Every year, World Art Day April 15 celebrates the fine arts, promotes awareness of creativity worldwide and reinforces the links between artistic creations and society.
Today, art comes in different forms, from photography, calligraphy, drawing, sculpting to painting and media installations. The arts have always been a powerful medium of expression and a way for us to explore and discover varying emotions.
This year, celebrate art by discovering different aspects of art in Ode to Art. What’s more, get a glimpse of international artists from all around the world and their creations. Get to know the concepts and stories behind each of their art pieces. Below, we have categorised a list of notable artists into installation art, sculptures, and paintings:
Installation Art – Trick of the eye
Sergi Cadenas
Sergi Cadenas has been training all his life to run his family’s centuries-old foundry in Spain but fueled by a passion for experimentation and creativity, he started painting at the age of 30. Self-taught, Sergi Cadenas builds large-scale canvases with precise vertical ridges before painting separate portraits on either side of the narrow ridges. The process leads to a mesmerizing effect in which each portrait appears to transform into the other as the viewer shifts vantage point, an exceptional technique that requires great precision in its difficult execution.
Sergi Cadenas is currently focusing on large-format portraits and takes both famous faces and people around him as models; he rose to fame after a series of Instagram videos of his illusory, dual-image portraits went viral. His works can be found in the Porrentruy Optical Art Museum (POPA) in Switzerland and in private collections around the world.
Paul Rousso
American artist Paul Rousso is renowned for his concept, “Flat Depth”, which he has been refining his entire professional career, and which he sees as the logical progression of art. This aims to render a flat object three-dimensional, or to collapse a three-dimensional object into two-dimensions and is a fusion of countless complex artistic methods such as painting, printing, sculpting, welding, chemistry, digital manipulation, and digital printing. Through heat infusion on plexiglass, Rousso creates his captivating hyper-realistic, hyper-sized, pop-art inspired sculptures.
Sculptures – Materialising Forms and Figures
Lee Sangsoo
Lee Sangsoo (born 1983) is a South Korean artist. He enjoyed painting and drawing lessons in middle school, then later furthered his arts education formally in high school and graduate school. However, the more he learnt about art, it was no longer as fun or enjoyable and it became a tedious full time job. It was only through revisiting his childhood youthful works did he rediscover the brilliancy and innocence in childlike composition, carefree and pure, largely inspiring his faux naif style of three-dimensional sculpture today. Lee Sangsoo works appear extremely dynamic, this aspect was created by alternating full and empty spaces in close relationship with nature and new technologies. Its minimalist animals, in form, but extremely lively in color, represent some typical morphological traits that make them immediately recognizable.
Hiro Ando
Being a multidisciplinary artist, Hiro Ando had added sculpture to his portfolio, creating artwork that furthers his conjunction of old and new. Built upon the traditional maneki-neko, standing for “lucky cat” within the Japanese mass culture, Ando constructs cat-like figures assuming various forms like samurai, sumo, and robot.
Sumo Cat
Hiro Ando's Sumo cat is a playful fusion of Japan's love for their Lucky cats and Sumo wrestling, both long recognized icons of the country's vibrant cultural landscape. The anthropomorphic sculpture stands in a 'shikiri' position (the starting squat by Sumo wrestlers before a match) with an aura that is both endearing and daunting. Ando recontextualizes these icons within the hyperreal mass culture of the modern day, by depicting the cat using a bright neon orange colour that has a distinct urban feel.
Samurai Cat
Standing proud and tall, Hiro Ando recasts the traditional samurai warrior in the form of Japan's favourite Lucky Cat. A symbol of wealth, prosperity and good fortune, the Lucky Cat now simultaneously takes on the role as an empowered, unflinching samurai warrior, applauded for their bravery and loyalty in pre-modern Japan. With three katanas and an impressive countenance, Hiro's Samurai cats and their vivid, monochromatic colour palette embody both the Artist's modern Neo-pop style as well as the spirit of orthodox Japanese culture.
Paintings – Celebrating the Little Moments
Eva Armisen
Having completed her degree in Fine Arts from the University of Barcelona, Eva trained at the Rietveld Akademie in Amsterdam and received a grant from the Joan and Pilar Miró Foundation in Palma de Mallorca. Eva's work focuses on capturing daily life and everydayness as something extraordinary - proposing a vital and optimistic look that takes us to a world full of emotions.
Painting and engraving are Eva's most common mediums, but the originality and ability to communicate in her work has led her to collaborate on a wide variety of projects such as public art installations, advertising, film and television campaigns or editorial projects. With an increasingly international trajectory, we can see Eva's work exhibited in cities such as Seoul, Los Angeles, Hong Kong Singapore, Lisbon, Taipei, Shanghai, and Melbourne; both in art fairs and individual exhibitions.
Lim Tze Peng
Lim Tze Peng is famously known for his Chinese ink drawings and paintings of Chinatown and the Singapore River produced in the early 1980s after having embarked on his artistic journey in the 1950s. His masterpieces are exhibited in the National Gallery, Singapore Art Museum and Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts and are part of many prestigious collections.
Lim has been bestowed several awards including the Special Prize at the Commonwealth Art Exhibition in England in 1977 and the prestigious Cultural Medallion in Singapore in 2003. In May 2012, he broke records with the sale of his works at a Christies auction in Hong Kong.
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