Marc Standing is an African/ British/Australian artist who was born and raised in Zimbabwe. He obtained his BAFA honors degree from the University of Cape Town in South Africa with distinctions in painting. After spending a decade in Australia and Hong Kong he now resides in London. Standing has taken part in numerous group and solo exhibitions internationally and is represented by Art Labor in Shanghai and Afikaris in Paris. He has also been a finalist in many art prizes over the years, including the Sovereign Asian Art Prize and is part of The Groucho Club collection in London.
Over the last three years Standing has been artist in residence at Amilla Fushi in the Maldives, and has taken part in residencies in the Philippines, Shanghai, and Mexico.
Standing’s vibrant and inventive painting has developed along a complex path. Sublime in the originality and mastery of his brush stroke, they are informed by anthropology, biology and the complexities of existence, both physical and metaphysical.
Exequiel Balut is an Argentine contemporary artist known for his expressionist paintings. His works are characterized by the use of thick lines that generously shape faces and bodies, fused with a strong use of flat color in various tones and textures. His works are often composed of eyes, mouths, noses and ears, intent to point attention to the human senses, however subjective the outcome of human perception is. Form begets a dialogue between the physical impact of the surroundings and the inner world. In his process, Balut embraces impulse and ‘mistakes’ to connect with the unconscious, offering a genuine and somewhat childish invitation to reimagine the complexity of being through paint strokes and color. In a unique watercolor technique, after completion, every canvas is washed in the ocean and dried in the jungle, where he currently resides. It is Balut’s circling back to the conversation and receiving the opinion of the elements that provoked it. He believes it’s a relevant, authentic and necessary conversation.
Michael F Rumsby (UK, 1968) has painted since childhood. After an international career in the corporate world he has been painting full time since 2012. He travels extensively in search of inspiration and produces paintings mainly based on the landscapes he encounters. He prefers to express his vision with rapid strokes and marks of acrylic paint on large canvases, whilst at times incorporating mixed media into his colourful and highly expressive pieces. Michael’s use of colour is often exaggerated, using it to depict scenery that is rooted in site visits to real locations but layered with his in-studio, real time imagination and a library of thoughts and images that he has stored in his mind when travelling. Colours are layered and juxtaposed, with an often kaleidoscopic effect. For Michael, painting is a full time love affair that
preoccupies his mind through every waking hour, always processing image and ideas as he moves about his day. After a two-year period working and exhibiting in Dubai, Michael now lives in the South West of France where he has his primary studio. Michael’s work hangs in private collections in Europe, The Middle East, The United States and Australia. He has just been taken on by one of London’s most established galleries.
David Craven was born in London, Ontario in 1946. He graduated from the University of Western Ontario in 1969 and the Ontario College of Art in Toronto in 1973. During his college years Craven was a competitive gymnast which would be echoed in the signature loops and swirls of his later paintings. In the 1970s Craven’s work was rooted in abstraction. At this time the canvases featured a pared down palette of black and white over aluminum. Craven moved to New York in the early 1980s and took residence above the infamous 211 Bar in Tribeca. He became part of a social circle that included artists Dia Diao, Stephen Ellis and Jack Willis. During this era Craven’s practice evolved into figuration. A series of heads painted in acrylic on canvas are illustrative of this transition from abstract to figurative work. In these canvases long strokes of color—white, pink, black—are painted in repetitive concentric lines that form the heads, which are barely legible and almost subsumed into the patterned paint. They prefigure the networks of lines and dots that Craven turns to in the later abstract seriesCraven showed with Gerald Sable (Sable-Castelli) in Toronto for over thirty years. His last shows in New York were with Anna Kustera. Craven died in 2016 and is survived by his widow Myra. Craven has had solo exhibitions across North America, in cities including Calgary, Toronto, Montréal, New York, Atlanta, Victoria, and Edmonton. His work is included in the collections of the National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Montréal Museum of Fine Art, the Vancouver Art Gallery as well as numerous private collections in Canada and the US. His work has been featured in several monographic publications as well as Time Magazine Canada , Parachute , The New York Times , Art in America , Canadian Art , Bomb and Flash Art .
Charlie Bluett’s has been an artist for most of his life but it became his day job 5 years ago and he is experiencing considerable success across the US and is now represented by over 15 galleries. His vivid color field works show an intense ethereal beauty, use of space, surface, texture and color. They demand of the viewer a moment of their time, allowing their minds to wander amongst the fine spatial sensibility and color inflection that lies before them. His works bring to mind a combination of the passionate elements familiar in Rothko’s collective bands of rythmic color and Vicente’s movement through color forms that appear within the canvas and Bacon’s surface blends of colour and yet they maintain through his unique creative process, a complete and resounding self expression.
Judy Ross is a New York based designer and artist. Traveling in India to work as an independent textile designer, she developed a passion for the centuries-old hand embroidery technique known as chain stitch, used by men in the Kashmir region to embellish shawls with traditional paisley and floral patterns. She lived on a houseboat on Upper Dal Lake while collaborating with the master embroiderers to develop a line of impeccably stitched contemporary wool scarves.
Two decades later she still works with the same artisans and has established a trusting and loving relationship with them. These artisans continue to bring her hand-rendered sketches to life as smooth, dense, fully embroidered fields of perfect stitches. From embroidered scarves, her product line has expanded to home textiles: pillows, rugs, fabric by the yard, curtains, bedcovers, and wall hangings. Judy Ross Textiles also produces furniture pieces such as stools, cubes and screens.
Judy Ross Textiles’ collection of hand-knotted Tibetan wool rugs interprets her trademark clean, graphic aesthetic at a larger scale. Her products are sold worldwide at high-end stores.
Three examples of her chain stitch designs are in the 20th-century textile collection of the Art Institute of Chicago: a wool shawl, a Boxstep linen panel, and a Procession runner.
Judy Ross Textiles produces two collections each year and collaborates with interior designers, and architects on custom projects. Her bespoke work can be seen in luxury hotels, buzzworthy restaurants, and home around the globe. Clients include Ritz Carlton, Four Seasons, Grand Hyatt, W Hotels, Wyndham Worldwide, and Barneys New York.
