New masters of paint: contemporary painting now

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Nogah Engler

 

Israel: born 1970

Nogah Engler studied History of Art, Philosophy, and Art Education in her native Israel before moving to London to take an MA in Fine Art.

Since graduating in 2004, Engler's hybrid landscapes have received wide acclaim. Influences such as the Early Renaissance and Pre-Raphaelites inform works that combine fragile beauty with a sense of melancholy and loss. The world she depicts seems poised in a state of precarious balance, evincing the natural cycle of life and decay, yet witness also to the destructive hand of man.

 

Gavin Nolan

 

Wales: born 1977

Since graduating from London's Royal College in 2002, Nolan's idiosyncratic approach to the portrait has become increasingly refined.

A master of detailed figuration, his work nevertheless incorporates elements of the absurd, fantastic and grotesque, a twist on reality that subverts the portrait's conventional role by leaving viewers with more questions about the subject than answers.

Still relatively unknown outside the UK and Germany (he lives and works in both London and Berlin), this situation is beginning to change with appearances in the US and inclusion in several well-regarded collections.

 

Ahmed Alsoudani

 

Iraq: born 1975

Born and raised in Baghdad, AlSoudani moved to the US after the first Gulf war to take his BFA at the Maine College of Art, followed by an MFA at Yale. He currently lives and works in Berlin.

Alsoudani's mixed media paintings and works on paper use both abstract and figurative means to depict extreme violence and a society at breaking point.

Combining the brutal with the mundane, AlSoudani's work speaks most obviously of the daily tragedies in his homeland of Iraq, but his paintings eloquently and disturbingly reflect the horror of violence wherever it may occur.

 

 

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