Lieven Hendriks takes everyday subjects in which the human touch is visible as a starting point for his work. For example, he paints nails in walls, stars and vases cut out of paper, and finger drawings on foggy windows. By using trompe l’oeil effects, his flat canvases appear as loosely stretched linens, deceiving the eyes of the viewer. In his work, Lieven Hendriks, plays a game with the nature of observation. His paintings anticipate how we look at art, how we focus our attention, and how this process is affected by surrounding circumstances. In this way, his work touches directly on the essence of painting and the value attached to it.

Creating hyperreal illusions requires mastery of one’s technique. When seeking to deceive his audience, Hendriks pulls out all the stops to make his work absolutely lifelike. Nothing is allowed to interfere with the illusion. For the artist, painting amounts first and foremost to a conscious demonstration of the highest professional skill. He uses his technical virtuosity to make the viewer think about the way we are used to look at paintings. Although his images seem to be crystal clear at first, they actually make us doubt through their ambiguity.

Lieven Hendriks (1970) studied at the HKU in Utrecht and was a resident at De Ateliers in Amsterdam. His work is part of many renowned international collections, including Museum Voorlinden, ESMoA Los Angeles, and the Centraal Museum in Utrecht.

www.lievenhendriks.com

Born in 1991 in Singerei, The Republic of Moldova.
Lives and works in Cluj-Napoca, Romania.

Pavel Grosu’s approach to painting is characterized by the prominence of the figurative, the preference for vague historical or social references, and the emphasis on the technical quality of the works, seen first and foremost as aesthetic objects. The artist deploys digital collage as a tool for building complex, carefully thought out compositional structures, later translated into paintings. In his newest series ‘Fragmented Dreams’, Grosu is challenging the many facets of representation through his often surrealist combination of elements. The fusion of contemporary human figures and ancient statues create an ongoing process of symbolism and signification, leaving the viewer in a state of wonder.

Pavel Grosu’s work engages with the topic of the fragmented or split reality in which we live. His paintings take as a starting point images from the media, being brought together as in a collage. He manipulates these media images in various ways to produce initial forms of digital collage: they are cut, juxtaposed, reshaped, blurred or inverted. By contorting them in some way, they confront the viewer with a rather confusing blend of visual stimuli – a disconcerting and disquieting mosaic.

Pavel Grosu was born in 1991 in the Republic of Moldova. He currently lives and works in the Romanian city of Cluj-Napoca, where he is doing a doctorate at the University of Art and Design. He recently had a solo exhibition at Sector 1 Gallery Bucharest and has shown works at the Five Plus Art Gallery, Vienna, Austria; Doris Ghetta Gallery, Milan, Italy; Boccanera Gallery, Trento, Italy, and Untitled, Miami Beach, USA.

Sir Isaac Julien, CBE RA is a critically acclaimed British artist and filmmaker. In 2018, Julien joined the faculty at the University of California Santa Cruz where he is a distinguished professor of the arts and leads the Isaac Julien Lab together with Arts Professor Mark Nash. Current and recent international solo exhibitions include: Isaac Julien: Lina Bo Bardi — A Marvellous Entanglement, CentroCentro (Panorama Madrid), Madrid, Spain, on view until 29 August 2021; Isaac Julien: Lessons of the Hour, McAvoy Foundation for the Arts, San Francisco (2020–2021); Isaac Julien: Lina Bo Bardi — A Marvellous Entanglement, MAXXI, Rome (2020–2021); Isaac Julien: Western Union: Small Boats, Neuberger Museum, New York (2020); Isaac Julien: Frederick Douglass: Lessons of the Hour, SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah (2019); Looking for Langston at Tate Britain (2019); and Playtime at LACMA (2019). Julien has previously exhibited at venues including Museum of Modern Art, New York (2013), Art Institute of Chicago (2013), Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego (2012), and Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (2005). Julien is the recipient of The Royal Academy of Arts Charles Wollaston Award 2017 and was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 2017.

Isaac Julien was born in 1960, London, UK
He lives and works in London, UK and Santa Cruz, CA

Hans Op de Beeck was born in 1969 in Turnhout, Belgium. He lives and works in Brussels, Belgium.

Hans Op de Beeck produces large installations, sculptures, films, drawings, paintings, photographs and texts. His work is a reflection on our complex society and the universal questions of meaning and mortality that resonate within it. He regards man as a being who stages the world around him in a tragi-comic way. Above all, Op de Beeck is keen to stimulate the viewers’ senses, and invite them to really experience the image. He seeks to create a form of visual fiction that delivers a moment of wonder and silence.

Over the past twenty years Op de Beeck realized numerous monumental ‘sensorial’ installations, in which he evoked what he describes as ‘visual fictions’: tactile deserted spaces as an empty set for the viewer to walk through or sit down in, sculpted havens for introspection. In many of his films though, in contrast with those depopulated spaces, he prominently depicts anonymous characters.

Hans Op de Beeck was born in Turnhout in 1969. He lives and works in Brussels, Belgium. Op de Beeck has shown his work extensively in solo and group exhibitions around the world.

Ryan McGinness was born in 1972 in Virginia Beach, VA
He lives and works in New York, NY

His work consists of an amalgam of icons and symbols. Drawing from his background in the design industry, Ryan McGinness’s work resolves the clinical graphic aesthetics of media as vast, contemplative fields of intimate meditation. It incorporates strong social commentary on iconography, language, and historical and contemporary symbolism. His graphic drawings and personal iconography are replicated, recontextualized, and materialized infinitely throughout his densely layered paintings.

Born and raised in the surf and skate culture of Virginia Beach, Virginia, McGinness moved on to study at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania as an Andrew Carnegie Scholar. During college, he worked at the Andy Warhol Museum as a curatorial assistant, which inevitably influenced his proclivity toward pop and graphic aestheticism. Known for his original extensive vocabulary of graphic drawings that use the visual language of public signage, corporate logos, and contemporary iconography, McGinness creates paintings, sculptures, and environments and fabricate the iconography of contemporary experience as spiritual and timeless.

McGinness’s work can be found in such art institutions as The Museum of Modern Art in New York, NY; The Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, CA; the Cincinnati Art Museum, Cincinatti, OH, and private and corporation collections including the Neuberger Berman Collection, New York, NY; Cobra to Contemporary/The Brown Family Collection, and the Charles Saatchi Collection, London.