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.

Fabian Marcaccio

Fabian Marcaccio

The Predator, 2001, mixed media installation

Fabian Marcaccio extroverts abstraction by deconstructing, dissecting, unraveling, and reconstructing Modernist ideals of painting. He creates sculptural composites with mixed media.

Formally he uses canvas as both a support and an image. He uses clear silicone gel to enhance the textural quality of brushstrokes.

He works with themes of manipulation, destruction, and reconstruction. His work could be considered abstract or non representational.

He says he engages the generic elements of painting to create mutual betrayals.

Jane Callister

Jane Callister

Yellow Falls, 2005, acrylic on paper

Jane Callister challenges notions of representation through her unique paint application process. Rather than painting onto the canvas, she pours and drips paint and other materials. In addition to questions of abstraction vs representation, she also challenges figure vs ground, color vs line, content vs form, and personal vs political.

Visually they include hard-edged drips, lacy stalagtites, and melted ice cream colors.

Her earlier works include representations of human bodies, but in her more recent works they are only implied. Now, she includes off-the-wall additions to her canvases.

Luc Tuymans

Luc Tuymans

Gas Chamber, 1986, oil on canvas

The Rabbit, oil on canvas

Tuymans uses photographs as source material to create dislocation from real events, manipulation and deception in art. He executes all of his works in a single day and experiences feelings of aggression and violence before and during painting. His works, removed from photographs, create a sense of detachment. They often appear blown-out and overexposed.

Very similar to Wilhelm Sasnal.