Dana Schutz

Dana Schutz (b.1976) is a painter in New York.

She graduated with a BFA the Cleveland Institute of Art in 2000 and an MFA from Columbia University in 2002. She grew up in Livonia, Michigan a suburb of Detroit and graduated in 1995 from Adlai E. Stevenson High School (Livonia, Michigan).

Her work is already present in all the major museums in North America and Europe, as well as in several important private collections. A number of her works are in the Saatchi Gallery and a large canvas titled "How we cured the plague, 2007" is currently on display in the permanent collection of the prestigious Mart Museum (Museo di Arte Moderna e Contemporanea Trento e Rovereto) in Italy [1]. She exhibits at Zach Feuer Gallery in New York and her first European solo show, Self Eaters and the People Who Love Them, was in Paris's Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin. Her bright, fantastical works have been compared to Currin, Goya, and Katz.

In Bomb Magazine[2], critic Mel Chin wrote that "dissection and dismemberment abound in Dana Schutz's work, all offset by sunny colors and a pert sense of humor. Among other things, she has created a race of people who eat themselves; a guy called Frank who is the last man on Earth; a gravity-phobic person who has tied herself to the ground; and a variety of characters that are spliced, for different reasons, on operating tables. Schutz loves to give her characters life and then cut them up. Yet hers is a blithe cruelty, the curiosity of a child playing at being a creator. Even when she hates, she does it with whimsy."

Tim Eitel

Tim Eitel (b. 1971, Leonberg, Germany) studied philosophy at the University of Stuttgart from 1993-94; Fine Arts at the Burg Giebichtenstein in Halle from 1994-96; and painting at the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst in Leipzig from 1997-2001. For the next two years, Eitel pursued his master’s studies under the teachings of Professor Arno Rink.

Eitel began showing his work in 2000. Most recently, he has had solo exhibitions at the Saint Louis Art Museum, Missouri (2005-6); Museum zu Allerheiligen-Schaffhausen, Switzerland (2004); and Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin (2002). An upcoming exhibition at the Kunsthalle Tübingen, curated by Martin Hellmold, is scheduled for November 17, 2007 through January 20, 2008.

In 2004, Eitel began to investigate increasingly ambiguous settings for his paintings. Walls, floors and surfaces were more precisely rendered, yet, through a simplification of the composition, they grew more difficult to decipher. A progressively darkening palette brings into sharp focus the edge between the abstract and the pictorial. Grey planes of the subtlest distinction, reminiscent of Rothko or Newman, readily slew into walls and floors in the presence of Eitel’s disinterested subjects (whether a group of school children or a lone shopping cart). The current exhibition continues and extends this investigation with five large-scale and ten small-scale paintings, many of which depict homeless subjects as well as their jerry-rigged carts, packed with belongings.

The work in his recent exhibition, he reflects a continuation of the artistic inquiry into the interaction of images. In his paintings, Eitel isolates pictorial elements, which he encounters (and photographs) in the outside world, and combines them into semi-fictitious compositions. These elements, such as a glance, a posture or a position, confer meaning without necessarily generating a narrative. In the end, Eitel extracts, rather than freezes, a moment from time by distilling out all reference to motion and change. The resulting quiet, which can at first appear as isolation or melancholy, transforms into a stillness that allows the viewer complete access into the nuances and resonances of each scene.

Yan Pei-Ming

Yan Pei-Ming is a Chinese painter born in 1960 in Shanghai. Since 1982 he has lived in Dijon, France.

His most famous paintings are "epic-sized" portraits of Mao Zedong worked out in black and white or red and white.

He works with big brushes, and his paintings are brought to life by the rapid brush strokes which structure the picture space.

Yan Pei-Ming was born in Shanghai in 1960, and was the second of four children. He grew up during the Cultural Revolution, and started to paint in his spare time. He applied for admission to the Shanghai Art & Design School, but was rejected due to his stutter.

 In 1980 he left Shanghai for France, where he enrolled in the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, graduating in 1999.

Yan Pei-Ming has become known for his "epic-sized" portraits, including works featuring Mao Zedong,  Bruce Lee  and his father.  He has exhibited his work in the Venice Biennale in 2003 and at the Sevilla Biennale in 2006. His first solo exhibition in the US was displayed in the David Zwirner Gallery in New York, May, 2007.

The Honolulu Academy of Arts and the National Gallery of Australia are among the public collections holding works by Yan Pei-Ming.

On February 10, 2009, it was announced that The Funeral of Mona Lisa will go on display at The Louvre on February 12, 2009 until May 18, 2009 in the room next to the original Mona Lisa.

Daniel Pitín

Daniel Pitín Born 1977 in Prague. Studied from 1994-2001 at the Prague Academy of Fine Arts in the Classical Painting studio under Professor Z. Beran and the Conceptual Media studio under Professor M. Sejn. Daniel Pitin is a young and talented painter who also works in - as well as being inspired by - film and video. During his studies at the Academy, he twice received the prize for the best work of the year, was the recipient of the Henkel Art Award for artists from Cental and Eastern Europe in 2004, and in 2007 was awarded the Mattoni Prize for the best new artist work at the Prague Biennale.

Daniel Pitin's film stills

Daniel Pitin choses as the subject of his paintings film stills not for the story they tell but for the gestures and expressions of its protagonists - movement and gestures are what interest Pitin and more often than not these are pained and violent. Our reactions to these are not ones of discomfort however but of attraction - the use of a refined, subtle color palette and gently expressive brush stroke lend these actions the adjectives beautiful, elegant. The movements no longer express a difficult emotion but are seen more for their purely physical traits, their movements in space and their unquestionable possession of the scene. This is accentuated by the fact that Daniel has chosen stills from classic movies such as Hitchcock's - highly stylized movies which while often of great psychological significance, seduce us by their aestheticism. Terrible things happen there but we cannot help but be attracted to this world of glamour and grand gestures. We are saturated with images from the camera, television, films, video games and we live vicariously through these, albeit the emotional experience is reduced and distilled taking in the positive aspects and sidestepping the devastating. They are presented to us in clean packaged boxes - we pick and choose - nothing will really touch us or affect us. As in Daniel's paintings the images are there but they are blurred, distant and ultimately out of our emotional reach.

 An Archeology of Painting
My most recent work has been focused on an investigation into the past. I try to dig up lost experiences (or at least those whose significance has been lost to me) that I have, for whatever reason, buried deep down in my subconscious. Something comes over me, an unexplainable impulse that can only be given shape through painting. In painting, I attempt to expose the real significance of some forgotten experience that has been buried under the dense layers of the preceding years.

Dawn Mellor

Dawn Mellor in her paintings and drawings uses black humour to deconstruct the cult of the star (which appears to have been chosen in our society as a substitute for religion) and its believer–the fan.

The majority of female protagonists in her works are music icons such as Madonna, Courtney Love or Britney Spears, but there are also appearances by film actresses and figures such as Audrey Hepburn, Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz (alias Judy Garland), or 'glamourous' politicians such as Hilary Clinton or Condoleezza Rice. All are subordinated to new narrative contextualization and equipped with new symbolisms and iconographies.

The painting style Mellor uses refers simultaneously to Surrealism, the colorfulness of Pop art and the underground trashiness of a Joe Coleman. The artist functions as a link, by drawing out a fictive role–whether she plays a lovelorn, a sadistic voyeur, a pathological pornographer, or a murderous stalker. Through these self-attributed 'painting' roles Mellor explores the moral codes communicated through mass entertainment.

For the past ten years, Dawn Mellor has been painting portraits of celebrities, consciously misrepresenting, sexualising and violating imagery culled from photographic portraits, gossip magazines, film stills and the internet. The combination of imaginative sadistic cruelty, satire and empathy could be seen as communicating something about the use of both individuals and groups as scapegoats onto which unwanted fears and anxieties are projected. Mellor states that “The paintings of this fashioned minority group of camp icons are vulnerable to my own diarist situations… overloaded collusions of identity, bombardment of consumerist products and imagery, psychological trauma, political and financial impotency and so on as a catalogue of felt experiences of the isolation, frustration and anxiety of the urban condition.” The melodramatic camp humour deployed celebrates a long tradition of camp as a tool of resistance to oppression, particularly within Queer culture and imaginative violence is presented as a cathartic source of pleasure.

Mellor lives and works in London. She has had recurring solo exhibitions at Team Gallery, New York: Victoria Miro Gallery, London; Il Capricorno, Venice and Galerie Drantmann, Brussels. She has participated in various group exhibitions including: Yvon Lambert, New York (2007); Defamation of Character, PS1, New York (2006); Expanded Painting, Prague Biennial (2005) and Remix: Contemporary Art and Pop, Tate Liverpool, Liverpool (2002). The artist has a forthcoming solo exhibition at Team Gallery, New York in April 2008, where the artist is represented.