Los Angeles native Laura Isabel Castellanos is the Hive gallery’s newest featured artist and resident. Castellanos’s captivating doe-eyed figures are a refreshing simulacrum to the works of multiple Italian masters such as Botticelli, Bernardino Luini, and Girolamo da Santacroce. Pulling influence from mythology, spirituality and art history, Castellanos has skillfully blended the vivacious energy of the current pop surrealist movement with the ornate extravagance of the high Renaissance. Castellanos’s willowy figures elegantly laze in lush, whimsical landscapes, often accompanied by a furry, winsome companion. A combination of cream-like brushwork, saturated hues and a caricature-like distortion of her subject’s features have surly made Castellanos a true avant-garde in her métier.
