Saturday, February 2, 2008

Beyond Pop Surrealism - Number 1


Julia Christe


PopDrawer sometimes hears from casual readers who say that while they are interested in new art, Pop Surrealism doesn’t interest them much. One such person this week referred to Pop Surrealism as “scary.” Okay, we get it. Big eyes, strange creatures, robots/monsters. Pop Surrealism isn’t for everyone. The truth is that Pop Surrealism is such an enormous tent, that it’s difficult to know exactly who should be gathered inside. Many artists often associated with Pop Surrealism would claim that their art should not be categorized as such, and others who wear the mantle of Pop Surrealism seems far from the “norm” of the movement. In fact, maybe there is no norm. Maybe Pop Surrealism is simply an umbrella term that includes any art with one of a number of common traits, e.g. cartoonish humans or animals, vivid surreal landscapes, or pop culture references. Again, this is far at once both too limiting and too broad. But enough of the pseudo art-school BS. What’s the point of this?

The point is that PopDrawer will be frequently showcasing artists whose work might not be considered Pop Surrealism, and might appeal to a broader audience, but may very well appeal to the collectors and lovers of Pop Surrealism as well. In other words, artists PopDrawer loves. Period. So without further ado, the first in a hopefully long series of “Beyond Pop Surrealism” artists, today brought to you, dear reader (yes you, the one solitary discerning sole reading this blog on a regular basis), with the help of LUMAS, a gallery and online store dealing mostly in photography, but also in fine art.

In the words of founders Stefanie Harig & Marc Ullrich, LUMAS was created “with the hope of making the art market more accessible and stirring our passion for photography in a new generation of collectors.” Add the words “fine art and merchandise” to this statement, and you have PopDrawers mission statement as well. LUMAS’ plan is described this way: “We offer selected works by these artists as hand-signed original photographs. These editions normally range from 75 to 150 prints, some being available even in full-wall sizes. This allows us to make high quality art photographs affordable to everyone.” And they ain’t kidding. The photos and art in the LUMAS collection are extraordinary. But PopDrawer’s favorite section is the “Young Art” section, where we can find up and coming artists at great prices.

Two such artists under the Young Art heading are photographer Julia Christe and digital artist Joshua Davis. Their works are available on the LUMAS site both in large format highly limited editions in the $1400 range (and we’re talking LARGE, about 4 feet by 5 feet), and smaller sizes (but larger editions) in the $350 range. This post is long already, so we’re just going to let the images speak for themselves. Be sure to go to the site to see the large shots of Ms. Christe’s work, because the scale here does not do them justice.



Joshua Davis

LUMAS - http://www.lumas.com/
Julie Christe - http://www.juliachriste.de/
Joshua Davis - http://www.joshuadavis.com/

No comments: