Breakthrough Artists of the Affordable Art Scene
December 11, 2022 - January 28, 2023
Opening: Sunday 11th of December 2022 4PM - 6PM
As an industry leader in the affordable art scene, Artspace Warehouse presents 10 contemporary artists in Breakthrough Artists of the Affordable Art Scene. These artists explore a wide variety of styles, source materials, and media, effectively demonstrating expertise within their respective practices. With a focus both on abstraction and figurative, this group exhibition of wall works emanates color, line, and imagery. Ranging from wire mesh sculptures to graffiti-inspired paintings, from paintings embracing awkwardness to mixed media artworks brimming with imagination, these breakthrough artists offer something for everyone.
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.
Gary John has been a street artist since 1985. Originally from Seattle, Washington, he moved to Venice Beach, California in 2003 and began selling his drawings on the Venice Boardwalk. After almost ten years of selling his work on the boardwalk and experiencing “a bout with homelessness,” John first exploded onto the international art scene during Art Basel Miami in 2013. His mixed media works blur the boundaries between Pop Art and Abstract Expressionism with Street Art elements. John cites Pablo Picasso, Keith Haring, and Jean-Michel Basquiat as his artistic inspirations. His artworks continue to be exhibited at galleries and major international art fairs in the United States, Asia, and Europe. Notable collectors include Kelly Clarkson.
Amber Goldhammer is best known for creating vibrant abstract paintings with a street art edge. She originally started painting with pigments, powders, and waxes and went on to experiment with mixed mediums and processes to keep evolving her artworks. Building upon layers of bold colors and sweeping gestural movements, her newest work includes positive messages of love and hope, written in a graffiti-style script. The new mixed-media series is a testament to Goldhammer’s own emotive interpretation of the ebb and flow of her life’s experiences.
Swedish artist Jonas Fisch paints with a jazz-like spontaneity, expressing personal emotions, commenting on contemporary society, and exploring old mythologies. Formulating a galaxy of the unknown, Fisch’s textural paintings flood the mind with possibility. His process is instinctive and organic, the paintings energetic and vibrant, emerging from his subconscious without judgment. They are constructed by feelings trying to find harmony. Endless figures, messages, layers, and symbols move in and out of focus as the eye explores his puzzle pieces with multiple solutions. Fisch has exhibited across California, New York, Chicago, Switzerland, and Hong Kong. His paintings can be found in private collections all over the globe.
Atticus Adams is a sculptor whose work embodies the transformative power of art to create beauty, meaning, and emotional impact from industrial materials. Using mostly aluminum mesh—generally found in screen doors/windows and filters—he creates abstract pieces and installations, which sometimes resemble flowers, clouds, and other natural phenomena. Recycling—as a practice and a concept—is essential to Atticus’s work. He often uses old industrial, architectural materials to create his art. Transformation, of course, is at the heart of all recycling: turning one thing into another; and in his art specifically, making something functional into something aesthetic; turning rough material into gentle forms.
Impasto-painted strokes of bright colors are the framework of artist Shiri Phillips’ textural abstract artworks. Inspired by the vibrant surroundings she found growing up on the Mediterranean and the Southern Californian Coast, Phillips is driven by the philosophy of “color is life”. Her works have been influenced by impressionism and the geometric nature of graphic design.
Born in Foggia, Italy in 1975, Fabio Coruzzi merges painting and photography into one imaginative image that offers a new outlook on an otherwise ordinary urban scene. His artworks represent an authenticity unlike any other: layered, textural, controversial, open to imagination, colorful, personal, and inspiring. Coruzzi’s work encapsulates not only urban environments, but the inhabitants as well. Irony is laced between figures drawn with an energetic architectural hand. His work is colorful, funny, and biting through resolutely rendered vignettes of collective cultural consciousness.
Using an impasto, painterly technique, Canadian artist Dana Cowie creates cubist-inspired farm and rural landscapes. Working within controlled color schemes, her artworks appear abstract up close and become more representational as the viewer takes in the larger image. Each stylized color represents shadows and grander forms of perspective that capture a more vibrant experience beyond the minute details of the subjects she paints.
Much of Ricky Hunt’s work is influenced by Egyptian hieroglyphics, graffiti, and his tumultuous past. After a brief period of drug addiction in the 1980s, he was incarcerated which led to the discovery of his artistic talent and personal transformation through his love of art. Hunt is inspired by philosophy, mathematics, scientific theory, poetry, and astronomy and these themes appear in his work repeatedly. He describes his chosen imagery as, "Chaotic order pouring from the watery depths of my unconscious.” His mixed media minimalist works reflect how he brought order into the disorder of his earlier existence.
Nigerian-Swiss artist Valerie Etitinwo creates abstract figurative paintings which celebrate the beauty of ugliness and awkwardness. Etitinwo’s artworks transcend each of her surrounding cultures to create work that is universally relatable through the celebration of imperfections. She creates her work with the conviction to push her creativity and expression to a level of intriguing “ugliness.” With each artwork, she fights the temptation of “cuteness” to go beyond what is expected.
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.
