Art Director & Artist, NYC

Chris Ballantyne’s work focuses on vernacular architecture and observation of the American landscape.  Banal features of suburban and industrial zones are sources for paintings that highlight the quirky and absurd.  Ballantyne states that, “Growing up in a military family and moving to different parts of the country, there was a certain familiarity to the kinds of houses and neighborhoods. They were a series of suburban developments built in separate regions of the country, always on the outskirts of larger cities, at the exit ramps of interstate highways, and all very similar in age and design.  My own notions of space developed out of this cultural landscape which was striving for an indidvidual sense of personal space,  consciously economic, and somewhere between urban and rural.” Dysfunctional structures are flawless in their strangeness, made beautiful through symmetry, simplified lines and flat, subdued colors. Ballantyne eliminates detail to emphasize the subtleties of the way we experience space and our attempts at containment. He extends these concepts further by expanding the imagery of his paintings beyond the picture plane and onto the surrounding walls. “Most of my works involve combinations of various places, drawn from memory. As well, my own interests in skateboarding and surfing altered how I saw  the use of these structures ranging from empty pools, sidewalk curbs, to ocean jetties in a way that tied in to my sense of this larger push and pull between culture and nature.” With shrewd restraint, Ballantyne accentuates the antisocial effects of our built environment with a hint of humor and plenty of ambiguity. A curious emptiness permeates the work of Chris Ballantyne. Graphically rendered buildings, pools, parking lots, and fences take on new meanings and amplified significance, isolated on flat fields of color.

Inga Wilkens (b. 1987) is a painter living and working between Hamburg, Berlin and Munich, Germany. Originally from a small artist village named Fischerhude in Northern Germany, art was all around her when she grew up. Fascinated from an early age by Impressionism and the aesthetic values of Zen, her intuitive use of color and arresting play with shadow strives for simplicity and lucidity. Her oil and acrylic paintings hover towards abstraction and minimalism, yet breathe the clean air and convey the meditative silence stemming from a deeply felt connection with nature. Her works evoke the earthliness of colors or the proximity of a clear night sky, a sense of freedom one only finds in the essence of things. Inga does not so much pre-compose her paintings; she rather creates them intuitively, as spontaneous reactions to the present moment. Her practice values process and embraces the chaotic, yet always maintains a compositional centeredness that never makes her works feel out of balance.

Artist/illustrator working globally but based in Stockholm.

I am an artist and graphic designer. After working for over ten years for institutions in the culture and art sector such as the Barbican Centre and the Institute of Contemporary Arts and then the leading arts publisher Phaidon, I set up my design and art studio in 2015. I split my time between design commissions and producing my own artists books.