Dio Horia returns to Untitled Art Fair, Miami, 2019 with the presentation of three new bodies of work by Hulda Guzmán, Despina Stokou and Aleksandar Todorovic.
Hulda Guzmán is a figurative painter whose work focuses on narrative and space. An artist living in the tropical jungle with a very liberal approach to life, she creates works that are connected to nature, often using wood as her painting surface and the lush vegetation of her home country as her subject matter. Whether the scene she depicts takes place in a natural space or indoors, Guzmán structures her compositions with an architectural sensibility, creating very defined spaces wherein her narratives intimately take place. Her works are vivid and theatrical, enticing an experiential interpretation from the viewer and encouraging a personal, visceral connection beyond words.
Greek artist Despina Stokou presents a series of new works based on her own interpretation of people’s bucket lists. Throughout her career Stokou has developed an artistic practice that is based on the unconventional fusion of different public texts that together explore popular culture and take a stand on various political debates and on how these debates are mediated by contemporary public forum. Stokou creates time intensive paintings and drawings that are not pieces merely to be looked at, but sublime objects meant to be experienced both as universal tools to update the current vocabulary used on contemporary debates and as a time capsule capturing the media pulse of a specific moment in time.
Taking influence from Byzantine art, Aleksandar Todorovic renders contemporary tech figures as religious icons and social media symbols as sacred, in egg tempera and acrylic artworks. Elsewhere, he paints ‘contemporary Byzantine icons’ that look at consumerism and contemporary global politics. His pieces are open critiques of contemporary society and politics and feature some of the world's most recognized characters. Depicted in a classical format using traditional materials (gold, pigment and wood), they are rich with narrative, symbolism, and well-informed cynicism. Humor is used in Todorovic's works in a dark and slightly twisted way, in order to help his audience to swallow bitter truths more easily.