New River Fine Art proudly presents a curated exhibition titled: Contemporary DeFi{ned} at Market Art + Design Hamptons 2021, opening August 12, 2021; showcasing artwork from Mr. Brainwash, Alex Gabriel Bernstein, Andrew Cotton, Estella Fransbergen, Pietro & Riccardo Ferro, Jennifer JL Jones, Takashi Murakami, Pose, Marlene Rose, Hunt Slonem, Super Buddha, and Bertil Vallien.

All the artists in Contemporary DeFi{ned} bring a groundbreaking, and often trailblazing technique, innovation, or narrative to their artwork, making it evergreen- always appearing contemporary and current. Mr. Brainwash wrangles with our collective psyche to commandeer our mind’s eye as he thrusts forward a vivacious encounter of his fragmented explosions of pop culture psychodelia. The showmanship and personality flows from hand to canvas in such an unequivocal way, that nothing is obscured in the transmission of transcendental pop art pizzazz.

The viewer steps into an alternative macrocosm of bold color, graffiti-style markings, and splatter paint pièce de resistance.

Black stencils, silkscreened iconology, and audacious street art aesthetics gyrate and pulse within an indefatigable composition.

Alex Gabriel Bernstein presents a bold and refreshing exploration of visual form and storytelling through the art of glass. Bernstein skillfully combines metaphor with the impact and optical quality of glass.

His cast, carved, and polished glass sculptures provide the viewer with intimate narrative landscapes, drawn from light, form, and color. Bernstein explores ideas about the passage of time and the processes of creation and transformation. The forms of Bernstein’s pieces, as well as the techniques he uses to work the glass, mirror processes in nature such as oxidation, erosion, growth, and decay. As a result, many of his pieces evoke images of flowing water, ice crystals, mountain peaks and jagged canyons, all structures that seem solid and unyielding but are in constant flux.

The work reflects his sense of exploration: an exquisitely cut geometric crystal sculpture set against a brutal, rusted steel backdrop, volcanic bursts of cut-glass spewing from a steel-encrusted base, layers of transparent color intermingling with ambient light. Bernstein’s sculptures reflect his feelings and sensitivity to others, curiosity, and enthusiasm for bringing new dimensions to his sculpture.

Andrew Cotton uses elements of art history, art movements, and signature aesthetics in his contemporary portraits that give us an unusual hybrid model of unsymmetrical duality. His Pop Iconology allows us to reference a culture in such a way that visual familiarity, recognition, and acceptance is reinforced through relatable imagery.

From splatter-painted Pollock portraits to Graffiti-style Basquiat busts, Cotton separates his subject in two.

Part anatomically correct portraiture juxtaposed with the preferred visual nomenclature of such identity, we see a bold and beautiful split personality. Cotton makes the outward appearance of his subjects and the inner, conceptual appearance exist simultaneously.

Ranging from 24-ct gold glazes to three different types of bronze patina – pearly white, traditional bronze, and highly polished bronze – Estella Fransbergen female form driven sculptures range in color as well as aesthetic, giving off energies that can stretch the spectrum from elegant and regal to naturalized earthen tones.

In her metaphorical forms, she uses the torso to represent nature, adorned with feathers, branches, leaves, semi-precious gems, and rare stones that have formed over millions of years. By channeling an ancient science, she can elegantly recount the symbolic meaning beneath each stone while our eyes detect the unique beauty of what lies within.

In the tradition of Murano, under the tutelage of their father, Pietro and Riccardo Ferro learned the innovative art of glass grinding. In 2000, they opened their own studio, Moleria, where all artists who work in glass grinding can be followed. The Ferro brothers see glass as a valuable canvas for creating and expressing their ideas. They specialize in developing new vessels and special artistic structures, the dynamic layers of which form exceptionally intricate details of craftsmanship. The brothers have collaborated with world-renowned artists such as Lino Tagliapietra, Davide Salvadore, Pino Signoretto, and many others.

An exploration of beauty and energy, Jennifer JL Jones’ mixed media paintings are a meditation on the dichotomy of the existence of nature both as corporeal reality and intangible spirituality. Employing multiple layers of abstraction and combined mediums including a refined glazing technique, she creates rich, organic patinas that evoke universal emotional and physical connecting points for the observer.

Layers of paint create a palimpsest quality to the work, elegant, ever-shifting paintings combining a poetic, sensual grace with consistently bold execution.

Takashi Murakami is a Japanese artist known for blurring the boundary between fine and commercial art. Often categorized alongside historic and contemporary artists working in the tradition of Pop Art, such as Andy Warhol and Jeff Koons, Murakami's work has achieved a widespread level of fame beyond the art world. His innovative “Super flat” aesthetic—combining classical Japanese art with contemporary Japanese pop culture—has led many to consider him one of the most innovative artists working today. Exploring the links between traditional printmaking techniques and Japanese manga in postwar society, Murakami’s art acts as a cultural barometer with subversive undertones and imagery.

With his popular collaboration with the fashion label Louis Vuitton, Murakami has established himself as a pioneer of promoting art as a brand.

Pop Artist POSE has remained distinguished in his inventive ability to take every day, throw-away things and introduce them into the world to communicate something much deeper. While his work relies on harnessing very simple human emotions like love, loss, and triumph, it’s presented in a complex union of vivid colors and layered application that aims for something much more profound than what’s at the literal, surface level. POSE’s diversity as a visual artist is apparent in grandiose outdoor settings through large-scale murals to the intricate bodies of work developed within his studio.

POSE takes from the world around him – whether it be bits of found signs or his wife’s old childhood books. His attempt at making sense of the environment around him started with graffiti and has matured into studio work with multiple dimensions and layers that are a pop blend of illustration, lettering and comic book-inspired aesthetics.

As his work evolves, so do POSE’s methods of encouraging his audience to let their imaginations run wild. Seeing more than just the value of the walls in a gallery setting, POSE has added three-dimensional installations to his repertoire. The result is an experiential art environment that the viewer can exist within and encounter on multiple levels.

When people first view Marlene Rose, they often feel certain aliveness inherent in the work itself. Her goal as an artist is to inject life into whatever she makes. In simple terms, to make the piece come alive. Marlene Rose's work has a quality of timelessness reflecting both ancient and modern. When casting sculptures she incorporates relics of modern life, interesting objects that have been cast away, industrial waste items that seem to unite present and past. In the end, the completed piece transcends the sensibility of mere time. Each piece is hand cast in sand from molten glass in a spectacular process of heat and light.

The energy of this dangerous dance of creation reflects in the finished work. They celebrate the unique properties of glass, of transparency, shine, and reflection. And because these are cast objects, they hold in their form the memory of the shapes and textures of the materials that formed them; they are fine-grained, rugged, or smooth, transparent, or translucent, colored, or clear. The glass immortalizes a glimpse of something fleeting beyond the moment, taking that moment, and freezing it over. She calls these pieces Evocators. They are kept moments, shards of what one has seen, unnamed emotions, visions, concepts, memories. They call back, and they are the vehicle upon which vision can ride away. The glass is there only to see through.

Hunt Slonem, the colorful monarch and jubilant mastermind artist in an imaginative land of butterflies, birds, and bunnies heralds a new decree of three-dimensional artworks that dazzle, entertain, and astonish. Continuing in his bold and brilliant investigation of the world’s flora and fauna, Hunt Slonem’s groundbreaking metamorphic transformation gives birth to a wonderfully refreshing realm of casted bronze, blown glass, neon, and multimedia-based au-courant artistry, in addition to his signature minimalistic and bold animal paintings.

Whipping the viewer into an ecstasy of artistic bliss, his new sculptures are a diverse mixture of ornate blue-chip craftmanship populated by Gothic Pop Art pageantry. Hunt achieves a new level of mischievous maturity, evolving beyond the painterly renditions of his favorite flora and fauna. He embarks on a journey that explores eccentric airs of contemporary art making. By working in a three-dimensional mode, Hunt shatters the procedural mould and ventures into uncharted territory of sculptural fabrications, propelling his art into a new, refreshing, and appealing realm of glass ears, bright lights, glowing fur, and polished bronze.

In Slonem’s Salon Collection, ornately baroque frames adorn the protruding bunny bust portraits… Fragile sensibilities of material are juxtaposed by a ludicrously portrayed aristocracy.

Neither gaudy nor kitschy, the immeasurable depictions are golden in their delightful executions.

The calculated renaissance to this perfect storm of three-dimensionality is the fact that Slonem owns the revival by exposing his artistic susceptibilities and recalculates a new simplicity that is worlds apart from the abstract expressionistic practices.

As a non-native Chinese artist living in Shanghai, Super Buddha began creating art in a hybrid environment of new and old. Coming of age as one of the pioneers of the Graffiti scene in Shanghai, Super Buddha found himself straddling two very distinct artworlds - the iconic Eastern Art and the Urban Art Culture.

Being one of the first artists to tag buildings in Shanghai, he risked life and limb to help establish a new style of street art that did not yet exist in this heavily populated area of China.

Super Buddha is now partnering with New River Fine Art for an exclusive launch of 3 new N.F.T.s on August 13, 2021. These new N.F.T.s flip the script on gaming by animating his 32-bit buddha as a token of enlightenment that brings blessing to retro-inspired video game worlds. These highly anticipated crypto-native and culturally relevant N.F.T.s by Super Buddha highlight his love for 1980’s and 90’s video game nostalgia and help bring a positive message to the impassioned contexts of gaming. Super Buddha’s lighthearted artwork features Buddha as a contemporary spokesperson that captivates the audience with witty one-liner blessings. Exhibited as a repetitive and reductively minimalistic bust of a bubbly cheeked, straight teethed, and large-eyed figure, this bald Chosen One is eternally cheery with his signature long earlobes that symbolize a conscious rejection of the material world in favor of a more spiritual enlightenment.

Bertil Vallien began designing glass in 1963 and today, he is one of Europe’s best-known glass artists. Vallien is famous for his sculpted boat forms, rich with narrative imagery, and for figurative faces or masks and heads that are both enigmatic and beautiful. The boat forms have long been part of Viking tradition representing the passage from life to death. The faces and masks are expressionless but suggest fear or longing, love or hate, watchfulness and thought. Sometimes a face or mask is the whole sculpture, sometimes it peers out from within a modernist form, suggesting a trapped soul. One of Vallien's best-known sayings is "Glass Eats Light", referring to the way in which light is contained within the glass. Vallien is a master of controlling the inner light, which for him adds to the spiritual and symbolic content of the work. Since the early 1960s, Vallien has been honored for his work in glass. Major museum exhibitions include: the Krapperup Konsthall, Sweden; VIDA Museum & Konsthall, Sweden; The Aguéli Museum, Sweden; Rockford Art Museum, Rockford Il.; and the Imagine Museum, St. Petersburg, FL.