Urban Ecologies: Cities Are Built for Art
March 4, 2023 - March 31, 2023
Opening: Saturday 4th of March 2023 4PM - 6PM
The city vibrates with creativity. In Artspace Warehouse’s group exhibition Urban Ecologies: Cities Are Built for Art, artists create urban art that explores the relationship between the city, the art, and the audience. Featuring a range of media and styles, including street signs, maps, and newspaper art, the exhibition showcases the creative potential of the urban environment. Through vibrant murals and thought-provoking installations, Urban Ecologies: Cities Are Built for Art invites the audience to consider the role of the city in contemporary art and celebrate the ingenuity of artists working in the urban environment.
Ivana Milosevic was born in Belgrade, Serbia in 1972 and received a master’s degree in Architecture from Belgrade University. In 2010, Milosevic began painting cityscapes influenced by her background in architecture and passion for urban planning. Using palette knives and brushes, she creates depth and texture through layers of paint and incorporates small human figures to add a sense of familiarity and bustling life to her works. Milosevic’s works are filled with the idiosyncratic moods of an urban landscape and her choice of color accentuates the choices made to create such dynamic spaces.
Scott Froschauer is a contemporary sculptor, fabricator, and multi-media artist who uses "culture jamming" to make social critiques through familiar elements from the urban environment. His works have been featured at Burning Man and sponsored for public and institutional projects. Through the subversion of signs and languages, Froschauer transforms negative rhetoric into alternative messages of positivity, connectivity, and playfulness. When talking about his art, Froschauer says, “The main visual language in street signs is traditionally negative, my artwork is about imagining how to give reassuring language in the place of negative language.”
Ross Tamlin is a contemporary artist born in Auckland, New Zealand in 1958. Tamlin's signature corrugated iron paintings combine traditional art genres with graphic art, influenced by the De Stijl movement. These paintings represent a synthesis of art and function, incorporating the aesthetics of modern industrial technique through color and imagery. Tamlin is particularly interested in the traditional appropriation of found objects in modern art and reconstructs their purpose and function to reveal new relationships between the object and viewer. Tamlin's works are held in private collections worldwide and in corporate collections such as ING Bank and Barclays Bank. He lives and works in Kyogle, New South Wales, Australia.
Naguy Claude mixes pop art and street art with characters from American Pop Culture, adding inscriptions like “Love” and “Just Exist” to deliver a positive message. This fusion of positivity along with nostalgic characters places Claude’s artworks into his own niche that is both familiar and innovative. Growing up in a working-class neighborhood in the Parisian suburbs allowed Claude to have a different outlook on the world and piqued his curiosity. Being self-taught, he is known to create his artwork under the artist nickname of "Nacks" and strives to explore new methods of expressing idols of mainstream culture.
Ekaterina Ermilkina is an oil painter born in 1975 in Saratov, Russia. She grew up in Yalta, Crimea, and was inspired by its unique beauty and rich culture to paint cityscapes. Ermilkina's artworks vibrate with color and motion, casting a candied haze across the cityscape. Ermilkina uses a skillful combination of applying and removing oil paint with a palette knife on canvas to create her original abstract fine art paintings. Her inspirations are the expressionistic magic skylines of big cities like Manhattan and Chicago, filled with colorful skyscrapers. In 2005, she moved to the U.S. Her works have been featured in various solo and group exhibitions and have been collected by notable collectors such as Kelly Clarkson.
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.
Maria C Bernhardsson is a colorful artist who lives and paints in Sweden. Most of her works are influenced by the architecture and geometry of houses. Bernhardsson travels the world photographing and sketching houses to use as inspiration for her canvas and paper works. She plays with the colors and shadows of individual houses in conjunction with the overall feeling of gazing at a collection of these buildings. She then adds playful details such as flowers and animals to make the houses feel more like homes.
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.
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.
