DAILY MAGAZINE
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Anne Songhurst's luscious oil-on-board still lives are beautiful homages to genuine maturity. Songhurst is one of a few self-taught artists whose work clearly benefited from being untouched by art school training, in which contemporary art schools tend to teach artists how to think rather than how to paint. Songhurst's lovely, lush images carry within themselves and beautifully present all the connotations associated with the still-life tradition that she follows.

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Alex Burdiak's recurring integration of steel and latex in one piece is the first thing that stands out about his work. With each material carrying a long lineage of social, cultural and art historical significance, Burdiak seems to be playing with expectations established by his predecessors, including Eva Hesse and Richard Serra.

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Aladdin Garunov's work relies heavily on cultural and textural juxtapositions. In many of his pieces the spiritual vocabulary of the east, represented by fragments of hand-knotted carpets from central Asia or copies of Byzantine mosaics, strikes an uneasy balance with the strident materials and textures of Western modernism. Together they represent a tactile point of intersection at which cultural and spiritual codes intermingle, change and are eventually diluted.

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Robert Lang's paintings take some unpicking. In them, photographic sources, transcribed in swathes of streaky paint, lose their clarity, like Polaroids de-developing. Figures appear in snatched fragments or at a distance, engaged in ambiguous outdoor activities - digging, camping, starting a fire - ahistorical actions that nonetheless allude to something post-nuclear, something apocalyptic.

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Adrian Wong uses ancient rituals to accentuate the dark corners and eccentricities of metropolitan existence. After having experienced a wave of misfortunes, in which nearly all his possessions got stolen and his health badly damaged, the artist, who originally trained as a research psychologist, decided that a cleansing ritual was needed to get back in tune with the positive powers of the universe.

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Younes Baba-Ali's sound installations demand to be heard before they remain to be seen. Having trained as a technician and musician, he naturally developed an affinity for sound and its propagation within space. In all of his work, Baba-Ali seeks to directly confront the visitor to its haunting presence, turning him into a participant of the piece and making him reconsider previously familiar objects.

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Robert Flynn's pitch-black graphite-and-charcoal drawings of plants and seedlings fade into shadow at the edges of the paper as though photographed in a nineteenth-century studio. Their backgrounds, too, have the colourless blankness of a drop cloth, casually bringing to mind family portraiture, a passport photograph, a head-shot.

Continue reading "ROBERT FLYNN: SAATCHI ONLINE CRITIC'S CHOICE BY BEN STREET" »

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Dana Oldfather is a self-taught painter whose work was awarded 2nd place in the 2008 9th Annual National Young Painters Competition, selected by the New York painter and art critic Peter Plagens. "Throughout my career as an oil painter", she says, "I have maintained a feeling for the monumentality of the human form. I aim to reflect attitude, indifference and sometimes despair, through the recreation of the figure and abstraction as a collaborative expression."

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Monica Goldsmith explores notions of time and consumption in her "Subdivisions" and "Abacus" series. Bringing forth strands from Modernism, particularly hard edge geometric abstraction, Goldsmith explores the transitory nature of seen and unseen states, rooted in physics and time. She uses the abacus, a counting device, to explore variables while capturing a flickering moment and suspending it in stasis.

Continue reading "MONICA GOLDSMITH: SAATCHI ONLINE CRITIC'S CHOICE BY LEANNE GOEBEL" »

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Alice Lang's soft sculptures evoke both the body and nature, through their associative and suggestive qualities. Unable to define the specific associations the works create within the boundaries of objects from life, they inhabit the unsettling domain of the unfamiliar. These unidentifiable shapes remain as nameless organic objects, inert and motionless, yet suggesting life and growth.

Continue reading "ALICE LANG: SAATCHI ONLINE CRITIC'S CHOICE BY RACHEL MULVANEY" »

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In a world increasingly dominated by wi-fi, e-news and digital social network sites it is maybe not unnecessary to wonder what kind of ecosystem an iPod would flourish best in. Or what the sex-life of two buzzing wireless networks could be like. Necessary or not, New York based artist [dNASAb] has made it his mission to visualise the organic waveforms that carry the data from phone calls, emails and twitter updates.

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"What you see is what you see." In 1964, this phrase by American artist Frank Stella exemplified the minimalist movement, and became Art History. Today, young sculptor Toby Christian seriously questions this quote. In fact, for most of his works, what you see is especially not what you see: a pebble is made of marble, a buoy is made of bronze, etc.

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Castles used to have this strange purpose in the world where they were built by men for men, sometimes to protect, others to defend, often to impress or intimidate each other. As trapped in some kind of time capsule, they now carry an increasingly mythical self-fictionalization, reinforced by the commodification of their image.

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Erik Berglin fuses that set-up and sprint in works that are part performance, part photography. In each work, the artist prepares a digital camera on a ten-second timer, usually choosing a backdrop of post-war architecture with a handy aperture or ridged surface for better purchase.

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The woodland creatures in Anne Van As's paintings emanate gentle beauty and subtle grace, much like the paintings themselves. Van As uses a slim range of colours in her oil canvases but she achieves compelling shades of meaning and emotion. The deer, rabbits, squirrel and wolf she paints dominate her canvases like giants, yet they still appear vulnerable because of their meek expressions and soft bodies.

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Leon Duniec, a student at ABK Maastricht, uses materials such as plaster and cardboard to create small-scale three-dimensional objects that look like preliminary models of unrealised sculptures. The forms are simple, reductive and roughly made. The surfaces are left untreated. The colour palette reflects these materials, chalky white, grey plaster and beige cardboard.

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Elizabeth Cooke's sculptures combine natural and industrial materials such as metal, stone and wood which operate as different forces interacting with each other while achieving some kind of effortless harmony. To see more of her work registered on Saatchi Online click here.

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Martha Posner questions the significance of fabrics often associated with beauty and wealth by reworking worn wedding dresses, vintage waistcoats and corsets. To see more of her work registered on Saatchi Online click here

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David Birkin's work is informed by the history of photography and its relationship to performance in contemporary art. By combining long exposure techniques with a conceptual methodology, his practice incorporates a specific performance into the image-making process and defines it within the parameters of that event.

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Mark Selby works with sculpture, film and installation, concerned with the functionality and disfunctionality of domestic design. In recent sculptural works Selby questions how communication between subjects is interfered with and problematised by the very technology that seeks to improve and proliferate our possibilities to connect with each other. Working with solid structures and materials, his sculptures investigate that which constantly slips away: the meeting of two minds, and what passes between them.

Continue reading "MARK SELBY: SAATCHI ONLINE CRITIC'S CHOICE BY MARIANNE MULVEY" »

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The narratives for Amy Stein's images are taken from local and oral history, which accounts for the familiar but also incongruous and sometimes bizarre impression that they give. To see more of her work registered on Saatchi Online click here

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For many of us today, avocado, nut brown and harvest gold shag rugs have come to signify the 1970s. Years from now, future generations will recognize a room with a hunter's trophy and antlers as a hipster signature of the early 2000s. What does this really say about our own era? Artist Joshua Levine offers one possible answer. His mixed media sculptures take an ironic swipe at urbanites who decorate their walls with replicas of dead animals, or the parts of the actual animals themselves, and also create compelling surreal works to replace the deceased deer on sophisticates' walls.

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Christopher Hodson's 'Moon Rock' plays with our common understanding of a readymade, while reverting to the fact that the found piece of Basalt which makes the work, could evoke something very contemplative and rare while be completely banal at the same time. To see more of his work registered on Saatchi Online click here

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Appau Junior Boakye-Yiadom takes the readymade as his starting point but brings it into performative play, often with paint or liquid such as plaster or spray paint. He sets up situations of everyday objects that are activated during a brief performance; the aftermath and the photographic or filmed record of it all form part of the work. To see more of his work registered on Saatchi Online click

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Taking as his subject the British Museum's Benin bronzes, Mishko Papic paints the objects as objects, faithfully recording a fraying of thin bronze, a warped corner. Each of his images is lit in the raking light of the conservator's studio. It's scientific, purposeful but never obvious. To see more of his work registered on Saatchi Online, click here.

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The fashion models posing in front of historic paintings in Dickson Schneider's series of oil on canvases seem intended to express paradoxical relationships between art and fashion. Are they supposed to juxtapose the lasting significance of great art with the timeless distractions of chic, pretty young women? Click here to see more of Schneider's work registered on Saatchi Online.

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De Haan's work shows a fascination for architecture, city planning and the changes that take place in the urban landscape. He combines this with an outrageous imagination and a meticulous execution of his self-taught painting technique, which is controlled and well managed without losing its liveliness and movement. To see more of his work registered on Saatchi Online click here.

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Miranda Maher is an American artist who has recently adopted the theme of birds as a way to explore how idiosyncrasies of the human psyche often stands unexamined and uncorrected. To see more of her work registered on Saatchi Online click here.

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Paolo Patrizi's photographic documentary stories explore the contradictions between traditions and modernity and cultural disconnections produced from too rapid economic growth common in the so-called developed world.

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Patricia Hagen's clusters of multicoloured lifeforms huddle at the bottom of tawny photo-studio backdrops. "Scatter", "Adrift", "Array": the titles of her paintings are vague stabs at the nature of these strange little conglomerations, like the uncertain scribbled notes of a scientist faced with weird bacteria in a petri dish. And it's the pseudo-science of pre-war Surrealism that comes most to mind when looking at her work, most obviously Yves Tanguy, with whom Hagen shares a kind of laconic regard for pictorial niceties, giving her tumid and perforated forms a feathery chiaroscuro and fungal weight.

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FocAR is a group of artists which have gathered around the common will to produce and share artistic gestures within urban and rural spaces. They operate like a team of urban observers that capture architectural elements to look upon its use and meaning within the urban landscape. To see more of their work registered on Saatchi Online click here.

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Miquetta Ahuja describes her drawings and paintings as 'works of Automythography' in which she explores the symbolic significance of blackness and the social implications of Black hair. 'In response to the history of Black hair as a barometer of social and personal consciousness', she says, 'I make the image of hair both corporeal and conceptual, giving it psychic proportions.' To see more of her work registered on Saatchi Online click here.

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The sculpture/furniture crossover art of Scott Richter has a rich history. Like several of his predecessors, Richter takes on the homespun associations of domestic furniture and leavens its emotional import by loading it down with layers of fat, sloppy, dribbly paint. To see more of his work registered on Saatchi Online click here.

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Galeria Callejera is a mobile and multidisciplinary Chilean art gallery by Pablo Rojas Schwartz, which similarly to other artists who have dealt with questions of mobility and displacement in their work, seeks to present emerging artists in his trailer. To see more of his work registered on Saatchi Online click here.

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Technology, and our love/hate relationship with it, is one of the main themes of Jools Johnson's work. The installations reuse every single nut, bolt and screw of old computers and reconfigure them into objects of strange yet familiar beauty. The result is a group of meticulous dioramas that bear witness to the information that we collect and then discard. To see more of his work registered on Saatchi Online click here.

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Pat Colella's subjects might be unknown to her viewers, but her pastel portraits present recognizable and appealing personalities. The fifty-eight year old Long Island-based artist explains her creative ambitions as: "my art is a statement about creating three-dimensionality in a representational yet expressive way." To see more of her work registered on Saatchi Online click here.

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Laurence Kavanagh's work digs deep into the bygone golden era of film noir and sci-fi literature. His latest project, 'The Lonely House' (2008) is a six-room installation based on scenes borrowed from a series of post-war romantic drama classics. To see more of his work on Saatchi Online click here

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Whether taking photographs of architecture, interiors or the human form, Robynne Limoges's main interest is light. 'I am obsessed with light as metaphor,' she says, 'and with the philosophical equation of just how little light is necessary to dispel darkness.' Her series entitled 'Figure as Dream' was made by shooting into the reflective surface of a mirror or polished glass so that each photograph captures not what she is standing in front of but what is behind her. The emotional intensity in these photographs is accentuated by the high colour contrast in each picture and by the dreamlike haziness she creates. To see more of her work registered on Saatchi Online click here.

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Fran Recacha's crisp Symbolist paintings would be captivating jacket art for authors ranging from Ayn Rand to Paul Auster or even Ian McEwan. The Barcelona-based artist creates gracefully molded figures engaged in dream-like scenarios open to expansive narrative interpretations and poetic depths. To see more of his work registered on Saatchi Online click here.

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Yury Toroptsov was born in 1974 in a small rural community near Vladivostok, and left Russia in 1998 to study in New York. In 2003 Toroptsov, a consultant to the United Nations, decided to change his profession and follow his long-time passion - photography, which he now does from his home in Paris. His most recent series, "The House of Baba Yaga" (2008), shown at Paris Photo in 2008, was made when he revisited his family house in a small village in Far Eastern Russia, which brought alive childhood memories and Russian fairy tales.

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Eyal Pinkas is an Israeli photographer and video artist based in Amsterdam. In his recent work, the artist takes everyday objects such as chairs and mattresses and dexterously manipulates them into fantastical yet elegant compositions, which he then photographs. To see more of his work registered on Saatchi Online click here

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Elia Cantori is a young Italian artist registered on STUART and currently studying at Goldsmiths College in London. The work in question, which consists of a perfect sphere with a doorknob and a key, brings to mind the urban poetic works of Mexican artist Gabriel Orozco and famously bizarre tale of Lewis Caroll's Alice in Wonderland.

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Margaret O'Brien manipulates domestic objects drawn from the everyday to create technically impressive and emotionally effective installations, which activate certain characteristics of psychological dysfunctions creating a sense of anxiety and spatial disorientation. To see more of her work on Saatchi Online click here.

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Ayad Alkadhi uses Arabic calligraphy and powerful figurative imagery to create narratives concerning the themes of religion, politics and culture. His recent paintings engage with the war in Iraq and the psychological, emotional and social ramifications for the Iraqi people. Works by Alkadhi are currently on view in an exhibition by Iraqi artists in exile at the Station Contemporary Art Museum in Houston until 1 February 2009. You can also see more of his work registered on Saatchi Online by clicking here.

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Jordan Tull's sleek, seductively sinister sculptures have no obvious function. Yet they imply a range of possible purposes. Subtle and stylish, Tull leaves the onus on viewers to make their own private assumptions and associations. To see more of Tull's work click here.

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Amy Elkins' 'Wallflowers' series animates all the old questions about what a portrait reveals. Each of her works engages its subject on his own terms. Some of them, young and beautiful and tattooed, are photographed against baroque wallpaper in Brooklyn. Others are shot against real sylvan backgrounds in Elkins' native New Orleans (craggy and a bit less young, and also tattooed). Rather than appropriate the mannerism of traditional portraiture, Elkins recharges it.

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Sally Noall's series entitled 'Dorothy's Shoes' alludes to two films whose visual imagery have become deeply embedded in our collective psyche: Alfred Hitchcock's 'The Birds' and 'The Wizard of Oz' starring Judy Garland as Dorothy. She invites us to consider why certain images and objects take on particular significance in our lives, why there is a certain nostalgia imbued in these iconic cultural landmarks, and what 'our cultural objects' reveal about us, our identity, our memories and our yearnings. To see more of Sally Noall's work registered on Saatchi Online click here.

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The fluidity of Sevmor Chen's paint hints at the skills of a traditional Chinese ink painter, yet Chen sometimes carries those skills into areas reminiscent of fashion design and sci-fi. At other times he reminds one of Egon Schiele or Elizabeth Peyton. To see more of Sevmor Chen's work on Saatchi Online click here.

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One of the most electrifying speeches of Barack Obama's campaign was made in Berlin in July of this year, and among the 200,000 or more people who turned out to witness this historical moment was Saatchi Online artist Hans Groeger, whose large-scale painting, 'Way of Hope' (2008), features Obama's Berlin visit as well as other key moments in Germany and America's recent history from the dropping of the atom bomb in Hiroshima in 1945 to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

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Hannah Bureau makes paintings inspired by natural forms - starbursts, the milky way, the Aurora Borealis, geology, iceberg formations, crystal formations and crystal gardens - as well as patterns from 1950s and 60s textile design, fractal geometry in nature and computer-generated fractal images. Bureau, who describes her paintings as 'autobiographical accumulations of memory and nostalgia', graduated this September with an MFA in Painting from the Massachusetts College of Art.

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Rose Eken, in her construction of model worlds and video scenarios, unpicks the processes through which certain sites or pop-cultural objects have become embedded within the collective consciousness. The Danish-born, London-based artist's open appropriation of familiar imagery, whether of Elvis' grave or a period interior, acknowledges the inevitable disparity between one's memory and the physical reality of a given thing or place, but most importantly, the notion of authenticity as a corruptible facet of technological meditation.

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Reminiscent of Ming and Yuan dynasty art, Joey Leung's work tells a pictorial story in a manner which falls somewhere between a modern cartoon strip and ancient Chinese scrolls. The scratchy fine drawings of fantastic fruit, animals and stick-like humans resemble the ancient pictographs from which today's Chinese calligraphy has evolved.

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Bojana Nikolic's medium is painting, her métier is exuberance, and her forte is a plastic fantastic land art. Of her own work, Nikolic writes: "A wall, the floor, a box, glass, a carpet, paper, a table, a chair, a pillow - all of these can become a painting. Does that not make all those claims that painting is dead nothing more but a neo-conservative wail?"

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As my mother would say: Morwenna Catt is "not a happy bunny." Nor are the embroidered cloth rabbit sculptures she makes in order to 'take recognizable artefacts and tales from childhood and subvert them into something malformed, battered and bruised; to evoke that darker side of childhood experience.' To see more of her work registered on Saatchi Online click here.

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Brunelli's majestic black and white portraits of animals take on an ordinary subject and turn it nothing short of haunting - a different way of looking at the everyday.

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The Chapman Brothers irreverently painted googley-eyed monsters on Goya's "Disasters of War" etchings; Duchamp butched up the Mona Lisa with a mustache; and Yasumasa Morimura bent the gender of art history's greatest beauties. In contrast to these artistic interlopers who appropriated art history in order to undermine its icons, Oxford-based artist Sam Branton's sassy insertion of his own signature characters into history's archives of decadent art would surely have enthralled and likely aroused his sources. To see more of his work registered on Saatchi Online click here.

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Since 1995, Norwegian sculptor Bjørn Bjarre's practice has consisted largely of an unfolding series of Plasticine works, collectively titled 'Abstract Feeling'. In this series, Bjarre subjects fragments of stylized, cartoon-like, mostly male body parts to a process of violent recomposition in a manner that seems to comment on the artist's role as a latter day Dr Frankenstein. To see more of his work registered on Saatchi Online click here.

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Gabriele Beveridge grew up in Hong Kong and graduated from University College Falmouth in 2007 with a First Class BA (Hons) degree in Photography. Discarding any conventional assumptions about the formal qualities of photography, Gabriele Beveridge's work explores the nature of the medium itself, in the hope of providing places in which the invisible, the ineffable and the unknown are allowed to present themselves.

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Abandoned buildings and ideas of beauty are the subject of Matthew Atkinson's paintings. What interests him is the way that over time these buildings have lost their original identity and become strange inhabitable lands, expendable and worthless. His work taps into a recent re-emergence of beauty in art which is not so much about the pursuit of beauty as a pursuit of the idea of beauty. To see more of Matthew Atkinson's work registered on Saatchi Online click here.

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Penpal, avatar, master, foil? David Hendrickx's relationship to the artist whose photographs serve as his source material is deeply unclear, the subject of his series entitled 'Appropriation'. The title is quietly wry as the project itself: Hendrickx's work reveals less how online practices have caused us to rethink our relationship to others' imagery, so much as blown it to simthereens.

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Samantha Keely Smith's paintings are radiant with pulsating fiery potency. Yet they present a disquieting chilly vision of a world that is no longer welcoming for humans. The New York-based artist's magnificent semi-abstract landscapes keep to a strictly limited palette of predominantly complementary colors. Its compelling contrasts nonetheless create a sense of total harmony which captures our imagination by creating the arresting aura of a world full and fulfilled without the presence of any extraneous life-forms.

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Petros Chrisostomou, a recent graduate of the Royal Academy Schools in London, creates carefully constructed models of everyday environments into which he places unexpected elements - and then photographs them. A form of still life photography, Chrisostomou's works disrupt and subvert our conventional expectations of mundane objects, such as biros spanning the width of his childhood living room, and giant eggs bulging out of a replica of the artist's kitchen), as well as shaking up our perception of the medium of photography itself. With their surrealist bent and playful distortion of scale, Chrisostomou's photographs allow the viewer, as he puts it, 'to speculate the real and the imaginary'.

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In her photographs of greenhouse interiors and other domesticated spaces, Icelandic artist Bára Kristinsdóttir captures the poetics of something that can serve as a metaphor of poetic evanescence itself. It is something that appears in much of her work, but quietly: water, in all of its temperature-based states, visible or invisible, never entirely present, never entirely gone. To see more of her work registered on Saatchi Online click here.

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Mike Hunter is a recent graduate of Edinburgh College of Art where he obtained a first class degree in photography. He shoots on large format negatives and uses a miniaturizing technique called 'tilt shift photography'. For his series of photographs entitled The Army Man project, he worked with a team of actors who he dressed up as toy soldiers and placed in real locations.

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Joanne Klein's palette is light and bright, but her forms are dense, solid and serious. At fifty-four, the New Jersey-born NYU graduate lives in rural upstate New York after years in Manhattan. Her work reflects both environments - large-scale abstract oil paintings which have a crisp formal structure appearance than alludes to urban architecture with a palette that includes grassy greens, pumpkin orange, melon yellow and other rich, earthy, organic hues. To see more of her work registered in Saatchi Online click here.

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Jesus Jimenez works in photography, video and installation, playfully exploring the world and his relation to it. His works are inspired by a personal obsession for order, the object and the trace it leaves behind. Whether he's adjusting the phones in a New York telephone booth into perfect symmetry, so that they are talking to one another, or moving two hand dryers so that they're blowing directly at each other, again in perfect symmetry, his works are witty and inventive, leaving their own physical trace on the places he photographs.

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Timothy Hutchings' sculptural practice presents a novel intersection of pastiche Minimalist geometry with an interest in social and formal aspects of play and gaming, but warfare provides a sustained undercurrent to each of these concerns. To see more of Timothy Hutchings work registered on Saatchi Online click here.

Continue reading "TIMOTHY HUTCHINGS: SAATCHI ONLINE CRITIC'S CHOICE BY BILL ROBERTS" »

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Maurizio Anzeri's obsession with found photographs taken from family albums began when he started visiting cemeteries in Italy and thinking about the headstones as the last trace of the dead, standing as if to say 'I existed'. Anzeri works with photographs of people and family groups that have been thrown away at the end of someone's life or deemed not worth hanging onto. His exquisite embroidered embellishments are a kind of celebration of these forgotten lives. He brings an intense psychological dimension to what might be 'the last portrait' of a person's life, creating an almost three-dimensional quality, as if to say 'Yes, you did indeed exist'.

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The funny thing about love is that lovers and parents think their beloved is extraordinary. Others might not realize the unique superiority of the person, but the one who loves them believes that their amazing attributes are beyond dispute. But Los Angeles-based artist Kristen S. Wilkins's humorous and insightful photographs playfully mock this misconception. By erasing sitters' facial features from found cameo portraits, Wilkins makes clear that our 'lovable' qualities are often properly seen only through a powerful, specific, emotional lens.

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Teiji Hayama's paintings join together western and Japanese influences, combining different art historical periods with contemporary Japanese pop culture. Pale, ethereal figures with elongated, tinted eyes and long blond hair bring to mind Japanese Manga characters and the depiction of women in Christian art.

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Consider: After energy production, livestock is the second highest contributor to atmosphere-altering gases; four pounds of grain are needed to produce one pound of meat; only three years ago Americans were eating, on average, 30.4 kg of beef annually per person and were also weighing in with an obesity rate at almost 30% among children; and market reports tell us that beef consumption in England is at its highest since the seventies, making 'fat cow' an appropriately common English-ism. It is therefore no surprise that bovine beauty is an often overlooked subject matter for artists. But for the Belgium-born and Britain-based artist Thuline de Cock, cows are the subjects of her beautifully realistic and sensitive oil paintings. To see more of her work registered on Saatchi Online click here.

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Italian three-person collective Amae are into cosmetics - not adornment. Their interest is either cosmic or scientific. What happens when you paint with makeup? When Amae photograph makeup explosions, they do it gorgeously with commercial hermeticism. Their make languorous videos of goo pouring down flesh. To see more of their work registered on Saatchi Online click here.

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"We wear Cain's mark on our forehead. Atrocity has so become our companion we don't recognize it- even when it is standing right before us and unmasking itself.' Angelika J. Trojnarski was born in 1979 in Mragowo, Poland, and left in 2004 to study at the Academy of Fine Arts in Düsseldorf, first under Herbert Brandl and, before his death in 2007, Jörg Immendorff. Her paintings hark back to the advent of modernism with their subdued palette, painterly handling of oils and assemblage of semi-finished and deconstructed imagery culled from an agitated sub-conscious. Several of her works will be on view at the Saatchi Online booth at Scope Basel this June, where it will be possible to buy the work of a selection of Saatchi Online artists.

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Bernhard Hildebrandt creates work at the centre of a conceptual duality between what is seen and what remains to be seen, between the static and streaming. In his Stereo series a painting and a photo of it, printed at an identical scale, are paired in diptych format. The viewer is caught stepping between the transient surface reflections playing out on polyurethane enamelled Plexiglas and the reflections captured in its alter-ego, the narcissistic photograph.

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As Russian-born and Paris-based artist Yury Toroptsov demonstrates in his work, the relics of fame carry as much magic as holy articles might to the faithful. But Toroptsov's work asks what fans are hoping to extract from their sensual engagement with a star's garments, or by their careful coping of their idol's appearance. Are these empty rituals of devotion or do fans have a larger spiritual aim when they look toward stars for inspiration? To see more of Yury Toroptsov's work registered on Saatchi Online click here.

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Volkan Diyaroglu is a young Turkish painter who was born in Istanbul on the 1st of May 1982 and currently resides in Valencia, Spain. In a recent interview he said: 'I simply paint on a canvas, on the floor and what you see from the outside as dripping, isn't really dripping, they are accidents that happen when I am over the canvas. The paint drips a lot while I put on a colour. The drips exist in my time and space, and since gravity also exists, they fall, and I accept them as they are. width="500" height="451" />

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George Igboegwu has no formal training in photography but his work stood out from the entries to the inaugural Sony World Photography Awards and will be shown on the Saatchi Online Wall in Cannes as part of the SWPA festivities later this month (22-26 April). To see more of George Igboegwu's work click here to go to his Saatchi Online profile page.

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Bart de Visser has made his artistic project the documentation of abandoned places and buildings in a process of decay. His interest in derelict places began as a child when instructions not to go to such places made them even more fascinating. He has since travelled all over the world photographing such buildings, trying to imagine what might have happened there in the past and attempting to capture something of the building's former life in its abandoned present state. Bart de Visser was born in Amsterdam, 1967 and will be exhibiting one of his photographs at the Sony World Photography Awards in Cannes, 20-25 April. To visit de Visser's Saatchi Online profile page click here. To find out more about the SWPA and Saatchi Online's exhibition click here.

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Marta Volkova was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, and since 1991 has been living and working in The Netherlands. A series of her paintings are on view until 12 April in an exhibition entitled 'Happy Endings' at Galerie Stevens in Maastricht. Click here to find out more about Marta Volkova and her work registered on Saatchi Online.

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Since registering on Saatchi Online Jaap de Vries has been invited by several galleries to have shows. He now has two galleries in Holland representing him and has been taken on by the London gallery 20 Hoxton Square where he had a solo show in September 2007. His work has featured in German Vanity Fair in an article about the success of artists who work is for sale via the internet, and later this year he will be in a group show at Gallery Primo Alonso in London. He has also been offered a solo exhibition at the FUEL Collection in Philadelphia in February 2009. He has two exhibitions on this Spring in Holland and will be showing work at ART AMSTERDAM in May.

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The most vividly accidental arrangement of artless objects that I've come across in recent times was in a half built house in Florida. The unfinished fixtures, the loose wiring, the litter of paint pots and the ditch cleared for a pool, all suggested a mood of labour and do-it-yourself potential that was very close to the interests of a lot of contemporary art. Joseph Giannasio's interventions in an older building summon a similar impression, but by heading in reverse - pulling up floorboards, resurrecting trash.

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Aleksandra Radonich's deeply saturated color photographs lead us on a complex journey through the people and places of her native Serbia. Familiar to the world through the mass media's lens focused on painful and perilous war events, Serbia and her people appear through the artist's eyes as proud and heroic protagonists of a contemporary fairytale, stoics bearing the scars of their history.

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Nidhi Jalan's work takes form through three-dimensional objects and installations. Jalan, who was born in Calcutta and has an MFA from Hunter College, New York, describes her work as 'an intermingling of past and present experiences' in which aesthetics and beauty lure the viewer into an experience which she hopes will encourage people to think about the fleeting pleasures of life. To see more of Nidhi Jalan's work on Saatchi Online click here.

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Painter Sarah Bereza's "great subject" for the past few years has been the sorority girl. These "Feisty Foxy Vixens," as she calls her sorority sisters in one painting, show up in distorted portraiture and in male-fantasy scenarios of college co-eds (her pink painting of a vicious, yet erotic, pillow fight comes to mind). Though the artist's approach remains decidedly ambiguous, the girls appear as plucky predators or ridiculed victims, or, most often, as both of these archetypes at once. To see more of Sarah Bereza's work registered on Saatchi Online click here.

Continue reading "SARAH BEREZA: SAATCHI ONLINE CRITIC'S CHOICE BY TRENT MORSE" »

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In The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway wrote that bankruptcy happens in two ways: 'Gradually, and then suddenly.' Change of all kinds moves at that pace, which is why Australian photographer Bronwen Hyde's 2007 series, "a self-portrait a day for a year," is a particularly compelling project. Even more appealing is her creativity in constructing 365 distinctly interesting images. To see more of her work, registered on Saatchi Online, click here.

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Maslen and Mehra's European Brown Bears in front of the Library of the German parliament explore "ideas that revolve around the meeting point and overlapping of nature and culture." The artist pair's mirror-surfaced two-dimensional sculptures add minimal new information to the urban landscapes in which they are situated, broadcasting unseen details of the surroundings and creating views that literally interrupt themselves.

Continue reading "MASLEN AND MEHRA: SAATCHI ONLINE CRITIC'S CHOICE BY ALIX RULE" »

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Jennifer Sanchez's paintings and works on paper are concerned with spatial relationships and the process itself of making a painting. Exquisite Milhazes-like curves, lines and circular patterns engage in a perpetually changing visual and spatial environment, which Sanchez hopes will invite the viewer to experience new and emergent spaces. 'What interests me most', she says, 'is the concept that space has no definitive existence yet it enables everything else to exist.'

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Poppy Jones graduated in 2007 Falmouth College of Arts in Cornwall with a BA (Hons) in Fine Art, and soon after went on to win the prestigious Lynn Painter-Stainers Young Artist Award. Jones makes monoprints which have an ethereal, ghostly quality that are deliberately hard to read - figures are caught in a blurry half-existence; places seem hinted at or imagined, depicted as if seen from behind glass or a filmy screen.

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A month before 9/11, the day Hugh Mendes graduated with an MA in Painting, he finished a painting of Bin Laden pointing a gun at a triumphant George Bush. Since this moment of uncanny foresight over six years ago, current affairs, newspaper clippings and obituaries have become Mendes' main source of inspiration.

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The Jordanian painter Hilda Hiary focuses on the circle as her source of inspiration and the focal point of her imagery. Her sensual and gestural abstract paintings are simultaneously celestial and earthly, with soft forms and organic palette creating the impression of cells seen at work within nature, not under artificial scientific conditions.

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Adam Faramawy, who was born in Dubai in 1981 and studied at The Slade School of Fine Art, describes his work as 'resolutely representational'. His videos display a fixation with fantasy and the fantastic, expressing ideas concerning what he calls 'transmissions of knowledge demonstrating fluid or floating identities'. His work brings together a wide range of ideas and interests from arabesque architecture, Sufi theology and ritual to psychedelia, grunge, YouTube and gothic. As he writes about his subjects, they are often depicted 'in a moment of enlightenment, always seeking to attain or become.'

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Will Corwin, who was born in New York in 1976, works with cast panels of plaster which he hangs, piles on the floor or leans against the wall to create what he describes as 'a surrogate surface'. Onto his plaster 'canvas', Corwin draws or paints creating pictures that also have a sculptural, architectural quality. 'The pictures are no longer merely paintings,' says Corwin, 'they become "things," objects that inhabit space within the room.'

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Zhang O was born in Guangzhou in 1976 and has since then lived both in London and New York. Living in different cities and experiencing different cultures informs much of her practice as an artist, particularly in her series 'Daddy & I' which pictures young Chinese girls with their adopted Western fathers.

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To give a concrete presence to an art practice that is based in ideas and actions rather than in objects, has been a challenge since the earliest days of conceptual art. For example, there is always the danger that an audience will confuse mere documentation of a happening with the circumstantial meaning of the actual event. Seekers of Lice, who take their name from Arthur Rimbaud's early symbolist poem, Les Chercheuses de Poux (1871), seem to have addressed this challenge by presenting their idea-based practice through a two-part manifesto "for a new materialism of possibilities."

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Urbanites often think of themselves utterly separate from other species. Yet every city dweller is actually in constant, intimate contact with a few familiar creatures who might not have the charm of their woodland brethren but are as close and unknowable to us as we are to other animals. The inner-lives and the outer impact of the common birds who occupy the streets and buildings in Manhattan are some of the key subjects of Brooklyn-based artist Miranda Maher's intensive and poetic installations.

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Hong Kong-born, New York-based artist Annysa Ng addresses issues of femininity and female suppression in her exquisitely executed sculptural and wall-based works. After studying in Hong Kong and Germany Ng moved to New York to enroll at the School of Visual Arts, and her work reflects her observations of women in both Eastern and Western cultures.

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Bill Durgin's project makes minimalist figuration like Joel Shapiro's bounding blocks of anthropomorphic metal look flaccid and cautious. Often curled into fetal positions or folded on to themselves, the bodies in Durgin's images appear as lonely lumps, like discarded objects isolated in space.

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L.M. Fernandes' work makes use of naïf line drawings and digitally enhanced mirror images to create pictures that look like kaleidoscopic hallucinations. The effect can be both superficially charming and deliberately evasive. The work often seems to draw upon the recent trend in art that recalls a whimsical, childlike world where the most seemingly innocent and familiar image, scrawled by a childish hand, can mask adult questions.

Continue reading "L M FERNANDES: SAATCHI ONLINE CRITIC'S CHOICE BY ANGELA ROBERTS" »

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Lupe Nunez-Fernandez enters the world of Aurelia Frey's photographs.

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Detailed, realistic and expertly executed depictions of monkeys and other primates dominate Boo Saville's work but it is her more adventurous, abstract works that are the most exciting. The ghostly human figures and alien-looking life forms, with titles such as 'Grimace', 'Bang Face' and 'Bogman', evoke an immediate response that seems to constantly evolve as one becomes acquainted with each image.

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Sara White Wilson culls keenly observed instances of accidentally insightful juxtapositions among advertisements, graffiti, peeling wheat-paste posters and other street decoration. The twenty-nine year old American-born, Paris-based photographer's primary talent is as a photojournalist, freezing the fleeting signs of the human fragility, outrage, upset and disorder against perfectly packaged and well-marketed commercial imagery.

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Someday, mad and brilliant bioengineers will extract from nature the next generation of everyday materials: electrical wires made of neurons, light bulbs of firefly bioluminescence, sturdy spider-web ropes, regenerative skin-cell walls. Though, as with genetically engineered organisms today, the fear will be that the objects could mutate in unpredictable ways. But Evy Jokhova seems unalarmed by such mutations. Through her paintings, drawings, prints, and installations, she imagines a world where animals and objects meld together in fantastical harmony.

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Sally Sheinman's candy-coloured sculptures playfully herald work that is as appealing for its generosity as for its innocence. Combining Native American ritual and tradition with simple psychotherapeutic approaches, she gently turns the accent from her work onto the viewer.

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Twenty-six year old German artist Nora May Klumpp's videos, which combine photographs and 3D material, and her inter-related installations take Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori's theory of the 'Uncanny Valley' a step further, and test our comfort level with the increasing verisimilitude of virtual reality.

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Elsa Salonen, a young Finnish artist based in Bologna over the last few years, makes video work whose subject matter - disability - serves as a springboard through which to explore a new visual language.

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Mark Jason Kemp works in fine pastel pencils and charcoal - he makes collages from his drawings as well as from various found objects. The resultant pieces are compact and almost gothic miniatures. He sometimes manipulates these miniature pieces on a computer so that they appear to be a series of Polaroid images. A mini-story is then told, helped along by the apparent time lapse on each sheet of 'Polaroids'. The changing images, we're told, hint at "a very personal short story."

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Lee Broughall is a young painter based in Surrey, and a 2006 graduate of the University of East London. His most recently completed series of four large-scale works employ the repeated motif of a misshapen disc floating on either a red or black backdrop. The discs contain blotches and other impurities that are reminiscent of the swirls and patterns of a planet's surface, like the famous Great Red Spot on Jupiter.

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Trawling through art on the net, it's not often that you find work which jumps straight off the screen. But Jason Hoelscher's paintings do just that, impressing themselves on your retina like filaments in the dark. With sassy titles such as 'Minimalish', 'Chromatose' and 'Attention Span Management', his highly polished neo-pop creations possess more than straightforward immediacy.

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Although Randall Sanderson says that "he randomly collects images that occur to him," it seems more likely that he collects moods and impressions. In 'Slur' (below) he conceives the idea of an insult in paint, suggesting that modern painting is a torrent of abuse waiting to be hurled at anyone.

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Anna Campbell Bliss has been producing and exhibiting work for over 30 years, and in that time her work continually evolved in keeping with ongoing technological advances, embracing change with open arms. She has moved from traditional silk-screen printing techniques to complex computer systems; and has mastered the technical intricacies of each skill she has exposed herself to: I explore the visual world seeking connections between poetry and mathematics, nature and the constructed environment.

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Sara White Wilson documents the residues of what were once carefully arranged compositions mounted on walls of city centres like Paris and Berlin. The Paris-based American photographer uses her lens to capture the haphazard peeling of the urban "fabric", which she then subtly manipulates with digital means in order to bring forth the incongruent pairings caused by its decay.

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Shay Kun's idyllic landscapes complete with their snowy mountains and winding rivers are unashamedly nostalgic. On first viewing, they seem to be hearkening back to German Romanticism and even further back to Neo-Classical longings for Arcadia, so full are they of serpentine squiggles, classical bridges and gently swaying trees. But into these idyllic landscapes the artist incoporates wrecked cars, irresponsible tourists and inappropriate contemporary interventions.

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Brion Nuda Rosch makes images by working with the fundamentals: ideas, form, composition, investigation, and humble materials. Rosch makes art out of what's available to him.

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Shen Wei's series, 'Almost Naked', possesses a strikingly accomplished balance of raw intimacy and formal intensity, seldom found in contemporary photographic portraiture. As trite as it may seem within the current climate of cynicism, sarcasm and irony, there is a real sense of emotional connection in these pictures, not only between the photographer and his models, but between the viewer and the viewed as well.

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Art viewers have an unfortunate tendency to confuse dark with deep, but the gentle, joyous and generously spirited public sculptures and paintings of Swedish/Dutch artist Folke Heybroek (1913-1983) offer a compelling case for the complex pleasure that optimistic art can provide.

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Michael Goodward's sleek and sexy sculptures and installations hinge on a subtle twist of expectations or a surprising use of materials. Reminiscent of the kind of post-conceptual alchemy performed by Tom Friedman, Goodward transforms mundane materials into poetic, humorous and sometimes ironic amalgamations.

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Even in the flat-screened passageways of cyberspace, there is something about Jeffrey Porterfield's sculptures that actively engages the imagination to roam in and out of the negative spaces that each piece lays down. Perhaps it is the powerful mix of a surfer's laid back touch and an ability to comprehend the rigors of an ordered universe that Porterfield's work seems to tiptoe along, that beckoned me in for a second look.

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Chris Graefensteiner's work stalks the psychological terrain between fairy tale, memory, horror and fantasy, combining all into images that are as eerie and discomfortingly familiar as they are enchanting.

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Jasminka Zweier's series entitled 'Warriors' catches men in the act of playing at shooting galleries. Sometimes, the men are depicted as lone shooters; at others they are clearly performing for their wives and girlfriends, captured by Zweier as they take part in a public spectacle under the watchful eye of the carnival staff.

Continue reading "JASMINKA ZWEIER: SAATCHI ONLINE CRITICS' CHOICE BY BARBARA POLLACK" »

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In Seldon Hunt's photographs the deserted forest resembles a manufactured diorama of the natural world, suggesting events and characters that have been removed or are hidden.

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David Cotterrell takes a long view of the political structures that define society yet his poetic manifestations often communicate the intimacy of one-on-one engagement. Critical of Western definitions of historical facts, Cotterrell poses specific questions about the delineation of public territory and classification of personal status. From Shanghai to Hull, his chosen sites and ambitious multi-media interventions force him to challenge his own take on other people's histories and the suitability of academic processes and modes of making in communicating complex ideologies to the wider public.

Continue reading "DAVID COTTERRELL: YOUR GALLERY CRITICS' CHOICE BY REBECCA GELDARD" »

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How can we protect ourselves? Christian Schoenwaelder's sculpture explores the occult quality of that which is secure. His meticulously crafted wooden boxes and cabinets, shrink wrapped mattresses and shapes shrouded in burlap are like ancient talismans, caricatured. Whether because of the threat their protection implies, or because they seem themselves seem threatening, these big objects are silently terrifying.

Continue reading "CHRISTIAN SCHOENWAELDER: YOUR GALLERY CRITICS' CHOICE BY ALIX RULE" »

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Hawaiian-born artist Kent Rogowski gives poignancy and personality to mundane toys and whimsical objects. Toys and games are commonly intended to provide creative escape, but the objects Rogowski playfully appropriates evoke nothing more imaginative or stimulating than visions of last-minute purchases and forgotten minor amusements.

Continue reading "KENT ROGOWSKI: YOUR GALLERY CRITICS' CHOICE BY ANA FINEL HONIGMAN" »

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The bread and butter of Jonathan Gitelson's art is that most elusive of subjects, everyday life. Since moving from New York to Chicago, Gitelson has turned the overlooked stuff of the city into the focus of his large-scale photographic works, capturing such things as discarded club fliers and pairs of shoes hanging from telephone wires.

Continue reading "JONATHAN GITELSON: YOUR GALLERY CRITIC'S CHOICE BY BILL ROBERTS" »

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After feminism, Peyton Place, Tom Learer, David Lynch, Gregory Crewdson and the directors of 'Desperate Housewives' unearthed the sinister activity, hypocrisy and seedy sexual subtext hidden behind clichés of saccharine, sanitized suburbia, it is hard to look at a beaming housewife and her spotless kitchen without expecting the worst. Bangkok-born, Philadelphia-based Laura C Wagner's sarcastic series of screen prints, 'The Cannibal Debutante', drives another spike into the myth of suburbian perfection.

Continue reading "LAURA C WAGNER: YOUR GALLERY CRITICS' CHOICE BY ANA FINEL HONIGMAN" »

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Claudia Drake's work culls the silent macabre of nineteenth-century visual culture to produce images of haunting pensiveness. Without the need for an exacto knife, she dusts off the banality of these fragments with a keen eye for editing in a digital process, coupling the playfulness of a Picabia collage with the black humour of the mid-century Italian painter and design impresario Piero Fornasetti.

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For years, Brooklyn-based artist Eric Doeringer (below) has been establishing himself as a New York art lover's Fairy Godmother by granting poor gallery goers' wishes for affordable little canvases of images made by their favorite art stars. He produces small-souvenir scale versions of well-known paintings, sculptures, collages, drawings and works in other media by more than a hundred contemporary artists, which he then sells at international art fairs and glitzy exhibitions such as the Whitney Biennial.

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Nicole Morris makes art about transition, evocative photographs and installations where 'one thing becomes something else'.

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Regardless of trends or personal style, fashion functions as a visual vocabulary which conveys the practical facts of our daily activities and expresses our aspirational images of ourselves. English artist Kelly Gardner's sculptures of dresses made from pages of books and lit from within by electrical lights poetically articulate that duality - clothes illuminate and project the true stories about who we are and also the fictions of who we wish we were. In rendering those tales, she selects textiles whose delicacy evokes the fragility of flesh, while the rich, vintage Victorian tints of her lace prints create an appealingly anachronistic sense of sensuality.

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Adam Latham, who graduated from London's Royal College of Art in 2005 with an MA in Painting, makes drawings and paintings which confront taboos and the limits of acceptable ideas of taste. His work, which has its roots in social and political cartooning, explores the role of exoticism in art, and the intricacy particularly of his drawings at first diverts one's gaze from their less than palatable subjects.

Continue reading "ADAM LATHAM: YOUR GALLERY CRITICS' CHOICE BY REBECCA WILSON" »

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Willem Besselink's practice mostly takes the form of performative installation. Created and developed during a set time period and within a set space, his works focus around a playful concept which involves the artist as arbitrator and members of the public as pawns on a game board.

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New York-based artist Joseph Giannasio scraps, peels and folds paint, wood and other banal building material taken from exhibition space floors. The rows of tightly bound rolls form single installations that are intended to represent the time he invested in their creation. As his materials crumble and corrode, it becomes increasingly difficult to divide the organic and artificial associations his art brings to mind.

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The visual immediacy of Syra Larkin's art is procured through a very angular style, echoing a Picassoian impulse to distort and exaggerate. Limbs are edgily pronounced, the white curvy flesh standing out against a monochrome background.

Continue reading "SYRA LARKIN: YOUR GALLERY CRITICS' CHOICE BY KATHERINE LEVY" »

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While the majority of the artists on Your Gallery employ the site as a showcase for reproductions of their art, the 'Lonely Hearts Correspondence Club' is one of only a few wholly web-based works. The tone of the project is appropriately maudlin, yet seductive and sincere, with images that are also sexy and Gothic enough to create romance out of the loneliness that causes a keyboard call-out.

Continue reading "LONELY HEARTS CORRESPONDENCE CLUB: YOUR GALLERY CRITICS' CHOICE BY ANA FINEL HONIGMAN" »

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In 2002 the Finnish artist Antti Laitinen embarked on an extended performance piece entitled Bare Necessities, a work Richard Long and Vito Acconci might have dreamt up had they ever collaborated. Laitinen decided to live in the forest for four days without provisions of any kind - except for state-of-the-art camera equipment with which to document his return to nature.

Continue reading "ANTTI LAITINEN: YOUR GALLERY CRITIC'S CHOICE BY MELISSA JOHNSON" »

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Echoing some of the spiritual introspection in Francesca Woodman's test prints and the rich symbology latent in Tarkovsky's films, as well as the overexposed corporeality of Warhol's reels, Monika Bielskyte's stories are as mysterious as her method, and reflect everyday miracles from an original sideways stance.

Continue reading "MONIKA BIELSKYTE: YOUR GALLERY CRITIC'S CHOICE BY LUPE NUNEZ-FERNANDEZ" »

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In January 1970 the American 'land' artist, Robert Smithson, created one of his celebrated earthworks, Partially Buried Woodshed, at Kent State University, Ohio. Four months later a demonstration against the Vietnam War took place at the university during which four students were killed by National Guardsmen. Since then Smithson's work has not only become an iconic work in the art historical canon but also a metaphor for the social and political climate of the time. Over three decades later Charlesworth, Lewandowski & Mann, a group of students from Goldsmith's College, London, recreated Smithson's work, engaging, as they put it, with 'a mythological and political discourse which calls into question the historical narratives of the protest movement in 1970s America'. Rebecca Wilson reports.

Continue reading "CHARLESWORTH, LEWANDOWSKI & MANN: YOUR GALLERY: CRITICS' CHOICE BY REBECCA WILSON" »

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Emily Jervis, currently studying for an MA in Fine Art at Central St Martins in London, creates strange, mythological characters - men in city suits photographed wearing incongruous animal heads, hybrid creatures made out of plaster, wire and fabric - which draw on her interest in fables, storytelling and leaving space for the viewer's imagination to run riot.

Continue reading "ESTHER JERVIS: YOUR GALLERY CRITICS' CHOICE BY MARK GREENE" »

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A price gun and price tags replace traditional tools such as paint and the paintbrush in Martin Roth's works which offer a commentary on consumerism in America.

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'My artistic sensibility is for ever tied to the past. At seven I was punished for touching Lenin's nose, as a teen forced to write false Komsomol meetings reports, as a student I spent time in the KGB's freezing rooms. My relatives were persecuted by Stalin; my parents investigated; amongst those killed by Nazis are my two grandfathers.' In her series of 20th-century dictators Alla Tkachuk depicts the defining figures of her childhood, fusing her own experiences with history and the politics of the last century.

Continue reading "ALLA TKACHUK: YOUR GALLERY CRITICS' CHOICE BY REBECCA WILSON" »

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Alon Ohana's paintings capture the essence of her subjects, depicting characters displaced far from the original newspaper photographs in which the artist finds inspiration.

Continue reading "YOUR GALLERY: CRITICS' CHOICE BY HONG-AN TRAN" »

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Magical explorations of an adult world through childlike eyes epitomise the work of Dhruvi Acharya.

Continue reading "YOUR GALLERY: CRITICS' CHOICE BY KATARINA HORROX" »

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Alex Rennie's paintings show the influence of Caravaggio, as he readily admits, but perhaps more subtly so the absorption of the Symbolists Franz von Stuck and Lovis Corinth. Either way, Rennie's paintings (re)create an ideal: a glowing and powerful London of classical proportions and a strong unflinching male figure.

Continue reading "YOUR GALLERY: CRITICS' CHOICE BY ASHLEY ELDRIDGE-FORD" »

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Like the feather neck adornments of some Amazonian tribe, the rigorous geometric patterns in Ross Holden's photographs are an abstraction of the surrounding world. The simple technique of repetition allows this 34-year old English artist to confer an orderly aesthetic identity onto the confusion of the world at large. By Jason Oddy.

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Icarus Helmut by Anthea Bush, one of the 30 artists selected for the Your Gallery@the guardian project, seems to quote and redo Meret Oppenheim's fur-covered cup. Hard and soft together become more heroic by referring to the body of an anti-hero, in both subject and form. Carter Foster, curator of drawings at the Whitney, is impressed by the slickness of industry combined with a softness and ephemerality.

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"The ingenuity of film and photography as art medium lies in its flexibility - most effective in documenting the raw and real and contrastingly also in staging and styling the less real. As photographer and video artist, Kiki Petratou embraces this fluidity."

Continue reading "YOUR GALLERY: CRITICS' CHOICE BY CHARLOTTE MCLAUGHLIN" »

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Mickey Mouse and Bugs Bunny, twentieth-century symbols of innocence, are encroached upon by bones, birds of prey and political figures such as Hitler and Lenin in what Dan Baldwin describes as 'contemporary versions of 17th-century vanitas paintings'.

Continue reading "YOUR GALLERY: CRITICS' CHOICE BY REBECCA WILSON" »

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Vicky Fox ifeels the rhythms of the tide looking at the watery interventions of sailor and boat-builder Marie Lorenz, whose work is posted on Your Gallery.

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People's dreams sent to her via email, or over the telephone, and etched onto eggs; sheets of paper with bullet holes, each one representing the longitude and latitude of an international atrocity... Tom Morris reflects on the work of Miranda Maher, whose work you can see on Your Gallery.

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Carlos Andrade and Todd Ayoung create videos and installations that, though often cryptic or abstracted, invariably refer to catastrophic events of contemporary history.

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Jamie Salmon works in a long tradition that extends from Franz Xaver Messerschmidt (1736-1783) to Ron Mueck (1958- ). Messerschmitt was born in the age of enlightenment where the physiognomy of the face, and its extreme expressions were a science. Salmon's bronze offers to the viewer a fragmented stoicism, a portrait bust of statuesque vulnerability.

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