Dallas Art Fair

Bertrand Fournier’s paintings are inspired by daily life, while extracting the essence of things and simplifying them as much as possible. The artist’s current subject matter is flowers; flowers from the imagination. “I try to invent flowers that don’t exist”, Bertrand Fournier says. The artist starts his process on a tablet, composing his shapes. In his fantastical, playful, compositions, bright, vibrant colors, and patterns. Though inexistent in the imaginary, they nonetheless tilt the universe. “For the least touch of color we put in a painting, reminds us of a flower”, the artist says. A slim single layer of paint enhances the two dimensionality of the image and purity of color; the pink, yellow and black. Yet the effect is immersive.

Fournier’s paintings are a balance between abstraction and figuration, symbolism and minimalism. The artist works principally on color and its combinations. His use of color is strong and outspoken, often with a vintage touch. Fournier’s lines are clear and decisive, his use of oil paint gives his paintings the right, visual aspect and texture on the canvas.

Bertrand Fournier (1985) is a self-taught painter, who began painting in 2016. He Lives and works in Janvill Sur Juine, France. After publishing his paintings on Instagram his work quickly gained attention from galleries both nationally and internationally. Bertrand has exhibited in solo exhibitions in The Hague, Madrid, Barcelona, Copenhagen, Sydney, Antwerp, Mannheim, Amsterdam, and London as well as group exhibitions in NY, Miami and L.A.

Anna Kunz was born in Chicago, Illinois, where she continues to live and work. After receiving her BFA from the Art Institute of Chicago, Kunz went on to complete her MFA at Northwestern University, eventually attending the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Skowhegan, Maine. Her works on paper, paintings, installations, and other composi- tions have been exhibited in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas, New York, Madrid, and Poland. Kunz’s work has also been included in numerous public and private collections. Galleri Urbane has represented Anna Kunz since 2013. She is currently represented by Berggruen Gallery S.F, McCormick Gallery Chicago, Il and Alexander Berggruen N.Y.

Kunz is the recipient of multiple awards and accolades, including nominations from 3Arts, Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, Richard H. Driehaus Foundation, Emerging Artist award from the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Artadia Chicago, Rema Hort-Mann Foundation’s Individual Artists Grant, and The Joan Mitchell Foundation in 2020. She has been awarded numerous artist residencies, including the Golden Family Foundation Residency, Edward Albee Foundation Residency, the Space Program at Marie Sharpe Walsh Foundation, the Roger Brown Artist Residency, and, most recently, the Monira Foundation Residency.

She is in the public collections of The Philadelphia Museum, Philadelphia, PA, The Block Museum, Chicago, IL, Fidelity Investments, Chicago, IL, Toyota collection Dallas, TX, and the Clements Collection of UTSW, Dallas, TX, among others.

Shinya Azuma makes a sketch of images inspired by the news programs or from sceneries in his daily life experiences, he then remakes it on canvas with bold brush strokes. Azuma’s use of peculiar scenarios, color and dynamic texture of the medium have quirkiness somehow, and vigour which stops us to see the picture. The themes of the works range from some well-timed serious issues such as the wealth inequality orprotests all over the world to personal sexual experiences, but they all capture different aspects of humanity. Like memes on the social media, the distinctive type of humor which can be both of the satire and the self- deprecating sarcasm is one of the attractions on his works.

Shinya Azuma was born in Osaka in 1994, and currently based in Kyoto, Japan. Azuma received M.F.A in Contemporary Art from Kyoto University of Art and Design.

Azuma’s works have been exhibited in galleries across Japan, including special section for young artists at Sydney Contemporary (2019).

Gabrielle Graessle was born in Zurich, Switzerland in 1956 and has been fascinated by painting and drawing since she was a child. She attended the Zurich Art School for 5 years, where she completed a degree in graphic design. The first exhibitions took place while she was still a student. During this time she made mainly black and white charcoal drawings in which she spontaneously depicted her personal imagery. For 15 years she was represented in various galleries in Switzerland, and many of her charcoal drawings are in private and public collections.

“I paint all what surrounds me, what I see. My work is intuitive and inspired by all what takes my interest. All becomes form, enters into my drawings and paintings: animals, nature, fashion, films, books, news, also feelings, music, images from childhood up to now, without restrictions. I start my work intuitively with or without an idea. It takes then on a life of its own, goes somewhere else entirely.

Often, I develop the ideas from my drawings and transform them into my paintings. My paintings are colorful, figurative, kitsch and large, sometimes with text, mostly 180 x 260 cm, done with acrylic, spray and sometimes glitter. I love large paintings, I like to be surrounded by my imagery, to immerse completely in my world of images.

I work normally on 4-6 paintings at the same time and switch between drawings and paintings, which frees me again and again and also leads to new topics......... I draw and paint without thinking, pin the drawings on the wall and don’t look longer at them.

The drawings are not looking for a result. I live and work in a group of old cottages in the south of Spain where I have several studios to paint and to draw. I hate routine and I always listen to music when I work. I turn the music on and then I let it happen.”

Stephen D’Onofrio is a contemporary visual artist focused on painting. He received his BFA and MFA from The School of The Art Institute of Chicago in 2013 and 2016, respectively. In 2018, D’Onofrio was a finalist for the prestigious Hopper Prize. He has exhibited extensively in venues across the country, including galleries in Dallas, Boston, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Philadelphia. His work can be found in numerous private and public collections including Fidelity Investments, Estée Lauder, and the Clements Collection at UT Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas. D’Onofrio has lived and worked in Philadelphia since being awarded an artist residency in the city at Jasper Studios in 2017. His work is represented in the United States by Galleri Urbane, Dallas. 

The artist’s thematic image-making is broadly characterized by an interest in the home decor market, the mass commodification of art, and the generic visual language that accompanies commercial design. His paintings explore the relationship between physical spaces and the objects we fill them with. Often alluding to typical domestic decor and household ornaments, his canvases make these inherently empty objects into simplified symbols and patterns that can then be rearranged and compressed to carry a formal sensibility. The “Produce(d) Paintings” series serves as an historic exemplar of still-life painting that is as old as the medium itself.

Currently, D’Onofrio addresses the idea of painting as ornament, incorporating stock subjects of landscape, still life, and portraiture becoming knickknacks into his lexicon. The painter distills, consolidates, and appropriates the overwhelming amount of generic design aesthetic in the commercial decor market. Rather than fight the inherent kitschiness of this visual language, he embraces the imagery so his canvases can, in turn, become a critique of the subject it represents.

David Surman uses figurative forms, to execute in a manner that appears easy and immediate. He does this because the artist feels art should be understood as something natural, like breathing, that comes spontaneously from all people. In each work the goal is to create a structure for thought and feeling that is both universal and specific. Though originally trained as a filmmaker, the artist now works primarily in painting. In recent years Surman has become increasingly interested in the projection of human experience onto the natural world. Employing elements of pathetic fallacy and cartoon form in a calculated way to imbue figures with both sincerity and irony, liveliness and psychology. Seeking to call into question the hierarchies of taste and value that structure both art and our view of the natural world.

David Surman (b. 1981) is a British artist based in London. He has established an international reputation in contemporary art for his paintings exploring the conventions and boundaries of figuration. Through animal imagery he has developed a contemporary language embracing gestural expression, a knowledge of art history and pop cultural motifs such as cuteness. He is a graduate of the animation programme at the Newport Film School (2002) and the postgraduate film studies programme at Warwick University (2004). Recent solo exhibitions include ‘Sleepless Moon’ at Gallery THEO (2024) Seoul, ‘Portraits of a Wild Family’ Sens Gallery (2022) Hong Kong, ‘Fairy Painting’ Sim Smith (2021) London, and ‘Sirens’ (2019) also at Sim Smith. His work is held in several major public and private collections, including the UK Arts Council Collection, The McEvoy Foundation for the Arts, the Neumann Family collection, the Hornik Collection, Colección ALKAR Arriola Zugaza and Colección Espinosa de los Monteros Sáinz de Vicuña.

In his paintings, Benjamin Terry gravitates toward crude, but slyly well-constructed object-making and a playful exploration of the relationships between implied and real space. Shallow atmospheric spaces are punctuated by hard-edged bits of plywood shapes that seemingly float past others, only to be pulled down by the weight of gravity. Outside of the studio, he has become transfixed with the observation that some people’s happiness may bring others misery.

The gradient is one of a handful of avant-garde painting tropes that recently emerged and then quickly succumbed to the clutches of kitsch. Terry observed artists as they adopted the airbrush and spray-painted gradient, oftentimes wondering if he needed to acquire an airbrush himself. It rivaled the thick, gestural, oil-painted brush stroke as an undeniably seductive painting maneuver. However, it wasn’t until an arbitrary event in the studio led him to use a sprayer, releasing the soft-edged color transitions into his own practice. There was something in the organic occurrence ofthe gradient that captured Terry’s attention. His work employs the risky and exciting problem solving that painting with gradients requires. Terry has infused life back into what he thought had lost its joy and freshness.

Benjamin Terry lives and works in Dallas, TX. He received an MFA in Drawing and Painting in 2013 from the University of North Texas. He has exhibited work in numerous solo and group exhibitions across the country including Atlanta, Baltimore, Brooklyn, San Francisco, Dallas, and Houston. Terry was an artist-in-resident at The Maple Terrace in Brooklyn in the spring of 2018 and 100 West Corsicana in 2020. Curatorial work has become an integral part of his practice with exhibitions curated at Kirk Hopper Fine Arts (Dallas), Circuit12 Contemporary (Dallas), and Texas Woman’s University (Denton) in 2017. He was featured in volume 96 and 132 of New American Paintings, and has received both the Clare Hart Degoyler and the Arch and Anne Giles Kimbrough awards from the Dallas Museum of Art. He is currently a Senior Lecturer at the University of Texas Arlington.

Jessica Drenk known and sought after for her compelling transformations that make use of common materials like Books, No2 pencils and PVC Pipes. Drenks newest work continues to push the boundaries of her creative practice by introducing, junk mail, and more recently archival book binding tape. In Drenks 2020 exhibition ‘Transmutations’she introduced the ‘Aggregate’ series which transformed the viewer to rocks and ridges forged in the crucible of the earth long with ‘Dendrite’ (Q tips dipped in plaster), The installation was recently curated as part of NADA x Foreland 2023 in NY.

“My work is an inquiry into materiality: what makes up the objects that surround us as well as the composition of the natural world. I am interested in how parts combine to create a whole and the intricacies of shape and texture found in the world at every scale. In treating everyday objects as raw material to sculpt, I practice a form of conceptual alchemy: through physically manipulating these objects the meanings to material-a subversion of the meanings associated with it, and a reference to the life cycle of objects through time.”

Jessica Drenk originally from Montana has an MFA in 3D art from the University of Arizona and a Bachelor’s Degree in Art from Pomona College. Drenks work can be found in private collections throughout the world and galleries across the United States. Her work is a part of several corporate collections, such as that of Fidelity Investments, Frost Bank corporate office collection, UTSW Clements collections , TCU’s School of Education and The Macallan distillery in Scotland, as well as the Yale University Art Gallery and Huntington Museum of Art.

Drenk has been the recipient of several awards, including International Sculpture Center’s Outstanding Student Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Award, and her work has been pictured in Sculpture, Curve and Interior Design magazines, as well as The Workshop Guide to Ceramics. A working artist since 2007, Drenk lives and works near Rochester, NY.

Drea Cofield’s work flows freely between the imagined and the observed. Painting outside alla prima has fine-tuned and heightened her relationship to color, movement, and life. It has also fleshed out her understanding of desire and its position within the narrative scope of her paintings. Desire exists in the mind as movement, the journey, the moment before touching - the space beyond. Always tantamount is the importance of looking; how color operates in relationship to the physics of sight and light, and how it is used as a means of seduction in the natural world. The landscape behaves as subject, frame, and referent. In this regard also is the aperture, the thing that seeks and captures the gaze: a sun setting, a nipple, the stamen of a hibiscus. Imagination weaves in and around these subjects through juxtaposition and invention. They are forms and moments chosen from Cofield’s life. She has experienced them with her eyes and her body. They are organized by her relationships, humor, and desires. Within this narrative of making, you see form tenderly rendered then dissolving into painted marks on surface. Puns play out in their turn.

Drea Cofield is an artist currently working in Brooklyn, NY. She has exhibited in the U.S. and internationally including New York, Los Angeles, and Italy with recent solo exhibitions at DePauw University in Greencastle, IN, and Exeter Gallery in Baltimore, MD. Upcoming shows include Future Fair N.Y, and the Dallas Art Fair, Heaven Gallery in Chicago, IL and Library Street Collective in Detroit, MI. Her work has been featured in the Brooklyn Rail, Artnet News, Juxtapoz, and Contemporary Painting (World of Art). She is the recipient of an Elizabeth Greenshields Grant and the Yale Gloucester Painting Prize. Residencies include the Guild of Adventure Painters Mobile Residency in 2019 and a Yaddo Residency in Saratoga Springs, NY, in 2023. She is the Founder and Director of Bomb Pop-Up, a pop-up art and music initiative that focuses on providing visibility in exciting contexts to emerging and established artists and musicians. Cofield received her B.A. from DePauw University (Greencastle, IN) in 2008 and her M.F.A from Yale School of Art (New Haven, CT), in 2013.

Meghan Borah’s expressionless, female-presenting figures occupy dreamlike scenarios that may not be tranquil as they first appear. Their faces appear aloof and almost impatient, suggesting the presence of some type of negotiation between the public, outward facade and private inner longings. In this way Borah’s paintings are an ongoing examination of how we see and present ourselves, and how we may sometimes ache to become something else.

The series Girls and Horses broaches a specific trope—that of the female rider on horseback— and yet does so with Borah’s customary lightness, delicateness, and ambiguity. Primarily, Borah offers simple, frontal depictions of a girl on an equine mount, an image drawn from a long practice of sketching. The composition’s spatial qualities, however, resist categorization: in canvases such as Girl and Horse with Pink Flowers (2023) or Girl and Horse with Fireflies (2023), the woman’s feet brush and seem to rest upon the edge of the canvas, and the horse’s body becomes a kind of dress, a continuation of the rider.

Meghan Borah is a painter and educator based in Chicago. Borah received an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago from the Painting and Drawing department in 2017. She is currently represented by Galleri Urbane (Dallas) and Goldfinch Gallery (Chicago). Her work has been featured in Patron Magazine, Chicago Magazine, Time Out Chicago, New American Paintings and ArtSlant. She has been the recipient of numerous artist residencies programs including the Vermont Student Center in 2018. Borah’s work was  selected to showcase her work on Platform, produced by David Zwirner.