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Like the Art Deco explosion of the 1920s and 30s, contemporary artists are blurring the lines between fine art and decorative art. These artists are subverting the affectation that considers decoration as frivolous in relation to fine art.
“The New Deco” features a cross section of serious artists from a different generations and cultures but all pursuing the difficult work of making meaningful art using highly refined techniques and incorporating materials such as bronzing powder, gold and other mineral pigments to add luster and reflect light to seductive and gorgeous effect. Eschewing the modern prop of shock value imagery or style, which immediately conveys an aura of profundity, these artists masterfully create artistic meaning with a full and joyous paean to the beauty of the chosen image. Art that is dazzling to the eye always labors under the danger of being facile or banal. The legitimacy of works like these, triumphantly avoiding those traps, is what makes these paintings extraordinary.
AnnaMir is a classically trained St. Petersburg painter who, coming from the Stroganov School, is steeped in both Russian neo-romanticism and socialist realism. Her paintings transcend classicism by applying a clear and overriding contemporary aesthetic. Dutch artist Paula Evers brings her Barbazon school sensibilities to create exquisite, open figurative and abstract works. Local painter Ivy Jacobsen, trained in Paris and San Francisco, expresses the younger San Francisco perspective, traveling regularly to lush, tropical environments for inspiration for her austere, yet stunningly rendered, observations of the natural world. Taken together these artists are bringing a contemporary sensibility to one of the oldest functions of art.
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