The Alluring Fantasies

Contemporary painter Laura Krifka paints highly emotive, intensely vibrant fantasies, capturing a dynamic sense of audacity and repulsion. The California-based artist begins her process by creating sculptural models based on correct anatomy, configuring them to convey an ambiguous narrative within a light box, and then photographing the composition before painting her large-scale artworks. Each of Laura’s paintings contains an element of anxiety. Her characters are tinged with a poignant sense of longing, fear, pain, or rapture, and gaze off the pictorial plane, suggesting the viewer is capturing an intimate and present moment.

The artist, whose color schemes are inspired by MGM musicals from the 1950s, says with each new painting, she gives herself a new technical challenge. The recent Pink Predator (pictured above) is remarkable as it is the first of Laura’s paintings to engage the viewer through the confrontational gaze. Directly implicating the viewer as a fellow predator, it not only disturbs and challenges the viewer, but also surprises him with an element of superb beauty, depicted through large, swelling flowers.

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