Allison Miller

Allison Miller

Wave, 2003, oil and acrylic on canvas

Repeater, 2013, oil and acrylic on canvas

Allison Miller is an abstract artist who includes unique materials like dirt into her oil, acrylic, and pencil works. She combines linear mark-making with abstractions. Her pieces use bright colors, bold forms, and heavy textures. Her line work has been described as a gravity-defying 3D sculptural effect. Formally, she is deliberately inconsistent but in a way that does not evoke collage.

Black is consistently dominant in her paintings. Other colors are drab and institutional with bright colors peeking through.

She explores new territories while she paints and doesn't like to talk about her work. One of her preoccupations is figure-ground relationship. Her use of depth and layers cause viewers to question what they're supposed to be looking at.

Shahzia Sikander

Shahzia Sikander

Mirror Plane, 2012

Shahzia Sikander likes the idea of exhausting an image. Sikander creates stimulating visual experiences for her audience through the addition of modern and non-traditional elements by forcing the viewer to reconcile conflicting sensibilities hidden within beautifully rendered landscapes as well as offering a wide range of stimuli from the traditional Muslim world to popular Western culture, such as mandalas, airplanes and cowboy boots and soccer balls. 

For her subjects, she mixes personal and historical experiences such as reading the Qu'ran. She seeks to subvert Eastern stereotypes through her work.

She is very skilled in Indo-Persian miniature painting technique and formal practice.  She frequently uses repetitive shapes to represent movement. In the one above, she uses the same shape repetition for the hair and the flight of birds, which is really cool. She does a lot of performance-based installations to further get her concept across.

Art 21 video

Rosy Keyser

Rosy Keyser

A Blind Torpedo Walks Into a Bar, 2013, raffia, enamel, glass, wood, and basket

Saturday Nite Special, 2013, enamel, oil, and rope on canvas

Rosy Keyser can be classified as an abstract painter, although I might think she's more non-representational? She works beyond her medium's natural habitats by including materials derived from upstate New York like corrugated steel, beer cans, sawdust, and tarps. In fact some of her "paintings" appear to just be collages of materials and not paintings at all.

Her use of unusual materials seems to be about exploration and place.

Bernard Frize

Bernard Frize

Vibisi, 2001, acrylic and resin on canvas

Neobi, 2004, acrylic and resin on canvas

Bernard Frize is a French artist whose works question the materiality and processes of painting. Viewers often wonder how he creates his seemingly impossible line variations and patterns.

Formally, he uses acrylic and resin to create works that appear to have entered the world fully formed. He works on a large scale and uses a variety of often unusual colors. They appear sort of like he melted crayons and then drew with them.

He creates process paintings that have been compared to a choreographed dance. He created Reciproque by following directions shouted to him by someone else in the room.

His line work is comparative to Karin Davie.

Fred Tomaselli

Fred Tomaselli

Untitled (Expulsion), 2000, leaves, pills, mushrooms, photo collage, acrylic, and resin on wood panel

Gravity's Rainbow, 1999, leaves, pills, photo collage, flowers, acrylic, and resin on wood panel

Fred Tomaselli works with a variety of unorthodox materials in an attempt to transcend the banality of our everyday world. His life in Southern California has had a profound effect on his work, as he looks for a spiritual transport to the idea of "somewhere else". He includes themes inspired by Disneyland, music and drug culture, and wilderness.

His works are very aesthetically interesting. At first glance they appear to be patterns of paint on a wood panel, but they're actually composed of pot leaves, pills, wings, stems, petals, and photographs. He then uses acrylic paint and seals it with resin. The unusual materials reinforce the concepts of his paintings.

Anselm Kiefer

Anselm Kiefer

Margarethe, 1981, oil and bundles of straw on canvas

Icarus- Sand of the Brandenburg March, 1981, oil, emulsion, sand, shellac, and photograph on canvas

He incorporates materials such as straw, ash, clay, lead, and shellac into his large-scale oil paintings. Many of his works resemble landscapes or interiors of rooms.
He works with themes of German history, the horrors of the Holocaust, and the spiritual concepts of Kabbalah.

Also works in photography, sculpture, and book design.