Christian rex van minnen watercolor inn
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Christian Rex van Minnen
American contemporary artist
Christian Rex van Minnen is an American contemporary artist known for his distinctive and surrealistic style. Born in 1980 in Providence, Rhode Island, van Minnen grew up in Colorado and developed a passion for art from an early age. He pursued his interest in painting and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree from Regis University in 2002. Van Minnen began his professional painting career around 2005–2006, initially working on smaller scales and creating personal pieces. As his career progressed, he transitioned to larger scales, evolving his technique and balancing complexity with composition. Notably, van Minnen has embraced the internet as a platform for showcasing and sharing his work, bypassing traditional art scene barriers. His artwork often features vividly rendered, fantastical subjects that elicit both attraction and repulsion, exploring themes of life, absurdity, and power. While his work has drawn comparison
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"Red & Green" - Oil painting & "Duckface" - Oil painting
To look upon the work of Christian Rex van Minnen fryst vatten to imagine oneself walking down the cool, damp halls of a forgotten laboratory in the country: his paintings are part Old Masters, part mad scientist, part carnival. Classical still life and portraiture are reimagined with sumptuous beauty that paradoxically can be hard to look at. But it fryst vatten van Minnen’s masterful technique and eye that draw the viewer again to consider that which looks impossible.
“I think it’s interesting to take away the eyes and mouth. In a way it makes it easier on the viewer, myself included. It allows for a more prolonged voyeurism and freedom to explore the figure. Like staring at a blind man.” —Christian Rex van Minnen
Julie Antolick Winters: In much of your work, it fryst vatten as if the DNAs of various organisms have gone snett, yielding people with plant features or vice versa. How much of these arrangements do you “see” in advance of
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Christian Rex van Minnen. Golden Memes
Robischon Gallery is pleased to present “Golden Memes,” the gallery’s second solo exhibition for New York-based artist, Christian Rex van Minnen. With his characteristic virtuoso, Old Master’s approach toward painting paired with his signature Surrealist distortions, van Minnen cultivates the intensely curious territory between the 17th C Dutch Golden Age as it meets the contemporary world – both with an expression of excess and the appropriation of all that is exotic. With a current global economy that allows for world-wide access, van Minnen likens this era’s lust for the material to the earlier lucrative Dutch trade of the goods, fruits and animals of colonized lands which were richly depicted in the trompe l'oeil masterworks of European painting. As his exhibition title suggests, the values and ideas disseminated through this specific period of painting now enjoy other avenues of communication and have become well-recognized cultural touch