Art Around The World: Miguel Soler-Roig, Lluis Lleo, Mei Lu
Miguel Soler-Roig (Barcelona, 1961)
His education has been influenced by the Bauhaus and the new Swiss typographic style. He studied at the Basel Art School. Subsequently completed a Masters in Fine Arts at Rhode Island School of Design, Providence. For several years has been living and working in New York, and after his return to Spain he continued his studies in photography, completing a Master of Art in Photography at the European Institute of Design in Madrid (IED), and numerous international photography workshops. As an artist, photography is his primary concern and interest. Miguel lives the moments while photographing, but as he says, sometimes portrays what he wants to live.
Lluis Lleó (Barcelona, 1961)
who has lived in New York since 1989, is an artist who moves with identical ease between painting and sculpture, making his work especially difficult to catalogue. His recent works are neither sculptural paintings nor painted sculptures: they are works that lie midway between abstraction and figuration, having the particular characteristic the combination of painting with elements in relief that provide the work an arquitectural matrix. Arquitectural references, that since the beginning of the 1990s, Lleó has used in his work, focusing on the mysterious and evocative power of geometry and the rythms and pacing that it can define. The result is a body of work that seeks concurrence between elements that appear opposite, lyricism and power, order and chaos, presence and transparency.
A third generation painter, Lleó has inherited from his father and grandfather an interest for traditional techniques, discovered as a child in the rural churches of Catalonia and the medieaval frescoes of the Vall de Boí (or in the MNAC Museum on Montjuich in Barcelona), using pure pigment with the fresco technique, which although has a long tradition in Catalan art history is currently used by very few painters. The fresco, as noted by Robert Hughes in reference to the artist, is “that unique, neglected, vulnerable and yet miraculously durable medium of water-based paint chemically bonded into wet plaster, so that there is essentially on division between the support and the design,” and offers unexpected qualities to the work while underscoring the ineffable contradiction that makes indistinguishable the medium from the painting and complicates the definition of the work of Lluís Lleó.
His work is in the permanent collections of the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, the Banco de España, Madrid, The Nagoya Museum, Japan, the Sofía Imber Museum, Caracas, The World Bank, Washington, among others.
Lu Mei - Beijing , China
Chinese artist Lu Mei, was born in Henan, China. She Graduated from Henan Zhoukou Normal University of Fine Art in 1991, and continued her studies in Fine Arts at the Central Academy of Arts and Design from 1991 to 1996. She studied Chinese mineral color at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in 1999. In 2000, she came to Chicago, USA and later moved to New York City in 2012. She was a member of the International Shuxiang Society in Beijing since 2014. She currently lives in Manhattan, New York and traveled often to her art studio in Beijing. She is a guest professor of Zhoukou Normal University of Fine Arts Institute in China. Lu Mei’s works had been exhibited at different museums and galleries in China, America and Europe. Her art works were collected by museums and private collectors from different countries.
