33 Contemporary

With over two decades of professional experience, Nanette Fluhr has created portraits which hang in public and private collections worldwide. She has received honors and awards from The Artist’s Magazine, The Catherine Lorilland Wolfe Art Club, The Art Renewal Center, The Portrait Society of America, and the School of Visual Arts, where she studied the techniques of the Old Masters under John Frederick Murray. During this time, she painted museum-quality replicas at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Her work has been displayed at The MEAM Museum in Barcelona, The Salmagundi Club, The Butler Institute of American Art, The National Arts Club, and The Wausau Museum of Contemporary Art, as well as in a six-museum exhibit on contemporary American realism in China.

Ellen Starr Lyon, b. 1974 in Columbus, Indiana. Ellen is a figurative painter focusing on modern portraiture that revolves around feminism, motherhood, and coming of age. She is a current member of PoetsArtists, Portrait Society of America, AWA, NOAPS, Indiana Artists (IN/A), Hoosier Salon, and Juniper Gallery. Lyon has shown at Abend Gallery in Denver, CO, Manifest Gallery in Cincinnati, OH, Woman Made Gallery and 33 Contemporary both in Chicago, IL, WMOCA in Wausau, WI, and several online exclusives on Artsy through the 33 Contemporary Gallery. She has been published in Fine Art Connoisseur Magazine highlighting artist self-portraits. Ellen has a BFA in Painting and a BA in Art History from Indiana University. IU has acquired several of her paintings.

Pegah Samaie is an American-Iranian artist who was born and grew up in Tehran, Iran. Pegah’s art moves through the shadow of her past life. She uses art as a tool to face the experiences she and other women have encountered in a culture dominated by patriarchal governments and households. Her early experiences in Iran changed her perception of the role of women in society; they motivated her and influenced her way of talking about women. Art is her voice to talk about her feelings and experiences. She received her BFA with honors from the prestigious Laguna College of Art and Design in Laguna Beach, CA, where she is now also completing her Master of Fine Art degree.

Homeira Mortazavi’s figurative paintings deal with issues of self-identity, women’s experience and the relation between human and nature, focusing on women and flowers in particular. In her work, she highlights a natural expression of the female naked body in all its splendour and its intimate and sensual beauty. Her attempt is to translate this aesthetic of the female nude as an act of liberation or even a means of individual resistance to traditionalism and conformity that many women experience especially in Middle East, where she was born. Mortazavi questions biases views towards nudity and its place in our societies. While the female body has become a place where power is exercised for conquest and control, She seeks to reconcile the body with nature and society.

Sarah Warda is a classically trained expressive realist painter working primarily in oils. The subject that most interests her is the human form. Using light and contrast as a metaphor revealing the inner and outer form, she strives to go beyond the surface in her work. Her portraits often delve deeply past the outer layer revealing the sometime vulnerable sitter’s soul and story along their journey. The subject of these intimate portrayals is most often represented by those closest to her. Frequent muses include her closest friends and the artist’s son who is often portrayed in the many stages of childhood.

Junyi Liu is a Chinese representational painter. As a Chinese living in the States, she is able to see people from a different perspective, and capture certain interesting qualities of them on canvas. She likes to paint Asian women, and appreciate their beauty. By depicting models in different locations and lightings, she explores both the surreal, theatrical feelings and the true, ordinary life people are living. Her paintings cover subjects such as the male gaze, loneliness of modern citizens, self-inspection, and more. She often uses metaphors and bold colors in the works.

Sergio Gomez is known for his large scale figurative abstraction paintings and drawings which focus on the cycles of life. His life size figures are created in series and based on a specific theme or idea. He depicts the human form as a silhouette, aura, shadow or trace of his own body. Gomez’s multiple textures, drips, splashes, patterns and vibrant colors honor flesh and physicality while his alluded figures celebrate humanity and spirituality. Besides his ongoing cycles of life series, his paintings occasionally explore social and political, and contemporary issues.

Painting illuminates from a very personal starting point. Over the past few decades, Patricia Schappler has explored universal themes of love, loss, and intimacy through eyes that have gazed frequently on herself, her family, and her community members. Using mixed media, acrylic, and oil, she has searched the narrative of the figure in shallow space, often with collage and pattern, using composition as an impetus for storytelling. Employing many sources including working from life, photos, memory, and invention, she paints until something unseen before, is revealed. Through sensual application, Schappler layers complex marks on surfaces which are many times large in scale, echoing the intricacy of relationships, and evoking mood. Inspired by childhood fairytales and myths, Patricia looks to literature, film, and family, as she questions how we expand the concept of home.

Vicki Sullivan's richly colored figurative oil paintings aim to convey a sense of positive emotion and feeling to the viewer revealing elements of her subjects’ personalities besides her own. 
While depicting contemporary subjects, her method is inspired by 19th Century Realism. Her work involves glazing many layers making the colors rich and glowing as if from the inside and it takes several months to complete a single artwork
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Lorena Lepori's main subject is the human figure. Her work has a narrative based on the representation of femininity playing with archetypes, stereotypes and personal memories  translated and delivered in a contemporary scenario.

Laurie focuses mainly in oil painting, working in portraitures of marginalized people, such as people with disabilities, medical conditions, sexual identification or ethnicity, or a combination. As a Deaf queer woman of mixed heritage, she seeks representation that is not often found in mainstream society.

Elena Degenhardt is a Russian-born German artist working primarily in soft pastel and charcoal. She pushes traditional boundaries of these dry mediums by applying wet techniques throughout painting process, using unusual painting surfaces, incorporating other materials into her work and presentation, destroying her work in the process and rebuilding it. Origins of her work lie in observation and self reflection. A gesture, sudden emotion or sensory experience may prompt a new work, a narrative further developing during the working process. Her multicultural and multilingual background and frequent relocations both in her childhood and adult life influenced artistic choice of themes: lost identities, displacement, bonds, human fears, memory and time. Fascinated by time and full of fear of its passing, she holds fleeting moments of life in visual images, her painting subjects being on the verge, in transition, in-between.

David Morris’ figurative realism stems from an intense and persistent interest in human anatomy from multiple perspectives: beauty in form, function, and structure. While continuing to teach anatomy at the medical school level, he uses charcoal, graphite, and oil paint in his artwork to convey something beyond the scientific aspect of the body. He has a deep affection for working from life and strives to share something about what he experienced in the presence of that person represented. In this process of portraying people, Morris explores concepts of psyche, intimacy, and gaze as it relates to gender.

Paulina Aubey’s LEGO portraits ingeniously merge popular form with popular content in order to question our relationship to celebrity. Having begun her artistic career working with pastels, Aubey’s passion for pop culture inspired her to try her hand with a more popular medium: LEGO bricks. She has elevated this unusual medium to the status of fine art, creating expressive portrayals of contemporary icons and the idols of her 1980s childhood. Her portraits of religious figures, movie characters, and pop stars—including David Bowie and Marilyn Monroe—blur the distinction between figurative and abstract art. They appear highly detailed from a distance and become pixelated upon closer inspection; this viewing experience prompts audiences to reflect on how much we can ever truly understand our idols. In order to create her portraits, Aubey chooses a digital image of her subject and manipulates it to create the desired expression and color scheme before selecting appropriate blocks of LEGO to build the work.

Manu Saluja’s oil paintings fuse the urban landscape of New York City with narratives of it’s complex and diverse people. The subjects in her paintings are often shown in dream-like contemplation; a meditative state she has placed herself in during the bustle of the city. Saluja uses a variety of paint strokes: from loose, chromatic drips and thick layers; to subtle gradations of light and shadow. Rather than portray a sanitized version of her native city, her paintings allow light to flow over soiled, cracked tiles, rust stains and graffiti with the same grace it would a garden or Cathedral. Saluja strives to express the inner strength and vulnerability that coexists in people, and communicate the sublime she finds in ordinary moments and spaces. Winner of the 2019 BP Portrait Exhibition Travel Award, Saluja’s work is currently touring London’s National Portrait Gallery, the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh, and the Ulster Museum, Belfast.

Sarah Means is a contemporary realist, focused on capturing human aesthetic and beauty in our hidden, reflective moments. Through glazing layered bits of oil color from a basic palette, Means portrays layers of our internal, vulnerable selves hidden in our limited exterior. Upon closer inspection, brushstrokes and pigments are evident, mirroring ourselves, not as simple as we may seem. Her oil paintings are often inspired by the mountains and lifestyle of the western US where she currently resides.

Amy Gibson is best known for her rich color and tonal hyperrealistic portraits which portray the complexities of the human condition. Drawing inspiration from personal subjects, she creates oil paintings which capture their personalities and ways they view and interpret everyday life, society, and their environment.