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The Writhing Anatomy of Melancholy: Artwork by Christina Mrozik

Christina Mrozik’s intricate drawings and paintings imaginatively fuse animal and plant life in order to explore inner worlds. Organic decay, exposed anatomy, unnatural amalgamations of natural entities are common features, with her signature delicate ribbony skeletons resembling grass. Sometimes the animals are wrapped around, shrouded, or embraced by a cage of the grass-like ribbons/bones. Birds emerge gruesomely from the exposed and lacerated throats of larger birds. The precisely drawn depictions of strangely hybridized, combined, distorted, multiplied, fractional creatures are wildly expressive, summoning specters of pain, beauty, and transformation. Snakes, rabbits, doves, seabirds with their merciless gaze…all are pitifully dissected and tenderly displayed, complexly mingled and interwoven, to illustrate phases of the human condition.

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David Altmejd’s Hare

I love David Altmejd’s eerie epoxy Hare (2022) sculpture. It has the quality of a sketch made three-dimensional, with its rather sickish green palette of acrylic paint and colored pencil. This bizarre creature, with its unsettlingly lifelike blue eye, is both evocative of the childhood appeal of rabbits, of incarnations of anthropomorphic rabbits, and yet repellently uncanny. As Altmejd states, “A perfect object for me is something that is extremely seductive and extremely repulsive at the same time.”

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Otherworldly Gems by Omnia Studios

Omnia Studios fashions gorgeous, lavish, surreal and fantastic jewelry. Themes of the occult and mythology predominate, taking inspiration from a range of supernatural symbols and iconography, including cartomancy, Puritan winged skulls, the Moirae (Greek goddesses of fate), and Spiritualist planchettes. One of my favorite pieces is the absolutely incredible Charon’s Lantern Amulet, which represents the lamp of the river Styx’s ferryman, containing quartz crystals for illumination and held by two little ghostly hands. Bold, ornate, and baroque, these splendid jewels are perfect for darkly luxurious occasions or as everyday, beautifully odd statement pieces.

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Immortal Veil: The Art of Maëva Stancil

Maëva Stancil’s lovely dotwork drawings convey a sense of occult grandeur. A cold glitter of stars, skulls, sigils, moths, and sprays of flowers create a visual language for a mystical world made ominous by statuesque hooded figures and mysterious disembodied hands. The medieval combines with fantasy elements in a style that is spare, yet rich with the suggestion of arcane knowledge. Grim and somber as the strange figures are, their foreboding is offset by the fragments of nature surrounding them.

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Ghoulishly Beautiful Portraits by Roberto Diaz

The gory and rather sensationalist mixed-media creations of Roberto Diaz are wonderfully disturbing. Diaz combines traditional drawing with digital painting to execute darkly surreal portraits of dignified figures from past epochs, deformed by monstrous changes, additions, and appalling transformations. He uses a somber palette with warm, burnished tones which is evocative of the Old Masters, offset by the more lurid reds of the blood and grisly flesh. There is a constant tension and balance between the repulsive and the pleasing in all Diaz’s works.

A multiplicity of eyes, breaches in flesh, gaping maws, woeful signs of decay and ruin warp these subjects painted with a beautifully classical quality, who are often surrounded by a sort of halo or bubble of air. They are blessed – or kept alive – by graceful swirls of thin red tubes like veins or IV lines. The skeletal noses, stitches, and exposed subcutaneous flesh are reminiscent of rotting cadavers, while other distortions look as if their bodies had been cloven and fused back imperfectly. The tearfulness of some of these beings leads one to feel that they suffer terribly, with the ceremonial, grave sadness of those looking out at us from history. They possess the mournfulness and piety of old paintings, while at the same time they are corrupted by this macabre modern aesthetic which seeks to amalgamate and subvert all.

There is an alluring, palpable luster and glisten to the gore and viscera in Diaz’s paintings, the substance of the imperfect bodies. Unsubtle in horror, intensely impactful, the verisimilitude and level of technical achievement, the masterly chiaroscuro, draw in and seduce the eye. The juxtaposition between aesthetic pleasingness and sinister conception exploits our instinctual revulsion against perceived flaws and deformities in the human visage. This accomplishes a profanation of the allegedly divine, marries the lovely with the hideous, and evokes in us a delicious combination of disturbance and aesthetic gratification.

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Childhood

We enjoy the immense freedom of dreams, in which nobody believes, except as a joke, to share on coming down to breakfast.
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Children are not expected to think, but are allowed to suffer, and rehearse the future… In at the windows floats the scent of hot, wet nettles and the long summer. The yellow dressing-table drawers are smelling of emptiness. We have not arranged our things, who will not be staying long in this house.


O childhood of moonlight [and] solid statues! How solid, I broke off an arm to prove, and the smell of the wound was the smell of gunpowder and frost. Often the footsteps were not mine that fell along the gravel paths…other voices would carry my song out of my control… All were turning gravely in the dance, only I was the prisoner of stone.
When I no longer expected, then I was rewarded by knowing: so it is. We do not meet but in distances, and dreams are the distance brought close. The glossy mornings are trampling horses. The rescue-rope turns to hair. Prayer is, indeed, stronger, but what is strong?
O childhood, O illusions, time does not break your chain of coloured handkerchiefs, nor fail to produce the ruffled dove….

–Patrick White, Voss

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Igor Skaletsky

Igor Skaletsky is an artist based in Tel Aviv, Moscow, and Berlin, who creates playful visual pastiches using a combination of traditional and digital painting and collage. His works ironically blend historical imagery and iconography with the aesthetics of modern high fashion. The resulting oeuvre can contain the somberness of an Andrew Wyeth landscape, the pious richness of the Old Masters, absurdly alongside satirical symbols of contemporary life and culture.

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The Glass Coffin: Liza Corbett Revisited

Below are some recent works from one of my longtime favorites, Liza Corbett. Her fanciful watercolors enchant me with their elegant, melancholy surrealism, sweeping, willowy lines, and languid Victorian ladies. I especially like the motif of eyes peering out of women’s skirts, as if their vestiture were a kind of morbid extension of their bodies/selves. Her delicately lovely images put me in mind of spiritualist seances, mythological stories where women are transformed into animals, and the membranous veil, as diaphanous as her art, between the living and deathly realms. I love the artist’s statement on her site, which elaborates:

{Liza Corbett’s work contemplates The Summer-Land, the spirit world that lays unseen alongside our own. She creates visual narratives populated with otherworldly women and animals, under heavy suns in hazy, wan skies. Her subject matter is tinged with the menace of pre-modern life and suffused with an air of melancholy. Influenced by nineteenth-century spiritualism, by Dark Romanticism, and by myths, fables and old tales, Liza aims to create images that, like tarot or other methods of divination, suggest a strange and impenetrable significance underlying our worldly existence.}

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The Hellish Dreamscapes of Aleksandra Waliszewska

Warsaw-based artist Aleksandra Waliszewska paints the inner landscape of nightmares. With her rather primitive, naive style, her oil and gouache paintings also have an ostensible childlike sweetness which is belied by the horrific themes depicted. She is fascinated by themes of torture, sadomasochism, and the macabre, drawing from a variety of influences including Renaissance art, fairy tales, folklore, and horror movies. Her paintings are often inhabited by young women with an androgynous, waifish physique and uncanny children, alongside monstrous cats, spider-women, and other hybrids of beast and man. These strange beings perpetrate and have perpetrated upon them gruesome acts of violence and violation – the line is often blurred between prey and perpetrator. The subjects, whether victim or villain, tend to possess a malignant or sinisterly mischievous air.

As S. Elizabeth writes on Unquiet Things, “Whether against the backdrop of a well-lit classroom, a shadowy forest landscape, or the viscera-strewn confines of a dusty cave, madness, magic, and mythology cavort hand in bloody hand.” These morbid and perversely jovial scenes take place in eerie wastelands, lonely forests, empty and surreal wildernesses. I find her work to be reminiscent of the classic surrealist painter Leonora Carrington. Waliszewska is more inspired by historical art and the Quattrocento than contemporary movements, although she also takes imagery from modern sources such as video games. The Dark Arts: Aleksandra Waliszewska and Symbolism explains: “Drawing from the specifically Slavic histories of the Upiór (the living dead), Waliszewska claims her artistic and conceptual descendance from premodern art and Symbolist works of the late 19th and early 20th century from Nordic, Baltic, and Eastern European regions.”

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