Hunted Projects sixteenth VISIT is with Slovak artist Martin Lukáč. Martin is a painter whose works own a powerful expressionistic sensibility. Neither exclusively figurative nor completely abstract, his paintings are technically diverse and utilize numerous painterly processes. Lukáč exhibited with Hunted Projects in 2020 showcasing a series of small scale works on paper that further expand on his signature Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle series.
Hunted Projects fifteenth VISIT is with Vienna based artist André Hemer. André Hemer is a painter, whose work explores the intersections between digital media and painting. His interest in sampling digital media - including scans, found digital images or systems, and digital drawings - is born out of a desire to synthesize the concerns of the post-internet age with more traditional methods and techniques. Combining digital and traditional processes, Hemer sculpts images out of paint, which are scanned on a flatbed scanner. The scans are printed on canvas and function as an underlayer onto which paint is applied and the original sculpted paint is attached, creating a dialogue between material and image. His works embrace and reveal the transformations and transactions occurring between the contemporary digital image and the traditional painted object.
Hunted Projects fourteenth VISIT is with New York based artist Ryan Wallace. Wallace's interdisciplinary work spans radically diverse concerns. Related primarily through existentialist core principles, the miscellany of ideas present in Wallace's work manifest the complexities of the metaphysical as well as the clarity of total consciousness. Wallace taps into the visceral nature of Suprematism while simultaneously conjuring the bodily experience of Light and Space; a marriage between the cognitive and intuitive that occupies a dimensional, non-linear space. Shredded tape, vinyl screens, wax, and other discarded studio materials converge upon a single plane as Wallace reconstitutes detritus from previous works and forges new abstractions. Through this technique, he visually articulates the most alluring notions of evolution - manipulating the physical and metaphorical layers inherent to our perception.
Hunted Projects thirteenth VISIT is with New York City based artist Matt Mignanelli. Mignanelli creates paintings based on geometric forms, inspired by light, shadow, and architectural elements present in the urban landscape. His process combines incredibly detailed, methodical hand painting with references to utilitarian painting applications in municipal and industrial contexts. He uses enamel and colours such as mailbox blue to reference these functional uses of paint within the urban environment. Mignanelli typically works within a limited colour palette of black, white, or blue, while freely exploring permutations of form and recording the element of chance associated with his freehand process in splashes and drips of paint. The spontaneity that emerges makes the paintings feel alive.
Hunted Projects twelfth VISIT is with New York City based artist Michael Bevilacqua. Referencing his favourite bands, fashion labels, drugs, racing cars, and the like, Michael Bevilacqua’s semi-autobiographical mixed-media works serve as a platform for exposing his cultural, intellectual and spiritual preferences. Known for combining high and low culture through elements of painting, drawing, graphic design, digital print, animation, and collage, Bevilacqua characteristically works in a saturated palette, covering his glossy canvases with brand logos and doodles.
Hunted Projects eleventh VISIT is with Los Angeles based artist Hilary Pecis. Hilary Pecis’ works reference the history and medium of painting. Following the traditional motifs of still life and landscape painting, Pecis challenges the genre with her use of energetic and vibrant swaths of color, highly pigmented patterns, and manipulated perspectives. Using her surroundings as inspiration, outtakes from dinner parties, friends’ homes, gardens, collections and libraries are granted saturated life in visually stunning, modest memorials. The process of translating these photographs into paintings allows Pecis the opportunity to meditate on the specific moment and memory captured, helping her to create sincere translations of her own experiences. Each painting leaves clues through which we glean an understanding of the artist herself.
Hunted Projects tenth VISIT is with Rotterdam based artist Daniel Mullen. By applying glazed layers in combination with hard edge painted lines, Daniel Mullen creates layered images that figuratively communicate abstract concepts. When creating illusionistic forms Mullen aims to illustrate an abstract idea or phenomenon, turning abstraction on its head. He is driven by a sense that abstract art does not simply reproduce perceived outward reality but can be instead a transference of that which lies beyond our visual comprehension. In collaboration with American artist and filmmaker Lucy Cordes Engelman, whom Daniel is married to, the synesthesia series explores the sensorial relationship between colour and abstract concepts of time and space. Each colour they use represents a number, and when these numbers are used to illustrate time the painting appears as a layered image, a representation of time. Number two, for instance, is a shade of yellow.
Hunted Projects ninth VISIT is with Tel Aviv based artist Guy Yanai. Guy’s paintings encompass a variety of historical influences but seem distinctly of a technology-inflected moment. Inspired by historical figures such as Matisse and Cezanne, as well as more contemporary figures such as Tal R, his paintings capture unoccupied scenes of everyday life, flattened into a shallow depth of field with solid blocks of colour that create the appearance of cut-outs or collage. His paintings draw on sources from everyday life such as spaces that the artist visits, plants, films and conversations - but in Yanai’s paintings, these images become reduced to geometric blocks, abandoning references to the outside world in favour of a visual experience equally indebted to digital images and abstract painting.
Hunted Projects eighth VISIT is with London based artist Daniel Crews-Chubb. Daniel makes compelling works that employ a traditional expressionistic, painterly language amid a conceptual framework investigating the potency of the iconic image and the dramatic dynamism of historic and contemporary visual repetition. Contending with his primary influences of ethnographic art, ancient rituals, social media and Modernism’s artistic legacies, he creates organically progressive quasi-figurative paintings in series which rely on a group of constructed historic or mythic characters for the work’s narrative, but are primarily conduits for abstract mark making.
Hunted Projects seventh VISIT is with Australian artist Jordy Kerwick. Jordy is self-taught artist whose works incorporates dense impasto brushstrokes that flatten the perception of space; instead it is his thick application of paint that offers dimension and texture. He explores the relationship between thick patches of colour and form while incorporating recurring elements of iconography such as contours of flowers, figures and snakes as a means of fusing painting and sketching. These intuitive and enticingly tactile marks celebrate the artists role of investigating the inherent potential of his chosen media of oil paint and spray paint.
Hunted Projects sixth VISIT is with L.A. based artist Chris Hood. Though representational in nature, Hood’s paintings and drawings reflect an understanding of the abstract nature in which personal and social imagery collides in the twenty first century. Combining traditional techniques with the languages of digital territories, his work often features images culled from American counter-culture, art history, and mass media rendered abstract by translation. Drawing parallels to his interests in psychophysics, his paintings are cast in a liminal space with a unique reverse-stain technique that rests his compositions in ambiguous and perceptual tension. Likening them to faded advertisements or t-shirts turned inside out, Hood invests the evocative physicality of his paintings with themes of identity, memory, and loss. The resulting works hint at challenges with the idea of static perspective while pointing to larger questions concerning the role of images and contemporary painting.
Hunted Projects fifth VISIT is with Dusseldorf based artist Roy Mordechay. Roy’s works are inextricably linked to his cultural-anthropological examination of imagery and motifs, which motivates a sensual play of figures, lines and shapes. Inspired by narratives of his biography, which range from first memories as a child to his current nomadic life moving between Düsseldorf and Tel Aviv, he enriches his abstract compositions with detailed symbols. While looking at his works, one can see his irredeemable desire to bring all individual parts together into a meaningful narrative.
Hunted Projects fourth VISIT is with New York based artist Kadar Brock. Kadar Brock’s large-scale abstract paintings own a discordant combination of techniques, styles, and colours that come together in clashing tension. Impasto brush strokes are scraped away with a razor blade, the canvas is sanded with a power sander and the surface is white washed with an industrial primer-sealer. The process continues until an unexpected harmony is achieved. In the end, his works become a historical object that contains and obfuscates a lexicon of images.
Hunted Projects third VISIT is with New York based artist Preston Douglas; his work explores the relationships between fashion, painting, performance and installation. Through drawing, painting, digital scanning and printing, his works push the boundaries of how a painting can be made and questions how a painting is viewed, experienced and ultimately exhibited. With a background in fashion, his physical and digital paintings often become digitally printed onto luxurious fabric and become integrated into wearable fashion lines.
Hunted Projects second VISIT is with Berlin based artist Jason Gringler, he creates paintings and sculptures that utilise industrial materials like aluminium, plexiglass, mirror, concrete and spray-paint. His bold and monumental works explore the history of abstraction and minimalism whilst simultaneously embracing chance, failure, physical gestures and destruction as processes in his working methods. Through the use of reflective materials, Gringler’s works interact with the space in which they are exhibited, whilst drawing attention to the participatory role of the work and viewer.
