Justin Mortimer
Justin Mortimer (b.1970) is a British artist whose paintings consistently invite us to question the relationship between subject matter and content, beauty and horror, and between figuration and abstraction.
While the imagery is almost exclusively pitiless, the texturing of the paint, the play between light and shade and the passages that lead from photo-realist definition to near-abstract formlessness are so sensitively handled as to make the work at least partially redemptive as well as to indicate a key philosophical dimension: the oblique relationship between evidence and interpretation.
He won a national portrait competition when he was at the Slade, which showed that he was really into portrait world. He got the commission to paint Harold Pinter for the National Portrait Gallery when he was 21 and later that he was offered commissions from people such as David Bowie. He was already able to support himself as a portrait artist.
After college, he worked on the commissions and also what he wanted to paint which was imaginative works. Working in two things was his way to cope with the pressure and the stress when he did high-level commission such as painting a queen. His personal work was also very similar with his commission works, and he basically painted the same way but tried to race ahead and develop more for his own work.
He stopped doing commission works in 2008 and was able to survive from his sales of just his work.
During 2004, he was interested in Leipzig Painters.
A contested term referring to the generation of artists that studied at the Art Academy in Leipzig, Germany, and emerged during the post-reunification climate in the 1990s. Championed by dealer Gerd Harry Lybke, these artists can be loosely group together by a dedication to technical skill and figuration to depict the visual, economic, and social contrasts within the former East. Neo Rauch is one of the most famous artists to emerge from the school; his highly skilled, enigmatic scenes oppose the clear narrative or message dictated by the official style of Socialist Realism.
This time is when he started using photoshop and internet to make collages.
"I was dealing with the disassociated figure in space — the outsider — the person on the periphery of the situation, which is what I seem to be exploring more and more."
He has abandoned the very bright colour field paintings that he was making before and his colours went monochrome. He said that he re-educated himself in terms of colour and fro he next 6 or 7 years his paintings became very dark pictures, metaphorically and physically.
Kid (2015)
“Kid” shows a naked boy in a kind of forest scene — perhaps a campsite — with only a slight hint of campfire, surrounded by what could be a tent or some sheets hung out to dry. This painting alludes to the outcast, to the refugees who have been coming over on boats, to all these displaced children in Calais.
At one point the image was more sexual which was slightly problematic: I kind of regret dulling that down. It was rather like Eric Fischl’s painting “Sleepwalker” which shows a boy masturbating in a kiddie pool. I have always liked Eric Fischl’s work. When the young Brits — Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin among them — were taking off in the early ‘90s, Fischl was the lifeline that kept European representational artists going. We were referencing him, and the weird “otherness” that he had.
Image
Das Besucher (2004)
this picture it started with this ultimate European holiday destination — quite an old image from the 1960s or ‘70s. It’s so quintessentially European, and yet you have nurses in Ebola protective gear walking up the hill towards you. These Ebola figures came in towards the end of this painting: initially I had a sort of bent-over figure with three arms coming out of his face, a bit like my painting “Nes Ziona,” which is also in this show. I wanted to re-paint that figure. At any rate, I eventually stripped out that figure and put in the Ebola nurses.
So you have this incongruity: the Ebola people, coming to your doorstep, which I suppose is a theme I have explored a lot. There is a knock on the door, the SS taking someone out, the Serbian militiaman coming down your village street and pulling out the Muslims. It’s that kind of horror, but I’m also trying to present very coloristic, beautiful painting. The painting in this show is the most formal in terms of its elements. The paintings are quite cinematic and you know where you are in the space. In other paintings things are more difficult and more opaque.
JS: Your color strikes me as one of the strongest elements of your work. It heightens our senses and draws viewers into your paintings.
JM: I have always enjoyed color: I stripped it out and now I am coming back to it and it is a joy, I have to admit. I have to do it in a clever way if possible. I try to make the colors slightly wrong: toxic and altered. I’m not into painting a blue sky. If one of my skies is blue it is because it has been stained by smoke bombs and sodium lighting. If it’s a sunny sky I’ll put a lot more yellow into it: I’ll make it sulfurous, hence the turquoises. It’s all wrong. It’s not the bucolic view you are expecting.
Toba Khedoori
Toba Khedoori is an Australian artist whose ambitious works encompass drawing, painting, and installation to produce poignant meditations on images as spatial constructs.
Isolating objects from their backgrounds, such as ceramic tiled floors, a chain link fence, a fireplace, or a doorway, Khedoori calls attention to the everyday world and our movements within it.
Steeped in the tradition of artist’s like Vija Celmins and Ed Ruscha, the artist posits open-ended questions about perception and meaning.
Born in 1964 in Sydney, Australia to Iraqi parents, she went on to receive her BA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1988 and her MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1994. Notably, she is the twin sister of Rachel Khedoori, an artist also based in Los Angeles, CA.
Today, her works are held in the collections of the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Albertina in Vienna, among others.
Untitled (rope 2) 2011 Oil on linen 37 1/8 x 23 3/8 x 1 inches (94.3 x 59.4 x 2.5 cm)
Untitled (doors), 1995 (detail). Oil and wax on paper, 132 × 234 inches
Untitled (Black fireplace) 2006 encaustic, wax, oil paint on paper 141 x 205 in. (358.14 x 520.7 cm)
Hurvin Anderson
Hurvin Anderson is a British painter known for exploring his Jamaican heritage through depictions of verdant Caribbean landscapes, tangled into abstractions rich with cultural references.
His work sheds light on the complexity of growing up in England while desiring to reconnect with familial roots, which he accomplishes through a dedication to the medium of painting itself.
"This is my practice, I paint—and I try to do other things but I always come back to painting,” he has said.
“I find painting a fascinating thing and a constant battle. It's hard enough to be an artist.”
The artist also often works through photographs rather than memory, which solidifies the feeling of distance that is woven throughout his oeuvre.
Born in 1965 in Birmingham, England, Anderson received his MA in painting from the Royal College of Art in London, where Peter Doig was his professor and served as an important influence.
He has shown with Thomas Dane gallery in London and Michael Werner Gallery in New York, and in 2002 completed a Caribbean Contemporary Arts Residency Program in Trinidad.
His works can also be found in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Tate Gallery in London, among others.
Anderson lives and works in London, England.