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#sculptureAugust 12, 2021
Grace EbertAll images © Diana Beltrán Herrera, shared with permission
Colombian artist Diana Beltrán Herrera (previously) adds to her growing collection of intricate paper sculptures with new plant and animal life. From her studio in Bristol, the artist and designer recreates lifelike reproductions of turacos, monarchs, and various species with nearly perfect precision. Innumerable fringed strips become feathers, faint scores mimic delicate creases in petals, and layers of bright paper form brilliantly colored plumes, creating a colorful and diverse ecosystem of wildlife from around the world.
Prints, jigsaw puzzles, and cards are available in Beltrán Herrera’s shop, and you can see more of her recent commissions and personal projects on Behance and Instagram.#animals
#birds
#flowers
#fruit
#paper
#plants
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Detail of “Lee Jeans.” All images courtesy of the artist and Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery, New York, shared with permission
Loosely Woven Burlap Mimics Digital Pixels in Jennifer J. Lee’s Photorealistic Paintings
February 26, 2025
Art
Kate Mothes
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On the loosely woven surface of jute burlap, Brooklyn-based artist Jennifer J. Lee paints photorealistic scenes that explore the saturation of images in contemporary experience. The fabric’s gridded structure conjures associations with pixellated screens, playing with the relationship between digital and analog representations of everyday objects.
Recent paintings, nearly a dozen of which were on view in the artist’s solo exhibition at Klaus Von Nichtssagend Gallery, highlight a personal glimpse of nostalgia, a fascination with the act of looking, and seemingly banal imagery transfigured into symbolic references and objects.
“Acid Jeans” (2024), oil on jute, 16 × 12 inches
Lee’s paintings starkly contrast the instant gratification of scrolling through endless images, challenging the speed at which we consume information. She describes her process as a form of “waking meditation and sustained observation,” translating digital pixels into hand-painted brushstrokes and stretching fabric to simulate screens.
The artist’s technical ability to translate finite details onto a relatively rugged surface speaks to the time and attention required to produce a single painting. Small in scale, her pieces reveal surprising interactions between the objects’ surfaces and the woven jute.
Denim, for example, sports its own signature weave, which in works like “Acid Jeans” seems to somehow exist in both harmony and opposition with the burlap. Portraying a smooth object in “Security Mirror” presents the challenge of making glass appear polished while nodding to the graininess we associate with CCTV footage. And a bunch of footprints in sand suggest another kind of graininess altogether, the shadows and subtle colors of which seem to vibrate or flicker thanks to the low-thread-count jute weave.
Lee’s recent paintings harken back to Y2K, an era on the cusp of immense technological and social change as personal computers, mobile phones, and the internet became more widely available, spawning the social media platforms we still use today—albeit profoundly changed since they first emerged.
Find more on Instagram.
“Security Mirror” (2024), oil on jute, 13 × 13 inches
“Pizza” (2024), oil on jute, 12 × 20 inches
“Beach” (2024), oil on jute, 12 × 21 inches
“Tennis” (2024), oil on jute, 22 × 15 inches
Detail of “Pizza”
“Lee Jeans” (2024), oil on jute, 15 × 13 inches
Detail of “Tennis”
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