Texas-born artist Paul Manes has mastered a range of media from charcoal and oil painting to burlap and kaolin, a clay mineral. His densely layered images often contain universally recognizable motifs supported by a conceptualized framework. For Manes, bowls are common objects which represent a connective thread amongst the global community. "Everybody, no matter how poor, across all cultures, has a bowl in his hands,” Manes says. “It can contain food, and hope, and often it is empty."

Paul Manes lives and works in New York City. He graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Lamar University (Texas) and later received a Masters of Fine Art from Hunter College (New York). His works have been exhibited across North America and Europe at galleries such as Kouros Gallery (New York), Pan American Arts Project (Texas), Marisa del Re Gallery (Italy), Jan Turner Gallery (Los Angeles), and Paul Rodgers/9W (New York). Manes's work is part of multiple public and private collections including that of Yoko Ono, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Detroit Institute of Arts Museum, the Guggenheim Museum, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Swiss-born, Los Angeles-based artist Francesca Gabbiani’s vibrant gouache on paper and cut-paper collages are often filled with animals, insects, flowers, birds, and figurines. A prominent figure in the contemporary art world, she has been featured in Interview and frieze magazines as well as at leading institutions like the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Geneva, Switzerland.

Gabbiani’s complex, densely layered works create impact through vivid colors, intricate strokes, and focus on vacancy. Her collages often build from an open central space, which is both captivating and reflective. The viewer is confronted with the possibility of entering the void, filling it with personal reflections and narratives.

Francesca Gabbiani studied at the École Supérieure des Beaux Arts (Geneva, Switzerland) and received her MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles. She has shown nationally and internationally at Marianne Boesky Gallery (New York), Patrick Painter Gallery (Los Angeles), Sara Meltzer Gallery (New York), Lora Reynolds Gallery (Austin), Monica de Cardenas (Switzerland), FLAG Art Foundation (New York), the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (Geneva, Switzerland) and the Museum of Modern Art (New York). Her artworks are part of the permanent collections at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), Museum of Modern Art (New York), and Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles).

The photographs of Dirk Westphal are dictated by personal investigations and inquiries into the experiences of his life as an artist. Westphal’s series are often formulated from different encounters near his Chinatown studio and from being seduced by the allure of artificial color and prefabricated beauty. Exploring various neighborhood bodegas, drug stores, and pet stores, it is in pre-packaged desserts, cough medicine, mouthwash, toothpaste, and fish that Dirk captures these ideas. Although each subject and series are fundamentally different, themes arise involving color, mutation, artifice, contemporary culture, and the artist’s own sense of meticulous order. Inherently, Dirk’s conceptual depth is elevated, sometimes concealed, by the gloss of aesthetic beauty, humor, and wit.

Dirk Westphal received his Masters in Fine Art from the California Institute of the Arts. His photographs have been shown throughout the United States and abroad at such galleries and institutions as the Tim Olsen Gallery (Sydney), the CatStreet Gallery (Hong Kong), Baldwin Gallery (Aspen), DesignWithinReach (Los Angeles), the New York Historical Society, Art in General (New York), Exit Art (New York), Glenn Horowitz (East Hampton), and Mixed Greens (New York). His artworks are included in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute (New York), the Progressive Collection (Cleveland, OH), the New York Times Photo Archives (New York), Pfizer, Corel, and Sir Elton John.

Dirk’s images have appeared in a wide array of publications and books including The New York Times and New York Sunday Times magazine, V magazine, The Village Voice, The New York Observer, Marie Claire, and der Spiegel.