Artists. Strong. Bold. Fierce. Bringing worlds together.
COLLABORATING WITH
EDVARDA BRAANAAS
Edvarda Aslaksen Braanaas is a Norwegian artist, currently based in Los Angeles. Throughout her career in Europe, Edvarda sought to redefine the notions of classic beauty. Edvarda's work is immersed and saturated with both classic art history and contemporary visual language. Her career is a story of juxtapositions as she aspires to join the spiritual to the sensual, the commercial to the artistic, the superficial to the profound. In Los Angeles, a city and a state of mind that to such a remarkable degree consists of a patchwork of subjective and selective realities where the local culture seems to encourage a fluidity in terms of identity and artifice, she has found the perfect canvas for her wide-screen meditations on beauty.
When we gaze into Edvarda's giant females, They also gaze back. The moments captured in the seven paintings presented explore the fundamentals of what it means to see, and to be seen. Edvard's women, painted in tempura on solid walls of wood, not unlike the pictures painted of sacred Christian personage, capture intimate, revealing moments of fear and courage, power and vulnerability, submission and faith, pain and surrender, devotion and trust. Lookatme makes a bold and sensual assertion: to be truly seen is to be truly loved.
POUL LANGE
It is simple things: a leaf from a tree, a petal of a flower, a page from a long discarded book, a fragment of a broken musical instrument. But when put together, they take on meanings and start telling stories. Poul Lange comes from a literary background of book jackets and illustrated books, so it should be no surprise that his collages and assemblages can be read and interpreted, if you take your time. Formed with both words and images, the meaning you'll find are not unequivocal; most likely you'll end up with your own unique interpretation since the language is better suited for contemplation than for bold-faced statements. Born in Denmark, but with residence in the US for a couple of decades, Lange recently moved from New York to Downtown LA. Living close to the Los Angeles Flower market, he has recently found great inspiration in the botanical world. Poul Lange has exhibited in both Europe and USA, where his inaugural show in New York's SoHo was "1998--Held Together By Glue," a diary-collection of 365 collages.
edvarda
poul lange
TOMMII LIM
Tommii Lim is an artist, photographer and director who resides and creates in Downtown Los Angeles. His works are a minimalist depiction of the way he interprets and catalogs his life. Through the conversations and adventures he experiences, Lim draws inspiration from the beauty of the simplicity of our existence through controlled line and space techniques. His distinct style of painting has often been referred to as a seduction of lines through motion and use of simple conceptual element to convey emotion. Lim's photography and videography style also use a minimalist approach to capturing the small moments and emotions of his subjects. He was trained and managed under the late Karl Bernstein (Charter founder of MOCA / Mirage Editions / Karl Bernstein Gallery). His unique style of visual communication and creative direction has taken his visions to various exhibitions and projects around the globe including recent wins at the Cannes Lion awards and collaborations with Kobe Bryant, Nike, Honda and Grammy nominated artist Starro, to name a few. He is set to paint an array of murals in 2017 and is currently planning for his much anticipated solo exhibition in LA.
STEVIANN MATIJEVIC
SteviAnn Matijevic is a mixed media installation artist. Her practice is based around using mixed media to create controlled environments. Through sound, video, sculpture, and drawing she is able to create conceptual platforms for inquisition fundamentally drawn from her education in Psychology.She is interested in finding how human behavior can be manipulated and controlled by filtering information through the senses.
In her drawing, she use ambiguous faces to emphasize the question of who is in fact, subconsciously watching and controlling us, whether that be our family, celebrities, or a form of religion. Recently in her sculpture practice she's been interested in the symbolism behind the bird cage. She portrays cages in a visually metaphorical way by incorporating human forms (or lack of) to stress the idea of choice in entering them. The materiality of her work is ephemeral as well as archival. This juxtaposition of one being timeless and the other disintegrating over time highlights the conceptualization behind her work.
steviann
Gary Brewer’s paintings explore the contours of our spiritual and sensual experiences. He creates images of nature as metaphors that express the world before us, the world within us, and the unknown forces that have shaped the universe.
Color is a powerful element in Brewer’s paintings. There is a musical quality to the orchestration of the chromatic chords and how they move: coming forward or receding in space. He creates a spatial dimensionality with color alone. It conveys moods and nuanced suggestions that conjure memories and physical sensations. In Brewer’s paintings one feels as though they are drifting through the watery depths of the sea or traversing the furthest reaches of deep space.
Elements of nature in which the artist feels an emotional response find their way into his work: forms that allude to the body, movement or beauty. Coral, orchids, lichens, gold, silver and dark matter are subjects that Brewer uses to create powerful paintings which communicate a profound engagement with the history of painting and with looking deeply at the natural forces that have brought us into being.
Gary Brewer is also a writer using his love of art and his knowledge of history to explore the meaning and motives of artists in his Studio Visit/Interviews for the online magazine:
Art and Cake and he is also a contributor to Hyperallergic.
GARY BREWER
MAXIM
Maxim was born in Prague, Czechoslovakia, during communism. Growing up under an oppressive regime, he developed an undying conviction to uphold the truth and the need to stand up to all injustice. His work reflects his struggle between the despondency and longing for the prospect of mankind as a whole.
Maxim has obtained his education in arts and typography in Prague during the 90's in the midst of the Velvet Revolution. In the fall of 1999, Maxim moved to the United States and in 2011 he found a new home in downtown, Los Angeles. This is when and where he fully started focusing on painting.
Paintings are his testament to the world we live in–its crudementt and beauty, its freedoms and indoctrinations. His large-scale, extremely textured, and sculpted paintings are a direct manifestation of his internal vying to find a higher meaning and order in our human character.