Gallery

Suspended Central Mountain Time, 2018

Flashe, oil and acrylic on dibond
54 x 72 inches

Melissa Brown was born in Morristown, NJ and now resides and works in Brooklyn, NY. Brown uses simple line drawings like a puzzle in which a variety of painting techniques, (silk screen, flashe, airbrush, oil paint, resin, etc.) are collaged into the drawn shapes, coming together to form a single experience or atmospheric space.

Of her work, she has said: “I make paintings, animations, and performances that explore what is otherworldly about ordinary experience. I use a collage of techniques—observational oil painting, stencil, airbrush, and photo-silkscreen—to create a multi-registered view of reality.” Her work is in the permanent collections at the Whitney Museum of Art and the New York City Department of Education.t

Gold and Silver, 2021

Ink and collage on watercolor paper
10 3/4 x 7 3/4 inches

Matthew F Fisher paints idealized scenes of nature that appear suspended in time, such as a perfectly uniform wave at its peak just before breaking. The meditative process through which he works is reflected in the calmness of his paintings. Fisher slowly and intentionally layers acrylic and ink onto the canvas, rendering objects with such dimension and volume that they appear sculptural against flat, gradient backgrounds. Inspired by childhood memories of spending time near the water and contemplating the vastness of the ocean, Fisher often paints seascapes featuring recurring motifs such as seagulls, crustaceans, and the rising and setting sun. These symbols are rearranged in each painting to create new compositions and narratives.

Fisher’s paintings exist within this memory-as-reality, semi-rational in their structure. Using the language of landscape painting as the middle ground between figuration and abstraction, Fisher simultaneously references past, present, and future. This nod creates a limbo between polarities of natural and artificial, action and frozen, real and imagined and is where the narrative starts, and like the painted image, is finished in the viewer's mind.

Compression, 2022

Oil on linen
23 5/8 x 19 11/16 inches

Since 2014, Rob Lyon has been painting the unique landscape of the South Downs in England where he grew up and later returned to raise his family. Inspired by long walks amongst its distinct ridges of wooded rolling hills and valleys, dramatic skies, and sweeping vistas, the artist works methodically and meditatively to capture and inscribe the unique spirits encountered there

Common motifs of birds, hills, trees, and other foliage, depicted in expressive colors, strong lines, and patterned brushstrokes, assemble on the canvas in simplified forms, repeating and reassembling, held in harmonic tension as though briefly caught between moments of entropic flux. Various combinations of dots, lines, and shapes create a graphic language that is sometimes consistent, but often not. A field of grey with white lines in one scene fills a sky in the next, while treetops merge into hills and horizon lines bleed into the landscape. In exploring grief and loss through an evolving relationship to the landscape, Lyon is able to meditate on that which is beyond the scope of human understanding—time, death, the vastness of the natural world—constructing a complex world of visual mythmaking that tells more than just stories of the past, present, or future, but of fundamental relationships that mutually construct one another perpetually.

figure 4, 2022

Oil and acrylic on canvas
36 x 29 inches

Edgar Bryan’s paintings are imbued with moments of vulnerability and a sense of light-hearted honesty. Known for work characterized by a self-effacing sense of humor, Bryan's process centers on a layered materiality and a well-developed sense of color, moving back and forth between a comical ineptitude and masterful virtuosity. Bryan updates classic forms of still-life and self-portraiture with irreverence and a highly finessed color palette replete with domestic objects and pop-cultural motifs. Often working from the standpoint of the clown or the fool, Bryan stages scenes that introspectively meditate upon the idea of the failed artist, lending the depths of self-reflection an air of comic relief. Each canvas possesses a theatrical quality – layers of frozen action and interaction absorb one another, condensing into logically self-contained narratives.

Bryan’s paintings center process over content: games, thought experiments, and self-imposed assignments create an initial impetus, guiding the ensuing flow of rich colors and characters. These works offer no concrete arguments or overdetermined statements. Rather, each canvas becomes a pretext for introspection, inviting the viewer into a world which at once both familiar and prickly, open-hearted and gently self-deprecating

Get behind me Satan!, 2021

Crochet, yarn, t-shirt, Levi's jeans and Vans shoes
67 x 39 x 14 inches

Luis Flores's approach to art-making involves a deliberate combination of the mechanics of self-portraiture and fabric material. The artist is best known for his life-size doppelgängers —soft sculptures constructed with hand-crocheted yarn. A limited engagement with and access to emotions is a hallmark of American masculinity, and Flores processes these notions of social norms and gender stereotypes through the form of his own body, which is in fact constructed by means of a craft often explicitly attached to the female gender. With these elements, he tackles the subject of what it was like to grow up identifying as a man, and the boundaries therein. His particular pairings provoke these social constructs and the language we use to describe them.

Flores’s work ranges from sculpture, installation, and video performance to painting and drawing. His life-size soft sculptures, constructed with hand-crocheted yarn are like doppelgängers, whereas his small-scaled crocheted works, such as Cusi, or caste sculptures, such as Venus, are re-imaginations explorations of art history. Flores’ work continually taps into a limited engagement with and access to emotions as a hallmark of masculinity, race in America, and gender expectations and stereotypes

Lilted inflexion, 2022

Oil on linen
54 x 72 inches

Since 2014, Rob Lyon has been painting the unique landscape of the South Downs in England where he grew up and later returned to raise his family. Inspired by long walks amongst its distinct ridges of wooded rolling hills and valleys, dramatic skies, and sweeping vistas, the artist works methodically and meditatively to capture and inscribe the unique spirits encountered there.

Common motifs of birds, hills, trees, and other foliage, depicted in expressive colors, strong lines, and patterned brushstrokes, assemble on the canvas in simplified forms, repeating and reassembling, held in harmonic tension as though briefly caught between moments of entropic flux. Various combinations of dots, lines, and shapes create a graphic language that is sometimes consistent, but often not. A field of grey with white lines in one scene fills a sky in the next, while treetops merge into hills and horizon lines bleed into the landscape. In exploring grief and loss through an evolving relationship to the landscape, Lyon is able to meditate on that which is beyond the scope of human understanding—time, death, the vastness of the natural world—constructing a complex world of visual mythmaking that tells more than just stories of the past, present, or future, but of fundamental relationships that mutually construct one another perpetually.

Be Me (Spun Out), 2020

Hot-sculpted glass and bronze
11 x 5 3/4 x 6 3/4 inches

Working in a variety of media, such as wax, bronze, fire, glass, silicone, copper, and rope, Kelly Akashi investigates the capacity and boundaries of these elements and their ability to construct and challenge conventional concepts of form. Drawing attention to the fluidity and interconnectedness of the media she uses, Akashi aims to capture the tension and physicality of objects in her practice.

Currently, Akashi has a major solo exhibition at the San Jose Museum of Art, which will travel to the Frye Museum of Art in Seattle in 2023. Her work can be found in the permanent collections of the Brooklyn Museum, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; CC Foundation, Shanghai; X Museum, Beijing; The Perimeter, London; David Roberts Art Foundation, London; Sifang Museum, Nanjing, among others

& Ganga water glistens, 2020

Boxing gloves, vintage textiles and chain
46 x 9 x 9 inches

Zoë Buckman’s multidisciplinary practice incorporates sculpture, textiles, ceramics, photography, and large-scale public installations. Adopting an explicitly feminist approach, her work explores identity, trauma, and gendered violence, subverting preconceived notions of vulnerability and strength.

Buckman regularly chooses to work with objects symbolically associated with gender. Whilst her oft-adopted boxing gloves hint at a bellicose masculinity, the artist also incorporates vintage fabrics into her work, from lingerie to dishcloths and table linen. These textiles, traditionally used and decorated by women, recall an intimacy with the body and a proximity to the domestic space. Bearing traces of their past, vintage fabrics point to a history of patriarchal subjugation, but also to the necessity and comfort of intergenerational dialogue between women.

Both verbal and non-verbal dialogue is an integral part of Buckman’s practice. Her eclectic choices of source material, the snatches of conversation, stained tablecloths, hip-hop lyrics, and, especially, lines from her late playwright mother’s scripts, all represent mnemonic totems which, when taken together, establish a deeply personal constellation of the artist’s lived experience.

Untitled (western tanager, female red shouldered hawk, American crow, American goldfinch, barn swallow, red-breasted nuthatch, western meadowlark), 2022

Oil on canvas
56 x 46 inches

Howard Fonda fills his canvases with colorful portraits, flowers, and a spattering of other figurative subjects, as well as ebullient abstract compositions derived from nature. He achieves a sense of immediacy through loose brushstrokes, which, as Michelle Grabner wrote, “serve as an abstract field, the artist privileging intuition over illustration and conveying transcendental philosophy without strictly picturing a divinely invested natural world.” Ever philosophical and introspective, Fonda expresses a romantic worldview through text-based paintings, such as an untitled work from 2011, composed of the words “endless, timeless, limitless, nothingness,” written in sprawling violet letters across a sky-blue background. His series of untitled works from 2012, as well as his largely autobiographical paintings and drawings from 2013, embody his conviction that, “the difference between representation and abstraction is like the difference between clouds and sky.”

Gilded (Split Being), 2019

Acrylic and gold leaf on fabric, poplar
48 x 24 x 2 1/2 inches

Peridot Fiddle

Woven textiles, sherpa, glitter, resin, metallic thread, acrylic paint on canvas
36 x 24 inches

April Bey grew up in The Bahamas and now resides and works in Los Angeles, CA as a visual artist and art educator. Bey’s interdisciplinary artwork is an introspective and social critique of American and Bahamian culture, feminism, generational theory, social media, AfroFuturism, AfroSurrealism, post-colonialism and constructs of race within supremacist systems. Bey’s incorporation of mass-produced objects and reproductive media including printmaking and video underscores the means by which images come to define reality through their incessant replication in a world we experience increasingly through virtual means.

Bey’s work is in the collection of The California African American Museum, The National Art Gallery of The Bahamas, The Center for Contemporary Printmaking, Fullerton College Art Gallery, Museum of Art and History, Lancaster, CA, and more. Bey has exhibited in biennials NE7, NE8 and NE9 in The Bahamas. Bey has also exhibited internationally in Italy, Spain and Accra Ghana, West Africa.

b. 1979 Blue Curl, 2018

Oil on canvas
78 3/4 x 51 1/8 inches

Bernhard Buhmann is an Austrian painter whose surreal paintings conjure alternate realities, complete with jesters, buskers, and flying machines. Buhmann works from his imagination, fusing elements from art history and science fiction to create images that are uniquely dream-like in their inherent formal familiarity, but are in fact complete surrealist fantasy. The works are whimsical, but his manifested mental world can quickly turn ominous. Buhmann’s canvases are sizable enough to envelop and immerse viewers in layers of color and dense imagery, emphasizing an illusionistic effect; “they [the machines] seem to be three-dimensional, even if it’s not possible,” he says.

b. 1974 No. 10, 2018

Oil pastel, charcoal, acrylic and newspaper mounted on canvas
30 x 24 inches

Derek Fordjour makes paintings, sculptures, and installations whose exuberant visual materiality gives rise to portraits and other multilayered compositions. Born of both broad sociological vision and a keen awareness of the body’s vulnerability, Fordjour’s tableaux are filled with athletes, performers, and others who play key roles in cultural rituals and communal rites of passage. In his paintings, Fordjour methodically constructs the ground of each composition through a collage-based process involving cardboard, newspaper, and other materials and pigments. The varied and textural surfaces that emerge are as complex—and physically engaging—as the dynamic subjects that Fordjour inscribes on top, within, and through them

His ability to grapple with many strata of artmaking on physical, conceptual, and straightforwardly human terms alike allows his project to communicate the widest possible array of emotions, from celebration and ecstasy to melancholy and lamentation. This, in turn, allows Fordjour to connect to audiences inside and outside of traditional art venues.

Scrim, 2022

Oil on hemp
32 x 28 inches

Nat Meade is a Brooklyn-based painter and educator who uses his work to reflect on the complex feelings that surround the experience of moving through different phases of life. The figures in Meade’s paintings become stand-ins for himself in his investigation of the experience of becoming an adult, husband, and parent, each character viewed through the dual lens of self-scrutiny and societal expectation.

Meade details his process: “I start with an image: a photograph, someone I notice during the day, a scene from movie, often a memory. I make several small studies on paper, basing each study on the previous one as in the game Telephone. I pin the successful studies to the wall and use them as references for the final painting. As with the works on paper, the painting goes through several iterations. I cover the canvas with color, scrape it down and work back into the phantom image. I do this over and over. I reduce and make the forms tangible to my eyes while zeroing in on the parts that sparked my initial curiosity. My subjects are meant to be elevated and beatific and at the same time buffoonish and absurd.”

Tiradero, As the world turns, 2022

Found mosaiced materials, mirrored glass, latex, acrylic on polytherane coated foam
Ball: 33 x 31 x 33 inches Donut: 68 x 60 x 19 inches

Los Angeles-based artist Mindy Shapero (b. 1974) fuses mythology with spirituality into her sculptures, paintings, and works on paper. Investigating an on-going fabricated but literary-informed story through her work, Shapero gives form to characters, symbols, and myths through a perfected craft technique.

Nearly assuming the role of a shaman, her works transport the viewer into her fantastical and dynamic world. Using media like tile, steel, foam, acrylic paint, and silver leaf, Shapero layers the materials gleefully and obsessively on top of each another. Seemingly free of cynicism, Shapero embraces a visionary tradition from the mysticism of William Blake, the supernatural, and Romanticism, to psychedelic shamanism.

Tuscaloosa, 2020

Oil, acrylic and Flashe on canvas
24 x 18 inches

Chino Amobi is an American experimental electronic musician, contemporary artist and director. Amobi’s series of oil-on-canvas still life paintings of exotic floral species, echoes his accelerated experience traveling and performing throughout the world as a celebrated musician.

Amobi approaches painting with the same vernacular as his music compositions, and vice versa; using sound as a means of immersing the listener into the space of a landscape, envisioning each moment in his musical arrangements as a painting. So too, his paintings frame visions of life bursting forth in a fevered neon dream with sonic vibrations: the exotic bloom a proxy for his entranced audience on the dancefloor, at the height of ecstasy, at the peak of inflorescence.

Salmos 31:15, 2022

Terracotta, gold and jade
19 x 17 x 15 inches

While celebrating life, death, and the afterlife, Joel Gaitan’s work studies the matters of self-identity, sexuality, and ancestral lineage. From forgotten tongues, to erased cultures, Gaitan immerses into traditional hand building clay techniques, keeping a sacred tradition from Nicaragua & Central America alive in a colonized world. Raised within Pentecostalism, Gaitan still carries the music, verses, and The Holy Spirit with his own interpretation. Gaitan highlights Nicaragüense lifestyle and aesthetics with ceramics and other mediums depicting portraits, utilizing elements of poetry, colors, and storytelling. Gaitan uses each work as an offering to the ancestors; those who have been encountered, and those who have not.

Pocket, 2022

Oil on panel
20 1/8 × 16 inches

RJ Messineo makes paintings involving observation and abstraction. Concerned with experiences living in and moving through public and interior spaces, the works implicate the body and reference landscape, the street, windows, beds, and blankets. Messineo engages a wide, and sometimes incongruous range of scale relationships, mark-making, and compositional structures to make the paintings, from expressionist gesture to process-based systems and chance encounters. Many of the large paintings incorporate sheets of plywood adhered to the surface of the canvas, often extending beyond the rectangular picture plane to create idiosyncratic shapes. The rigid elements allow Messineo to push the application and texture of the oil paint – thick, impasto sections are scraped onto the surface or carved into, scribbling marks fade into shifting moments of washy, brushed-on color.

Chair with lilies, 2018

Acrylic on canvas
16 x 20 inches

Long-time Bay Area resident Shana Sharp paints the world around her. Whether it be the idyllic, if endangered landscapes around Sonoma, flowers from her garden or the architecture of Roma Sur in Mexico City, what she depicts is almost always experienced first hand, photographed, and then painted with a disarming honesty and directness. It is almost as if things were suddenly, yet carefully seen, and then portrayed as such. How does she do this? Unencumbered by any conventional, academic training, she manages to preserve the relative purity of a personal, idiosyncratic vision of the world while foregrounding the sensual immediacy of paint.

In other words, the work is refreshingly bullshit-free (the near impossible dream of every painter). If becoming a painter is a process of learning everything and forgetting it in order to develop one’s own language, then Sharp seems to have skipped this process and gone directly to her own marking making and pictorial idiom. Nevertheless, it is not difficult to see echoes of say Alice Neel or Fairfield Porter in the intimacy of what she makes. Some have remarked parallels to the work with Lois Dodd or Charles Burchfield, but what and how Sharp paints is irreducibly her own.

Phalynx, 2022

Oil on linen
20 x 16 inches

For the New York based abstract painter Tom Burckhardt the idea of absurdity has been a compelling point of departure which has led him to push and question the very integrity of a painting as an object. Many of Burckhardt’s recent works have been executed on cast plastic made from molds crafted by the artist giving him a quasi-standardized though slightly uneven object to paint upon. Tom’s abstraction are amalgamations of dissociative forms, colors or patterns forced into a given matrix and left to coexist in this tenuous community of various visual vocabularies. In fact, the opportunity for play extends beyond the picture plane as the artist goes so far as to paint tacks along the stretcher side and even the stretcher bars on the verso of the works further pushing the boundaries of painting and sculpture. The works are always at play much as the artist is always at play with them in the studio and hopes that the viewer’s interlocutor will also join in this painterly paradox of contradictory commentaries.

Blue Cave and Moon, 2019

Oil, crayon, pastel, and acrylic on canvas
73 x 61 inches

The amorphic, animalistic forms of German painter Michael Bauer are built upon color washes, meandering lines, and bulbous protrusions. Utilizing a variety of rendering techniques and materials, including pointillism, text and high-chroma colors, Bauer transforms his free-form compositions into dynamic and ornamented abstractions. He borrows from the colorful tradition of Modernist composition, juxtaposing collaged cutouts with a bevy of 20th century painting methodologies—including Cubist, Pop, and Surrealist techniques—to make the swirling paintings he’s become known for.

Says Bauer of his process, “I will say, especially in paintings, there is always a figurative sense behind it. I look at figures and I look at inventions of figures. But then of course once you paint, it jumps back and forth between something that could be a landscape but is also certain color arrangements. So you’re constantly changing back in the way you look at it and in the way you work. It goes both ways.”

b. 1972 Xiniwe at Casshilhaus, North Carolina, 2016

Silver gelatin print
31 1/2 x 24 2/5 inches

South African photographer and filmmaker Zanele Muholi was born in 1972 in Umlazi, South Africa. Muholi self-identifies as a visual activist, and their development as a photographer is deeply intertwined with their advocacy on behalf of the LGBTQ community in South Africa and beyond. Muholi has produced a number of photographic series investigating the severe disconnect that exists in post-apartheid South Africa between the equality promoted by its 1996 Constitution and the ongoing bigotry

toward and violent acts targeting individuals within the LGBTQ community. As an ensemble, Muholi’s images display the depth and diversity of this group in South Africa and in various countries that the artist has visited.

In the individual black-and-white portraits of lesbians, women, and trans men that comprise Muholi’s ongoing Faces and Phases series (2006– ) the sitters’ nuanced expressions and distinctive dress challenge the formulaic frontal pose of traditional portraiture. While nearly all the people who appear in the series display a stony expression that boldly confronts the gaze of the viewer, each face intimates something different—curiosity, disenchantment, pride, frustration, or compassion. In constructing a visual archive of individuals from the LGBTQ community, Muholi also highlights the agency of the subjects by providing an outlet for self-representation.

Kale, 2018

Acrylic on canvas
18 x 24 inches

Long-time Bay Area resident Shana Sharp paints the world around her. Whether it be the idyllic, if endangered landscapes around Sonoma, flowers from her garden or the architecture of Roma Sur in Mexico City, what she depicts is almost always experienced first hand, photographed, and then painted with a disarming honesty and directness. It is almost as if things were suddenly, yet carefully seen, and then portrayed as such. How does she do this? Unencumbered by any conventional, academic training, she manages to preserve the relative purity of a personal, idiosyncratic vision of the world while foregrounding the sensual immediacy of paint.

In other words, the work is refreshingly bullshit-free (the near impossible dream of every painter). If becoming a painter is a process of learning everything and forgetting it in order to develop one’s own language, then Sharp seems to have skipped this process and gone directly to her own marking making and pictorial idiom. Nevertheless, it is not difficult to see echoes of say Alice Neel or Fairfield Porter in the intimacy of what she makes. Some have remarked parallels to the work with Lois Dodd or Charles Burchfield, but what and how Sharp paints is irreducibly her own.

Untitled, 2020

Oil on canvas
45 3/4 x 36 1/8 inches

Fusing European Expressionism with American popular culture, André Butzer has painted his way through the artistic and political extremes of the 20th century – life, death, consumption and mass entertainment – into the 21st century. With wide ranging influences including Paul Cézanne, Edvard Munch, Henri Matisse, as well as Walt Disney and Henry Ford, Butzer has developed a unique and elaborate fictitious universe.

Many iconic characters have come to populate Butzer’s ‘Science Fiction-Expressionism’ with their recognizable large comic-book eyes, inflated heads or oversized hands. First appearing in 1999, these bright figures and shapes continue to lure the viewer in subsequent bodies of work. Engaging with the fundamental dimensions of color, light and painterly expression, Butzer’s practice has shifted through the seemingly utter blackness of his N-Paintings, to a return to vibrancy, following his move to California between 2018 to 2021. Painting en plein air year-round, these recent works vibrate with a bold, energetic force.

Mechanism (study), 2019

Mica, aluminum and acrylic on canvas
28 x 26 inches

Tanya Goel is best known for her grid paintings that distil the mayhem of city life into orderly arrangements in colour. Informed by her interests in pigmentation, material and light, the artist reflects upon both changing landscapes and ruptures in spaces. Goel's process also calls alchemy to mind; the materials that comprise her paints are collected by the artist from buildings and demolition sites. Back in her studio, Goel pulverises and chemically analyses her found materials—including limestone, brick, mica, concrete, cement, glass, aluminium, soil, graphite and foils—before extracting pigments. Her paintings, then, not only document the city's architecture but also the artist's movements throughout the debris of the metropolis.

The artist is interested in the idea of the Screen, which painting has always been analogous with. We can trace the Screen through the trajectory of Art History from the flatness of Egyptian art to the simulated three-dimensional space of the Renaissance, back to the flatness of Modernist Abstraction. Goel’s works elaborate a dialogue for painting acknowledging the digital screens in which most of our information and images now reside, exploring both the limitations and the freedoms to be found within this flux.

Private Chamber Drawing I, 2020

Watercolor and ink on paper
12 x 9 inches

Amy Bessone is a Los Angeles-based visual artist whose practice across media challenges cultural representations of the female body, incorporating various art historical and kitsch references from Greco-Roman nudes to dime-store porcelain pinups. Subverting notions of female figuration and the male gaze, Bessone’s work addresses the dichotomies of high and low, gender and form. Using the physical body as a literal and conceptual framework, the artist exposes the fetishism of objects, both in the art world and as feminist theory

Bessone’s work is included in the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (CA); the Rubell Family Collection, Miami (FL); the Saatchi Collection, London (UK); and Frac Bretagne, Chateaugiron (FR).

Landscape, 2018

Acrylic on canvas
11 x 14 inches

Long-time Bay Area resident Shana Sharp paints the world around her. Whether it be the idyllic, if endangered landscapes around Sonoma, flowers from her garden or the architecture of Roma Sur in Mexico City, what she depicts is almost always experienced first hand, photographed, and then painted with a disarming honesty and directness. It is almost as if things were suddenly, yet carefully seen, and then portrayed as such. How does she do this? Unencumbered by any conventional, academic training, she manages to preserve the relative purity of a personal, idiosyncratic vision of the world while foregrounding the sensual immediacy of paint.

In other words, the work is refreshingly bullshit-free (the near impossible dream of every painter). If becoming a painter is a process of learning everything and forgetting it in order to develop one’s own language, then Sharp seems to have skipped this process and gone directly to her own marking making and pictorial idiom. Nevertheless, it is not difficult to see echoes of say Alice Neel or Fairfield Porter in the intimacy of what she makes. Some have remarked parallels to the work with Lois Dodd or Charles Burchfield, but what and how Sharp paints is irreducibly her own.

Psuper Psycho Jug, 2020

Glazed earthenware
12 1/2 x 10 x 8 inches

Sharif Farrag is a ceramic artist who merges classic ceramics styles with his own improvisational building techniques, representing his hybrid identities through clay. His esthetic combines influences from growing up near Los Angeles, discovering graffiti, and skateboarding, as well as his parents’ cultural backgrounds, and being raised Muslim in the U.S. post-9/11.

Blue Vase with Ladder, 2016

Oil on canvas
56 x 53 inches

Ginny Casey’s paintings feature decrepit interiors teeming with objects such as chisels, woodcutters, pulleys and books that are distorted, engorged, disproportioned, and rendered biomorphic. Casey's environments estrange the domestic, casting shades of anxiety, perversity, and discomfort on common household items. Architecture, too, appeals to a dream logic in Casey's work, as trap doors, staircases that lead to nowhere, and ladders extending into the abyss appear across her compositions. The paintings encourage open interpretation: for Casey, “It’s like trying to see in the dark… it’s all intuitive.” Starting from drawings of individual objects, Casey redraws and collages these together, building relationships and narratives into what becomes the finished composition. Her paintings do not begin with preconceived notions of a finished product; rather, a story develops, emerging from her subconscious. Casey draws upon psychoanalysis, free-association, dreams and the unconscious to make her paintings.

b. 1982 Untitled Painting in Cerulean, 2016

Acrylic on canvas over panel
48 x 36 inches

Sayre Gomez has risen to prominence in recent years with his semi-fictionalised and photorealistic paintings known as X-scapes. Executed in a wide range of techniques, including trompe l’oeil, airbrushing, stencilling and those used to paint Hollywood sets, his work is inspired by the urban landscape of Los Angeles. Many of his paintings feature the housing, road signs, billboards and landmarks that form the backdrop to long car rides around the city. His paintings can simultaneously touch on the beauty of nature (vivid sunsets, sumptuous palms), the passage of time, urban decay and commercial nostalgia (signs, colours and lettering often evoke bygone days) and contemporary life (graffiti, cell phone masts).

Gomez synthesises his observations into hyperreal images that challenge our ability to differentiate between authenticity and simulation: a cityscape that feels true-to-life might just as easily be an artificial construction. In this way, he explores the increasingly tenuous link between our everyday surroundings and a digital culture that is relentlessly driven by enhanced and manipulated images. The flawless execution and even luminescence of Gomez’ canvases, as well as the shifts between hard and sharp focus, can be seen as painterly reflections on the digital flattening and blurring of life and culture through screen-based technology. Openings and barriers, such as windows, doors, gates, shutters, walls and fences, are recurrent metaphors in his oeuvre that suggest Los Angeles is a city of promise and freedom, but also one of broken dreams and destitution. Gomez also explores these themes through other mediums, including sculpture, installation and video.

Gomez’s works are held in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; mumok, Vienna.

Girls, 2019

Archival pigment print
25 x 20 inches 25 3/4 x 20 3/4 x 1 5/8 inches (framed)

Erin O’Keefe is a visual artist and an architect. Her work explores both the specific properties of photography and many of the material and theoretical concerns of architecture. O’Keefe’s oblique geometric photographs are staged to look like abstract paintings. Combining elements of photography, painting, and sculpture, O’Keefe constructs formal still life arrangements using hand-painted cardboard, plexiglass, and wood blocks and photographs them under precise lighting conditions, seemingly flattening three-dimensional objects to appear as if they exist on a single plane.

She is in conversation with a lineage of photographers from Florence Henri and others in the early 20th century to Barbara Kasten, who started exhibiting in the early 1970s, to contemporaries who are also examining photography on an elemental level specific to the digital age. Specifically, O’Keefe is interested in the layer of distortion and misapprehension introduced by the camera as it translates three-dimensional form and space into two-dimensional image, creating an inevitable misalignment.

b. 1974 Sitting Mossboy, 2017

Ceramic, feathers and nylon fibers
54 x 72 inches

Kim Simonsson leads the viewer into an imaginative, fairytale-like world inspired by the forests of his native Finland, folklore, the idea of apocalypse, and the ambient hum of contemporary life— among other things. The life-size ceramic “Moss People” he is best known for are innocent yet beguiling figures, mostly children. Together they make up a far-reaching vision that hints at the sublime. Simonsson is a superb sculptor who uses clay with great sensitivity for his subjects that stands out in all of his gestures. Every sculpture is handmade in the artist’s studio in Fiskars Village, Finland.

“The name Moss People refers to children’s innate camouflage,” explains Simonsson. “The moss green figures blend perfectly into their natural surroundings, just as a soft carpet of moss covers the ground, rocks, and tree trunks and acts as a sort of protection. In the Moss People’s world, lost and disconnected children, evoking different characters… choose leaders and end up creating false idols.” In addition to the Moss Children, Simonsson plays with milky white, cobalt blue, and anthracite black glazes, as well as metallic lustres of a wide variety. Each such variation on his overarching theme expands the mythos that surrounds his work, unifying each and every sculpture into a fascinating whole, almost a gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art).

b. 1970 74 x 50 x 2 1/2 inches

Plywood, poplar and lacquer
54 x 72 inches

Chiappa’s sculptural works turn exhibition spaces into immersive and surreal spaces. Chiappa’s art operates squarely within the uncomfortable intersection of two symbolic legacies, mining the darkly humorous vein where perfection and failure meet.

Composition #45, 2017 is intended to serve as a sculptural room divider.

snow! (4), 2022

Oil stick and acrylic on canvas
48 x 40 x 2 inches

Eliot Greenwald’s paintings map the ever-evolving terrain of individual experience, tracing the distances between subjective reality and the natural world. In his newest work, the artist's car scenes take place amidst exotic, lush fauna. Neon lights emit from each metal facade, shifting in complexion from dull to bright like a human gaze gaining clarity. The car becomes a stand-in of sorts for the viewer themselves, a non-theological spirit which evokes the interior of the mind. Greenwald constructs a type of repetitive continuity between works, single motifs or images reappearing over and over again. This use of repetition, for Greenwald, mirrors the slow evolution of one’s cognitive understanding of reality. You don’t see one tree, for instance, and suddenly possess a perfect idea of what all trees are. Rather, you see many trees of many shapes and many colors and many sizes, and from this slow accretion of trees, come to develop a personal relationship to trees as a whole.

To this end, his imagery is often surreal, perhaps even Dada-esque, in its proportion, shape, and color. He is not interested in realistic representation. The images he puts to his canvases are studies on mythmaking, what we do to make sense of our particular location in time and space. They are the products of his own mind, reflections of his particular subjective understanding of what certain objects can, or should, look like

Day's End, 2020

Archival pigment print
40 x 32 inches

Erin O’Keefe is a visual artist and an architect. Her work explores both the specific properties of photography and many of the material and theoretical concerns of architecture. O’Keefe’s oblique geometric photographs are staged to look like abstract paintings. Combining elements of photography, painting, and sculpture, O’Keefe constructs formal still life arrangements using hand-painted cardboard, plexiglass, and wood blocks and photographs them under precise lighting conditions, seemingly flattening three-dimensional objects to appear as if they exist on a single plane.

She is in conversation with a lineage of photographers from Florence Henri and others in the early 20th century to Barbara Kasten, who started exhibiting in the early 1970s, to contemporaries who are also examining photography on an elemental level specific to the digital age. Specifically, O’Keefe is interested in the layer of distortion and misapprehension introduced by the camera as it translates three-dimensional form and space into two-dimensional image, creating an inevitable misalignment.

Reclamation III: Rite of Passage, 2019

Ceramic, leather, steel, auto body filler, wood
42 1/2 x 17 x 12 inches

Rose B. Simpson is a mixed-media artist whose work explores the impact, both emotional and existential, of living in the postmodern and postcolonial world. Growing up in a multigenerational, matrilineal lineage of artists working with clay, her practice is informed by indigenous tradition.

Androgynist clay figures adorned with found and manufactured objects are often at the base of Simpson’s practice. The pieces are ruminations on family, gender, marginality, as well as the effects these aspects have on the understanding of self. While the choice to work in clay is a link to familial relationships, the inherited nature of the material also adds to the concepts being presented. Just as individuals are shaped by memory and experience, objects made of clay become a record of the process that shaped them. The resulting pieces are both powerful and vulnerable and offer intimate records of self-exploration.

b. 1967 Yellow Canary (Stepping Out in Blue and Pink Sunset), 2018

Oil on canvas
40 x 30 inches

Ann Craven is a painter living and working in New York City. Craven’s painting can be divided in two – the iconographic and the abstract. Craven is well-known for her lushly colored, bold, serial portraits of the moon, various animals but often birds, flowers, trees and other iconic images from everyday life.

Craven has been making paintings of the moon, a symbol of time and memory, since 1995 from varying vistas in Maine and her studio rooftop in New York. She has been making paintings of birds since the late 1990s, inspired by color-plates found in her Italian grandmother’s vintage ornithology books. Like the moon the birds serve as a touchstone for memory, each repetition of the image a revisiting of a moment, a recalling of loved ones.

Area II, 2018

Oil and arcylic on canvas
67 x 35 inches

Vivian Greven creates ethereal paintings that borrow visually and thematically from classical arts, pop arts, and digital media world, sliding in fluidity between representation and abstraction. Working in alluring colors and restrained arrangements, her paintings display the interplay between surface and form with a glowing luminosity, dramatically flirting with body structure, dualism, and human existence depicted in serenity and clarity. Beauty is rooted within holiness, which is in connection with the universal balance between the immortal and the ephemeral.

Her work belongs to the collections of the Long Museum in Shanghai, the Sammlung Philara in Düsseldorf, the STRABAG Artcollection in Vienna, and the Providence College Galleries.

Round face, 2016

Ceramic
36 13/16 × 35 13/16 × 10 7/16 inches

Born in Shiga Prefecture in 1980, he started using the artist name Otani Workshop in 2005. Currently based in Shiga Prefecture town of Shigaraki, the artist works with wood, iron, and other materials in addition to ceramics. Silent and literally bulging heads, figures with their arms raised like praying figures, monumental middle fingers extended upwards, anthropomorphic vases, children, animals, soils, bronzes: Otani Workshop’s bestiary is a world in itself, a world in which dreams and tales converge as well as fantasies and daydreams, a world in which the queenly imagination and the kingly gesture triumph, in which forces and forms meet.

The artist describes having had a fairly normal, even idyllic, childhood, exploring and communing with nearby mountains and woods, with plenty of time for daydreaming. He enjoyed spotting human faces and animal shapes in stones and other inanimate objects – a sensibility he likens to the animism of Shinto, which teaches that all things are imbued with a spirit. ‘I want to create work that has a spirit of its own,’ he wrote in an exhibition text accompanying his 2020 show at Perrotin in New York City. This almost shamanistic motivation is an underlying element in much of the artist's work.

b. 1979 Madame X, 2016

Oil on linen
38 x 30 inches

Emily Mae Smith’s sly, humorous, and riveting compositions nod to art historical movements such as Symbolism and Art Nouveau, though with a distinctly 21st century spin. Smith creates lively compositions that offer sly social and political commentary, with a nod to distinct historical painting movements, such as symbolism, surrealism, and pop art. Her genre-defying paintings speak through a vocabulary of signs and symbols addressing timely subjects including gender, class, and violence. Smith’s paintings tackle art history’s phallocentric myths and create imagery for subjectivities absent in visual culture, specifically the feminist perspective.

Her lexicon of signs and symbols begins with her avatar, an anthropomorphic broomstick figure. Simultaneously referencing the painter’s brush, a domestic tool associated with women’s work, and the phallus, the figure continually transforms across Smith’s body of work. By adopting a variety of guises, the broom and other symbols speak to contemporary subjects, including gender, sexuality, capitalism, and violence.

Time/Space, 2022

Acrylic and glitter on canvas
10 x 8 inches

Dewey Crumpler is an artist, muralist, painter, and professor based in Berkeley. Crumpler’s work examines issues of globalization and cultural commodification through the integration of digital imagery, video, and traditional painting techniques. During his formative years, and after witnessing the erasure of Black history and other identities and cultures from his education, Crumpler was motivated to create art that examines racism in the United States.

Dewey’s works are available in the permanent collections of the Bank of America Collection at Harvey B. Gantt Center, California African American Museum, Triton Museum of Art Los Angeles and the Oakland Museum of California.

Figure, Half Reclining, Hand Pushes Bun, 2018

Acrylic on canvas
16 1/2 x 24 inches

Known for her anthropomorphic hot dogs, American artist Ivy Haldeman whimsically plays with notions of desire, consumption, gender, and the body. Haldeman's surreal acrylic paintings present anthropomorphic, feminized hot dogs and items of clothing, as well as close-ups of limbs in different poses. She works with a limited palette in a graphic style that places strong emphasis on line. Bright and gleaming, the artist's acrylic canvases layer transparent colors over ground layers of titanium white paint.

Haldeman's “hot dog lady” has been a recurring character in her art since 2016. The original inspiration for this feminized sausage was a mural of a hot dog in stilettos she saw painted on the wall of a deli in Buenos Aires in 2011. A sensual and elegant character, Haldeman's hot dog figure is hyper-feminized. She is a tall, red-orange, long-armed, and leggy figure complete with high heels, pouty lips, and long lashes, conveying sultry facial expressions. She is often reclining in a relaxed fashion against a pillowy beige bun, a luxurious bed, couch, or fur coat.

Ardente Primavera, 2020

Glazed majolica with iron rebar base
44 x 18 x 18 inches

Los Angeles-based artist Alessandro Pessoli is a cross-disciplinary artist who has gained international attention for his hauntingly expressive imagery, drawing from both his intimate, often subconscious, personal narrative and grander considerations for the media-saturated reality and the art historical framework that inform it. Utilizing a plethora of media, from brushwork and stencils to terracotta, Pessoli imbues his canvases and sculptures with a wealth of imagery, all connected by an emotional intensity. His chaotic compositions seem to be clumsily scattered collages, but upon closer inspection, exacting, photo realistic painting appears; he has a very delicate understanding of materiality.

Pessoli’s works are rich in conflict - imbued with celebratory color yet strikingly dark in subject, featuring figures who are at once in ecstasy and in anguish, flippant and doomed - bopping in an inescapable, screwball universe. Pessoli’s recent body of work is ultimately celebratory, even if his characters are initially tormented by the state of a real and metaphysical world. Often playful guns and other weapons transform into sexual metaphors alongside fruit, and other symbols of life, nature, and innocence. With a nod to this child-like vision, Pessoli’s universe is doused in opulent color and iconography of popsicles, rainbows and butterflies. The obscure is juxtaposed with an enlightened and primal positivism. It’s the divergent emotive progressions of Pessoli’s narratives that keeps us submerged in his intricate, visual landscape.

b. 1979 Madame X (Study), 2016

Ink, acrylic, watercolor and gouache on paper
10 x 8 inches

Emily Mae Smith’s sly, humorous, and riveting compositions nod to art historical movements such as Symbolism and Art Nouveau, though with a distinctly 21st century spin. Smith creates lively compositions that offer sly social and political commentary, with a nod to distinct historical painting movements, such as symbolism, surrealism, and pop art. Her genre-defying paintings speak through a vocabulary of signs and symbols addressing timely subjects including gender, class, and violence. Smith’s paintings tackle art history’s phallocentric myths and create imagery for subjectivities absent in visual culture, specifically the feminist perspective.

Her lexicon of signs and symbols begins with her avatar, an anthropomorphic broomstick figure. Simultaneously referencing the painter’s brush, a domestic tool associated with women’s work, and the phallus, the figure continually transforms across Smith’s body of work. By adopting a variety of guises, the broom and other symbols speak to contemporary subjects, including gender, sexuality, capitalism, and violence.

Desert Sun, 2022

inkjet transfer on plaster and canvas, acrylic, armature wire, Permalac
29 x 19 x 17 inches

David Kennedy Cutler is a Brooklyn-based artist

Pharaoh, 2021

Oil on linen
48 x 36 inches

Daniel Heidkamp is visual artist, painting fleeting moments captured in landscapes, interiors and figuration. His paintings navigate memory's subjectivity while ultimately aiming to extract the ethereal from the mundane and the ordinary. His process is rooted in observation, while his subject reference originates from 'on-the-spot' reflections.

Throughout his canvases, painter Daniel Heidkamp unites the saturated palettes of the Fauves, the vibrant oil paints and lush landscapes of the French Impressionists, and the observational traditions embraced by Edward Hopper, David Hockney, and Winslow Homer. Interior and landscape scenes dominate Heidkamp’s compositions: Favorite subjects include Central Park, the sun-baked French Riviera, and woodlands and seascapes from the artist’s native New England. Heidkamp straddles realism and abstraction as he privileges mood over faithful reproduction. He uses smooth brushstrokes and saturated hues to evoke a sense of the extraordinary and ethereal in the everyday.

Immediate Boredom of Acceptance, 2020

Oil and pastel on linen
48 x 36 inches

Cindy Phenix’s work focuses on the relationship between the public and private spheres. She explores the various norms that govern them, the dynamic of their coexistence, the power relations they are the site of and the emotions they trigger. To this end, the artist creates complex scenes that convey powerful narrative and affective movements.

Phenix draws her inspiration from participation/discussion groups that she organizes and leads. Through collaborative projects and shared experiences, these groups aim to raise awareness of feminine experience. At first, the women are led to interact with artworks, to take part in games and to position their bodies in installations created by the artist. They are then invited to share anecdotes and reflections as part of the discussions that Phenix guides. The bodily performances and stories shared in the process serve as fertile analysis ground for the artist who reinterprets them in her compositions.

Cindy Phenix’s paintings generate a palpable formal tension. Some surfaces are made up of gestural and abstract impastos, while others—left untouched—reveal the raw potential of the canvass. Painted zones are juxtaposed with drawn lines and take us into paradoxical spaces. Many characters, depicted in transformed complexions and bodies, interact here. The ambitious and ambiguous displays and the broad spectrum of techniques that Phenix puts to the task give rise to a dazzling emotional charge.

b. 1979 Witness, 2017

Ink, watercolor and gouache on paper
8 x 6 inches

Emily Mae Smith’s sly, humorous, and riveting compositions nod to art historical movements such as Symbolism and Art Nouveau, though with a distinctly 21st century spin. Smith creates lively compositions that offer sly social and political commentary, with a nod to distinct historical painting movements, such as symbolism, surrealism, and pop art. Her genre-defying paintings speak through a vocabulary of signs and symbols addressing timely subjects including gender, class, and violence. Smith’s paintings tackle art history’s phallocentric myths and create imagery for subjectivities absent in visual culture, specifically the feminist perspective.

Her lexicon of signs and symbols begins with her avatar, an anthropomorphic broomstick figure. Simultaneously referencing the painter’s brush, a domestic tool associated with women’s work, and the phallus, the figure continually transforms across Smith’s body of work. By adopting a variety of guises, the broom and other symbols speak to contemporary subjects, including gender, sexuality, capitalism, and violence.

b. 1985 Red Rose, 2017

Pigment print mounted to Dibond
30 x 24 inches Edition 2/3 + 2AP

Sara Cwynar is a Canadian artist who lives and works in Brooklyn. Using studio sets, collage, and re-photography, she examines the ways in which design and popular images work on our psyches and how their visual strategies infiltrate our consciousness. Cwynar's work presents a marriage of old and new forms that are intended to challenge the way that people encounter visual and material culture in everyday life.

Cwynar uses a variety of media, including photography, collage, bookmaking and installation, to explore the nature of photographic images and the power and limitations of the medium itself. Cwynar' background in literature and graphic design helps to create the fascinating hybridity of her pieces. Using saved personal photographs and found images from both printed resources and the internet, her work communicates not only about the final image of a photograph but also about the process of image making. Cwynar is also known for repurposing items bought through sites such as eBay.

Her work is in several collections, such as the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Art Gallery of Ontario, and the MoMA Library of New York.

Deep Winter House Party While My Friend's Mother, A Dog Breeder, Was Away At a Dalmatian Conference and We Became Sick on Rum, Vodka and Schnapps While Outwise it Snowed and Blew, 2020

Oil on panel
40 x 60 inches

Andrea Joyce Heimer is a self-taught painter known for her exploration of the suburban experience, drawing inspiration from the neighborhood mythos of her childhood home in 1980's Great Falls, Montana.

Adopted as an infant and plagued by lifelong clinical depression, Heimer struggled early-on with feelings of disconnect from her family and community. Her sense of isolation continued into her teens, but by then she'd found comfort in a peculiar activity: observation. Through quietly observing the lives around her Heimer was able to piece together neighborhood tales of madness, conspiracy, and love, often substituting her own theories to fill any missing pieces of the story. The result was a kind of vicarious connection to those around her -- a connection that sustained her during deep depressive bouts.

Of this inspiration, she shares: “I make narrative paintings, largely on the subject of loneliness. I am an adoptee whose records were sealed at birth, meaning I wasn't permitted access to my own biographical information. In the absence of even basic knowledge of my background, storytelling becomes an important outlet.”

It is fragments of these stories that make up Heimer's darkly imaginative narrative works. Part allegory part autobiography, her tremendously detailed paintings depict scenes of heartbreak, madness, and the emotional claustrophobia that stems from living as an outsider in one's own backyard.

b. 1985 Glass of Petrol, 2017

C-print
39 1/4 x 31 1/2 inches Edition of 5

Agnieszka Polska is a visual artist who uses computer-generated media to reflect on an individual and their social responsibility. She’s attempting to render the ethical ambiguity of our time into hallucinatory films and installations.

Agnieszka Polska creates video works employing mainly found material, such as archive photography and illustrations, which she subjects to subtle interventions, whether animating them or working them into the existing image. In the process, the artist changes their primary context, simultaneously creating illusions of documentation. She investigates the impact of documentation on its future reception. Her visually powerful explorations of lost times or half-forgotten figures of the Polish avant-garde, turn to how the past is fictionalized and re-worked. Her animated videos evoke a sense of melancholia, and a longing for something that perhaps never was, but which she makes real at least on film.

b. 1979 Hand to Mouth II, 2018

Oil on linen
19 x 16 inches

Emily Mae Smith’s sly, humorous, and riveting compositions nod to art historical movements such as Symbolism and Art Nouveau, though with a distinctly 21st century spin. Smith creates lively compositions that offer sly social and political commentary, with a nod to distinct historical painting movements, such as symbolism, surrealism, and pop art. Her genre-defying paintings speak through a vocabulary of signs and symbols addressing timely subjects including gender, class, and violence. Smith’s paintings tackle art history’s phallocentric myths and create imagery for subjectivities absent in visual culture, specifically the feminist perspective.

Her lexicon of signs and symbols begins with her avatar, an anthropomorphic broomstick figure. Simultaneously referencing the painter’s brush, a domestic tool associated with women’s work, and the phallus, the figure continually transforms across Smith’s body of work. By adopting a variety of guises, the broom and other symbols speak to contemporary subjects, including gender, sexuality, capitalism, and violence.

Lifted Light, 2020

Acrylic on canvas
36 x 30 inches

Throughout her vivid, large-scale canvases, Mira Dancy renders female nudes in sinuous, calligraphic lines and dense, geometric compositions. The artist—who also makes neons and shower curtains featuring similar motifs—draws on a feminist ethos. Dancy subverts the long art historical tradition of objectifying women as she presents her figures with exaggerated sex appeal, a strong sense of self-possession, and near-mythic appearances—at times, her kaleidoscopic nudes seem more goddess-like or archetypal than human.

Her work is included in the permanent collections of LACMA, Los Angeles; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Columbus Museum of Art, OH; and Yuz Foundation, Shanghai.

My Animal Companions Kept Me Company When Everyone Else Went Swimming In The Pond In The Cow Pasture Across From My Grandmother's Cabin, 2021

Acrylic and oil stick on panel
40 x 60 inches

Andrea Joyce Heimer is a self-taught painter known for her exploration of the suburban experience, drawing inspiration from the neighborhood mythos of her childhood home in 1980's Great Falls, Montana.

Adopted as an infant and plagued by lifelong clinical depression, Heimer struggled early-on with feelings of disconnect from her family and community. Her sense of isolation continued into her teens, but by then she'd found comfort in a peculiar activity: observation. Through quietly observing the lives around her Heimer was able to piece together neighborhood tales of madness, conspiracy, and love, often substituting her own theories to fill any missing pieces of the story. The result was a kind of vicarious connection to those around her -- a connection that sustained her during deep depressive bouts.

Of this inspiration, she shares: “I make narrative paintings, largely on the subject of loneliness. I am an adoptee whose records were sealed at birth, meaning I wasn't permitted access to my own biographical information. In the absence of even basic knowledge of my background, storytelling becomes an important outlet.”

It is fragments of these stories that make up Heimer's darkly imaginative narrative works. Part allegory part autobiography, her tremendously detailed paintings depict scenes of heartbreak, madness, and the emotional claustrophobia that stems from living as an outsider in one's own backyard.

Pod, 2021

Oil and oil stick on linen
40 x 30 inches

Hayal Pozanti makes bright abstract paintings and prints that feature bold interlocking and overlapping forms suggesting ancient hieroglyphics and contemporary digital encryption. The artist works strictly within a visual language she calls “Instant Paradise”—an invented lexicon of 31 characters that correspond to specific numbers and letters from the English alphabet. As a Turkish transplant in New York who speaks numerous languages, Pozanti views her lexicon as a way to communicate about cross-cultural experiences while exploring themes of acceptance and unification. Early in her career, Pozanti created digital collages, GIFs, and paintings that address the relationship between the virtual and physical worlds.

‘Painting is my way of understanding the physicality of the world, becoming one with the world,’ says Pozanti, whose work has undergone a marked shift in the past five years. Organic shapes evoke half-moons, sea foam, animals and falling waves, expressing amoeba-like forms in fantastical abstract landscapes. The flourishing growth of nature in Pozanti’s work is both a metaphor for the human imagination and a vision of life beyond human exceptionalism.

Ceremonial Vessel #1, 2021

Earthenware, china shards and mixed media
36 x 26 x 24 inches

Sharif Bey is a Syracuse-based artist, whose works investigate the cultural and political significance of adornment and the symbolic and formal properties of archetypal motifs, while questioning how the meaning of icons and function transform across cultures and time. Producing both functional pottery and ceramic and mixed- media sculpture, Bey’s inspiration derives from modernism, functional pottery, Oceanic Art and Art of the African diaspora.

He has held artist residencies at the McColl Center for Art + Innovation, John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Pittsburgh Glass Center, and Archie Bray Foundation for the Ceramic Arts

dipformground, 2016

Enamel, acrylic, holographic security foil on birch panel
60 x 48 inches

Untitled, 2018

Ceramic and glaze
13 x 16 x 18 inches

Roger Herman's ceramics and canvases harmonize a cacophony of styles. Shifting between abstraction and figuration, vivid palettes and dark hues, glossy surfaces and matte earth tones, the artist’s pieces are united by a gestural rawness and spontaneous vibrancy. Drips of paint run down the exterior of hefty vessels, whose sides are sharply cut with irregular peepholes and freckled nubs of glaze that lend a haptic sensuality. Herman’s imagery--drawn equally from pop culture and art historical tropes--reads like an archeology of styles: manga, erotica, surrealism, Paleolithic cave paintings. Like an exquisite corpse, the only prevailing constant is the randomness of choice, the embrace of chance with an inexhaustible curiosity for the renewing nature of the painting process in itself.

Raw energy and an instinctual sensory relationship to color and textures is immediately apparent through the bulk of his work, which spans from drawings to paintings, books to ceramics, t-shirts and woodcut prints. His wild blends of ad-hoc and quickly dashed lines, shapes, opacities, smears layer together in awkward but satisfying compositions. They’re so careless as to seem accidental, but as with any material mastery, what looks effortless actually requires decades of practice. Gestures are as boldly applied as covered up, allowing shapes to recede and reveal themselves simultaneously, in a true polyphony of style.

Arteriole Pubescens, 2012

Polyurethane foam, porcelain, glaze, resin, cotton thread, fabric, beads, buttons, acrylic paint, rhinestones, fiberfill, artificial foliage and moss; wax and glass dome with Acrylic base
8.5 x 6 x 6 inches

Drawing from her experience as a Colombian-American, Lina Puerta’s art examines the relationship between nature and the human-made, and engages in themes of food justice, xenophobia, hyper-consumerism, and ancestral knowledge. She creates mixed media sculptures, installations, collages, handmade-paper paintings and wall hangings by combining a wide range of materials, from artificial plants and paper pulp to found, personal and recycled objects.

In her early work, Puerta was interested in the female body and seeing it through the lens of nature, free of religious taboos and hypersexualization. These ideas manifested as sculptures of anatomical and botanical hybrids, highlighting their functions and intelligence as wondrous, spiritual and magical. She then began the Botánico Series in 2010 to explore the tension between the human and botanical worlds. Deconstructing the human control exemplified by artificial plants, she reassembled them to mimic the resilience and seeming chaos of wild plants, sometimes erupting from the gallery walls themselves. At other times Puerta made “contained” works inside suitcases or bell jars that are small ecosystems just like our own bodies. These incorporate lace, sequined fabrics, and jewelry to reference the body, as we are also part of nature and need to reconnect with the celebratory aspect inherent in both nature and ourselves.

b. 1978 Google Search Water Protectors, 2016

Marker, acrylic, chalk and collage on linen
54 x 72 inches

Despina Stokou is a contemporary artist, writer and curator based in Los Angeles, California. She primarily produces gestural, expressive paintings, often large and displaying vivid color, that include layered collage elements like cut paper letters spelling out pointed phrases and topical passages that tumble and pile up across her canvases.

Stokou is known for transposing swaths of online textual data onto canvas. Boiling her painterly impulse down to an essence, she has said: “What I really try to create is a dialogue, a monologue, if you will. I’m very interested in communication and the way information passes…I look at the text and I want to paint it.” Her engagement with and use of text draws mainly from digital platforms and messages, tracking not only the content of social exchanges but the contemporary infrastructure that bears them as well. Tangled layers of text appear at points legible and illegible beneath abstract smears and swipes of color that together convey a sense of amped up, frenetic energy characteristic of her work.

Powwow Princess, 2020

Leather, canvas, rubber, trade beads, deer and porcupine hair, braiding hair, wood and metal
46 x 13 x 10 inches

Natalie Ball’s art practice includes installation art, performance art, mixed-media textile art, sculpture, painting, and printmaking. Ball approaches her sculptural work through the lens of auto-ethnography, aiming to dislodge dominant narratives and expectations surround Native American experience and history to establish more complex racial narratives. Her studio practice uses visual archives, history, gesture, materiality, and personal experience as the foundation to create painted textiles and sculptures as Power Objects.

The Dancing Spots of Revolving Centers, 2021

Glazed stoneware sculpture with oil on linen
25 x 21 x 4.5 inches

Stephanie Temma Hier fuses ceramics and oil painting to create wall works that contrast material and subject matter. She often focuses on photorealistic still lifes and surrounds each canvas with custom frames composed of intricate sculptures. Her curious combination of incongruous images stem from hours she’s spent browsing the internet, with her resulting works demonstrating strange tensions and moments of comedy. Hier is often drawn to motifs related to food and consumption, and her busy arrangements further evoke our ingestion of an overflow of visual culture in the digital age.

Her paintings interact with their sculptural pairings to create new narratives both rich in the use of art historical references and feather-light by the means of pop-cultural ephemera. The vision put forward in her work reminds us that no image, context, or framework exists in a vacuum.

PORTRAIT OF YAA, 2021

Acrylic, oil on African print fabric
43 x 33 x 6 inches

Patrick Quarm’s practice explores identity, focusing on the notion of cultural hybridity and social evolution. His paintings weave and splice cultural signifiers from different eras and communities into multi-layered works. Quarm’s vibrantly hued figurative portraits of individuals and groups reflect his analysis of how identity, especially his own, relates to space and place. He describes his paintings, composed of acrylic paint and an array of African printed fabrics, as a form of cultural archaeology that allows him to unearth the layers that have accumulated throughout history. Quarm draws on his experience growing up in Ghana surrounded by the residual impacts of imperialism to explore themes such as hybridity and cross-cultural dialogue.

b. 1989 Unique Triple Girl Floor Lamp, 2018

Painted ceramic with gold detailing

Katie Stout has described her work as “naïve pop.” In their form, Stout's objects meander playfully between functional object and abstract sculpture. Her works draw on unexpected craft techniques, and are often peopled by characters that fight the staid usability of traditional furniture while also proposing design solutions. Cheerful yet vibrantly assertive, her works tend toward maximalism and often convey challenging portraits of femininity.

Stout’s body of work expands beyond lighting to seating, shelving, mirrors, carpets and curtains, incorporating materials such as clay, bronze and glass. With the intention to peel back layers of seriousness often associated with design, Stout uses traditional materials to create non-traditional forms, pushing the boundaries of what is expected and acceptable.

Stout’s dynamic practice embraces the formal qualities of design, fine art, and fashion and is inspired by an eclectic spectrum of references, from decorative arts and the intricate patterns of Victorian lace to kitsch suburban interiors and female-dominated craft traditions, such as pottery and textile work. Stout interprets and combines these varied aesthetic and conceptual threads through her own distinctive lens to produce unique works that subvert and dismantle traditional frameworks and understandings of functional objects. In instances, her works are imbued with an effortless and carefree humor, while others carry an incisive critique of outmoded stereotypes on everything from the decorative arts to gender roles. Layered and intricate, Stout’s approach and vision evade clear definition, as she moves freely across the ideas, materials, and techniques that spark her interest.

Thinking Green, 2019

Ceramic and glaze
Overall: 39 1/2 x 15 x 14 inches Vase: 16 x 15 1/2 x 14 inches Stool: 23 x 15 x 12 inches

Woody De Othello is a Miami-born, California-based artist whose subject matter spans household objects, bodily features, and the natural world using ceramics, painting and large-scale bronze sculpture. Everyday artifacts of the domestic tables, chairs, television remotes, telephone receivers, lamps, air purifiers are anthropomorphized in glazed ceramic, bronze, wood, and glass.

Othello’s sense of humor manifests across his work in visual puns and cartoonish figuration. “I choose objects that are already very human,” says Othello. “The objects mimic actions that humans perform; they’re extensions of our own actions. We use phones to speak and to listen, clocks to tell time, vessels to hold things, and our bodies are indicators of all of those.” Othello’s scaled-up representations of these objects often slump over, overcome with gravity, as if exhausted by their own use. This sophisticated gravitational effect is a central formal challenge in his work. Informed by his own Haitian ancestry, Othello takes interest in the supernatural objects of Vodou folklore, nkisi figures, and other animist artifacts that inspire him.

Shara's Iris, 2021

Oil on panel
48 x 24 inches

Drew Bennett is an Oakland-based artist. His painting practice draws inspiration from a desire to actively observe the world fostering a continually deeper awareness, connection and ultimately gratitude for the world around him.

In 2012, Bennett founded FB AIR, Facebook’s artist in residency program. Between 2012 and 2018, Bennett grew the program from a headquarters-based residency experience to an international site-specific installation program commissioning hundreds of new works annually.

Rose, 2020

Patinated bronze
54 3/8 x 21 1/4 x 13 3/4 inches Edition 2/3 + 1 AP

Working across a diverse range of media including painting, drawing, print, textiles, sculpture and furniture, Tal R questions our conceptions of and presumptions about our surrounding reality – what we’re seeing and where its meaning lies. With their flamboyant colors and exuberantly painted imagery, the paintings for which Tal R first became known give the impression of being simple, almost turning high art into child's play. While they are certainly direct, with paint often squeezed straight from the tube, his canvases in fact wear their sophistication and intelligence lightly. Central to the work is Tal R's profound understanding of painterly tradition which simultaneously accommodates muscular, expressive brushstrokes used to describe people, objects or places, and a stabilizing pictorial format informed in part by formalist abstraction.

Tal R was born Tal Rosenzweig in Tel Aviv in 1967 to a Danish mother and Czechoslovakian Jewish father. The duality of Tal’s heritage is recognized in his work, which offers sensations both celebratory and sinister. Saturated color is weighted by shadow; café and street scenes, festooned and radiant, are simultaneously claustrophobic and labyrinthine. His subject matter is intentionally easy to describe, but meaning, as in dreams, is enigmatic.

Shell Flower, 2022

Mixed marbles and wood
60 x 12 x 12 inches

With a series of stone and woodworking traditions from the ancient world to American tramp art, self-compiled at his disposal, Ian L.C. Swordy filters his work through a ragged sieve of relentless and confrontational performativity. Here, a would-be motley crew of sculptural techniques unifies under punk's lasting entreaty to its adherents: find a guitar first, then figure out how to play it.

Anchored by a longstanding conceptual practice that deemphasized the object and leaned toward feats of athletic resolve and endurance–culminating in his walk across America from New Haven to Venice Beach– Swordy considers materials' relationship to time, labor, and durability. A sense of operative temporality persists; his sculptural objects, like his performances, suggest a triangular relationship between artist, viewer, and artwork, with duration connecting them all.

New to carving both stone and wood, Swordy's point of entry into both traditions remains, by design and necessity, primeval and intuitive. Get a band together first, then learn to play. His materials, as broad as they are specific, connect his freestanding sculptures with his wall works, assemblages created from accumulative detritus gathered along the artist's daily walks in New York.

Weeping Vase, 2019

Ceramic, underglaze, glaze
42 x 14 x 14 inches

Woody De Othello is a Miami-born, California-based artist whose subject matter spans household objects, bodily features, and the natural world using ceramics, painting and large-scale bronze sculpture. Everyday artifacts of the domestic tables, chairs, television remotes, telephone receivers, lamps, air purifiers are anthropomorphized in glazed ceramic, bronze, wood, and glass.

Othello’s sense of humor manifests across his work in visual puns and cartoonish figuration. “I choose objects that are already very human,” says Othello. “The objects mimic actions that humans perform; they’re extensions of our own actions. We use phones to speak and to listen, clocks to tell time, vessels to hold things, and our bodies are indicators of all of those.” Othello’s scaled-up representations of these objects often slump over, overcome with gravity, as if exhausted by their own use. This sophisticated gravitational effect is a central formal challenge in his work. Informed by his own Haitian ancestry, Othello takes interest in the supernatural objects of Vodou folklore, nkisi figures, and other animist artifacts that inspire him.

b. 1984 Smoking Heart, 2017

Alkyd on canvas
44 x 36 inches

Chris Hood’s paintings depict layered arrangements of images set against fields of stained color, scattered landscape vignettes, picturesque vistas, “clip art”-style icons and simplified central figures. Painted from behind as opposed to from the front, Hood works in a reverse layering process — as each layer dries it seals the surface, blocking the successive layers from penetrating the canvas. The imagery appears to fracture, double, and dissipate amongst the surfaces. Drawn from an archive of personal photographs, self-portraits, advertising imagery and anatomical studies, the figures that Hood paints seem to be in a trancelike state — dreaming, sleepwalking, or hypnotized — suggesting that the disparate images that make up the compositions may be organized by dream logic or governed by a series of undetermined associations.

Private Chamber Drawing 4, 2020

Watercolor and ink on paper
12 x 9 inches

Amy Bessone is a Los Angeles-based visual artist whose practice across media challenges cultural representations of the female body, incorporating various art historical and kitsch references from Greco-Roman nudes to dime-store porcelain pinups. Subverting notions of female figuration and the male gaze, Bessone’s work addresses the dichotomies of high and low, gender and form. Using the physical body as a literal and conceptual framework, the artist exposes the fetishism of objects, both in the art world and as feminist theory.

Bessone’s work is included in the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (CA); the Rubell Family Collection, Miami (FL); the Saatchi Collection, London (UK); and Frac Bretagne, Chateaugiron (FR).

b. 1975 Furniture Art (Riyadh), 2015

Spray enamel, thermoformed acrylic
43 x 33 inches

Using the mediums of sculpture, painting, and installation, Mika Tajima’s work is about control, performance, and freedom. She analyzes the evolving and amorphous zones that intersect productivity and leisure, examining how human behavior and emotional experiences have been transformed within the long sweep of capitalist development. Tajima’s research-based practice explores the technologies and ideologies that shape human behavior through conditioning everyday life.

b. 1988 Mr. Top a la gymnastique, 2017

Oil on canvas
54 x 72 inches

As a descendant of the wandering ancestry of the Romani community, Jeremy Demester draws from a wide variety of cultures and traditions within his oeuvre. It is an inherited wanderlust that first drew the artist to Benin in 2015, where he was invited for a residency at the Zinsou Foundation in Ouidah. Here, Demester discovered an alternate way of connecting to the world, through the power of magic, rituals and dance inspired by a keen observance and insightful knowledge of the country’s nature and ancient rites. Today, the artist lives and works between Benin and the South of France.

Demester’s recent works gather and convey the visions of an artist who gives a central place to intuition, which is a driving force in his practice. ‘Painting is a body in which thought and unknown desires are embodied,’ he explains. Drawing on the rich folklore, oral history, mystics and mythology of Benin culture, Demester explores the imaginative forces that bind Vodun societies and travelling peoples in his vibrant paintings, esoteric sculptures and intricate works on paper. Frequently executed in vivid layers of paint – at times free-flowing and gestural, at others meticulously rendered – his work speaks to the dreamy, expressive landscapes of the spiritual world.

b. 1980 Kinjiki (Forbidden Colours), 2016

Oil, acrylic and pigment on digital print on canvas
70 9/10 x 47 1/4 inches

Donna Huanca is a Bolivian-American contemporary artist living in Berlin. Her interdisciplinary practice evolves across painting, sculpture and performance, exploring the human body in relationship to space and identity through her unique visual language. Starting with performance art, Huanca creates scenic and immersive environments populated with paintings and sculptures that echo the painted bodies of her performers. Working primarily with the nude female body, while at the same time concealing it beneath layers of paint, cosmetics and latex, Huanca draws attention to the skin as a complex surface though which we experience the world around us.

Largely collaborative, the partnership between artist and model is imperative to Huanca's practice. By exposing the naked body, while at the same time concealing it beneath layers of paint Huanca and her performers urge the viewer to confront their own instinctive response to the human form, which, in the artist's hands, is both familiar and distorted, decorative and abstract.

Bound 7 (After Kanye) Samoyed Siberia. Tranversing the ice beneath those northern lights. Nazdarovia, 2021

Acrylic on canvas
48 x 48 inches

Umar Rashid (also known as Frohawk Two Feathers) is a natural storyteller. He employs writing, illustration, painting, and sculpture to construct fabulations or, put simply, alternative historical narratives that reference a panoply of cultures, collapsing geography and time. At the core of his practice is a reimagining of romantic history painting and eighteenth-century colonial scenes. Rashid steers clear of simplistic dichotomies, challenging the viewer with a complex iconographic language of arcane classifying systems, maps, and cosmological diagrams. His work is informed by recognizable cultural references, whether historical materials such as Egyptian hieroglyphs, ledger art, Persian miniature painting, and illustrated Spanish colonial manuscripts or more contemporary phenomena such as the hip-hop era of the 1980s and 1990s. Alongside these identifiable sources—often regarded as “truth”—are unseen, fantastical stories, with Rashid taking on the role of what one might call a fabulist.

Rashid makes paintings, drawings, and sculptures that chronicle the grand historical fiction of the Frenglish Empire (1648–1880) that he has been developing for over seventeen years. This alternative history and its many subplots are told with elaborate visual and literary detail—with painterly tableaus depicting large networks of protagonists that relate to one another across bodies of work, and with lyrical and humorous artwork titles often a paragraph in length. Each exhibition is produced in response to the geographical locale of the host site; each time Rashid building upon his encyclopedic knowledge of global colonial history and conjuring new fabulations that underline the roles of race, gender, class, and power in the tales of what was, what was recorded, what was negated, and what could have been.

Boundaries of the Soul, 2022

Oil on canvas
60 x 52 inches

Stephen Thorpe paints interiors, where rooms are likened to the psychological interiors of the mind. Drawing on psychoanalysis, sociology, folklore, and the reality of myth, Thorpe’s intricately composed paintings are at once representational and abstract, deliberately rendered to represent the dualities, synergies, and contradictions of relation between environment and human interiority. Such nuances are present in all aspects of the work – from his painterly process, with visceral and physical applications of paint paired with contemplative, controlled marks; to the chosen subject matter, encompassing busy patterns, half-familiar objects, and skewed perspectives juxtaposed with quiet, singular planes of color.

Thorpe’s work offers a rich interplay of fragmented images, half-glimpsed through complex and often entangled emotions, thoughts, dreams, and memories, while appropriating various symbols, archetypes, cultural icons, patterns and textures. Through the indexing of graphic and physical modes of painting, his work offers up spaces of connection and disconnection to contemplate how we come to be in relation both to ourselves and others.

Times of grace, 2019

Acrylic on aluminium
58 5/8 x 39 x 3/8 inches

As a descendant of the wandering ancestry of the Romani community, Jeremy Demester draws from a wide variety of cultures and traditions within his oeuvre. It is an inherited wanderlust that first drew the artist to Benin in 2015, where he was invited for a residency at the Zinsou Foundation in Ouidah. Here, Demester discovered an alternate way of connecting to the world, through the power of magic, rituals and dance inspired by a keen observance and insightful knowledge of the country’s nature and ancient rites. Today, the artist lives and works between Benin and the South of France.

Demester’s recent works gather and convey the visions of an artist who gives a central place to intuition, which is a driving force in his practice. ‘Painting is a body in which thought and unknown desires are embodied,’ he explains. Drawing on the rich folklore, oral history, mystics and mythology of Benin culture, Demester explores the imaginative forces that bind Vodun societies and travelling peoples in his vibrant paintings, esoteric sculptures and intricate works on paper. Frequently executed in vivid layers of paint – at times free-flowing and gestural, at others meticulously rendered – his work speaks to the dreamy, expressive landscapes of the spiritual world.

b. 1980 Acid in Joshua Tree, 2016

Oil, acrylic and pigment on digital print on canvas
74 4/5 x 56 1/10 inches

Donna Huanca is a Bolivian-American contemporary artist living in Berlin. Her interdisciplinary practice evolves across painting, sculpture and performance, exploring the human body in relationship to space and identity through her unique visual language. Starting with performance art, Huanca creates scenic and immersive environments populated with paintings and sculptures that echo the painted bodies of her performers. Working primarily with the nude female body, while at the same time concealing it beneath layers of paint, cosmetics and latex, Huanca draws attention to the skin as a complex surface though which we experience the world around us.

Largely collaborative, the partnership between artist and model is imperative to Huanca's practice. By exposing the naked body, while at the same time concealing it beneath layers of paint Huanca and her performers urge the viewer to confront their own instinctive response to the human form, which, in the artist's hands, is both familiar and distorted, decorative and abstract.

Bread & Butter (Pink House with Pool), 2022

Oil on canvas
24 × 36 inches

Scott Reeder is a multi-disciplinary artist based in Chicago, Illinois and Detroit, Michigan. Reeder views all aspects of contemporary artistic practice—including content, methods, mediums, materials, and artist biography—as useful tools with which to engage in cultural critique through his work.

In his paintings, sculptures, and installations, Scott Reeder uses simple forms to address complex ideas and deploy cultural critique. He has become known for his cartoon-like style, expressive contour lines and bright colors, demonstrated infamously in his “Cute Communists” series (2007) of famous communist leaders painted with doll-like cuteness. His other subjects include paintings of anthropomorphic objects, in a reconsideration of the familiar and mundane, and humorous references to iconic art historical works, as in Cops Ascending a Staircase (2009) (a reference to Marcel Duchamp’s most famous work). More recently, Reeder has begun to make a series of spaghetti paintings, in which the silhouettes of various types of cooked and uncooked spaghetti are spray painted onto a surface in abstract compositions.

Riff Raff, 2022

Acrylic on canvas
70 7/8 x 90 1/2 inches

Sophie von Hellermann’s romantic, pastel-washed canvases draw inspiration from fables, legends and classical mythology. Von Hellermann’s lush, gestural paintings—whose lyrical compositions express intense emotional and psychological content—are informed by German Expressionism. She applies pure pigment directly onto unprimed canvas, using broad-brushed washes to imbue her paintings with a sense of weightlessness. She smears pastel-hued paints directly onto wet, unprimed canvases using a broad brush to create a soft, romantic effect. All rendered in the same loose, painterly style, figures and their surroundings dissolve into each other, blurring the boundaries between subjects and space.

She says, “what interests me is how the mind works and how dream images come together from things you’ve seen, read, and experienced both years ago and yesterday.” Translating and combining both found and mental images into paint with an almost automatist spontaneity, she explores the invented space of the unconscious rather than the perspectival space of direct observation. With her swift mark-making her paintings seem refreshingly unburdened by the weight of the past and Hellerman is able to move freely between demonstrations of great facility and a total rejection of it.

Pillow Caryatid, 2021

Glaze on porcelain
97 5/8 x 22 1/8 x 20 1/8 inches

Francesca DiMattio’s practice combines a cacophony of influences, which she applies in a layered and non-hierarchical approach to her work. Her sculptures draw from the tradition of ceramics, merging contrasting references and styles within each fluid construction. In both her sculpture and painting, she discovers ways to weave together the history and artistry of craft, transposing it from a practice of quiet control into one that seems unpredictable, explosive and shifting. She mixes high and low, East and West, the historical and the contemporary

DiMattio fractures and reconfigures a wide array of references including art history, children’s books, cartoons, pop culture, and craft. Though elements seem ready-made, she, in fact, sculpts and glazes everything by hand. Her sculptures are complex and multifaceted—each angle revealing seemingly endless experimentations in ceramic and glazing techniques. Throughout each assemblage, DiMattio’s layering and fragmentation maps a crucial dialogue between cultures and styles, pointing to the plasticity of representation. Through shifts in scale, elements that are typically accents become primary. Things do not behave as expected. Tiny figurines appear over scaled, floral motifs become viral, and torsos morph from flora and fauna. Through painting and the hybridization of art and craft she has introduced a dialogue with the past that has enlivened the contemporary world art scene.

Of her work, DiMattio says, “I’m interested in dissolving the images and materials that evoke and describe a kind of upper-middle-class lifestyle. My materials reference things that are desired, but the making of each work necessitates a kind of crumbling or breaking down of the structure of that desire.”

fresh strawberries, 2022

Oil, glitter and mirrors on canvas
66 7/8 x 74 3/4 inches

The sculptures and paintings of Pieter Jennes explore themes such as representation, inclusion, and exclusion. Jennes’s paintings feature lively scenes full of blocky figures, and are often redolent of myths and comedic theater performances. Drawing on new and old cultural phenomena, Jennes is especially interested in what he describes as “alternative historiographies.”

Inspired by painting, cinema and his own neighbourhood, Pieter Jennes is thus the creator of a highly unique oeuvre. His very recognisable personal style draws on the work of Flemish painters from the 1920s, such as Jean Brusselmans and Gustave De Smet, but also Ensor, Otto Dix or Georg Grosz, African masks and folklore, the cinema of David Lynch and Werner Herzog.

Marcello the Legionary Duck, 2019

Diabas
24 3/8 x 7 7/8 x 2 3/8 inches

Stefan Rinck is a German visual artist, born in 1973 in Homburg/Saar. He lives and works in Berlin. For his figurative stone sculptures Rinck uses traditional tools and techniques of direct carving.[3] He works with sandstone, limestone, marble and diabase. He finds his sources of inspiration in various epochs in particular the French Romanesque period as well as popular culture such as video games and comics. Rinck’s stone figures build a community of characters, animals, monsters and hybrid creatures endowed with symbols and cultural attributes. He uses examples from history, myths, religion and folklore as reference material and places them in a contemporary context. He often deals with the issues of collective unconscious.

The art theorist Bazon Brock states, “Rinck adopts the figurative forms of expression of culturally collective fantasies remaining his independent language.” One of the key elements of his language is the humorous expression whose lightness stands in contrast to the materiality of the stone. The humor has a liberating effect and helps the viewer to experience the unconscious. The cross-cultural and trans-historical communication qualities allow Rinck's sculptures to achieve universalizing ends, claims curator Daniel S. Palmer.

Yellow Lilo, 2021

Oil on linen
55 1/8 x 82 5/8 inches

Jonathan Wateridge's paintings are elaborately crafted 'non-events' that have the trappings of a real occurrence but for the most part are entirely fabricated. A significant part of his work over recent years has been to reconfigure or re-make a given scenario or found image. This involves building full-scale sets and using performers to enact roles, within the context of the studio, in order to set up questions about the way we frame and understand notions of the real. His work initially employed painterly realism as a 'default setting' by which to view the world, curbing any excesses of style to emphasize not only the often fleeting, banal and everyday quality of the scenes depicted but also the nature of their construction.

More recently, this has given way to an increasingly lyrical use of paint which explores the tension between the social dimension of the figuration and the more formal and expressive qualities of the work. This Side of Paradise, is his latest series of paintings, the title of the show itself referring to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1920 debut novel of the same title, which told of the downfall of its protagonist from wealth and privilege.

The pool itself features prominently in the entire series, and the approach Wateridge uses to present it is utilized throughout all the series' subjects. The pool, its surroundings and the figures depicted are all distorted to varying degrees - colors are mixed up, forms are abstracted and minimal. The pool itself appears unwelcoming. The poolside figures are far from the grinning, posing holidaymakers one might expect but muted, static forms with expressionless faces and milky eyes. The series bursts with atmosphere, and on further analysis more details reveal themselves.

In this series, the viewer appears as an unwelcome guest to the poolside scene. The figures are all still, motionless, sometimes staring out at the canvas towards the viewer, and at other times lie by the poolside in an almost corpselike manner. The psychological effect this has on the viewer is difficult to understate. As the series progresses, the draped, lifeless bodies become more frequent.

These large works were begun in late 2019 and demonstrate a paradigm shift in Wateridge’s style of painting, with loose and suggestive brushstrokes and use of color. Early modernism is evident in the color, which echoes fauvism, but the positioning, composition and atmosphere of the shots is perhaps more evocative of Edward Hopper, and like Hopper's work, explicitly what the paintings imply is left to the viewer to decide.

Adam and Eve (after Lucas Cranach), 2021

Acrylic on wood panel
12 x 9 inches

Hilary Doyle’s paintings begin with simple observations of day-to-day life. The scenes she portrays may seem mundane—a woman walking in the rain, holding a newborn baby, or commuting home on the subway—yet Doyle offers glimpses into the inner lives of her subjects through her deft use of color and the subtle nuances of body language.

Speaking on the Garden Series, of which Adam and Eve (after Lucas Cranach) is a part, Doyle says, “Archaeological, mythological and historical evidence all reveal that the female religion, far from naturally fading away, was the victim of centuries of continual persecution and suppression by the advocates of the newer religions which held male deities as supreme. And from these new religions came the creation myth of Adam and Eve and the tale of the loss of Paradise.” This

When I say the word forever, 2022

Acrylic, oil stick and oils on canvas
50 x 38 inches

Natural symbols, private symbols, and conventional symbols complicate Jones’ landscapes of memory that seize and concentrate potentially lost moments. Depictions of figures sleeping, swimming, playing music, stretching, and conversing prioritize physical touch, while botanical, architectural elements, and domestic objects and animals overlap or abut to highlight boundaries in close quarters. Decorative and ornamental moments flourish in playful blasts that appreciate collage and dense patterning. Transposing evocations of claustrophobia with gleeful love and play, these snapshots of camaraderie “slow down” moments, as Jones says, not nostalgically but maybe to explore tensions between inside and outside per Bachelard’s dialectic that champions transgression of dualistic contrasts. In Jones’ paintings, calm and ecstasy are filtered through serendipitous slips, uncertainties, disruptions, and confusions, in part alluding to her experience of early motherhood during a pandemic.

Large Cup, 2019

Stoneware, porcelain and glaze
20 1/2 x 10 inches

Brian Rochefort sculpts clay to produce bulbous vessels that are eruptions of form and color. These highly textured works feature vibrant polychrome surfaces and cracked glazing that produce a visceral —at times uneasy —effect. They also exemplify Rochefort’s ongoing fascination with volcanoes, craters, and other natural phenomena and environments like tropical rainforests and barrier reefs. Made of stoneware, earthenware, and glass, his ceramics are painstakingly hand-built and suggest unique ecosystems that appear alive and oozing, yet frozen in time.

Rochefort’s vessels are created utilizing a process that is principally additive. Each cup begins as a small cylinder. The works are then glazed and fired over with color and accumulated texture; these steps are repeated and a single work can go through a process of several firings. As a lexicon of surface finish and coloration, the shelved groupings are chromatically rich in color, and varied in surface volume which belie the artist’s rigorous investigations into process and material. Rochefort’s work pushes the formal and technical confines of the medium of ceramics, and this never-exhibited cabinet forms a glossary to the artist’s larger practice.

Somewhere Out There, 2019

Acrylic, foil, foil paper, glitter, graphite on panel
18 x 24 x 1 inches

Esther Pearl Watson, who is based in Los Angeles, grew up in series of small towns outside of Dallas, Texas with her siblings, mother, and flying saucer-building father, Gene. Her father’s flying saucers and the nomadic aspects of her childhood inspire her “memory paintings,” which playfully narrate the experience of an economically precarious family living in rural America. Watson’s work highlights an absurd, persistent, and particularly American optimism that only seems to grow stronger in the face of failures of family, policy and the American Dream Watson’s paintings depict farmland and highways, oil rigs and pay day loan storefronts, playgrounds and parking lots each with a brief memory written in the corner of the painting to describe the scene. All the while, glittering flying saucers dot the sky and the children, usually pictured in something of a cheerful tumble, seem to be the ones narrating the text as if recollecting the facts years later.

Dying Of The Light, 2022

Oil and Flashe on canvas
36 1/4 x 16 1/8 inches

Brooklyn-based Austin Eddy’s works are characterized by their skewed perspectives and dimensional flatness, influenced by Cubism of the early twentieth century. His monochromatic works—mixtures of oil pastel, cardboard, spray-paint, and newsprint—have been described as Picassoeque, with their flattened and fractured form. These works take inspiration from relationships in the artist’s personal life, whether a case of romantic rejection or a lost encounter with a stranger at a bar. However, Eddy describes, "Yes, the work has always been about things I have seen, felt, or thought. But letting go of that personal narrative part and allowing a larger interpretation to take place is the end goal I guess, Letting go of yourself so others can find you".

Eddy’s more recent works feature abstract compositions of colorful, curvilinear shapes, which often resemble landscapes, hands, or portraits of women. Eddy creates a delicate balance between figuration and abstraction

Column 4, 2019

Pink Panther foamular, plywood, resin dye and custom handmade silk rugs
72 x 19 x 72 inches

Baseera Khan is a New York-based artist whose work shares experiences of exile and kinship shaped by economic, pop cultural, and political situations. She mixes consumerism with spirituality and treats decolonial histories, practices, and archives as geographies of the future.

Khan sees bodies as constantly subject to volatile social environments globally and most notably within capitalist-driven societies such as the United States. Volatility creates a need for Khan to self-censor and develop secretive environments. Living between surveilled and othered, she can find exile anywhere and kinship by its side. These life lessons transform into motives of obscurity that lead her to a careful deployment of material and linguistic shifts. The use of fashion, photography, textiles and music, sculpture and performance manifest Khan's native femme Muslim American experience, a legacy for her aesthetic concealment.

Bouquet of Flowers and a New York Rainy Day, 2021

Glazed ceramic
16 x 14 x 13 inches

Jennifer Rochlin began her career as a painter and it shows in the painterly figurative scenes that coat her unapologetically misshapen ceramic vessels. When she began teaching art at a Los Angeles high school, she was tasked with starting a ceramics program from scratch despite never having worked with the medium. Inspired by the work of Betty Woodman, as she taught herself how to mold clay, she started using it in her personal practice—first to make tiles, then asymmetric vessels that she builds up using clay coils. The artist purposefully leaves her handprints visible, and also marks her artworks with sgraffito etching or even bite marks.

Rochlin’s pots are created by gradually building up coils of clay in a spiraling fashion, through which the marks of her hand are left imprinted on the surface of the clay. For this reason, her pots possess a distinctive form, with their motifs at times depicted in response to those forms, weaving a story in three-dimensional space. The lush flora and fauna of California is often taken up as a motif. Other motifs include pop-cultural references, decorative patterns, personal narratives and more recently, art-historical references such as Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus, giving a new context to a world-famous artwork that has been prized for centuries. The artist’s work, which combines the positive aspects of two-dimensional painting and three-dimensional pottery, has garnered acclaim for their richness of expression.

The Space-Time Field Theory, 2022

Acrylic and mixed media on canvas
18 x 24 inches

Esther Pearl Watson, who is based in Los Angeles, grew up in series of small towns outside of Dallas, Texas with her siblings, mother, and flying saucer-building father, Gene. Her father’s flying saucers and the nomadic aspects of her childhood inspire her “memory paintings,” which playfully narrate the experience of an economically precarious family living in rural America. Watson’s work highlights an absurd, persistent, and particularly American optimism that only seems to grow stronger in the face of failures of family, policy and the American Dream Watson’s paintings depict farmland and highways, oil rigs and pay day loan storefronts, playgrounds and parking lots each with a brief memory written in the corner of the painting to describe the scene. All the while, glittering flying saucers dot the sky and the children, usually pictured in something of a cheerful tumble, seem to be the ones narrating the text as if recollecting the facts years later.

Dying Of The Light, 2022

Oil and Flashe on canvas
36 1/4 x 16 1/8 inches

Brooklyn-based Austin Eddy’s works are characterized by their skewed perspectives and dimensional flatness, influenced by Cubism of the early twentieth century. His monochromatic works—mixtures of oil pastel, cardboard, spray-paint, and newsprint—have been described as Picassoeque, with their flattened and fractured form. These works take inspiration from relationships in the artist’s personal life, whether a case of romantic rejection or a lost encounter with a stranger at a bar. However, Eddy describes, "Yes, the work has always been about things I have seen, felt, or thought. But letting go of that personal narrative part and allowing a larger interpretation to take place is the end goal I guess, Letting go of yourself so others can find you".

Eddy’s more recent works feature abstract compositions of colorful, curvilinear shapes, which often resemble landscapes, hands, or portraits of women. Eddy creates a delicate balance between figuration and abstraction.

Convocation, 2022

Oil on canvas
44 x 50 inches

Benjamin Klein's landscape paintings depict a colorful and ambiguous world of uncertain proportions, psychology and materiality. His world is populated by anthropomorphized, animal-like characters that interact and metamorphose in fragmented scenes, filled with semiotic and symbolic potential. Incorporating many ideas and influences, his more recent series of abstract paintings explore a range of approaches to creating a compelling and energetic, personal formal language.

The hypnagogic world that Klein has created in his landscape paintings suggests a parallel dimension, an existence distinct from our own but not quite separate. In many of the paintings, a glowing sky creates a field in which all kinds of astronomical phenomena impossibly co-exist. The brushwork here borders on abstraction, as planets, comets, and nebula dissolve into exuberant mark-making. Stars and clouds, usually ethereal parts of our sky, here become solidly impasto. The artist takes his rightful liberty to create such unlikely combinations as dinosaurs, sharks, and rats along the same shoreline.

Thunderbolt, 2021

Oil on canvas
60 x 36 inches

David Roy’s varied practice is driven by the firm belief that art should never be estranged from everyday life. In 2016, he founded a space agency called BLACKNASA to promote the use of rockets for peaceful purposes only. BLACKNASA continues to conduct rocket science; both technical and social, through the design, fabrication, and launching of rockets, as well as interventions in public space.

Untitled (Couple in a Parking Lot), 2022

Oil on linen
95 1/8 x 89 1/8 inches

In her striking portrayals of the tragicomic everyday, Grace Weaver examines the charged social and cultural conditions that underlie self-concept, intimacy, and individual experience. Depicting elastic-limbed, Mannerist figures that arrange themselves before mirrors and collide on street-corners with an unrelenting air of exuberance, her works contend with what she terms the “theater of public life.” In Weaver’s paintings, body becomes scenario: playful, sweeping lines and dense planes of luminous color act as linguistic elements, each directing its own physical weight and affect onto her female subjects.

In Weaver’s paintings, psychological narratives are suggested with an economy of expression—through the sideways tilt of a glance, the subtle curl of a lip, or the droopy slouch of a shoulder. Occupied with observations of self-conscious performativity and awkward aspirationalism, her work is grounded in an insistent empathy with her subjects. The protagonists in Weaver’s solitary female portraits are not necessarily drawn from life—rather, the artist considers them archetypes of feminine self-presentation. They are pictured in once-private spaces of preparation—the kitchen, the vanity mirror—that have become semi-public.

Looking toward influences that range from the torqued perspectives of American Regionalism to the gravity of Piero della Francesca’s paintings and the monumental figuration of Jose Clemente Orozco’s murals, within Weaver’s street scenes, the sidewalk serves as a stage upon which interpersonal dynamics and power struggles are played out. Alienation versus belonging, cruelty versus connection—the pains, pleasures, and anxieties of everyday existence are writ large in this collective space. Weaver playfully explores the contradictions embedded in this social fabric: who has power, who is powerless; who is revealed, and who is hidden from the gaze of the viewer. These scenes allow her to build an audience within the painting, creating a chorality within the picture plane. The cast of characters, like Weaver, are as much subject to performing a strata of social anxieties as they are to wryly observing them.

Cantaloupe, 2022

Oil on canvas
36 x 30 inches

Jessie Edelman’s paintings generate layers of fictional spaces, which may be film screens, paintings, photos, or distant vistas, often including a human subject in the foreground witnessing the scene alongside the viewer. The exuberance of Edelman’s colors and elegance of her brushwork are echoed by the timeless Mediterranean-esque locations, such as views from poolside of a villas on a bluff or opulently decorated seaside terraces. Late 19th century and early 20th century artists such as Cézanne, Degas, and Rothko have stylistically influenced her work. She is equally informed by the development of visual culture that occurred in this period and is ongoing today.

Blue/Green Weed, 2021

Acrylic on linen
17.5 x 13.5 inches

Emma Kohlmann evokes a contemporary feminine mythology in her lush ink washes and watercolors, which position images of plants, butterflies, and birds alongside enigmatic faces and figures. Since graduating from Hampshire College in 2011, the Bronx-born, Massachusetts-based Kohlmann has exhibited at galleries in New York, Los Angeles, Portland, Athens, Tokyo, and Copenhagen. The Portland Museum of Art and MOCA Tucson have also exhibited her work. Kohlmann enjoys a lively market for editions, clothing, artist books, and zines, which she sells directly from her website. She has created album art for musicians and illustrated for publications such as Vogue.

Artemis, 2022

Oil and sand on canvas
66 x 68 inches

Jonathan Ryan began as an observational painter, depicting confounding architecture and landscapes, and then gradually shifted toward imagined forms. His background in observational painting provides him with the foundation to use light and shadow in ways that give depth to his geometric, abstract forms.

Ryan’s current work continues to be influenced by industrial structures and archaic architecture. He has an ongoing investment in color, materiality, and Modernist form in painting. His compositions are pictorial puzzles, evoking either a distant future or some remote corner of our current world. Drawing inspiration from ancient ruins, industrial landscapes and the backgrounds of digital video games, the artist affixes sifted sand and decomposed granite directly to his work—creating built up surfaces that interact with the paint in intricate ways. Ryan renders plateaus, crater-like indentations and hillocks with delicate shading, evoking the visual effect of trompe l'oeil—a kind of 3D optical illusion used throughout art history.

Untitled (Armory - Medium 1), 2019

Colored pencil on paper
14 x 11 inches

Louise Bonnet is a Geneva-born, Los Angeles-based painter. The figures that populate Bonnet’s paintings and works on paper walk a line between beauty and ugliness, between absurdist, knockabout comedy and extreme psychological and physiological tension. Inhabiting sparse, eerie landscapes and boxed in by the edges of the canvas or the page, they act out dramas of profound discomfort that plumb the depths of the artist’s subconscious. Drawing on a range of sources, from Old Master painting to Surrealism and underground comix, Bonnet toys with signifiers—of gender and sexuality in particular—in a playfully confrontational style. Her subjects are at once monumental in scale and diminished in capacity, their limbs grotesquely bloated, and their eyeless faces partially obscured by dense caps of hair.

Working primarily in oils, Bonnet combined the mordant wit of Philip Guston with the nuanced chiaroscuro of Caravaggio in a style that is usually either overstated through cartoonlike inflation or left indeterminate, allowing the figures to function as universal stand-ins for unconscious drives and anxieties. In some images, this signature approach to the human figure is combined with an exploration of Christian imagery and its history in European painting.

She has public collections at Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Denver Art Museum, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Hammer Museum, ICA Miami, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among others.

Cassanova's Delight, 2020

Oil, acrylic and mixed media on canvas and wood
48 x 48 inches

Conrad Egyir is known for his bold, graphic portraits of Black individuals that deliver the immediate visual punch of Pop art. Portrayed like royalty and other canonized icons, his subjects preside over canvases that are shaped like large-scale stamps, postcards, and perforated notebook pages.

Egyir experienced a meteoric rise in the art world after receiving his MFA from the Cranbrook Academy of Art, garnering interest from collectors; singer Beyoncé also included a print of the artist’s work in her 2020 visual album Black Is King. Egyir also had his first solo museum exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit in 2020, where portraits on view embodied the artist’s visions of the self-liberated citizens of a better, imagined world. Another solo show followed in 2021 at the Institute of Contemporary Art San José. Informed by West African iconography, religious motifs, and pop culture, Egyir explores notions around identity politics, migration, and community.

Untitled, 2021

Monotype, ink on paper
33 x 25 inches (framed)

Emma Kohlmann evokes a contemporary feminine mythology in her lush ink washes and watercolors, which position images of plants, butterflies, and birds alongside enigmatic faces and figures. Since graduating from Hampshire College in 2011, the Bronx-born, Massachusetts-based Kohlmann has exhibited at galleries in New York, Los Angeles, Portland, Athens, Tokyo, and Copenhagen. The Portland Museum of Art and MOCA Tucson have also exhibited her work. Kohlmann enjoys a lively market for editions, clothing, artist books, and zines, which she sells directly from her website. She has created album art for musicians and illustrated for publications such as Vogue.

Bad Lemon (Soft Spots), 2019

Amber, agate, labradorite, garnet, citrine, turquoise, malachite, quartz, sesame jasper, rhodonite, red malachite, smoky quartz, carnelian, Italian onyx, pink lepidolite, breccicated jasper, serpentine, amethyst, magnesite, aventurine, lapis lazuli, ocean jasper, pink tourmaline, tektite, glass, steel pins on coated polystyrene
19.5 x 28.5 x 17.5 inches

Insistent on their physicality, Kathleen Ryan’s sculptures recast found and handmade objects as spectacular, larger-than-life hieroglyphs of Americana. Her mediums, which range from bowling balls to a deconstructed Airstream camper, are both familiar and iconographic, and seemingly lost in time. These materials are often at odds with the subjects they represent: delicate, sensual grapes are rendered with heavy, utilitarian concrete; mold colonies are composed of semi-precious gemstones. As in Dutch vanitas paintings, the relics of the everyday—seed pods, jewelry, domestic fixtures, moldy fruit—become tongue-in-cheek allegories for sexuality, decadence, and the cycle of life

Her work is held in public collections including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Cc Foundation and Art Centre, Shanghai; Arsenal Contemporary, Montreal; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas; and Nasher Museum of Art, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina.

Rain 2, 2021

Oil on canvas
20 x 16 inches

Brittney Leeanne Williams explores the potential of the female body to both encapsulate and express a variety of psychological states. Rendering skin tone in a surprising spectrum of reds in an effort to subvert expectations, Williams depicts the figures as both faceless and contorted into a near circular embrace of their own bodies, or that of another. Ensconced in these intricate moments partially inaccessible to the viewer, the bodies expand out of surreal fractured backdrops, sourced from the artist’s own personal history. Acting as an amalgamation of both the artist’s identity, as well as that of her female family members, these bodies serve as communal symbols of hope and love, pain and loss.

Drawing on personal trauma and responding to the systemic oppression of Black people, Williams positions Black bodies as sites of suffering and mourning and also as shrines. Emphasizing natural contours, her portraits of fictional individuals are also surrealistic landscapes—planes where memories intersect with possible futures and wellsprings of transformation and transcendence.

b. 1983 Untitled_0083, 2018

Plaster, gesso and varnish on wood
60 x 48 inches

Davide Balliano utilizes an austere, minimal language of abstract geometries in strong dialogue with architecture, investigating existential themes such as the identity of man in the age of technology and his relationship with the sublime. Upon first glance, his paintings appear clean and precise but closer inspection reveals scrapes and scratches that uncover the organic wooden surface underneath the layers of paint, as a decaying façade of abandoned modernistic intentions.

Sourcing from detailed geometrical constructions, his paintings in plaster and gesso on wood, evolve through progressive alterations, erosions, and weathering of the surface, carrying the work to the third dimension on the verge of sculpture. The result is a constellation of dynamic compositions, mapping the complex system that surrounds and contains us, or at least the artist’s sketch of his impression of it.

Originally trained in photography in Turin, Balliano shifted to painting and sculpture in 2006 while relocation to New York City, where he currently resides and works.

Sphinxy 2, 2021

Watercolor and sumi ink on paper
14 x 11 inches

Emma Kohlmann evokes a contemporary feminine mythology in her lush ink washes and watercolors, which position images of plants, butterflies, and birds alongside enigmatic faces and figures. Since graduating from Hampshire College in 2011, the Bronx-born, Massachusetts-based Kohlmann has exhibited at galleries in New York, Los Angeles, Portland, Athens, Tokyo, and Copenhagen. The Portland Museum of Art and MOCA Tucson have also exhibited her work. Kohlmann enjoys a lively market for editions, clothing, artist books, and zines, which she sells directly from her website. She has created album art for musicians and illustrated for publications such as Vogue.

b. 1963 Place (Sunnyside), 2016

Oil and mica on linen
57 x 45 inches

Starting in the 1990s, Jackie Saccoccio was known for her vivid and evocative works of gestural abstraction, building on the work of artists like Helen Frankenthaler and Joan Mitchell. Her works, inspired by abstract expressionism and Italian Baroque art, were part of a movement which emphasized adding vitality to abstract painting through experimentation with randomness and paint handling.

Saccoccio worked with large canvases on which she outlaid "expansive waves and splashes of bright, luminous color", creating fragmented visual spaces. She introduced randomness in her works by pouring and splattering paint while tilting the canvas in different directions. She also transferred paint between canvases, pulled them across, and scraped through dry paint pigments to add onto the randomness. In what has been described as an intensely physical process, she would sometimes press together two large and wet canvases, apply mica for an additional layer of sheen, and at times have as many as 50 layers of paint on her canvas. These actions, and the added bright colors, introduced an additional element of spontaneity to her works. The outcome was highly layered, vibrantly colored, drip-networked, and had large shifting fields of color.

Starting in 2008, Saccoccio focused on a style of painting featuring abstractions with amorphous blobs of paint resting on top of grids of paintings. Calling them "portraits", she focused on creating a hovering effect in her paintings. In an interview with Elle, she mentioned that she wanted to communicate the idea of impermanence by making the painting, a static object, appear like it was moving.

Sealed by Fire, 2020

Acrylic, rope, yarn and dye on canvas
51 x 43 inches

Rachel Eulena Williams works at the boundaries between painting and sculpture. Her reconfigured canvases unbind painting from the stretcher, avoiding conventional support systems and imagining a myriad of spatial contortions. Her evident interest in color represents a liberation from, and criticality of, Western art history’s othering of color, and categorizing it as unruly, foreign, and vulgar. Instead, her interest in imagining unrestrained structures exceeds those boundaries and is partially inspired by science fiction. Williams’ drawings also manipulate the way images are presented, playing with assumptions about virtuosity through abstraction.

Magna Cum Laude, 2021

Oil, acrylic and mounted wood on canvas
96 x 84 inches

Conrad Egyir is known for his bold, graphic portraits of Black individuals that deliver the immediate visual punch of Pop art. Portrayed like royalty and other canonized icons, his subjects preside over canvases that are shaped like large-scale stamps, postcards, and perforated notebook pages.

Egyir experienced a meteoric rise in the art world after receiving his MFA from the Cranbrook Academy of Art, garnering interest from collectors; singer Beyoncé also included a print of the artist’s work in her 2020 visual album Black Is King. Egyir also had his first solo museum exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit in 2020, where portraits on view embodied the artist’s visions of the self-liberated citizens of a better, imagined world. Another solo show followed in 2021 at the Institute of Contemporary Art San José. Informed by West African iconography, religious motifs, and pop culture, Egyir explores notions around identity politics, migration, and community.

Bounty, 2019

Oil on linen
84 x 64 inches

Michael Berryhill’s powerful, resistant, and important approach begins with the fusion of a distinct palette with a process of addition and subtraction that enables the artist to work everything out on the rough weave of the painting’s linen surface. Berryhill’s Day-Glo palette seems inspired by painting’s past as much it is by the fluorescent artifice of computer screens.

Described often as a Surrealist, Berryhill is interested in the area of perception spanning legibility and illegibility, the crystalline and the fuzzy. What is the relationship between seeing and memory? How much have our perceptions of the world been shaped by the culture or religion in which we were raised? Where does the border between the commonplace and the unique begin to dissolve? What is shared and what remains private?

By raising these questions in his work, Berryhill reveals his preoccupation with painting’s capacity for the imaginative and solitary, rather than with its ability to explore social interactions, be they interpersonal or public.

b. 1983 Spontacts BO 04, 2016

Copying pencil and oil on canvas
78 7/10 x 63 inches

Jane Schroeder is known for a practice grounded in irreducible and frenetic painting techniques. A devoted formalist, she produces paintings which are largely governed by the action of the paint itself, resulting in webs of languid, curling brushstrokes that guide viewers’ roving eyes. Looping brushstrokes contain subtle variations in saturation, producing an effect of depth, like a many-layered web that advances towards and recedes from the viewer. Executed in large scales, with the eye of a meticulous colorist and a keen sense for composition, Schroeder’s works recall both the moving, intuitive body and the still, conceptual mind.

Schroeder’s practice is a meditation on process and repetition, slowness and speed. Her jostling maze of variously translucent and shaded coiling lines employ formal repetition to meditative effect. Furthermore, each series consists of a highly refined color palette, usually employing two or three shades. The slowness of her process characterized by experimental discovery also finds expression on her surfaces, which represent meticulously painted moments that might either be understood as negative space or positive shapes, depending on how one approaches the compositions. The deliberation of such moments is contrasted by sections of more frenzied, quickly-applied paint which register the trace of the artist’s decisive hand at work.

Dandelions and Squiggles, 2021

Stoneware and glaze
19 x 21 x 21 inches

Bari Ziperstein is an artist based in Los Angeles, California. Working in mixed media sculpture, Ziperstein’s primary focus is in ceramics. Her plural and fluid practice includes discrete objects, large-scale installation, site-specific public sculpture, and her line of functional ceramics, BZIPPY. Materially experimental but conceptual at its core, Bari’s practice engages ideas of consumerism, propaganda, and the built environment. Her objects and sculptural tableaux reflect her interest in the political dimensions of capitalist economies and challenge the construction of desire and aspiration in contemporary American culture through a historical lens.

Tete-a-tete (Hot Girl Summer), 2022

Oil on canvas
20 × 24 inches

Maggie Ellis’ paintings are anthropological observations of her life in New York City that oscillate between the pleasing and mundane, the voyeuristic and disconcerting. The artist adapts her style and technique to suit each composition, sometimes combining photorealistic precision with frenetic and gestural mark-making in a single work. Ellis always paints through a comedic lens to depict unrealistic and exaggerated figures—subjects that are frequently preposterous, bizarre, grotesque and camp.

Embodying the ethos of her paintings, Ellis describes of her own New York experience: “On a crowded subway I feel nurtured (and disgusted), a singular body being held in a sea of bodies. The train car serves as a dirty womb carrying all of us. And we are speeding through dark mysterious cavities under the city. We don’t know each other but we’re together. My eye moves around independently of my body and I become a wandering eye watching. I am perceiving and being perceived at once. The perspective of an outsider has always been my vantage point.”

Spiritual Plant, 2021

Watercolor and sumi ink on paper
14 x 11 inches

Emma Kohlmann evokes a contemporary feminine mythology in her lush ink washes and watercolors, which position images of plants, butterflies, and birds alongside enigmatic faces and figures. Since graduating from Hampshire College in 2011, the Bronx-born, Massachusetts-based Kohlmann has exhibited at galleries in New York, Los Angeles, Portland, Athens, Tokyo, and Copenhagen. The Portland Museum of Art and MOCA Tucson have also exhibited her work. Kohlmann enjoys a lively market for editions, clothing, artist books, and zines, which she sells directly from her website. She has created album art for musicians and illustrated for publications such as Vogue.

Plunge into Purple, 2019

Acrylic on canvas
20 x 16 inches

Katherine Bradford is a Brooklyn-based painter, widely applauded for her vibrant palette, eccentric compositions, and her approach to narrative and figurative painting in a wholly personal, unpredictable way. Bradford’s figures often defy society’s expectations of women and all genders, serving as surrogates for a mother, painter, and lesbian coming of age at the turn of the 21st century. The performance of paint on the canvas—her modus operandi—activates her characters who collectively chronicle her life and present universal themes of humanity as they float, swim, dive, and commune in candy-colored cosmos of ethereal abstraction and terrestrial routines of daily life.

Art in America's Robert Berlind characterizes her method as "predicated on a trust in possibilities beyond her conscious intentions or formal inclinations, and on a responsiveness to what shows up on the canvas." Bradford has said that she does not begin with a plan, but rather draws on her ongoing vocabulary of forms, discovering each image through the painting process and intuition. Artcritical editor David Cohen writes that she combines "the peculiar poetic charm and nonchalance of provisional painting with the energy, seriousness, and resolve of classic abstract painting"; he compares her formal evolution to Philip Guston's ("high-abstraction-to-low-realism") but differentiates her treatment of subjects as romantic, heartfelt, and whimsical.

Yoga Heaven, 2022

Oil on linen
51 x 39 inches

Maggie Ellis’ paintings are anthropological observations of her life in New York City that oscillate between the pleasing and mundane, the voyeuristic and disconcerting. The artist adapts her style and technique to suit each composition, sometimes combining photorealistic precision with frenetic and gestural mark-making in a single work. Ellis always paints through a comedic lens to depict unrealistic and exaggerated figures—subjects that are frequently preposterous, bizarre, grotesque and camp.

Embodying the ethos of her paintings, Ellis describes of her own New York experience: “On a crowded subway I feel nurtured (and disgusted), a singular body being held in a sea of bodies. The train car serves as a dirty womb carrying all of us. And we are speeding through dark mysterious cavities under the city. We don’t know each other but we’re together. My eye moves around independently of my body and I become a wandering eye watching. I am perceiving and being perceived at once. The perspective of an outsider has always been my vantage point.”

Untitled (Charites), 2020

Oil on canvas
20 x 16 inches

With a limited palette and a strict lexicon of images, Becky Kolsrud brushes into existence a mythic, metaphysical realm of O’Keeffian horizons, blobby clouds, high heels, and salmon-colored women. The centerpiece of her exhibition “Elegies,” at the JTT gallery, is a fifteen-foot-long panorama, completed in 2021. Titled “The Chorus,” it can be read as an allegory of the past year of isolation and mourning. A body of water is dotted with small islands, populated by cypress trees whose trunks are human legs; an open casket floats in the center of the composition. In another, smaller landscape, bordered by a band of sky blue, a neon-pink skull rests on the curve of a green planet as a lemon moon blares from the corner. On the floor, Kolsrud has installed a sculptural counterpart to her canvases—an expanse of mannequin feet in clear plastic mules—as if to suggest that every utopian Eden or Lesbos has a dystopia lurking beneath.

Night Tree, 2021

Acrylic on canvas
30 × 24 inches

Katherine Bradford is a Brooklyn-based painter, widely applauded for her vibrant palette, eccentric compositions, and her approach to narrative and figurative painting in a wholly personal, unpredictable way. Bradford’s figures often defy society’s expectations of women and all genders, serving as surrogates for a mother, painter, and lesbian coming of age at the turn of the 21st century. The performance of paint on the canvas—her modus operandi—activates her characters who collectively chronicle her life and present universal themes of humanity as they float, swim, dive, and commune in candy-colored cosmos of ethereal abstraction and terrestrial routines of daily life.

Art in America's Robert Berlind characterizes her method as "predicated on a trust in possibilities beyond her conscious intentions or formal inclinations, and on a responsiveness to what shows up on the canvas." Bradford has said that she does not begin with a plan, but rather draws on her ongoing vocabulary of forms, discovering each image through the painting process and intuition. Artcritical editor David Cohen writes that she combines "the peculiar poetic charm and nonchalance of provisional painting with the energy, seriousness, and resolve of classic abstract painting"; he compares her formal evolution to Philip Guston's ("high-abstraction-to-low-realism") but differentiates her treatment of subjects as romantic, heartfelt, and whimsical.

Untitled (the Yin Will), 2018

Oil, acrylic, ink, alcohol, salt on linen
53 x 37 inches

Liam Everett’s abstract mixed-media painting and sculpture result from a process of steadfast and repetitious application and erasure, employing non-traditional methods to apply—and caustic substances to remove—painstakingly developed layers of paint and composition. Inspired by the dynamic alchemy of the natural environment in California, this method makes plain the interactive properties of the substances on the canvas—how they counteract, preserve, or react to one another. In this way, Everett’s investigative procedure, laser-focused on the subtle behavior of his materials, becomes akin to the scientific assaying of chemical and mineral substances in order to determine purity or the limits of stability.

In the studio, the artist develops this process by imposing physical obstructions, demanding exaggerated levels of adaptation and effort that recall the straight-faced farce and gesturality of absurdist theatre. Everett brings the body into the problem-solving inherent in art-making, destabilizing and actualizing all at once. The studio space, then, is akin to a rehearsal space in which progression and perpetual motion never quite reach a reliable resolution. The toil of this circuitous working method is imbued in the work, revealing itself on the canvas as a complex material and metaphysical depth.

Untitled (whale, octopus sun), 2022

Oil on linen
57 x 66 inches

Craig Kucia is known for his thought-provoking paintings with intricate and uncanny compositions which explore the visual and psychological spaces that arise between memory and imagination.

Kucia's paintings integrate references from various historical movements such as Surrealism, Pattern & Decorations, and Cubism, to name a few, as well as draws from his own personal experiences. With varying subjects, the artist explores the possibilities of oil painting by using various techniques within his work by juxtaposing flat and graphic elements with materially rich impasto. Often using universally familiar imagery—such as sperm whales from his signature whale series or motifs of flora and fauna—Kucia's otherworldly paintings contain an allegorical and metaphorical resonance. The unexpected and intriguing narratives Kucia purposes, invites viewers to reflect, question, and create their own stories within each work.

Time Mirror, 2022

Aerosol spray on canvas
72 x 65 inches

American contemporary artist Andrea Marie Breiling is known for her multi-layered abstract paintings. Energetically executed in spray paint, Breiling's large-scale canvases capture an atmospheric, ethereal aura. Breiling's works are composed of multiple layers of spray paint, manipulated to imitate brushstrokes with various spray tips. Featuring undulating lines in primary colours, Breiling's paintings emulate the intensity of movement deployed in their construction.

Breiling has noted the significant influence of music in her painting practice—from upbeat electronica to moody, slow-tempo songs. Often listening to music while working in her studio, Breiling allows this to set the mood, guide her movement and energy, and help to gather her thoughts in her painting process.

Sun with Rainbow Rays Study (Night), 2021

Acrylic on paper
10 x 8 inches

New York-based artist Amy Lincoln paints dream-like scenes of imagined landscapes, atmospheric activity and vibrant, fantastical foliage. Drawing on three prevailing genres of oil painting—landscape, still life, and portraiture—and working with a distinct color palette, Amy Lincoln employs a visual vocabulary that unsettles any clear-cut category. Her uncanny use of bold and unnatural colors and highly manicured style, evocative of Henri Rousseau’s vivid jungles, instills a discomfiting quality in otherwise idyllic settings, which include scenic deserts and verdant forests. Her paintings strive to create an exotic sense of the natural world. “I think my paintings are a whole lot more controlled and manicured than nature really is,” Lincoln has said. “I try to convey the structure of a plant, not to represent it realistically.”