A Road Back Home: Contemporary Portraiture
December 2, 2023 - January 26, 2024
Opening: Saturday 2nd of December 2023 4PM - 6PM
Artspace Warehouse is pleased to present a new group exhibition, A Road Back Home: Contemporary Portraiture, inviting visitors to journey through a nostalgic landscape that is both playful and poignant. This exhibition showcases works that embody the power of portraiture to evoke memories, awaken emotions, and celebrate the human spirit. The works on display range from whimsical cartoons to ghost-like figures, from contemporary colored pencil drawings to dramatic scenes, each one exploring the complexities of human experience. Implementing vibrant colors and dynamic lines, the artists in A Road Back Home ruminate on the beauty and versatility of contemporary portraiture, unlocking forgotten feelings and encountering familiar phantoms.
Inspired by her background in fashion, Georgia-born artist Lindsey McCord creates artworks that encapsulate the fun of being stylish and the accompanying confidence. Her experience in the fashion industry is evinced in her work by details of design such as patterns, construction, and styling is evident throughout her artworks. While her figures tend to have neutral expressions, the bold colors and patterns of her work express the joy and celebration of fashion. McCord continues to steadily amass a following and is collected by a growing number of collectors.
US Navy veteran Randy Morales fuses nostalgia and graphic expressionism within his street-pop artworks. The choice of subject matter within his artworks is strongly influenced by his experience growing up in the 90s. He says, “Being a young African American and Puerto Rican male in Washington state already being different from all the other kids I chose to hide my creative side and just go forward with life day by day. I ended up in the military since I had no other plans in life and found myself doing creative things during my free time just to pass time.” Carrying on the theme of feeling like an outsider for much of his life, Morales focuses on characters that he would consider less “obvious” to the masses but more emotionally evocative to those who recognize them.
Alessandro Siviglia is an Italian artist born in Salerno in 1982 and now living in Rome. After a 15-year stretch of taking a bold, guerrilla approach to art Siviglia began to hone his current style which combines his street art background with more traditional artistic conventions. Siviglia emphasizes the difference between a painting and reality, and the different ways of seeing, or perceiving, the world around us. His work reflects the concept of relativity and combines people, lifestyles, and stray animals while accounting for both his observations from cities and his experience with street art.
Erin Hammond alternates layers of pencil, charcoal, and acrylic, combining an active interest in the female body with experiments in color and shading. Hammond predominantly works directly on wood, allowing the textures to puncture her surfaces. Her artworks on canvas exhibit a softer rendering of her subjects. Her background in both film and fashion allows Hammond to use the unfinished elements of her aesthetic to explore the contemporary fascination with (im)perfection latent in those professions.
Blurring the distinction between figure and ground, Swiss artist Edith Konrad’s spectral forms inhabit dark and muted abstract environments punctuated by vivid bursts of color. In combinations of acrylic on canvas, mixed media, and collage, she studies line, color, texture, and the qualities of acrylic itself. In some works, traditional mark-making and color field painting techniques are evident, while in others Konrad references the visceral immediacy of cave painting and painting on stone. Her scenes are frequently obscured by layers of paint.
Preservation of vulnerable wildlife is the focus of Naomi Jones’ work: she finds catharsis in painting soulful animals. Portraits of vulnerable species native to the North American landscape are painted with an illustrative sensitivity, reminding the viewer to appreciate the delicate balance of nature. She tries to make such wildlife, frequently living on the edges of homes and gardens, visible through paintings set among vividly patterned backgrounds. Jones is inspired by Georgia O’Keefe’s attention to the natural world and Frida Kahlo’s narrative approach to painting.
Since the opening of Artspace Warehouse in 2010, the gallery continues to be an industry leader in affordable, museum-quality artworks making collecting art accessible and budget-friendly. With one gallery in Zurich and two galleries in Los Angeles, Artspace Warehouse specializes in guilt-free international urban, pop, graffiti, figurative, and abstract art. The expansive 5,000-square-foot space offers a large selection of emerging and established artists from all over the world.
