Michael Azgour

Three Time Art Party Participant • Virtual Gallery*

Vintage Vacation Memory

Artist’s Website

www.azgour.com

Artist’s Statement

My paintings are influenced by the ubiquity of digital photography in contemporary life.

Building on the commonly held presumption that a photograph is a sufficient representation of a memory, I often combine unrelated images together in the same composition in order to challenge the viewer’s interpretation of a picture.

Simple geometric patterns and expressive applications of paint represent the distortion, motion blurs, and pixilation of low-resolution digital photography, which is common in today’s social media. Repeated figures are used to reference bracketing in photography and movement in video.

The surfaces of my paintings are very different from that of actual photographs. Paint is built up over the course of many layers to yield a rich, varied surface that is very different from the mediums of photo paper and LED displays.

About the Artist

Michael Azgour is a Californian artist, currently working between San Francisco and Krakow, Poland. His paintings have been exhibited in galleries across the US and Europe and are part of numerous collections.

Michael’s abstract figurative paintings focus on expressive and geometric abstractions of the figure and environment. He uses the medium of oil on canvas to talk about a very different media—photography—and the changing function of images in contemporary society. His unique painting process combines distortions in form, depth, and an emphasis on expressive paint application to create visual ambiguity and mystery.

Michael teaches art and design courses at Stanford University and the San Francisco Art Institute.

Virtual Gallery

Michael s in Poland this year and can’t make the Art Party, but he misses us, and we all want him to come back.  Visit his website!  Tell him he is amazing.

– Anne