Sublime Dolls

Dark Pop Surrealism

 

Dark Pop Surrealism

 

Dark Pop Surrealism Blood

Dark Pop Surrealism

Dolls are surreal, dark and today they have come to represent perfect, endless, but also lifeless beauty. I must also add “voiceless beauty” too, since a doll doesn’t speak. I have used dolls several times in my images in the attempt to emphasize the fact that a woman in many situations is seen and treated as a doll. But, if a doll is voiceless, would images of dolls speak any sort of truth about them?

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Nigredo Blackness

Nigredo Blackness is a digital painting conveying the alchemical stage of blackness and putrefaction...

 

Nigredo Blackness

The Catharsis of Ophelia

 

Nigredo Blackness. Today I looked at some of my digital paintings from the Nigredo series, and I found out that many of them were left unfinished. I was especially interested in one of those images, the one that best represents the Nigredo phase, one that has actually a lot of black matter in it, an almost entirely black and white piece.

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Babel Tower Story

The Tower of Babel

Babel Tower Story, mixed media painting of a futuristic Tower of Babel.

Barbel Tower Story

The Tower of Babel is an interesting subject from my point of view. It was reported in the Bible (Genesis 11:1-9), and it tells the story of humans that once upon a time all spoke the same language on earth. As people migrated from the east, they settled in a land called Shinar which in the Bible appears eight times and it refers to Babylonia, a territory encompassing both the city of Baylon (Babel) and the southern city Erech. Babylonia used to be a great and powerful empire.

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Poisoned Ivy

About Barbara Agreste

Poisoned ivy - About Barbara Agreste - Ophelia Blood Lake - A painting from "The Catharsis of Ophelia" series.

Poisoned Ivy

 

Barbara Agreste, post surrealist artist, her artwork takes the viewer into a dreamy world full of tricky tiles, falling flowers, and sharp shards.
She blends poisoned ivy to the image of Ophelia, showcasing a doll as the best example of her strange way of conceiving beauty: never flaunting, discreet and androgynous, part of a concealed world immersed in thriving nature and cold swamps, a fragile universe of subtle ethereal pain and melancholic moods.

Barbara Agreste disseminates fallen petals, disconnected shiny leaves, and fragments of mirror along impervious paths, leading the viewer of her video art, and short films to a journey characterized by the instability of walls and floors, and by the dazing alternating colours of unsteady tiles. There is always danger in these adventures, uncanny places of hidden eyes, or architectures built with the special purpose of causing accidents to the passengers. It is nature the tricky environment, full of leaves and blood, but this natural lanscape is also magnified and remoulded: it is not a totally true vegetation that we see, but rather a genetiacally modified one, a distorted natural proliferation, reminiscent of the cinematic settings, assembled like a labirinth hiding too many things, leading to a previously arranged scene.

Never trust your eyes.

poisoned-ivy

Poisoned Ivy

About Barbara Agreste

Fairy Doll


Oil painting of a doll as Fairy, from the Ophelia series by Barbara Agreste.

Fairy Doll (Ophelia Series)
90 x90 cm
Oil on canvas

Fairy Doll

Dolls


Dolls - Why do I like dolls so much? I suppose because they are creepy...

I love dolls.

If I could I would buy an entire collection of them: dolls of all kinds.

 

It was very interesting to discover that there are so many dolls out there in the market, just by searching on the internet I found entire forums on dolls, not Barbies, but many versions of the most refined, strange, and unusual dolls for collection.

Three years ago I bought a doll from Korea, a beautiful piece of art, and with it I made a lot of digital and oil paintings. I am still doing it, my research with the doll seems to have no end, I have infinite questions for the doll, therefore I keep photographing it.

 

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Sublime dolls and deceit

Sublime Dolls is a review about Barbara Agreste: her video art shows restless figures and the anxiety of...

Sublime Dolls

Barbara Agreste, post-surrealist artist, much appreciated abroad for her VideoArt, is presenting for the exhibition “The sharing of difference” four paintings that dwell on the subtle dreamy line that separates life and death.

Her figures have no peace, and are representative of the uncertainty and anxiety of the contemporary human soul.

 

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In Reptilica Barbara Agreste’s Symbols

Barbara Agreste's symbols. The doll is also sadly a symbol for a perfect lifeless beauty...

“In Reptilica i simboli
di Barbara Agreste”

Video of the week:
“In Reptilica Barbara Agreste’s symbols”

Review by Claudia Quintieri | 18 June 2012

Barbara Agreste loved art ever since. Her formal training begun at the art College of her town, and after that she lived in Milan for some time attending a Set Design course in Brera Academy.

Video Art, Short Film by Barbara Agreste. Image with a doll on a checkered blue floor watching worms pass by.

(The image above refers to the short animated filmReptilica)

In 1993 she moved to the UK where at first she took contemporary dance classes, and performed in dance companies; but after two years she returned to the visual arts enrolling at the University of Kent.

 

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Ghost

Ghost, Painting of a Doll from the Ophelia Pop surrealism series by Barbara Agreste

oil on canvas
80 x 60 cm
2012

Ghost

Doll Snakes

Doll Snakes, Painting of a Doll with Snakes on her Head. Oil on canvas by Barbara Agreste.

oil on canvas
110 x 110  cm
2011

Doll Snakes

Ophelia’s Pond

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Ophelia’s Pond

ophelia-pond

oil on canvas
120 x 90  cm
2011

Ophelia’s Pond

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Video Art Reptilica animation