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Han Xiao Toledo, Castilla La Mancha, Spain

June 14, 2009 Debut was inspired and affirmed by a letter from Charles Saatchi. In 2014, it was discovered by Rebecca Wilson, chief curator and art development director of the American art platform „Saatchi Online“. The existing 96 works have been widely collected by collectors in the United States, Taiwan, Germany, Spain, Greece, Australia, Switzerland, Canada, Portugal, Nigeria, and Brazil.

What is art for you?
For me, art is not some kind of flat knowledge like „modernism“, it is a special kind of intelligence, it has depth. It reverberates in the life that surrounds me, and I should discover them. I won’t close the door of life because it’s there.

What’s your inspiration?
I was born in China, an environment of extreme hysteria, what I saw and what I felt, together nurtured the roots of my work. I am inspired by the difficulties I cannot overcome and the things I have accomplished.

What does your work aim to say?
The shape of our inner being, the state of our soul, explains how „people“.

What are your biggest influences?
I don’t think it has arrived yet.

What work do you most enjoying doing?
Those that work between pictographic and non-pictographic, and those that work instinctively.

Where people can buy your work?
Buy my work on Saatchiart or contact me in person.

… Her portraits possess an innate sense of loneliness and anxiety, and are reminiscent of Francis Bacon’s paintings. She deliberately blurs out the faces of her subjects and makes it difficult to discern any identifiable features. Her energetic and highly impastoed brush strokes and rich color palette of vibrant blues, ochres, greens, and pinks illuminate her canvases and beg the viewer to linger. – Kat Henning (Curator of Saatchi Art)

What are you working on at the moment?
I came to Spain from China and the internet block was lifted. Now my family and I are learning Spanish. This is the internet age and I have a lot to learn. I’ll add a completely different theme.

Han Xiao – www.saatchiart.com/hanxiao

The exhibition gives us insights into the spectrum of expressive forms of art. The artworks shown are based on what had happened, memories and perception, spanning from the past into the future.

Lavinia de Rothschild is an artist, art collector who has never felt like she belonged to any one culture or nationality. Lavinia has always felt closer to animals and nature than to humans and our mechanical world.

Kalina Horon is an artist painter from Poland, who has been living in Vienna since 2014. Although she received classical music training in her childhood and youth, she decided to give it up in favour of painting.

Kenji Lim graduated with a BFA from Ruskin School of Art, Oxford University, in 2002 and with a Masters in Sculpture from The Royal College of Art, London, in 2019, and has lived many lives in between.

Dan McCleary is a Los Angeles based artist. He has exhibited extensively in the United States and frequently travels to Oaxaca, Mexico, where he makes etchings at the Taller Sangfer.

This is Liza. A 23-year-old girl. Also an illustrator, graphic designer, and explorer of all things circling in our brains. She visually describes thoughts which have their own existence.

Carlos Vergara is an artist from Barranquilla, Colombia, currently studying at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. Within his work, he positions himself in the periphery of diverse scenarios.

Pati Baztán is a Spanish artist, based in the middle of the countryside near Barcelona. She paints as she lives, with wild abandon. She is more interested in being led by the desire, emotion, and primal instincts.

Elke Foltz is a French painter. Her work is a search for balance within a constant chaos. All the elements aim to be in harmony and in perpetual renewal in spite of the prevailing disorder.

It was William Burroughs who, in the early 1960s, in his eponymously named cut-up novel, described the human body as a ‘soft machine’, constantly besieged ‘by a vast, hungry host of parasites’.

Olga graduated on the Academy of Fine Arts in Bratislava and has also studied at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts. She has realized dozens of solo and group exhibitions in Austria and in other European countries.

Due to the fusion of digital life with the physical they have become part of our lived reality. The inability of consciousness to distinguish reality from a simulation of reality is addressed through artistic positions.

Feels so warm that you can walk around with your transition jacket. We are invited by the artist Nives Widauer to her studio, and I arrive there with Cornelius, who backs me up in documenting this conversation.

Kim Dorland pushes the boundaries of painted representation through an exploration of memory, material, nostalgia, identity and place. Drawing heavily from the Canadian landscape.

In Impuzzibil, there are these bodies struggling and folding and stretching in stacked boxes. They didn’t disappear but they’re not fully there either. And there is no magician present to help out.

From one art fair to the next, from Vienna to Milan. Therefore, the impressions of the second edition of SPARK reach the reader a little late. I deliberately visited the site of the art fair three times.

Faye Wei Wei’s paintings feel like they are wearing lingerie, draped in a body of delicate sensuous marks. The colors, often posed against a white background of exposed untouched canvas, are transparent and fleeting.

A dominating motive theme in her work is using the unexpected to create tension. Playing with the viewers expectations, she broaches the issue of moments paired with distorted items of her imagination.