Pontone Gallery
74 Newman Street
W1T 3DB London
United Kingdom
Phone : +44 (0)20 7730 8777
Mobile Ph. : WA +44 7983 162923
Email : [email protected]
URL : pontonegallery.com
Alessandro Lorenzetti ()
Alanah Sarginson ()
Helen Kunkel ()
About
Chris Rivers Air
Luciano Ventrone Spuntino
Seontae Hwang The Space with Sunshine III
Matteo Massagrande Serra
Gretchen Andrew Facetune Portrait, Blue Relevé
Yigal Ozeri Worn Leather
Madeleine Gross Two Lovers 2
British artist Chris Rivers transports us into his abstract interpretation of the elements. A dynamic blend of bright blues and greens forms a cloudy composition, evoking a sense of airy movement throughout the piece. Delicate, impasto floral details seem to drift through the canvas, as if suspended in mid-air. The light color palette and subtle layers of paint enhance the ethereal quality, perfectly capturing the essence of air.
Artwork: Air, 2024, Oil on canvas, 170 x 170 cm (66.9 x 66.9 in)
Born in 1983, Chris Rivers is a self taught artist from Manchester, England. A former professional rock drummer, Rivers began painting in 2014. His large and dramatic oil paintings are bold, abstract displays of charged colour and fine, surrealistic detail.
Not everything is as it first seems in these worlds. Soft light filters through overlaying mists of complimentary tones, gradually swelling with dramatic saturated colour before receding into the image. Upon closer inspection, these clouds are populated by minute details; flowers, insects, figures and other characters scatter and interact across the painted surface, offering a sense of scale to the great haze of abstract colour. Distinct rococo elements can also be detected, as curvilinear motifs fade in and out of the vibrant, bustling compositions.
United Kingdom
Luciano Ventrone (1942–2021), born in Rome, was a masterful Italian painter celebrated for his hyperrealistic still lifes that blend impeccable technique with a reverence for light and colour. His paintings, showcased worldwide in galleries and exhibitions, captivate viewers with their heightened realism and evoke the tradition of Italian masters, combining naturalism with symbolic depth to explore themes of beauty, transience, and materiality.
Artwork: Spuntino, 1999, Oil on linen, 40 x 40 cm (15.8 x 15.8 in)
Hwang Seontae’s light box installations, created from layers of etched and printed glass, depict minimalist, contemporary interiors. Illuminated by subtle light sources, these scenes evoke a sense of stillness, where the quiet interplay of light and shadow hints at both absence and anticipation. The serene atmosphere invites contemplation, capturing a moment of pause within the simplicity and order of domestic space.
Artwork: The Space with Sunshine III, 2022, Tempered Glass, Sandblast & LED Backlit, 112 x 152 x 4 cm (44 x 60 x 1.5 in)
Korean artist Hwang Seontae makes lightboxes. Carefully crafted from sandblasted glass and discreet LED lamps, they depict contemporary, domestic interiors. These calm and ordered scenes are lit by windows which frame views of natural landscape. In contrast to the colour of the outdoors, these idealized, indoor spaces are monochromatic, formed from graphically-rendered line and flat, grey halftones. This is a rigidly controlled and measured vision of utopia.
South Korea
Matteo Massagrande’s paintings are rich in detail and atmosphere, combining evocative interiors with subtle shifts in perspective. Each work invites the viewer to explore layers of memory, space, and light.
Artwork: Serra, 2023, Oil on board, 40 x 40 cm (15.8 x 15.8 in)
Italian artist Matteo Massagrande is a highly accomplished painter of empty domestic interiors. His sumptuously-rendered spaces evoke a powerful sense of human presence and the passage of time.
Massagrande's acute depiction of light and texture reveals scuffed and time-worn surfaces, cracked and decaying plaster, sagging ceilings and battered doors, partitions and window frames. The marks of time are on everything. This is all articulated in a rich colour palette, full of tonal variation and fine modulation of temperature. Each image explores vistas of inter-communicating rooms and passages. The tessellations of the tiled floors, reminiscent of the perspective grids of the Renaissance, lead out into a sun- drenched landscape.
Italy
Gretchen Andrew, an American-born artist, combines digital and AI-generated imagery to examine the intersection of algorithms and aspirational reality. She takes computer-generated oil paintings of idealised female subjects and manipulates them with additions generated by a robot program she codes herself. The result is a portrait of tension between "who you are and who the algorithms say you should be."
Artwork: Facetune Portrait, Blue Relevé, 2025, Oil on canvas, 45.7 x 91.4 cm (18 x 36 in)
Gretchen Andrew is known for her unique combination of traditional artistic mediums such as photography and oil paint with advanced technologies such as robotics, algorithm and artificial intelligence. She first became known starting in 2019 with her hacks on major art world and political institutions.
In Gretchen's new Facetune Portrait series the artist uses custom robotics to physically apply popular "beautifying" Al algorithms into oil paintings. She trained in London with the artist Billy Childish from 2012-2017. In 2018 the V&A Museum released her book Search Engine Art. Gretchen's work has been exhibited in solo museum exhibitions with The Monterey Museum of Art and the FC Linz as well as with The Photographer's Gallery London, Photo Museum Winterthur, Paris Photo, Untitled Miami and The National Endowment for The Arts. She has been the Artist in Residence with The National Gallery X London and is the winner of the 2024 21C Acquisition prize. Her work is widely covered including recent articles in Artforum, Fast Company, Flash Art, The Washington Post, Fortune Magazine, Monopol, Wirtschaftswoche, The Los Angeles Times, Forbes, and The Financial Times.
Israeli artist Yigal Ozeri specializes in photo-realistic portraits of women set in serene landscapes. Drawing from classical themes, his works immortalize the delicate beauty of the human form with remarkable precision. Ozeri’s intricate technique brings his subjects to life, evoking both their realism and their deeper, symbolic essence.
Artwork: Worn Leather, 2025, Oil on canvas, 76.2 x 76.2 cm (30 x 30 in)
Born in 1958, Yigal Ozeri is an Israeli artist based in New York City. He is a ‘photo-realist’ painter, in particular of beautiful women in landscapes. A veteran of many international exhibitions, his paintings feature in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the McNay Art Museum in San Antonio, the Jewish Museum of New York, The Israel Museum, the Tel Aviv Museum of Art and the Albertina in Vienna.
His emphatically romantic subjects mine a seam of closely-related female characters. The paintings are virtuoso displays of rigorously-controlled technique, intended to bring about an appearance of intense and compelling realism. Ozeri pays careful attention to the soft tonalities of the body, the subtleties of drapery, the play of both diffused and focussed light across form and landscape and the rendering of the variegated textures of surface. These are images of someone immediately present; the artist’s meticulously-crafted recreation of a snapshot moment insistently demands our attention.
United States
Madeleine Gross layers expressive brushstrokes over photographic imagery, creating a dynamic tension between the mechanical and the hand-made. Her work explores themes of love, loss, and the passage of time.
Artwork: Two Lovers 2, 2024, Acrylic paint on original photography, 107 x 94 cm (42 x 37 in)
United States
Exhibiting Artists