This autumn Pontone Gallery exhibits at the prestigious Art Miami fair. The gallery showcases a selection of its international artists, who range across the fields of painting, photography and sculpture. Common to all is a deep immersion in and mastery of their chosen practice. These artists are concerned with making pieces that seduce and intrigue the eye. They deploy a profound and mature understanding of process to fully express their ideas.
Matteo Massagrande is a critically acclaimed Italian painter. He creates images of atmospheric architectural vistas and emotionally significant landscapes. Steeped in the classical tradition, he brings a great depth of art historical reference to his work. Second to none in his skilful use of representational technique, his pictures conjure up complex and compelling illusions of haunting spaces.
American artist, Malcolm Liepke was born in 1953 and raised in Minneapolis. He is an experienced, mid-career painter who has exhibited all over the world; his work is represented in numerous private and public collections. He is a painter of a particular world, a 'demi-monde', inhabited by mostly young and attractive subjects, who project an air of self-absorption and watchfulness. Isolated figures pose with an almost insolent self-regard, others appear more vulnerable, as if exhausted by the rigours of a dissolute life.
Reef Hsu is an experienced artist with an international reputation and award-winning pedigree. His practice divides into two areas of practice: the figurative and the abstract. The drawings are graphic depictions of natural forms and animals, juxtaposed in tightly-wrought and crowded compositions. Hsu's paintings are schemas of diffuse pastel, colour articulated by a subtly-textured paint film.
South Korean artist JIHI creates mixed media images on panel which, at first glance, seem to be simple, graffiti-like characters. These humble forms combine to create an allegory full of highly implicit symbols. Utilising this light and bright formative language, she explores the heavy theme of lonely human alienation and crooked social reality.
Korean sculptor, Hwang Seontae, makes lightboxes. Constructed from etched glass and concealed LED lighting, these are meticulously crafted images of still contemplation. We are shown crisply delineated and subtly illuminated scenes of domestic interiors. They have the quality of stage sets, ready for action, anticipating human presence.
Englishman Chris Rivers makes powerfully gestural oil paintings in a contemporary, Romantic idiom. His subjects range from the churning voids of outer space to lush and sumptuous flower still lifes. His flamboyant and expressive handling draws the viewer into an exciting world of turbulent expression.
Born in 1958, Yigal Ozeri is an Israeli artist based in New York City. He is a ‘photo-realist’ painter, in particular of beautiful women in landscapes. His emphatically romantic subjects mine a seam of closely-related female characters. They allude to an art-historical cast list of classical nymphs, dryads, Botticelli goddesses and Pre-Raphaelite muses. His sylph-like models are contemporary iterations of such enduring archetypes, strategically placed in evocative settings.
With a background in film and design, Polish painter, Jarek Puczel, found his vocation in painting and for the last fifteen years has worked prolifically, showing at many international art fairs and galleries. Puczel's subject is the figure, particularly the head. His compositions typically feature a couple, male and female, engaged in an intimate embrace. A romantic and idealised moment is rendered in a coolly dispassionate style.
Throughout December Pontone Gallery will be running a parallel exhibition featuring these artists at its London space in Fitzrovia, minutes from Mayfair and the West End.
