September 8 – 13, 2017

Artists:

Andrew Dykes

is an upcoming artist based in New York, finding new grounds in the merging dichotomies of Masculinity V Femininity. He applies a specific layering approach to enhance Hyperrealism with Neo-expressionism, often portraying masculine depictions of a flower. You will not get lost in the loose brushstrokes or the elegant waves behind a petal; instead you will see the painting exactly for what it is. You will see an emboldened cluster, consolidated and contrived.

Dykes starts with a centered format to activates the space and create a deliberate confrontation to the viewer. He assembles a variety of mixed media, often building layer upon layer with silver and ink to bring the paintings to life. Once completed, he flattens the background and allows the subject to shine. Infusing masculinity with femininity, light with dark, and realism with abstract: the media then merge and become equivalent to the picture they create.

“I want the painting to be both visceral and mysterious: where once you begin viewing the painting, the painting soon stares back.”

Michael Ezra

has distinctive and easily recognizable style in sculptural nudes. His work is focused on creation of unique laconic images of sculptural forms by using the medium of fine art photography. It is dedicated to discovery of novel concepts of sculptural form of human body and study of dualism via harmonious conjunction of contrasting elements.

Ezra’s work with a human form, provocative and unconventional, inspired a wide following; but it is his clean and precise manner of execution of each piece that became a special hallmark of the artist. Equally found in his sculptural nudes and landscape works, it renders a unique sense of clarity and completeness to each of the master’s pieces.

“I enjoy exploring dualities, the opposing qualities inherent to everything in nature. It is then when all of them are present, I get a sense of completeness and harmony that I strive to pursue in my work.”

Yelena Lezhen

was born in Kiev, Ukraine. She graduated Kiev College of Art and Design and worked as a graphic designer after graduation. She immigrated to the US in 1989 and settled down in New York. This city impressed her by its museums, exhibitions and diversity of cultures and art life. The city life and surrounding her nature of New Jersey remains the source of her inspiration.  She is married and has two children.

Yelena’s symbolism bears an emotionality required to express, soberly and directly, a specific emotive atmosphere. In her work she tries to find a bridge connecting fantasies and reality, leading from the invisible to the visible.

Yelena Lezhen has participated in numerous art exhibitions and won a number of juried selection calls for art and awards. Recently she exhibited and sold her art works at Art Hamptons 2016, and also at art exhibitions in Barcelona, Paris, Reggio Emilia (near Milan). She will exhibit her works at SALON ART3F NICE (France) in October, 2016. Her paintings and drawings can be found in private collections around the world, including United States, Germany, Israel, Russia, and Ukraine.

Naoaki Funayama

I’m from the city that is famous for Mt. Fuji. I really like that mountain, and dinosaurs as well. Both have special meaning: “power”, “greatness” and “specialty.” The work titled “X-don” means “tooth of the unknown.” With paleontological research the whole body of a dinosaur can be restored from just the fossil of one tooth. I have questions about how that works. Human beings can’t know everything. We can only work from one part by imagining a thing’s whole. Today’s images of dinosaurs are one of the possibilities we can consider from a hypothesis. The paleontologist presents just one possibility from the limited viewpoint of a selection of relics of the past. This theory has overturned. “X-don” shows that which is larger than a mountain. I am expressing one of its possibilities.

Angelica Verkeenko

My creative process combines my passions for painting, photography, printmaking, and product design.
My current multimedia works focus on my long interest in transfer my impressions of the nature and
painting traditions.

Khachik Bozoghlian

“Sculpting is like architecture—you manipulate objects, the placement of lines and curves to create another space.”

I learned about the Viennese Expressionist painter Egon Schiele when I went to the MoMA exhibit (The Leopold Collection, Vienna) in 1997. I didn’t know anything about him until then. I was taken by Shiele’s lines and colors as well as his subject matter. I had not yet seen anyone deal with the explicit eroticism of the human body in the way he has. He abandoned the aesthetics of conventional beauty to present the psychological complexity of his subjects, including himself. His unrelenting gaze on himself and his subjects jump out from his work. For this, he was censored during his time.

Although it was never mentioned, I could see in his work the influence he had on other twentieth century artists that I admired. Schiele’s color palette is present in Francis Bacon’s work. I could see his lines coming out of Alberto Giacometti’s sculptures.

Since my visceral experience of Schiele, my mission has been to recreate his brush strokes and sensibility into my own sculptures. I want to capture the same psychological intensity that he delivered in his drawings and paintings. Like Schiele, I want to expose the human psyche