Subliminal-Yellow - Oil on Canvas 76.5'' x 64'' Yuumi Asatsu explores the emotive potential of paint, using her vibrant palette and evocative marks to draw viewers in. Even when Asatsu’s oil paintings depict still scenes or fields of color, they are full of movement. Strokes dance across her compositions and the paint takes on a life of its own. Textured and dense, the surfaces of Asatsu’s canvases sometimes resemble geographical terrains in which valleys dip into darkness and lithe leaves or petals blow in the wind.

Asatsu has an affinity for neo-Expressionism, knowing that dramatic brush marks and hues have the power to kindle emotion. She has also been influenced by German photographer Martin Liebscher, an artist who uses repetition to make conventional scenes absurd.

Asatsu, who usually crafts an image a day, believes an artwork should ultimately be free of an artist’s feeling and so she distances her personal story from her work. She paints to offer viewers an emotional vehicle for experiencing the world, and she invites them to project their own feelings onto her canvases.

Kerstin Arnold in her studio It takes a special talent to transform items of the everyday into works of art that demand scrutiny and interest beyond the mere technical skill of execution or the physicality of their subject matter. Kerstin Arnold personifies this talent—her intimate still lifes convey the same closeness and personality as her portraits. Given exaggerated perspective and unusual angles, the viewer is brought up close to places never quite seen before. The freshness and vitality of her approach means that Arnold can convey something surprising in subjects that are seemingly mundane.

Though an autodidact, Arnold’s work draws on a large tradition of the painting of still lifes of food and drink. As with the Dutch masters, there is an implied luxury or abundance about the compositions. In the Old Masters, lustrous fruits and vegetables lie under hanging hares and bright-eyed fish. Many of Arnold’s objects are similarly suspended, their luminescence similarly emphasised. She uses oils because of the intensity and vivaciousness of the colors they produce and the subtle sheen and depth of their surface. She applies the paint in successive layers, building the compositions up gradually to achieve a natural finish. Arnold’s developed painting technique is a more modern hyperrealist one, echoing pop art styles and the modern aesthetic of Hopper and Hockney. Underpinning this precise style is her consummate draughtsmanship, the graphic quality of which heavily influences her painting style. She also trained as a technical draughtswoman and has worked with various companies. 

Rie Osogoe’s lithe, layered compositions revitalize Modernism’s fixation with color and shape, giving geometric abstraction a fresh face. In Osogoe’s acrylic paintings, angular planes of color dynamically pile up, one on top of another, like note cards or swatches artfully stacked on a table. Osogoe experiments with arrangements and relationships, tilting shapes on their side, playing austere hues off against warm ones, or allowing fields of color to slip off the canvas’ edge.

Influenced by Warhol and Pop Art, Osogoe is particularly attuned to the rhythms and color schemes present in contemporary culture.