Jana Vodesil-Baruffi was born in the Czech Republic in 1957 and from childhood developed a keen interest in art, sport and nature. After finishing five years training as an Interior Designer, she escaped communist Czech Republic in 1981 and arrived in Perth penniless but ready to work and create my own destiny.
Tom Christophersen is a Sydney based, non-binary, Queer performer and visual artist who is as petrified of beautiful things and death as much as he is transfixed by them. It is primarily the car crashing of these two themes which permeate the surrealistic, often dark portraits and films he makes. Tom works almost exclusively on watercolour paper and creates mixed media works which comprise elements of drawing and painting to produce highly rendered, tonally realistic but slightly illustrative figurative works.
Brian Hoang was born in Vietnam a few years after the war ended. Two years later, together with his parents they left the country and spent about 6 months in a refugee camp before relocating to Canada. When he was a young kid, his dad would often pose as action figures and draw them for him. Seeing how Brian was able to take a real-life object and turn it into a drawing was inspiring. Once he discovered comic books in grade 6, art became something Brian wanted to do for a living when he grew up.
Natasha Zraikat is a Gold Coast (Yugambeh Country) based artist uses a carefully constructed aesthetic vocabulary of fantastical elements and deliberately executed realism to visually rekindle man’s connection with the natural world. Born in California to Jordanian and Russian-Ukrainian parents, Natasha immigrated to Australia in 1990 where she has lived ever since.
Ramona Russu is a Romanian painter, graduated from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels and settled in Corsica in 2014 to pursue my creative journey. Her artistic work explores the complexity of women's emotions and experiences and highlights the idea of imperfect beauty through monochrome pieces enhanced with 24-carat gold leaf.
Rachel Romano is a New Surrealism Figurative Painter. Her connection to art began at age 7 with sojourns with her father, a poet, to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which planted the seeds of storytelling. Rachel finds inspiration in personal myth and the stories of others. The laughter, love, and sorrow of our lives fills her creative well.
A Balkan mountain child and a young arts protege who grew up to become a world renown contemporary artist with a PhD in art history. Iva Troj grew up in the outskirts of Bulgaria’s Romani slums in the last decade of communism – a world full of sexual predators, communist propaganda, censorship and no path to artistic livelihood other than what she could imagine in her wildest dreams. Today, she is a Gerety Award winner and 3 times Cannes Lions nominee for her Halo Masterpiece [biggest ever launch in the Halo franchise’s history, with more than 20M players, 520M reach], Towry Best of England Award winner, and 2 times Contemporary Art Excellence Artist of the Year award winner.
Theo Polymorphos is a North American painter of imaginative realism, whose art explores the mysterious journey of the soul, exploring themes of ecstasy, initiation and metamorphosis. Taking a deeply personal approach, he builds on these themes with symbols and motifs from his own dreams, spiritual practices and natural environment. After a decade wandering the globe as a consultant, he rekindled his childhood love of drawing and painting and quickly became obsessed. The confidence gained from learning traditional drawing and painting methods unlocked the door to his imagination, catalysing a total reorientation in life. He recently completed a three year course in imaginative realism under Tenaya Sims at the Georgetown Atelier in Seattle, Washington. He currently resides in Central Florida where he continues to develop his portfolio.
Maysa Bogheiri is a self-taught watercolour painter with a passion for surrealism. Her artwork is primarily centred around female subjects, offering a unique journey of self-expression and introspection. Drawing inspiration from personal memories, feelings and the subconscious, Maysa’s creations exude both darkness and beauty. As an Iranian American artist, her paintings offer glimpses into the crossroad of her cultural background. Through her art, Maysa invites you to explore her inner world and discover your own meaning within her creations.
Courtney Alnutt's work reveals personal insight into her life and reflects self-exploration. Her work also documents her own personal academic journey. The techniques used in her work are those traditionally employed for representational art and produced with oil paints on fine linen panels.
Nico Pearleyes is a French artist, illustrator and graphic designer based in the Paris area. Nico's work reflects this deep and mystical questioning on the nature of reality and on the relationship between what is unknown (but still exists in our consciousness), what is known, and our power to “reshape” reality by looking at it with new eyes.
Hirabayashi Takahiro paints surreal worlds inhabited by young women and girls. He expresses the ambiguous boundary between reality and unreality through the female figure, who is neither a child nor an adult, but something in-between.