Featured Art
Over the Influence is delighted to present Easter Egg , a group exhibition.
Featuring the work of Hyangmok Baik, Jonathan Edelhuber, Mark Whalen, Mark Whalen, Okuda San Miguel, Mike Lee, Ben Arpéa, Hiroya Kurata, Andy Dixon, Florent Stosskopf, Cleon Peterson, Jerkface, Hirosuke Yabe, and Vhils.
ARTISTS
Born in 1990 in South Korea, Hyangmok Baik received his MA in Fine Art from Hongik University in 2019. Diving into the artworld by quitting his stable job, Artist Hyangmok Baik shares his celebrative and liberating perspective on life through his painting.
Working primarily in oil and acrylic, Jonathan Edelhuber’s paintings, drawings, and sculptures meld elements of the modernist motifs of Picasso and Matisse filtered through a pop sensibility borrowed from comics and cartoons.
Mark Whalen mixes everyday themes while merging industrial materials with found objects and studio reserves. Building relationships with iconic human shapes, color, and chromed elements, Whalen expands the narrative into vivid depictions of life’s folly. Sculptural storytelling is revealed as a stacking of disturbances, conundrums and entertaining questions about life and beyond. Mark Whalen’s contemporary work continues to expand architectural boundaries for interior and environmental applications.
Mike Lee is a New York based artist who conveys contemporary social attitudes and anxieties through simplified silhouettes of the human form. By avoiding detail and blurring identity, his iconic figures amplify the emotive undertones of his own biographical narratives. These stylized forms are universally relatable and deeply cathartic reflections of the artists own life.
Ben Arpéa is a French-Italian artist who lives and works in Paris. Born into a family of art lovers and collectors, Ben Arpéa has been immersed in a rich artistic universe since childhood, where he began to create, draw and paint.
Hiroya Kurata was born in Japan in 1980. He received his BFA from Parsons School of Design and currently living in New York City. His paintings combine representations of found imagery with those of personal remembrances, creating scenes that feel at once familiar and strangely disconcerting. Referencing the visual language of manga and landscape paintings, Kurata explores the conception and emotion of nostalgia.
Exploring themes of decadence, patronage, and the relationship between art and wealth, Andy Dixon draws inspiration from such opulent artifacts as Flemish still-lifes, Versace silk shirts, and auction house objects. By layering historical references with contemporary social commentary, Dixon plays with the tropes of art history and questions the inherent value in luxuries from past and present. An underlying self-deprecation stirs beneath the surface of his candy-colored canvases – a poignant study in the psychology of value.
Stosskopf’s work deftly blends traditional themes and archetypes through a contemporary perspective, reminiscent of Jonas Wood, Guy Yanai, Hillary Pecis, or Paul Wackers, using bright, unrelenting colours that lay out his complex still lives and scenes plucked from the annals of Classical Antiquity, the Baroque movement, and Modernism.
Cleon Peterson’s chaotic and violent paintings show clashing figures symbolizing a struggle between power and submission in the fluctuating architecture of contemporary society. Peterson’s work acknowledges the demons within us and sheds light on the inherent violence of civilization.
Born and raised in Kanagawa, Japan, Hirosuke Yabe received his BFA in Sculpture in 2002 and continued as a research student in 2004 at Tokyo Zokei University of Art and Design.