Although never an official member, Paul Delvaux (b. 1897 - d. 1994) was a Belgian painter associated with the Belgian Surrealist movement. Delvaux was greatly influenced by his contemporary, René Magritte, yet his paintings also possessed their own twist on the realist tradition of older Flemish artists like Jan van Eyck. His compositions almost exclusively feature somnambulant women in various states of undress, sleepwalking seductresses roaming a vaguely Romanesqe dreamscape rife with enigmatic visual allegories.

Julie Mehretu's large-scale, mixed media paintings create a dizzying field of layered landscapes to construct colorful and complex and lines. Throughout her painting process Julie will add architectural and geometric sketches in ink, smudges of acrylic paint and then sand everything down to create a smooth finish. Someone has done us the pleasure of creating GIFs of this process from a PBS video segment called "Systems." See the GIFs and watch the video after the jump...

The mystical and the erotic converge in I:MAGE, a week-long exhibition showcasing the best international artists working today in the emerging genre of esoteric art. More than 16 artists will exhibit their work at Store Street Gallery in Bloomsbury, London, from Sunday May 19th to Saturday May 25th, 2013. The common thread between the exhibiting artists is the internalization of esoteric themes and the externalization of the mythical, the magical, the carnal, and the mysterious in their many forms. 

In our May 2013 issue,  Juxtapoz was honored to have the chance to speak with enigmatic Norwegian artist, Odd Nerdrum. Writer David Molesky finished the piece and headed to France for a special exhibition and open house that the Nerdrum Museum held at the artist's home in Maisons-Laffitte. The event also served as a release for a new book from the Nerdrum Museum called, "Crime and Refuge."

One of our favorite artists that we learned about last year was Rhode Island-born, Christian Rex van Minnen. The paintings he had at Copro Gallery in Santa Monica were absolute standouts, a new, bizarre twist on pop-surrealism and classical painting that just captured our attention. We just saw some of his newer works, and wanted to show them today.

This past December 2012, we featured the works of Nicola Verlato in our print magazine. Because he was so articulate and detailed in his expression, we asked him to interview fellow Italian artist Fulvio di Piazza for our April 2013 issue. Because he was so good at that, when Verlato sent us a video of his process for creating the magnificent painting, Burzum, we want to show people how a painter really gets down. 

One of our favorite painters that we have learned about over the past year is Romanian artist Dan Voinea, who mixes both a classical realist style with an almost performance like character connstruction. Voinea just opened a solo show, A Momentary Rise of Reason, at Beers.Lambert Contemporary in London. As the gallery notes, " Yet while technically realistic and anatomically correctly proportioned, the works are characterized as much by their apparent lack of realism: their fantastical tendencies, collapsing or nondescript environments and preference for magic realist narratives. "

Via our friends at Juxtapoz Latin America, Brooklyn based Matt Leines recently opened a solo exhibition, Hyperbolic, at Beginnings in Brooklyn. After living in Philadelphia for a few years, the artist moved to New York and settled into a rhythm that was both fresh and cheerful, or as the gallery notes: "Those who follow (Leines') work may have noticed a shift in the last few years, somebody flipped a switch in the artist’s brain–or maybe spun a dial–and all sorts of things began to happen: visible spectrum increasing, palette spinning out, subjects becoming more universal and less referential.

Spread across MOCA Grand Avenue and The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, the first survey in the United States of the Swiss-born artist Urs Fischer weaves together some of his most memorable and iconic sculptural works while creating an unexpected landscape in both venues.

Painter Derek Stefanuk was born in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan in 1980. Since graduating from the Alberta College of Art & Design in 2004, Stefanuk has found steady work as a fine artist, a scenic artist, and a painter for theater and cinema. His subjects have been almost always been figurative, with a special focus on portraits of women in a style that could be best defined as expressionistic realism.