Postcards from Nowhere
April 29, 2023 - May 26, 2023
Opening: Saturday 29th of April 2023 4PM - 6PM
In Postcards from Nowhere, nine contemporary artists invite viewers with them on a journey through a series of often familiar locations. Through a variety of media including painting, sculpture, and mixed media, this exhibition explores the ways in which artists construct and represent place, both real and imagined. The featured artworks offer glimpses into other worlds and invite viewers to consider the ways in which we create and inhabit the spaces around us. Inspired by personal memories, collective histories, or purely fictional realms, Postcards from Nowhere invites audiences to engage with the concept of place on a deeper level, and to consider the multiple meanings and associations that it holds.
Swiss artist Marion Duschletta was born in 1972 in Graubünden, Switzerland. Marion Duschletta transforms luxury objects and urban areas around the world in her works. She layers an intriguing mixture of urban photographs and American pop icons opposite brand names and advertising references, adding bold colors and compelling patterns. She transfers them onto archival paper which is mounted on canvas. The pop icon imagery is often distressed to emphasize a bygone era. She further enhances the artworks with acrylic paint and additional texture. Duschletta has received international acclaim for her works, with notable collectors including Ariel Winter in Los Angeles, CA.
Carl Smith works with a combination of silkscreen printing, collage, and painting. Smith is originally from Santa Fe, New Mexico, and studied art at The Cooper Union in New York. He combines his own photographic materials with drawings and other narrative fragments where he selects and transmits individual pieces onto a canvas through screen-printing and further completes his works with oil paint. With the use of found images, he tells slightly absurd and humorous visual anecdotes. The process of making these narrative works is what Smith refers to as “drawing with pictures.”
James Zamora is an American artist known for his unique “aisle paintings”. Using different spatial compositions, the artist translates common marketplace imagery into a stylized, elevated environment. Through his artistic practice, Zamora explores the particularity of the relationship between our eyes and perception through the subtleties of our immediate reaction. His paintings investigate current trends and their effects on the consumer.
Bay Area artist Melanie Tiongson creates fun and whimsical artworks featuring figures full of curiosity inspired by Filipino folklore and the uncompromised freedom of her young daughter’s imagination. Her mixed media paintings feature a combination of collages of vintage Tagalog books, expressionist abstraction, and illustration to communicate positivity and love. Tiongson studied at the Art Institute of California in San Francisco which pushed her beyond traditional drawing toward her unique illustration-inspired style in part through her love of graphic design.
Born in the Netherlands, artist Gerdine Duijsens’ dining and party scenes maintain a recognizable style that can be distinguished by four main elements: people, lush layers of color, expressionistic mark-making, and portraiture. Duijsens' figures are "bon-vivants," somewhat blasé, comical, cheerful, and bored. Her internationally collected paintings reflect the modern culture of consumerism, the desire to achieve status, and overindulgence. In their unguarded moments, Duijsens displays her characters as their vulnerable and insecure selves, when in their seemingly unobserved moments they briefly escape from a world in which status, knowledge, protocols, and power keep them prisoner.
Stuart Dunkel is an artist, musician, and author. Dunkel was born in Fair Lawn, New Jersey in 1952 and currently lives in Boston. He enjoyed a long career with top orchestras in Boston, New York, and Hong Kong, and in 1994 he transitioned from music to fine art. For his subject matter, Dunkel alternates between still life, landscape, and animal portraits that fuse detailed depictions with subtle humor. He hopes his viewer will find joy, optimism, and playfulness as well as a sense of classical balance and beauty in his work. Dunkel has exhibited at galleries throughout the United States.
Michael Giliberti studied graphic design at UCLA and at Parsons School of Design in New York, and printmaking at Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles. It was his interest and exposure to photography, combined with his training as an illustrator, that formed the basis of his creative process. Giliberti muses, “I paint subjects that may be familiar to people or attract their attention; maybe a place they’ve visited, or possibly somewhere they’d like to go.” He translates his photographs into a complex layering of acrylic paint on canvas to add depth with new color combinations and subtle textures. His paintings are characterized by vivid colors and powerful compositions.
Kathleen Keifer’s paintings show the breathtaking California scenery with its recognizable elements in a new light. Keifer’s paintings invite the consideration of the complex relationship between time and timelessness. It is the sheer visual interaction between the elements, taken in their bare simplicity that interests her. Water, sky, and architecture change their appearance with the shifts in weather and light. Her broken brushstrokes depict light and color in luminous waves, dissolving form into a shimmering surface of vibrant light.
Amanda Arrou-tea (aka Mandi Oh) was born in the coastal city of San Sebastián in Basque Country in the North of Spain. From a very young age, she felt a connection with mermaids, feeling in her whole being that they were real, so she started looking for her female clan in every sea, river, and pool. Spawning from these seas of feminine mysticism, Arrou-tea portrays female creatures that are in one spirit with mermaids through paint, video, and photography.
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.
