Mexican artist Ramiro Chávez Tovar has created another mesmerising Op Art piece called “Nested Spaces” or “Espacios Anidados” using only black, white and various shades of grey.  As with his previous ‘Ghost‘ piece, “Nested Spaces” is almost impossible to look at for any length of time and has a very strong visual effect.

Espacios Anidados – Nested Spaces – Ramiro Chávez Tovar

You can see the original piece over at Ramiro’s Deviant Art page.

Although clearly not an ‘Op Artist’ in any traditional sense Sasha Braunig uses some of the techniques employed by the Op Artists, making use of high contrast colours and repeating geometric patterns and shapes in order to create a distancing and vibrating effect for the viewer.  However, unlike the Op Artists, Sascha’s work is not purely abstract – they are in fact portraits – and this allows her to introduce what she calls a ‘psychological’ effect as well as ‘retinal’ effect.

Her series of portraits, three of which are shown below, combine elements of Surrealist Art, Baroque Art and Op Art to stunning and somewhat hypnotic effect.

Untitled (icy spicy) 2011 Sascha Braunig – Oil on Canvas over wood panel 66×48.3cm

You can see more of Sascha’s fascinating work here.

Record High – 2012 – Sascha Braunig – Oil on Linen over panel – 40.6 x 50.8cm

Sascha currently lives and works in Portland, ME. She holds a BFA from The Cooper Union, New York, and an MFA in painting from Yale University.

Goldwarp – 2010 – Sascha Braunig- Oil on canvas – 46 x 35.5 cm

Bloomberg recently teamed up with Artnet to analyse the sale prices for the works of around 1,000 artists (living and dead) in order to determine which artists’ works were increasing in value the most.

Cleveland based ‘first generation’ Op Artist Julian Stanczak came out 6th in their analysis with his works increasing in value over 3,000% over the last 12 years.

Stanczak was one of the artists who was featured in the groundbreaking ‘Responsive Eye’ exhibition that really brought Op Art to the attention of the mainstream in the mid 1960s.  He is currently 81 years old and is still painting. He lives in Ohio with his wife Barbara.

You can see the top 15 hottest artist list at Bloomberg’s site.