Meet 3 New Artists: Ana Pietraru, Jochen Görlach and more

Ana Pietraru
Romanian artist Ana Pietraru takes inspiration from the vibrant melange of nature and culture. She often uses the flower form to investigate the potency of memory, colour, and space, loosely undoing and recreating floral arrangements. Her work is bold and declarative; each painting is a sumptuous escape where colours burst like fireworks and smudge thickly across each canvas. From glowing violets to sunny yellows, Pietraru masters an abundant use of colour to electrify viewers into seeing nature anew. Her gestural layering and impasto technique adds further surface texture, taking what first appears as still life work into another realm altogether. Highly emotive, her paintings have been exhibited and published all across Europe.

Emma Read
For artist Emma Read, the sea is her muse. It’s often what’s been closest to her – as a child she grew up by the British coast in Deal, and has extensively travelled to watched her partner surf around the world. Working in acrylic and ink, Read delicately layers paint and water to create dreamy abstractions that seem to rock and turn like the waves themselves. Glowing with a prismatic range of colours, her paintings tap into the nuance of light and colour that the water’s reflective quality brings about. Read truly captures the meld of sky and sea with intuition and painterly skill.

Jochen Görlach
Jochen Görlach’s paintings possess a haunting quality that lingers long after you’ve turned away. In contemplative states, figures emerge from inky black backgrounds that both shroud and reveal them like moving smoke. His muted colour palette imbues each work with a solemn and almost spiritual feel that works its way deep into the viewer’s psyche. Comparable to the ghostly photorealist work of artists like Michaël Borremans and Gerhard Richter, he has honed a unique compositional structure that perhaps errs closer towards minimalism. His work has been featured in several exhibitions, including key galleries and museums such as the Galerie Rothamel in both Frankfurt and Erfurt, Germany.

The Blue Leaf by Ana Pietraru