Beautiful Bizarre Magazine, founded in Australia in 2013, began curating exhibitions around the world in 2015. Their international group exhibition Secret Longings will be held at Corey Helford Gallery in Los Angeles, March 11 through April 15. The 15th international exhibition features 80 artists and is the first to be shown at the gallery.
Troy Brooks, The Wounded Healer, oil on Belgian linen, 24 x 20"
The gallery is an appropriate setting for the exhibition being a center for New Contemporary art. It notes that “its goal as an institution is to support the growth of artists, from the young and emerging, to the well-known and internationally established. CHG represents a diverse collection of international artists, primarily influenced by today’s pop culture and collectively encompassing style genres such as New Figurative Art, Pop Surrealism, Neo Pop, Graffiti, and Street Art.”
The poet and novelist Sylvia Plath wrote, “I want to be important. By being different. And these girls are all the same.” Plath was born in 1932 and died by her own hand when she was 30. She struggled with her own demons as well as the misogynist demons of society at large. Yet, she was important…because she was different.
Agnieszka Nienartowicz, Preparations, oil on canvas, 24 x 18"
The Toronto-based pop-surrealist painter Troy Brooks admires Plath as well as the femme fatales who populated film noir in the 1920s and 30s. As a boy, watching his mother paint watercolors, he sat beside her and did drawings…of Wonder Woman. His distinctive women, willowy with long faces and expressions that suggest they have not been the girls Plath rejected, invite getting to know them, not by an analysis of the hints that may be provided but by following intuition.
Brooks experienced his own form of misogyny by being ridiculed as a young gay boy for acting “too” feminine and being different. He comments, “The women in my paintings are usually depicted in very polished and sophisticated settings, but always with an atmosphere of tension. They are often times caught in moments where something transformative has or is about to happen, accompanied by animal familiars or wildlife symbology. I’m interested in the contrast between the veil of civilized etiquette and the brutalities of nature.”
Brad Kunkle, Moon Bloom, oil and silver leaf on linen, 12 x 9"
The determination of what transformative thing has happened or is about to happen in The Wounded Healer is up to the viewer. Brooks’ “animal familiar” is subtly portrayed in the bumblebee sitting on the faucet of the sink—a stand in for part of his own anger. The Polish painter Agnieszka Nienartowicz also liberates women in her equally finely-rendered paintings. She says, “Following the theory of empiricism, according to which on the day of birth everyone is tabula rasa—a blank slate, every event leaves a trace. Systems of beliefs and practices, doctrines, cults and rituals leave deep and indelible traces. They provide a framework for thinking in a firm and unquestionable way, because they establish themselves as infallible. Just as the skin contains the interior, keeping it together, so beliefs and doctrines imprint on it with birthmarks and tattoos.” Her female subjects bear tattoos from across art history.
Kazuki Takamatsu, These 2 Are Me, acrylic, acrylic gauche, medium, gesso on canvas, 12½ x 16"
In Preparations, a women arranges her hair in a exquisitely perfect bun, it’s complexity echoing the entangled serpents of her grisaille tattoo. The “proper” hair style belies the sensual complexity of her tattoo. By appropriate portions of historic art, she says, “I deprive them of their original meaning and transform them into an artifact. This ambiguity is what I love.” —
Corey Helford Gallery 571 S. Anderson Street • Los Angeles, CA 90033 • (310) 287-2340 • www.coreyhelfordgallery.com
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