Born in Orange County, CA, Painter James Gortner attended Hawaii Pacific University and received his MFA from Columbia University. His paintings feature reversed found wall and floor paint, as well as assemblages of transformed objects and paintings by other artists. Gortner paints and sculpts into the assemblage using a variety of techniques ranging from abstract to hyper-realistic. 

Gortner’s work has been shown at The Fisher Landau Center For The Arts (LIC), Mana Contemporary (Jersey City), Lyons Wier Gallery (New York), Fernando Luis Alvarez Gallery (Connecticut), and The Pool Gallery (Berlin). His work has been written about in the Hartford Courant, Men's Journal, The Berliner, and in New American Paintings (Northeast). He belongs to the collections of the Eileen S. Kaminsky Family Foundation, Jimenez-Colon Collection, and the Wooster Street Art Collective as well as the private collection of President Jiang Zemin of China and actress Reese Witherspoon, among others. He lives and works out of New York City.

Paintings by artist Yoram Chisin are displayed at EL AL's King David Lounge at Ben-Gurion Airport.

Yoram Chisin has been living in the world of international fashion, surrounded by creativity and passion expressed through textiles, shapes, volumes and colors. This intense creative atmosphere boosted his own creativity that found its expression through the media of painting.

In 1971 Yoram Chisin was born in Toulouse, France, and in 1973 he arrived in Israel, where he lives and works today.

Chisin works mainly on canvas, choosing the type of fabric for his paintings carefully: from cotton to linen, his experience with textiles makes choosing the ideal media an expertise of his. In most of his pieces, Chisin uses oil colors on thick linens. The linen absorbs the oil during a fascinating process: while the color dries it changes in front of the artist, the piece comes to life.  

His artistic process consists of combining the right color with the right fabric.

Through the choice of colors, Chisin expresses the most emotional and personal part of his art: purple, blue and green to convey a sense of peacefulness, deep turquois and gold to convey strength and light.  

Chisin refers to the Jewish tradition of “Avnei Hoshen”, the ritual jewel that ancient Jewish high priests used to wear on their chest. This jewel consists of 12 stones, to represent the 12 tribes of Israel. The “Avnei Hoshen” was crafted in gold and set with colored precious gems. Chisin uses stripes and inserts of gold, blue and purple, colors featured in the “Avnei Hoshen” and that symbolize meditation, spirituality and elevation.

The color as supreme expression of emotion is represented at its best by American painter Mark Rothko: in his paintings, color is the only main player, annihilating drawing, composition, limits, space and borders. The art of Rothko is an immersion in color, an experience of losing limits, falling into the painting and letting go.

Layers and dripping of oil are featured on the canvases of Chisin. Scratches that reveal the colors underneath are a characteristic of his paintings and represent the inner conflict he experiences.

Mindful of the heritage of masters Jackson Pollock and Gerhard Richter, Chisin balances layers of colors with geometric shapes, representing his attempt to control the chaos of thoughts.

The works of Yoram Chisin has been presented in galleries around the globe, recently in Sydney, Melbourne, Miami, New York, Brussels and Antwerp. In Israel his artworks are on display at Art Market by Bruno Art Group in Tel Aviv Port.

Dede is an Israeli artist who has been working in the public sphere since 2006. Dede conducts his way as an urban tourist. The urban landscape, together with the social and the personal questions it evokes are the main drives behind Dede's work. In his works, Dede examines and questions the man-made urban lifestyle, as he reflects on absurd, paradoxical human existence. His body of works concerns problems and mental phenomena shared by individuals in the urban society. Dede uses various techniques and different tools each time; since the ideas leading him arise from within the experience of the dynamic urban life, every question requires a new and fresh approach. His works are often site-specific, both in the theoretical and the practical aspects: they facilitate a meaningful relationship between the concept that generates them, the specific location where they appear, and the materials and methods used to create them. Dede has created and exhibited pieces in many cities around the world, including Tel Aviv, New York, Montreal, London, Vienna and Prague.

Andre Bogart Szabo is currently in residency at ESKFF at MANA Contemporary. Since 2010 he has worked on paper and canvas exploring the nature of line. Consistent throughout his work is the use of black lines on a white background. His practice is inspired by the painting and calligraphy of painter-monks working in the Zen Buddhist tradition.

Andre’s paintings and drawings have been on view at ArtHelix Gallery, Brooklyn, NY / Local Project, Long Island City, NY / Chris Davison Gallery, Newburgh, NY / Greenpoint Gallery,

Brooklyn, NY.

Nitzan Mintz is a street artist and poet from Tel Aviv. She graduated from The Department of Fine Art and the Department of Creative Writing at Minshar College, and the Helicon School of Creative Writing, both in Tel Aviv. Mintz’s process integrates her poetic work and the material that contains it and their physical, actual location in the street. Her poems combine the personal with the political; they are written out of an internal urge to verbalize mental processes which respond to the outside world. Mintz creates collages and assemblages out of words and material, often layering words and materials at the expense of readability. Their aesthetics stems from the outside to the inside, from the urban landscape into the studio. She creates her work in specific selected locations across the city, locations with a greater and longer history than her own. Her method of working consists of assembling words, places, materials and shapes together to create the final piece. Nitzan has created and exhibited pieces in many cities around the world, including Tel Aviv, Vienna, Prague, Berlin, New York and Montreal.

Verdiana Patacchini AKA Virdi, was born in Orvieto, Italy in 1984. She received her MFA from Via di Ripetta Academy of Fine Art in Rome in 2009. In 2011 she took part in the 54th Biennale di Venezia, for the Italian Pavilion and in 2012 her artwork La Veronica won the Catel Prize. On march 2016 the Emmeotto Gallery of Rome presented her solo show Unconscious Mind at the Consul General of Italy in New York. She currently lives and works in New York. 

I seek a primitive impact from a surface when I'm working. I like to create atmospheric effects that transmit to the viewer the sensation of looking through a vaporous and vague surface to discover ambiguous and timeless images within. 

American artist, Serena Bocchino has been recognized by many art institutions for her work and is the recipient of numerous awards including the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, the PS 1 International Studio Residency, the Artists Space/Artists Grant, the Art Matters Grant, the Brodsky Center Printmaking Residency and the Basil Alkazzi Award, USA. The New Jersey State Council on the Arts has granted her Fellowships in both Painting and Drawing.

The Museum of Modern Art in New York featured Bocchino’s paintings and methodolgyin a film documentary by Monica Scharf .  from 1989-2013 Bocchino’s work has been the subject of six films.

Bocchino’s exhibitions have received critical attention from The New York Times, The New Yorker, Artnews, Art in America, Newsday the San Francisco Art Examiner, ArtCritical, On Verge magazine and the Star Ledger. In 2015, her first monograph was released written by Lisa A. Banner, Jonathan Goodman and Lily Zhang.

Serena Bocchino is just back from an exhibition at the Taoxichuan Art Museum of China Central Academy of Fine Arts. She will be at a residency at the the Eileen Kaminsky Family Foundatoin (ESKFF) at MANA Contemporary Art in Jersey City NJ in the Fall 2017.

Public Art Collections that her work is part of include the following:

Art in Embassies Program, Bergen Museum of Art and Science, Bronx Museum of the Arts, Fidelity Investments, Islip Art Museum, Janssen Pharmaceuticals, Lotus Museum, Beijing China, McKinsey & Co. Incorporated, Moelis International, Montclair Art Museum, Morris Museum, Newark Public Library, New Jersey State Council on the Arts, Noyes Museum, Pfizer Inc, Price, Waterhouse and Coopers, Saks Fifth Avenue, New York, NY, Smithsonian Museum, Irma and Bill Seitz Collection, Washington D.C., Springfield Museum of Art, St. Louis Art Museum,The Prudential, The Brodsky Center, Rutgers University, Trenton State Museum, the Taoxichuan Art Museum of China Central Academy of Fine Arts and The Zimmerli Art Museum.

Painter and illustrator, proficient in traditional and digital mediums.

Originally from Tromsø in the north of Norway, currently residing in Brooklyn, New York.