Empire of the Gods

The Artists

MIDARTZ

Mark Wright, known as MidArtz, is a New York-based neo expressionist artist whose work explores bold storytelling through dynamic brushstrokes, expressive color, and layered symbolism. Raised in The Bronx and now working in Port Jervis, NY, Wright’s artistic journey is deeply influenced by Jean-Michel Basquiat and Pablo Picasso.

His paintings capture raw emotion and energy, often blending acrylic, oil, pastels, and spray paint to construct figures and fragmented compositions that evoke movement, identity, and cultural narratives. Each piece is a visual
journey, where abstraction and realism merge to create a compelling dialogue between the viewer and the artwork.

For Wright, neo expressionism represents freedom—both in technique and in thought. His work invites audiences to engage with characters that embody strength, vulnerability, and resilience, reflecting the complexities of human nature. Through his art, he challenges perceptions and provokes introspection, making each canvas an evolving narrative of personal and collective experience.

Giorgi Togonidze

Giorgi Togonidze is an emerging artist whose work explores the interplay between human presence, memory, and material abstraction. Initially trained in business and working in the banking sector, his lifelong passion for art led him to pursue formal training at the New York Academy of Art. There, he found a renewed sense of purpose and creative voice rooted in texture, surface, and earthbound materials.

Togonidze’s paintings are meditative and tactile, often grounded in natural tones of clay, ash, sand, wood, and stone. These elements evoke the organic cycles of erosion and emergence, serving as metaphors for memory, identity, and transformation. His practice is driven by instinct and process, layering earthy textures to create quiet but potent compositions. Through this approach, Togonidze connects the physicality of material with emotional undercurrents, offering a reflection on how time and presence leave their mark.

Stephanie Tamez

Stephanie Tamez is a multidisciplinary visual artist whose work explores transformation, identity, and the sacred through richly layered compositions. Drawing on her background in tattooing, painting, and sculpture, she weaves together ancient iconography, spiritual symbolism, and contemporary narrative. Her figures often appear mythic, fragmented, or ceremonial, rooted in the body as both vessel and storyteller.

Her practice is deeply informed by growing up in a Mexican-American Catholic household, navigating multiple identities, and inhabiting cultural spaces that feel simultaneously inside and outside the mainstream. Tamez’s work taps into personal mythology, ancestral memory, and metaphysical questions of faith, gender, and duality frequently referencing Catholicism, indigenous traditions, and borderland experiences. Through layered surfaces and hybrid forms, she invites viewers into a space where the divine and the human coexist, raw and unfiltered.

Michael X. Rose

Michael X. Rose creates oil paintings steeped in gothic tension, classical technique, and
theatrical myth-making. Drawing inspiration from Italian horror cinema, Shakespearean tragedy, and the tropes of gothic literature, his works capture the precise moment when fate hangs in the balance, disaster or salvation, terror or transcendence. Each scene feels like a final reckoning, frozen just before the inevitable unfolds.

Conceptually grounded in themes of ritual, mortality, and the grotesque, Rose paints like
an Old Master. Layering pure pigments, rabbit skin glue, and oil glazes to create luminous, almost cinematic surfaces. His works often feature strange rites, uncanny landscapes, and mythic figures caught in tableaux that invite both delight and discomfort. Familiar forms are twisted into visual riddles, drawing the viewer close before revealing something darker beneath.

Rooted in metaphysical inquiry and macabre beauty, Rose’s practice is a reflection on
the eternal transformation through fear, storytelling, and the sublime. His paintings don’t just illustrate myth, they stage it.

Madge Scott

Madge Scott is an award-winning international folk artist whose work delves into themes of identity, cultural heritage, empathy, and community. A self-taught artist, Scott draws on her Jamaican roots and life experiences in New York to create powerful visual narratives that blend history, storytelling, and symbolism. Her practice spans painting, collage, drawing, and mixed media, often combining older works and new techniques to create dynamic, textured compositions.

Her work focuses on the human figure, both realistic and abstract. Inviting viewers to reflect on shared experiences, resilience, and the emotional complexity of individuals and communities. Scott's portraits often feature expressive colors, layered surfaces, and symbolic details that explore the roles people play in shaping cultural and historical memory. With each piece, Scott seeks to build bridges between past and present, individual and collective, inviting others to consider how we define ourselves and each other. Her work reflects a deep commitment to bringing people
together, using art as a means to promote empathy, understanding, and unity.

Frances Nguyen

Francis Nguyen’s practice is rooted in a deep tension between classical technique and
contemporary disillusionment. Working across painting, drawing, and sculpture, Nguyen
re-constructs visual memory with precision and imagination, forming his concepts through design, then refining them using both traditional and modern methods. His art often blurs boundaries between history and myth, creating highly detailed, symbolic works that challenge perception and reframe the human form.

By referencing the old masters while experimenting with new materials and methods, Nguyen creates allegorical works that explore the complexities of beauty, power, and the collective unconscious. He transmogrifies classical narratives with modern discontent, using realism to reimagine mythological worlds where memory, identity, and form collide. Each piece invites the viewer into a layered dialogue between past and present, order and chaos, the seen and the felt.

MaryAnne Ramirez

Mary-Anne Ramirez creates contemplative figurative works that explore femininity, inner strength, stillness, and the surreal beauty of everyday life. She works primarily in watercolor and gouache, drawn to their softness, fluidity, and expressive unpredictability. Her pieces often balance realism with painterly abstraction, blending the real and imagined to evoke a quiet emotional depth.

Through her practice, Mary-Anne seeks to create visual spaces that feel intimate, meditative, and timeless. Her figures often embody archetypal energy; guardians, dreamers, divine beings serving as invitations to pause, reflect, and reconnect with the sacred aspects of the self. Whether expressed through image or word, her work is rooted in gentleness, emotional resonance, and a reverence for the unseen.

Kimberly Callas

Kimberly Callas creates deeply symbolic figurative sculptures that explore our relationship with nature, the body, and ecological identity. Her work fuses digital technologies with traditional sculpting methods, melding natural materials like beeswax, bark, and hand-dyed silk with 3D printing and CNC processes. These tactile, layered forms reflect humanity's physical and spiritual connection to the natural world.

Callas approaches the body as a vessel for transformation, embedding her figures with motifs from nature, such as bees, flowers, mountains, while exploring themes of memory, ritual, and ecological awareness. Through the use of intricate surface textures and symbolic language, her sculptures serve as both contemporary relics and sacred objects, urging viewers to reconnect with their environment and themselves. The result is a body of work that feels both ancient and futuristic, rooted in ritual yet born from innovation.

Rhea Marmentini

Rhea Marmentini is a Spanish-born multidisciplinary artist whose practice moves fluidly between sculpture, painting, and ceramics. Her work fuses ancient technique with contemporary vision, creating pieces that feel both timeless and otherworldly.

From intricately carved marble sculptures and expressive bas-reliefs to ceramic forms and richly layered Estofado paintings, Rhea brings a distinct voice to each medium. Her creations often carry a mythic or symbolic presence like relics from an alternate realm while reflecting deeply personal themes of transformation, power, and spiritual resonance.

She is also the designer of the Dragon House in Valencia, Spain, a fantastical architectural project that reflects her singular imagination and ability to blur boundaries between art, craft, and structure. Her works are part artifact, part story, always inviting viewers into a world just slightly beyond our own.

Bank Art Gallery is proud to represent Rhea Marmentini and showcase the breadth of her powerful, multifaceted practice.

Joseph Eschenberg

Joseph Eschenberg is a multidisciplinary artist whose mixed media practice draws from assemblage, photography, and painting to examine the tension between chaos and control. His work transforms found materials—objects that are weathered, chipped, cracked, or discarded—into poetic compositions that explore the impact of light, time, and surface. Rooted in an urban sensibility and informed by a lifetime of creative experimentation, Eschenberg creates visual narratives that speak to resilience, decay, and the overlooked beauty in imperfection.

Inspired by artists like Robert Rauschenberg, he embraces improvisation as a core methodology. His intuitive approach allows material, shadow, and structure to guide the outcome. In his ongoing Variance series, Eschenberg investigates light’s interplay with negative space and form, layering depth and subtlety into stark, often minimal compositions. His works invite collectors and viewers alike to slow down, consider what is typically unseen, and find elegance in the irregular.

Jessica Damsky

Jessica Damsky’s work appropriates and recontextualizes classical imagery to examine the enduring control over women’s bodies, roles, and rights. Using oil painting and other two-dimensional media, she draws from art history, mythology, and American visual culture to confront the ways femininity has been idealized, suppressed, and politicized.

Referencing well-known archetypes and compositions from Titian’s Sacred and Profane Love to the reclining nude, Damsky exposes how these images shape societal expectations. Her compositions are intentionally disquieting: historical painting techniques and sublime American landscapes are used to signal that we are living in a present that feels like a distorted past. This tension is central to her work. By placing women’s bodies within symbolic, mythic, and political frameworks, she highlights how outdated ideals persist in modern times, especially amid threats to women’s rights and democratic values.

Her landscapes based on real places evoke the grandeur and the violence inherent in American identity, reflecting a nation capable of both beauty and harm. Damsky’s practice is a visual reckoning with that contradiction.

Terry McMaster

Terry McMaster’s practice is grounded in the exploration of symbolic imagery, mythic
resonance, and the sacred embedded in both nature and culture. Working in painting, collage, and mixed media, he draws from the material traditions of ancient civilizations and the subconscious terrain of dreams and archetypes. His art seeks out the unusual,
the mysterious, and the layered meanings that exist beyond the surface of things.

With imagery sourced from both personal and collective unconscious experience, McMaster’s compositions are charged with psychological and spiritual tension. Animals, spirits, and human forms appear in ritual-like spaces, echoing mythic traditions while also creating new ones. He invites the viewer into unfamiliar visual territory. Challenging perception and revealing what might otherwise go unnoticed or unrecognized.

For McMaster, art is a sacred act of retrieval and transformation. His work probes the
edges of understanding, where symbolic forms serve as vessels of mystery, power, and
potential. By engaging deeply with the strange and the symbolic, he opens a space for awe, curiosity, and the re-enchantment of vision.

Marian Brek

Marian Brek, known to many as Majchi, is a Slovakian-born, self-taught artist whose vibrant mixed media work fuses elements of abstraction, cubism, and pop art. Drawing from a rich cultural heritage and a lifetime of global experiences, Majchi channels his passion for painting into bold, emotionally resonant compositions that speak to joy, movement, and human connection.

Majchi’s work is known for its use of geometric forms, female figures, animal symbolism, and playful energy. He works with a wide range of materials including acrylic, oil, spray, and marker—bringing a dynamic, layered texture to every piece. With each brushstroke, Majchi aims to provoke thought, spark conversation, and inspire connection on a deeper level.

His work has been exhibited internationally and is held in private collections across Europe and beyond. For Majchi, art is not just a profession—it’s a lifestyle, a source of healing, and a powerful form of communication. His ongoing artistic journey is a testament to self-expression, constant reinvention, and the universal language of visual art.

Gülnar Babayeva

Gülnar Babayeva is a figurative sculptor and designer whose work explores the human form as a timeless vessel of identity, memory, and transformation. Originally from Azerbaijan and now based in New York’s Hudson Valley, she creates sculptures and ceramic forms that merge traditional craftsmanship with a contemporary sensibility.

Her multidisciplinary approach reflects her ability to move fluidly between functional design and purely expressive forms, often blurring the boundaries between the two. Drawing on a deep understanding of materiality, Babayeva’s works carry an elemental presence; earthy, tactile, and grounded, while evoking an intimate connection between viewer and subject.

Joel Brown

Joel Brown’s ceramic sculptures reflect a deep architectural sensibility shaped by years in building design and construction. His process is physical and collaborative, involving multi-day wood firings in kilns modeled after ancient Japanese designs. Flames and ash leave their unpredictable marks on the surfaces, making the kiln itself a creative partner in every piece.

Brown’s work begins with hand-built segments that are later composed into larger sculptural forms, open to variation and reconfiguration. Whether stacked, spiraled, or nested, his structures evoke fragmented alphabets, ruined temples, or landscapes imagined through time. While abstraction is at the core of his practice, viewers often associate his work with ancient dwellings, skeletal frameworks, or languages carved in
stone.

Rooted in ritual and repetition, his practice honors materiality, impermanence, and transformation. He embraces the unpredictable nature of wood-fired surfaces, allowing the process to co-author each piece. Joel Brown’s sculptures invite viewers to draw their own meanings, often seeing echoes of myth, architecture, or memory in the tactile and timeworn forms.

Anuki Bujiashvili

Anuki Bujiashvili’s work explores the intersection of mysticism, science, and the human subconscious. Drawing from ancient mythology, existential thought, and quantum physics, she constructs symbolic, dreamlike images that challenge perceptions of reality. Her paintings are layered with texture and emotion, often depicting figures in states of transformation or concealment embodying a tension between the known and the unknowable.

Anuki approaches her practice as a journey into the enigmatic. She uses abstraction, symbolic forms, and shadowy compositions to evoke mystery and introspection. Mythological archetypes, especially female figures such as Persephone, appear throughout her work, serving as vessels for stories of power, vulnerability, and timelessness. Her paintings create portals into a shared human consciousness, blurring the lines between past and present, spirituality and science, reality and illusion.

Through her work, Anuki invites viewers into a contemplative space. One where the subconscious meets cosmic forces, and ancient narratives resonate with contemporary existential concerns.

Neil Lavey

Neil Lavey creates mythologically charged and emotionally resonant sculptures that
blend classical form with contemporary sensibility. Drawing influence from Renaissance and Baroque masters like Michelangelo, Bernini, and Caravaggio, as well as modern figures like Thomas Hart Benton and Rodin. Lavey’s work reinterprets traditional
narratives through a distinctly personal and often fantastical lens.

His figures are steeped in symbolism, often embodying transformation, vulnerability, or
internal conflict. Through mythological references and dramatic gesture, Lavey explores the complexities of identity, masculinity, and emotional expression. He frequently works in bronze and 3D printed resin, integrating digital tools with centuries-old sculptural traditions.

With over three decades of practice, Lavey’s sculptures challenge the viewer to connect
across time, myth, and material. His art is a search for shared meaning, where ancient archetypes meet modern humanity in moments of tenderness, confrontation, or quiet introspection

Lisa Barker

Lisa Barker’s sculptural work is rooted in reverence for the feminine divine, for ancient power, and for the meditative process of creation itself. Working primarily with clay, stone, wood, and mixed materials, she brings to life figures that evoke myth, memory, and spiritual presence. Her sculptures are guided by a quiet intensity, often drawing from Egyptian iconography and archetypes of feminine sovereignty to explore what it means to embody clarity, strength, and light.

Her process is deeply intuitive, shaped by both her background in healing and her connection to the natural and symbolic power of materials. Whether casting in bronze or hand-sculpting clay forms nested in carved stone, Lisa seeks to honor the inner radiance of sacred figures and ancestral memory. Many of her works function as meditative vessels. Offering stillness, protection, and transformation to the viewer.

Through a blend of timeless symbolism and modern materiality, Lisa Barker’s work invites contemplation and inner recognition. Each piece holds space for the enduring essence of the feminine: grounded, sovereign, and illuminated from within.

Kiera Stuart

My artistic practice is deeply rooted in exploring relationship dynamics, the connection between the human body and nature, and the vulnerability inherent in both. Through drawing and painting, I create figures in diaristic psychological planes, weaving surreal narratives that question physical surroundings and emotional attachments.

The characters in my work exist in a liminal space
interconnected with each other and the physical world, investigating the fragility of human existence and the ecosystem. My figures are often androgynous and racially nonspecific, prompting reflection on the commonalities that bind us beyond mere appearances. I find solace in the idea that
many people have experienced similar internal conflicts, fostering a shared emotional experience.

The personal is often universal, a reminder that none of us are truly alone. I aspire to create dreamscapes—spaces for introspection on fragility, beauty, and the interconnected nature of existence. My work serves as a bridge between the
psychological and environmental, aiming to embolden social and environmental justice.

Art, for me, is both a healing process and an act of hope for a more just and compassionate future.

Michael Levchenko

Michael Levchenko’s sculptural practice explores memory as a fragile, evolving imprint
rather than a static truth. While his broader body of work spans digital and hybrid
techniques, his marble sculptures emphasize form as a vessel for emotional resonance.

A silent yet persistent language that speaks to how we remember, misremember, and
long to feel. He draws from primal, prehistorical aesthetics to tap into an ancient clarity of expression, using stone not just as a medium but as a metaphor for time itself.
Subtle imperfections in the carving process are intentionally preserved, reflecting the
distortions and edits that naturally occur in memory.

These minimalist, organic forms
hold emotional weight, inviting the viewer to engage with the tension between fragility
and permanence. Levchenko’s work is a meditation on the artifacts of feeling quietly
powerful, carved in stone, and open to reinterpretation.

Baju Wijon

Baju Wijono’s work is a dynamic fusion of mythology, resistance, and emotional expression, driven by a desire to reclaim marginalized narratives. His paintings are bold, biomorphic, and often confrontational. Layered with symbolism, gesture, and contradiction. He blends the elegance of calligraphic mark-making with the intensity of expressionist abstraction, creating compositions that pulse with color and tension while revealing hidden figures, faces, or symbols that surface upon closer look.

Much of his work interrogates the inherited stories we tell about gods, gender, power, and history. Pushing back against traditional mythologies that have been filtered through patriarchal, colonial, or heteronormative lenses. Through energetic brushwork and subversive imagery, Wijono challenges the viewer to consider alternate cosmologies, ones where ecstasy, queerness, and sacred madness are celebrated rather than erased.

Whether through portraiture or abstraction, his practice is an act of reclamation and re-enchantment. His work doesn’t just paint mythology, it rewrites it. Through veils of color, tension, and intuition, Wijono explores what it means to see, to feel, and to be seen on one’s own terms.

Nataliya Hines

Nataliya Hines creates richly layered, symbolic artworks that exist at the intersection of myth, memory, and machine. Her practice spans painting and digital media, exploring the blurred lines between the sacred and the synthetic, the ancient and the futuristic. Across her work, she constructs imagined figures and ceremonial scenes that feel both archetypal and speculative. Anchored in ritual yet shaped by modernity.

Her visual language draws from religious iconography, academic portraiture, folklore, and science fiction. Repeating motifs like feathers, fabric, carved objects, or hybrid beings serve as portals into layered narratives that question how meaning is made and remade over time. Whether exploring transformation, identity, or spiritual inheritance, her work invites the viewer into a world just beyond the edge of recognition, where something mythic, mechanical, and deeply human persists.

Hines asks: What remains when the story changes? What happens when technology
becomes part of the ritual? And how do we carry memory forward when the sacred meets the synthetic?

Elizabeth Arnold

Elizabeth Arnold approaches the visual arts through the lens of a clinical psychologist trained in indigenous medicine traditions. A self-taught artist, she draws from Folk Art, Outsider Art, and Art Brut, using humble, found materials such as bark, moss, and bone to construct immersive environments rich with symbolic meaning.

Her practice explores the intersections of autobiography, mysticism, cultural memory, and the sacred feminine. Inspired by ideas of interspecies communication, deep listening, and plant consciousness, Arnold works with imagery rooted in animism and the intricate, unseen networks that connect all living beings such as the mycelium systems beneath our feet. She views the human body as a living archive, holding the stories, traumas, and wisdom of generations.

Arnold’s installations, including Madre Selva, are conceived as spaces for reflection and reconnection. Inviting viewers to step into a dialogue between science, spirituality, and myth. Her work challenges linear concepts of time, instead embracing a multidimensional perspective that honors ancestral presence, ecological reciprocity, and the interconnected nature of life.