Tal R, "The Shlomo"

The work of this Danish artist—who was actually born in Israel to a Danish mother and a Holocaust-survivor Jewish father—are strange, indeed, though in the most compelling sense. His mix of styles and subject matter harken back to the café and street scenes of late-19th- and early-20th-century modernism, and his particular medium—pigment mixed with rabbit-skin glue—coat his canvases in a dry, pastellike sheen. Though his colors are bright and his approach to figuration cartoonishly naive, his paintings are shrouded by a mysteriously dark pall, as if you were viewing them through a filter. If Madeline creator Ludwig Bemelmans could be resurrected somehow as Franz Kafka, his work might look something like this.