Trevor Mikula

Trevor Mikula’s slyly humorous paintings move between simple renderings of commonplace objects and geometric still lifes to surrealistic figurative tableaux and even bold-faced text works. Mikula depicts vivid thickets of flowers, fishbowls of whales and tropical fish, and geometrically designed cows in thick impasto brushstrokes and rich fields of color. His work brings to mind a range of artistic forebears, from the Surrealist juxtapositions of Salvador Dalí to the dense expressionism of Gustav Klimt and the Pop art playfulness of Ed Ruscha. Mikula uses a palette knife to achieve his thick hand, and he often uses decorative elements such as gold leaf.