New Figurative Works for April

In her first print for ART FOR CHANGE, Laura Berger’s Meeting uses transparent washes of color to peel back layers of her personal universe. The floating figures melt into and emerge from each other, connected through touch and abstracting disconnection between the self and others. A waking spirit rises from the bodies at rest, opening to a land of dreams. An intuitive process, Berger builds thin layers of colors, keeping compositional details malleable as she works through the ideas in her preparatory sketches.

In Being and Being Held, Emma Kohlmann’s third collaboration with ART FOR CHANGE, Being takes on name and action, serving as a reminder for what both the self and others can provide. In her characteristically lush, naturalistic style exploring the forms and environment around her, contrasting colors become ablaze in a gaze and naked embrace, awash in a soft blue. These characters morph from the artist’s subconscious, defying proportions in her distinct visual language.

Unlike Berger and Kohlmann’s works, a singular figure in Becky Kolsrud’s Allegorical Bather dominates the narrative–an amuse-bouche of abstracted odalisques. Her brunette hair curls around the rolling waves contoured in soft blue gradients, a gracious painterly quality that carries the eye high and low through the emergent details of the artist’s soft strokes. Inspired by modern masters such as Corot and Picasso, the evocative portrait reexamines the centuries old visual trope through an allegorical corps to say the least. Who is the muse without a form? A gaze through the path of the waves, or a memory that is washed away–Kolsrud’s Allegorical Bather invites dialogue on the necessary boundaries constituting a nude.