SHARPEGALLERY
Kim Suntei
Our gallery is the exclusive representative of Suntei KIM in Europe which explains why we have a wide variety of his artworks to propose.https://www.kimsuntei.com/
We believe Suntei to be a very promising Korean artist because of his sensitivity, the quality of his paintings and the variety of his topics. Some of his works can be found in Korean Museum of Art in Seoul.
Suntei has already had several solo exhibitions in Seoul, Tokyo and New York. We were very happy to celebrate the opening of our Art Gallery with his first solo exhibition in Europe on May 25th 2024.
I particularly love how the traditional oriental painting techniques he learnt for several years collide with the modern topics in his paintings.
Suntei Kim was born in 1964 and grew up in a small island called Bogildo, located in the south of Korea and spent his childhood surrounded by nature. Suntei studied Oriental painting in Seoul and Tokyo and while studying in Japan, he was able to experiment with various materials such as silver leaf, gold leaf, and stone carving. The 2011 tsunami (Fukushima) was a turning point for him and has been reflected in his work since then. His series “Unstable Landscape” is the painting of nature reacting to the onslaught of external elements.
Gailius Pranas
Gailius PRANAS is an artist born in 1928 and deceased in 2015. The artist's works have gone up for sale at public auction 152 times, mostly in the Print-Multiple category.
Born in 1928 in Lithuania. Pranas lived in France, first in Strasbourg and then in Paris. He was a student of Fernand Léger, a French cubist painter, famous for his colorful, graphic paintings. At the “Ecole nationale des Beaux-arts”, Pranas learnt about the art of lithography. He was exhibited in numerous Parisian art galleries. He is also represented in the US. I met Pranas at one of his exhibitions in the late 1990’s and bought directly from him.
I love the Eagle Lake series, colors & lines. For me, with this pond close by the Eagle, it is a graphic evocation of nature before Men started to mess around. The combination of the greenish blue and purple colors makes me inevitably think of the 1980’s.
Jean Fautrier
Jean FAUTRIER is an artist born in France in 1898 and deceased in 1964.
Fautrier's career began in 1920. His paintings, figurative at the time, were made up of still-lifes, landscapes and nudes. After a brief period of recognition however, the economic slump stopped his artistic career: forced to leave Paris in the early 1930s, he lived in the Alps for several years, working as a ski instructor and manager of a hotel with its own dance hall. Returning to Paris in 1940, he met or renewed his acquaintances with writers including André Malraux, Francis Ponge, Paul Éluard, Georges Bataille and most importantly Jean Paulhan, who would become his most ardent champion. During the War years he developed a new approach to the image in which paint itself took on a steadily increasing role in the representation of objects, landscapes, and bodies.
Le Maquis is one of his last Art works. Jean Fautrier acknowledged having been influenced by Turner (he studied Art in London). Ref: Catalogue Mason 285. It is numbered and signed.
Pierre Bonnard
Pierre BONNARD was a painter born in France 1867 and deceased in 1947.
Bonnard in addition of being a painter was also and illustrator and printmaker, known especially for the stylized decorative qualities of his paintings and his bold use of color. A founding member of the Post-Impressionist group of avant-garde painters Les Nabis, his early work was strongly influenced by Japanese artists’. Bonnard was a leading figure in the transition from Impressionism to Modernism. He painted landscapes, urban scenes, portraits and intimate domestic scenes, where the backgrounds, colors and painting style usually took precedence over the subject.
In Place de Clichy’s lithography dated 1899, Bonnard makes us see a busy place in Paris by nighttime. The four elegant women wearing hats seem to be ready to go to the restaurant or to attend a show in Montmartre which is close to Place de Clichy. In the background, we can see a man pushing a cart as well as two streetlamps. Electricity has started to spread in public places in Paris since 1816.
The orange and brown shades of the women's attires contrast with the seemingly blue evening colors.
Marc Chagall
Marc CHAGALL was born in a small Hassidic community in the outskirts of Vitebsk, Belarus, on July 7, 1887 and died in France in 1985 in Saint Paul de Vence
His parents were of modest origins. As a child, Chagall attended the Jewish elementary school, where he absorbed the Jewish’s culture, imagery and themes that would feature largely in most of his later work. In 1911 Chagall moved to Paris, France. After settling briefly in the Montparnasse neighborhood, Chagall moved to an artist colony known as La Ruche (“The Beehive”), where he
began to work side by side with painters such as Amedeo Modigliani and Fernand Léger as well as the avant-garde poet Guillaume Apollinaire. At their urging, and under the influence of the wildly popular fauvism and cubism, Chagall lightened his palette and pushed his style ever further from reality.
After a brief stay in New York coinciding with World War Two, Chagall came back to live in France. In 1977, where he received a retrospective exhibition at the Louvre.
We propose 2 lithographs which are views of Paris (with certificates of authenticity) and one of which is a biblical scene (signed).
Maximilien Luce
Maximilien LUCE, was born in Paris in 1858 and died in Paris in 1941. Maximilien Luce was a French painter, lithographer, draftsman and one of the first Neo-Impressionists. He was born into a poor family in Paris on the 13th of March 1858. Throughout his friendship with Camille Pissarro, Luce came to meet with Georges Seurat, Paul Signac and Henri-Edmond Cross. With them, he was one of the founders of Neo-Impressionism (Pointillism).
Luce was always very interested in the worries and pains of ordinary people and attempted to honestly transmit such human plight in his portrayal of dockers, masons and other farmers whose daily works he witnessed.
Luce remains a very important figure in French Post-Impressionist art, as a Pointillist and a social realist.
Baignade à Rolleboise, was painted circa 1920 and illustrates how Luce has assimilated the techniques of impressionism and post-impressionism. In that Eden Garden, we see a boat, three youngsters out of which two are taking a bath close to a beautiful tree. In the background a village in a late afternoon light. A peaceful, idyllic version of humankind reunited with nature.
Gustave Cariot
Gustave CARIOT was born in Paris in 1872 and died in Paris in 1950 Cariot was born at 14 rue de Birague; in the Marais which was the center of the Jewish community in Paris. His parents were of modest origin: his father produced a variety of luggage and related travel goods. The summer of 1872 marked the early stages of rebuilding the city in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71.
As a child, Cariot would have experienced an extraordinarily rich urban environment just outside his door. Little is known about his educational background. Throughout the 1890s, Cariot’s work was centered in Paris. Towards the turn of the century, Cariot began to paint more rural scenes of wheat fields and haystacks, most likely during visits to Normandy. The year 1909 would mark a turning point, however, when he became the object of a ruthless campaign orchestrated by colleagues associated with the Salon d’Automne. The Salon d’Automne itself had been established in 1903 as a reaction against the academicism of the Salon Nationale des Beaux-Arts. The founding group consisted of many avant-garde artists of the day, including Henri Matisse, Pierre Bonnard, Georges Roualt, and Hector Guimard. In 1905, the annual exhibition created a scandal when Matisse and his circle of compatriots exhibited a radically new approach to painting characterized by bright, flat areas of color that was unrelated to the factual reality of daily life. Images of green skin, purple hair and bright yellow waves on the river were received with shock, dismay, and outrage. The art critic Louis Vauxcelles described the artists as “wild beasts” (“fauves” in French), thus dubbing their work Fauvism for the foreseeable future.
With this background, it might seem odd that the members of the Salon d’Automne would not welcome a fellow artist who shared many of their concerns. The work we propose here ,L’Eglise de la Campagne, dated 1927 had stroke me with the audacity of the colors of the trees in the background: purple trees, a legacy to the Fauvism. This little church is not without reminding me of a much famous one, l’ Eglise d’Auvers-sur-Oise from Van Gogh. Not only because of the theme; in both paintings you will find that there is a focus on an empty foreground leading to the church. Could it be some kind of allegory that we need to accept to take the necessary steps to connect with our spiritual soul?
Irina Alaverdova
Irina Alaverdova was born in 1974, and deceased in Moscow in 2021. She is a Russian artist who graduated from the Moscow Academic Art School Member of Artists’ Union of Russia in 1993. She was living and working in Paris when I met her in the1990’s. She took part in many exhibitions in Moscow as well as in France, Switzerland, Monaco, Spain. She was more particularly involved in the organization of the “Urban Garden” collective Exhibition of Russian artists that took place in 2019 at the “Orangerie du Senat” which I visited. I knew her before that exhibition as I had bought the Pont Saint Michel back in 2017 (the pastel we propose here). I can’t remember exactly how I got to know her, but I think it was through the art gallery that represented her in the Marais. I must have pushed that door one day inquiring about her displayed artworks. As I always ask if I can meet the artist before making any purchase, this must be how I ended up taking “a cup of chai” at her place in the 11th district of Paris.
Irina showed me all pile of beautiful oil paintings. There were dozens of them in addition to many pastels. It was too difficult for me to choose that day. But I made up my mind and bought from her later. She has a very sensitive and poetic way of painting and is a great colourist. I bought that pastel (Pont Saint Michel) because I love the perspective and the subtle colors of the water. There is almost no sky. We are drawn to look at the reflection of the sky in the water. Irina loved to play with reflections, as I have noticed in various of her other works. How she was able to paint in so many different ways the stones (of Paris, Moscow or Saint Petersburg) has always astonished me.