Here are a few of my favorite biographies, written from 2021 to 2023.
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MOTONORI UWASU
Motonori Uwasu was born in Osaka in 1975 and graduated in Fine Art from Osaka University of Arts in 1999. His paintings are vague constructions of the world from a vehicle’s back seat window. With warped lines and over-forced perspectives, Uwasu uses a surreal visual style as metaphor for the plurality of memory. Memory, to Motonori Uwasu, is not untrustworthy, but weak and muddy. Especially in that of a child, it represents the past in a less-than-scientific manner, as opposed to the traditional way in which history is referred to.
His work is a confrontation to the idea that if every moment of the past were written down, history would fit into one textbook entitled ‘The Truth.’ Uwasu recalls a scene from memory of being in a car, driven by either his mother or father to a destination unknown. Despite the lack of factual evidence from this moment, he still remembers the simple snapshots of buildings and vehicles from the rear window. These snapshots, when put to canvas, cherish the fluidity of memory and revel in its multiplicity. In the act of incongruous depth or uneven outlines we are left admiring not the precision of Uwasu’s recollection, but how tender the past and future are in their many ways of being understood.
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SHABU MWANGI
Shabu Mwangi (b. 1985) is a professional contemporary artist living and working in the Mukuru Lunga Lunga of Nairobi, Kenya. He established the Wajukuu Arts Project in 2013 with the intention of strengthening the lives of his neighbors through the arts. His work is both informed by and highlights the community, his relationship to it, and the stories of its people.
Mwangi works primarily with oil paint, sculpture, and installation, referencing the multitudes of change and stagnation in our very different, but shared world. His work examines the societal inequalities that are enforced by modernity, culture, and politics. However reactionary to these things, his paintings originate from within himself. He paints to look inward, to dig deep into identity, love, death, and reality. Painting, for Shabu, is a way of responding to and coping with the pain of internal and external conflict. Painting from the psyche, as opposed to from reproduction, allows him to better act on the pain of the problems around him. Shabu Mwangi has so successfully created solutions for those around him by acknowledging reality in its totality; happiness and sadness, good and bad.
His label as an artist acts as a sort of teleportation device, allowing him to see beyond the horizon of his environment. While his travels to Europe or America have highlighted the inequalities of his nation, they have also gifted him with an altered state of mind. It is that of personal freedom. A state of mind that comes from the appreciation of life and the tools to shape one's environment. If his artistic practice is an investigation of the world's effect on him, then his work with Wajukuu is an experiment with his effect on the world. Over its lifetime, he has used Wajukuu as a vessel to share this freedom. By sharing knowledge, resources, and appreciation, Wajukuu attempts to undo the political framework that constrains the lives of its community, one challenge at a time.
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MONIKA KARANDI
Hungarian painter Mónika Kárándi creates blurry spaces where the body is simultaneously human and non-human. It is part of the earth and above it. Her fungal figures play with one another and the dirt below them as if the extravagant image of man were suddenly stripped to its roots. Kárándi’s imagined post-anthropocene displays the romantic scenes hidden in mundane moments; often pictured are leafy coves of tangled bodies devoid of the man-made. The oil paintings are humbly beautiful depictions of what ‘life’ could be in another time, on another planet, or of another interpretation of the word itself.
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PASCAL MoHLMANN
Zurich based artist Pascal Möhlmann sits somewhere between the Louvre and social media. He is known for his reinterpretation of classical painting laden with the motifs of the modern age. Akin to the modern Neue Wilde or the traditional perfectionism of the old masters, Möhlmann's distinctive style, "New Beauty," sees the beauty of nature and the body in a contemporary landscape. His combination of "tradition" with current culture is a reminder of life, a reassurance that the present is just as valid as the past. Even as culture has shifted towards the digital, Möhlmann affirms the tensions of the time by visually appreciating the world through the eyes of the masters. His style emerges between his sense of impatient urgency and love of the real, tangible beauty of the world; and thus his work is a vivid recreation of what he sees around him, in person or on social media. This cultural intelligence has adorned him with a large following and has allowed him to collaborate with household names like Virgil Abloh and Roger Federer. Pascal Möhlmann paints "what is now."
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NIALL CAMBELL STRACHEN
Niall Cambell Strachan (b.1986) is a Scottish visual artist that paints imagined beings with intuitive brush strokes, summoning playful creatures from his subconscious for the audience to make sense of. The facial expressions of his unnameable animals, while simple, portray the animals as complex, emotional beings, stumbling through a world much like their human counterparts. In these painterly gestures, Strachen manages to create dreamy characters with subtle narratives, interacting with others inside and outside of the frame. Niall makes with cardboard, spray paint, acrylics, and wood, harnessing the naivety of a boy's adventurous wonder to include the audience in the fantasy. Niall Strachan has exhibited in Shanghai, Madrid, and Paris with group shows in Miami and Brussels. Following a sold out art fair in Madrid and the US, Niall's tribally ornate abstraction has made him one of 2022's most sought after artists.
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KIERON LEACH
Kieron Leach (British) is a street artist in a different sense. His objects are a curated collection of anonymous sculpture, seemingly crafted by an engineer and plucked from the high street. They are junction boxes and meaningless machines, textured by their time hidden amongst their related mundane street objects. His sculpture is contextually post-vandalism, in which the art is in the observation rather than the creation. He is ostensibly a model maker, recreating the individual items apart from their greater systems; the items that poke their heads out of the sidewalk and inform us of a spider web of infrastructure beneath. Leach also works in figurative sculpture, drawing on subcultures from football to construction, highlighting the peculiar material outputs of each. Aside from sculpture Leach is also an excellent furniture and set constructor, all skills that feed back into his art. He has recently exhibited in London and Manchester and presents a piece made from a salvaged London bus in this auction.
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ALEXANDRA LEVAUSSER
Through sculpture, painting and animation, Canadian artist Alexandra Levausser makes testimony to the act of human creation, leaving her imprint in fired clay. Her work and process model an ideal relationship between human and nature while sculptures made of earthen materials reveal what is real and surreal in our environment. Levausser offers an alternative to the anxieties of change, imagining serenity where there might otherwise be disjunction. Her mixed media paintings are peaceful and timeless interactions between elements of the human and elements of nature, giving places to harmonise with nature and embed in our environment. Inspired by mythology, physics, and biophilia, Alexandra sees nature as a tool for healing and creates art to explore freedom and as an emotional connection to landscape.
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SAYURI NISHIKUBO
Sayuri Nishikubo is an emerging Japanese artist working across the broad range of blacks...and whites. She paints with a wise and classical sensibility, supplanting facial features with words of affirmation. While working in a hospital, Nishikubo taught herself graphic design and illustration designing logos and packaging, eventually painting with black and white acrylics and coming to the style that her followers have come to know. The artist's phrases, like "Mystery creates wonder, and wonder is the basis of man's desire to understand" ring in times of disillusion and are the artist's attempts at drawing parallels in the world. Her paintings are a form of sense making, while also a study on the textual and physical patterns that make up our environments. Nishikubo has recently exhibited in Taiwan and Tokyo while also collaborating with fashion brands to create unique garments and printed t-shirts.
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ANMAR MIRZA
Norwich based multimedia artist Anmar Mirza has a unique relationship with creative production and the obstacles that get in its way. Through the mediums of acrylic, pencil, crayon and woven tapestry, Mirza explores the visions of a clouded mind. Often eyes are concealed in warm fuzz and at times lost in chaotic brushstrokes and emphasised lines, depicting the emotion fuelled lens by which we can distort reality. The artist turns fragments of feelings and memories into works of art in the process of freeing his past. Juxtaposed to this ‘mess of life,’ Mirza’s work also portrays an intense feeling of clarity. In putting the rollercoaster of emotion to paper, he has worked out his internal process of clarifying those things that stop him from producing the work that he wants to produce. His process revolves around simplicity and ritual in order to raise a healthy balance of reflection and production. It is clear that when this balance is stable Anmar can play with life’s most beautiful things; painting floral abstractions alight with bees, faces, and sunlight. Mirza’s expertly rendered emotions can be seen across the buildings of Norwich, as well as in Amsterdam and Barcelona. With [REDACTED GALLERY NAME], Mirza presents a two tone bus panel adorned with his characteristic bee and eyes.
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MISHA HUNTER
Canadian painter Misha Hunter examines the conflict of existential thought in a material world. His scenes explore sentimental spaces and moments that deal with the never-ending search of purpose in a life that inevitably ends. Hunter paints the objects that collect us in a society that tells us that success is garnished from physically wealthy ambitions. The artist's experiences with trauma, addiction, and anxiety inform his search for connections in the unknown, finding parallels between spirituality and materiality. These links culminate at ghosts in the garden, a corner of the room, or a mundane micro-environment of a shop. His work is questioning the classic chicken and egg question, is it the objects we create that shape our environment or is it the environment that shapes our objects, and what does either have to do with the human psyche.
