UNIX Gallery Houston presents a Holiday Group Show of its best works for the 2015 holiday season. Including work from Eugenio Merino’s solo show Will Work For Fast Food, the exhibition will also include artworks by international artists Peter Anton, Justin Bower, Ingrid Dee Magidson, John Messinger, Marcello Lo Giudice, Pino Manos, Desire Obtain Cherish, Alfredo Scaroina, and KwangHo Shin. This group presentation will be on view at UNIX Gallery, 4411 Montrose Blvd. Houston, TX, from November 20, 2015 - January 2, 2015. A reception will be held on Friday, November 20, 2015 from 6:00 - 8:00 PM.
Peter Anton alters and overstates food to create new meaning. Best known for his series of oversized boxes chocolates and ice cream bars, the sculptor puts and emphasis on confectionery products. His artistic style employs humor, scale, irony, and intensity to transform ordinary, common foods into pleasing and seductive objects of desire. Viewers are placed in a vulnerable state and a communication with their inner selves in a more honest and direct way is provoked. Playing with instinctual human needs and desires, Anton activates the hunger for pleasurable things and forces the viewer to surrender. “I have an innate reverence for the things we eat. Food brings people together and there is not a better way to celebrate life,” states the artist.
In her three-dimensional, enigmatic portraits of kings, queens, nobility, and courtiers from centuries past, Ingrid Dee Magidson brings back to life her subjects and re-imagines these individuals to immortalize them in time. The artist employs innovative methods to add depth and intrigue to her works with a technique Dee Magidson calls “layerism.” Between the portrait and multiple layers of transparent acrylic the artist places items such as antiques, vintage photographs, butterflies, and flowers to create a unique world the viewer can explore and decipher. The artist explores the delicate balance between the conscious and subconscious and the ambivalence between the physical and the spiritual as expressed through the use of transparent layers that reveal depth hidden at first glance.
John Messinger combines elements of photography and tapestry to create large-scale, 3-dimensional mixed media artworks. His body of work consists of thousands of individual 3.25” x 4.25” instant photographs assembled together to create photographic tapestries that examine the proliferation and ubiquity of the photograph in the digital age. Inspired by the notions of singularity and time, Messinger combines hundreds of varying images and transforms them into a single experience. His work fuses indexical and abstract imagery to question the notion of photography, photographer, and subject. On melding constructed histories into a documentary format to question the perception of truth, Messinger states, “I believe that all documentary work is on some level a self-portrait of the documentarian.”
Marcello Lo Giudice combines his knowledge of the Earth’s metamorphoses with a profound affection for organic, geological substances to create a variety of meticulously crafted paintings and sculptures. Lo Giudice composes vibrant and energetic paintings by spreading and layering colorful pigments thickly on the canvas, thus creating a coarse, haptic surface. Internationally renowned art critic and Yves Klein historian, Pierre Restany, defined Lo Giudice as an exceptional “telluric” painter. Lo Giudice has been exhibited at the main pavilion of the Venice Biennale in 2009 and 2011 and has a significant European and American collector base.
Pino Manos was born in Sassari on March 10, 1930. In 1951 he moved to Milan where he attended the Academy of Fine Arts “Cimabue” (along with Enrico Castellani and Vincenzo Agnetti) and “Brera”. Working with Augustine Bonalumi and Lucio Fontana, Manos expanded his body of work, adhering to the movement of Spatialism. In 1980 he founded in Milan “The Creative” for the socialization of Art and the development of creativity as a therapeutic element. The aim and purpose of the association is the awakening of latent potential in every individual is important, through creativity liberate the energies and untapped potential in a progressive journey of body awareness in its multiple modes of communication and expression. This endeavor furthers his expression of manipulating the canvas and making it just as much an emotional expression of the work as a vehicle for his painting.
Since his emergence as street artist in the early 2000s, Desire Obtain Cherish (DOC) has become known as pop sculptor working across a wide variety of different media and a combination of styles including street, pop, conceptual and appropriation art. His controversial art work explores contemporary desires and obsessions with sex, gender, drugs, commerce, media and fame. Transporting controversial, satirical messages, Desire’s vibrantly colorful, entertaining and impeccably produced art exposes society’s inability to control itself and examines the commercial promise of fulfillment and happiness that ends in dependency.
Alfredo Scaroina explores the powerful influence the creative process has on his paintings. His techniques both dictate and reveal the subject matter, as he starts using different mediums and an array of reclaimed materials such as recycled mail, paper, found fabrics, archival newsprint, recycled magazines, old canvases, dirt, sand, metal, dust and everything he can find to create complex, urban decayed layered compositions. Scaroina also addresses how his paintings influence the emotional and physiological perception of the individual from one culture to another, as well as the collective unconsciousness in the Jungian sense. He incorporates archetypal symbols and primitive motifs into his paintings as a kind of universal language that is recognizable to people from many different backgrounds. Scaroina embraces experimental techniques and materials as a way to express fresh ideas about the function of art in a multicultural world.
In his paintings, KwangHo Shin captures the complexity of human emotion and the experience of the mind, as we perceive it visually. Evoking themes of Abstract Expressionism, Shin employs intense and vibrant colors in order to depict individualistic expression of emotion and a sense of self. He applies charcoal and oils in thick brushstrokes to distort and exaggerate the subject’s facial features. His technique confronts the viewer with the resulting emotional impact these painterly effects have on our understanding of the subject. Shin’s portraits are able to document the psychological changes and clashes that arise in the self.
For more information on the artists or available works visit UNIX Gallery online or find us on Artsy. UNIX Gallery in Houston is located at 4411 Montrose Blvd, Houston, Texas.