Born in 1972, Alliou lives and works in the Côte d’Azur and has a great technical mastery of painting.  Working off photos lifted off magazines and transferred to canvas, his black/white oil paintings imbue a sense of duality between contemplation/action, focus/blur, and good girl/bad girl using a technique that is reminiscent of painters from the 19^th century.  From a distance his paintings look like photographs and up close, clearly an oil painting creating a visual photograph/painting in a single work of art.

Arianna Caroli

Talking to Buddah, ICON, 2003

24 Kt Gold Leaf, pencil, oil on canvas

14 ½ x 14 ½ x 1 ¾  IN

(36.5 x 36.5 x 4.5 CM)

Healing Flower, ICON, Miami 2003

Egg Tempera, 24 Kt Gold Leaf on canvas

18 x 14 x 1 ¾  IN

(46 x 36 x 4.5 CM)

Untitled (Psalms 91:11)

24 Kt Gold leaf, colored pencil on paper

12 ½ x 9 IN (32 x 23 CM)

Arianna Caroli

Inspired by her Etruscan land and the magic of Southeast Asia, Arianna Caroli draws from her studies leading to a doctorate degree in Ancient Literature and Archeology at the University of Rome and her painting studies under the direction of maestro Fortunato del Tavano to create her ICON series.  Caroli masters the challenging technical feat of working with 24 Kt gold leaf in many of her works of art.  In the medieval world, gold was the only tangible representation of the spiritual light and was the way Byzantine painters transcended reality.  Caroli’s work conceptually revolves around “movement” [similarly she is constantly moving around the world]; healing energy is drawn from the gold within her paintings.

Sam Gilliam

Doubled I  & Doubled II

Golden Acrylic on Nylon

60 x 70 x 50 IN each

Born in Tupelo, Mississippi in 1933 and moved to Washington D.C. in 1962 Gilliam is internationally best known for his draped or suspended paintings released from the restriction of wooden stretcher bars—a major development in the 1960’s.  He is considered one of America’s most important living abstract painters.  As Tom Freudenheim wrote in a Wall Street Journal review of Gilliam’s 2006 retrospective at the Corcoran Gallery of Art: “As strongly as anyone since de Kooning, Mr. Gilliam is a painter of passages-lyrical mélanges of splashes and streaks that often emerge from the rich strata of paint and challenge one another.”

Kathleen Holmes

Front Wheel Dress, 1998

Mixed media

20 x 20 x 14 IN

Born in Monroe, Louisiana in 1953 and spent a couple of years in Trinidad, West Indies and now lives and works in Lake Worth, Florida.  Holmes oeuvre is distinctly feminine~ but with a twist~ as she utilizes made and found objects to create objects that act as metaphors for her native Southern culture.  Using rusted, pierced, and shaped metal refers to man-made aspects of our culture and provides the conceptual counterpoint to the woman-made textiles, creating a metaphorical duality to her works.

Fredda Psaltis

Chi Star, Healing amulet

24 Kt gold or Silver on pewter, Pink Swarovski crystals

1 ¼ x 1 IN closed; 1 ¾ x 1 IN open

Unlimited edition

Born in New York City, New York Psaltis received her degree in Fine Arts from Carnegie-Mellon University and Osaka University of Art in Japan.  Following the events of 911 while on an airplane, Psaltis drew the first sketches of what would become her signature art work, the Healingstar of Peace which was originally launched by the AJ Japour Gallery in 2004.  The Healingstar of Peace is inspired by the Kabbalistic model of the universe known as the Tree of Life.  Each gem stone symbolizes one of the ten sephirot or divine emanations.   More recently, the Chi Star was inspired by the courageous spirit of Psaltis’ niece, Chiling Hammer, a vibrant young mother with two children who was diagnosed with Stage 4 breast cancer.  A portion of all proceeds from the Chi Star are donated to Breast Cancer Organizations.

Qin Feng

Civilian Landscape Series, 2008

Mixed Media

55 x 79 IN  (140 x 200 CM)

Born in Xinjiang, China in 1961, Qin Feng graduated from the Shandong Art Institute in 1985.  Qin paints in the grand tradition of calligraphy with an infusion of abstract expressionism.  Qin splits his time between Boston, where he is an artist-in-residence, at the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA), Boston and Beijing where he is the founder of the Beijing Museum of Contemporary Art.  In 2007, Qin’s work was selected and exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Brush and Ink exhibition:  The Chinese Art of Writing.  Later this year, Qin will be part of a group exhibition at the MFA, Boston entitled:  Fresh Ink:  Ten Takes on Chinese Tradition.

Wang Qingsong

Offering, 2003

C-print

23 ½ x 45 IN (60 x 115 CM)

33 ¼ x 55 IN (85 x 140 CM)

Signed, numbered, and dated by the artist

Water is considered one of the five main elements in the Chinese Lunar Calendar. It suggests the flowing of time.  In traditional Chinese culture, the colors green and blue symbolize vigor and vitality.  Born in 1966 in Heilongjiang Province, China, Wang lives and works in Beijing.  He attended the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts and is now an internationally recognized artist who utilizes stage sets to create dioramas based on historically important stories and events with a wry wit; he then allows the camera a to tell a “contemporary, true, and understandable story”.  Among exhibitions Wang has been featured include the 2007 Second ICP Triennial of Photography and Video, Ectopia, at New York City’s International Center of Photography.

Henry Richardson

Untitled, Pair of Orbs, 2004

Sculpted Glass and Wood

24 IN each

Henry Richardson is a sculptor who commits himself to cold glass as the starting material for all his sculptural works; namely, plates of commercial–grade glass used in the construction of windows for residential and commercial buildings.  Advances in the tensile strength of commercial grade glass have important meaning to the lifeblood of the State of Florida.  Without hurricane-proof glass, the Miami skyline would not have been possible, or if contemplated, not without the near constant concern of wind gale forces during hurricane season.  A constant theme of Henry Richardson’s work is regeneration, the healing of an individual after trauma or emotional stress.  Born in 1961 and taught by Charles Stegman and Chris Cairns, Richardson has been exhibited widely in the US and the 2005 World’s Fair, U.S. Pavilion in Aichi, Japan.  His outdoor public works have been exhibited at the DeCordova Museum in Lincoln, Massachusetts, the Costal Maine Botanical Gardens and presently has a monumental work, Tikkun, on view at the Miami Beach Botanical Gardens. 

Zhang Dali

Dialogue Series 199939B, 1999

C-print, mounted and framed

23 ¾ x 35 ½  (60 x 90 CM)

32 ½  x 44 ¾  IN (83 x 113 CM)

Signed, numbered, and dated by the artist

Born in Harbin Heilongjiang Province, China in 1963 and educated at the National Academy of Fine Arts & Design, Beijing, Zhang has remained a working artist in his home country.  Zhang’s signature outline is a human head with an AK 47 tag which cover many buildings in the Chinese capitol city.  199939B is part of a series of works known as the Dialogue, which documents his graffiti work through photographs.  In this series he is commenting on the tremendous amount of destruction the government of China has authorized as they rush to join the rest of the western world at the dawn of the 21^st Century.

Zhang Huan

My Boston I, 2005

Color C-print, mounted and framed

19 ½  x 39 ½  IN (50 x 100 CM) 31 ½ x 51 ¼ IN  (80 x 130 CM)

Signed, numbered, and dated by the artist on the verso