Ned Evans, Bingo, Acrylic and Mixed Media on Canvas, 41 x 41 inches

When a surfer catches a wave perfectly, for a few ecstatic moments his body, the surfboard and the sea become one, flying with the wind toward the implacable beach. Malibu, Baja, El Salvador, Hawaii: the Meccas of surfing have been the classrooms of Ned Evans for nearly a half-century, just as were the art classes of Robert Irwin, Ed Moses, Larry Bell and Craig Kaufman at the University of California at Irvine.

Evans’ exuberant canvases, inspired by surf and strand, evolved from “natural influences of the ocean, transferring its movement and energy into abstracts of color, strokes, patterns and layers,” according to the artist, who states:

“The physicality of surfing and the immersion in the medium translate into what happens in the studio. It’s not conscious—it just happens for me. I like to immerse myself in the process of the painting and the liquidity of the paint. Everything’s done wet on wet, and it carries right over into a similar sensation when you’re surfing. In other words, it’s about getting lost, losing the gravitational pull, or at least suspending it all for a moment.”

Evans’ paintings have been featured in more than 100 exhibitions in such leading venues as the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art, the La Jolla Museum of Art, and the Laguna Beach Museum of Contemporary Art.

See more artwork by Ned Evans here

Urban Cries, 34 x 18 1/8 inches (61 x 46 cm), 2006, Oil on Canvas

As with so much Chinese contemporary art, the sensuous women depicted by Wang Niandong are more than meets the eye, according to one critic. Chinese artist Wang Niandong frequently superimposes a young woman against an urban background with butterflies, gazelles or other symbolic references to nature.

Most critics think the butterflies refer to a transformative effect, suggesting that clothes—or in Wang’s case, lack of them—or cosmetics have changed a young woman into a sexual commodity. At least one of the artist’s paintings refer to Japanese art, however, and in Japanese culture butterflies also connote promiscuity, thus the artist may be lamenting a lapse in traditional sexual restraint.

According to Dr. Bobbie Allen, “Chinese art is exploding in the world market because the art world has been flooded with imitations of Western styles. Collectors hungry for the ‘contemporary’ without the ‘weird’ or abstract snatch up nostalgic landscapes or romantic portraits executed with immaculate technique and virtually no origin.

“Wang, it seems to me, has put all his women in this position. She (Wang’s archetypal woman) always seems to me to be like Chinese art itself, which can no longer look back on its past, but rather than forging a new future for itself, puts on the lurid clothes of American capitalism and sells herself like hotcakes.”

Clowns, Money, Plane and Love, 11 3/4 x 47 1/4 inches (30 x 120 cm), Oil on Canvas, , 2007

Born in 1978 in Sichuan Province, Wang attended Central Academy of Fine Art in Beijing and completed his graduate work in the oil painting department of Sichuan Fine Art Institute in 2002

See more on Wang Niandong

Marco Tulio, Untitled, 57 x 64 1.4 inches, 2007, Oil on Canvas

A major article in the Christian Science Monitor (The heart of Latin art By Gloria Goodale) on the unprecedented number of major exhibitions of Latin American art around the nation features a painting by Marco Tulio and quotes a museum director who singles it out as an example of magical realism.

“La Montera” (The Bullfighter’s Hat”) depicts a pensive young woman draped in a sheet, seated in a bullfighting ring. Near her are flower petals and the toreador’s cap. His cape is draped across a nearby barrier. Looking on are two sinister characters, one holding a scythe.

The painting is one of the six loaned by ArtSpace/Virginia Miller Galleries to the Naples Museum of Art for its “Latin American Painting Now” exhibition of works by 50 artists being shown until Jan. 10th. The newspaper article states:

“The contemporary Latin American artists on display at the Naples (Fla.) Art Museum vividly carry forward many of the characteristics that have traditionally defined Latin art. ‘Vibrant colors, figurative imagery, and a joyful embrace of everyday objects,’ says director Michael Culver.

“He points to such artists as Marco Tulio, whose work ‘The Bullfighter’s Hat’ offers a contemporary spin on traditional elements of Latin American art. ‘He paints like the old masters with layers on layers that create a fine, wonderful surface that looks immaculate – almost like a photo – but also almost surreal in the way he places the object,’ says Mr. Culver, adding that it also evokes another traditional Latin theme — magical realism, in which simple objects take on meaning.”

Other paintings from the gallery loaned to the Naples exhibition are by Alfredo Arcia, Humberto Castro, Michelle Concepción, Ramón Oviedo and Elmar Rojas.

“Autocycles,” the latest twists in the lifelong evolution of paintings by Matt Carone, will open at ArtSpace/Virginia Miller Galleries at 7 p.m. Friday, Mar. 6th.

Largely inspired by his 45-year friendship with the famed Chilean painter Roberto Matta, Carone’s paintings recently took a turn toward a more patterned abstraction.

According to the artist, the new subtly toned works “seem to be an opening of a new door of automatism.

“The approach is similar to the past works but the image is arrived at more spontaneously and graphically,” Carone says. “Subconscious symbols and rhythmic gestures relating to each other or canceling each other out seem to be the building blocks to the final statement.

“The seed,” he acknowledges, “was planted by Matta.”

Like the abstract expressionists, Carone seeks “a spontaneous image as a consequence of a gesture…dictated more by the subconscious than by a rational, disclplined procedure.”

Carone became interested in art as an adolescent during the summer of 1944, when he was asked to model for Hans Hoffman. His older brother, the well-known painter Nicolas Carone, was studying with Hoffman.

Through his brother and years of involvement in art, Carone has had a close association with many of the era’s most famous artists and critics, including Conrad Marca-Relli, James Brooks, Paul Jenkins, Sandro Chia, Larry Rivers, Balcolm Greene, James Rosenquist, Duane Hanson, Thomas Hoving, Clement Greenberg and many others.

His extensive professional biography lists one-person exhibitions in such museums as the Fort Lauderdale Museum of Art, the Boca Raton Museum, and the Palazzo Panni Museum in Arco di Trento, Italy, along with numerous leading private galleries.

View artworks here

Josephine Haden, 48 x 60 inches, Exaltation, 1999, Acrylic on Canvas

Gallery artist Josephine Haden continues to rack up impressive awards and exhibitions.  Her work will be featured in a one-person exhibition at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond, Virginia, from June to September 2009.

Haden also was awarded  the prestigious Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Fellowship for 2008-09, juried by Jeffrey Grove, Curator of Modern & Contemporary Art, High Museum of Art, Atlanta. Previous recipients include Cy Twombly.

Haden also was juried into two important publications: “2008 New American Paintings,” the annual exhibition-in-print, and “Studio Visit” magazine, which featured her works twice in 2008.

Haden’s major solo exhibition at the McLean Project for the Arts in McLean, Virginia, was accompanied by a catalog with an essay by the renowned Donald Kuspit, who has been termed “one of America’s most distinguished art critics.”

Kuspit observes that the “blues, browns and greens of her landscapes have a radiance all their own, independent of the nature they represent…Haden moves easily between the rough, raw, rounded and smooth, refined, flat—they nonetheless fit together, strangely yet seamlessly, like pieces of a trialectial puzzle.”

Kuspit clearly is equally impressed with Haden’s figurative work, referring to her as “an allegorist of alienation” whose “works resonate with the melancholy of the Sublime.”

As part of its Spring Collection 08, ArtSlant, “the #1 contemporary art network,” chose Haden along with four other artists to be showcased with a feature article. It notes that her paintings are included in private, public, and corporate collections in the United States and France, including the William J. Clinton Presidential Library and Museum.

The gallery web site features Haden’s works in five categories: Abstracts on Wood, Figures on Wood, Figures on Canvas & Paper, Landscapes on Canvas and Treescapes on Canvas.

Alfredo Arcia, El Arresto, 20 x 40 inches, 1996, Oil on Canvas

Mystery! Sex! Religion! Politics!  Military maneuvers! Surrealism! All those and more are found in the Latin American magical realism of Venezuelan painter Alfredo Arcia, whose subject matter often defies explanation or analysis but never fails to jolt the imagination.

In “El Arresto,” one of the artist’s least complicated compositions, armed soldiers in combat gear debark a military truck, apparently heading for a strolling bride and bridegroom still in wedding attire. In the foreground is an excavated trench containing the shattered remains of a Corinthian column and sculpture of Pan, the Greek god associated with fertility. Two pipes, possibly water mains, cross the trench.

Arresting the couple surely would interfere with their potential fecundity, the traditional (or classical) reason for marriage, just as damage to the water mains could limit the growth of plants relying on their flow—but are these really the artist’s implications?

You can see “El Arresto” and other works by Alfredo Arcia, who has been called “the Gabriel Garcia Márquez of painters,” on the gallery web site, www. virginiamiller.com,. under “Mid-Career Artists.”

Prepare to be astonished

Gallery artist Soledad Salamé will open a one-person exhibition that explores how global warming is changing the Maryland coastline at the Contemporary Museum in Baltimore on March 26th. Marianne and Robert Taylor will hold a champagne brunch fundraiser for the project on March 8th in their waterfront home in Pasadena, Maryland. The artist will speak about her forthcoming exhibition at the event, to be co-hosted by the Taylor’s daughter, Kymberly Taylor, and the museum’s deputy director, Robert E. Haywood.

ArtSpace/Virginia Miller Galleries regularly exhibits the work of Colombian painter Marco Tulio in its group exhibitions of Latin American artists as well as at such expos as the 2008 Bridge Art Fair during Art Basel Miami Beach and at Arteaméricas, the annual Latin American art fair.

Tulio’s stylized, surrealistic paintings have been described as “magic realism” reminiscent of the literary works of his countryman, Gabriel Garcia Márquez.

Rod Drown, editor and publisher of the popular blog “Muse Views,” writes that Tulio “achieves a quality of heightened reality. He has a refined skill at presenting archetypal forms within the painting that, although subtle and nuanced, are accessible to close observation.”

Drown goes on to describe the three triangular shapes that form the composition of one of Tulio’s paintings, and notes that “in Buddhist philosophy, geometry and symbolism are the means whereby all spiritual facts are expressed, and through which they are to be interpreted. The set of three is the triad in which is expressed the triple nature of the manifested soul” and that whether or not the artist composed the painting in this manner, “Tulio’s discerning use of geometry and symbolism characterizes his mental state,” which he suggests was “a religious state of mind—and, in a sense, (he) painted an icon.”

At the conclusion of his lengthy article, Drown observes that in recent years, Tulio did a number of paintings for the Vancouver Opera Society. Several of them, including works depicting leading characters from “Madame Butterfly” and “A Masked Ball,” are included here

Kyle topped more than 200 entries from across the nation to win first place in the Valdosta National 2009 Juried all-Media Competition at Valdosta State University at  Valdosta, Georgia.

The winning entry, “Future Site of Everything,” typifies the artist’s ongoing concern about the loss of natural habitat to development: a sign bearing its title, surrounded by a forest of miniature trees and shrubs and a tiny railroad.

A second multimedia work by Kyle, titled “Scientists of Sudden Death,” was awarded an honorable mention.

“Kyle uses his highly developed artistic talent to make universally significant statements about the environment,” said gallery owner and director Vireginia Miller. “These two awards are well-deserved recognition for the outstanding work being done by this artist.” The gallery regularly displays Kyle’s multimedia installations and other works in various exhibitions in Coral Gables as well as at the Bridge Art Fair held during Art Basel Miami Beach.

The prestigious competition was juried by the renowned painter Arnold Mesches, presently featured in a one-person show at the Santa Monica Museum of Art. The 85-year-old artist, who began exhibiting in 1946, had his 100th exhibition at PS1 in New York in 2002.

Five series of Kyle’s works are shown on the gallery web site under Mid-Career Artists. Although he uses only one name professionally, with permission of the artist the gallery web site includes two names in order to be ranked on search engines.

Emerging Chinese, Mid-Career Artists of the Americas To Be Exhibited at Bridge Art Fair-Wynwood and at ArtSpace/Virginia Miller Galleries in Coral Gables, Florida

ArtSpace/Virginia Miller Galleries in downtown Coral Gables continues its 35-year tradition of introducing important artists and art movements to this area with “SAVE AS: Contemporary Chinese Art Born of Ancient Traditions,” the first major exhibition of paintings in this country by Cao Xiaodong, opening from 7-10 p.m. Friday, Nov. 7th.

Although his computerized screen-pattern technique and compositions clearly categorize Xiaodong as a contemporary artist, his style is compared by Chinese critics to that of their ancient ink and watercolor landscapes because of his use of traditional tones and his paintings’ nostalgic sense of preserving the past.

Xiaodong’s favorite subject matter is to contrast Western cultural icons with their Chinese counterparts, such as Hugh Hefner with Mao Zedong, or Playboy Bunnies with young women wearing Mao-era uniforms. He is well known in China for his 500-portrait mural of Chinese who were famous from 1911 to 1949.

The second artist to be exhibited is Li Xiaofeng, a 43-year-old Beijing artist. After being introduced by the gallery at the Bridge Art Fair in Wynwood, Xiaofeng’s two full-length dresses and a man’s jacket, shirt and necktie made of broken pieces of ancient Chinese porcelain will be added to the exhibition in Coral Gables. Two receptions will be given for the expanded “SAVE AS” exhibition from 7-10 p.m. Friday, Jan. 2nd, and again on Friday, Feb. 6th.

Being exhibited outside China for the first time, the sculptural “garments” consist of shards of Ming, Qing, Yuan and Song dynasty porcelain that the artist has fitted together so perfectly the finished dresses and jacket appear to have been designed for their materials. Mounted onto a leather undergarment, the works open on the sides or back, just like an actual dress or jacket, and can be modeled as if they were of fabric.

Sharing ArtSpace/Virginia Miller Galleries’ Chinese booth at the Bridge Art Fair in Wynwood from Dec. 2nd – 7th will be artists introduced to this region by the gallery in two major exhibitions last year, including painters Li Bo, Kang Can, Liang Haopeng, Yang Na, and Liao Zhenwu, along with newcomer Mu Lei and stainless-steel sculptor Liao Yibai.

Li Bo disregards the conventions of composition and scale and depicts his subjects in the same size along a linear path. According to the artist, the string of apparently unrelated objects in Li Bo’s enigmatic painting should be viewed in context of television, other media outlets, and particularly the Internet, where random “surfing” can provide serendipitous juxtapositions even poetic insights.

Kang Can depicts his swiftly evolving nation as an infant in overwhelming situations, such as perched atop an enormous club sandwich or hypodermic needle. As China’s widespread industrial and manufacturing abuses continue to be disclosed, his babies remind us of the vulnerability of his nation as well as its awesome potential for continued economic growth.

Liang Haopeng’s works are mostly paintings of unruly behavior, chaotic gatherings often depicting verbal and physical arguments. He deliberately paints the figures in his canvases with oblique lighting and rimmed in red, so they appear violent and sinister. By capturing his subjects in peak action—what the renowned photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson called “the decisive moment”—Haopeng creates a powerful sense of tension between the painting and its viewers.

Yang Na’s doll-like, self-absorbed women, inspired by internationally popular anime cartoon characters, epitomize the sexual fantasies of global mass media. Her emphasis on cosmetic enhancements may refer to the avatars of video games, whose persona are created from a menu of facial features, hairstyles, and clothes.

Born and educated in Sichuan, Liao Zhenwu’s current series of paintings were inspired by the recent devastating earthquakes in that region. The gritty shades of black and gray in his paintings also refer to the polluted air in China’s cities.

Mu Lei, being shown outside China for the first time, compares the trendy young urban women of China with high-powered fighter planes and other armaments, suggesting that both are equally dangerous.

Liao Yibai’s welded stainless-steel sculpture places his dog, Man-Man, in birdlike poses and guardian-lion masks, sometimes with wings. Yibai, who grew up in an accident-prone factory that made propellants for China’s defense missiles, often incorporates hand tools into his limited-edition works.

Across the aisle from the gallery’s Chinese booth at Bridge Art Fair-Wynwood, ArtSpace/Virginia Miller Galleries will present mid-career artists from the Americas.

Mateo Arguelles Pitt, an Argentine artist whose works often contrast spaces crammed full of people in confrontation or communion with relatively empty spaces or flat planes, will be represented by “Sunflowers,” a four-by-five foot mixed media painting, and three of his sculptures of an alert dog. Pitt says that these recent three-dimensional themes speak of the relationship between people and nature, as an extension of our bodies.

Mexican artist Sergio Garval, winner of a number of his country’s leading awards, often chooses subjects of decadence and destruction for his mixed- media drawings on board and oils on canvas.

Other artists sharing the booth include Alfredo Arcia, Benjamin Cañas, Matt Carone, Humberto Castro, Michelle Concepción, Arnaldo Roche-Rabell, Elmar Rojas, Soledad Salamé, and Mariano Vargas.

Greater Miami’s longest-established contemporary fine art gallery, ArtSpace/Virginia Miller Galleries has been exhibiting outstanding artists since 1974. For more information, call 305-444-4493 or visit the gallery website, www.virginiamiller.com.