kyoto proved intense but afforded me a deeper understanding of the Japanese passion for ceramics. Japan possesses a very unique culture that connects to an enduring spirituality. While in Kyoto I took classes at Asahi Yaki Pottery and was inspired to develop my skills during the final year at UAL. It was just natural for me to work again with clay; from the first day at university I almost didn’t leave the ceramics department.

It allows me to work in three dimensions, as well as transferring my painting and photography skills to create a new meaning via a single medium. I am always excited when I open the kiln after firing, seeing what results

I get, whether the form survived the high temperature, how colours come out. I am not sure if I can compare it to anything else. I just love it.

AMM: Your art incorporates not just ceramics and photography, but also installation and painting.

Why is it important for you to work across different mediums and how does your approach change according to the materials you’re using? Do they ever overlap or connect?

KS: I like challenges and trying new things—I don’t like monotony and I believe it’s important to be open to different possibilities. To work

“I created vases based on ‘A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte’ and ‘Bathers at Asnières’ (painted by Seurat) and the vase ‘Dance’ based on four different paintings by Henri Matisse. This gives my vases a contemporary sensibility—subverting these famous paintings which appear to exclude gay life, and instead populating them with gay men enjoying every imaginable coupling.

My focus is on the fantasy of a perfect gay world. Some of my work focuses on historical conflicts and also responds to events in the present which are emotional for me.”

- Krzysztof Strzelecki in ceramics you need certain skills which photography and painting definitely helped— a sense of colour and form. Installations for me are about the space, how objects reflect the space or how space changes meaning with an installation. You can have an amazing piece but it will have a different meaning in the white cube gallery to a church. Working with installation helps me to understand this effect.

Right now, I am focusing a lot on ceramics, since travel is restricted and therefore there’s less opportunity to take photographs. But

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 22, Interviewed: Krzysztof Strzelecki

16

all these mediums are connected. Making a living from art is more complicated than most people imagine. Today’s artists need the wide knowledge and skills which make it possible to sell art. Making art is not enough; you need to take an interesting picture of the art, edit the image, promote on social media to approach a potential client or just make the piece stand out more strongly. Today’s artist has to have knowledge of all those aspects to be successful. Working across different mediums helps with that.

AMM: Can you tell us about your extensive lockdown project which uses vases as vessels for exploring ‘cruising fantasies’? It’s interesting to us that you’ve chosen to depict situations revolving around physical contact and bodily intimacy, since these kinds of interactions are currently limited

by Covid-19 regulations. Did the restrictions of the past twelve months engender or influence the creation of these images at all?

KS: We spent the last year in more-or-less strict lockdown, depending on the time of year and country, and I know many people hated it, but for me it was useful. The break from the world, from travelling, was essential to have the space to develop my work. Of course I was frustrated when I had to cancel all my bookings for future travel—not able to meet with friends and my partner for a few months as we were in different countries. All this was infuriating, but it gave me something that I never allowed to give myself before: time to be in one place, the possibility to work without distractions, take some distance and observe.

We altered our style of living almost like a scifi vision: replacing face-to-face relationships with online contact. We became afraid of human touch or even being close to each other. I wanted to create work which gave an opposite vision: a new-old world where gay cruising is taking advantage of the ability to meet and looking forward to a time when meeting a stranger brings excitement and joy— this is what ‘the cruising fantasies’ is about.

Many artists have visited parks and lakes to watch people and sketch them at play, and gay men used parks, forests and abandoned parts of the city as venues for illicit sexual encounters. Cruising sites have now lost their ‘aura’ and today most gay ‘cruising’ happens online, privately behind phone screens.

Following this shift to online life, I have focused on sourcing images from the web to conjure up new scenarios, new encounters.

AMM: In what ways does your work seek to engage with contemporary and historical queer culture and LGBTQ+ issues? Does your art often respond to current political events?

KS: A significant issue of queer culture is ignorance of its presence in ‘Straight White Male’ culture. There are not many paintings representing queer people in the everyday landscape. In many historical paintings, gay men seem to not exist or are invisible in the artist’s eyes (with the exception of a few paintings, rather forgotten by mainstream

17

photography by Krzysztof Strzelecki

publicity). My recent vases reinterpret famous paintings, presenting them with only gay men.

Those previously invisible are now taking over the space to remind us that gays were, are and will continue to exist. Mimicking these ‘utopian’ painterly visions instils the idea of ‘cruising’ as integral to everyday life. Paul Gauguin and Georges Seurat depicted a heteronormative utopian vision in their paintings but imagine, instead, what might have been conjured up had they adopted a blatant same-sex agenda? I created vases based on ‘A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte’ and ‘Bathers at Asnières’ (painted by Seurat) and the vase ‘Dance’ based on four different paintings by Henri Matisse. This gives my vases a contemporary sensibility—subverting these famous paintings which appear to exclude gay life, and instead populating them with gay men enjoying every imaginable coupling. My focus is on the fantasy of a perfect gay world. Some of my work focuses on historical conflicts and also responds to events in the present which are emotional for me. The vase ‘Olympia’ was influenced by the Black Lives Matter protests; ‘Empire-Deity and Lighting’ comments on women’s fight in Poland for the right to make decisions about their own bodies and lives instead of the Church’s political agenda.

Making a utopian vision is maybe impossible but worth trying.

AMM: We’re struck by the resonance between your vases and ancient Greek pottery, particularly in relation to your own depicted narratives of queer identity and classical allusions to queerness in mythology and art. Is there a connection between your works and depictions of queerness in art history?

KS: Greek and Roman mythology represent my favourite periods in our civilisation. My appreciation started at school when we studied ancient civilisations; it was impossible not to notice the acceptance of sexuality and adoration of the male and female body.

For me, it seemed like a time when sexuality was explored and worshipped rather than being a source of shame and a taboo subject.

Mythology is about the storyteller, fantasies, imagined creatures, handsome powerful gods, a vision of the world and its creation. By making my own vision I create mythology based on gay sexual fantasies. The simplicity of visual expression on Greek pottery is particularly inspiring for my art. Many ancient civilisations used ceramics to depict everyday life, wars and sex—including gay sex. I see such pottery as a record of history. I want to create the same freedom and celebration of sex on my vases, creating this mythic atmosphere and telling stories of love, equality and freedom.

AMM: The naked body is prevalent in both your photography and ceramics. What is the significance of the forms of embodiment your work represents?

KS: The body is part of our civilisation and nature. It literally embodies our lives and we are still too often ashamed or afraid of it. We often focus on clothes more than on the body itself. We hide under layers and layers of fabric,

“Greek and Roman mythology represent my favourite periods in our civilisation. My appreciation started at school when we studied ancient civilisations; it was impossible not to notice the acceptance of sexuality and adoration of the male and female body. For me, it seemed like a time when sexuality was explored and worshipped rather than being a source of shame and a taboo subject.

Mythology is about the storyteller, fantasies, imagined creatures, handsome powerful gods, a vision of the world and its creation.

By making my own vision I create mythology based on gay sexual fantasies. The simplicity of visual expression on Greek pottery is particularly inspiring for my art. Many ancient civilisations used ceramics to depict everyday life, wars and sex–including gay sex.

I see such pottery as a record of history. I want to create the same freedom and celebration of sex on my vases, creating this mythic atmosphere and telling stories of love, equality and freedom.”

- Krzysztof Strzelecki

19

trying to be ‘perfect’ according to advertisements created by the media. People should appreciate their bodies more as subjects of adoration and care. In my photography, I often show the landscape as the main focus and it is only if you look closely that you notice my body. Nature absorbs human form, camouflages the fragile body and protects it.

Looking at the desert landscape, it’s hard to find a naked body in the sand.

AMM: Much of your work situates the body in relation to natural environments—can you tell us about the thinking behind this?

KS: In relation to my vases, nature is a safe place; it’s the biblical Garden of Eden. It creates a safe environment for men to discover their desires. Nature has always been significant in gay culture; cruising for sex with a stranger often takes place in public spaces like parks, forests and beaches. I want to remind people of that heritage and how we are part of these environments. Many of us have forgotten how important nature is and don’t appreciate its beauty or necessity. Recently, when we were a banned from meeting inside buildings, people went out to meet safely in nature; open air once more became shelter for humans.

AMM: Your photography in particular revolves around the self-portrait. How does the concept of the artist as both maker and subject resonate with your work? Do you consider all your pieces to be manifestations of self-reflection and selfexpression?

KS: I am drawn to the idea that the body is a medium for transferring feelings, but I continue to struggle with my role as performer or model.

I use my body to explore how it affects the surroundings and, at the same time, how the environment impacts the body. I struggle with the idealisation of the male form in my own photographs and I am still exploring how I want the pictures to be read by a contemporary audience. The body has not changed through the centuries—only our awareness and approval has transformed. Taking self-portraits and videos confirms a view of myself and how others may see me. In all my photographs you can find my reflection and by this my expression of the given moment, my emotions and thoughts.

AMM: Where else do you source imagery to inspire your work?

KS: At the moment, I find a lot of inspiration on Instagram—there are so many talented people and it’s like a never-ending scrolling book of artwork. ‘Cruising fantasies’ was inspired by pictures people have shared with me, pornographic movies and my own photography.

Exhibitions, galleries and museums are my favourite source of inspiration—nothing moves me more than to see somebody’s work in real life. Art books and magazines are good sources too, often for selected best pieces. The most inspiring however is real life itself—visiting LGBT-friendly places, gay beaches and cruising areas—that atmosphere of freedom cannot be

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 22, Interviewed: Krzysztof Strzelecki

replaced by any book or picture.

AMM: We love the organic, slightly imperfect forms of your ceramics. What do you find compelling about this way of working, as opposed to wheelthrowing the ceramics and striving to achieve perfect symmetry?

KS: Clay has its own ‘feelings’ and I like to expose them. I like how the force of gravity takes over the wet clay, making it ‘wavy’. I don’t want my work to look perfectly straight or smooth as if it came from a factory, copied unlimited times. Every piece is unique and that’s important for me. I like to use the walls of my ceramics as canvases for painting. Every wall tells a new story. Round vases are beautiful and possibly one day I will make some project with them, but they don’t let you see the whole picture at once in the way I am looking for at the moment. Plates have a flat surface to paint on, but I wanted to show a longer story—that’s why I moved to vases.

AMM: Talk us through some of the technical aspects of making your ceramics. Do you hand-build them?

What kinds of pigments and glazes do you use?

KS: Yes, all my vases are hand-built and because of that, they are unique. First I make a collage in Photoshop of pictures and drawings I am planning to use. Then I make a template of the vase and cut the shape from a slab of clay.

When the clay is getting hard I assemble the walls and the vase then dries, ready to be painted. I transfer the image to the clay by hand, adding the rest of the landscape details and then painting with colourful slips (liquid clay mixed with pigments). Depending on the size of the vase it can take from two days to four days to finish—it’s important to finish painting when the vase is still leather hard. After this, I am able to curve the outlines which add depth to the vase and brings out the details. That is the most time-consuming part and there is no room for mistakes. After a week, sometimes longer, I biscuit fire my work. This is the most vulnerable stage—if it cracks then I have lost a week or more of work on the piece. If it is successful there is a good chance that the second firing with transparent glaze will succeed. Ceramics are unpredictable. Knowledge of your kiln and glazes allows you to imagine the result before it is fired, but each work is still a surprise when I finally open the kiln.

for somebody else than for my own projects.

However, ‘never say never’—honestly I haven’t had an opportunity to undertake a ceramics project with somebody else yet, so it could still be something for me to discover and enjoy.

AMM: How do you find working between London and Świdnica? Would you say the two places are vastly different in terms of artistic culture and creative community?

KS: It’s a difficult question. Because of the current situation (Covid-19) I have not been in the UK for a few months—the longest time since I first moved to the UK. After my graduation, I decided to live in both cities. Świdnica is a small city: it’s impossible to compare it to London and all the opportunities which London provides.

London is the capital of art—it is an exciting world but often absorbing so much time that it leaves too little space to work on my art.

However, Świdnica allows me the time to think and focus. I like being here primarily because it is close to nature and family—there are fields and a small forest directly behind my house.

It’s a good place to work, especially during a pandemic. Moving back to Poland during the first lockdown, I never thought I would be staying for such a long period of time. I’m looking forward to being able to travel again between the UK and Poland.

AMM: What kinds of things are you working on just now? Are there a lot more vases in the making as the pandemic stretches on?

KS: I am still working on the ‘cruising fantasies’ series; the more I make of those vases, the more I want to make. I enjoy it and am still finding a lot to discover. I am absolutely planning to explore the series more and see where this will take me next—I don’t have any number in mind for when to stop. I’m also doing some experiments with larger scale and interactive work. For example, I would like to make a sculpture of Kouros 1:1 of a male posture and some wall installations with plates.

AMM: Is your practice a collaborative one? Do you find it valuable for your own art to work alongside and in dialogue with other artists?

KS: Dialogue with other artists and other people is important. I am emotionally attached to what I am doing whereas other people can bring a fresh perspective to my vision.

Connections are important and I try to keep in touch with as many artists as I can. Everyone should be able to hear feedback on their work—it can only improve the technique. In my practice, I generally prefer to work alone as a kind of meditation and introspection. I like collaboration but rather when working

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 22, Interviewed: Krzysztof Strzelecki

Featured image (p.18): Krzysztof Strzelecki Seashore (Cruising fantasies series) glazed ceramic 43 x 34 x 11 cm

Featured image (p.21): Krzysztof Strzelecki Hyde Park (Cruising fantasies series) glazed ceramic 55 x 43 x 20 cm

20

21

Krzysztof Strzelecki Laguna glazed ceramic 46 x 27 x 16 cm

22

Krzysztof Strzelecki Sunshine glazed ceramic 44.4 x 25 x 13 cm

23

Krzysztof Strzelecki La Playa glazed ceramic 45 x 35 x 17 cm

24

Krzysztof Strzelecki Camping glazed ceramic 43 x 25 x 18 cm

25

www.bonyramirez.com

“Pre-colonisation Caribbean luxury”: Bony Ramirez’s multimodal artworks draw on the opulence of traditional portraiture to exalt underrepresented narratives In Bony Ramirez’s portraits, sculptural, drawn and painted, the compositional techniques of Renaissance portraiture are applied to the depiction of Caribbean iconography and culture.

The religious icons that Bony encountered growing up in a Dominican household mark the origins of his fascination with Renaissance imagery. His first artistic ventures in drawing and imitating religious iconography still have a place in his practice, only in his current works the traditional saints and martyrs are replaced by exuberant, large-limbed and majestic figures representing Caribbean subjectivities and histories. Made first on paper using a combination of painting and drawing techniques, then transposed onto wood panels, Bony’s figures command the visual field, occupying their surroundings with a regal authority. Bony’s dynamic process of layering his medium lends his subjects a further sense of dominance in their differentiation from their backgrounds; the figures are given heightened prominence both materially and compositionally.

The symbols with which Bony surrounds his figures turn European traditions of Renaissance opulence towards images which uphold the significance of iconography specific to the Caribbean, including machetes, plantains, indigenous vegetation and animals. By placing these symbols in the context of religious and Renaissance portraiture, Bony is affording reverence to a culture which colonial versions of history tend to disregard.

Similarly, his veneration of black and brown figures using highly saturated palettes and exaggerated, powerful stances supplants the homogenised, imperial, white narratives of European Renaissance portraiture and presents instead a decolonised vision of the Dominican Republic. In this, Bony seeks to create compositions in which others who share his experiences and cultural references will feel represented—in his words: “that is who I paint for—for me and my people.”

interview by Rebecca Irvin

Featured image: Bony Ramirez La Boda Del Cocodrilo / The Crocodile’s Wedding, BR2054 acrylic, colored pencil, oil pastel, oil bar, pastel paper, Bristol paper on wood panel 60 x 48 inches Courtesy the artist and Thierry Goldberg Gallery, New York

AMM: Hello Bony! To start off—could you tell us about the events and decisions that led you to become an artist?

BR: I’ve always loved art ever since I can remember. I don’t know where I got it from.

Like most Dominican children, I didn’t grow up in an artistic household. I started drawing religious icons, since that’s mainly the type of art you would find in a Dominican home.

These religious paintings are the reason my work is so inspired by the Renaissance.

I realised I was really good at it when we moved to the US and I took art classes in high school. This was my first official introduction into making art. Since then, I’ve made it my goal to become the best artist I can and keep expanding my horizons.

AMM: Your style is incredibly distinctive; how would you describe the work you create and how has your artistic style developed over time?

BR: In terms of my aesthetic, it would be pre-colonisation Caribbean luxury. I would describe my work as if Peter Paul Rubens and Francis Bacon moved to the Caribbean and had a baby—that would be me! My work has changed a lot, I started with a style more aimed at children. At one point I wanted to be a children’s book illustrator, so my early works are cute little characters. Later I realised that I wanted my work to be stronger and to have a bigger purpose. My characters turned into full blown adults with multi-coloured and exaggerated limbs.

AMM: The use of layering in your images is very intriguing—can you tell us more about multimodality in your work and how the sculptural aspect of your practice merges into your paintings?

BR: For my process, my figures are made on paper pasted on a wood panel background.

I make my figures on Bristol paper, I do an acrylic wash, colour pencil and then I blend the colour pencil with soft oil pastels. The background for the pieces is all acrylic paint and sometimes I use oil bars to complement it. At the end, the figures are pasted on the panel, combining the two together into one piece. I’m basically working on two artworks at a time for one piece, one is the figure on paper and the other the background on wood.

Recently I’ve started incorporating more sculptural elements into the panel, like knives and swords. These sculptural elements take the already mixed media work to the next level.

AMM: It must require a lot of dynamic creative energy to utilise so many different mediums alongside each other and in combination—how do you handle your process when making to keep the various elements connected and coherent?

BR: The process is a bit complex. In pictures is looks like a normal painting, but when seen in person, the viewer comes across the layers of materials and mark making. In the pasting of the paper, often all the details on the artwork

“I think what interests me the most about Renaissance portraiture is the compositions and the play between the surreal and ordinary.

I like the power and seriousness those compositions exude!

I like for my figures to be taken seriously, for the viewer to feel that the figure is not only taking up space, but that it’s in charge of that space. When I look at these Renaissance portraits of royals that’s how I feel. I want my Caribbean, brown and black figures to take over these predominantly whitecis-male narratives that have been advertised to us in these Renaissance portraits.

I love going to museums and looking at all these Renaissance pieces and I enjoy the colours, compositions and storytelling elements of them, but as a brown Caribbean immigrant living in the United States I don’t feel represented in these works that I love so much. I want my people to feel represented and to know that they have a space in history.”

- Bony Ramirez

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 22, Interviewed: Bony Ramirez

28

make the paper lines get lost, especially if the piece has an intricate background. When adding things like swords on to the panel, the swords usually complement the meaning or idea that I’m trying to convey with the piece.

AMM: There is a chromatic intensity to your works; the palette is so rich, vibrant and evocative.

We’d love to hear about the significance of colour choices in your art.

Can you tell us about the symbols, motifs and metaphors present in your works?

BR: I was born and raised in the Dominican Republic; the Caribbean colour palette is full of strong and vibrant colours that are definitely present in my work! A lot of light blue, pink, yellow, just to name a few. If you look into Caribbean architecture, these colours are common on most houses, especially in the country side of DR. By carrying this colour palette into my paintings and sculptures, I’m carrying my home with me. In the same way, my work includes a lot of motifs and symbolism that are very unique to the Caribbean. Some of these motifs/symbols include machetes, plantains, tropical trees and animals, and most recently rooster fighting.

I am aware that sometimes my work gets so specific in terms of the meaning that only people from the Caribbean or the diaspora in general will get it, but that is who I paint for— for me and my people.

AMM: We’re particularly interested to know more about the influence of Renaissance portraiture in your work; how is this tradition repurposed in your images?

BR: I think what interests me the most about Renaissance portraiture is the compositions and the play between the surreal and ordinary.

I like the power and seriousness those compositions exude! I like for my figures to be taken seriously, for the viewer to feel that the figure is not only taking up space, but that it’s in charge of that space. When I look at these Renaissance portraits of royals that’s how I feel. I want my Caribbean, brown and black figures to take over these predominantly white-cis-male narratives that have been advertised to us in these Renaissance portraits.

I love going to museums and looking at all these Renaissance pieces and I enjoy the colours, compositions and storytelling elements of them, but as a brown Caribbean immigrant living in the United States I don’t feel represented in these works that I love so much. I want my people to feel represented and to know that they have a space in history.

AMM: Could you please tell us more about the distortortion feature in the bodies and especially the limbs of the characters you paint?

BR: I was never good at proportions while I was in school. It was really difficult for me to draw the human body anatomically correct.

When trying to find my voice and a specific style, I told myself, why don’t I embrace this and exaggerate it even more! So I started

photography by Daniel Terna

taking “human anatomy” to different extremes.

I looked into artists like Francis Bacon and Picasso and was fascinated on how they explore the human form. In addition, I explore a lot with the idea of the human anatomy and what the average human being considers “male” or “female”. It’s interesting when people see my figures and give them pronouns based on what gender they think I’m trying to portray. In my head, my figures aren’t exactly human beings, so the idea of gender doesn’t really exist for most of my figures. In a way that asks the viewers to examine what exactly means to be a human?

AMM: What kinds of things inspire your work beyond the visual?

BR: I look into a lot of my personal experiences as inspiration. I look for ways I can translate those experiences into my work without being too autobiographical. Being surrounded by nature and intricate interior spaces also informs my work! I’m a big anime fan—I watch a lot of anime as a way of letting the character’s expressions and movements in the series inform my own figures!

AMM: What excites you about the contemporary art world? And how do you hope it will evolve in the future?

AMM: What things have helped you to keep making and keep creatively motivated over the past twelve months?

BR: In the last twelve months, my art career has exploded and people have started to finally pay attention to my work. For the first time in my life, a few months ago I was able to have my own studio! I was creating in a new and more comfortable environment.

In addition, one thing that also made me creatively motivated was seeing all my artist friends or artists I admire create even bigger and better work; I feel like we’re in a time where all of us are really pushing ourselves!

AMM: What kind of creative experimentation are you engaging with at the moment? Do you have specific aspirations for the development of your work?

BR: My work is already mixed media, but I definitely want to keep pushing the boundaries of my practice by exploring with new materials. I have been thinking a lot about incorporating photo transfers and fabric in the works. I also want to get more creative in terms of my sculptures.

BR: What really excites me about the contemporary art world is really the idea that there are almost no limits when creating an artwork and getting your point across! I really like that freedom. On the other hand, I feel like inclusivity is something that I hope can evolve in the future of the contemporary art world and the art world in general. I believe we are heading in the right direction—we’ve had more BIPOC and women artists being recognised than ever! There is still a lot to do, but I see a bright and more inclusive art world ahead.

AMM: Are there other artists currently working whose art you admire and with whom your own artistic sensibilities resonate?

BR: I really enjoy looking at artists that work with several mediums at one time or just push one medium into new ways. I really like David R. Harper’s use of different sculptural languages to create a body of work. I’ve also always been obsessed with Maurizio Cattelan, he’s really a genius! In terms of pushing the boundaries of the human anatomy, which is something that I do with my work, Patricia Piccinini and Sofia Mitsola’s work really resonate with mine! In general most of the artists that inspire me would be 200 years old by now, if they were alive!

31

Featured image: Bony Ramirez El Gallo Ganador, 2021 acrylic, oil pastel, colored pencil, oil bar Bristol paper on wood panel 72 x 48 inches Courtesy the artist and Thierry Goldberg Gallery, New York Photo by Joshua White

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 22, Interviewed: Bony Ramirez

Bony Ramirez El Tiguerazo! acrylic, colored pencil, oil pastel, oil stick, paper on wood panel 40 x 60 inches Courtesy the artist and Thierry Goldberg Gallery, New York Photo by Daniel Terna

32

Bony Ramirez Dónde Están Los Limóncillos? acrylic, colored pencil, oil stick, oil pastel, paper on wood panel 48 x 72 inches Courtesy the artist and Thierry Goldberg Gallery, New York Photo by Daniel Terna

33

Bony Ramirez Las Perlas Traen Lágrimas/ Pearls Bring Tears acrylic, colored pencil, oil pastel, plastic pearls, paper on wood panel 60 x 48 inches Courtesy the artist and Thierry Goldberg Gallery, New York Photo by Daniel Terna

34

Bony Ramirez Sound Of The Ocean acrylic, colored pencil, oil pastel, paper on wood panel 60 x 40 inches Courtesy the artist and Thierry Goldberg Gallery, New York Photo by Daniel Terna

35

Bony Ramirez Caribaby: The Carnaval Apoxie clay, tin foil, Styrofoam, resin doll eyes, aluminum armature, crushed velvet fabric, polyester fiberfill, polymer clay, acrylic, oil pastel, golf tees 24 x 17 x 8 inches Courtesy the artist and Thierry Goldberg Gallery, New York Photo by Daniel Terna

36

Bony Ramirez N.O ! / Noblesse Oblige, 2021 acrylic, colored pencil, oil pastel, switch blade knives, Bristol paper on wood panel 48 x 36 inches Courtesy the artist and Thierry Goldberg Gallery, New York

37

curated selection of works

by Fabiola Alondra and Jane Harmon founders of Fortnight Institute, NYC www.fortnight.institute

Featured image: Alicia Reyes McNamara Between pastels and coloured pencil 21 x 29.7 cm more on p. 88

www.eashull.com

E l i z a b e t h S h u l l

Image: If…Then colored pencils on paper 5 x 7 inches

40

We are what came before us but we make earth’s language our own by attempting to translate the endless astonishment. Uncovering and exploring the thoughts that bring images to me is an ongoing “archeological” journey while always digging deeper in an attempt to understand my imagination and remain on an authentic path. The central rhythm in my work is the exploration of texture frequently combined with the disclosure of the unexpected. My art process is about the magic of risk taking, discovery, and reacting to what intrigues me.

Elizabeth Shull was born and raised in Southern California and lives in Los Angeles. Her predominant intention is to encourage visual exploration and trigger thinking beyond the predictable. Elizabeth received an undergraduate degree from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and holds an MFA from Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles. She has participated in several exhibitions and her work is held in select private collections.

Image: Presence colored pencil on paper 5 x 7 inches

41

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 22: curated selection

www.andersenwoof.com

A n d e r s e n W o o f

Image: Why Do You Hurt Me oil on canvas 18 x 24 inches

42

Andersen Woof is a visual artist based in Baltimore working in both traditional and digital mediums. He enjoys experimenting with different image-making approaches, enhancing the unique characteristics of each to tell meaningful stories. Originally trained in landscape architecture and urban design, Andersen is passionate about form-making and fascinated by the dynamics between people and places, especially the emotional impact of physical spaces. Within his work, Andersen constantly looks for ambiguous and absurd narratives that reflect humanity, and he believes stories with open endings linger in our minds. As an Asian and gay immigrant living in the US, Andersen’s practice is also strongly influenced by his personal life journey, and he explores subjects such as solitude, relationships, fear, violence, and desire. Through each of his works, Andersen investigates what it means for human beings to live simultaneously with joy and pain.

My recent oil paintings examine contradictory and layered emotions. Like many of my past works that tend to reveal a sense of humor with a notion of melancholy at the same time, they reflect my true and conflicted inner world. Since adulthood, I have rarely felt completely happy or wonderful without a slight hint of sadness, and vice versa. Every day I find myself dealing with delight and sorrow concurrently, and I know I am not alone. The people in my paintings are often inspired by strangers I have photographed from the streets. The random moments of their unstaged expressions and body language are mesmerizing and make me wonder about their lives; I find the mystery of strangers infinitely satisfying. Additionally, the landscapes and gardens where these stories take form help enrich the mixed emotions of the paintings, and they are almost like my signature—symbols that recall my previous life working as a landscape architect. These images are like fantasy versions of my personal and internal journey—they tell fictional stories of people with similar emotional experiences to mine in life.

Image: Gotta Get Up oil on canvas 16x20 inches

43

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 22: curated selection

J o n

J o a n i s

www.joanis.org

Image: Dying Palm gouache, coloured pencil and coffee grinds on cotton paper 56 x 76 cm

44

Jon Joanis (b. Montreal, 1969) spent his formative years learning drawing and painting under the Canadian painter and illustrator Leslie Coppold (Royal Canadian Academy of Arts) while assisting in teaching high school art classes and also briefly apprenticing with Canadian painter Stanley Cosgrove. In 1988, after completing a Fine Arts and Design program near Montreal, Jon had two works selected to represent Canada for a UNESCO exhibition in Paris.

Throughout, Joanis studied and performed music professionally as a jazz guitarist, eventually becoming a student of guitarist Mike Stern in New York City, and also studying guitar and composition under Roddy Ellias in Montreal.

Over the years, Jon worked as an artist and designer for other artists and special effects companies in Montreal and Los Angeles, painting, sculpting and model-making as well as freelance graphic and interior designing. Jon continues to play and write music, while seriously reacquainting and reconfirming his relationship with drawing and painting.

Isolation Works: A Short Statement on Recent Efforts The last year brought me to as-yet unseen and un-experienced landscapes, skies and vistas—both personal and physical. After living in Montréal and then more recently, NYC, the vast and prolific landscapes of Alberta, Canada were at once shocking and comforting. These places gave me the space and “permission” to use them as “armatures” for the layering of sometimes imaginary or exaggerated elements: elements of texture that I might find in foods or fabrics and elements of fantastical colour that I experience before falling asleep. Indeed, much of what I end up painting is often a hybrid of what I have seen during my waking life and what images flash through my brain as I make repeated efforts to sleep.

Until very recently, my studio has been a 30” square card table, some paints, pencils and paper along with whatever else I could find that will make a mark or give some lumpiness to an otherwise smooth surface. There are times when restrictions in space and medium can be a guide to a new way of image-making, treating surface and in fact, seeing. Interestingly, finding new and personal ways of image making seems to create a new way of viewing the subject itself—forming a “Mobius strip” of interactions. My new home and studio is now (as of 2021) Texas, USA.

Image: Roadscape 2 - Driving with Andrew gouache, coffee grinds and coloured pencil on paper 61 x 46 cm

45

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 22: curated selection

M a r i a n a

G a r i b a y

R a e k e

www.marianagr.com

Mariana Garibay Raeke is a multidisciplinary artist working with a range of media. Her work examines ideas of transformation/translation through material explorations guided by process and place. She is interested in making works that capture the ephemeral nature of experience and question our understanding of images, objects, and bodies.

Born in Mexico and based in Brooklyn, Garibay Raeke holds a BFA from the California College of the Arts and an MFA from Yale University School of Art. Her recent solo exhibitions include “To the Center and Back”, La Señora, Oaxaca; “closing the space between us”, The Chimney, Brooklyn. She has been an artist-in-residence at the Museum of Arts and Design, NY; Anderson Ranch Arts Center, CO; and Pocoapoco, Mexico.

Image: Sol acrylic on linen 14 x 11 inches

46

R a m i r o

H e r n a n d e z

www.ramirohernandezart.com

Beautiful Adolescents stand on the edge of here and there, as California visions of suburbs and coastal paradise halo their peripheries. Nuanced with rainbow washes over dusty, warm greys, delicately forming figures echo a fading memory and a wondering future at the mercy of today’s innocence. Curated selfies overlap with the imagined faith of the Old Masters. This then is a modern telling of Venus in front of the mirror, as she sits playfully between a moment of self-reflection and recognition of the viewer. Idolized youth in its dawning awareness appears symbolically between high and low culture, bringing temporal and sublime spaces to the agency of painting, until the sacredness of paint is brought into question.

Ramiro Hernandez was born in San Diego, CA in 1986. He received his BFA in Painting from California College of the Arts 2010, in San Francisco, CA. He currently lives in Los Angeles, CA.

Image: Wild West oil on canvas 24 x 18 inches

47

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 22: curated selection

H i r o y a

K u r a t a

www.shiloku.net

Hiroya Kurata was born in Japan in 1980. He received his BFA from Parsons School of Design and is currently living in New York City. His paintings combine representations of found imagery with those of personal remembrances, creating scenes that feel at once familiar and strangely disconcerting. Referencing the visual language of manga and landscape paintings, Kurata explores the conception and emotion of nostalgia.

Image: Munch with Tommy shirt oil on panel 8 x 8 inches

48

N e l l

B r o o k f i e l d

www.nellbrookfield.com

Nell Brookfield is a London-based artist who, through painting and drawing, responds to the human and natural world around her. Brookfield’s work often weaves together sight, imagination and memory. She graduated from the Royal Drawing School in 2018, after studying Anthropology at UCL. Brookfield has recently spent a year studying Painting at the Pratt Institute in New York City. She has exhibited in group shows in London at Christie’s, the Royal Drawing School, Protein Studios, September Gallery, the Willis Museum, Bowes Parris, Matchett & Page Gallery, and RISD. I investigate the emotional and physical spaces between people that are present in both intimate or tense moments; and the feelings of alienation this provokes. There is a sense of tenderness and touch between the figures, whilst always the possibility of struggle and strife.

Drawing in soft pastel and painting with pigment on paper or canvas, intense colours and patterning accentuate the charged moments between the figures. The fabrics and gloves are tools to either mask, or reveal human instincts of desire, frustration and rejection.

Image: Squeeze acrylic on paper 14.5 x 12 inches

49

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 22: curated selection

D i e g o L o z a n o

www.yawgo.xyz

Diego is a Hispanic artist: I like to implement the bright colors of my culture into my art. I mainly work with oil pastels and occasionally digital illustration.

Image: Aerobics Cube oil pastel on canvas 18 x 24 inches

50

T h a l e i a K a r p o u z i

www.thaliakarpouzi.com

Thaleia Karpouzi graduated from the School of Fine Arts of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, in the department of Visual and Applied Arts, holding the title of Integrated Masters in painting in 2017. She currently resides in the Netherlands.

In my practice I am working on paintings, drawings, cutouts and sculptures. Using a multitude of narratives from memory, literature, poetry, myths and also my everyday experience as a raw material I am creating stories exploring women’s agency. With the memories of a girl who grew up in the 90s, I recall personal stories and experiences and I reflect on the social context, the stereotypes and ideologies through which I reached adulthood. In addition, searching through the rich historical material of my country I am studying the childhood of girls in ancient Greece, stories recorded in myths and historical texts, a fact that made me discover a long continuum of rituals and traditions over time.

Being a 34-year-old female working artist today, I realize to the maximum the conflicting feelings and thoughts of the adult woman as well as her biological limitations and I experience the surrounding pressure and the expectations or demands of the social environment, as to what a woman in her 34 years should have accomplished. Women today are trying to redefine their dynamics and agency: their value in the workplace, the recognition of their work in science and the arts, the control of their sexuality, their right on abortions, their privileges to abolish commercial beauty standards, even the ability to reconsider feminism in their own way. My figures are trying to make sense of their own state in an accelerating world, become aware of their own wills, fears and limitations, and perceive themselves as able and entitled to occupy a decision-making space.

Image: Devilish... acrylic, pigment powder on canvas 115 x 75 cm

51

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 22: curated selection

C l a i r e P a r t i n g t o n

www.clairepartington.co.uk

Image: Young Daughter of the Picts with the Head of the Artist (Marc Quinn) glazed ceramic and mixed media 81 x 38 x 20 cm

52

Claire Partington is a UK born artist based in London. She graduated from Central Saint Martins in 1995 with a 1st in Fine Art Sculpture. After leaving college she worked within the Museums and Galleries that had initially inspired her enthusiasm and interest in Art History, gaining a Post Graduate qualification in Museum Studies in 2000. Claire started making ceramics after attending evening classes at Kensington and Chelsea College in 2005 and began selling and exhibiting her work made at night school. Her work features in notable international collections including the Victoria and Albert Museum in London; the Museum of London; the Seattle Art Museum; and the Reydan Weiss Collection in Germany. She was the recipient of the Virginia A Groot award in 2018, and the same year exhibited an important largescale commission ‘Taking Tea’ at Seattle Art Museum.

My work is heavily influenced by my exposure to the standards of European Art History and my time working with the UK’s National collections. I started out making figures in wide historical dresses that resembled large bottles or hip flasks and I associated them with 17th and 18th century salt ware bottles with head stoppers. The work was usually inspired by vivid fairytale and folklore imagery and the figures had interchangeable heads to reflect the zoomorphic metamorphosis of the character or subject. Over time my interest in character as well as narrative has evolved and the work has become like a cast of my own re-imagined characters that seem to have emerged from an unknown history and reflect my personal mix of historical iconography and contemporary narratives and styles.

“Underpinning all Claire’s work is a social commentary, particularly about women, and particularly about power. All Claire’s women have attitude: these are women who use their aesthetic presence to project strength more so than to attract, in contrast to her dandified male figures counterparts who seem beholden to their whimsies. In part, this is a conscious redressing of the gender motifs that have carried on unquestioned for centuries in folklore and aesthetics. But it is also a means of re-evaluating the beautiful object: that beauty is often far more complex and far more mischievous than it may seem”. – James Freeman

Image: Mother & Child glazed earthenware panel H 60 x W 50 cm

53

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 22: curated selection

A n n e

L i n d b e r g

www.annejlindberg.com

Anne Lindberg is an artist living and working in Wilmington, North Carolina.

Image: Still Life with Breast Pumps oil on canvas 41 x 32 inches

54

H a l e y

D a r y a

P a r s a

www.haleyparsa.com

Haley Darya Parsa works in a variety of mediums, engaging in painting, drawing, fabric-dyeing, cyanotypes, print, and sculpture. Parsa investigates the ways in which images, objects, and rituals embedded in personal histories can relate to a larger cultural context. Having grown up in Texas as Iranian-American, she places her family and Persian heritage under an intimate meditative lens, reflecting on ideas of distance, separation, and connection. Her work is both sentimental and critical, thinking about how we read, identify, and value things.

Haley Darya Parsa (b. 1996) received her BFA from the University of Texas at Austin before moving to Brooklyn, New York, where she lives and works. In 2020, the artist’s work was the subject of two solo exhibitions at Third Room Project, “The sun leaves me to find you” in Portland, Oregon, and “Sharing Suns” online. In 2019, a solo presentation of the artist’s work, “What is Lost in Distance and Separation”, curated by Carlotta Wald, was on view at Winterfeldtstr 56 in Berlin, Germany.

Image: A love letter to the flowers in Texas and the trees in Iran acrylic on canvas 36 x 24 inches

55

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 22: curated selection

M i k e y

Y a t e s

www.mikeyyates.net

Ever since I could remember I’ve drawn people. The youngest of four sons, each brother often gathered together at the dinner table with paper and pencils to sketch the various characters that colored our lives: Scorpion from Mortal Kombat, Ryu from Street Fighter or Ken Griffey Jr. from the Mariners. My mother and father’s combined careers in the U.S. Army entrenched our family into a pattern of deployment and relocation. Frequently moving across, over and out of the country, drawing people remained one of the few constants regardless of place or time.

In my childhood I’ve spent winters in Bavaria playing basketball on military installation courts, summers in San Antonio running cross country, and rainy days in the Pacific Northwest walking home from school with plastic bags tied around my shoes to protect them. While no longer constrained by military orders, a pattern of mobility extends into my adult life; I spent time in the Philippines attempting to play for the PBA, made rap instrumentals in Houston and now, most recently am studying painting in Colorado. Through relocation I’ve moved through a variety of worlds and cultures. In order to assimilate, I often shapeshifted my younger self in new surroundings to live as unnoticed as possible. All the while I have keenly observed the settings and people through which the story of my life and those around me took place.

I am interested in the stories places tell about people, and the stories people tell about places. These interests in character and setting carry over into my painting practice and are central to my work. While painting I am finally stationary. I am able to sample multiple places, people, and experiences to build up a visual mosaic of a hybrid existence, curating a space for people to relate to each other.

Image: Merienda oil on canvas 36 x 30 inches

56

J e s s i c a A l a z r a k i

www.jessicaalazrakiart.com

Jessica Alazraki was born and raised in Mexico City and is based in NYC since 1998. She earned a bachelor’s degree in Communications from Universidad Anáhuac, and a Certificate in Drawing & Painting from the New York Academy of Art. She has exhibited her work in the US in three solo exhibitions and over 40 group shows in both the US and Mexico. She completed the Trestle Art Space Residency Program in 2020 and participated in the 2019 ARTWorks fellowship at JCAL. In 2019 she was accepted into the Creative Capital NYC “El taller program,” in collaboration with Hemispheric Institute.

In 2020 she was awarded the New Work Grant from the Queens Art Fund and the Diane Etienne Founders Award from Stamford Art association. Her work was published in New American Paintings, No. 152, Northeast Issue. Shortlisted for Hopper Price and 2020 winner of the MvVo Ad Art Show. She received “The Award of Excellence” from Huntington Arts Council. She was given an “Honorable Mention Award” by the Barrett Art Center at the Circle Foundation for the Arts and the prize for second place at the Brooklyn Waterfront Artists Coalition. Received “The Passion Project Award” and the “Artdex Award.”

As a Mexican woman living in New York, I feel it is my responsibility to open up a dialogue about immigrants. My work intends to bring Latinx life into contemporary art by celebrating the culture and highlighting family values. The narrative shows interior domestic scenes surrounding tables. Bright colors and decorative patterns are very characteristic of my works; in my pictures, portraits are always in the foreground and close to the viewer. Intense brushwork provides unique character combined with flat backgrounds to highlight emotion.

Image: Cats & Kids on Yellow oil on canvas 43 x 65 inches

57

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 22: curated selection

P a l l a v i

S i n g h

www.pallavisinghart.com

Image: Reclamation from the past acrylic on paper 29.5 x 21 inches

58

Pallavi Singh is an Indian artist born in Ballia in eastern U.P., currently living and working in Delhi. She received a Masters degree in Painting from the College of Art, Delhi University in 2011. Singh attempts to bring forth expansive and compelling perspectives through her paintings while using research as a strong base to supplement her ideas that reflect on the canvas. It has been an endeavour to merge and analyse her social observations and accounts of personal experiences in a third-person view to maintain objectivity.

Currently exploring the grooming culture amongst Indian men and tracing the trend of metrosexuality in its various articulations and the constructs, how we perceive sexuality, gender stereotypes, and beauty, art is her voice to yield the challenges against conventional roles. Being a particular generation of a metropolitan city of India, she witnesses the presence and genesis of several urban trends in neoliberal India, how urban men were slowly and gradually demolishing traditional concepts of rugged masculinity. While grooming and beauty were considered inherently feminine, it has been her attempt to explore its sensitivities in detail and deconstruct the idea across time, geographies and culture. She cherishes the opportunity to establish a connection with the history and current trends of her country with the subject she is exploring. Delving into the psyche of an Indian Man in relation to the physical aesthetics upheld by them has widened her perspective on how we have sustained rigid demarcations for genders and why it is important to renew that idea to flexibility.

Her previous efforts have been honoured with achievements such as: Artist Opportunity Fellowship award for Vermont Studio Centre (USA 2019), WADe Asia-WADe India Art Award (Women Architects, Artist and Designer Awards-2017), Skowhegan School of painting and sculpture USA (2015) by The Inlaks Shivdasani Foundation scholarship, finalist of 10th Sovereign Asian Art Prize ’13-’14, Hong Kong. Her work was also exhibited at the 24th Gabrovo Biennial of Humour and Satire at the Museum of Humour and Satire, Bulgaria (2019) and Pepper House Residency project by KochiMuziris Biennale, India (2018-2019). Her works have been exhibited both nationally and internationally.

Image: Colony Life acrylic on paper 29.5 x 42 inches

59

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 22: curated selection

J o n a t h o n

C i o f f i

www.jonathonwcioffi.com

Image: Camellia House marker 14 x 17 inches

60

I am an artist and poet living in NYC. I started developing my style by drawing pictures of boys, as if it were done by my early elementary school self. When I think back, I can picture a wall of self portraits drawn by 3rd graders, hanging in a school hallway. They are all so honestly drawn! At that age, drawing displays an innocence, simplistic expression, and vast fantastical worlds that are not limited to any artistic “ability”. Kids are able to imagine such detailed scenarios, they almost seem like memories, and convey them with truth. Thankfully, I don’t think I outgrew that. As an adult, my work has those same qualities mentioned, but now incorporates my evolving understanding as a queer artist. Each piece has an elaborate backstory, and I become quite attached to the subjects. There would be no work without the internal storytelling that is constantly taking place. The story comes first then I move on to drawing. The story develops and changes as I go along, but I typically give a glimpse into it with the title of each piece. Creating these works is a way for me to see what I want to see and explore stories I want to hear about. I work mostly with markers. I favor Crayola.

Image: I Imagined a Boy Under a Bridge, and Now He Is at the River’s Edge Where This Scene Is Taking Place. (Cathedral) marker 24 x 18 inches

61

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 22: curated selection

Y u k o

S o i

www.yukosoi.com

Born in 1985 in Japan, I have been drawing with colored pencils for fourteen years. I’ve recently been drawing abstract art, but before I was drawing like these artworks, which were created using colored pencils on Japanese paper. One of the biggest themes that I am working on is life, the other would be feelings on thinking about someone. I guess colored pencil art works can be difficult to express as contemporary art, pencil art looks light and weak when lined up with other oil and acrylic paints. Colored pencils are an important drawing material for me to express the delicate heart of a person.

Image: A person colored pencils on Japanese paper 27 cm × 22 cm

62

P h i l o

C o h e n

www.philocohen.com

I am an artist based in Brooklyn working across media. Constantly shifting between image collection, drawing, photography, print and collage, I also work on large scale installations and insist on creating a full body of experience for audiences. In my work, I tend to look at and deconstruct themes of the domestic, the family and womanhood. I constantly revisit concepts of home and solitude, particularly through the exploration of dialogue and reference. The body, woman and fluid, inhabit my studies.

I was born in Paris, France in 1998. I graduated from Sarah Lawrence College in 2020 with a BA in Art History and Comparative Literature. I am also the founder and artists curator of Speciwomen, an independent print publication and online archive aiming to change the representation of women in the Arts.

Image: A year on Mars ink, pencil and colored pencil on paper 6 x 8 inches

63

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 22: curated selection

M i n y o u n g

K i m

www.minyoungkimwork.com

Image: The jar acrylic and pencil on canvas 36.5 x 35.5 cm

64

Minyoung Kim was born in Seoul, South Korea. She graduated from Sungshin Women’s University BFA in painting and MFA in printmaking. After graduation, she had four solo exhibitions and one residency experience in Seoul as a selected artist. Now, she is attending the MFA in the painting department at Slade School of Fine Art since 2019.

She is working on the subject of her experiences and memories. Rather than a happy moment, events such as bitterness, failure, sadness, dissatisfaction, frustration, fear seem to dominate most of her thoughts. The images she draws look incomplete, awkward and bizarre, like a typical witch’s figure and a sad mermaid, a cat that beats people, and a woman with a knife who tries to hurt something.

It may seem rather violent or grotesque, like a story in a cruel fairy tale, but on the one hand, she tries to express cute and humorous feelings or assimilation emotions simultaneously in the work. This can be seen as a mixture of heterogeneous things, a dissonance of the characteristics of grotesque.

The ironic scenes that make people laugh while feeling emotions such as eccentricity and fear are a reflection of her inner state and are two sides of psychological anxiety and conflict. This is because she wants to create a contradictory situation where the situation in the work is serious but not serious by implementing a meeting between disparate elements, such as pain, ridiculousness, unfamiliarity and familiarity in the work.

Image: The window acrylic on unstretched canvas 162 x 152 cm

65

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 22: curated selection

I s a b e l

C a v e n e c i a

www.isabelcavenecia.org

Image: Sheila graphite on paper 59 x 42 cm

66

Isabel Cavenecia, born in 1990, is a Peruvian/Dutch artist who lives and works in Berlin.

Whenever I feel bad I take a long bath. I painted the walls of my bathroom with hearts, and there are soft lights and candles placed within. Inside this bath, I feel the water helps me to calm down. I have always had this immense love for water. Being in water and also drinking water. The water allows me to flow into a mental world, where everything is weightless and flowing, sometimes calm and sometimes wild. Here, I can close my eyes and let the water take care of everything.

In the past I have been acting more like an architect of water. I created spaces in the computer that are flowing on water or in air. For some time now I’ve started applying a more subconscious approach to my water worlds.

I fill an empty paper with graphite and I look at the shapes that emerge in the clouds of graphite. It’s kind of like a Rorschach test. Then, I start to erase the contours of the shapes that appear to me, until eventually I am left with an image. During this process, I make a lot of mistakes and I keep erasing and adding until I find an image that makes sense to me, and gives me a certain sense of tranquility and wonder.

Image: Off She Goes graphite on paper 36 x 30 cm

67

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 22: curated selection

M a r y s i a

G a c e k

www.marysiagacek.com

Marysia Gacek (b.1986 in Nowy Targ, Poland) lives and works in New York, USA. Gacek received her MFA from the Glasgow School of Art, Glasgow, Scotland, and BFA from the School of Visual Arts, New York. Solo shows include: “pleasant setting,” Glasgow Sculpture Studios, Glasgow, Scotland (2015); “Same Goals,” Neoterismoi Toumazou, Nicosia, Cyprus (2015); “My Name is Wendy,” Unosolo Project Room, Milan, Italy (2011). Group shows include: “Hope Floats,” Crush Curatorial, Amagansett, NY (2018); “Third Hand Mary,” 77 Mulberry, New York (2017); “Dear Green,” ZK/U, the Center for Art and Urbanistics, Berlin, Germany (2014); “On the Golden Wire for Thirty Four,” NURTUREArt Gallery, Brooklyn, NY (2013); “Quiet Like a Lake,” Unosunove, Rome, Italy (2011). Gacek is a co-founder of a publishing imprint Maria Editions and a faculty member at the School of Visual Arts in New York.

Image: Untitled pencil on paper 8.5 x 11 inches

68

H a n n a h C o s a c

N a i f y

www.hannahcosacnaify.com

Hannah Cosac Naify, born in 1995 in San Francisco, is an American- Brazilian raised in Florence, Italy.

She graduated from Rhode Island School of Design in 2017 with a BFA in painting, and is currently based in Brooklyn, NY where she continues to develop her studio practice.

Image: One Step Over the Mountain chalk and charcoal on paper 56 x 76 cm

69

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 22: curated selection

J e n n i f e r

J e a n

M a w b y

www.jjtmstudio.com

Jennifer Tazewell Mawby has an interdisciplinary practice with an emphasis on painting. Her works are idiosyncratic and often humorous with pictorial worlds and narratives crafted from content gleaned from history and myth, and stolen from data science and social media. Jennifer holds an honours Masters of Fine Art jointly awarded by OCA and University for the Creative Arts (UCA) in the UK. In these works, she is interested in the portrait as a vehicle that allows for completing and correcting erroneous or lost narratives. These works give a “short story for minor characters” who she invents through a spontaneous drawing practice. The portraits are all of women, and she uses the convention of the profile to underscore a repositioning of history as “herstory”. Profile portraits feature heavily in historical painting and drawing and also in decorative narrative sculpture such as bas-relief. Profile portraits are also commonly found on coinage or on medals and memorials. Whilst portraits of specific, real women appear occasionally in those instances, the women depicted on architectural friezes, engravings, or ceremonial medallions are more typically archetypes taken from myth or legend (such as Athena to represent wisdom, or Nike to represent victory). Borrowing the convention of the profile portrait while depicting women with clearly distinctive, individual and strong characteristics as a way to subvert the gaps in female representation and legacy within our western, male dominated historical narratives.

Image: Abigail - “Abigail likes the Blues” oil pastel on paper 14 x 11 inches

70

S e o

K i m

www.instagram.com/instantdoodles

A strong understanding of realism—or good draftsmanship—has always been of foundational importance to my work as a cartoonist. My drawing ability informs my lines with a sense of weight, movement and anatomy that lends a lifelike believability to otherwise simple, two-dimensional characters. Lately, as I develop my personal work and shift from cartoon territory toward something more like “Art”, I believe I would like to enrich the level of realism that I blend with my stylized drawings; to place my characters in fuller, fleshed-out worlds while employing realityinformed-yet-whimsical light, color and atmosphere. I envision pictures of high emotional impact in the vein of Baroque or Romantic-era paintings but with fantastical scenes populated with the playful creatures that live in my mind: magical stretchy cats and bunnies, sexy trolls and nymphs, aliens, monsters and chimeras of wholly new configurations.

Seo Kim is an artist and cartoonist currently based in Los Angeles. She is known for her storyboard work on Adventure Time as well as for her personal comics and drawings which she shares on her Instagram (@instantdoodles).

Image: Oxolina’s Garden pastel and colored pencil 11 x 14 inches

71

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 22: curated selection

P e o n i a V á z q u e z - D ’ A m i c o

www.peoniavazquezdamico.com

Image: Subtle body watercolor on paper 10 x 8 inches

72

I paint still lifes: fruit peeled and rotting, flowers, my body. Arranged in stillness, but seemingly on the verge, these combinations are meant to conjure verbs. The effects of touch, past or imminent, are accented. Objects are coupled, tied, mashed. Fruit decays, disfigures; flowers wilt as I work. Beauty plays repulsion plays beauty plays narrative plays abstraction.

Growing up in Latin America, I often witnessed how religious images became sites for emotional and even physical projections. This intimate dynamic made a lasting impression.

I blend (ap)perceptions of novels read, things seen, and sensations felt: Mexican votives and impressions of Delacroix, Samuel Beckett’s characters, saintly halos, and my own interoceptions.

I was born in Guadalajara, Mexico, and grew up in Mexico, the US and Ecuador. I received a BFA from the Cooper Union and currently live and work in New York City.

Image: Subtle body (Virgin II) watercolor on paper 12 x 9 inches

73

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 22: curated selection

L u z C a r a b a ñ o

www.luzcarabano.com

Image: Agua oil on linen 11 x 9 inches

74

Each of Carabaño’s paintings explores perceptual and sensorial shifts. At times these images appear to be in the mists of disappearing, other times they sit fixed on ambiguous, yet articulate, fields of colors. There’s a mystery to these paintings. They reference everyday objects, but these objects have been transformed in the making of the paintings. The displaced and reimagined subjects are carefully rendered. Every part of these small works has been touched, including the edge of the canvas, often touched into softer rectangles. These images reflect Carabaño’s wonder of the visual world, and they hold their own curious unnamable insights.

Luz Carabaño (b. Maracay, Venezuela) is an artist currently based in Los Angeles, CA. Carabaño received her BFA from New York University in 2017 and is currently a graduate painting candidate at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her paintings have been exhibited at Dimensions Variable (Miami), Kate’s Little Angel (Los Angeles), DiabloRosso (Panama City), and GBG ARTS (Caracas).

Image: Descalzos oil on linen, stretched over shaped panel 10 x 7 inches

75

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 22: curated selection

M i k e N u d e l m a n

www.mikenudelman.com

Mike Nudelman (b. 1985, Smithtown, New York) currently lives and works in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He received a BFA in Printmaking from Cornell University and an MFA in Painting & Drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His work has been shown in solo exhibitions at Fortnight Institute (New York, NY) and Thomas Robertello Gallery (Chicago, IL), and in group exhibitions at Geoffrey Young Gallery (Great Barrington, MA), SPRING/BREAK Art Show (New York, NY), Hyde Park Art Center (Chicago, IL), Devening Projects + Editions (Chicago, IL), The Valley (Taos, NM), and Hecho a Mano (Santa Fe, NM), among others.

Presenting familiar materials in unfamiliar ways, Nudelman’s methodically layered images dissolve into an array of inky hatchings.

And yet, like the dazzling pixels on an illuminated screen, the ballpoint pen strokes simultaneously mask and reveal what enigmatic sights lie beyond the paper’s surface. Many of the drawings are based on melancholic UFO photographs created in the 1970s and 80s.

Deconstructing layers of illusion, time, scale, and mediation on sublime landscapes has been a central focus of Nudelman’s work for the past decade. Here, these ideas are explored further through a disorienting sense of deja vu which permeates many of the scenes, as traces of branch geometries, saucer forms, and sloping horizons echo from one drawing to the next.

Image: Goes the Other Way ballpoint pen on paper 7 x 5 inches

76

Tr a v i s M a c D o n a l d

www.travis-macdonald.net

Travis MacDonald was born in 1990 in Bunnythorpe, New Zealand and is an artist who currently lives and works in Melbourne. He completed a Bachelor of Fine Art at the Victorian College of the Arts in 2011.

His deliberately understated works often feature a subdued palette and subjects that bridge the mundane to the absurd. They offer an idiosyncratic take on the more traditional genres of figuration and landscape painting. He draws upon his interest in art history, music and world events to present a memory: blurred, twisted and suggestive of a greater narrative, merging the personal and the universal.

Image: Relocating the school oil on sized cotton on shaped wood 15 x 13.5 cm

77

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 22: curated selection

K i e r e n J e a n e

www.kierenjeane.com

Kieren Jeane lives and works in Baltimore, Maryland, and is a Painting BFA candidate at Maryland Institute College of Art. She works with narrative themes, and these selected paintings are a depiction of destructive stories of relationships. She explores the romances that she observed and fantasized about as a child, tracing the often painful positions that women had to undertake in relationships. She translates the passionate, ludicrous, and unscrupulous aspects of love into symbolistic and figurative paintings through vibrant and violent mark-making.

Image: Loving Force pastel and acrylic on canvas 22 x 28 inches

78

K e v i n M o s c a

www.kevinmoscastudio.com

Kevin Mosca (b.1993 in Albany, NY) received his Bachelor of Fine Arts from Maine College of Art. He currently lives and works between Queens and Troy, New York with his wife Megan. Mosca’s work has been shown in group exhibitions at galleries including CFCP Gallery, The Magenta Suite, and Grant Wahlquist Gallery.

My studio practice records revelations of peace that I have experienced in the past, as well as the present. Through these revelations I create paintings that depict narratives of peace, resurrecting a memory that otherwise would have become a fleeting thought. This selfreflection allows me to make sense of these experiences and share them with others so that they might feel the same peace I have felt from my own meditation.

Image: Self Reflection oil on canvas, artist’s frame 24 x 30 x 3 inches

79

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 22: curated selection

A n t o n i o F a b o z z i

www.instagram.com/antoniofabozziengraver

My interest is generally aimed at traditional artistic techniques that I try to learn through the study of painting treatises (Cennini, Suardo, De Chirico etc.) and text on restoration. I believe that every good painter must know in depth the material and the elements with which he works to the point of being able to recreate them when necessary. I am particularly interested in egg tempera with cherry resin and the use of pure pigments that I can partly self-produce through simple chemical processes or by extracting them from vegetables. This type of painting, somewhat “compendiary”, is characterized by very vivid and stable colors over time. However it requires a certainty and does not forgive second thoughts.

These small paintings are part of a larger cycle that mainly includes engravings and drawings, called “Hortus”. These are closed spaces with often walled accesses. Once gardens that provided food to the inhabitants, today often abandoned and mysterious. For some time nature has taken over space and forgotten about the wounds of pruning. Man is alien and precluded; as he no longer has the feet to walk and follow in the footsteps of nature.

Antonio Fabozzi was born in 1978 in Italy. He graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Urbino, received his MA degree at the Painting Studio in 2006.

He also studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Cracow, Naples, Macerata and Perugia. Now he lives and works in Italy, his main interests are graphic arts (intaglio technique) and drawing.

Image: Montagna I tempera on panel 16 x 18 cm

80

B e n j a m i n S t y e r

www.benjaminstyer.com

Enchanted musical notes hang in the air; tumbling starbursts strobe across the void; the city through a forest; skeletons gather at the fountain near a clicking metronome; an empty room. Benjamin Styer’s sprawling, endlessly fertile world teems with energies and bizarreries from anomnivalent imagination. Historic esoterica, hauntological illuminations, and gothic remembrances whisper one to another by candlelight. Compulsively integrating these traditions—or ghosts of traditions—into his practice, Styer chronicles a self-led journey through the visionary, mystical, and mysterious dreamvaults of visual history. Extended looking at Styer’s pictures suggests a willful inhabitation of different headspaces and varied states of reason; he seems to slip into and out of ecstatic dreaming at will. This pulls him toward various modernisms (early abstraction, Transcendentalism) and folk traditions (needlework samplers, intuitive perspective) as they speak to the constant interchange of the (un)conscious mind. It’s precisely this fluidity that gives Styer’s art its aura and meaning: the potent suggestion that certain uncharted continuities exist between creative impulses and attitudes that function outside aesthetic and temporal boundaries, where memories exist before they crystalize. Styer’s work alludes to mythologies, traditions, and legends that never existed, but are intuitively readable and eminently timeless. He taps into a sort of hive-unconscious, where thoughts of thoughts and slippery imagery, thumbed through in some book somewhere, becomes embodied and made real in a constantly growing and deepening system. Calligraphy, geometric abstraction, landscape, and surrealist vignettes somehow seamlessly gel, the invention of a single mind that operates on and between permeable levels concurrently. In his world’s vastness lies its connectivity and pronounced spiritual generosity: Styer’s chief ask of his viewers is only that they’ll unlatch their dream-minds, that they might float through his for a while. Benjamin Styer (b. 1990) lives and works in Northampton,MA. Image: Island After Rain acrylic on masonite 20 x 16 inches

81

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 22: curated selection

M i k e O u s l e y

www.mikeousleyfineart.com

I am an artist focused on the local folklore and culture of my community in Southern Appalachia. I have been influenced by the unique Folk Art traditions throughout the South. In remaining true to Appalachian folklore and folk life I consider myself to be a folk artist. I draw from ideas I’ve heard from local storytellers, legends, and real experience. I seek to blend the real and physical experience of the Appalachian landscape with the fantastic elements of legend and folklore.

Image: Hi to the Witches oil 16 x 20 inches

82

B i r d i e

H a l l

www.birdiehall.com

Birdie Hall (b 1994) is an artist based in Montana and New York. Her paintings, etchings, drawings, and soft sculpture reimagine familiar archetypes and landscapes with a sly sense of humor, while touching on themes of spirituality, psychedelics, nature, visionary poetry, modernist literature, the American West, epistemology of science, theories of the New Age, ethnobotany, reproductive history, midwifery, and the afterlife. Her work, which often combines visual and textual elements, is born of an interest in a return to bodily experience (in “that dark involvement with blood and birth and death” to quote Joan Didion) amid the alienation of modernity and technology, as well as from a deep concern for the liberation of all sentient beings from suffering.

She received her undergraduate degree in philosophy in 2018, and is finishing her MFA in printmaking at NYU. She has shown her paintings and etchings at Diane Rosenstein Gallery (“The Creator Has a Master Plan,” October 2020-December 26, 2020); IBRC Gallery in Butte, Montana (“Afterbirth of a Nation,” February 2018); at The Silverbow Art Foundation in Bozeman, Montana (“What Wondrous Love is This,” July 2019); and at the Modern Love Club in the East Village, New York (“You Are Not Sick and Cannot Die,” January 2020). She has two forthcoming 2021 shows at Chinatown Soup in New York City, and Intervall Gallery (curated by Amanda Fortini) in Livingston, Montana.

Image: Cowgirl Attacked By A Jaguar oil on canvas 16 x 20 inches

83

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 22: curated selection

C i l l i a n M o y n i h a n

www.cillianmoynihan.com

Image: Souvenir from another life oil, acrylic, pastel & varnish on canvas panel 12.5 x 18 cm

84

As a child I was an explorer, crawling through bushes, climbing trees and building forts. As we become adults all these things leave our lives. For me, painting is the only place in life where that explorative freedom still exists.

I am inspired by memories, lyrics, stories, music and film. As I go about my day, I get an uncanny flash of a life I have lived and sometimes a life that I have not lived. I try to capture these moments as best as I can to give them form. Creating images gives me the freedom to spend as long as I want in any moment, preserving time and emotion. There is always a dialogue with the painting when it is being made. Each painting is built up in multiple layers of paints, pastels and varnish, changing form as if recreating a trail of thought.

Cillian Moynihan (B.1992) is an artist living and working in Cork, Ireland. He has exhibited nationally and has work in private and public art collections since his graduation from Crawford College of Art & Design, Cork, Ireland in 2015.

Image: What do you call love acrylic, pastel & varnish on canvas panel 12 x 16.5 cm

85

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 22: curated selection

M i c h a e l F a n t a

www.michaelfanta.com

Image: One Night in Vienna oil on cotton 33 x 27 cm

86

The oil paintings of Michael Fanta are often being characterized by their reductive composition and formal simplicity. On closer look, they reveal a strong emphasis on laborious surface treatment and highly detailed physical structure. Fanta switched from abstract painting to figuration and began using small canvases as test models for larger work. For offering more appealing possibilities of creating a language of childlike humor and intimacy, small format painting would later move into the center of his practice. Understanding painting as a tool for reflection and self-dialogue, Fanta is cultivating said humor dealing with issues as substance abuse, sexuality and violence. To the artist, painting is about willpower: “The hardest part is getting out of bed, going to the studio and changing into working clothes.”

Michael Fanta (b 1989) attended the class of Daniel Richter and received his Master of Arts Diploma from the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna in 2016. He also studied at the Iceland Academy of Arts in Reykjavik. He has had solo exhibitions at the Institute of Modern Art Nuremberg, the Austrian Cultural Forum Budapest and at Gallery Zeller van Almsick Vienna, in addition to a number of notable international group exhibitions. Fanta has participated in residency programs in Venice (IT), Zagreb (CR) and Athens (GR). Publications include Dark Bar (Verlag Forum Stadtpark 2018), Night Out (Institute of Modern Art Nuremberg 2018), WC (self-publishing 2019) and 100 Painters of Tomorrow (Thames and Hudson 2014). He lives in Vienna.

Image: Switch oil on wood 30 x 21 cm

87

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 22: curated selection

A l i c i a

R e y e s

M c N a m a r a

www.aliciareyesmcnamara.net

During quarantine I began a series of drawings that started as a place to put my anxieties, but it quickly became an investigation of folklore and rituals around loss, mourning and healing, in which beings and landscapes mutate and shape shift, creating a personal imaginary in forms of embodiment.

Alicia was born in Chicago, Illinois and currently lives and works in London. Alicia completed her MFA at University of Oxford Ruskin School of Art in 2016. Her work has been included in Bloomberg New Contemporaries exhibition at the Bluecoat in the Liverpool Biennial and later at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts. She was awarded the South London Gallery Graduate Residency 2016-17, where she exhibited in Spring 2017. She was the recipient of a residency at Kiosko Gallery in Bolivia through Gasworks and Triangle Network, as well as a residency at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in the US. She most recently was awarded an a-n bursary, a Jerwood Bursary, and the Chisenhale Studio Summer Residency. She has two solo shows she is looking forward to in 2021 at Lismore Castle Arts in Ireland and Niru Ratnam Gallery in London.

Image:

By Moonlight pastels and coloured pencil on paper 21 x 29.7 cm

88

K a t h e r i n e

C o l b o r n

www.katherinecolborn.com

Katherine Colborn is an artist living and working in Cincinnati, Ohio. She received her MFA in Studio Art at the University of North Carolina Greensboro and has exhibited her work around the US; recent exhibitions include a solo show at Greensboro Project Space in North Carolina, as well as group shows at Bolivar Art Gallery at the University of Kentucky, the Weatherspoon Art Museum, and nationally juried exhibitions at Site: Brooklyn, and Manifest Gallery. She currently teaches at Northern Kentucky University and will be completing a residency at Vermont Studio Center this summer.

My studio work is fueled by a desire to alleviate the contemporary pressures of a culture propelled by competition and production. I use framing and perspectival shifts to process images and structures at a time when—as a result of late capitalism and global crises—the concepts of home and rest are in constant flux. In an attempt to counter feelings of distance, upheaval and anxiety, painting is my quiet resistance: it encourages reflections upon transience and domestic life and offers space to navigate transition. It is an attempt to fix the unfixable—to pin down the fluid concept of the sacred. Inspired by hermeneutic philosophy and apophatic theology, I find myself swinging between contradictory states of belief.

I am chasing steadiness in a liminal place that encompasses a simultaneous coming and going. This experience manifests itself most often in protected spaces, thus I’ve been led in my work to themes of threshold and sanctuary. My works create a respite and an entryway. They remind us that painting, in its stillness and imaginative capabilities, teaches us to rest where we do not live.

Image: So Short a Distance oil on gessoed panel 12 x 9 inches

89

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 22: curated selection

editorial selection of works Featured image: Johanna Seidel High Noon oil on wood 21 x 28 cm more on p. 109

F r a n z i s k a

G ü t t l e r

www.franziskaguettler.de

Image: Ich warte schon so lange auf dich oil on linen 150 x 130 cm

92

I once dreamed of a message in a bottle that had travelled across the sea through the decades into the future. It was washed up in 2092 on a coast, which is where it was found. I saw indistinct figures, walking, standing and opening the bottle on a misty beach. Instead of a written message, the bottle contained noises and images. Suddenly the figures looked very distinct and one was wearing a shiny green jacket. It started raining, and that is when I woke up.

In our content saturated society it is often hard to disconnect, and in turn, re-connect with our imagination. The works of Franziska Güttler are a rare opportunity to release from reality and enter a world of fantastical freedom. Scenes are set with an array of characters: frolicking foxes, peacocks perched on a budding branch, crocodiles in conversation with coupled figures, as fish spring from the water at their feet. Nature, animals and humans act together in a nonhierarchic collaboration. The stage is set, but the procession of play is left enigmatic. This freedom of narrative invites us to shed societal restrictions and look at the world with our own rules. The scenes can stagger between dystopian or utopian, the line is left unclear.

Güttler grew up in Dresden during the GDR and shares a picture of her as a young girl attending the peaceful demonstrations in 1989. We naturally move on to the post-reunification years that followed in the early ’90s: “in my (childlike) memory the situation or land was immersed in a feeling of a timeless full stop or break and at the same time breathing in an air of freedom, of loss for the people leaving, heading westward, of uncertainty, danger and hope.”

Güttler studied fine painting and graphics class at the Academy of Fine Arts in Dresden, leading on to HGB Leipzig, then back to Dresden for her masters.

East German art academies are known for their technical brilliance, something that is clearly deep-rooted in her practice.

Image: Falstadt oil on linen 200 x 160 cm

93

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 22: editorial selection

V i c e n t e

B l a n c o

www.vicente-blanco.com

Image: Todo lo que fue tocado (Everything that was touched) colored pencils and watercolor on paper 110 x 165 cm

94

Drawing, as a primary medium, is the basis of my artistic research: from the first animation videos, paper relief collages and pencil and ink drawings. I approach drawing as a kind of sieve through which I can filter images proceeding from different worlds: real and imagined, integrating elements coming from my context and the world of art or architecture which are heavily loaded with symbolism. My projects arise from the observation of my closest environment. I live in a rural area where identity, traditions, architecture, landscape and language are fading, absorbed by new economic models. Aesthetics are not valued and the appreciation for details and care for the environment disappear under neoliberal models that import luxury and the exotic. In this context, I use drawing to create an imaginary of something that no longer exists, of something that has disappeared. In drawings we look for truth, not power. In that sense drawing interests me as an essential tool to build other narratives about belonging, care, responsibility or collective and individual memory.

Vicente Blanco, Santiago de Compostela (Spain), received his BFA from the University of Vigo in 1997. He has shown his work in several solo exhibitions such as Lo que se espera de nosotros, CGAC (Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea, 2003); Alguna vez pasa cuando estáis dormidos, Espacio Uno, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, (Madrid, 2004), The Proll Thing. 16 proyectos de arte español, ARCO’ 06, (Madrid, 2006); Otra vez algo nuevo, Galería Elba Benítez (Madrid, 2006), Contrato para paisaje, Galerie van der Mieden (Antwerp, 2009) or Estructuras para pertenecer, Galería silvestre, (Madrid, 2019). He received among others, scholarships for the artistic creation Beca Endesa for the Plastic Arts (2005-2007), Beca Unión Fenosa (2003- 2005) and Beca de Proyectos Generación 2000 (2001).

Image: Todo lo que fue tocado (Everything that was touched) colour pencils, charcoals and watercolor on canvas 110 x 165 cm

95

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 22: editorial selection

A m y

B r a v o

www.amybravo.com

Amy Bravo is a Cuban/Italian American painter, born 1997 in New Jersey and currently based in Brooklyn, New York. She received her Bachelor’s of Fine Arts degree in Illustration at Pratt Institute in 2019, and currently is working toward a Master’s of Fine Arts degree at Hunter College.

Bravo has recently come to fine-arts painting, completing her first large-scale work on canvas in 2018. Bravo is an artist interested in the shared language of culture and family, be it a found, queer family, or blood relatives. Her work is an attempt to understand and reflect the existence of a queer Cuban person who has neither a found family, nor many living blood relatives of Cuban descent left. Challenged with the complications of Cuban politics (particularly in regards to homosexuality), Bravo’s large scale paintings seek to create an impossible utopia in the vague outline of Cuba, with the impossibility being the most crucial element. This utopian desire hinges on the question of what it means to love someone or somewhere you do not always agree with. What does it mean to love unconditionally? What toll does it take? Who picks up the pieces?

Image: Se un Bravo acrylic, graphite, wax pastel and collage on cut canvas 68 x 78 inches

96

Z u z a n a

S v a t i k

www.svatikxsekac.sk

I graduated from AFAD in Bratislava, Slovakia in 2018. I work primarily with the media of ceramics, drawing and painting. Theoretically I am concerned with the problematics of gender equality, searching for one’s own identity, gender stereotypes and prejudices of Eastern Europe, “masculine” and “feminine” nature of people, things and activities, expectations of dominance and submission. My work connects these contrasts and analyzes pressure, seething, tension, ambiguity, and subsequent liberation of the object, its narrativity and its archetypal nature. The theoretical dimension of my work builds upon the practical one, and by means of ironizing these historical, biological and social interconnections, it reflects my own personal experience with them. I believe that a vase doesn’t have to be decorated with flowers and abstract patterns only, I believe that through a committed painting qua mode of decoration of utility objects I can mediate messages, reflect reality and contemporary situation, and also emphasize the potential of applied art and ceramics as an opinion-shaping medium in the formation of society’s democratic values. As an artist, I am deeply concerned with this problematic because it asks why decorate vases with flowers, why obey the ideal of beauty in applied art, why surrender the ability to reflect everyday reality with its social and political tensions. I perceive the vase as an archetype, an object in our households and living rooms immediately tied to the feelings of home. However, it is also a metaphor for the stereotypical view of women as homemakers, vain decorators and housewives. My work hinges on the social and gender prejudices and depicts the influence of this environment and way of thinking on my art. It reflects my impressions of society, people, personal identity, popular culture, social constructs, naming of the acceptable and unacceptable, good and bad.

Image: Bitches running the show glazed clay 37 x 32 cm

97

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 22: editorial selection

M e g a n

R e a

www.meganrea.co.uk

Image (left): Assisi oil on handmade paper 19.4 x 33.7 cm

Image (right): Drenched in Tuscan Sunbeams oil on handmade paper 50.3 x 82 cm

98

I am a painter from London and mainly work in oils. The past year has forced me to rethink the scale of my paintings and the surface that I work on. Producing work away from the studio encouraged me to use accessible materials and begin experimenting with a new process. My current practice celebrates fictitious cityscapes in Italian frescoes by reimagining them as architectural fragments in their freshly painted state.

Inspired by the shallow perspective of medieval Sienese and Florentine works, building facades are stripped of their adornments and abstracted, angled to bring them to life in a playful trompe I’oeil. Early Renaissance structures depicted in paintings by Fra Angelico and Giotto are re-envisaged in concertina form, enhancing the strength and vigour of the original buildings. Crenellated walls weave around angled pillars, archways stack like bricks to mimic contemporary high-rises.

The preparatory technique involves finely blending newspaper with water, draining it, and rolling the pulp onto a wooden board to dry. In some way, this reflects the arduous preparation of the frescoes where layers of plaster were applied before the outline of the composition, sinopie, was painted with an earth-coloured wash in preparation for the final thin layer of plaster, intonaco. Volume and perspective are achieved in the fresco pieces with the subtle employment of light and shade and I have used colour washes to mimic the once vibrant, now friable appearance of the fresco cycles. This effect is enhanced by the dampened then dried newspaper and echoes the gradual decomposition of the plaster in a number of the fresco cycles, a reminder of the passage of time and of the transitory nature of life itself.

Image: Night Murmurs oil on handmade paper, metal eyelets, ribbon, wood 51.2 x 31.3cm (paper only)

99

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 22: editorial selection

A n d r e w O r l o s k i

www.andreworloski.com

Image: Saint Without A Shrine cast bronze, cinderblock 140 x 119 x 23 cm

100

Andrew Orloski (b. 1986) is a multidisciplinary artist who primarily works in the language of sculpture.

Andrew lives and works in Fresno, California but was raised outside of Philadelphia and has spent the past decade working for various colleges and universities around the country; namely Wellesley College in Massachusetts, Grinnell College in Iowa and most recently, California State University, Fresno. The artist is currently an MFA candidate at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and holds a BFA from Millersville University, Pennsylvania and a Post Baccalaureate in Sculpture and Extended Media from Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia.

Image: It Remembers cast bronze and glass 53 x 28 x 27 cm

101

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 22: editorial selection

A m b a

S a y a l - B e n n e t t

www.ambasb.com

Amba Sayal-Bennett works across drawing, projection and sculptural installation. Her practice explores how agency operates within human and non-human assemblages, from our use of language to material encounters in the studio.

Amba Sayal-Bennett (b. 1991) lives and works in London. She received her BFA from Oxford University and her MA in the History of Art from The Courtauld Institute. She was awarded her PhD in Art Practice and Learning from Goldsmiths and has published her practice-based research with Tate Papers. Amba is a co-founder of Cypher Billboard, an artist-run public program of site-specific billboard artworks and off-site projects based in London. Select solo exhibitions include A Mechanised Thought, indigo+madder, London (2020); Every Line Makes a Cut, Carbon 12, Dubai (2019); Plane Maker, Carbon 12, Dubai (2017); Diffraction Metis, Yve Yang Gallery, Boston (2016); and Deft Nodes, Lundgren Gallery, Palma de Mallorca (2016). Recent group exhibitions include Odds, TOMA, Southend (2019); ABSINTHE §2, Collective Ending, London (2019); Espacio, Luz y Orden, José de la Fuente, Santander (2019); A Plot for the Multiverse, indigo+madder, London, (2019); And Proceed To Fill The Next Fold, The Future, Galleri 21, Malmö (2019); and A World In Vertigo, Brunel Museum, London (2019).

Image: Hitch powder coated mild steel, fabric, foam, chemiwood, MDF and tape 96 x 71 x 62 cm

102

H a n n a h

H u g h e s

www.hannah-hughes.com

Hannah Hughes is a London-based visual artist. Her practice incorporates collage, photography and sculpture, using photographic fragments and discarded everyday materials to create speculative forms situated between flat images and the physical world. Hughes works with a hidden vocabulary of shapes found in the negative spaces surrounding the body. The jostling sculptural compositions in her collages navigate our sensory relationships with objects, architecture, and other bodies. They recall physical actions such as zipping and rooting, folding and tucking, and unseen forces of gravity and weight. Crossing from one fragmented form to another through openings and seams, Hughes’s collages explore the nature of spatial boundaries, borders and edges, reflecting a desire to travel through the photographic image, peel back its corners and get to the other side.

Hannah Hughes (b. 1975) graduated from the University of Brighton in 1997 and has since exhibited in the UK and internationally. Recent group exhibitions include: ‘These Fingers Read Sideways’, Fettes College, Edinburgh, (2018); ‘Concealer’, Peckham 24, London, (2018); ‘A Romance of Many Dimensions’, Sid Motion Gallery, London, (2018); ‘The Office of Revised Futures’, Format Festival, Derby, (2019); ‘The Truth in Disguise’, GESTE, Paris, (2019); ‘New Formations’, Catherine Edelman Gallery, Chicago, (2020); ‘Super Flatland’, White Conduit Projects, London, (2020); and ‘Gleaners: Olivia Bax & Hannah Hughes’, Sid Motion Gallery, London, (2020). She has recently exhibited a site-specific work for ‘Entractes #15’ using the windows of The Eye Sees gallery, Arles, France (2021). Her work has also been included in ‘The State of Things’, published as part of Landskrona Festival, Sweden, (2020); and an experimental publication ‘Material Immaterial’ by Rodrigo Orrantia (2018-2020).

Image: Mirror Image #42 collage 13.6 x 9.8cm

103

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 22: editorial selection

A l i n a B i r k n e r

www.alinabirkner.com

Image: Untitled (Happy Cell) acrylic on canvas 170 x 120 cm

104

Alina Birkner was born in 1989 in Munich. From 2010 to 2016 she studied Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. She lives and works in Munich.

“Alina Birkner’s work inspires contemplation. Derived from the symbolic use of the spiral, synonymous with rebirth and the passage of life unfolding, Birkner’s work causes the viewer to stop and gaze. Enveloped by gentle palette-soft pinks, purples and yellows, the works vibrate with a quiet intensity. Inspired by strong female artists of the past such as Hilma Af Klint, Georgia O’Keeffe and Agnes Pelton, Birkner’s work channels the mysticism and otherworldliness of her predecessors. In a contemporary art world overwrought with flash in the pan trends and rapidly changing markets, Birkner’s thoughtful and penetrating works are a welcome voice. Her continued explorations of spiritual meaning presented in the form of two-dimensional works that radiate with weightless luminosity are an inspiration.”

Courtesy of Mindy Solomon Gallery

Image (left): Untitled (Three Happy Seeds) acrylic on canvas 170 x 120 cm

Image (right): Untitled (Outer Planet Seedling) acrylic on canvas 170 x 120 cm

105

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 22: editorial selection

A l i a

A h m a d

www.aliaahmad.com

Image: The Farm oil on canvas 122 × 152.5 cm

106

Alia Ahmad is a 24-year-old Saudi Arabian painter (b.1996). Graduating in 2018 from King’s College London with a BA in Digital Culture, she started to focus on research in Fine Art. Recently graduated with a Masters from the Royal College of Art, Alia concentrates on painting but uses a range of media to narrate the way that memory, place and landscape can converge within a written and visual practice.

Alia’s colour palette is influenced by an upbringing in Riyadh’s industrial/desert landscape. A majority of her paintings represent the different placid dreamscapes, with linear impressions of the Saudi landscape. The visual language of the paintings plays on the tense contradiction that exists between the extreme emptiness of place and its lush characteristics. Using drawings made in a specific place, she focuses on key aspects such as local flora in a chosen environment. She has recently been looking into a way to play with perspective in the landscape by placing an emphasis on the temporal nature of day and night. Her works examine the point at which light touches upon distinct parts of the land. Additionally, she aims to investigate balance between natural elements, such as light and plants, by painting them even more explicitly. Alia finds that by directing paintings towards the ‘linguistic’, through a use of motifs, she is able to steer the narration within the work. The overarching narrative in the current paintings focuses on the way that memory is able to act as well as react, to the theme of landscape in the Saudi environment.

Image: Notes On Flowers oil on canvas 160 x 160 cm

107

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 22: editorial selection

Y a n

C o p e l l i

www.yancopelli.com

Yan Copelli’s investigations unfold in a cross-disciplinary manner. Whether traditional or digital media are used, his works open a field of ontological speculations of objects, exchanging shapes among themselves, common uses and significations in which utilitarian or decorative artifacts have in relation to the bodies they adorn. Generally, hybridity, torsions and the recurrence of specific colors and themes are aspects that draw reflections on identity constructs, as well as signifiers of taste.

We may identify his poetics, for example, with the metonymies attributing body parts to parts of objects—feet, hands, head, neck. It is according to this sort of semantic dislocation that Yan gives life to his work, a particularly performative and extravagant life, full of poses and tricks. His works, including paintings, claim a body-like condition for themselves.

Image: Vamp oil on canvas 60 x 40 cm

108

J o h a n n a

S e i d e l

www.cargocollective.com/johannaseidel

Johanna Seidel, born 1993, Sebnitz, Germany, lives and works in Dresden. Johanna studied Fine Arts and Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts Dresden and the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts Paris and was part of exhibitions in Dresden, Leipzig, Paris and Berlin.

In my artistic work I deal with the nature of perceived realities. I approach these by means of a poetic visual language, in which symbols from history, mythology and dreams mix with the everyday and the personal. The canvas offers me the space in which I can freely create references and develop narratives, constantly searching for the balance between realistic and naive figuration. From the painting itself, I thus develop stories and still images that exist in an atmospheric space, condensing memories into abstract moments that become universally accessible and experiential here.

Image: It´s a secret oil on canvas 100 x 100 cm

109

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 22: editorial selection

W i l l i a m S c h a e u b l e

www.instagram.com/willschaeuble

Image: Bird Watchers, No. 3 oil on canvas 55 x 65 inches

110

I was born and raised in Iowa with one goal and one goal only: to catch the biggest freshwater pond fish in the Midwest. But since that is an ongoing process and might take a while I started painting naked bald people and dogs with long tails as a way to pass the time. When not painting or pretending to be a cat, I‘m hanging largemouth bass from trees and trying to get birds to land in my hands. If you buy my paintings I will use the money to fund my fountain pen collection, fuel my evening ice cream routine, pay off school and my rent and help advance my career so I don’t have to go home and work for my parents.

I often describe my work as ‘paintings about nothing’. I tell little stories that if you think about hard enough you can find the meaning of life in, but most of the time they are pretty pictures about nothing. I’m interested in people, places and things and the different outcomes I get when combining them. The little moments of the day to day that have a sense of humor fuel my practice.

Image: Best In Show, No. 2 oil on canvas 24 x 18 inches

111

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 22: editorial selection

J o c e l y n

To f f i c

www.jtoffic.com

Image: Genesis oil on canvas 200 x 125 cm

112

Jocelyn Toffic is a figurative narrative artist working mainly in oil, although she dabbles in mixed media assemblages, video, and live/dead animal installations. She is a 2007 graduate of the University of New Hampshire’s Art Department where she received a fellowship for her final year of undergraduate study. Jocelyn is also co-founder and co-curator of the ARTpm Challenge, a late Winter event open to the public designed to further develop a community of creativity in the seacoast of New Hampshire and Maine, where the artist lives. The event culminates in a huge group show at BUOY Gallery in Kittery, ME. Jocelyn exhibits her work extensively in New England, and occasionally NYC and San Francisco.

She has done two winter Icelandic artist residencies. The first in 2013 at HEIMA in Seydisfjordur and the second in 2015 Hafnarfjordur Museum .

Her work is part of the permanent collection at the Icelandic Phallological Museum and Hafnarborg Museum.

Her most recent focus is a large scale series working title Through Dangers Untold. It has been ongoing since 2009. This body of work makes its own mythology but was based heavily on an academic level study of world mythologies with a focus on the teachings of Joseph Campbell and Nordic Mythology (specifically the prose Edda of the Icelandic Sagas). These large tapestry-like narrations allude to great battles between men and monsters and children, who know more of the darkness than we give them credit for. It is a series born of plots unknown, deep mysteries that respond to questions with only more questions. Like the ancient cave paintings, they come from a gutteral primal place, and leave a mark.

And they are filled with darkness. Lest we forget that darkness is real and a part of the human tapestry and as deserving of honor, as the light.

Image: Stone Cliffs Paper Dolls oil on canvas 140 x 100 cm

113

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 22: editorial selection

L i a n

Z h a n g

www.lycheeone.com/wp/artist/lian-zhang

Image: Apple oil on canvas 30 x 40 cm

114

My working practice is based upon a practice of assembling constellations of images through which a serial network of fractured narratives start to emerge. Partly this involves a splicing together of the imaginary and reality in ways that break up the logic of both realms and syntax of images. The process of fracturing opens out the process to differing velocities so the paintings might appear in a state of arrest or suspension, as being in slow motion or even subject to the blur of speed. It is as the underlying laws pertaining to physical reality are transformed but the way in which images might start to cohere into their departure from the habitual. If images are subject to the process of fragmentation, then temporality is likewise, and in this way, new and surprising conjunctions might yield from the folding operations of interiority and exteriority.

There are two types of drawing in my work, one pertaining to the inscription of figures and forms and one that draws lines pertaining to invisible abstractions. Painting is the means of discovering just how these two orders of inscription might cohere together. Recently a shift has started to occur in my work. There is the same kind of multiplicity and fragmentation, but it is directed away from the memory of either collage or cinematic montage toward the construction of imaginary mood-scapes in which traces of memory surface but without definite anchorage. They might be drifting apart from any sense of fixed determination or stylistic will. I might say that this is born out of hybridity as a critical concept but that is a far too lazy term because it implies a critical operation or device. Instead the word fascination comes to mind because it evokes the suspension of both time and will.

Image: Shou Tao oil on canvas 40 x 50 cm

115

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 22: editorial selection

O l e g Ts y b a

www.olegtsyba.com

Image: Leda and the Swan oil on canvas 180 x 180 cm

116

Oleg Tsyba is a Russian artist: Like many artists before me, I try to comprehend the form as the primary component of art.

The spaces and heroes in my works have an alternative color scheme—with this I emphasize that the color of the skin does not matter. The modern world still cannot accept the truth—we are all equal and everyone is unique. Most often, the subjects for my works are myths and ancient scriptures. These themes are always relevant to Humanity—they tell us about love, passion and death. They inspire me to create my artworks.

Image: The Sleeping Venera oil on canvas 320 x 160 cm

117

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 22: editorial selection

P a u l

B o o t h

www.paulgbooth.com

Paul Booth (b. 1978) lives and works in New York City. His drawings explore recurring themes such as self-portraiture, literary and mythical figures, religious iconography, and Sisyphean feats.

Compositions, whether populated by many bodies or a single figure, occupy a compressed space they are never able to burst free from.

His work was recently featured at NADA Miami by SITUATIONS. Booth studied painting and printmaking at Arizona State University.

Image: Hand in the Rain with a Flower oil and charcoal on canvas board 14 x 11 inches

118

C a r y

H u l b e r t

www.caryhulbert.com

Cary Hulbert is a multidisciplinary New York-based artist, educator, and curator. Cary received her MFA from Columbia University, BFA from Montserrat College of Art, and is a Bronx Museum Artist in the Marketplace alumni. Her exhibition highlights include Fisher Landau Center (NYC), The Jewish Museum (NYC), Ortega y Gasset Projects (NYC), IPCNY (NYC), Danforth Museum (Boston), Liu Haisu Art Museum (Shanghai), Taimiao Art Gallery (Beijing) and the Museum of Contemporary Art Vojvodina (Novi Sad).

I create environments untouched by humanity: wild, untethered to gravity, mixing and merging with minds of their own. I see my work as a return of power to nature. Playful, scary, and beautiful, each piece redefines the natural world’s imaginable capabilities and evolution. Working within a multidisciplinary practice, my work spans sculpture, installation, printmaking, and drawing. Often incorporating various techniques and mediums, my work transcends boundaries, further creating a unique environment.

I imagine a world void of humanity’s influence, leaving flora and fauna to intermingle and transform as the work progresses.

I create my work by intricately layering to build depth and play with my space. For example, my drawings are often on translucent frosted mylar, containing different layers of drawing, painting, and silkscreening on the front and back. Bright colors demonstrate a natural beauty while simultaneously serving as warning signs. I imagine new species, ecosystems, and environments. Each of my artworks is a new world, a new dimension, and a chance to change one’s understanding of nature. My viewer, typically the only human presence, is left to explore and be a part of this newly imagined, natural potential.

Image: Looking Up color pencil, gouache, and silkscreen 20 x 16.5 inches

119

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 22: editorial selection

S u n g

H w a

K i m

www.sunghwakim.com

Image: Nocturne: Night after night, I’m about to write another line of my confession acrylic and gouache on canvas 24 x 18 inches

120

At the start of the pandemic, the absence of human interaction and the collective uncertainly about the future incited feelings of anxiety and fear. Like many artists, I found the act of creation challenging. There was something shameful about being in my studio while all over the city, all over the world, people were suffering. I started taking long, late-night bike rides to escape both my thoughts and worries and New York City’s crowded streets and subways. The “Nocturne” series captures the particular scenes, emotions, and images, that I experienced while on my nightly excursions. I found that under the cover of darkness, light appeared brighter. Moving through the night was like navigating through the uncertainty of our current moment. The moon, the stars, and the fireflies, became my guides, beacons of hope, compassion, and goodwill toward humanity. Capturing these moments of light breaking through darkness brought me inner peace and comfort, I hope the viewer is able to feel that same sense of solace.

Sung Hwa Kim (b. Seoul, South Korea) received his MFA at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in 2012, and his BFA from The Art Institute of Boston in 2008. After graduating from MICA, Kim attended the Windy Mowing Painting Residency in Halifax Vermont and was a semi-finalist for the prestigious Janet and Walter Sondheim Prize at the Baltimore Museum of Art. Kim has exhibited his work throughout the northern east coast in Maryland, Massachusetts and New York. Since 2014 Kim has been featured in many online sources including Hyperallergic, Young Space, CHAOS Magazine and Friend of The Artist. Kim moved to New York City in 2014 where he currently lives and works.

Image: Nocturne: Last Night’s dream and unspoken feelings acrylic and gouache on canvas 30 x 24 inches

121

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 22: editorial selection

M a t t h e w B a i n b r i d g e

Image: On the tragic loss of a bountiful kingdom coloured pencil on paper 24 x 32 cm

122

Matthew Bainbridge (b. 1992, Jarrow, UK) graduated from the Glasgow School of Art in 2014 with first class honours from the School’s painting & printmaking program. He currently lives and works in Amsterdam, NL. Bainbridge’s drawings provoke the superficiality of surface with imagined worlds and quasi-personal characters. Cartoonish landscapes are as deep as they are dumb, overly-saturated, and impossibly plastic. Collective longing is found within the drooping of a flower, and wistful boredom in the bending of a root; familiar, organic lifeforms, twisted into personhood by the wanting hand of the artist. Always present is an all-seeing moon—sometimes an eye, transfixed, unwaveringly—as omniscient as a god hanging luminous in the sky.

His works are reactions to in-the-moment emotions, processed and laboured over against the wider weight of the world. A wrought tableau, a personal, cryptic newspaper.

www.matthewbainbridge.com

Image: Dragon’s Tryst coloured pencil on paper 16 x 12 inches

123

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 22: editorial selection

M a s a r u

S u y a m a

www.instagram.com/suyama_masaru

Image: Man takes, man taken acrylic on canvas 162 x 162 cm

124

Masaru Suyama is a self-taught painter based in Japan.

He initially had his sights set on cartooning, applying for numerous cartooning prizes and was selected as a GARO prize finalist by the prestigious GARO cartooning magazine. Cartooning was his first experience in art making. He is now a skilled mixed media painter. Masaru has exhibited in Tokyo, London and New York.

Image: His usual route acrylic on canvas 162 x 130 cm

125

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 22: editorial selection

M a u r a

S a p p i l o

www.cargocollective.com/maurasappilo

Maura Sappilo studied in London at Camberwell College of Art and the Royal Drawing School. She is currently stuck in her family home near Matera, in the South of Italy.

Maura explores mysterious and incomplete narratives through the combined use of heavily worked images and ‘borrowed’ text (or collage poems). She draws inspiration from art, music, fashion and crafts history, as well as film and literature. Her work so far includes drawings, gouache paintings, artists books, installations, animations, and bands merchandise.

Image: For an orange ink on paper 25 x 18 cm

126

L i e k e

R o m e i j n

www.liekeromeijn.nl

Lieke Romeijn is a 29 year old woman living in The Netherlands. She takes photographs, makes ceramics and loves to paint. Colours are very important in all of her creations and she likes to reunite animals and humans in her oil monotypes.

Image: Animals humans humans animals oil monotype 16 x 24 cm

127

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 22: editorial selection

C o r e y R u e c k e r

www.coreyruecker.com

Image: Crossing Over oil on linen 18 x 24 inches

128

Corey Ruecker: University of California, Davis, 2013, BA Philosophy, Art History Ind. Study; Boston University, MFA 2016. Rep: Good Naked, Brooklyn, NYC. The history, vibe, and culture of Los Angeles directly informs my work. I see my work as an intersection between my indigenous heritage, my Chicanx identity, and my travels. I’ve lived in many places throughout my life and painting is a way for me to share those stories.

Image: Lost Coyotes oil on linen 23 x 28 inches

129

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 22: editorial selection

J i l l i a n D o l a n

www.jilliandolan.com

My recent paintings attempt to construct alternative emblems for America that exist in our cultural memory, and decipher them within narrative encounters. The work then becomes object portraiture—the personification of inanimate things.

I am interested in the mythologies that shape contemporary ideas of American exceptionalism. These are myths about gold panning, harvests, the fisherman in the yellow raincoat, and our relationship to animals, real or folk legend. One proposed anti-symbol is the spotted bindle or “hobo sack”. It is of a wayward and wandering entity, concealed possessions, a stand-in for the body, temporary displacement or a migratory existence. History becomes mythology in the contemporary perversion of symbols. The splintered channels of American life disprove or sustain figments of this Romantic America. Which and whose mythologies become our inherited identity? Which do we reject and rewrite?

Image: Gold Panning egg tempera on panel 8 x 10 inches

130

M e l a n i e

B a r n e t t

www.instagram.com/melanie.barnett.ceramics

Amidst a collapsing environment, I ask myself what the future may hold. How long will the Earth’s surface remain habitable, and how long do we have to reverse the potentially irreparable climate crisis caused by human actions? Perhaps an untimely death to humanity is closer to destiny than it is to destruction—maybe that is what it means to be human.

Detritus provides foreshadowing of humanity’s fate to perhaps one of the last generations with the time and resources to reverse ecological damage.

Moss, liverworts, and fungi – all ancient organisms that have lived far longer than we can imagine—consume human figures in grotesque, fantastical ways, reducing them to a state of detritus by way of an enhanced decomposition process. I am interested in the permanence of ceramic; compared to the average human life span, ceramic works are essentially immortal. Forever is a long time, and these works will tell our story for generations to come, whether or not life continues to exist. For too long, humanity has chosen to ignore the damage that we have caused to the planet, and as a consequence to our own inaction, one day we shall pay the ultimate price.

Melanie Barnett is a contemporary figurative sculptor currently residing in Brandon, Manitoba, Canada on Treaty 2 Territory. Originally from Grandview, Manitoba, an agricultural community of less than 1000 people, Barnett’s work speaks to her unique relationship with land and earth as both an autonomous figure as well as a commodity. Her current body of work, Detritus, consists of a series of figurative ceramic sculptures and watercolour drawings which speak to humanity’s relationship with the planet and the consequences of the climate crisis. Barnett will be graduating in May 2021 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts Honours in Ceramics from Brandon University.

Image: Slept within the soil glazed ceramic and acrylic paint 13.0 x 14.0 x 19.5 inches

131

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 22: editorial selection

B r i a n

S c o t t

C a m p b e l l

www.brianscottcampbell.com

Image: Cape flashe on canvas 20 x 16 inches

132

These landscapes combine everyday iconographies, archetypes, and hallucinations. Like a garden, the spaces I am interested in are at once portals to a physical world and yet completely artificial. As such, the imagery in my work reflects the idea of memory itself, as a collection of real and fictional experiences. Drawing—an important gravitational point and central language for these paintings— accounts for the preference for flatness, grayscale colors, and trading heavily in lively immediacy. Humor is allowed to surface while also being deftly held in check, taking a jab at the sublime, and permitting something sober and emblematic to emerge.

Brian Scott Campbell (b. 1983, Columbus, OH) received a BFA from Columbus College of Art and Design, OH and an MFA from Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University, NJ. Campbell lives and works in Denton, Texas and is Assistant Professor of Drawing and Painting at The University of North Texas.

Campbell has exhibited widely including shows at Stene Projects, Stockholm; Arts + Leisure, New York; Dutton, New York; Fredericks & Freiser, New York; Asya Geisberg Gallery, New York; Jeff Bailey Gallery, New York; Anna Zorina, New York; Metropolitan Art Society, Beirut (curated by Suzanne Geiss Co. New York); Zevitas Marcus, Los Angeles; David Shelton Gallery, Houston; David Risley Gallery, Copenhagen; NADA New York and Untitled Miami Beach Art Fairs among others. Awards and residencies include Atlantic Center for the Arts Residency; the Macedonian Institute; a McColl Center for Visual Art Full Fellowship; a Vermont Studio Center Fellowship, the Artist in the Marketplace Program, Bronx Museum, New York. Campbell’s work has been featured in Modern Painters / Blouin ArtInfo; Whitehot Magazine; Contemporary Art Review LA (CARLA), The Huffington Post; Hyperallergic; Glasstire; i-D Magazine / Vice; and Art Viewer, amongst others.

Image: Mid Summer flashe on canvas 20 x 16 inches

133

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 22: editorial selection

K e e n a n

D e r b y

www.keenanderby.com

Image: Sitting on top of the world oil on linen panel 16 x 12 inches

134

My current paintings are part of an ongoing exploration of light and color inspired by the forests and deserts of Southern California. This series of work draws influence from the ecosystems of the desert chaparral, examining how desert scrub plants grow outwards against the landscape, expanding their root systems to seek out groundwater. I aim to capture the twisted and gnarled forms of the ancient pinyon pines and junipers, sagebrush, and creosote as they break through and obfuscate the deceptively expansive and wrinkling vistas and the light-saturated haze that envelops the surrounding valleys, hills, and mountains.

Drawing and painting within these primordial landscapes provide me with a rich trove of material to be further examined in my studio-based practice. Back in the studio, direct observational paintings function as artifacts of my lived experience. These time records form the basis for slower, larger-scale works. In these larger studio paintings, I use accumulated layers of washes, scrapes, smears, and layers of color that push and pull against one another to create a sense of depth and space. The plein air works bring to the table a specificity of place in terms of atmosphere, density, color, and depth. Through the processes of replication and manipulation, these organic structures transform to take on new forms and meaning. Each piece builds upon another, guiding and creating a memory connected to both the external landscape and to an everchanging internal microcosm. The convergence of these two modes of working becomes a meditation on time.

Keenan Derby is an Atlanta, GA native, currently living and working in Los Angeles, California. In addition to studying at the International School of Painting, Drawing, and Sculpture, Montecastello di Vibio in Italy, Derby received his MFA from Boston University and BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art.

Image: Mountain view, rising moon oil on linen panel 9 x 14.5 inches

135

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 22: editorial selection

F l o r a M c L a c h l a n

www.floramclachlan.co.uk

Image: Underworld etching 40 x 44 cm

136

I live in the ancient landscape of Wales, in the UK, with my partner and two sons. Our house stands on the edge of a wild and empty moorland, backed by the Preseli hills. In the stone cow barn I have established my studio and print workshop, and there I work with etching, stone lithography and oil painting. I am currently doing a Masters in Fine Art at Aberystwyth School of Art. I have a degree in English Literature from Oxford University, and my work is deeply informed by those years spent wandering in dark and tangled thickets of words. The magical action of word-pictures and drawn pictures is what fascinates me—the spell-casting.

The submitted five etchings show my exploration of the image of the mythical forest. The wild forest in fairy tales and myths is chaotic, pathless and uncut; it is a marginal landscape. Entering it means passing over into another world, where great reversals and transformations are possible. To pass through the forest is to become changed. I found myself exploring the wild forest as an internal phenomenon. The image of the wilderness is linked to the unconscious—a teeming and unpredictable life-force, in which you could lose yourself. I remembered the symbolic quests of medieval romance poetry, adventuring through the nurturing and destructive aspects of the landscape, its nests and chasms, its sanctuaries entwined with sharp thorns.

As lockdown limited our adventurous roaming outside, I turned to look into the forest inside my mind, investigating those myths and folk tales which tangled with my own psyche. I took close-up photographs of tiny sections of etchings I had already completed to make the compositional shapes for this series. I wanted to switch off my usual ways of making an image, and tap into something unexpected, something aleatory and atavistic, from deep down inside myself. In the process of manipulating the fluid etching grounds to fit these found compositions, figures were glimpsed through the trees: not the usual questing knights, but women, moving quietly, at home in the undergrowth. These women are leaving the shelter of home and garden and seeking out the bonylegged witch. They are taking on impossible fairy tasks, they are weaving shirts out of nettles in silence, they are making and breaking enchantments: they are shapeshifting and dancing with wolves, they are gathering kindling, and they are listening to the sound of the wind in the trees.

For me these stories are not dynamic narratives. They are cyclical and reflective in nature, a dreamlike connection to the collective unconscious that lies like a richly jewelled magma underneath everything, at the core of humanity. Their message to me was, ‘You are not alone’.

Image: Kindling etching 40 x 44 cm

137

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 22: editorial selection

S y l v i a

F e r n á n d e z

www.sylvia-fernandez.com

Image: Conversación 9 oil on canvas 300 x 200 cm

138

Sylvia Fernández (Lima, 1978) studied at Corriente Alterna, an art school in Lima, Peru, where she graduated with honors in 2002. Since then, she has taken part in several group and solo shows both in Lima and abroad. She has participated in various competitions and was a finalist at the BCR Contest (Lima, 2018), ICPNA Contemporary Art Award (Lima, 2018), semi-finalist Portrait Award (London, 2017) and finalist in Focus at Abengoa Foundation (Spain, 2005), Passport for an Artist (Lima, 2004), among others. She has also participated in fairs such as Salon Acme (Mexico), Arco (Spain) and Art Fair Cologne (Germany). Her work is part of different local and foreign collections.

My working process is a delving dialogue with painting, a relationship that allows me to explore intuitively through the material arriving at images that connect internal intimate interests to plural universal ideas. I´m interested in associations driven by daily life merged with everyday subtle emotional changes letting me into an uncanny internal uncertain path. Recently my work has taken me to explore the abstract boundaries of the mind and body and their relation to nature, time and memory, life and its loss, the heartbreak of time, and what precious remains.

Image: No todo es oscuridad oil on paper 52 x 50 cm

139

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 22: editorial selection

O r i e l e

S t e i n e r

www.orielesteiner.com

Oriele’s work explores a wide array of painting techniques and processes, using colour and light as the dominant means of experimentation. She is interested in a palette’s ability to evoke emotion, whether through direct, singular use or via juxtaposition and dissonance. Her compositions portray vivid dreamscapes, and the figures within offer a sense of eeriness. The figures themselves often make their way in to her direct environment via found photography, imagination and drawings. Organic forms taken from this imagery transform themselves into a range of motifs, which dominate her work. These motifs are her way of building up a relationship with the imagery, and she continually builds upon this visual alphabet through uninhibited, free-associative drawing and painting. This results in a childlike quality that represents immediate, impulsive thoughts.

‘My mouth is bored’ explores Oriele’s relationship with food using humour and personal experiences—something artists have done at various points in history. In his painting ‘The Ricotta Eaters’, Vincenzo Campi paints himself as an over-indulging peasant. The humorous composition and figuration of him and his fellow diners is intended to confront all kinds of questions and taboos around the position of food in society, class, and culture at the time. These dichotomies—of capitalism, personal health, and addiction fascinate Oriele, as seen in her recent painting ‘A balanced Diet’ where she investigates her own relationship with these contradictions through the use of humorous, sarcastic imagery.

Image: There’s No ‘We’ in Food gouache on paper 28 x 38 cm

140

L y d i a

B a k e r

www.lydiakbaker.com

A need for a playful escapism led me to create my current body of work. As I draw, I immerse myself in different worlds, offering the viewer a point of departure from reality.

Trusting my intuitive nature, I use colored pencils on paper to create vibrant, whimsical scenes. Female figures enjoy bodily freedom, savoring moments of discovery and pleasure. The beauty of nature is spiritualized—nestled somewhere between pure harmony and the unknown.

Lydia Baker (b. 1990) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She received a BFA from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2013 and an MFA from the New York Academy of Art in 2020. She is a recipient of the 2020-21 Chubb Fellowship through the New York Academy of Art. Baker’s work has been featured by Juxtapoz magazine and exhibited throughout the United States, recently at Sugarlift Gallery in New York, NY and in the Chubb Insurance viewing room through Art Basel Miami Beach.

Image: She’s Not Heavy, She’s My Sister colored pencil on hand-painted Fabriano paper 22 x 7.5in, 22 x 15in, 22 x 7.5in (22 x 30 in total)

141

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 22: editorial selection

Ta l l u l a h

K i n g

www.tking563e.myportfolio.com

Tallulah is a second year illustration student: I’m not completely certain yet what my work is about, or what direction it will take. I do know that I’ve always been drawing the same strange characters, as much out of instinct as anything else. They are scrunched and grumpy—arms flailing, brows furrowed, sometimes fuzzy and sometimes not. They are all distinctly uncomfortable yet somehow content in their discomfort.

Through my work I try to investigate where they come from and what they have to teach me. Recently I’ve been really into puppet making and sculptural practices and I am curious as to how I can make my internal world have physicality and presence. My hope is that through this process I can connect what is in within me to the world outside, and begin to understand my role in all of it.

Image: So Much Alike pencil on manilla paper 9 x 12 inches

142

E r y n

L o u g h e e d

www.erynlou.com

Eryn Lougheed is an artist from Victoria BC, Canada. She has a Bachelor of Design from OCAD University in Toronto and was the recipient of the 2019 Illustration Medal.

Her work consists of paintings and objects, drawing inspiration from textiles, folk art, fiction, and the natural world.

Image: Goodbye to All That gouache on paper 8.5 x 11 inches

143

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 22: editorial selection

M a r i a

S e r g a

www.mariaserga.tumblr.com

Image: Lümmelmann oil on canvas 80 x 60 cm

144

Maria Serga, born in 1997 in Idar-Oberstein, is a Ukrainian-German artist based in Berlin studying at the University of Arts. Her paintings have interrogated the dissolution of private and public space, and the often bizarre situations currently taking place therein. Topics such as sexuality, instincts, middle-class behavior and the conformity are main components of her work. Her characters often forcing an uncomfortable confrontation with voyeurism and the things they do or have in mind when they think no one is watching. Maria Serga’s paintings are full of mysterious symbols. It reminds of a riddle, which you can’t solve to the end, because there is always a secret hidden.

Image: Give her some food oil on canvas 70 x 50 cm

145

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 22: editorial selection

B r a d S t u m p f

www.bradstumpf.com

Image: Trace the Contours oil on panel 11 x 14 inches

146

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. His paintings function like miniature stage sets; they are small in scale and consist of arrangements of handmade objects organized to depict lust, love, and expectation with visual poetry. The handmade objects within these paintings consist of paper birds, paper butterflies, drawings, and notes that add an additional layer of encapsulated thought. It is the poetry of the everyday, and love for his wife that inspires his setups. He wants his paintings to function like an open door to a quiet room for which you can peek into, or the stage-set of a play halfway through.

Image: We Plunge oil on panel 16 x 20 inches

147

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 22: editorial selection

N i n a

E l i z a b e t h

www.ninaelizabeth.net

My work is concerned with capturing qualities of colour and form that allude to the mystical and emotional dimensions of life. I am interested in encounters that awaken the heart, inspire wonder, and fill the spirit with joy.

Nina Elizabeth (b.1989 in Guadalajara, Mexico) is a visual artist based in Copenhagen and Berlin. Growing up between Denmark, Mexico and Sweden, she undertook her education in the UK, obtaining an MA from the Royal College of Art in London (2014).

Image: In the Depth of Winter watercolour on fabric 161 x 99.5 cm

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 22: editorial selection

148

We are looking to discover more emerging artists and to publish and help further 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.

For any questions, please feel free to get in touch with us at info@artmazemag.com