After last week’s presentation of the best stencil artwork to feature on the walls of our London gallery, we thought we’d stick with a similar vein but turn it on its head somewhat and present the best painted artworks available.
As well as the wealth of talented street and urban artists producing cutting edge works, our Soho gallery is perfectly balanced displaying contemporary artworks produced with the brush as opposed to the spray can. Our philosophy is if it looks great then why not.
Zachary Walsh, a graduate with a masters in fine art from The Royal College of Art sets the precedent for the fact that his paintings demonstrate outstanding qualities of craftsmanship. His portraits stem from a sincere optimism about the value of beauty in painting, tinged by a sensibility for contemporary realities. Embedding fluid figure painting into abstract colour grounds, he creates portraits that are romantic, harmonic and self-consciously 21st century set in impersonal mood-scapes built from the ebb and flow of brushwork and colour washes. Rhythmic yet disjointed, beautiful in defiance, Zachary’s paintings strike a quite unique balance of tension and calm.
Charming Baker studied his craft at Central St Martins. His work combines a number of complex processes into a deceptively simple whole. This simplicity is not the product of naivety or simplistic thinking but rather the paring down of elements that come from experience and wisdom, as well as a playful instinct to entertain us. The end results can seem ‘charming’, even elegant and playful, but because a sharp message is invariably the driving force behind the works, they always have a significant sting in their tail. A wide audience is now appreciating his art with collectors from both the fine art and the urban art worlds buying up his work.
Gosia Kosiec is an extraordinary painting talent to emerge from Poland. She graduated with her masters in fine art from the Academy of Fine Arts in Lodz, Poland, in 1997 and has been exhibiting ever since. Her work has been featured in several exhibitions throughout Poland, across Europe and in the US most notably Saints and Sinners, London, Sotheby’s in Amsterdam, the Lodz Central Museum, and the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts in New York.
