Like a kaleidoscope, an artist’s eye is ever changing. Ahead, emerging and established artists from around the world detail their intricate and seemingly arbitrary patterns and processes of creativity through one poignant piece of work.
Anna Pogossova
The saccharine provinces conjured up by Moscow-born, Sydney-based artist and still-life photographer Anna Pogossova unpack what is assumed, albeit without words. To Pogossova, colour is “highly symbolic and has a way of influencing interpretation in profound ways”. “To quote Miranda Priestly, ‘It’s not just blue’. Colour comes from something more elusive and otherworldly,” she says. Fitting, then, that her work Ø Portal Entry (The Acrylic Age) configures folkloric shapes with the familiar texture of smooth plastic toys, theme-park rides and waterslides. Constructed from pigment paint, this fictitious playground emerges from its goopy residue to create a speculative environment which deconstructs form and function. It’s not too dissimilar to Salvador Dalí’s surreal landscapes. What will emerge next through the arched passageway is anyone’s guess. Yet without fail, you can rely on a vivid palette to be Pogossova’s perennial building block. Cinematic techniques, pop culture motifs and science-fiction elements are an additional framework to convey these fantasy lands. These are tools Pogossova uses in her work to trigger associations. “What [the pieces] are and how they are made is much less important than their ability to transport us.”
Margaux Ogden
Painting tessellating patterns in saturated secondary colours is viewed as a feminist choice by Brooklyn based artist Margaux Ogden. “It’s a way of pushing back against the historical male seriousness of abstraction,” is how she describes it. “Bright colours are often associated with the unserious or the feminine and using them is one way for me to embrace those interpretations,” she says. This piece began with the artist sitting by ancient ruin, Bath of Caracalla, on the outskirts of central Rome, and drawing it. The sketch was used as loose scaffolding to explore endless possibilities of form, colour, and surface. Through the artist’s choice of paint colours—selected ever so intuitively—her modus operandi was realised. “The patterned repetition of colour speaks directly to my work, especially how the image evolves when it spins,” she says. “There’s an eerie beauty to it. It feels very much reflective of nature.”
Samantha Thomas
The fundamentals of art—shadows, structures and shapes—are the primary paradigm in which Samantha Thomas views her work. Utilising everyday studio items like raw canvas, thread and acrylic paint, the Texas-born, California-based artist parlays mundane materials into something that defies convention. Lines are a common thread in Thomas’s pieces, but the flickering forms appearing in Incendiaria are much more personal than the vibe the inorganic holes and ombré background initially give off. Referencing the act of map-making (cartography), Thomas revisited the process of stitching burnt linen into a canvas painted with acrylic paint after watching her Malibu house be ravished by the 2018 Woolsey Fire. “This was the first body of work I made post-fire and my palette completely changed,” she says. “I began working with rich saturated hues and gradients of shifting colour. The burning of the linen also became more violent and gestural. Living in Southern California, we experience some of the most stunning sunsets and sunrises, which are a result of smoke from surrounding fires. These paintings echo the sentiment that beauty can be made from a source of destruction.”
Daniel Domig
Jutted and protruding limbs in washes of eggplant, tangerine and midnight blue aren’t what we see in our reflections. But what if Daniel Domig’s rendering of the human form is the real mirror image? With this work, the Vienna-based painter reimagines figures in relation to themselves. “We live in a time where we seem to have forgotten how beautiful fragmentation—the plethora of perspectives and experiences—can be,” he says of his inorganic subjects. “From political to personal, we search for the simple and often one dimensional aspects of life. I like to lean in the opposite direction.” This consciously defiant act encourages more room for the uncertain, unfinished and imperfect parts of ourselves—a theme that’s carried through in each stroke. Domig’s use of thin layers of oil paint demands further inspection to spot the multicolour particles hiding within a monochrome palette. He likens this process to his childhood evenings in Vancouver. “When I was young, I often marvelled at the colours I could see in the dark that weren’t visible when my mother first turned off the light,” he says. “Art is a lab to explore vision, time and transformation.”
Janet Werner
Canadian artist Janet Werner has painted large-scale fictional portraits of duality and polarity since 1997. This 27-year dedication to unconventional composites is due in part to a fascination with realism and photography but also a study of contrasts and antithetical pairs. In Virgo, Werner says her inspiration formed from “juxtaposing opposites”. The push and pull between warm and cool tones, and movement and stagnation, forms a sort of multi-bodied Hydra—a mythical creature in the midst of a dance. “My sources were two images from fashion magazines,” Werner says. “In the bottom, the recession of feet creates a visual rhythm, along with transparent films of warm colours that hide and reveal the two figures. In the top half, there is a stable, monumental, solid blue form, like a curtain coming down on a stage. Here I turned the image upside down, so the whole painting is actually reversible. In the final painting, the two parts form a kind of weird creature, both moving and still.”
Musonga Mbogo
By way of Singapore and, most recently, a residency in Napoli in Italy, Canberra-based visual artist Musonga Mbogo tells narratives that are rich in culture. Utilising contemporary tropes, Mbogo paints a character study of his Tanzanian and Zimbabwean roots and Australian upbringing. To him, a kaleidoscope is a passage to “new perspectives”, a theme prominent in this particular work. Titled Purity, a name inspired by the 2018 A$AP Rocky single featuring Frank Ocean, the piece embodies the notions of rebuilding after division, diaspora and discovering a sense of being. “The artwork focuses on the act of resetting yourself when things are falling apart and embracing the road towards finding new peace,” Mbogo says of the contemporary piece. Each section of the work can be seen as a segment that reveals the artist’s psyche and converges at different angles to engage different points of view. In a way, these vivid explorations could be viewed as a self-portrait broadcasting Mbogo’s aspirations, anxieties and journey towards amalgamating as a “third culture” kid.
Sarah Morris
Sarah Morris began her career as an assistant to one of the 20th century’s greatest satirists, Jeff Koons. Rather than using humour or irony to impart modernity, Morris fuses structural lines with vibrant patterns. The result? A captivating piece that is equal parts multifarious as it is mechanical. In this work, titled You Cannot Keep Love from her 2020 Sound Graph series, Morris utilises household gloss paint in an interplay between natural and manufactured assemblies. Her relation to global cities is crucial to her designs. Knowing this, one viewer may see skyscrapers; another may perceive an optical illusion of tessellating parts moving together. These different interpretations are exactly what Morris hopes for, with the name of the series inspired by German filmmaker, poet, and lawyer, Alexander Kluge. “[Alexander and I] were speaking about the role of the artist in relation to their audience, and that you cannot dictate or control what goes on,” Morris says. From this, voice work and sonics arose as the central focus. “It’s impossible to think about my work and the city without sound,” Morris says.
Sally Scales
“My inspiration is always my homeland,” says proud Pitjantjatjara woman, leader and artist Sally Scales. Hailing from the far west A angu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY) Lands in remote South Australia, Scales’s connection to The Dreaming—Tjukurpa in her native, near-extinct language—is the tether that binds her entire body of work. Typically working on large-scale linen canvases, 337-23AS is a rather restrained acrylic work that tells the story of her country, identity and ancestors. “When I paint on canvas I can throw the paint and create many layers. On paper, I have to be very deliberate. I’m limited down to only five,” Scales shares. “Colour always informs my approach, but in a different way. [Here], it’s more about the absence of it.” The watercolour strokes intersecting with black and red circles are an ode to the artistic styles of her two grandmothers, Kuntjiriya Mick and Kunmanara (Wawiriya) Burton. The elements of the creative outputs of both her elders are a throughline which tell a story of neverending stewardship to lands and waters.
Charlotte Alldis
Like an imaginary friend, the protagonist in Charlotte Alldis’s artwork, Transference, stands dominant in the frame, as mythical and bulbous as a child’s mind would allow. Backdropped by a jungle of technicolour contours, the central composition of the playful figure almost serves as a triptych with each limb dividing the piece into panels. Each background imparts its own youthful narrative as the character mesmerises the viewer with their outstretched movements and spiderleg eyelashes. It’s the kinetic zest that radiates most about the work. “Colour dominates the visual space in my works and brings a lot of energy,” Alldis says. “I could spend all day mixing paints.” This verve is perceptible in the uniqueness of her creature. According to Alldis, this piece was born during a time when she would “paint to get inside my body and out of my brain”. “It came to me quickly, as if it was ready to exist,” she recalls. “The largeness of the character is magnetic, it’s much bigger than me in real life. It feels like I painted this strong character to protect me—it feels playful and silly but also determined and fierce.”
This story first appeared in GRAZIA Singapore’s February 2025 print issue.
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