Lorraine Shemesh

Lorraine Shemesh

Bubbles, 1990, oil on canvas

Spots, 2012, oil on canvas

Lorraine Shemesh is a hyper-realist painter. She lists Edward Hopper, athletic figures, dancers, Abstract Expressionism, and Neo-Impressionism as her influences.

Themes include unconventional cityscapes, figures, interiors, repetition, and water.

Her underwater scenes are super good - highly saturated colors with water distortion. Her earlier works are humorous and contemplative.

Tal R.

Tal R.

Victory Over the Sun, 2000, oil on canvas

Sisters of Kolbojnik, 2002, oil on canvas

Tal R. represents what is at front and back of the mind in conjunction with the bodily and the emotional. He shows melancholy and ecstatic states of transformation. He describes painting as a lunchbox. Subject matter includes imaginary pastoral scenes, primitivism, and patterns to convey a generosity of spirit and joy!

Colors are off, broken, or dense. Paintings exhibit spatial realization through a dynamic horizontal field. He uses collage, pencil, and oil in a variety of techniques (splatter, drip, brushstrokes, etc.)

Uses images from pop culture, and his cultural works are narrative.

Lisa Yuskavage

Lisa Yuskavage

Edge of Towners, 2011, oil on linen

The Smoker, 2008, oil on linen

Lisa Yuskavage is a figurative painter who works with themes of re-emergence. She is concerned with the immediacy of contemporary life. Her engagement with the human form is representative of John Currin.

Adjectives of her female nude include lavish, erotic, cartoonish, vulgar, and angelic.

Formally, she places her figures in front of rich, atmospheric skies, so as to appear to occupy their own realm. Her lines and colors appear dreamlike.

John Currin

John Currin

The Bra Shop, 1997, oil on canvas

Kiev, 2008, oil on canvas

John Currin is a figurative painter influenced by Renaissance oil paintings, contemporary culture, politics, and women's magazines.

He creates parodies of our sex-obsessed culture through distortion of the human figure. Main themes include pornographic eroticism and manipulation. Often his portraits appear satirical, kitschy, and humorous. Over time his works have gotten much more explicitly erotic.

Amy Sillman

Amy Sillman

Amy Sillman speaks of painting as a physicality, like an extension of her arm. She believes honesty is the most important quality in a painting.

She uses richly complicated textures and colors (although with limited palettes). She uses gesture, color, and drawing-based procedures to imply femininity, performativity, and humor.

Dana Schutz

Dana Schutz

Death Comes To Us All, 2003, oil on canvas

Twister Mat, 2003, oil on canvas

Dana Schutz's work has been described as teetering on the edge of tradition and innovation.

Still lifes become personified, portraits become events, and landscapes become constructions. She embraces the area in which the subject is composed and decomposing, formed and formless, inanimate and alive. She works with themes of death and discomfort.

She paints in thick impasto with heavy line work, deep colors, and dark shadows.

After looking at a variety of her work, I think she addresses reality in a very illogical, surrealist way.

Albert Oehlen

Albert Oehlen

Piece, 2003, oil on canvas

Mirage of Steel, 2003, oil on canvas

Albert Oehlen's paintings are neither beautiful nor seductive. Their self-consciously brutal surfaces seem to be corrupted from within, a perversion of the paintings they might have been. Link to Saatchi Gallery. 

He combines aspects of figural sexuality, mechanical distance, and painterly abstraction. It is possible to find representations of objects or figures in his mostly-abstracted works, although he exposes the limitations of both.

Formally, puddles and washes convey a refracted, dreamlike sensibility. He plays with depth perception and foreground/background relationship. Some of his compositions seem rushed and crowded, while others seem discouragingly bare.

Other works not shown here are mixed media on panel, inkjet prints, and collaborative works with other artists.