►Shintaro Ohata - Sculpture and Canvas to 3D Paintings

►When first viewing the artwork of Shintaro Ohata up close it appears the scenes are made from simple oil paints, but take a step back and you’re in for a surprise. Each piece is actually a hybrid of painted canvas and sculpture that blend almost flawlessly in color and texture to create a single image. The cinematic figures are sculpted from polystyrene while the backgrounds are made from traditional painting techniques. 

Via his artist statement:

Shintaro Ohata is an artist who depicts little things in everyday life like scenes of a movie and captures all sorts of light in his work with a unique touch: convenience stores at night, city roads on rainy day and fast-food shops at dawn etc. His paintings show us ordinary sceneries as dramas. He is also known for his characteristic style; placing sculptures in front of paintings, and shows them as one work, a combination of 2-D and 3-D world. He says that it all started from when he wondered "I could bring the atmosphere or dynamism of my paintings with a more different way if I place sculptures in front of paintings". Many viewers tend to assume that there is a light source set into his work itself because of the strong expression of lights in his sculpture.

►Ron Muech – Hyper realistic sculptor

►Ronald "Ron" Mueck (born 1958) is an Australian hyperrealist sculptor working in the United Kingdom.There is a point, when sculpturing, at witch taking great care of details leads to creating hyper realistic artwork that cannot be set apart from the real world objects it is supposed to represent. Ron Muech sculptures are just that, extraordinary realistic art that seems real even after looking at it for the tenth time. The design of his creative sculptures can be explained just using this word: superb!

Mueck's early career was as a model maker and puppeteer for children’s television and films, notably the film Labyrinth for which he also contributed the voice of Ludo.

Mueck moved on to establish his own company in London, making photo-realistic props and animatronics for the advertising industry. Although highly detailed, these props were usually designed to be photographed from one specific angle hiding the mess of construction seen from the other side. Mueck increasingly wanted to produce realistic sculptures which looked perfect from all angles.

In 1996 Mueck transitioned to fine art, collaborating with his mother-in-law, Paula Rego, to produce small figures as part of a tableau she was showing at the Hayward Gallery. Rego introduced him to Charles Saatchi who was immediately impressed and started to collect and commission work.
This led to the piece which made Mueck’s name, being included in the Sensation show at the Royal Academy the following year. Dead Dad is a rather haunting silicone and mixed media sculpture of the corpse of Mueck’s father reduced to about two thirds of its natural scale. It is the only work of Mueck’s that uses his own hair for the finished product.

Mueck's sculptures faithfully reproduce the minute detail of the human body, but play with scale to produce disconcertingly jarring visual images. His five meter high sculpture Boy 1999 was a feature in the Millennium Dome and later exhibited in the Venice Biennale.

In 2002 his sculpture Pregnant Woman was purchased by the National Gallery of Australia for $800,000.

Check out the photographs that speak louder than words about the detail levels and the creativeness of his artsy sculptures.

Mueck first gained international attention with Dead Man, a naked, half-scale impression of his father shown in “Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection” (1997) at the Royal Academy of Arts in London. With no formal art training, he perfected his skills in the commercial world of special effects, model-making, and animatronics. In 1996, he presciently created for his mother-in-law, well-known British painter Paula Rego, a figure of Pinocchio, the quintessential embodiment of truth and lies. Saatchi saw this sculpture, and smitten, began acquiring Mueck’s work.

►Philippe Faraut - Mastering portraiture

►Philippe Faraut is a figurative artist specializing in life-size portrait sculptures and monumental stone sculptures. His media of choice are water-based clay and marble. He received his degree in woodcarving and the construction of French fine furniture from Germain Sommeillier in Annecy, France, his boyhood home. An avid traveler, Philippe's destinations have allowed him the opportunity to study the cultures of many countries in Europe, Asia, Africa and the Caribbean, thus influencing his work in portraiture sculpting. After establishing residence in the Chesapeake Bay area of Virginia, he developed an interest in modeling the head in clay. Soon thereafter, he relocated his studio to New York State and began teaching sculpting classes. 

Philippe has created numerous original works ranging from six-inch porcelain figurines to monuments in both stone and bronze. He has exhibited his sculptures in various galleries and national competitions including several of the National Sculpture Society's Annual Exhibitions shown in New York City and Brookgreen Gardens, South Carolina, as well as the American Portrait Society's Annual Exhibit in New York City. In addition, he has studied forensic reconstruction with internationally recognized expert Betty Pat Gatliff.

For nearly twenty years Philippe has traveled throughout the United States and Canada, teaching sculptors and aspiring sculptors how to render portraits in clay at private studios and institutions such as the Longview Museum of Fine Art in Texas. Together with his wife Charisse, the couple has made Philippe's techniques available to students in the form of a three-part video series, in addition to step-by-step instructional sculpting books. 

As an award-winning stone sculptor specializing in representational art, Philippe feels that the renewed interest and willingness of artists to return to the study of the human form has the potential to bring back to our society an appreciation for traditional beauty.

Philippe and his wife Charisse are committed to creating unique specialty teaching materials for their company PCF Studios, Inc. All tools and casts are designed and made locally at their Honeoye studio. They also oversee the quality and printing of their books and DVD productions by printing in New York State.

http://philippefaraut.com/

►Kris Kuksi – Fascinating art of the macabre

►Born March 2, 1973, in Springfield Missouri and growing up in neighboring Kansas, Kris spent his youth in rural seclusion and isolation along with a blue-collar, working mother, two significantly older brothers, and an absent father. Open country, sparse trees, and alcoholic stepfather, all paving the way for an individual saturated in imagination and introversion. His propensity for the unusual has been a constant since childhood, a lifelong fascination that lent itself to his macabre art later in life. The grotesque to him, as it seemed, was beautiful.

Kris Kuksi garners recognition and acclaim for the intricate sculptures that result from his unique and meticulous technique. A process that requires countless hours to assemble, collect, manipulate, cut, and re-shape thousands of individual parts, finally uniting them into an orchestral-like seamless cohesion that defines the historical rise and fall of civilization and envisions the possible future(s) of humanity. Each sculpture embodies the trademarks of his philosophy and practice, while serving as a testament to the multifaceted nature of perception – From timeless iconic references of Gods and Goddess, to challenging ideas of organized religion and morality, to the struggle to understand, and bend, the limits of mortality. None is complete without a final and brilliant touch of satire and rebuke all conceived in the aesthetic essence of the Baroque fused with the modern day industrial world.

In personal reflection, Kris feels that in the world today much of mankind is oftentimes frivolous and fragile, being driven primarily by greed and materialism. He hopes that his art exposes the fallacies of Man, unveiling a new level of awareness to the viewer. His work has received several awards and prizes and has been featured in over 100 exhibitions in galleries and museums worldwide including the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery. Kris’ art can also be seen in a number of international art magazines, book covers and theatrical posters. Kris’ art is featured in both public and private collections in the United States, Europe, and Australia that include individuals such as Mark Parker (Nike CEO), Kay Alden (three time Emmy award winning writer for Young and the Restless & Bold and the Beautiful), Fred Durst (musician, and film director), Chris Weitz (movie director The Golden Compass & Twilight: New Moon) Guillermo del Toro (movie director Pan’s Labyrinth & Hell Boy 2) and Robin Williams (Academy Award and Golden Globe winning actor).

http://kuksi.com/

►Henrique Oliveira - Breathtaking installations

►Henrique Oliveira currently is based out of Sao Paulo, Brazil. Oliveira creates these wickedly huge "dimensional" wall sculptural/installation pieces out of hundreds of pieces of wood and PVC pipes.

http://henriqueoliveira.com/