The exhibition Sensorial Perspectives creates an immersive sensory experience in which sculptures and two-dimensional pieces work their magic over a captivated audience, drawing viewers into new and unfamiliar worlds of imaginative perspectives. From realistic still lifes to atmospheric semi-abstract scenes to decontextualized bold figures, the subjects in the works beckon the viewer with the promise of a compelling story. The artists each exercise unprecedented technical mastery in the execution of their highly original compositions to leave viewers with a truly unforgettable impression.

Drazen Beslic

Self-taught artist Drazen Beslic is inspired by the natural world and human history. He creates oil on canvas paintings exploring “our function and place on this beautiful planet.” Beslic began drawing at the age of six, and grew up admiring many master painters, including Claude Monet. The Impressionist influence is most strongly felt in Beslic’s use of light in his paintings. A general gauziness floods the scenes he creates, producing worlds that are both gentle and dreamlike. Many of his paintings suggest cultural narratives and point to ritual and tradition as central to the human experience. Beslic portrays many different subjects in his works, from majestic and mythical landscapes, to contemplative scenes of figures alone or in pairs. Through the interplay between light and shadow, Beslic masterfully captures moments in time: the fleeting gestures of dancers, advancing clouds at nightfall, or the delicate rustle of a robe.

The artist was born in Bosnia and was educated as a surveyor. He cites the multicultural Balkans region as having a significant impact on his work. He now lives in Denmark.

Elaine Bradshaw

“I paint to celebrate, connect with, and better understand the natural world,” says Elaine Bradshaw, and her paintings illustrate that engagement. The artist creates images that bridge the worlds of realism and abstraction, capturing the details of the natural environment while incorporating them into striking graphic patterns. Adept at recreating the surface of a leaf or a piece of fruit, Bradshaw is also able to use paint as a source of pure expression, with bold brushstrokes and drips enlivening her images. She works primarily in acrylics on canvas and board, and makes the most of the range of textures that acrylics can recreate, and the intensity of color they provide.

The artist notes that the “rhythms, colors, and forms" of living things are a central focus of her works, and her eye for color and composition places those elements in a dynamic relationship. With a sharp ability to use light and shadow, and an expert use of proportion and perspective, she gives her images a powerful physical presence, instilling them with a strong sense of movement and life.

Marco Donner

Marco Donner creates paintings that are infused with light, spirit, and a sense of innate joyfulness. This is a reflection of his personal beliefs and practices: Donner has been meditating since college, spending his quiet time between a form of meditation called Vipassana and sending healing prayers on behalf of friends, acquaintances, and the Earth. The spirituality and creativity he finds through this practice can be found in his all pieces, which frequently feature angels, the Buddha, or the idea of nature as the sublime. Stylistically, Donner is adept at combining the spontaneity of plein-air impressionistic landscapes and the naiveté of early renaissance religious works with a contemporary color palette, transforming his work into something that feels new and fresh.

Born in the United States, Donner has traveled extensively and his work can be found all over the world. Wherever he goes, he carries his paints and canvas, just in case. He says if there’s one theme in his paintings, it’s “light, as in the light of our souls, and silliness, while still attempting to touch that abandoned part of our being and common humanity.”

FalaBella

Argentinian artist FalaBella’s oil on canvas works feature exaggerated emotionality, archetypal human figuration, wholesome natural landscapes and chic geometric stylings. Drawn to earthen hues and azures skies, the works build an easy bridge into the ripe orchards of the artist’s imagination. With clear anchors in mythology and perhaps magical realism, FalaBella’s creations often have a narrative quality, and impart their own kind of wisdom via visual cues and powerful ancient symbolism. Enhanced by the colors, light and forms of nature, particularly trees, fields, and their ilk, each painting serves to probe the primordial relationships between nature and culture, real and imaginary. Beguiling viewers with classic references to Latin American traditions such as masquerade, the works unfold in glittering bits and glowing pieces, to be digested by each viewer in his or her own time.

FalaBella has been the recipient of a number of awards for his work and has exhibited internationally including in South America and Europe. The artist was born in San Andres de Giles, Buenos Aires, Argentina, where he still lives and works.

Williams Gonzalez

You could say that Uruguayan sculptor Williams Gonzalez was born to create art out of metal. Growing up in a family of blacksmiths, Gonzalez started working in his father’s blacksmith shop at sixteen. In his spare time, he explored the artistic side of the medium. His somewhat surreal pieces are sculpted using hand tools and cold iron, a process he prefers because it allows him greater feeling of expression. He says he works the iron like clay, shaping each piece of metal with his hands, adding and subtracting as needed, filing down the rough edges and smoothing the surface of the iron until it has the unique, soft finish that his work is known for.

All of Gonzalez’s pieces are inspired by nature and creation: the creation of plants and animals by God, and the human desire to create art. Although these sculptures are made from cold iron and steel, there is a warmth and suppleness to each piece that makes it feel approachable and organic, brilliantly succeeding in Gonzalez’s goal of conveying emotion and movement through a balance of form and space.

BG Karlsson

n his oil paintings, BG Karlsson creates a world that is soft-edged and dreamlike, but also has an immediate physical presence. Capturing social gatherings as well as introspective views of individual subjects, the artist has an unusual ability to combine a fine eye for detail with an overarching sense of mystery and reserve. He is able, in just a few strokes of paint, to precisely render objects and to give his human subjects a spontaneous feeling of movement and vitality. But the artist’s reserve is embodied in his decision not to depict the faces of the people in his paintings. “I don’t paint faces,” he says, “because I think that it's more exciting to watch the paintings reveal themselves without putting too much focus on the faces. ”

That focus is instead placed on expressing the textures, depth, and mood of each environment. With his subtly executed effects of light and shadow, and his skill at juxtaposing his colors to animate each image, Karlsson turns even the most diffuse, abstract background into a convincing world, bringing the emotions and attitudes of his subjects alive.

Concha Osuna

Through stunning figural watercolors, Concha Osuna achieves a perfect expression of her subject through her chosen medium. Osuna depicts quotidian street scenes at an intimate range. Her subjects go about their casual business, together and alone, during the unremarkable workday. Yet everything about the composition demands that the viewer look more closely – Osuna frames faces closely, and finds powerfully expressive moments that never seem false. She skews the perspective to suggest action, and includes only a few choice environmental details to create an interconnected, village-like atmosphere. Above all it is the artist’s exquisite watercolor technique that sets the work apart. She allows light to flood her images like another pigment, and builds textures out of transparent layers with a preternatural delicacy. Colors are exceptionally pure, and malleable when they need to be. When the image calls for fine detail, Osuna knows how to hone in and create precise lines and depth.

Concha Osuna was born in Granada, Spain, and has exhibited in several major cities in her home country, participating in both group and solo expositions.

Dominique Riviere

Franco-American artist Dominique Riviere is an award-winning jewelry designer who has more recently turned his attention to two-dimensional fine art. With an exceptional eye for compositional elements, such as color and form, Riviere creates enchanting portraits of women in traditional garb playing classic Chinese instruments. Although Riviere’s paintings are inspired by the masters of the meticulous Chinese watercolor paintings that came out of the Song Dynasty, he chooses to utilize hard pastels as a medium over these traditional watercolors in order to cultivate a more mystical mood.

Riviere has spent much of his life traveling to China, and these experiences have formed much of the basis of inspiration of his work. Each of Riviere’s figurative renderings contain strong emotive elements that help to create a spiritual and numinous effect. For Riviere, the point of his work is not to uncover a deeper meaning, but it is rather about “the exaltation of culture and beauty.”

Dominique Riviere currently lives and works in Manhattan, where he teaches jewelry design at the Fashion Institute of New York.

Shivender

Self-taught New Delhi artist Shivender is inspired by nature. His canvases are the result of his visualization and observation of the world around him: people, objects, and nature. As a result, these works combine imagination with spirituality and emotion, capturing a moment in an attempt to convey the artist’s feelings and sensations to viewers. As Shivender says, his pieces are suspended in time, each a capsule of the past, what he's learning in the present, and a preview of the future.

Shivender is particularly interested in beauty, expression and color, and seeks to achieve a perfection of harmony by finding the best way to present a subject. For this reason he tends to work in series, exploring a single subject in different perspectives and hues, first in charcoal and then in acrylic. This work is a unique combination of the conscious and the unconscious, incorporating both to create what Shivender himself describes as “a sense of visual mystery” that intrigues the viewer and invites us to explore his pictures in greater detail.

Lucy Ward

In Lucy Ward’s still life paintings, fruit, vegetables, bowls, and bottles are turned into objects of beauty. Whether she is creating a classically composed arrangement of apples on a counter or a seemingly offhand image of a wicker basket filled with laundry, Ward gives her paintings a full-bodied physical presence, bringing each scene alive while also capturing “the essence of the subject.” Working in oils on both linen and canvas, she capitalizes on the rich colors that oils provide in images that possess a vibrant, yet enigmatic glow.

“I am fascinated by the way light affects everyday objects and reveals their beauty,” Ward says, and her facility at creating effects of light and shadow, as well as her impressive ability to recreate textures from cloth to metal, lend each image a depth and variety that are thoroughly engaging. Citing such artists as Vermeer and Sargent as influences, she excels at using subtle manipulations of color and tone to direct the viewer’s eye, giving her works a dynamism and energy that contrast nicely with the tranquility of the scenes she sets.

Ralph Whiteaker

The first love of American artist Ralph Whiteaker has always been color, especially color that is rich, deep, beautiful, and full of life. In his figurative paintings, Whiteaker employs a masterful sense of color and composition to infuse expressionist elements into the piece and bring his subjects to life. In addition, each piece is highly gestural in nature, lending flow and movement to the composition. In essence, Whiteaker’s work is a celebration of the human spirit and how that spirit both transcends and is contained within the physical human form.

Whiteaker has long been a student of spirituality in all of its diverse manifestations, and his work reflects this. For Whiteaker, art is meant to be a driving force that challenges viewers to go beyond the physical self to the realm of the spirit. Whiteaker offers his art as an inspiration to viewers, a conduit meant to draw the viewer into a new relationship with their own life force and with the vast power of the human spirit.

Ralph Whiteaker currently lives and works in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where he is also a certified project manager for an IT consulting firm.