Michele Mikesell On Sale

American artist Michele Mikesell incorporates elements of Pop art, Surrealism and Expressionism into her eclectic works and creates a unique visual experience for the viewer. Her figurative paintings and portrait paintings depict figures that seem to be peering out at and contemplating anyone within a stone’s throw of the works. In Mikesell’s subjects’ faces, the influence of the 17th-century Dutch masters is also detectable, while her abstract paintings are marked by the influence of postwar Abstract Expressionist painters.

Mikesell was born in Alabama in 1973. She earned her BFA at Texas Woman's University, Denton, in 2002, where she minored in graphic design. In 2004, Mikesell earned her MFA at the University of Oklahoma before moving to Dallas to begin her artistic career. It didn't take long for her to begin turning heads. Dallas-based DECORAZON Gallery, located in the city's historic Bishop Arts District, started representing her in 2006.

When Mikesell begins to work on a piece in her studio, she is unhurried, allowing each project to unfold before her by reacting to the marks in the paint. Many of her paintings are of human figures with whom viewers may feel a sense of familiarity, while other works feature anthropomorphic animals or petroglyphs meant to function as metaphors for the dichotomy of animal instincts and human ideas. Mikesell also draws inspiration from mythology: The Morrigan (2017), for example, is based on a powerful figure from Irish folklore.

Mikesell has exhibited at many art fairs around the world, including SCOPE Art Show, London Art Fair, Aqua Art Miami and the Asia Contemporary Art Show in Hong Kong. She had a solo exhibition at the Ardmore Museum of Art in Oklahoma, and her work is held in numerous private and corporate collections and has been featured in publications like Juxtapoz magazine.

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Used to refer to a time rather than an aesthetic, Contemporary art generally describes pieces created after 1970 or being made by living artists anywhere in the world. This immediacy means it encompasses art responding to the present moment through diverse subjects, media and themes. Contemporary painting, sculpture, photography, performance, digital art, video and more frequently includes work that is attempting to reshape current ideas about what art can be, from Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s use of candy to memorialize a lover he lost to AIDS-related complications to Jenny Holzer’s ongoing “Truisms,” a Conceptual series that sees provocative messages printed on billboards, T-shirts, benches and other public places that exist outside of formal exhibitions and the conventional “white cube” of galleries.

Contemporary art has been pushing the boundaries of creative expression for years. Its disruption of the traditional concepts of art are often aiming to engage viewers in complex questions about identity, society and culture. In the latter part of the 20th century, contemporary movements included Land art, in which artists like Robert Smithson and Michael Heizer create large-scale, site-specific sculptures, installations and other works in soil and bodies of water; Sound art, with artists such as Christian Marclay and Susan Philipsz centering art on sonic experiences; and New Media art, in which mass media and digital culture inform the work of artists such as Nam June Paik and Rafaël Rozendaal.

The first decades of the 21st century have seen the growth of Contemporary African art, the revival of figurative painting, the emergence of street art and the rise of NFTs, unique digital artworks that are powered by blockchain technology.

Major Contemporary artists practicing now include Ai Weiwei, Cecily Brown, David Hockney, Yayoi Kusama, Jeff Koons, Takashi Murakami and Kara Walker.

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Figurative art, as opposed to abstract art, retains features from the observable world in its representational depictions of subject matter. Most commonly, figurative paintings reference and explore the human body, but they can also include landscapes, architecture, plants and animals — all portrayed with realism.

While the oldest figurative art dates back tens of thousands of years to cave wall paintings, figurative works made from observation became especially prominent in the early Renaissance. Artists like Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and other Renaissance masters created naturalistic representations of their subjects.

Pablo Picasso is lauded for laying the foundation for modern figurative art in the 1920s. Although abstracted, this work held a strong connection to representing people and other subjects. Other famous figurative artists include Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud. Figurative art in the 20th century would span such diverse genres as Expressionism, Pop art and Surrealism.

Today, a number of figural artists — such as Sedrick Huckaby, Daisy Patton and Eileen Cooper — are making art that uses the human body as its subject.

Because figurative art represents subjects from the real world, natural colors are common in these paintings. A piece of figurative art can be an exciting starting point for setting a tone and creating a color palette in a room.

Browse an extensive collection of figurative paintings on 1stDibs.