JD Malat Gallery is pleased to announce its participation at artmonte-carlo Art Fair 2022. As a representative of diversity and innovation, JD Malat Gallery brings together an eclectic and insightful group show, including highly expressive works by the following artists: Georgia Dymock, Kojo Marfo, Luis Olaso, Santiago Parra, and Georg Óskar. JD Malat Gallery is proud to exhibit a plethora of contemporary artists at artmonte-carlo 2022, which serves as a bastion of diversity and multiculturality.  
About the artists 
Georgia Dymock is a London-based artist known for her textured oil paintings of fluid tubular forms. Dymock’s process begins with manual sketches transposed into Photoshop and Illustrator digital software which is then manipulated and translated back into the analogue world of paint on canvas. The subjects reveal her re-imaginings of friends, family and self; the figures are stripped of traditional body identifiers to allow the exploration of new meanings, identities, gender fluidity and body image in our post-digital age. Dymock’s painterly technique explores the constant push-pull relationship between physical and virtual worlds, making her work intellectually and visually stimulating. 
Born in Ghana, Kojo Marfo developed his interest in art and visual culture through the traditional Akan artifacts, sculptures and carvings that he was exposed to as a child. The large-scale figurative paintings that depict single figures, families, animals and social gatherings, are inspired by the diverse social map of New York and London. Marfo creates  his paintings in an effort to inspire change and cross-cultural connection. Through abstracting the faces and bodies of his subjects, the artist builds a bridge between his colourful depictions and the reality of struggling to live in the West as a Ghanaian artist.
Spanish artist Luis Olaso was initially self-taught, typically working from improvisation. His artistic practice is divided into two parts; action and analysis. Deriving inspiration from Bilbaoan nature and his surroundings, Olaso scratches with oil pastel and applies impulsively constructed spots and drips of acrylic onto canvas which are altered later. While it is natural to draw parallels between the ensembles of objects in Olaso’s work and the mimetic tradition of still-life painting, Olaso aims at presenting an abstraction of forms based on his feelings, state of mind, and personal views. 
Colombian artist Santiago Parra is internationally recognised for his large, abstract, and highly expressive black paintings. His staple medium of black acrylic paint on raw canvas plays an integral role in his quest for autonomous expression. Parra’s single brush stroke technique presents the purest and most seamless channel for expressing and materialising the subconscious mind. The artist achieves a harmonious conversation between spontaneity and pondering in his practice, capturing the suspended flatness of calligraphy-like imagery.
Icelandic artist Georg Óskar fills his canvases with a sarcastic twist, a signature in his artistic practice. His paintings act as a visual diary of personal observations of the mundane, drawing inspiration from popular culture and local fairytales. Óskar’s work is saturated with humour and wit, as well as a melancholic quality that channels the artist’s long-standing interest in the extremes of human existence. Childish excitement, grey existence, happiness, loneliness and societal criticism are layered onto the canvas, inspired by the artist’s quest to explore and understand the human condition. 
JD Malat Gallery’s participation at artmonte-carlo 2022 strengthens our interest in promoting and situating established and emerging artists within the framework of contemporary art. The exhibited works are part of the wider international art historical context of figurative abstraction and abstract expressionism. By bringing its engaging programme to the culturally diverse audience of Monte Carlo, JD Malat Gallery seeks to encourage the continuous dialogue between art, artists and viewers across the world.