Yuki Watanabe was born in Shizuoka/Japan in 1981. He finished his studies at the Graduation of Department of Art at Nihon University (Department of Oil Painting) in 2006. He travelled to Leipzig, Berlin and Bremen for a month in 2014 on a fact finding trip about German Art. He lives in Chiba and works in Tokyo. “I am a painter who is always searching for possibilities of what artwork can express in the balance of colours, lines, texture and brush strokes. I strive to reproduce the reality I was feeling while sketching into my paintings. Furthermore, I focus on the implication of composition and creative uses of perspectives I also value the study of matière, which is said to be “the skin of the artist themselves”. I recognize the reality of chaos as it is, where many elements have complicated connections and relationships. I don’t put them within the limited space of the canvas, but show them in my paintings as they are, in their unique balance and dimensions.”
LIA Portraits w/ Yuki Watanabe
Izat Arif (b. 1986) is an artist based in Kuala Lumpur whose works range from drawings and installations to videos and objects. In Izat’s work, power structures are given their own personal identities, with him cheekily role-playing the characters of some of our puppet masters in property development, bureaucracy, and art criticism. His approach is often journalistic, where satire is fused with a responsive leaping between different subjects that speak to current revelations in popular media and culture.
LIA Portraits w/ Izat Arif
Malena Del Pino (born in Miami, 2002) is a multidisciplinary artist who has worked in video art, projection art, and sculpture. Malena received a BFA at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. While there, Malena was enrolled in SVA’s Visual and Critical Studies department, a hybrid humanities and interdisciplinary art program with a focus on Aesthetics. During their studies, Malena developed a paper collage technique that allows them to enlarge their digital images to a tremendous scale with simple copy paper and saran tape; this has now become the primary medium for the artist. Malena’s work utilizes the positioning of seemingly opposing, and random images to create a codified language. This language allows the artist to comfortably speak about taboo subject matter without repercussions.
LIA Portraits w/ Malena Del Pino
“I am shaped by my family’s common myths, our tradition of storytelling and the history of my surroundings. I am interested in places where the past and present intersect, always with the story and narrative as a focal point, whether it be the beach town of Lomma, forts along the Skåne coast, or disguised oil-pumps in Los Angeles. Through the arrangement of drawings and videos in installations I encourage the viewers to create their own stories out of my raw materials. Most of my work is based on images collected from photo albums and digital archives. The act of collecting often leads to new associations which connect the different images, creating unexpected narratives. I isolate and abstract parts of the motifs based on the story I want to tell, stripping them of their context and rearranging them in installations. When moving around the exhibition space, viewers can engage with the works from different angles, discovering new combinations of images. The fragments are retooled, telling a different pictorial tale.”
LIA Portraits w/ Hugo Hernqvist
Anna Gibson is a Barbadian contemporary artist who explores multiple mediums, crafting images of body manipulation through realism and expressionism. She has been practicing for over 5 years completing her Associates and Bachelor Degree in Fine Arts (2017). Her artwork centers around exploring and exposing vulnerabilities women have about their differences to each other, and how they seek to physically mask or morph their bodies, to achieve acceptance within their cultural, racial and social environment. The most recent artworks are crafted around the evaluation and comparison stage of your physical image. Each angle taking advantage of the mind and body’s, vulnerable disposition, while emphasizing these self-inflicted processes of metamorphosis, using harsh and soft combinations of drawing/ painting, and exaggerated shapes and forms of “abnormality”.
LIA Portraits w/ Anna Gibson
“My practice is structured around the existential experience of the national past and I employ the medium of painting to access it. I use found old photographs, which I enlarge and transfer onto canvas to paint over them, speculatively inserting my presence in the scenes they contain. I’ve always found old, mundane photos of typical family life fascinating. They provide a window into daily life of the other times I could not witness, and let us see people who do not exist anymore, whose personal life stories did not go into history books – especially if they were women, working class, ethnical or racial minorities. I feel a strong protest against the fact that these memories gets completely erased by some big narratives and big, mostly male names. At some point discovered that when I paint over the enlarged photographs, I get unprecedented energy to my brushwork. I feel the urge to climb into this moment of precious lost history, insert myself in it, and interact with the characters, and that fuels my painting. The large scale of my works allows me to see them as a portal, now just a window into that life in the past, and my spontaneous colour choices and wide gestures allow me to manifest my material presence in them. I seek to disrupt the linear spatial perspective of the photograph, I mix the foreground and background into a single pictorial mass of slimy paint, like memories from old age become just a mass with some sparkles.”
LIA Portraits w/ Katya Granova
Helena Mcgrath (b.1968, London, UK) studied BA English Literature and Art History at Cambridge University (1987-90) and MA Fine Art at University of Hertfordshire (2015-17). She worked as a Script Editor and Producer of TV drama for fifteen years (1990 – 2005) before becoming an artist. She is currently a Visiting Lecturer in Fine Art at University of Hertfordshire, UK. Helena is a figurative painter whose work attempts to balance accessible narrative with pictorial invention. She aims to create a tension between the abstract qualities of paint and the representation of people and things. She works with oil paint or water-based tempera and charcoal. Often her paintings are a kind of autofiction, re-creating scenes from own life that are blended with stories, characters and settings borrowed from literature, art history or popular culture. The fictional elements in her paintings are sometimes incorporated as text, but more often as images taken from found photographs, book illustrations and other artworks. They embody certain ideas or emotions and express a kind of personal mythology that lies behind everyday life. Helena is interested in the way in which stories organise and give meaning to human experience. While narrative is increasingly used as a tool for political, social and economic manipulation, she believes that it also provides opportunities for empathy, communication and creativity.
LIA Portraits w/ Helena McGrath
Israeli (b. 1976, Jerusalem) is a painter based in Tel Aviv and Herzliya. She holds a B.F.A. with honors from the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, Jerusalem (2002), and an M.F.A. from Goldsmiths, University of London (2005). She also studied at the Glasgow School of Art. Her work has been exhibited widely in Israel and abroad, including solo shows at the Ralli Museum (Caesarea), Maya Gallery, Beeri Gallery, Ashdod Art Museum, Alon Segev Gallery (Tel Aviv), and the Taylor Foundation (Paris). She has also participated in numerous group exhibitions at institutions such as the Haifa Museum of Art, Hangar Bicocca (Milan), Winzavod Center (Moscow), Art Forum (Berlin), and Fresh Paint Art Fair (Tel Aviv). Since 2006, Israeli has taught painting at the Bezalel Academy, where she also coordinates the Orthodox Extension Program. Alongside her artistic practice, she has curated several painting exhibitions in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Her work has received recognition from the Ministry of Culture and Sports, the Rabinovich Foundation, Mifal HaPais, Asylum Arts (NY), the Taylor Foundation (Paris), and the America-Israel Cultural Foundation, among others. Her paintings are held in both public and private collections worldwide.
LIA Portraits w/ Talia Israeli
Elechi Todd is an artist from Trinidad and Tobago. In his collages, drawings, films and photographs, he aims to subvert stereotypical perceptions of the Caribbean. Being a place characterized by its Carnival, crime and beaches; Todd attempts to explore more personal narratives that reveal the nuances of Caribbean life. He often uses materials that echo carnival craft aesthetics, and encounters his subjects during mundane experiences of life in Trinidad. Elechi completed The Fountainhead Residency in Miami in May, 2019 and had his work included in Prizm Art Fair 2020. Elechi has also co-curated and participated in several group shows with fellow artists from Trinidad and Tobago, most recently A Shot To The Ego, 2020 and Why Now? At Y art gallery 2023 and his first solo effort Who is “We”? In 2022.
LIA Portraits w/ Elechi Todd
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