The Paris Opera enlisted JR to transform the Palais Garnier's facade, setting the stage for an unprecedented performance choreographed by Damien Jalet to Thomas Bangalter's music (ex Daft Punk).
153 dancers took the stage or let’s say, each of the “pixels” of the facade grid, performing their enduring commitment to creativity and dance. They wore costumes designed by CHANEL during the show, including a custom outfit for Étoile dancer Amandine Albisson.
James Jean is a highly acclaimed Taiwanese-American artist, famous for his exceptional skills in illustration and fine art. He was born in Taiwan, but moved to New Jersey, USA, at a young age. Later, he attended the School of Visual Arts in New York City.
Jean gained significant recognition for his cover illustrations for the DC Comics series "Fables," which earned him multiple Eisner Awards, a prestigious accolade in the comic book industry. His artistry expanded beyond comics, delving into painting, drawing, and commercial work, showcasing an incredibly diverse range of styles and techniques.
Jean’s artwork blends surrealistic elements with intricate and detailed compositions, incorporating organic and geometric forms. His pieces are characterised by vibrant colours, intricate linework, and an ethereal quality that captivates the imagination.
Apart from his commercial success, Jean has held solo exhibitions worldwide, displaying his captivating artwork in galleries and museums. His contributions to the art world have earned him numerous accolades and a dedicated following of art enthusiasts.
James Jean's ability to seamlessly blend fantasy, mythology, and contemporary themes into visually stunning creations has solidified his position as one of his generation’s most influential and admired artists.
Illustrator Nani Tamoona uses AI and clever “prompts” (“using it is like talking to AI chatbot in that you provide text, asking it to make an image, and it gives you an answer” - thoughts on AI art by Eric Wayne).
The way Nani aka Moonchildtamoo uses AI as a base for her work is outstanding and proves that generated art can be beautiful and captivating
Montreal-based illustrator Yun Ling creates a long visual story of a lone archer exploring the unknown world
Classical sculptures becomes reinterpreted as a four dimensional form. The audience is presented with a shifting perspective of the sculpture, mirroring the conflicting perspectives of our own history and religions, both of which are become distorted through time. It draws a parallel between our history and current political landscapes, where it has become harder than ever to decipher truth from bias, with two realities presented at any given time.
The works each progressively fracture into fragments of the initial mold, creating a complex and impossible interpenetrating form, they shift back and forth before regressively returning to the start, the loop continues endlessly. The sculptures are to be enjoying in the static, moving, and 3D dimensional form, owners of the NFT's will receive an animated sculpture for their Metaverse galleries.
Emma Steinkraus is an artist, editor of Company Editions, and Assistant Professor of Fine Art at Hampden-Sydney College. Her paintings and installations use strategies of juxtaposition and layering to explore ecology, gender, and the history of science. Her current project, Impossible Garden, spotlights the contributions of pre-20th century women to scientific art through an immersive wallpaper collaged from reproductions of their work.
Daniel lives and works in Leiden, The Netherlands. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. In his current work he searches for the transmutational properties of matter. The portraits and sculptures do not have a definite form and posses different realities on how they can be perceived. In order to come to new forms Daniel cuts up paintings, finds things on the street and uses creations made by others. The loose elements from these endeavours are used as disjointed brushstrokes that are reassembled in coherent shapes again, creating an object which holds no truth in shape.
The idea of the artists is to show the connection between a stable classical image in art and instant modern variability. It is she who is difficult to perceive by the viewer. She, most often, attracts with her duality, which the very union of two contemporary artists possesses.
Galina Shevchenko is an artist from Finland. For a long time, she worked in the classical style of painting. Her delicate watercolours, full of romantic mystery, promise both tranquillity and adventure: “The sun has not yet risen above the haze of clouds, and the mountains in the distance seem blurred in the predawn haze. The yachts are preparing to leave the bay for the open sea, but so far everything is motionless and breathes peace and quiet.” And now Galina herself embarked on the study of new facets of contemporary art.
Daria Khasaia lives and works in Istanbul. She chose the fragility of human emotions as the main direction of creativity: shame, anger, and pain along with unconditional love, tenderness and acceptance. She expresses her vision of the complex human nature with the help of collage, photo and video art, which can be accompanied by a live musical performance.
The creative union of such dissimilar artists was born in 2019 when they both received the Peggy prize. This union can be called a harmonious symbiosis of opposites, which breathed life into the "Connections" project. Connections between mature and young, unshakable and changeable, past and yet to come. As well as the connections between people, nations, and countries, which the girls demonstrate by personal example.
The artists presented five works in mixed media, where they combined classical and modern techniques. The message of most of the works is clear on an intuitive level. This is due to the desire of girls to make the contact of viewers with art more accessible.
The world is rushing at a crazy pace, changes sweep everything around, giving birth to new and new trends, names, and meanings ... It is impossible to remain a retrograde, nervously sitting on a stool of the past. And at the same time, it is so important to have unshakable foundations and roots that will help you not get lost in the whirlwind of a crazy future. Where is this edge? Transition? Merging two elements?
Each of the artists answers this question in her own way, but such dissimilar voices of the girls surprisingly merge into unison.
Galina brings out the haze of a blurred watercolour of hazy shades, deftly writing out the smallest details. Unites Daria's collages into a surreal world full of myths and deities, as if in an unusual dream. Unites the works of the artist’s mood, wary and curious in relation to the subtle moment of transition.
Most of the works have an unusual structure - this is an attempt to come up with the very future art that the project is looking for. Artists simply allowed themselves to be in a creative search, without depriving themselves of inner freedom. After all, the theme of the connection between the past and the future, life and death is presented to each of us in different ways.
Alejandra Her is an artist based in Caracas, Venezuela. Her art focuses on the exploration of internal and external worlds, carrying out a simultaneous process of literary and graphic creation.
“Artist Rogan Brown introduces his intricate cut-out paper ‘coral garden’, following his previous series that emphasised the mesmerising diversity of the coral realm. In his previous sculptures, the artist sought to capture the durable yet fragile silhouette of the corals, which is a symbol of the overwhelming impacts of global warming and man-made destruction.” via designboom
‘Coral Garden’ is part of an ongoing series displayed at Galerie Bettina in Paris, as a contemplative journey to the heart of nature. “The reefs are a potent symbol of the planet itself: teeming with life and colour and biodiversity and yet threatened with extinction because of our inability to control our own appetites and to accept the consequences of our own actions.”
CG artist Mario Domingos recently pours all his decades-baked knowledge into the digital art by releasing NFT series of motion pieces called “The Liberty Cap Visions”
Talented London-based classic-taught artist Ben Ashton granted a knighthood to his majesty the Glitch by creating awesome distorted portraits (mainly self-portraits) with oil on canvas. Ashton's work combines precision in execution with humour and character, balancing emotive response with a strong contextual foundation. Worth to mention his commission for Rag’n’Bone Man platinum single and then epic album “Human”. Ben did an a portrait of a singer that appeared on the cover art.
Utopia
by Camille Walala
Camile Walala, who recently painted a parade of shops in east London, got the idea to design a new Oxford Circus at the beginning of lockdown – when she says she was “struck by the silence of the streets” and “the sense of peace that had descended on London in the absence of the traffic”.
Pedestrianised, exploding with colour and full of imaginative street furniture designed to be interacted with in multiple ways, Camille’s Oxford Street is a place of joy, surprise and asymmetry – an antidote to the flatness and homogeneity that often characterise the standard high street.
In a letter accompanying the series, Camille reflects on her 23 years living in London, and credits the capital with sparking and shaping her career as an artist. This project, she explains, is in essence an expression of her love and gratitude for the city, as well as a serious proposal for a new, more enriching urban landscape. Full of colourful, bold architectural structures and 3D surfaces, the images present a vision of an urban thoroughfare that exists for more than practical purposes, inviting numerous forms of interaction. It’s a place for gathering and meeting, resting and rambling – evoking the multiple community functions of the agora, or public square, in ancient Greece. Walala imagines the space as somewhere the natural and the human-made can coexist and complement each other, weaving water and verdant plant life into her speculative streetscape.
In constructing the surface of her works, Sung-Hee uses a collage method in which many circles are hand-cut or gently torn from traditional “hanji” paper, then layered with oil pigments and placed one atop another. Sung-Hee successfully combines a traditional Korean sensibility with her unique vision and personal narrative. Her works explore the complex relationship between colour and texture through a labour intensive, time-consuming process.
Multi-media artist based in Los Angeles Luna Ikuta shares their love to frozen moments of a nature beauty through creating motion artworks featuring a short life of plants
Renowned interactive media production company Sila Sveta was commissioned by fashion designer David Koma to create a totally digital catwalk in a futuristic environment
Concept and Artistic Direction: David Koma
Creative Direction: Polina Zakh
Creative Direction, Art Direction and CG: Komron Komron, Evgeny Mezhibovskiy
Cloth Simulation: Danya Qebab
Character Animation and Modelling: Efim Strand
Sound: Rob Taliesin Owen
Styling: Marc Goehring
Talent: Tamar M.
Powered by: Sila Sveta
Through a range of perspectives, glaring upwards, scanning downwards and cutting across the city skyline, Malachowski’s lens searches the metropolis like a surveillance camera.
Minsk-based artist Dima Kashtalyan shares his black-and-white detailed ink drawings and same but scaled techniques he uses for creating urban art murals
