The striking pieces in Spatial Articulation are an example of how patterns can create an imaginary and non-conforming space that draws the viewer into a never ending and constantly transforming world. Each artist, inspired by their own experiences, crafts a unique abstract image that feels familiar but never exhausted. Through these worlds, the viewer is invited to see the inner thoughts and truths of the creative mind.

Osvaldo Bacman

For Osvaldo Bacman, geometric forms are a way of “visualizing the invisible.” His colorful, kaleidoscopic images, executed with watercolor pencils on paper, infuse those forms with motion and life. Starting out with basic squares, circles and triangles, Bacman creates a complex, multi-layered world that subtly, yet powerfully, pulls the viewer in. With a compositional style that blends sharp precision with a dynamic sense of rhythm and direction, he gives each of his images an energy built from a unique combination of repetition and variation. Shapes and patterns will be repeated, but their direction, size or angle will be constantly varied, resulting in works that seem to be in a constant state of transformation and movement. He uses the term “language” to describe these paintings, and the way that he lets his shapes and colors change meaning and appearance through context and placement makes that term a thoroughly apt one.

As a child, Bacman lived opposite the National University of La Plata, Argentina's School of Fine Art, where he attended countless courses on drawing and painting. He has been living in Germany with his family since 1976, where he has been creating his artwork and participating in solo and group shows.

M.L. Burdick

Like slides under a microscope, M.L. Burdick’s ink and mixed media pieces illustrate the underlying beauty in the strata of organic forms magnified. Although her work resembles both biological phenomena and the logic puzzles of complex mathematics, there's nothing formulaic about her highly intuitive process. Rather, each piece is an experiment that creates new life straight from the ether. Even at her most experimental, Burdick keeps her work polished, displaying a mastery of aesthetic and curatorial judgment.

While firmly in the domain of the abstract, there is always something uncannily realistic about Burdick’s artwork. The combination of her naturalistic palette, her understanding of light and contrast, and the almost photographic textures she uses – derived, perhaps, from her background in photography – create a sense of immersion, as though each work is about to come to life. This vivacity liberates Burdick’s work from the sense of repetition, producing cohesion and a feeling of photographic suspension of energy. The viewer, in this sense, is privileged with a snapshot of a fleeting moment, and the anticipation of the artwork springing back into motion.

Nonia De La Rosa

Nonia De La Rosa’s digital paintings are detailed explorations of controlled chaos. The precise yet finite clarity of computers combines with De La Rosa’s free-flowing colors and warped perspectives. Her psychedelic palette ranges from swirling neon to ethereal wisps of cool blue and silver. De La Rosa’s paintings seem to diagram a bionic pulse: an infinite grid of transformation, projecting an alternative visual model of a central nervous system. Rather than solely focusing on the digital machines, De La Rosa uses software to examine the human spirit. The paintings are in reference to dreams, anger, love, and the soul, empowering her artificial portraits with very human passions. De La Rosa creates an explicit dialogue between familiar emotions and alien light formations.

The patterns in De La Rosa's paintings exist somewhere between the subconscious mind and the computer's logic. Her images express improvised design in high resolution. Each painting is printed on fine art paper for a limited series.

De La Rosa lives and works in León, Spain.

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GEDDA

The subjects of GEDDA’s paintings are water and the cosmos, and those two worlds meet in images that ground an open airiness with fluidity and a dynamic sense of movement. Working in what she calls “the tradition of lyrical abstraction,” the artist animates her compositions by enhancing the depth and light of each color she uses, making her images glow from within. She also combines painting techniques and textures to strong effect, mixing liquid fields of color and drips of paint with sharply etched lines and rough, energetic brush strokes. These elements come together in works that balance freedom and openness with a tightly organized sense of formal balance.

Over the course of her career, the artist has gone from making black and white drawings to oil on canvas paintings, to finding a unique style in her current work, done in oils and resin on plexiglass. Sometimes painting on both sides of the clear plexiglass surface, she gives her images a complex, multi-layered presence, making each pattern a physically compelling environment. The resulting works create dreamlike spaces whose ebbs and flows exert a hypnotic force.

GEDDA's paintings are in public and private collections in France, Portugal, Switzerland, Japan, Finland and the Caribbean Islands.

Karen Hochman Brown

Karen Hochman Brown’s mind-bending digital artwork melds nature, geometry, and sophisticated technology. In her latest series of “digital paintings,” Hochman Brown approaches one of fine art’s most enduring subjects – the flower – from a completely contemporary perspective. She uses fractal software to explore the structures of the bloom: symmetries, quirks, and the network of connections between petal, leaf, pistil, and stamen. The images, however, are not clinical or scientific but delicate, emotional, and even resplendent. The artist reaches deep into the earth to devise unique color palettes for each image, making dramatic use of luxurious yellows, greens, purples, and reds. Her flowers are presented straight on, in perfect compositional symmetry, a reference to both geometrical constructs and the mandala, with its promise of balance. The flowers themselves contain a great deal of detail but are not strictly realistic. They occupy a stylized space in which nature’s patterns and those created by humans co-exist.

Karen Hochman Brown was born in Santa Barbara, California and today lives in nearby Altadena. She is also an accomplished graphic designer who ran her own business for many years.

Sissel Hovden

In Sissel Hovden’s work, a wide range of materials and approaches come together in vividly realized images that bring the artist’s internal world alive. “By observing and letting the inside speak,” she says, “I try to find what is my truth.” As part of that search for the truth, she creates both digital prints and works executed in acrylics and ink, employing photography, painting and written language in provocative and challenging combinations. She exhibits a photographer’s keen sense of how sharp focus and soft diffusion can direct our attention, and adds to that a painter’s subtle sensitivity to color. The resulting works are at once dreamlike and energetic, engaging the viewer’s attention on several levels.

With a background in graphic design and a strong eye for composition, the artist gives her images a balance that places all of her experimentation in a peaceful, harmonious setting. No matter how freely drawn their lines are, or how many drips of paint or pieces of language cover their surfaces, her works always have a clarity that ensures the message comes directly across.

Zlata Hurtic

Fluent in a range of artistic languages, Vancouver-based painter Zlata Hurtic draws equally from the artistic and emotional gifts passed down from her late brother, Hamid, and her experiences growing up in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Hurtic tackles a diversity of issues in her growing body of work, exploring what it means to be a woman, the diasporic nature of life, and the beauty found in the act of self discovery.

Comprised of various media and aesthetics, the defining characteristic of Hurtic's oeuvre is the emergence of forms from layers of abstraction. These figures often represent the indomitable female spirit. As her figures seem both to be forming themselves and acting as recollections of what came before, Hurtic creates a dimensionality of timelessness. This evolving nature is amplified by her almost antique color schemes and the subtle shifts that build into complicated architectures of texture and light.

Liz Johnson

Liz Johnson, who signs her work LJ, creates kaleidoscopic paintings that blur the line between representation and abstraction. Liz uses oil, acrylic, and mixed media to create images of the heavens. She paints colossal galaxies and wispy light beams across space; both climactic events and graceful echoes of planets and stars that once were. Liz distinguishes herself through technique. She makes every mark with a dynamic movement, more controlled than Abstract Expressionism but too raw to be called realism. The compositions are thoughtful and the subjects are undeniably recognizable, but drips, streaks, and dashes remain proudly on the canvas surface. Though she paints space, spatial representation is not a subject for Johnson. She instead treats her subjects in a flattened way, like patterns on a surface, more aligned with the methods of abstraction. The work questions reality and highlights the incomprehensible majesty of the skies.

Liz Johnson was born in Iowa and today lives in Fort Worth, Texas. She is involved in local art and has owned a gallery featuring the work of artists from North Texas and the surrounding area.

Virginia Saldaña

The paintings of award-winning artist Virginia Saldaña are studies in contrasts, mixing oil with acrylic and figurative with abstract. By situating her figures within complex and thoughtful treatments of light and color, Saldaña creates an atmosphere in her pieces that can be described as contemplative, tranquil, even inspiring. Saldaña describes her paintings as humanist in philosophy and focused in execution. “My painting speaks of the natural simplicity of the simple pleasures,” she says. “[They are] an invitation to rediscover the beauty hidden beneath the visual noise of our everyday world.” As in photography, there's a sense of stopping time and capturing a moment in a single, eloquent image that brings forth the more ideal aspects of daily life.

A native of the Andalusia region of Spain, Saldaña is heavily influenced by artists like Joaquín Sorolla, who visited her hometown of Ayamonte, Diego Velázquez, and Pablo Picasso. She says she hopes people who see her work will take away positive things from it, such as a sense of simplicity and an awareness of natural beauty.

Martin Sitta

Born and raised in the Czech Republic, Chicago-based Martin Sitta paints abstract, stylized portraits that blend his talents as an artist and graphic designer. Inspired by the illustrations of Alphonse Mucha, as well as Gustav Klimt’s lavish portraits of women, Sitta inherited a passion for feminine beauty as complemented by thoughtful design. As a multi-talented painter, photographer, and graphic designer, Sitta is able to glean knowledge from one medium and transfer it to another with extraordinary results. His multiplicity of interests, which include abstract expressionism, fashion illustration, and minimalism in graphic design, serves to bolster his own creative endeavors.

Stylistically, Sitta’s work most closely resembles that of Ryan McGinness. Over the years, he has managed to capture the feminine mystique in a series of curves and abstract imagery most commonly associated with graphic design. Sitta’s work, painted in acrylic on large, stretched canvas, lately pairs numerals with the female form, resulting in a curvaceous display of graphic portraiture. Asked about his process, Sitta says, “Every painting is a revelation… I commit myself freely to the emotional action of painting.”

Veronika Wifvesson

Veronika Wifvesson’s geometric oil and acrylic paintings on linen have a legible and modern logic. Her works are automatic and communicative of inner thoughts, placing recognizable shapes and symbols in a heightened context. Each of the abstract images is meant to convey “life’s simplicity.” Crisp triangles and bars of rich or metallic pigment present extrasensory concepts. In some images, large shining triangles cut a deep “V,” or gold and silver bars bisect square canvases, parting fields of different shades of blue, coral, or white to suggest new depths. In other pieces, typographic symbols capitalize on the inherent simplicity and graphic nature of text, placing “I” or “<” shapes in a more transparently visual context. Each canvas uses a limited color palette, describing geometric worlds with an economy of information. Consequently, each work is inherently shareable, using common associations with line and form to present pieces that are both fresh and familiar.

A native of Sweden, Veronika Wifvesson works in Helsingborg. She paints with attention to providing an alternative to the inclination to complicate life.