Argentinian painter Diego Gravinese focuses his work around photo realistic imagery. His works are hand painted replications of photographs. His work is highly detailed, capturing both mundane and bizarre scenes in photo realistic style.

Lola Dupré is a collage artist and illustrator currently working near Avignon in the south of France. Until November 2011 Lola worked in Glasgow Scotland, at the Chateau studios and then from the Chalet studios.

Salvador Domènec Felip Jacint Dalí i Domènech, Marquis de Púbol (May 11, 1904 – January 23, 1989), commonly known as Salvador Dalí, was a prominent Spanish Catalan surrealist painter born in Figueres. Dalí was a skilled draftsman, best known for the striking and bizarre images in his surrealist work. His painterly skills are often attributed to the influence of Renaissance masters. His best-known work, The Persistence of Memory, was completed in 1931. Dalí’s expansive artistic repertoire includes film, sculpture, and photography, in collaboration with a range of artists in a variety of media.

Dalí attributed his “love of everything that is gilded and excessive, my passion for luxury and my love of oriental clothes” to a self-styled “Arab lineage,” claiming that his ancestors were descended from the Moors.

Dalí was highly imaginative, and also had an affinity for partaking in unusual and grandiose behavior. His eccentric manner and attention-grabbing public actions sometimes drew more attention than his artwork to the dismay of those who held his work in high esteem and to the irritation of his critics.

Karel Funk’s hyper-realist portraits are as enigmatic as the urbanites they depict. Anyone who has ever ridden the New York subway at rush hour knows the feeling of being pressed so close to your fellow commuters that you can see their every pore, shaving nick and flaking follicle. To artist Karel Funk, newly arrived in Manhattan from his native Winnipeg, Manitoba, in 2001, that proximity to strangers on a train proved overwhelming at first—then career changing. He’d been toying with suburban angst in his paintings but felt that route was already well traveled by others. In urban voyeurism, however, he knew he had found his ideal subject.

Funk photographs his models in poses against white backgrounds, and later refers to the digital images on his computer screen while he paints, inventing as he goes until, in the home stretch, he ignores the photographs entirely. “At a certain point you have to make it into a painting,” Funk says, “so that it’s speaking by itself.” The works on the pages that follow do just that.

Drawings by, Jonathan Zawada

Leif is an artist and Creative Director. His work explores themes of connectedness, the relevance of nature and the psychedelic or altered experience. By utilizing these subjects he attempts to coerce the viewer into a realignment with themselves and their surroundings.

Art in the Streets will showcase installations by 50 of the most dynamic artists from the graffiti and street art community, including Fab 5 Freddy (New York), Lee Quiñones (New York), Futura (New York), Margaret Kilgallen (San Francisco), Swoon (New York), Shepard Fairey (Los Angeles), Os Gemeos (São Paulo), and JR (Paris). MOCA’s exhibition will emphasize Los Angeles’s role in the evolution of graffiti and street art, with special sections dedicated to cholo graffiti and Dogtown skateboard culture. The exhibition will feature projects by influential local artists such as Craig R. Stecyk III, Chaz Bojórquez, Mister Cartoon, RETNA, SABER, REVOK, and RISK. The exhibition, which makes MoCA the first U.S. museum to survey graffiti and street art, focuses on artists from New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, London and Sao Paulo and traces the development of street art from the 1970s to the current day. Over 50 installations are on show, by influential artists like Os Gemeos, ROA, Neck Face and Banksy.

The show will open through 8 August 2011.

MOCA
250 South Grand Avenue
Los Angeles
CA 90012

Grace Jones was born in Spanish Town, Jamaica, the daughter of Marjorie and Robert W. Jones, who was a politician and Apostolic clergyman. Her parents took Grace and her brothers Chris and Bishop Noel Jones and relocated to Syracuse, New York in 1965. Before becoming a successful model in New York City and Paris, Jones studied theatre at Onondaga Community College. In the 1973 film Gordon’s War, Jones played the role of Mary, a Harlem drug courier.

Jones secured a record deal with Island Records in 1977, which resulted in a string of dance-club hits and a large following. The three disco-oriented albums she recorded – Portfolio (1977), Fame (1978), and Muse (1979) – generated considerable success in that market. These albums consisted of pop melodies set to a disco beat, such as “On Your Knees” or “Do or Die” and standards such as “What I Did for Love” from musical A Chorus Line, Jacques Prévert’s “Autumn Leaves”, “Send in the Clowns” from Stephen Sondheim’s A Little Night Music and Édith Piaf’s signature tune “La Vie en rose”.

During this period, she also became a muse to Andy Warhol, who photographed her extensively. Jones also accompanied him to New York City nightclub Studio 54 on many occasions. The colorful artwork and design for Jones’ three first albums and accompanying single releases were created by another of Warhol’s longtime collaborators, Richard Bernstein, arguably best known for his many cover illustrations for Interview Magazine in the 1970s and early 1980s. In 1978, she appeared with French model and singer Amanda Lear in the controversial six-episode Italian TV series Stryx.

Jones’ is a capable actress and her acting occasionally overshadowed her musical output in America; but not in Europe, where her profile as a recording artist was much higher. She appeared in some low-budget films in the 1970s and early 1980s. Her work as an actress in mainstream film began in the 1984 fantasy-action film Conan the Destroyer alongside Arnold Schwarzenegger, and the 1985 James Bond movie A View to a Kill. In 1986 she played a vampire in Vamp, and both acted in and contributed a song to the 1992 film Boomerang with Eddie Murphy. In 2001, she appeared in Wolf Girl alongside Tim Curry.

Kilian Eng is an illustrator, graphic designer, and animator based in Stockholm/ Sweden.