There is a private, far away world that artists return to time and time again. Its parameters, molded in childhood and chiseled away in practice. Like the natural landscape, it is always shifting, eroding, and regenerating anew. We can see it, too, eyes closed: a snow capped mountain, an ancient organism, our body, cosmic. Eyes open, gaze fixed, it is a coil on a vine, a statue, light streaming from a window.
Ambera Wellmann, Eating the Dark, 2024. Image courtesy of the artist.
Rich with shadow play and visual distortion, Ambera Wellmann’s enigmatic dreamscapes evoke the unease of sleeping in a haunted hotel room. Both Baroque-adjacent and Francis Bacon-inspired, the painter’s lush compositions layer the subliminal with an uncompromising brutality. Wellmann’s spectral figures dismantle the confines of a carnal realm: Both dark and optimistic, they bleed into worst case scenarios while committing to a bacchanal reverie.
Alvaro Barrington, The Dance, 2018. Image courtesy of the artist.
Alvaro Barrington is a conductor of mediums, of geographies, and of histories carried in objects ranging from Hermès wool blankets to salvaged wooden planks. The Venezuelan-born artist was raised between Grenada and Brooklyn, and now resides in London. This breadth of lived places and cultures is crystalized in his collaged paintings. Barrington’s approach mixes Robert Rauschenberg’s spot-on material command with David Hammons’ ability to bring mystery to the familiar. He is equally fascinated by carnivals, jazz, and forefathers of Abstract Expressionism. Even in his simplest gesture of a line, there is a trait of explosive life and appetite for art.
Claudia Keep, Crystals at the Natural History Museum, 2024. Image courtesy of the artist and March Gallery.
The present freezes and then melts in Claudia Keep’s paintings: Every instant oozes and drapes like a family heirloom blanket. If every moment is trivial yet majestic, Keep’s diaristic scenes prove their intertwined duality. She paints in modest scales, avoiding challenges to our memory’s intimate borders. Whether a medley of freshly bloomed flowers, the sun glistening on the warm summer sea, or a recently occupied bed in a fall morning, Keep’s daily inspirations are everyone’s—but also relentlessly her own.
Anicka Yi, preparatory sketch for a new Radiolaria sculpture, digital rendering, 2024. Image courtesy of the artist.
Anicka Yi is an alchemist of scientific and sensual curiosities. She strives to capture the beauty within the biological lexicon while further immersing the viewer in scents and forms that, at first glance, sit in the realm of the unrecognizable. They are versions of the microcosms surrounding us, rendered macro and therefore visible. Both alien and sensual, Yi’s optical fiber pod sculptures resemble deep-sea creatures and ornate chandeliers. Emanating a quality that’s both beautiful and foreign, the artist’s frames zoom us into the atom, where the gigantic and minuscule align.
Lee Mary Manning, Radiohead’s OK Computer, 2024. Image courtesy of the artist.
Has anybody seen Lee Mary Manning? The artist’s snaps of New York feel bizarrely familiar, as if they were stolen from our own smartphones—or even more thrillingly, as if they were lugged out of our memories. Manning’s stills of the city unearth the unseen amidst the cacophony of over-exposure. Beauty feels unexpectedly attainable in their shots of everyday people and places, as well as their orchestration that unearths new layers beneath. Plants burst their greens through concrete, and streets stretch into infinity. Manning’s photography feels like a friend who knows us all too well.
Andrew Cranston, Mount Fuji for John Maclean's 'Tornado,' 2024. Photography by Matt Barnes. Image courtesy of the artist and Karma.
Was that a dream or a memory? Andrew Cranston ceaselessly makes us wonder. The Scottish painter's powdery vignettes are just near enough to grasp but gone in the blink of an eye. Off-kilter proportions absorb people while interiors dissolve into abstractions. Cinematic and fickle, his moments resist the urge to settle, as if they might slip away from their canvases. Cranston's painterly fluidity, however, stands as testament to his mastery over the palette and form. Fascinated by fiction, he occasionally uses hardcover books as his surfaces, appointing the ghost of a story to hold his painted tale.
Zanele Muholi, Mnotho I, Los Angeles, 2024. Image courtesy of the artist and Southern Guild.
The subjects in Zanele Muholi’s portraits gaze at us with deep wells that brim with potential, holding their own stories as well as those of their network. The South African photographer and visual activist focuses their lens on Black queer communities across their native country, as well as on theirself. The result is disarming in its compassion and sense of immediacy, at once confrontational and tender. Blending photography’s documentary and cinematic possibilities, their images incorporate various poses and elaborate handmade costumes that establish autonomy while radiating with grandeur.
Alix Vernet, Statue, Tuileries, Travaux en Cours, Jeux Olympique, 2022. Image courtesy of the artist.
Alix Vernet works in—and with—New York. She is a wanderer in search of material in the city’s corners and façades that fly under the radar of the disinterested eye. In a metropolis of tireless transformation, the artist makes casts of its enduring architectural bodies, while everything else in radius shape-shifts. Vernet’s latex molds of building facades, such as those taken at the grandiose Brooklyn Public Library or the unassuming 18 Saint Marks Place, yield stoneware wall sculptures that monumentalize slivers from a mammoth town wherein every dweller forges their own narrative map. A homage to sprinters, daydreamers, and vagabonds alike, the artist’s love song to downtown embodies a place between public and private, tactile and remembered.
A new show from Public Art Fund places bronze casts of Thaddeus Mosley’s signature hand-carved wood sculptures in New York City’s City Hall Park. For the 98-year-old artist, his physically demanding practice, like life, is all about balance.
Culture
Prada Mode finds its way to Osaka, Japan for its latest iteration, directed once again by architect Kazuyo Sejima.
