Disc of Life

Since the mid-1980's, Matthew Weinstein's work has consistently meditated on the terrifying and absurd experience of death. The artist's drawings and paintings from the mid 1990's feature skeletons seem to come to life, walk upright and interact with humans, alongside hovering art historical faces crying tears of blood. For a 2006 work, The Triumph of Painting, Weinstein cast skeletons in bronze, playing Frisbee.

Weinstein's digitally animated video Chariots Of The Gods (2009) stars a fighting fish swimming in an empty restaurant interior based Hitchcock's Vertigo. Weinstein deploys a type of naturalism recognizable as belonging to the idiom of the cartoon, particularly anime and more traditional forms of Japanese art such as Hokusai. The Pixar visual language is put to uncanny ends: The late Natasha Richardson provided the voiceover, speaking in a non-linear narrative. Subsequent paintings and sculptures are fabricated from the videos and based on the 3D digital visualizations. Richardson's death during production of the work provides one of its eeriest themes; it is an irrational fact of the work.

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The Limits of Chaos

Zhivago Duncan's mixed paintings and screenprints take off from the accessibility and ease of execution offered by contemporary strategies of appropriation. Like many young artists, the 29-year-old, Berlin-based Duncan is fascinated with the legacy of Late Warhol—the point in the signature portraiture where the serial image merged with the ubiquitous artist, and where iteration seemed to reach exhaustion. In portraits of bygone icons and anonymous headshots alike, Duncan conflates additional tropes of pop communicability-Day-Glo colors, graffiti drips, even the statics endemic to the margins of a Xerox machine—until the painting is itself a satire of diffused presentation.
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Inka Essenhigh Plots the Undoing of the Figure

Inka Essenhigh is a New York-based painter whose highly colorful paintings feature dramatic distortions and abstractions of figures and landscapes. Earlier bodies of work dating to the 1990s featured opaque effects, linear elements and violent painterly gestures, all in tension with the artist's rich, vibrant color fields. Essenhigh is masterful at drawing us into her paintings under the notion that we are in familiar territory, from which her work then pushes the viewer to re-consider the effects of distorted figuration and abstraction on our powers of recognition.
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Beyond the Surface: Richard Phillips

Richard Phillips' paintings, typically large-scale portraits of women rendered in fetishistic detail, are usually described as hyper- or photorealistic. His working method involves the careful pre-selection of source photos that punctuate Phillips narrative content. But whether he's painting landscapes, advertising materials or subjects drawn from the history of world war, Phillips doesn't use photography as a means to an end, or even as a means to figuration. For Phillips, photographic source material is a starting point for an analysis of the types of exchange that happen during representation and beyond it.
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