DoArt


Howie B	Lynda Benglis	Verne Dawson

Charles de Meaux	Steve DiBenedetto	Jim Drain

Rachel Feinstein	Sylvie Fleury	Gloria Friedmann

Maureen Gallace	Bruno Gironcoli	Rachel Harrison

Jang Lila	Bertrand Lavier	Li Nannan

Linder	Miltos Manetas	Didier Marcel

Amy O'Neill	Ken Price	Hiraki Sawa

Catharina van Eetvelde	Sophie von Hellermann	Charline von Heyl

Tsuruko Yamazaki	Otto Zitko

(b.1963, Glasgow, Scotland)

Howie B is a Scottish-born Jew, who started as a DJ and now has his own label that produces albums for celebrity musicians like Bjork, U2, Tricky, Massive Attack, Brian Eno, Sinead O'Connor and so on. Howie B himself pursues an active career in music. Currently, he has expanded his territory to original sound tracks of films (he has won awards for music in the Wim Wenders film End of Violence and Run Wark’s short film For Babies) and also to the fashion scene (with the sponsorship of the Italian Fashion House Fornari, he owns Havana Men’s Wear Collection and he is also working as a designer). His knowledge of music is profound and he has won several awards, so he is an artist with a firm following of fans. He also owns the French Stereo Pictures brand, Last Bingo in Paris and the American Lunatic Works/BMG label, Mayonnaise.

(b. 1941, Lake Charles, Louisiana, USA)

Lynda Benglis is the frontrunner of metaphoric sculptures in the form of living creatures, and presents various experimental works using paintings, drawings, ceramic, print and videos. By doing so, she delivers messages as an expressionist, feminist, pop artist, punk artist and minimalist. Among these titles, Benglis represents post-minimalism focused on women, in contrast to masculine minimalism, and reaches a balance between abstract works and mass production.

Benglis believes that art is a rich, organic gesture, and expresses ideas through shapes like an electric circuit rolled and wrinkled inside a metal frame in a strange shape. Lynda Benglis takes interests mostly in the physical traits of things and their impact on spectators, and uses various materials like polyurethane and aluminum in order to give an iconic impression. Additionally, in order to present properly the themes that she likes, such as confrontation and balance between power and mass or femininity and masculinity, the artist chose materials like stone and metal. By weaving steel and aluminum in a wrinkled manner, she makes her artworks look like a cloth wrapped in metal. In such artworks, materials, forms and eternity interact with each other. Characteristics of her art can be found in the borrowed organic forms that look like mollusks, beetles or giant candies. Studying these artworks is a fun rather than strange experience for spectators.

Artworks by Lynda Benglis are included in the collection of galleries like MoMA and Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.

(b. 1961, Meridianville, AL, USA)

Verne Dawson was born in 1961 in the United States and graduated from Cooper Union art school. Currently, he is based in New York and pursuing his art career. He has a variety of interests including the universe, past history, past culture, legends behind birth, allegory, symbols, narrations, time, numbers, astronomy, calendar, planets, stars, anthropology, folklore, religion and ancient tribes. At the same time, the artist takes his subject matter from landscapes, images inside science fiction, nudes, animals, architectural materials, ancient tribes and still life, and interprets them in his art.

Verne Dawson combines contemporary culture and phenomena with the ancient legends behind birth, and represents time before prehistoric times tens of thousands years ago through the present. The artist continuously inquires into the perpetuity of past history or past culture inside contemporary history. His idea is to understand the present through researches into the past and furthermore to talk about the future. At the same time, the idea is to talk to the past and the future through the present. That is, the modern materials that are seen in the fantastic past landscapes can be interpreted as talking about the future through the present. Instead of idealizing the themes too much, the artist suggests the theme with implicit narratives through compositions and details that are not revealed on the surface.

(b.1969, Istanbul, Turkey)

Charles de Meaux is a video artist and experimental film director who moves back and forth between Paris and Bangkok. Together with Pierre Huyghe, Philippe Parreno and the committee to popularize contemporary art, Charles de Meaux established the Anna Sanders Films in 1998, which can be described as a collection of projects that traverses between films and contemporary art. As a part of his participation in the program, Charles de Meaux made a few special films and art pieces, which he dedicated to the image character of Anna Sanders. Films and artworks were released and displayed in various cities like Paris, London, Manchester, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Berlin, Geneva, Tokyo, Rome, Milan, Madrid, Barcelona, Bangkok, Warsaw, Busan, Seoul, and Beijing, and they were also selected as major films in international film festivals such as Cannes, Venice, Toronto and Edinburgh. Charles de Meaux is also the director of the DVD collection of Anna Sanders, whose distributor is MK2. You Should Be the Next Astronaut, a video work, is research into sci-fi film, and it presents a new direction. At the same time, it is a technological parody of the entertainment industry. In this artwork, the artist injects imagination, dreams and hopes to the audience and awakens them.

(b. 1958 Bronx, New York)

Steve DiBenedetto, based and in New York and now pursuing a career there, seeks half-abstract images through paintings and drawings. For a long time, the artist has taken an octopus as his own symbol and created his compositions on this subject matter. It is expressed in spaces where whirlpools, radial shapes and circular shapes are collected, and this is a reflection of the horror and fantasy that are hidden inside the childhood memories of the artist, expressed in forms entangled and twisted like cobwebs or ivy trees. In his art, the sky is expressed in pieces and in ever changing forms and these are usually expressed in the shapes of complicatedly entangled octopuses and helicopters, the two main symbols of the artist. This presents a feeling of looking at the disturbing outcries from voices inside the artist, an extremely private expression that shows the psychological status of the artist, rather than an influence of cubism or homage to a certain trend influenced by art history. This artist thinks that the very act of producing or painting an artwork, which is meditative art, is a way of awakening in itself and his artworks are the reflection of this thought.

(b.1975, Cleveland, Ohio, USA)

Jim Drain was born in Ohio, USA in 1975, and is now living in Miami to pursue his career. He was a member of the now-disbanded art community, ForceField, and the major characteristic of his works is the aesthetic, hallucinating, primitive, post-modern and brilliant sense of colors, and the biggest influence in his work is known to be the ForceField.

Jim Drain appears to have learned hints in Africa in creating his artworks, as they have geometrical patterns and labor-intensive forms in sculpture. He produces non-western patterns in sewn and embroidered knits, leather with screen prints, beads and tassels that remind spectators of the primitive tribes, and produces symmetrical or asymmetrical forms of sculptures. He also presents textile sculptures that shine with unique use of colors, reminding viewers of femininity and primitive nature together. The fact that a male artist is carrying out labor-intensive handicraft techniques overturns the trite logic that this is feminist art and removes dichotomy of logics. That is, his artworks can be described as a strong visualization of the “Dismantling of the Dichotomy” of post-modernism.

(b. 1971, Arizona, USA)

Rachel Feinstein was born in Arizona, USA and graduated from Columbia University. She works with various media, including painting, drawing and sculpture.

Rachel Feinstein’s works are known to have been influenced by Pino Pascali of the Arte Povera group. Until he died in 1967, Pino Pascali presented works which were composed by painting wooden pieces, spreading cloth and covering electric cables with cloth. Through Pascali’s works, Feinstein was inspired to use various materials. After looking pieces of sculpture from Northern Europe’s Renaissance period, revived in Germany around the 15th and the 16th centuries, Feinstein started to take great interest in the reverse sides of sculptures, which had interested no one and which were not even visible. Feinstein also was influenced by Veit Stoss and Tilman Riemenschneider, the masters of the period, and presented an installation of a reverse side of a sculpture. Additionally, through working only on the frontal side, Feinstein added dramatic elements to the artworks, and also presented works that can be appreciated from several angles, giving elements of film or stage drama.

(b. 1961, Geneva, Switzerland)

Sylvie Fleury has found her subject matters in fashion, beauty and shopping, which are considered superficial aspects of modern society, and connected them with art.

In the early 1990s, Fleury started to win attention in the European art scene, with her “shopping bag” works. This artist is keenly interested in fashion and daily lives are transformed into art through her “shopping bag” project in the early 1990s. Several artists have worked to convert ready-made products to art, but Sylvie Fleury is special in presenting the course of her own shopping by displaying what she shopped for and the shopping bags. This later would develop into casting work. She transforms the products that she shopped for to sculptures by giving a solid casting (after bronze casting, mercury or 24k gold is coated), and brings the products to boutiques, which become the exhibition spaces for display. Interaction between fashion and art is a very important concept in Sylvie Fleury’s works, and this series was born by converting boutique to exhibition and then back to boutique, while products become artworks and then again return to products, in interaction or inter-invasion. From the year 2000, she started to cast in gold all the items that are needed in the act of shopping, not just the things that she shopped for.

Unlike the critical awareness and aggressive method of 1980s feminism, Sylvie Fleury back then stressed femininity and led post-feminism through soft touches, and she is also expanding her territory in installation, video, performance, photography and painting.

(b.1950, Kronach, Germany)

Gloria Friedmann, born in 1950 in Germany, has been based in Paris and Burgundy in France since 1977. In the early stages of her career, Friedman worked mostly in photography, but now she is engaged with various media such as paintings, installations and sculptures, etc.

She focuses on the relationship between nature and the culture made by human beings or on the conflicts between the human race and nature, and adds visible aesthetic effects to man-made natural materials. By doing so, she expands the effect of empathy and calls attention to social awareness and interests. For example, she would have stuffed animals like deer, cows and parrots present a scene of a dramatic moment, at a standstill in a space, and then she expresses the scene like live photography or adds colors to the background of stuffed animals in order to sublimate it to a painting. Enchanted by the theme of “Nature,” this artist concentrates on describing animals, the symbol of nature, as a holy existence, and what she ultimately pursues in her works is the expression of conflict between nature and human society. Gloria Friedmann is interested in the way we live in the present in the world, and describes self-reflections on time and space of human beings who live in the present in the time of the world, a world that is fast spinning. To do so, she presents human beings absent-mindedly seated on a globe that symbolizes the Earth, or presents anonymous human beings holding the time given to us. This also reveals the artist’s intention to reflect on the past, present and future of human beings through the sublime language of the Mother Nature in the order of the universe.

(b.1960 Stamford, Connecticut, USA)

Maureen Gallace was born in 1960 in Connecticut and she is now living and working in New York. Gallace travels around the suburbs of New England, her home territory, to take photographs and to draw sketches, which are the basis of her paintings. That is, the landscape in her works carry memories and recollection of her childhood. However, what is exceptional in her landscape is that it lacks life and it has a lonely echo that seems to be personified. Gallace’s landscape series is drawn on small canvasses about the size of a notebook, using wide brushes. She uses colors like olive green, sandy brown, faded blue and off-white, which add a gloomy and melancholy atmosphere to the works. Images that frequently appear in the paintings are houses without windows and doors, huts and small boats, trees and the sky, and these make spectators feel as if they are reading a poem. Through such a method, the artist is drawing a landscape that actually exists but is adding her recollection and memories of her own childhood to create an extremely private space, instead of describing the landscape as it is. Lack of windows and doors in the houses that appear in Gallace’s landscape paintings and the abstract paintings of the landscape play a role in removing spectators’ stereotype of a ‘house’ or a ‘hometown’ and show the feelings of the landscape in the work as it is. This is the reason why her paintings bring about loneliness and dismal feelings, although they use ‘houses’ and ‘hometown’ as the subject matters.

(b. 1936 , Villach, Austria)

Bruno Gironcoli is celebrated for avant-garde, post-modern and original forms of sculptures, and he works mostly on sculptures and prints. In 1993, he received the Grand Austrian State Prize and in 2003, he participated in the Venice Biennale as representative of the Austrian section.

Bruno Gironcoli works in the category of expressionism or structuralism, and it appears in the form of the proliferation of forms or organic expansion. The main characteristic of his work is the use of overturning images, and this is expressed in the characters that are grotesque and sadist/masochist, with a target of fascism. Scale is an element that has a big impact on Gironcoli works, and organic forms that are revealed in his giant works present alchemic symbols and suggestions. His works appear to coexist with art deco and science fiction, and they show a form where beauty and irony exist together. Through his works in general, he reveals mental panic or psychological disturbance through the ephemeral nature of life, a sense of futility and nightmares. At the same time, in his works, there are transformed machines and human bodies, and the organic extension between the two, which express the contradiction and absurdity of life, together with the deep and complicated abyss that goes beyond contradiction and absurdity at the same time.

(b.1966, New York, USA)

Rachel Harrison, based in New York, works with installations, sculptures and photography as her media. Rachel Harrison presents a type of work that does not belong to any history or school of philosophy. Harrison mostly presents works of architecture as an independent object in space, with common and contemporary materials. Such a way of working turns out to be mix of the hand-made form from the hands of the artist and the ready-made from the industrial products in daily life, which altogether presents a very abstract form of sculpture. Most of her work gives off very cold or confused feelings. Harrison mixes kitsch, contemporary culture, politics, the consumer society and meaningless images together with art, in a comic and poignant way. Materials that this artist likes to use are chairs, wigs, cubes, potatoes, mannequins, video cameras, photography, magazines, newspapers, etc.

(b. 1980, Seoul)

Jang Lila began her work with video and photography of human beings wearing animal masks, and the artist humorously and precisely depicts heads of animals that are familiar to human beings, like rabbits, cats, lambs, foxes, beavers and wild boars, in a size that is a little bigger than human or similar and in ceramic dressed with white glaze. Despite the fable-like and symbolic elements, the image that comes from the medium of ceramic forms a certain distance in the boundary between sculptures and decorative art. By putting artworks with glittering white surfaces on colored props, the artist creates a space that is like both sculpture and narrative with stories. To the artist, Jang Lila, living creatures are categorized into human beings and other animals that are not human. Therefore, heads of human beings represent individuals whereas heads of animals are thought to have no such individuality. This is why the artist uses heads of animals that have lost individuality, instead of heads of human beings, in a way to cast a question: Are we still human or already animals? Animals that appear in the works are selected because their physical characteristics are easy to distinguish, not because they have certain images or symbols. The white color inside the artworks visually symbolizes the nature, both fragile and heavy, which is the inherent characteristic of ceramic. At the same time, the white color symbolizes absence, and, together with empty heads of animals, this highlights the identity, which is a major theme of the artworks.

(b. 1949, Châtillon-sur-Seine, France)

Bertrand Lavier has been an experimental artist in the European art scene since the 1970s, and is one of the most influential artists of his generation in Europe. He works mainly with paintings and sculptures, and his artworks blur the boundary between sculpture and paintings. For example, in his work, paintings sometimes become sculptures and sculptures sometimes become paintings, and at the same time, objects of daily life sometimes become art pieces and art pieces sometimes become objects of daily life. Called the “logician of reality,” the artist makes endless roundtrip moves between the essence of art and reality. By doing so, he disturbs our stereotypes about art and reality, and leads us into a territory of confusion and disturbance, in order to disturb our fixed system of understanding. Earlier, he used to coat an object with rough paintings. Later, he started to use ready-made goods as his subject matter and coated them with paints or reconstructed them in other ways. Recently, based on his past way of working, he is discovering new ideas and materials from daily life to create various works.

(b. 1978, Xuzhou, Jiangsu Province, China)

Li Nannan, a young woman who is both a sculptor and installation artist, works mainly with a theme of living creatures like animals and insects. These creatures exist as independent entities but this artist uses space presentation to express their meanings. Space presentation is combined with nature and expresses nature as an existence in itself. This artist, however, tries to convey the friendliness of nature or warmness inside the artist. She presented a series of works that show sea life creatures, languid animals of various kinds, small living creatures intended to show uncertain identity, cactus and so on. Recently, the artist has been working on a project to express motions, facial expressions and the shapes of insects.

(b.1954, Liverpool, UK)

Linder, based in England, works mainly in photography and graphic design, based on collage. Linder is also widely known as a performance artist. The artist has also made a short film, Red Dress, and has been prominent in various fields, including a post punk music scene where the artist made a name as a feminist reformer (from 1978 when the artist was a founding member of the post-punk group Ludus until the group disbanded in 1983). Women in Linder’s works are mostly nude, and they are wearing giant cakes, cameras, machine or flowers, etc. These collage images were borrowed from pornography magazines, women’s fashion magazines or magazines on living, and the artist reconstructed these images like a puzzle, in a bid to criticize the phenomenon whereby bodies of women were commercialized by mass society and mass media. In other words, the artist’s works led the feminist movement of the time, and told stories and criticized the ‘beauty’ in society, the ‘beauty’ of women to ‘men,’ and at the same time the ‘beauty’ of women as the given custom in society. Since 2000, the artist has mostly presented works in which giant flowers, especially roses, is placed, and presents a visual construction that is still daring. By presenting this construction of female nudes placed together with flowers, which symbolize women in a conventional sense, the artist criticizes the consumer culture and the stereotypes of authorities and at the same time, expresses femininity. Additionally, through the anonymity achieved by the deconstruction of the face of the subject, the artist tries to talk about women’s desire for utopian life and the contemporary society that has become consumed by technology.

(b. 1964, Athens, Greece)

Miltos Manetas is the founder of the movement called ‘NEEN,’ which is a new form of art movement that is appropriate to the digital era. The word ‘NEEN’ does not have any meaning in contemporary languages, but in ancient Greek, it means ‘now.” NEEN works only on the Web, and it produces many images using ready-made characters like Super Mario or Lara Croft. Works by NEEN are characterized by unlimited downloads and expansion, and the artist strongly advocates this Copyright Free movement (www.imgonnacopy.com). This movement implies that everything can be stored, represented and reproduced by others. Miltos Manetas considers that the web site is the true art genre of our times, on the premise that his body and self died after the Sept. 11 tragedy in New York and we are living ghost lives, floating around the virtual reality as on the Internet. To embody this idea, the artist collected an immense number of domains, and, after learning that whitneybiennial.com domain does not belong to the Whitney Museum of American Art, he let the museum know that he bought the domain. In 2002, during the Whitney Biennial, he presented an artwork that used this web site. Recently, he had an exhibition at the new Saatchi Gallery in London, and also presented a media art performance with Howie B at the opening show before the alliance exhibition in doART Beijing gallery.

He is noted for his paintings that are mostly descriptions of computer hardware, Internet web sites and Internet cable wires, and materials in his artworks are in fact ‘artificial;’ depicting an immaterial existence that floats around without roots just like a computer interface, although they take the form of daily living, described in daily lives. His perspective is that paintings are representations in themselves and that there is no meaning in copying them. He also thinks that nothing exists and every existence is without form and life which floats around the web site. This perspective is what his artworks present to the spectators.

(b. 1961, Besancon, France)

Didier Marcel, based in Dijon, France, is categorized as a conceptual artist and neo pop sculptor in France. To Didier Marcel, what is important in artworks is how an artwork expresses a total display and how to express a certain story through display, rather than the singleness of an artwork. The artist’s purpose is ultimately to express a ‘micro cosmos,’ through display of an artwork. As seen from Marcel’s definition of display, Marcel produces an exhibition, rather than an objet d’art. This is why it is hard to define Marcel’s works as simple sculptures; in particular, the ‘whirlpool’ format that the artist often uses to make the whole artwork rotate brings active self-reflection to the exhibition. This artist pursues both ‘independence of forms’ in artworks and ‘decoration,’ and at the same time, presents the confrontation between the two so as to add tension and balance in the space. Mostly through abstruse yet attractive sculptures that imitate architectural materials or objets, he exposes the difficulty of modern relationships in nature and maximizes the effect of the expression or exposure. He makes people imagine and daydream through vague artworks, and this is the power of Didier Marcel.

(b.1971, Beaver, Pannsylvania , USA)

Amy O'Neill is a graduate of the Pratt Institute where she studied art, and she is now based in Geneva and New York. She takes her subject matter from festivals and parades in the United States, her home country, and from the folklore and folk culture of her second home country, Switzerland. She uses this subject matter to mostly work on drawings and installations. She is also much interested in B-culture, and reflects such interest in her works. However, instead of showing repulsion or criticism of the so-called mainstream class or introducing kitsch character, Amy O'Neill focuses on the B-culture itself and shows academic as well as philosophical research into the folk culture and the B-culture, and this is what makes her special. At the same time, she turns around the periphery of B-culture through her works, and then looks into and expresses the customs of mainstream society that is gradually changing.

Amy O'Neill uses as subject matter themes in daily lives or regional folk tales or narratives, and then shows a supernatural reality that coexists beyond the normal daily lives or the real side of the reality that is told in a distorted way. For example, there is the “pine tree holy ground” located in Baldwin, Michigan, which was introduced to the world by Raymond Overholser in the 1930s; Overholser made more than 200 pieces of impressive and simple furniture, because of his love for the pine trees. Amy O'Neill's work, "Tree for Hire" (2006) is an artwork that borrowed the original furniture designs by Overholser. The transformed trees were also used as the subject matter for the drawing series titled "Big Trees" (2006), and she expanded these images to the size of human beings.

(b. 1935, Los Angeles, USA)

Ken Price is an artist and craftsman based in the United States, and well-known for abstract forms of ceramic pieces. The artist produces mostly original forms of sculpture in small sizes and brilliant colors, and many of them are inspired by nature. The forms are mainly organic and biological, and they have original nonrepresentational forms that are similar to inner organs or digestive organs. His sculptures remind spectators of melted lava or hot fudge sundae ice cream, with surfaces that are smooth and psychedelic. The drooping shapes are somewhat similar to the rubber works in the early stage of Richard Serra. Recently, he has been working with one or several small lumps in circular shapes, and he is known for repeating the process of rubbing about eight layers of paints with sand, to help the appearance of unexpected colors and to have visual patterns making the same forms.

(b.1977, Ishikawa, Japan)

Hiraki Sawa, based in England, is a Japanese video artist who talks mainly about dreamy and poetic spaces through his artworks. Sawa uses his own apartment as the main place to film his works, and he uses miniatures. Using a simple method of overlap, he makes a subtle crossover and combination between real-life living space and imaginative space. His works look like pieces of time-worn films or simple experimental films, and there are often ‘rocking horses’ and ‘shadows.’ Rocking horses are always moving but at the same time they are always in the same place. However, in his works the rocking horses move about the houses and show a magical force where unreality or fantasy inside reality becomes reality. Taking the indoor spaces as the background, through plants, animals and fireworks that are expressed in the form of shadows, the artist describes how ephemeral our lives are and how fast they pass away. The artist focuses on visually describing the range of human imaginative power in daily lives. In particular, Hiraki Sawa recommends viewers venture to the highest point of human imaginative power inside the highest level of landscape that an indoor space can express. To that end, the artist opens the door of imagination broadly. The artist expresses imagination in minute detail and enables spectators to have a tour around the world without physical movement. In doing so, the artist reminds spectators of the fact that human mentality is a territory of unlimited discoveries.
Black and white video work of the artist also reminds viewers of the photographic stop motion etudes on human beings and animals of the 19th century. Hiraki Sawa’s works present a peek into the current capacity of digital video and a subtle connection to fixed films or photographic techniques, and this is what differentiates his works from other media works. Black and white images and antique toys of his, which belong to the past, add a melancholy and a sentimental feeling to his works in general.

(b. 1967, Gent, Belgium)

Catharina van Eetvelde, a Belgian-born artist, is currently based in France. She graduated from the Royal Academy School, and her media art works started to make name through releases in galleries in Munich. She uses media art (animation), paintings and drawings as her main media, and she constructs mixes and reconstructs materials in an abstract way that represents reality like human beings or figures with her own imaginative power, to deliver unique feelings. The artist uses materials with somewhat complicated elements in the simplest and wittiest way possible, by combining sentiments of pop culture and so on, and these materials properly deliver the subtlety of emotions by mixing together with abstract composition that reminds spectators of poetry.

In the case of her drawings and paintings, the artist mostly produces artworks in small A4 sizes, and her paintings are extremely small parts of what the artist really wants to express; she takes meaning in what can be a story as a whole, although it may not be independent as one piece. The artist sometimes intentionally describes one part alone in minute detail and makes a reconstruction, and these paintings that are reconstructed through partial sections interact ultimately with other paintings, including other compositions. In this sense, every single piece that she completed is very dreamlike and in the form of an organic shape. The artist sometimes paints a simple drawing using lines and often uses watercolors to have a faint layer of coloring. Some of these completed pieces are produced as animation films.

(b.1975, Munich, Germany)

Sophie von Hellermann is a German-born artist who is now living and working in London. After graduating from Royal University in 2001, she was encouraged and sponsored by Charles Saatchi. Under the influence of her father, who was a nuclear physicist, she gets inspiration from the scientific imagination, scientific equipment or time capsules. While her contemporaries are focused on expressing reality, von Hellermann expresses her imaginative power. In several ways, she gives imaginative and romantic feelings to her works. For example, her favorite technique of color field painting technique gives a soft and lyrical feeling by smearing the colors on the canvas. This is an influence that is traced to Helen Frankenthaler, the painter who represents color field painting, and Morris Rouis, the American abstract painter. Von Hellermann also uses empty space to color the canvas lightly, and expresses a feminine artist image even without using brilliant colors, and her works mostly present the innocent and pure feelings of women.
Works by von Hellermann combine the language of science and art, and speak largely about time, light and space, and this tendency shows in a vague hybrid born from the mixture of her imaginative power and her original half-transparent techniques. The original blurry feeling of the artist in coloring expresses fantastic travels in time and space.

(b.1960, Mainz, Germany)

Charline von Heyl is a female painter, which makes her a rarity in the art scene, and she is now based in New York. There was a perception in Germany in the 1980s that female painters could not win attention, but she did not give in to this tendency and pursued her own world of art. From the 1990s, her abstract paintings began to be introduced in Germany and the United States, and she started to make a name. She was influenced by the social background of 1980s Germany, as it was the time and place that formed her perspective as an artist. This is why her works now still have rich influence of 1980s Germany. Her paintings are a sentimental expression of emotions in terms of use of colors and themes, but in terms of the power of expression they seem dynamic and strong. She mostly works on abstract paintings, using lines and sides at her liberty, and these are unstable forms, lines that cross without rules, tapes, and the choice of colors. This implies the high level of mental activity, analysis and passion for direction in her paintings. The contrast of negation and affirmation and various mental activities are revealed in various colors and expressions in her works.

The artist uses various media such as oil painting, collage, photography or box tapes, and among them, masking tape is one of her favorite tools of expression. Her works do not paint or visualize particular objects. The artist only focuses on how to paint, as her heart leads her, without revealing any particular images. In the end, she visualize the activities in her heart or mentality, and these are the characteristics of her abstract paintings.

(b.1925, Ashiya, Japan)

Tsuruko Yamazaki, who was a member of the Japanese avant-garde movement called the ‘Gutai movement’ from 1954 to 1972, mostly produces expressionist and avant-garde works. In Yamazaki’s works, light, colors, forms, materials and subject matter work as one life and show a world that is repeated in unlimited, mutual chains. Influenced by the Gutai movement, each life in her works makes one element that constitutes the whole, and one life is connected to another life. At the same time, one life sometimes disappears from the whole or dominates the whole. Such dynamic expressions of the artist gain their meaning in that they have interest in every existence and new possibility that does not fall behind the times. The image, which is made in a situation that is connected infinitely to the chains of each element, suggests images of an unfamiliar world to the audience. The artist creates live colors by mixing several shades of colors and unexpected shadows on metal materials, and makes the audience feel the oppressive force that comes from the strength of each medium.

(b.1959, Linz, Austria)

Otto Zitko, living and working in Vienna, Austria, pursues a sardonic European style of abstract painting. He works mainly on large drawings using lines, and these are not paintings simply on white pieces of paper. He paints on white walls of galleries, using coal, and then presents an exhibition. His paintings use lines that are drawn freely without rules, and these lines do not appear as fixed set of movements; the paintings pursue surrealism and express themselves inside surrealism.

In Otto Zitko’s works, an important element is a line. An abstract expression using lines can be said to be a major element in his works. This artist successfully completed paintings in abstract expressions, under the influence of Jackson Pollock, the noted artist of American abstract expressionism. Zitko has been described by the American art scene as an heir to the Pollock style of painting. Lines in the artist’s works show movements of contraction and expansion, and these movements mean the revelation of the artist’s mentality and emotions. In terms of psychology, his paintings are completed with a phenomenon like ‘reminiscence,’ which refers to a situation where what was remembered appears after a certain passage of time in recollection. The reason that his artworks have very strong movement of lines and use of space along with gurgling energy, like the paintings of children, is the influence of the reminiscence phenomenon.