Ria Koreman Art

"Guardians" Contemporary Oil Monkey Eyes Post-Cubist Abstract Whimsical Animal Hunt Slonem (American, b. 1951) "Guardians" 24 x 19 inches Oil on Canvas Signed, dated 1995, titled, and numbered "JEM0668" to verso. A Certificate of Authenticity from Hunt Slonem Studio attached. Unframed Provenance: From a New York City Collection. BIO Hunt Slonem was born in Kittery, Maine in 1951. His fascination with exotica imprinted during his childhood in Hawaii and experience as a foreign exchange student in Managua, Nicaragua. Slonem received his Bachelor of Arts degree from Tulane University of Louisiana and studied painting at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Since 1977, Slonem soloed in over one hundred fifty exhibitions at prestigious galleries. His work is exhibited globally, including in Madras, Quito, Venice, Gustavia, San Juan, Guatemala City, Paris, Amsterdam, Madrid, Stockholm, Oslo, Cologne, Tokyo, and Hong Kong. Over fifty museums internationally include his work in their collections, among them The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York. His work has been shown in thirty-one different museums. Corporate collections include American Telephone and Telegraph, Chase Manhattan Bank, Citibank, Continental Airlines, Goldman Sachs Co., IBM Corporation, Marriot Corporation, Paine Webber, Inc., Port Authority, and Readers Digest Inc. He won the 1991 National Endowment for the Arts Grant in Painting, and McDowell Fellowships in 1986, 1984 and 1983. Since 1973, Slonem has lived and worked in New York City in his legendary loft with his seventy pet birds. The birds are his models. So enmeshed and unique are his aviary, studio, lifestyle and painting, that Slonem has been featured on television a dozen times and in numerous articles. In his 1993 essay, the late Henry Geldzahler describes, "The visual field of Hunt Slonem's paintings is a continuum accented by ovals of varying shape and colors that it turns out are birds." The birds evolved from Slonem's early paintings of saints as well as inspiration from the pioneers of bird imagery in painting, including Fabritsius, Heade and Audubon. Audubon shot one hundred birds...

Fishermen of Mola di Bari represents a deeply personal turn within Bruno Surdo’s practice, grounding his classical training and allegorical sensibility in lived history and ancestral...

Contemporary artist, Augustina Droze, uses animals as symbols to describe her personal lived experiences. Her current body of work explores her life as a foreigner, her gaze upon the...

MONIKA ROSSA studied painting at the University of Arizona, in the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris and at the Escuela de Diseno in Barcelona. She practices drawing and easel painting....

Gwen Wong's work is both painterly and allegorical, caught somewhere in the middle between the representational painter and the narrator. "I am inspired by the idea of a childhood re...

Gwen Wong's work is both painterly and allegorical, caught somewhere in the middle between the representational painter and the narrator. "I am inspired by the idea of a childhood re...

Gwen Wong's work is both painterly and allegorical, caught somewhere in the middle between the representational painter and the narrator. "I am inspired by the idea of a childhood re...

This painting exemplifies Bruno Surdo’s synthesis of Renaissance figuration, Northern allegory, and psychological symbolism. Female figures twist and overlap beneath a lattice of tree branches, while animals—a lamb, fox, squirrel, hummingbird—inhabit the same compressed pictorial space. The interlocking limbs and diagonals recall High Renaissance and Mannerist strategies of sculptural composition, and Surdo’s atelier training is evident in the anatomical precision and volumetric modeling of flesh. Yet the scene feels intentionally dense and claustrophobic. Rather than a pastoral idyll, the forest becomes charged—alive with tension, concealment, and layered meaning. The symbolic animals situate the work within a long art historical lineage. The lamb evokes innocence or sacrifice; the fox suggests cunning and instinct; birds often signify fragility or spirit; the spider embedded in the branches recalls vanitas traditions of the Dutch Golden Age, where small creatures signal mortality and hidden threat. However, the background introduces an additional, more psychological register: the partially obscured eye and the numbers 3, 5, and 7. These are not naturalistic elements; they intrude like fragments from another realm. Their presence subtly aligns with Jungian thought—an area of interest for Surdo—where numbers function as archetypal structures of order within the psyche. In Jungian symbolism, such numbers carry qualitative meaning rather than mere quantity, suggesting stages, wholeness, embodiment, or cycles of psychic development. Their appearance within the forest—traditionally a metaphor for the unconscious—suggests the mind’s attempt to map or structure instinctual terrain. The eye, half-hidden behind branches, intensifies this reading. It can be understood as a symbol of awareness or consciousness emerging from within the thicket of instinct. Rather than divine omniscience, it feels psychological—an archetypal “watcher” embedded in the natural world. The forest thus becomes more than environment; it reads as psychic landscape. Surdo collapses civilization and instinct, rational structure and animal impulse, into a single visual field. Within his broader oeuvre—often concerned with the tension between performance and authenticity, order and chaos—this work becomes a contemporary myth of the psyche. Renaissance form provides authority and structure, while allegorical animals and Jungian symbols suggest the layered architecture of the unconscious. The result is a painting that feels timeless yet inwardly modern: a meditation on innocence, predation, awareness, and the hidden numerical and symbolic frameworks through which the human mind seeks to understand its own wilderness. Bruno Surdo Nature's Web of Dependency oil on canvas 64h x 66.50w in 162.56h x 168.91w cm BRS082 Bruno A. Surdo b. Chicago, 1963 EXHIBITIONS 2021 Ethos + Truth, Gallery Victor Armendariz, Chicago, IL 2020 Realities, Gallery Victor Armendariz, Chicago, IL 2018 Liberation, Gallery Victor Armendariz, Chicago, IL Blood Sport, Gallery Victor Armendariz, Chicago, IL Art on Paper 2018, Gallery Victor Armendariz, Pier 36, New York, NY SOFA Chicago 2018, Gallery Victor Armendariz, Navy Pier, Chicago, IL 2017 POP!ARAZZI, Gallery Victor Armendariz, Chicago, IL Coming Attractions, Gallery Victor Armendariz, Chicago, IL 2015 SOFA Chicago 2015, Ann Nathan Gallery, Navy Pier, Chicago, IL Bruno Surdo: Allegories, Ann Nathan Gallery, Chicago, IL 2014 Bruno Surdo: Respond, Ann Nathan Gallery, Chicago, IL Modern Metaphors, Rockford Art Museum, Rockford, IL 2013 Bruno Surdo: Revelations, Ann Nathan Gallery, Chicago, IL Vice + Virtue, Northern Illinois University Museum of Art 2012 Contemporary Realism Biennial, Fort Wayne Museum of Art, Fort Wayne, IN 2011 Bruno Surdo, University of St. Francis School of Creative Arts, Fort Wayne, IN Uncensored, Ann Nathan Gallery, Chicago, IL 2010 Art Chicago 2010, Ann Nathan Gallery, Merchandise Mart, Chicago, IL 2009 Art Chicago 2009, Ann Nathan Gallery, Merchandise Mart, Chicago, IL 2007 Bruno Surdo, Art Institute of Indianapolis, Indianapolis, IN 2006 Context/Content: Making Meaning with the Figure, University of Arkansas, Conway, AR Creative Imaginings, Mobile Museum of Art, Mobile, AL Bruno Surdo: Cycles, Ann Nathan Gallery, Chicago, IL 2005 Art Chicago 2005, Ann Nathan Gallery, Chicago, IL 2004 Tragedy, Memory, & Honor, Richard M. Daley Center, Chicago, IL Art Chicago 2004, Ann Nathan Gallery, Chicago, IL Group Show, Arcadia Gallery, New York, NY Drawings VII, Koplin Del Rio Gallery, West Hollywood, CA Armory Show, New York Armory, New York, NY 2003 Paintings & Drawings, College of Lake County, Grayslake, IL The Art Show, New York, NY Bruno Surdo: New Work, Ann Nathan Gallery, Chicago, IL Art Chicago 2003, Ann Nathan Gallery, Chicago, IL 2003-10 International Show of Contemporary Artists, Chicago Art Open, Chicago, IL 2002 Bruno Surdo: Perception of Appearance, Frye Museum, Seattle, WA Tragedy, Memory, & Honor, Richard M. Daley Center, Chicago, IL Bruno Surdo: Transcendence, Ann Nathan Gallery, Chicago, IL Art Chicago 2002, Ann Nathan Gallery, Chicago, IL Tragedy, Memory, & Honor, Ann Nathan Gallery, Chicago, IL 2001 Magic Vision, Arkansas Art Center, Little Rock, AR 1998 Evanston and Vicinity Artists, Evanston Art Center, Evanston, IL 1996 Bruno Surdo: A Personal View, University of Wisconsin, Kenosha, WI 1995 Bruno Surdo: Recent Works, College of Lake County, IL AIDS in Our Society, Loyola University, Chicago, IL Bruno Surdo: Life, Struggle, and Hope, Chicago Cultural Center, Chicago, IL 2001 Magic Vision, Arkansas Art Center, Little Rock, AR Bruno Surdo: Dualities of Life, Ann Nathan Gallery, Chicago, IL 1999 Group Show, Ann Nathan Gallery, Chicago, IL 1998 Group Exhibition, Fine Arts Building Gallery, Chicago, IL 1995 Spiritual Inquiries, Struve Gallery, Chicago, IL 1994 Recent Works, The 14th Annual Juried Exhibition for Lake County Artists, Grayslake, IL Go Figure, Figurative Works on Paper, Chicago Printmakers Collaborative, Chicago, IL SELECTED COLLECTIONS The Re-Birth of Venus, Temporary Loan, Fort Wayne Museum of Art Arkansas Art Center, Little Rock, AR College of Lake County, Greyslake, IL Flashpoint Academy, Chicago IL John Robert Wiltgen Design Shoemaker Ruud Collection Julie & Thomas Danilek Michael Vozzella and Mike Silver Benjamin Fernandez Tom Braake Betsy Colburn Michael Diemand & Lor LaRose Michael Staab & Kathy Brock Bruce Leep Frank Tzurect Mary Foley Rosalyn Carlson Mimmy Turney Janet Long Halstead Billy Hunt Carol Galli Myles Kerrigan Honorable & Mrs. Edwin Berman Theodore Gage Northrop Art Museum Past Present & Future Company Dr. James & Peggy Kemmler Salvatore Monastero Nix & Virginia Lauridsen Joel Miller David & Marlene Zerkel Ann & Andy Abel Claudia Rush Marc Miller Leonard Goldberg Lawrence Pucci Howard Tullman Collection Susan & Manny Kramer James Rinnert Richar Interiors Michael & Nancy Colt Khalid Altijir Dr. Joe Grodman Beryl & Jack Gore Larry Wolf & Eric Naegle Chuck Wolandi Jack Schwab & David Sandelin Thomas Kaczmarek Marti Dinerstein Craig & Michael Golden...

Kirké fascinated both the ancient Greeks and Romans because the stories told about her were unbelievable but too enticing to ignore. She was called the Dread Goddess for a very good ...

This is a fanciful image of a child exploring the world and finding delight in the nature around her, surprise and simple pleasures

Gwen Wong's work is both painterly and allegorical, caught somewhere in the middle between the representational painter and the narrator. "I am inspired by the idea of a childhood re...

Oil on canvas Teppei Ikehila is a Japanese artist born in 1978 who lives & works in Tokyo, Japan. He is graduated from Shimane University in 2001. Since 2000, he has held many p...

Standing Watch (the Jackal) Oil on canvas 60 x 72 in 152 x 183 cm Michele Mikesell’s Standing Watch (the Jackal) presents a mesmerizing anthropomorphic figure — a jackal-headed bei...

Gwen Wong's work is both painterly and allegorical, caught somewhere in the middle between the representational painter and the narrator. "I am inspired by the idea of a childhood re...

Gwen Wong's work is both painterly and allegorical, caught somewhere in the middle between the representational painter and the narrator. "I am inspired by the idea of a childhood re...