» Artists

Roger Ballen: Boarding House

01/03/12 at 06:03:14 am

Artist and photographer Roger Ballen was born in New York in 1950, and he has lived in Johannesburg, South Africa, since the 1970s. Roger Ballen’s interest in photography dates to when his mother worked as a photo editor with Magnum Photos in New York, and teenager Ballen befriended the likes of Henri Cartier-Bresson, Bruce Davidson, and Elliott Erwitt.

Working as a geologist, Roger Ballen began to photograph the homes and white residents of rural South Africa before developing his more theatrical and expressive documentary style in the late-1990s. Well known works by Roger Ballen include Twins, Front Door, Hope Town, Bedroom of Railway Worker, Puppy Between Feet, Boarding House and Prowling.

Roger Ballen’s photographs are like images from a waking dream: compelling and thought-provoking, with layers of rich details, flashes of dark humour, and an altered sense of place. Blurring the boundaries between documentary photography and art, Roger Ballen’s work is both a social statement and a complex psychological study.

Ballen’s recent work enters into a new realm of photography as the series of works from Boarding House are almost exclusively painterly and sculptural in ways not immediately associated with photographs. The human and animal subjects have all but disappeared and function more like stage props or weird sculptures within the composition.

Roger Ballen has won numerous awards including Art Directors Club Award Photography, Photographer of the Year at Rencontres d’ Arles, PhotoEspana for Best Photographic Book of the Year in Spain and was a finalist for the Citigroup Prize.

Roger Ballen: Contemplation

Roger Ballen has released a number of books featuring his photography including Boarding House, Shadow Chamber, Fact or Fiction, Outland, Cette Afrique’, Platteland, Dorps: Small towns of South Africa and Boyhood. He has also made documentaries of his work including Memento Mori, Selfportrait, Die Antwoord, Platteland: Images from Rural South Africa and Dorps: Small Towns of South Africa.

Roger Ballen’s work is held in many public and private collections including Berkeley Art Museum, California, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, Durban Museum, South Africa, Galeria de Arte La Aurora, Spain, Hasselblad Center, Sweden, Louisiana Museum, Denmark, Victoria and Albert Museum, London and  the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

We have two limited edition prints by Ballen available including Contemplation and Boarding House (pictured) which are accompanied by a signed and numbered luxury edition of the Ballen book Boarding House.

We offer a number of interest-free payment options, contact us for more information.

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Lucie Bennett: Candied

29/02/12 at 11:02:41 am

Lucie Bennett’s interest in the female form has taken her to a new dimension in her latest series of works. Retaining a female sensuality so reminiscent of her earlier works, Bennett uses line, shape and colour to glorious effect.

We have a new original work by Bennett now available called Candied (pictured). This unique piece is gloss on aluminium panel with exposed aluminium, measures 29 x 29 inches and is priced from £4500.

During study visits to make drawings at the Botanical Gardens at Kew, Lucie Bennett discovered uncanny similarities between plant forms and the occasionally florid structures of the body’s internal organs. Many of the recent works began as drawings and collages inspired by these visits, and the resulting imagery is visceral and vaguely hallucinogenic. These new works are rich in enigmatic patterning, executed using bold colour combinations. Tubular, colonic shapes elide with what look like stylised fallopian tubes; fractal borders between lakes of contrasting colours switch between figure and ground and back again.

Underpinning the project is a post-Pop sensibility that delivers a strong graphic punch. This really comes into its own through her use of gloss paint on aluminium which, though painstaking and time-consuming to execute (and fraught with risk), nevertheless lends the works a physicality that would have been lost to more conventional painterly approaches. Her insertion here and there of a Lichtenstein-like drip motif seems like a witty comment on the dribbling viscosity of her chosen medium. Nor is she afraid to leave some areas of the brushed aluminium support unpainted, which adds a luxurious contrast to the adjacent fields of colour. Coriander Studio have worked with her to their usual exacting standard to produce a superb series of prints that reproduces those unpainted areas with great fidelity.

Lucie Bennett has exhibited widely from 2001, including several times in New York – at the prestigious Armory Show among others, and a solo exhibition of new work in London in 2011. Her work is on permanent display in London’s Groucho Club, and she has been commissioned to create work for Selfridges and House of Fraser. Bennett’s Wink adorned a Porsche at Silverstone in 2005 and her work has been featured on the BBC’s The Apprentice (alongside Rob and Nick Carter) and The Culture Show. Popular prints by Lucie Bennett include Pink Knickers, Red Felt Tip Girl, Green Felt Tip Girl and Thundercloud. Lucie Bennett gained a BA from Manchester Metropolitan University in Interactive Arts, graduating in 1997. She also studied at L’Ecole Regionale des Beaux-Arts de Nantes in France.

We also have a collection of new prints by Bennett available including Orange Blossom, Blue Jungle and Kuniyoshi priced from £500.

We offer a number of interest-free payment options, contact us for more information.

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Hector de Gregorio: Crook

28/02/12 at 12:02:54 pm

Bestselling artist Hector de Gregorio has been described as ‘an unswervingly incendiary artist’, he is interested in seducing the viewer, and his deliciously dark photographic images certainly act as a visual lure. In his images nothing is sacred, containing as they do religious overtones and something beyond mere festishism.

Crook is based on the theme of Salvator Mundi where an especially enigmatic Jesus looks intensely at the viewer. Salvator Mundi, or Saviour of the World, is a subject in iconography depicting Christ with his right hand raised in blessing and his left hand holding an orb surmounted by a cross, known as a globus cruciger. The latter symbolizes the Earth, and the whole composition has strong eschatological undertones. The theme was made popular by painters such as Jan van Eyck, Hans Memling, Albrecht Dürer, Titian and a painting of the subject has recently been attributed to Leonardo da Vinci.

It tends to be an intense image meant to grab the viewer’s silent attention and to anchor it before the image. In Hector de Gregorio’s image he wants to show this intensity in a less clear way. It is unclear as to who the man in the image actually is, such as a prisoner, a distressed man or even Jesus himself. De Gregorio wanted to add tension to the piece with the ideas of beauty and compassion never been entirely clear.

Crook (pictured) is available to buy as a series of 3 hand-finished works on paper measuring 20 x 24 inches, priced from £2000.

De Gregorio graduated from London’s Royal College of Art in 2009, with a Master’s Degree in Printmaking, where he developed his labour-intensive way of working. Each image involves extensive research and costume making, photography, digital imaging and hand-finishing.

Hector de Gregorio photographs his friends, often in his studio against a blank wall, and dressed in elaborate costumes he has designed and made. He takes a number of photographs from the initial shoot, and stitches them together to distort the perspective of the finished image, and adding elements such as a parchment-coloured backdrop, Latin phrases, and other motifs, often with religious or mythical connotations. The finished images are then printed onto fine art paper or canvas, and overlaid with oils, waxes, gold leaf and varnish.

Hector de Gregorio is interested in European art, and particularly the representation of ecstasy, whether this is the sensuality of the Renaissance painter Lippi, the realist style of Caravaggio, the macabre of Bosch or the metaphysical of Dali’s surrealist works. Other influences include his mother, who was a dressmaker and taught a young de Gregorio how to design and make clothes, and his Catholic upbringing, which seeded a further interest in religious and devotional art from all religions. All these elements combine in these portraits that have often been described as having a medieval feel, and therefore they are utterly familiar and rooted firmly in the past, yet are completely contemporary.

Hector de Gregorio has exhibited widely, with exhibitions in London, Berlin, Milan, New York, Miami and Chicago. His deliciously modern portraiture is held in the collections of Lady Victoria Conran, Mehmet Omer Koc and Theo Fennell.In November 2009 he won the prestigious annual Young Masters Art Prize for his inspiring contemporary portraiture.

UK collectors can buy these artworks using our interest-free credit facility; contact us for more information.

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Focus On Hush

27/02/12 at 10:02:47 am

Hush’s latest work deepens his exploration of the resulting emergences brought about by the evanescent quality of street art. Appreciating and identifying the remains of past tags as points of expression, the artist transitions this influence to his work that he refers to as ‘action painting’ or ‘pure expressionism’. In his new work, Hush remains influenced by the escape from the constraints of traditions, the contrasts between old and new, the past meeting the future and the fusion of Eastern and Western culture.

Having originally trained as a graphic designer and illustrator at Newcastle School of Art and Design, Hush’s art practice has taken him throughout Asia, Europe and the USA, with recent successful solo exhibitions in New York, LA and San Francisco, whilst simultaneously developing his prominence as a contemporary artist. His immersion in a diversity of cultures has informed his work largely recognised for its portrayal of the amaranthine of the female form while infusing cross-cultural influences and variant genres within contemporary art.

A distinguishing facet of Hush’s work is the complexity of his technique that combines various street approaches with traditional art practices. This multi-layered approach includes materials such as acrylic, inks, screen printing, paper and tea. Through the use of opposing themes and aesthetics, he presents contemporary depictions of traditional portrait and figurative imagery.

Absorbing cultural and visual influences from his extensive travels, Hush found a striking connection to the mark making, tagging and graffiti he had encountered along the way.

He observed each ephemeral mark as evidence of another’s action or creative expression, despite its gradual degradation over time. He found the remnants of previous marks left on the ever-changing street surfaces to be progressive where accidental layering often evolved into something beautiful. Hush seeks to capture the beauty that years of decayed tagging can create and magnify the value of these actions through his contemporary paintings.

The artist’s canvases mimic city walls once adorned with wheat pasted images, tags and painting that over time are repeatedly layered upon image after image.

We’re proud to have worked directly with Hush since 2006, and, in addition to solo exhibitions in London and Newcastle, have exhibited his works in group exhibitions and art fairs in London, Manchester, New York, Miami and Basel.

He has been featured in several publications including Street Knowledge (Harper Collins) and The Street Art Stencil Book (Laurence King Publishing), Huck magazine, Art Monthly and The Independent newspaper, where he was recognised in their list of the ‘Top 20 Up and Coming Artists’.

His work is held in public and private collections, including Mitsubishi Securities, London and Portsmouth Museum of Art, New Hampshire.

We currently have one new original work by Hush; Sirens II, featured here. This beautiful painting comprises acrylic paint, spray paint and screen print on primed Belgium linen measuring 40 x 58 inches – click here for more information.

Miranda Lopatkin: Patterns

23/02/12 at 10:02:49 am

Miranda Lopatkin’s photographic prints deal with memory and loss, and often have a melancholic taint. Lopatkin creates her work from slides and photographs, which she projects and re-photographs.

We have a new collection of work by Lopatkin available from her Time and Place series including Patterns (pictured top) and Happy Day (pictured bottom).

These new works feature images from the National Portrait Gallery slide library, and Lopatkin is literally breathing new life into the slides as they are projected onto people. As the images juxtapose with the model neither slide nor model is individual as each one is unmistakably merged with one informed by the other.

These archival prints are from an edition of 5,  measure 38 x 26.5 inches, and are priced from £600.

We offer a number of interest-free payment options, contact us for more information.

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Michele Fletcher: Centred

22/02/12 at 11:02:59 am

Michele Fletcher’s new body of work is concerned with a contemporary exploration of the landscape genre, with a focus on a loss of human connection to the natural world. Her current work, informed by urban ‘wild’ spaces that inhabit East London’s parks and overgrown abandoned, areas, reflect an intimacy of space within an urban existence.

Fletcher graduated with an MA in Fine Art from Chelsea College of Art & Design in 2007 and also studied at Goldsmiths College. In 2010 she was awarded the Fringe Mk Painting Prize and in 2006 the Marmite Painting Prize.

We have a new collection of paintings by Fletcher available including Last Night, Over Grown and Out of Bounds and Centred (pictured) priced from £1600.

A selection of these works will be on display as part of our Michele Fletcher solo exhibition Time Spent, 26 Mar – 4 May.

We offer a number of interest-free payment options, contact us for more information.

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Carne Griffiths: Choke

21/02/12 at 11:02:43 am

Carne Griffiths’ images explore both human and floral forms, figuratively and in an abstract sense. He is fascinated by the flow of line and the ‘invisible lines’ that connect us to the natural world. These may be considered lines of energy or spiritual connections between ourselves and our surroundings and his work is often an emotional response to images and situations encountered in daily life.These daily images are recorded in a dream-like sense onto the page where physical boundaries are no longer important.

Carne Griffiths’ work takes us on a journey of escapism, often focusing on scenes of awe and wonderment, they offer a sense of abandonment to the artist and to the viewer an invitation to share and explore this inner realm.

Choke is part of the Violence of Flowers series which mixes studies of plants with portraiture. The Violence of Flowers series explores our relationship with nature further. It draws an analogy between our darker side and the deception and violence inherent in the plant kingdom that is often masked by their beauty.

Carne Griffiths’ artwork is born from a love of drawing and the journey of creating an image on the page. Working primarily with calligraphy ink, graphite and liquids, such as tea, brandy, vodka and whisky, he draws and then manipulates the drawn line. After graduating from Maidstone College of Art Carne Griffiths served an apprenticeship and worked as a gold wire embroidery designer for 12 years which is why floral pattern, repetition and flow play a large part in his work.

Carne Griffiths has exhibited widely, with recent exhibitions including London, Brighton, Newcastle, Ibiza and New Orleans.

Choke by Griffiths is an archival quality giclee print, printed on 310gsm Hahnemuhle Etching Paper from a signed edition of 25, priced from £125.

We offer a number of interest-free payment options including the Own Art scheme*, where you can spread the cost of your order over 10 months. Contact us for more information.

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Focus On Lucie Bennett

17/02/12 at 06:02:49 am

Lucie Bennett’s new series of prints and paintings use line, shape and colour to glorious effect. Her screenprints and paintings on aluminium panels depict an abstracted female form interwoven with flora – these new works are lush and sensual, with an erotic charge.

Lucie’s earlier works, such as the iconic Red and Green Felt Tip Girls and the sublime Pink Knickers, celebrated the female form and were minimal and immediate.

Her new works are a riot of colour, influenced partly by a childhood spent in India and Burma where her father held military and diplomatic posts, the sensual attractions of her Asian summer holidays left an indelible imprint on her creativity.

Even now she retains vivid bodily memories of her youth — of walking barefoot over the black and white marble tiles surrounding Burmese temples and registering their contrasting temperatures; of savouring the astringent zing of nimbo pani lime drinks and the taste and texture of a certain kind of Burmese dumpling.

Lucie’s new works are rich in enigmatic patterning as the female form morphs into plant like structures; the outline of a petal becomes a female breast, a cloud blooms into a row of nipples, and a frond of something akin to seaweed takes on the meandering undulations of an intestine-like tube alongside shapes reminiscent of blood cells. Lucie was inspired by study visits to make drawings at the Botanical Gardens at Kew, and the 19th century German botanist and naturalist Ernst Haeckel, whose book Art Forms in Nature illuminated the structural similarities between plant forms and human organs.

Lucie works in household gloss paint on aluminium panels – materials that are heavy, industrial and masculine, and act as a contrast to the sensuality of her subject matter.

It is a painstaking process that starts with the creation of paper collages that aid in planning the composition and litter the walls of her studio, alongside labelled paint swatches and scribbled ideas for future works: ‘purple, gold, lime green’ or ‘green, black and gold’.

Lucie begins by sanding the aluminium panels in preparation for the application of gloss paint, and to create an interesting surface texture on any areas of exposed aluminium. She works beneath a polythene tent in a scrupulously clean environment to minimise dust in her work, wearing a gas mask to avoid inhaling paint fumes. The paint is applied by hand by brush – collectors often think the work has been created using an airbrush – and due to the nature of the paint and the flat, glossy surfaces that have become her trademark, Lucie has to apply a single application of paint in one sitting. A continuous line can take hours of painting with no break, and each colour layer takes days to dry.

Even her prints push the boundaries of printmaking, featuring UV varnish glazes and, in Silver Jungle, aluminium cut collages. They were printed at Coriander Studio, one of Europe’s longest established and most prolific printers, who have worked with such luminaries as Damien Hirst, Sir Peter Blake, John Hoyland and Sir Terry Frost.

Lucie Bennett graduated from Manchester Metropolitan University and L’Ecole Regionale des Beaux-Arts, France in 1997 with a BA (Hons) degree in Interactive Arts. Upon graduating she began showing with galleries in France, London and New York, and in 2005 was featured in the first UK series of BBC’s The Apprentice. Also in 2005 she released her first series of limited edition prints, including the sold out and highly sought after Green Felt Tip Girl, Thundercloud and Rose-Coloured Shoes, and later that same year another work, The Wink, raced on a Porsche at Silverstone’s 24 Hour Britcar Race.

Lucie has continued to show widely in solo and group shows and art fairs in London, New York, Miami, Newcastle, Exeter and Ipswich, including a critically acclaimed solo exhibition at London’s  Menier Gallery last year.

Her work has been featured on BBC2’s The Culture Show on two occasions, and in 2008 was included in the Jackie Oudney directed film French Film.

Throughout her career Lucie has supported numerous charities, including The British Red Cross, The Terence Higgins Trust and the ME Support Group.

Her work is held on permanent display at the Groucho Club, London and is held in the collections of Virgin Group and Citigroup, in addition to many private collections.

Lucie Bennett’s new series of signed, limited edition screenprints, including Kuniyoshi, featured here, is available to buy through Opus Fine Art, with prices starting from £500.

We also have two beautiful new original works in household gloss on aluminium panels; Mallow and The Yellow Lines of Her are priced from £5,400.

Click here to view the series >

David Choe: City Girl

16/02/12 at 12:02:55 pm

Rarely do we see a street artist with the skills and complexity of David Choe. Rapidly establishing himself as one of the greats of the genre, Choe is compellingly repulsive. His complex and pulchritudinous pictures, seductive, appealing and ambitious yet equally mischievous, brutal and insular demonstrate what an angry, intelligent talent can truly achieve. Choe sculpts and paints in oils, acrylics, crayon and mixed media. Influences flow through comic book culture to gothic art, impressionism and the surreal.

The content of Choe’s work is equally complex and in contrast to the slick, succinct, populist messages of some of his contemporaries. The fictional military heroes of GI Joe wield boom boxes above Arabic slogans; hip young metropolitan ladies whisper their cruel conspiracies; seedy delights beckon from behind pretty vistas; grown men scream for ice cream; absurdist animals rope humans into their incomprehensible schemes.

The artist’s first solo show was held at Double Rainbow, a small ice cream shop on Melrose Avenue of Los Angeles’s Westside. His show was only supposed to run for a month, but it stayed up for two years, after pieces starting selling faster than the ice cream. Since then he has shown at various cities around the world, including San Jose, New York City and London. His works have previously been in publications such as Hustler, Raygun, Vice and Juxtapoz Magazine.

We have two works by David Choe available including London Girl and City Girl (pictured) priced from £500.

We offer a number of interest-free payment options, contact us for more information.

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Damien Hirst: The Souls

15/02/12 at 11:02:11 am

The Souls by Damien Hirst made up of 4 butterflies, in different colourways, each one in an edition of 15. Vibrant with hue, the finished effect of each print is that of a resonant tension between the stillness of death and the trembling, iridescent life that the individual butterflies convey.

These colourways are selling quickly so please contact us for pricing before more of the editions sell out.

We have a collection of different butterfly colourways available including The Souls III – Burgundy/Cool Gold/Cornflower Blue (pictured) The Souls III – Frost Blue/Sunset Gold/Leaf Green and The Souls I – Fushia Pink/Oriental Gold.

We offer a number of interest-free payment options including the Own Art scheme*, where you can spread the cost of your order over 10 months, or defer payment for up to 12 months. Contact us for more information.

Contact us for pricing information >

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