Bai (Carl Karni-Bain)

Two Men and a Horse, Painting on Paper, African American Artist, Basquiat Vibes

2024

In contrasting colors that pop Live Composition II, 2024 by African American artist Bai is a 30” x 22” abstract acrylic, oil pastel, and ballpoint pen work on paper. A focus on an ...

The original painting on paper, Indian Chief, 2024 by contemporary African American artist Bai (Carl Karni-Bain), is in the artist's series on indigenous Indian chiefs. 30 x 22in, a...

The earthy tones, rich in texture in an acrylic and oil pastel by African American artist Bai is a portrait of an androgenous subject with Modigliani eyes, Ornetta, is an enigmatic p...

The Three Wisemen, 2022 by Carl Karni-Bain (Bai) is a contemporary mixed-media fabric work. The piece 3 wisemen, portraits on watercolor paper, are painted with oil sticks, charcoal, acrylic paint, and layers of fabric. The piece is installed in a clear plexi shadow box. The 46" x 42" work is mounted on archival board and installed in a clear acrylic box frame: 48" x 44” depth: 2” A one-of-a-kind work. Provenance: artist's studio In the artist's words: "I have been painting faces and figures throughout my career as they are part of an ongoing journey of which neither I nor the viewer will ever tire. The foundation for my portraits comes from the African Mask. As a child, I remember the visual impact it had on me and remains strong in my retained memory to this day. The mask forces a response from the viewer, whether a primitive or contemporary response." ~Carl Karni-Bain (BAI) ***** Artist's Bio: For three decades BAI (Carl Karni-Bain) 1959- has exhibited regularly in the San Francisco Bay Area, North Carolina, and New York City. As an artist in over two dozen international art fairs since 2003, BAI has garnered an audience worldwide. In 2013 Thelma Golden, Director of The Studio Museum...

Robin Winters (American, born 1950), Untitled (Red Face) from "Cherry Block Series" 1986, monotype, pencil signed and dated lower right, plate: 6"h x 8.5"w, overall (with frame): 22.25"h x 18.25"w. Provenance: Property from a Private Collection, San Francisco. Winters was invited to make monotypes at Experimental Workshop in San Francisco, (they printed Richard Bosman, Sam Francis, Claire Falkenstein, Deborah Oropallo and Kenneth Noland and many more greats). Winters chose to paint on wood blocks rather than the more usual metal plates in order to capture the organic quality of the natural material. He exploited a salient characteristic of the monoprint in Ghost Story by adding new painted elements onto the increasingly faint ghost images that result from successive impressions from a single block. In so doing he achieved the effect of transparent layers of color and shadow imagery. Winters's brightly-colored monotypes portray an array of figures and landscapes (and an occasional still-life) that, although can be seen in the context of a general trend away from abstraction that has marked the 1980s, defy strict stylistic categorization. They are neither realistic nor abstract, psychological self-examinations nor narrative fictions, but they contain elements of all of these approaches. Like Jonathan Borofsky, Winters derives much of his subject matter from dreams, believing that through his private fears and obsessions he can touch similar emotions in others. Although at first glance Winters's images look as if they could have been made by a child, closer attention reveals sly art historical references to Jackson Pollock and Pattern Painting (the drip and splatter backgrounds), Mark Rothko (the three-part horizontal compositions) and Minimalism (the gridded Cherry Block Series: Bread Beat). Robin Winters (born 1950 in Benicia, California) is an American conceptual, multi-disciplinary, artist and teacher based in New York. Winters is known for creating solo exhibitions containing an interactive durational performance component to his installations, sometimes lasting up to two months. Winters first emerged in the burgeoning Soho NYC art scene of the 1970s. An early practitioner of the Relational Aesthetics (social interaction as an art medium) Winters also created in works through sculpture, installation, performance, painting, drawing and prints. His art maintains a whimsical spirit, and he often returns to ongoing themes involving faces, boats, cars, bottles, hats and jesters or fools. Winters has incorporated such devices as blind dates, double dates, dinners, fortune telling, and free consultation in his performances. Throughout his career he has engaged in a wide variety of media, such as performance art, film, video, writing prose and poetry, photography, installation art, printmaking, drawing, painting, ceramic sculpture, bronze sculpture, and glassblowing. Winters was born in Benicia, California in 1950 to lawyer parents. As a child his hobby was collecting glass bottles found on the beach and under old buildings, which would later influence him as an artist. In 1968, Winters had his first durational performance, entitled Norman Thomas Travelling Museum. The artist drove a Volkswagen bus decorated in collage, many of the images relating to current events and politics. Inside was what the artist described as a “reliquary” containing many objects, including a bottle collection. Winters took the van to shopping centers and even as far as Mexico. That same year, Winters opted not to register for the military draft. Although he was deemed fit to serve, Winters refused. In 1975 the resulting legal proceedings finally came to a close after it was proven that the artist had been harassed by the local draft board. In his teens and early twenties, Winters became acquainted with several local artists who helped shape his aesthetic, most notably Manuel Neri and Robert Arneson. By the early 1970s, Winters was studying at the San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI) and had relocated to San Francisco. At this time Winters became friends with the Bay Area conceptual artists Terry Fox and Howard Fried, and participated in several of Fried's performance works. In 1972 Winters was accepted into the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York City. After coming to New York City, Winters helped support himself by working for various artists, among them the performance artist Joan...

This colorful artwork is one in a series of studies leading up to Long’s major ice sculpture installation Other in May of 2000. Bert L. Long Jr., was self-taught artist, was born in 1940 in Texas, grew up the Houston’s historic Fifth Ward and received his formal education from UCLA. Following a career as a successful master chef, Bert Long...

Faces are a recurring motif throughout Long’s extensive body of work - especially regarding eyes and mouths. This work features a misma of matter that coagulates into an image recogn...

"Image" is an original acrylic and pastel painting on paper by Reginald K. Gee. The artist initialed the piece on the back. It features abstracted, simplified figures and faces in fr...