COVID MASTERPIECES
Artists:
Elina Virdziniece
Martina Kosta Diankova
Ruth Dagan
Christy Lo Lok Lam
YiChen HO
Helen Lee
Marie Ruprecht
Lois Notebaart
Renata Franzky
Lucia Pinzani
Christina Geoghegan
Louise Byrne
DISCOVER ARTISTS:
ELINA VIRDZINIECE, LATVIA/UNITED KINGDOM
Elina Virdziniece is a Latvian multidisciplinary artist currently working between England and Latvia. She works across installation, painting, and moving image, creating immersive experiences through mixed medium across screen and space. She has been awarded a Bachelor of Arts from Birmingham City University and a Master of Arts from Goldsmiths, University of London.
Elina draws most of her inspiration from the sea, her abstract paintings are the result of a translation of emotions through an encounter with form, texture, and colour. Blues are often recurring in her work. She approaches each medium in a specific way - from moving image to installation and oil painting, each of them is characterized by a different process. The technique of oil painting consists of overlapping, layer by layer, of different colours and textures. She has exhibited in the United Kingdom and the United States.
MARTINA KOSTA DIANKOVA
Has Greek and Bulgarian origin and currently living in Greece. Martina is a professional
dancer and choreographer. She is one of the co-founders of Revelators dance company. The
company has choreographed since 2016 four performances that are presented at various
festivals in Greece. Martina also has choreographed one solo work presented in theaters and
festivals around Greece. She is member of the youth dance company since 2015 with
choreographer Zoi Efstathiou. Since 2017 she teaches yoga in Greece and around Europe.
Performances include collaborations choreographed by Christina Sougioultzi, Penny
Diamantopoulou, Alexandros Stavropoulos and Maria Gorgia.
Inspirations include nature, music, and the body, that are drone by freedom, limits, fears,
independence, balance, rebirth and nakedness. In this project, she explored the relationship
of the naked body-as a part of nature- and space.
RUTH DAGAN, NETHERLANDS
Ruth Dagan was born in Jerusalem in 1958 to the artists Hannah and Abraham Yakin. She received a B.A. in textile design from the Rietveld Academy of Art in Amsterdam and has lived in the Netherlands ever since. Originally, her main professional interest after graduation was putting on muppet shows for children. However, after a transformative journey, she took up painting.
During her career Dagan has written and illustrated five books, and has exhibited in the Netherlands and the United States. In recent years Dagan’s work has expressed concern for the world, specifically the hope that humanity will see the world as one, reduce overconsumption, and work to protect living and vegetative nature for the benefit of all kinds of life on earth.
The written word often serves as the springboard for her work. Dagan interprets texts such as fairy tales and Bible stories, illustrating them in drawings, objects or photographs. In her visual work she also likes to reference famous artworks, creating a dialogue with them and connecting the past to the future.
Her current masterpiece is entitled “The last supper of the world” which calls to mind the work of Leonardo da Vinci as well as with the images of photographer Adi Ness. The painting depicts people sitting around a round table symbolising the world. The world map looks fluid, hinting at global warming and serving as a nod to the ecological crisis that is at least partly caused by human greed.
At the top of the painting are woodcuts, which spell out “redemption” in Hebrew sign language. The dove of peace flies in the opposite direction. The painting also has plenty of hands, symbolising that same human greed.
The figures are dressed in clothes on which political maps are painted, whereas the tablecloth sports a geographical map. The message is clear: for global problems to improve, humanity needs to see the world as one. In addition, natural disasters and viruses - such as the Coronavirus - pay no heed to the territories carefully delineated by man.
To create this painting, Dagan photographed her family in Jerusalem in January 2020. Only a few months later, her father passed away. Due to lockdowns in Israel and the Netherlands she could not travel to bid him a final farewell, and consequently the work also came to represent the "last supper" of her complete family.
CHRISTY LO LOK LAM, CHINA
Christy, Lo Lok Lam 盧樂琳 (b. 1997, Hong Kong ) is a multimedia artist whose work deals with different forms of connection while also reflecting on the contemporary world. She received a B.F.A. in Fine art Painting from Savannah College of Art and Design in March 2020. Born and raised in Hong Kong, she moves to Georgia at the age of 20. She has exhibited her work in group exhibitions internationally, including galleries and international art fairs. Her first group exhibition was in 2015 at the Affordable Art Fair as a featured artist by Sovereign Art Foundation in Hong Kong. In 2017-2019, her paintings have participated at Open Studio Night at SCAD in the United States. Her first solo show Unpeeling/施 exhibited in the early in the winter of 2020. She has recently contributed as a summer artist residency in the Kunstraum studio, Brooklyn, NY.
YiChen HO, Taiwan/France
Taiwanese artist YiChen HO, currently based in the south of France, interests in different fields that can define her as a designer, researcher, artist. She obtained her MA degree in material from École nationale supérieure des arts décoratifs. Her works have always shown great influence from organic form, material and craftsmanship technique. By making object and sculpture, Her works focus on the relationship and interaction between human and space, and on the sustainable process of creation.
HELEN LEE, U.S.A.
Helen Lee (she/they) was born and raised in Chicago to immigrant parents from South Korea. She received her MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and BA from the University of Hawaii at Manoa. She has had the privilege of presenting works in the US, South Korea, Japan, Germany, Iceland, Finland and Canada. They were awarded SAIC’s Graduate Dean Professional Development Award to attend The Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics Convergence hosted by York University and is currently a HATCH Artist Resident with Chicago Artists Coalition.
Helen creates performances and visual art works that weave storytelling, analog and/or digital practices in film, video and photography, taxidermy, installation and social practice. Their work often investigates the facets of cultural identity, racism, shame, memory, ancestral healing, honoring grief, plant medicine, food rituals and meanings of home. They hope the work they create can help to amplify the voices of Asian American women making their narratives more visible while building authentic and meaningful connections and accessibility in all communities.
MARIE RUPRECHT, AUSTRIA
was born in 1975 in Upper Austria where she lives and works. She studied Experimental Design at the Institute of Fine Arts and Cultural Studies at the University of Art and Design Linz and graduated with honors. Since 1994 she has been working in the fields of photography, drawing, painting and sculpture as well as spatial installation.
An essential feature of her work is the direct engagement with the existing spatial and contentual conditions and the theme related appropriation of new cultural techniques for the realization of her works. The physical nature of the materials used, just as the experimental handling style with vastly varying work methods flow consciously in the formation process. The chosen materials are tested for their possibilities and the relationship between the aspects one can precisely plan and the unforeseen coincidences are time and again newly fathomed out.
LOIS NOTEBAART, THE NETHERLANDS
was born in The Netherland sin 1995, but have lived in the United States (Arizona and Montana) and France (Paris) while growing up. Currently she is based in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. She has attended the Academy of Photography in Amsterdam and completed her Bachelor of Arts there. During her second year of school she interned with photographer Robert Koene in Cape Town, South Africa. Besides the arts she is particularly interested in science and language, and is currently studying the Russian language. With a broad interest she works for big clients like Barts and Het Stedelijk Museum but also maneuvers really well in the art scene. The projects she takes on may vary from the personal projects she starts, but they begin in the same studio with a lot of research and books.
Her art characterizes itself for the three-dimensional layers of aluminum and collage way of working, protected with wooden frames she builds herself. The subjects she chooses are questions, political, personal, ethical questions that really can’t or shouldn't be answered. Questions like: 'Are we shaping our brain or are we shaped by our brain?' or ' Is it ethical to evolve our body?' ' Would you upload your brain?' and so on…
RENATA FRANZKY, GERMANY
works as an artist in Munich, Germany. Born in Central Asia with mother from Asia and father from Europe, she grew up with and between two completely different cultures, their myths, symbols, and rituals. This still has an impact in her art today. The love for strong colors and staging from her Central Asian side and her quiet, subtle element side of the European influence are evident in her work.
This is how she processes her cross-culture identity between Western Europe and her original home in the East, with which she feels closely connected, in her art.
Her figurative art is representational and abstract at the same time. Apparently opposing elements such as line and surface are united in a single picture. The unspoken and invisible, was made visible through the concrete representation and line. In her Art with topics as human being, everyday life, loneliness, isolation, but also soulfulness in gestures of daily life, concentrates Renata Franzky in spaces, colors and graphic elements. Thereby the line adopts the graphical layer true to the motto “the line is the human itself”.
Since her first solo exhibition in the City Gallery Bad Reichenhall in Germany in 2016 her works were presented internationally in several places such as Germany, France (Paris), Britain (London), Luxembourg, Italy (Florence, Venice), and Austria in different exhibitions, gallery shows and Biennales.
LUCIA PINZANI, ITALY/SPAIN
(b.1990) is an Italian artist based in Spain. Through artistic and musical studies, she developed her interests in the fields of visual contemporary art, experimental music and art curation. In 2020 she completed a Master in Art Therapy in Barcelona, where she currently lives.
After studying Visual Arts in the universities of Padua and Venice (Italy), she has been involved in the creation of artistic performances, sound art installations, and exhibitions in Padova (IT), Venice (IT), Istanbul (TR), Bergen (NO), Udine (IT) and Barcelona (ES).
She is a conceptual artist with a multidisciplinary approach who mainly researches both the visual and the acoustic dimensions, as well as the curative properties hidden in the art-making process through different mediums. She focuses in particular on how we unconsciously process sounds and images, and on the invisible boundary between perception, interiorization and imagination.
CHRISTINA GEORGHEAN, THE NETHERLANDS
explores the contemporary engagement of viewer and artwork,
depicting the environment and its direct influence of people in the
space. Her subjects in the work reflect on the introspective moments in galleries and the impetuous threshold of the constructed space and immersion. She completed her BA in Fine Art at Minerva Academie, Groningen, Netherlands and is currently undertaking a MSc In User Experience Design in Ireland that has influenced her work further in the constructed built space that influences social connection.