Art Basel Miami Beach Supplement

ART BASEL MIAMI BEACH

INTRODUCING

THE RECIPIENT OF THE 2023 YOUNG

ARTISTS PRIZE

KAHLIL ROBERT IRVING

It’s different.

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As Design Miami seeks to attract a new generation, its 2023 edition focuses on how good design shapes lives T WO MO N T H S AF T E R T HE DE B U T OF A SU C C E S SFU L PARI S E DIT ION , T HE FAIR WILL SHOWCA SE T HE DE S IGN WORLD’S LE ADIN G M AKE R S IN IT S H OME BA S E OF MIAMI .

BY STEPHEN WALLIS

AS THE global art-circuit throng descends on Miami

L i n Fa n g l u , S h e’s L a n d s c a p e, 2 0 2 3 . I m a g e c o u r t e sy of the artist and Sarah Merscough Gallery

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Beach for the annual weeklong alternate universe of fairs, parties, performances, and brand activations this December, Design Miami strives to provide some grounding context for the real-world impact that the furnishings and objects it showcases can have, not least in their power to prompt important questions.

Now in its 19th year, the fair returns to its tented quarters in Pride Park, steps away from the convention center and Art Basel Miami Beach, from Dec. 6-10.

Curatorial director Anna Carnick conceived its theme, “Where We Stand,” to be “a celebration of design inspired by place, identity, and heritage,” says Design Miami CEO Jennifer Roberts. “It’s about exploring the role design plays both in reflecting and responding to the world around us, with a spirit of hope and optimism.”

Roberts, who steered the leading international design fair through the challenges of the pandemic, has expanded the online sales platform for galleries that was launched during Covid lockdowns, and inaugurated a popular new Paris edition of the fair this past October. She used that occasion to announce the acquisition of Design Miami by Basic.Space, a digital marketplace with a curated mix of vintage items, new limited-edition products, and exclusive brand collaborations. “This next chapter offers a fantastic opportunity for us to continue to expand our offerings and reach an even wider audience, particularly among the next generation of great collectors,” says Roberts, who has clarified that Design Miami will remain independent.

At this year’s Miami edition, visitors can expect a familiar feel to the 35 gallery booths and 14 Curio displays, the fair’s curated presentations of innovative design. There are some notable first-time participants, including London’s Adrian Sassoon, Mumbai’s æquo, and Los Angeles’s Marta, which will show sculptural furniture-

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Wo r k s i n p r o g r e s s i n N i f e m i M a r c u s - B e l l o’s s t u d i o.

P h o t o g r a p hy by J i d e Aye n i . I m a g e c o u r t e sy o f t h e a r t i s t a n d M a r t a .

like objects by Nigerian designer Nifemi Marcus-Bello. Crafted in sand-cast aluminum at an autoparts foundry in Lagos, his richly textured works reference the dynamics of globalization and material supply chains as well as West African craft and ingenuity.

Materials will be the focal point of another first-time exhibitor, London’s Charles Burnand Gallery.

Furniture made from hurricanefelled mahogany by Reynold Rodriguez will be joined by JeanGabriel Neukomm’s dazzling umbrella-shaped mica chandelier and Steven John Clark’s designs for his studio, DenHolm, their idiosyncratic forms hand-carved from limestone and then embellished with dyes and graffitilike markings. “It’s all raw, honest materials that have been L a r a B o h i n c, S p i r i t ( Wo r k i n P r o g r e s s), manipulated in unexpected ways,” 2 0 2 3 . I m a g e c o u r t e sy o f t h e a r t i s t a n d says gallery founder Simon the Miami Design District.

Stewart.

Returning Design Miami regulars include Friedman Benda, which has locations in New York and Los Angeles (and will open a third in Paris next year), Galerie BSL from Paris, David Gill Gallery and Galerie Fumi from London, and New York galleries Todd Merrill Studio, Magen H, and Cristina Grajales. The latter’s garden-like booth will highlight Virginia San Fratello’s whimsical light fixtures composed of vivid, 3D-printed bioplastics with textures ranging from fluted to beaded to furry. “Intended to inspire intense happiness and pleasure,” according to the artist, the lights are an antidote to “the fear and darkness of the last three years, when many of us were afraid to touch things and to touch each other.”

Another fair stalwart, the Parisian Galerie Patrick —SIMON STEWART Seguin, will bring its usual array of exceptional designs by French modern masters Jean Prouvé, Charlotte Perriand, Pierre Jeanneret, and Jean Royère. This year’s trove includes two rare Prouvé S.A.M. Tropique metal tables and robust geometric seating made with urethane-coated one of his iconic aluminum panels with portholes. foam. Complementing the contemporary works, R & The multi-city Carpenters Workshop Gallery, Company will also offer vintage designs by Joaquim meanwhile, is using the fair to unveil a buzzy addition to Tenreiro, one of the Brazilian modernists who have long its stable: the Haas Brothers. The prolific duo will show a been a gallery staple. group of playful animal figures rendered in exquisitely If contemporary Brazilian furniture is your thing, the patinated bronze. The gallery’s booth will also spotlight centerpiece of Mexico City– and New York–based AGO the global influence of Dutch design, seen primarily Projects’s Curio presentation is a group of carved wood and through the lens of two celebrated gallery talents, inlaid-wax pieces by the São Paolo–based Rafael Triboli.

Maarten Baas and Nacho Carbonell, whose “non“The works have a wonderful hand to them, rendered in a conformist mindset,” says director Ashlee Harrison, language that’s rustic, masculine, even mystical,” says AGO “echoes through the country’s singular artistic output.” cofounder Rodman Primack.

For those who missed the past year of shows at R & Design objects inspired by nature and created with Company, the New York gallery will exhibit memorable organic materials are a mainstay at Sarah Myerscough standouts: Joyce Lin’s Exploded Chair, a selection of Gallery in London, and they will take center stage in Roberto Lugo’s ceramics that mix traditional forms with Miami, from Lin Fanglu’s landscape-like knotted, stitched, references to hip hop culture and his Afro-Latino heritage, and pleated cotton-fiber tapestry to Nic Webb’s minimalist and Luam Melake’s Listening Chair, part of her series of ceiling light carved from 250-year-old English oak.

“IN THIS SETTING, WHERE IT’S ALL ABOUT EXCELLENCE AND PUSHING ARTISTIC BOUNDARIES, EVERY EXHIBITOR KNOWS THEY’VE REALLY GOT TO BRING IT.”

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Botanical artists Full Grown have contributed chairs shaped from living willow trees, while Diana Scherer manipulated the subterranean root systems of grasses to create silky, textile-like wall hangings. “These are artists who collaborate with the intrinsic intelligence of nature,” says Myerscough. “They integrate the artistic and romantic into the scientific.”

References to the natural world are also prominent in the work of artists exhibited by Hostler Burrows, which has galleries in New York and Los Angeles and is marking its 25th year as a leading champion of Nordic artists and designers. Notable highlights include a free-floating light object by Ane Lykke and a fanciful hand-crafted wall “rug”

by Marianne Huotari, inspired by traditional Finnish weaving methods the artist has adapted using colorful ceramic beadwork. Huotari describes the piece as “a window to an idyllic escape—a mental landscape, an opportunity to dream, to seek change, and thus to grow.”

A similar spirit pervades this year’s Miami Design District designer commission, awarded to the Londonbased Lara Bohinc, whose installation Utopia will occupy public spaces throughout the neighborhood as well as at the entrance to the fair. Bohinc’s bulbous biomorphic seating, tables, and sculptures—made from environmentally friendly cork in pastel hues—suggest mushrooming amoebic organisms, their playful forms an invitation to gather and reflect.

“Design Miami is widely regarded as the premier collectible design fair in the world,” remarks Charles Burnand Gallery’s Simon Stewart. “Being included positions us at the forefront of the ever-evolving design landscape. In this setting, where it’s all about excellence and pushing artistic boundaries, every exhibitor knows they’ve really got to bring it.”

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THE META PUN OF HERNAN BAS T HE MIAMI NAT IVE’S FO R AY IN TO C ON C E P T UAL WO RK HA S IT S OWN T WI S T: N O NE O F T HE PIEC E S ARE M ADE BY T HE AR T I S T HIM SE LF.

BY ANNABEL KEENAN PHOTOGRAPHY BY JOSH ARONSON

“I already know what the headlines will be: Bas at the Bass,” jokes Miami-based artist Hernan Bas as he prepares the final works for his solo show, “The Conceptualists,” opening Dec. 4 at his hometown museum. “It’s fitting though,” he admits. “The show is a play on conceptual art, so I don’t mind a pun.”

Known for his expressionistic, figural paintings of androgynous young men, Bas has often embraced the double entendre. “The Conceptualists” expands on his interests in queerness, desire, the occult, and the absurd, but does so through the creation of fictitious conceptual artists who engage in eccentric behavior as part of their practices. Bas began the series over two years ago, debuting the works in two parts: the first at Victoria Miro in London and the second at Lehmann Maupin in New York. The Bass exhibition marks the series’ debut as an ensemble, and will be joined by seven new “Conceptualist” pieces exhibited for the first time— including Bas’s largest painting yet, measuring 9 by 21 feet. “‘The Conceptualists’ stems from a series loosely based on the hobbies that emerged in the pandemic,” says Bas. “Everyone was doing things they didn’t normally do, like baking bread. I started painting characters doing bizarre things and called them conceptual artists as a way

to excuse their behavior and to poke fun at art itself— conceptual art is always the butt of jokes.

“It also gave me the opportunity to make conceptual art, but not have it be my own,” he continues. “So if you don’t like the work in the painting, it’s not mine.” With the onus of authorship removed, Bas was able to conceive work that he wouldn’t otherwise physically create. In one piece, his fictitious artist sits in the milk aisle of a grocery store with a Polaroid camera. A nod to the old practice of depicting missing children on milk cartons, the subject leaves photographs of himself in public places when he feels lost. In another, a sculptor whose medium is popsicle sticks is so devoted to his craft that he insists

“IF YOU DON’T LIKE THE WORK IN THE PAINTING, IT’S NOT MINE.”

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on eating the popsicles instead of buying them clean.

The title states that he is in the process of making his “inevitable last work”: a coffin.

“They’re sad and morbid pieces, but I don’t want viewers to take them too seriously,” says Bas. “Humor is an important part of my work, even if it’s subtle. Looking back at the series, there are a lot of paintings that spark discomfort. I hadn’t realized that before, and I’m not sure what it says about me,” he adds, laughing.

Bas insists his subjects are not self-portraits, but acknowledges that their interests sometimes mirror his own. They also, intentionally or not, parallel his practice.

The exhibition culminates in his largest work to date—a panorama of an artist’s studio based on Bas’s own. The work, which contains references to the other paintings in the show, “is a very important piece for the series,” reasons the artist. “It’s a Wizard of Oz moment where the emerald curtain parts, and the viewer realizes that this character has painted all of the other works.” The subject in this final piece surveys his own creations as if organizing his own exhibition—the very experience Bas is having now. “I don’t like the word,” he admits, “but I guess the show is a little meta.”

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FOUNDER | EDITOR-IN-CHIEF SARAH G. HARRELSON

EXECUTIVE EDITOR MARA VEITCH

SENIOR CREATIVE PRODUCER REBECCA AARON

ASSOCIATE EDITOR ELLA MARTIN-GACHOT

EDITORIAL ASSISTANT SOPHIE LEE

ART DIRECTOR KATHERINE JORDAN

JUNIOR ART DIRECTOR HANNAH TACHER

I am so proud to introduce our inaugural Young Artists Prize, a new addition to our annual Young Artists list this year. In the eight years since we begin compiling the list, it has been an unending source of pride and excitement to watch the careers of CULTURED’s Young Artists honorees blossom.

We have also seen the extraordinary pressures that emerging artists are faced with—seeking out their audience and refining their practice while contending with the strains (personal and financial) that accompany these periods of transformative growth.

With the Young Artists Prize, an award bestowed on an outstanding talent from CULTURED’s annual list, the magazine does its small part in the monumental task of supporting an artist on their path.

It was difficult to select just one name from the incredible crop of talent that our editors assembled for the list’s eighth edition this year. To do so, I enlisted the help of Amy Cappellazzo, Ruba Katrib, Nicola Lees, and Mickalene Thomas to review the work of all 27 artists and identify the talent whose work reflects the spirit of the prize.

YOUNG ARTISTS PRIZE

2023 JURY

Amy Cappellazzo, Founding Partner at Art Intelligence Global

Mickalene Thomas, award winning contemporary visual artist

Together with our esteemed jurors, I am proud to award this year’s inaugural Young Artists prize to Kahlil Robert Irving.

Sarah G. Harrelson Founder and Editor-in-Chief @sarahgharrelson Follow us | @cultured_mag

TIMOTHY GREENFIELD-SANDERS; MYLES LOFTIN; POLSKEY/COURTESY PHOTO; JOSH TONSFELDT

Nicola Lees, CEO & Artistic Director, Aspen Art Museum

CULTURED Young Artists Prize finalists Jo Messer and Willa Nasatir in their studios.

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Ruba Katrib, Curator & Director of Curatorial Affairs, MoMA PS1

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2023 YOUNG ARTISTS LIST Being an artist is no ordinary occupation. It demands a way of seeing, a kind of relentless attention that can’t be turned off. In recent years, creatives have been forced to contend with the increasing commercialization of the cultural ecosystem, a stormy political landscape, and a wobbling economy. Between the MFA-to-solo-show pipeline and an emphasis on relentless social media self-promotion, our culture has never been more focused on the question of how to “make it” professionally as an artist. How to make a life as one isn’t as simple of a calculation.

CULTURED’s eighth annual Young Artists list arrives amid this existential maelstrom. The 27 makers featured in these pages, all 35 or younger, are a testament to the resourcefulness and optimism required to choose not only the work, but also the life of an artist. They represent a wide range of geographies, mindsets, and mediums. Some have shown their work in august institutions; others operate entirely outside of the traditional gallery system. Some practice in a vacuum, while others would never dream of working alone. Some compare their work to committing a crime, others to creating an avatar. While the Hong Kong– and Brooklyn-based Jes Fan works at the molecular level, New York native mosie romney uses eBay hauls and dreams as raw material.

LA-based Jasper Marsalis sees his practice as a “suite of questions” to answer each day, while Houston-born Charisse Pearlina Weston regards hers as a way to interrogate systems of oppression.

What unites them all is a commitment to their unique visions and an urge to follow their own compasses, no matter the weather.

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ALEX TATARSKY ADRAINT KHADAFHI BEREAL THERESA CHROMATI EMMA STERN AUREL HAIZE ODOGBO HARDY HILL MOSIE ROMNEY GIANGIACOMO ROSSETTI JASPER MARSALIS ISABELLE BROURMAN KAHLIL ROBERT IRVING SHURIYA DAVIS WILLA NASATIR JO MESSER OMARI DOUGLIN OSCAR YI HOU OLIVIA VAN KUIKEN OSHAY GREEN CASSI NAMODA DOMINIQUE KNOWLES ADAM ALESSI JULIA YERGER CHARISSE PEARLINA WESTON S*AN D. HENRY-SMITH JES FAN VIOLET DENNISON CONNOR MARIE STANKARD 7

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ALEX TATARSKY 34, NEW YORK

BY HIJI NAM | PHOTOGRAPHY BY ZOE CHAIT

ADRAINT KHADAFHI BEREAL 25, NEW YORK

BY KAT HERRIMAN | SELF-PORTRAIT BY ADRAINT KHADAFHI BEREAL In September, Bottega Veneta invited Adraint Khadafhi Bereal to its Spring/Summer 2024 show in Milan. It was the 25-yearold Waco, Texas, native’s first European fall.

He texted, “I’m walking around so much and forget to eat because I’m afraid that the city will disappear between blinks. I’m taking pictures, refusing to really look at them. It’s like sketching, for a time when I can afford to stand somewhere for long enough to scatter the dust that’s now up to my ankles.”

Bereal is a poet by disposition. It comes out whether he is walking around a foreign city, writing an essay, or shooting a fashion editorial. His art reeks of literature. Sometimes the association is direct, like with his next project, currently in its research phase.

He is trying to figure out why Toni Morrison and Audre Lorde only shared the same stage once. Bereal’s work always starts with a quandary. From there, field research, interpretation, and divination ensue. The Black

Yearbook, his breakthrough work, asked what the real Black student body of his alma mater, the University of Texas at Austin, looked like—the one not shown in the brochures. The project became a multiyear feat across universities, combining interviews, essays, and photography, and culminating in a self-published encyclopedia of personal testimonies and portraits that fell somewhere between a W.G. Sebald-ian novel and Mierle Laderman Ukeles’s 1979–80 Touch Sanitation project, where she shook the hand of every garbage worker in New York.

A portion of The Black Yearbook ran as a prominent New York Times feature in 2020, but this January, it will take book form with Penguin Random House. Reflecting on the milestone from his home in Brooklyn, Bereal notes that The Black Yearbook was not about making pictures, but being present in the stadium, the dorm room, the frat house, or the quad. The all-in approach and investigative thrust of the work aligns Bereal

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At the moment, Alex Tatarsky is deep in what they call “sad boy studios,” which consists of their bedroom, their mind, and hundreds of notebooks that say nothing.

It’s a zone of research for Sad Boys in Harpy Land, the New York native’s episodic, decade-long performance project that adapts Goethe’s 1796 story Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship—a tongue-incheek bildungsroman about a German boy who dreams of becoming a theater artist— and simultaneously pokes at and deflates the genre’s typically linear idea of progress.

The scope of Tatarsky’s work ranges from deliriously riotous solo plays such as Americana Psychobabble; to Shanzhai Lyric, the “poetic research and archival unit” they co-founded with their longtime collaborator Ming Lin; to Canal Street Research Association, the organization’s living theater offshoot and “fictional office”; and a recent residency as an ornamental hermit on the Glen Foerd estate in Philadelphia.

Each undertaking is marked by a playful approach to a serious commitment: getting to the bone of many of the art world’s deeply embedded ethical contradictions.

The Goethe adaptation germinated in their early 20s, when Tatarsky, 34, first began making so-called “solo performances” and confronted a crisis of meaning around both of those words. What does it mean to be solo, a person, an individual; and what does it mean to perform that?

While their stage presence tends to

“I’M EXHAUSTED WITH ‘BLACK JOY,’ I WANT TO KNOW WHAT COMES AFTER RAGE. IS IT SICKNESS?”

“CLOWN MAKEUP IS JUST STYLIZED TEARS, TRANSLATING YOUR SORROWS INTO SOME FORM OF AESTHETIC DELIGHT.” be refreshingly unhinged and hysterical, Tatarsky is warm and grounded in person, with a soft lilting voice that occasionally bursts into fits of giggles. “I realize these ideas might sound a little heavy-handed.

But remember, I do identify as a clown, so it’s lighthearted,” they say, laughing.

“It’s the first time they’re calling me a playwright, and I keep being like, ‘I’m just an experimental clown artist!’ Clown makeup is just stylized tears, translating your sorrows into some form of aesthetic delight.”

Like most of their work, Tatarsky sees Sad Boys—which debuted last year at New York’s Abrons Art Center and will be staged at the Midtown off-Broadway staple Playwrights Horizons this month (hence the playwright honorific)—as ongoing, life-long projects. “The way finished products are sold and premiered is antithetical to how a lot of performance practice is, which is growing and shifting over the course of a life,” they tell me. “I feel devoted to a work’s unfinished-ness and sense of unraveling, to letting the seams show.”

with artists like Leigh Ledare and Jill Magid, social provocateurs who don’t flinch at the mess we’ve made. “The truth is just as important as an imagined reality,” says Bereal.

“We’re walking towards much harder times, and that deserves space. I’m exhausted with ‘Black joy,’ I want to know what comes after rage. Is it sickness?”

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“[I’M TRYING TO] EXPAND WHAT’S HAPPENING IN THE REALM OF THE PAINTINGS INTO THIS REALM.”

THERESA CHROMATI 30, BALTIMORE

BY HENRY DEXTER | SELF-PORTRAIT BY THERESA CHROMATI

Metal supports—structures with the hard-line industrial feel of a factory farm’s machinery—fill the space in “DOOM BLOOM,” Theresa Chromati’s show with Dallas’s Tureen gallery this winter. Their severe edges are softened by the florid tenderness of the prismatic canvases they buttress—and by the fantastical botanical sculptures (so-called scrotum flowers) that wrap around them like vines. A recurring motif for Chromati, the scrotum flower is just one species in the elaborate mythological taxonomy of otherworldly beings that populate her work.

The testicular flora serves as an attendant to the multifaceted “central figure” that presides over the artist’s canvases. “[It’s a totem] that’s been woven into my paintings for years at this point,” says the Baltimore-born and -based artist. “It has been a guide, a friend, a listening ear for this central figure, as she stretches, lets go of herself, defines herself.”

Trained as a graphic designer, the 30-year-old has constructed her visual world by positioning layer after layer on top of one another, a process that echoes the way images are fashioned in virtual space. Glitter and felt serve as the erotic paraphernalia of her alien species, deployed to form nipples, a phallus, or secretions.

An impressively supple patinated bronze figure produced for her solo show at San Francisco’s Jessica Silverman gallery last spring, along with the scaffold-like supports the artist began making for her show at Veta in Madrid last summer, are the products of Chromati’s recent foray into metal. These works speak to her desire to “expand what’s happening in the realm of the paintings into this realm”—to explore the dissolution of the pictorial fourth wall.

For the artist, it’s all about freedom, dynamism, and movement. Openness and audacity are at the core of her work—“and questions,” she concludes, lots of questions. Chromati’s latest work, which will also be on view in Jessica Silverman’s Art Basel Miami Beach presentation, threads elements from this radically destabilizing symbolic ecosystem through a veil of normality with impressive technical and artistic ingenuity. In her experiments with new dimensions, the artist deepens her focus on the act of processing and reflecting the otherworldliness of humankind itself—“how vast, how nuanced we are” as a species.

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EMMA STERN 31, NEW YORK

BY MEKA BOYLE | PHOTOGRAPHY BY TOMMY RIZZOLI

In Emma Stern’s fantasy world, hot girls reign supreme. Since she graduated from Pratt Institute in 2014, the New Jersey– raised artist has been fleshing out her universe of “Lava Babies”—technicolor and otherworldly avatars who metabolize and reimagine classic tropes (pirates, rock stars, and cowgirls). With every series, she adds a new chapter to her everexpanding epic of hot-girl mythology.

“It’s all about building a universe and bringing these artifacts back with me,” says Stern of her approach to world-building. (She considers her social media presence a performance piece and created her first avatars online as a preteen exploring the still-new corners of the Internet.) “Paintings are one of those artifacts; sculpture, animation, and video are others,” she adds. But writing is the membrane that holds the visuals together.

Stern often devises a backstory for each painting, from which she creates a digital sketch with 3D modeling software that becomes a blueprint of sorts.

While Stern’s practice is multidisciplinary, painting is her greatest love.

“As soon as you put oil paint on canvas, it’s in dialogue with art history and the tradition of portraiture,” she says. In Daisy (banger!), 2023, a young musician in a bikini top and micro skirt perches unabashedly on a drum kit, a drum stick barely

obstructing the view up her skirt. “These are images that tend to exist in the weird underbelly of the Internet,” continues Stern. “That’s the interesting part for me: the way painting recontextualizes these tropes.”

The artist’s work has been described by turns as pornographic and “ironically misogynistic”—but Stern rarely deals with nudity and prefers authenticity to irony.

As far as any dialogue with the male gaze goes, she feels the conversation has run its course. “I’m tired of talking about it,” Stern declares. “Not everything is in reaction to, or for the benefit of, a hypothetical male audience.” Her hyperfeminine avatars are an extension of herself, after all.

Nevertheless, Stern is gradually incorporating men into her work. “I have this perfect little universe, but at a certain point I’ll need to introduce some conflict,” she concedes. On the heels of her solo exhibition, “Penny & The Dimes: Dimes 4Ever World Tour,” at Almine Rech’s London gallery in September, Stern is recharging and preparing for her first solo museum exhibition at Pond Society in Shanghai this spring. This will be the first time her motley cast of avatars will come together—a kaleidoscopic world of mermaids, rock stars, centaurs, elves, pirates, animals, school girls, and femme fatales—under one roof.

“IT’S ALL ABOUT BUILDING A UNIVERSE AND BRINGING THESE ARTIFACTS BACK WITH ME.”

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AUREL HAIZE ODOGBO 27, NEW YORK

BY HENRY DEXTER | PHOTOGRAPHY BY TIANNA STRICKLAND

“[ANCESTOR WORSHIP] ALLOWED ME TO BELIEVE IN MYSELF WHEN I DIDN’T HAVE A REASON TO, AND WHEN EVERYONE AROUND ME TOLD ME NOT TO BELIEVE IN THE YOUNG WOMAN I WAS GROWING INTO.”

Aurel Haize Odogbo’s interest in collage stems from her fascination with her chosen medium’s ability to take a fragment of our world and breathe new life into it. Using hard and soft pastels, metal leaf, and bird feathers as sinew, the Nigerian-American artist stitches images from the glitchy ecosystem of role-playing games together with signs, symbols, and cultural artifacts from the Yoruba tradition in pursuit of something “angelic.”

“Ancestor worship held so much power in my adolescence,” says Odogbo, who is transgender, when she calls from a “self-appointed” residency in Berlin. “It allowed me to believe in myself when I didn’t have a reason to, and when everyone around me told me not to believe in the young woman I was growing into.” The Baltimore-born artist’s fascination with the virtual also surfaced in her youth, when she would watch her older brother play classic video games on the TV—her face bathed in the flickering light of an alternate universe, entranced.

These games became the “possibility model” for Odogbo’s life as an artist—they proved that one could build and inhabit another world. She found herself particularly fixated on avatar creation and “on the ability to design a body without the constrictions of our world.” She saw the voltaic screen of her monitor as a kind of “digital altar or portal,” a place to commune with a vast network of imagined forms.

During the spiritual journey of Odogbo’s teenage years, her personal exploration of precolonial traditions and beliefs stood in stark contrast with the strict, prescriptive Christian religion of her father. The membrane that separates what we denote as “the sacred” and “the profane” loomed large in the 14 ambitious psychedelic collages she showed in “Quasiii—PortalsUponPortals,” her debut solo exhibition at Deli Gallery’s Mexico City outpost this summer. In the show, her abstract meditations on the angelic and the alien relied on speculation as their primary narrative mechanism, introducing us to deities that wait in the far-off future, shooting out from the picture plane like solar flares from a neighboring galaxy.

HARDY HILL 30, NEW YORK

BY HENRY DEXTER | PHOTOGRAPHY BY ALLISON LIPPY

Only a few years ago, Hardy Hill identified as a theologian. The artist—who is as lithe and mysterious as the figures who populate his dry and withholding copper intaglio etchings—studied printmaking as an undergraduate at RISD before pivoting to religious studies after his first encounters with the art world’s commodified underbelly.

“Art seemed to no longer make sense as a form,” he remembers. In 2017, Hill enrolled at Union Theological Seminary in New York, in search of “something that felt more honest.” For Hill, theology came to represent “this dematerialized, impersonal version of art,” and academia promised some kind of critical distance from the forces of the market, which of course, he laughs, “turned out not to be true.”

After graduating from the seminary in 2020, the artist returned to printmaking with obsessive fervor. “A print is something you have to commit like a crime,” he explains. Unlike with a painting, “there’s no amorous exchange.” His drawings, like the most gripping cold cases, are at once tidy and unresolvable. Each work begins with

a simple phrase, selected by the artist to describe the relationship between a set of often male, muscular, and spry figures. The resulting image is at once a straightforward translation of the text and a total betrayal of it.

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Sober, meticulous, and withdrawn, Hill focuses on scenes from domestic, not spiritual, life. If his drawings have an animating principle at all, it is self-abnegation.

When asked about the curious absence of religious iconography and divine narratives in the work, Hill muses, “In the Gospels, God never appears.” This is not to say that the 30-year-old makes “Christian art or even theologically inflected art,” but rather that the interplay in his drawings between what’s there and what’s not echoes the silence and truancy of the Abrahamic traditions.

Recently, Hill has made a significant departure from the technical minimalism that marked his early work with a new series of drawings done on film and exposed as photographs. These works, which he calls “contact prints,” wrestle with the art-

“A PRINT IS SOMETHING YOU HAVE TO COMMIT LIKE A CRIME. THERE’S NO AMOROUS EXCHANGE.”

ist’s ongoing interest in the camera. They also return hue, shadow, and lushness to Hill’s work, which long concerned itself with the surgical excision of everything that he felt constituted excess. In the spring of

next year, these new works will be presented in Hill’s second solo exhibition at New York’s 15 Orient, which promises to confirm his singular status as a thoughtful and unpredictable image-maker.

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“MY STUDIO ...

BELONGS TO ME IN A WAY THAT I HAVEN’T EXPERIENCED BEFORE. THAT BRINGS ME JOY.”

GIANGIACOMO ROSSETTI 34, NEW YORK

BY HENRY DEXTER | PHOTOGRAPHY BY MARY MANNING

MOSIE ROMNEY 29, QUEENS AND THE CATSKILLS

BY SHIRLEY NGOZI NWANGWA | PHOTOGRAPHY BY MARY MANNING Before they begin a new project, mosie romney pulls a tarot card. “I recently got the Chariot, [which] feels reminiscent of a spiral staircase,” they explain from their Catskills studio. “I’ve been thinking about spiral staircases as they relate to cyclebreaking and fantasy, entering other worlds … I’m making paintings about the spiritual journey and the physical journey.”

Romney grew up in New York City and studied at SUNY Purchase, where the now 29-year-old learned to appreciate the region’s hush, as well as its abundance.

Nature helps clear their head, and it is this lucidity that leads the artist from conception to finished product, translating a combination of daydreamed imagery and foraged objects, many sourced from eBay, into various abstractions on canvas or mixed-media assemblages.

Romney’s creations explore the concept of existence in all forms and in all places, mythical and biological. They often meld painting and poetry, making potions out of matter and swirling them around in an ethereal truth brew. In “Rhizome St./ Fugue Avenue,” their first solo exhibition with New York’s P.P.OW. gallery this fall, the artist dispatched from a multi-timeline universe, whose characters are connected,

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mysteriously, to each other. To make the series, they assembled found materials like metal studs and plastic baby figurines in a process one might liken to putting the pieces of a dream puzzle back together.

The resulting paintings’ palette—at once brilliant and muted, like the arching lines that punctuate each work—forces viewers to behold and traverse a seemingly infinite expanse.

When romney is not time traveling, they are destination hopping—thankfully, never alone. “Oopsie is definitely a support dog,” they say of their Lab/pit bull mix. “Being a painter is lonely … She reminds me to take breaks, go outside.

When she eats, I eat. When she needs more drinking water, I need to drink too.”

Romney doesn’t take for granted the lifestyle they’ve been able to cultivate as an artist. Having worked since they were 16, they relish not having to report to any place they don’t want to. “Now I check into my studio, and it belongs to me in a way that I haven’t experienced before. That brings me joy.” This state of enchantment permeates romney’s canvases, which vibrate with the potentiality of a reverie.

The only question is what they will dream up next.

There are about the same number of muscles in the hand as there are in the face, Giangiacomo Rossetti reminds me. For the New York–based artist, the comparison stresses the sheer expressive capacity of both body parts. “The hand is everything in painting,” he says, citing French theorist Pierre Klossowski’s influential but little-known 1965 text Les lois de l’hospitalité. Indeed, Rossetti’s emotionally brooding portraits present human flesh as at once sophisticated and articulate, brawny and robust. This exaggerated verisimilitude is central to his process, which resembles the tumultuous reactions by which the natural world evolves and transforms itself. Having come to painting late after experimenting with conceptual art, Rossetti educated himself through an excavation of art historical texts and technical bulletins. Perhaps it is this autodidactic excitement that fuels his volcanic fits of productivity.

The Milan native’s work rose to prominence on the cusp of the present figuration phenomenon. Today, the 34-year-old muses, “There is definitely an oversaturation of figurative painting, but there were also quite a few periods in which there was just figurative painting… for thousands of years. So I guess it can be fine.” When the artist turned to the canvas, he felt like he was doing something “rebellious.” Today, the idea that painting a figure could be an act of defiance appears absurd, but perhaps that is the point. “I don’t want any despotism, any strict lineage,” he proclaims, before concluding, “to begin with, the idea of making a painting was about breaking with lineage.”

In Fantasia n.6 – Contratto devozionale, 2020, a work first exhibited in Rossetti’s 2020 solo show at Greene Naftali, one figure drives a stake into the arm of another with a metal mallet. The piece began as a celestial scene where two planetary bodies held each other in orbit, but Rossetti decided the image wasn’t working. He altered the picture’s composition, resulting in a painting whose subjects seem to emit an almost gravitational intensity. On the phone, he proudly observes that recently, he’s experiencing a similar moment in the studio, “where everything is beginning to fall apart.” He’s working on a new show with the New York gallery, which is slated to open next spring. It’s one of those periods where everything is up for grabs again, where pictorial decay and creative rebirth intermingle to tremendous effect.

“I DON’T WANT ANY DESPOTISM, ANY STRICT LINEAGE ...THE IDEA OF MAKING A PAINTING WAS ABOUT BREAKING WITH LINEAGE.”

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JASPER MARSALIS 27, LOS ANGELES

BY HENRY DEXTER | PHOTOGRAPHY BY HANNAH TACHER “I was very interested in car design when I was younger,” recalls painter Jasper Marsalis. “I took this summer course, and the instructor explained that in their prototypal phase, you could only draw cars facing one direction. That really bothered me.”

That anecdote foreshadows the fixations that would emerge, years later, in the 27-year-old musician and artist’s work: a subversion of perspectival conventions, a complication of linearity, and an emphasis on the unreliability of optical experience. “It sparked my fascination with art-making, or with art-making as a suite of questions,” says Marsalis, who is currently on the road touring his debut album, Excelsior, under the moniker Slauson Malone 1.

Today, his artwork—the result of that suite of questions—sprawls well beyond a single medium. Intimately scaled oil paintings depict the vastness of light, while large-scale works contract as if under pressure. Occasionally, Marsalis

makes three-dimensional “drawings” out of soldered aluminum pieces that glisten like spider webs on the surface of his canvases. In his exhibitions, one finds bowling balls on a gallery floor, their holes stuffed with ear plugs or their rotundity interrupted with a wooden wedge. These anthropomorphic sculptures capture the simple physicality of the human figure— they make you feel the weight of your head on your shoulders.

In solo exhibitions at Los Angeles’s Kristina Kite Gallery, London’s Emalin, New York’s Svetlana, and Minneapolis’s Midway Contemporary Art, the prolific young multi-hyphenate has channeled his fixation on the insufficiency of the senses into artworks that force viewers to interrogate their own ability to perceive the world. And the ear, he contends, is just as treacherous as the eye. Marsalis’s musical output is as compositionally attuned to disorder and chaos as the artist’s two-dimensional work. For the Los Angeles native, the stage and the picture

“GOING BETWEEN MUSIC AND ART, TWO ECONOMIC WORLDS THAT SECRETLY I THINK REALLY HATE EACH OTHER, THAT’S AN INHERENTLY UNSTABLE POSITION.”

plane are interdependent, parallel forums for expression, but that doesn’t make the exchange a seamless one. “Going between music and art, two economic worlds that secretly I think really hate each other,” he muses, “that’s an inherently unstable position.”

Isabelle Brourman bears a striking resemblance to Lee Lozano. Like the late iconoclast, the New York–based artist maintains a rigorous painting practice that draws her attentions inward, while simultaneously pursuing an undercover life that draws her out into the world—to the edge of disappearance.

Brourman moonlights as a sketch artist, sneaking into courtrooms to bear witness to landmark trials all over the U.S. Getting access to these courtrooms often requires a disguise. Sometimes it’s as simple as carrying a sketchboard; other times it’s more ornate—a certain kind of blouse paired with a dusty rose lipstick, ever so slightly smudged across teeth, can make you invisible. (When Brourman covered Depp v. Heard, she spent months in disguise.

Her recordings of this marathon performance exist in the form of mixed media artworks or Notes app diatribes.)

Unlike her seasoned peers who work to capture the room’s realism, Brourman is not interested in likeness, nor in casting villains and angels. The 30-year-old is there to capture emotional information—what is lost in a verdict. She feeds off trespassing’s high risk and reward, enjoying adrenaline’s tightrope grip and the way it transforms her from bystander to participant. Brourman’s characters are not for an audience; they are a way for the artist to take back her body.

Last summer, at “Virginia is for Lovers,” her show at Murmurs gallery in Los Angeles, Brourman brought the terrorizing physicality of the courtroom to life by making a courtroom replica adorned with her Amber Heard and Johnny Depp trial drawings, including bar napkin scratchings—small breadcrumbs pointing to the aftersculture of celebrity trials. One piece, titled Bruise Expert, hung on Heard’s side of the reconstructed courtroom and laid out her contusions like a mood ring chart—each color swatch paired with a meaning. The watercolor, colored pencil, and ink artwork was inspired by the testimony given by Depp’s metadata expert witness, who opined on the extent of her injuries. “It is interesting that someone in metadata would be called as an expert on bruises,” the artist points out.

Brourman is currently attending another high profile trial, which means we only have an hour to chat. “I am fighting to play,” she tells me. “Each trial demands something different, each person on the stand, each city. Where is the release, and what needs to be released?”

“EACH TRIAL DEMANDS SOMETHING DIFFERENT, EACH PERSON ON THE STAND, EACH CITY. WHERE IS THE RELEASE, AND WHAT NEEDS TO BE RELEASED?”

ISABELLE BROURMAN 30, NEW YORK

BY KAT HERRIMAN | PHOTOGRAPHY BY ZOE CHAIT

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KAHLIL ROBERT IRVING

31, FAYETTEVILLE, ARKANSAS, AND SAINT LOUIS, MISSOURI

BY SHIRLEY NGOZI NWANGWA | PHOTOGRAPHY BY ANDREW CASTANEDA Kahlil Robert Irving is not interested in being seen, nor is he interested in being part of a scene. “I’ve been making things out of clay since I was 12 years old,” he announced in a 2022 interview with Mass MoCA. “I don’t have anything to prove to anybody.”

In the 19 years since Irving embarked on his relationship with ceramics, the sculptor has shared the company of eminent artists, showing at institutions as mammoth as the Whitney, MoMA, and New Museum. His sensory practice synthesizes his experience of the world as a Black man—what it feels like to be continuously inundated with images and videos of police killings of other Black men, for instance—with the study of perception, playing primarily with the literal and metaphorical aspects of sight.

Irving’s latest exhibition closed at Minneapolis’s Walker Art Center in November. An excavation of recent history, “Archaeology of the Present” featured a collection of sculptures that embody the layering technique for which the artist is best known. These amalgamated masses consist of amorphous debris and easily recognizable pedestrian objects like vases, teapots, and soda bottles positioned at different angles, their volume covered in part by facsimiles of news clippings, social media posts, or commercial decals. The works are often mistaken for found objects; Irving encourages those who detect the discrepancy to continue deconstructing what they know about the “fossilized” slice of time that is represented by the full sculpture. “If someone is able to decipher the code,” he explains, “then they have access.”

From his studio in Fayetteville, Arkansas—where he is currently a guest artist at the University of Arkansas and working toward a showing of “Archaeology of the Present” at Saint Louis’s Kemper Art Museum—Irving weighs his words on questions of accessibility and marginalization in his work and the greater art world. Last year, he experienced racist mistreatment while staying in a hotel. Around the time of the incident, he had also been tasked with taking care of his grandmother who later passed away. Making work— choosing creation over internal decimation, self-determination over powerlessness—simultaneously heals and fuels him. “I’m constantly reminded that this is a marathon,” he concludes. “But I also remember that the world is on fire, and I just gotta do what I can while I can.”

“I’M CONSTANTLY REMINDED THAT THIS IS A MARATHON, BUT I ALSO REMEMBER THAT THE WORLD IS ON FIRE, AND I JUST GOTTA DO WHAT I CAN WHILE I CAN.”

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“I LOSE TRACK OF WHERE THINGS BEGIN AND END A LOT, SO I TRY TO MAKE PAINTINGS THAT PORTRAY THAT.”

SHURIYA DAVIS 27, BYRAM, MISSISSIPPI

BY KAT HERRIMAN | SELF-PORTRAIT BY SHURIYA DAVIS

Shuriya Davis didn’t caption their bruise-colored, semi-abstract homages to Big Gay Idiot DJ, the early 2010s phenom formerly known as DJ Total Freedom, when they posted them on Instagram. In September, the Alabama-born, Mississippi-based artist began flooding the app with these brown, purple, and green premonitions from a muddy future. After a summer of silence (due to a health crisis) from a hitherto loquacious account, the posts were the first sign that Davis was in the studio again. “Working with portraiture is the quickest way for me to get ideas,” they confess over the phone. For the 27-year-old, the process is a kind of emotional shorthand. “I’m always returning to those images of DJ Total Freedom. They have an intimacy,” says Davis. “Those images set the tone for what I’m interested in making: figures that are deep and contemplative about the world they’re existing in.”

Muses, like DJ Total Freedom, enter the studio via Instagram screenshots and websites like Black Archives, a well of documentation that underscores the plurality and complexity of Black experiences. Once applied to a work however, a reference image—even one freighted

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with meaning—functions less as a blueprint than as something to riff on.

It’s no surprise that Davis looks up to Georg Baselitz, whose work embraces that moment where portraiture grazes abstraction. Nor is it shocking that Davis claims they learned to draw from studying Willem de Kooning in undergrad at the Rhode Island School of Design.

Unlike their figurative peers’ interest in representation as a way to affirm certain narratives, Davis does not seek resolution. The messiness of personhood is left intact.

“I lose track of where things begin and end a lot, so I try to make paintings that portray that,” they say. “One mark helps another mark find its resonance. I make use of every mark so that there are no accidents in this creation.”

At the moment, following memorable inclusions in group shows like Nahmad Contemporary’s “Ugly Painting” and a run of sold-out solo exhibitions, Davis’s marks are still in their accumulation phase. But there are more presentations on the way, at New York’s Derosia, and at Stars, their long-term gallery in Los Angeles. That’s enough of a plan for Davis.

Painting has their full attention.

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“I’M HAPPY THAT MY WORK STILL FEELS MYSTERIOUS TO ME, THAT IT DOESN’T FEEL SOLVED OR LIKE I’VE REACHED THE EDGES, THE CONTOURS OF THE THING.”

WILLA NASATIR 33, NEW YORK

BY HIJI NAM | PHOTOGRAPHY BY MARY MANNING

“I was talking with a friend the other day, and she said that being an artist is thinking, This is bad, this is very, very, very, very bad, but not derailing it,” says Willa Nasatir, laughing. “Like throwing a birthday party and wanting to cancel it at the last minute. But the thing about being 33 is having a better grasp of how to sit through that.” The artist is in a serene mood when I meet her at Los Tacos near Tribeca Park, and says that she hasn’t been feeling the post-show depression that often hits two to three weeks after an opening.

The show in question is her third solo exhibition at Chapter NY, the gallery that has represented the Los Angeles native since 2016. The obligatory CV line about Nasatir tends to include the fact that she had a solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art five years out of Cooper Union, but what’s useful in approaching Nasatir’s compositions across photography and painting is the psychoanalytic dictum at the heart of her work: Everyone and everything that appears in our dreams is a part of ourselves.

Nasatir’s pictures break down and anatomize the solidity of objects by splitting them up into parts, giving form to how the body is marked by and yields to the multiplicities of desire, power, and pleasure. As an observer-participant of the world she depicts, her process is arguably one of the subject reflecting on herself as an object, and the central theme of her work might be that of relationships—those that constellate the fractured facets within personality, sexuality, and friendship, dynamics that are never concretized but drift in an ever-shifting tide of ebbs and flows.

A couple days before our meeting, Nasatir had a dream that an Angelyne-like figure driving a hot pink Corvette backed into her car. The strongest emotional current in the dream was one of relief, she remembers, as she’d recently switched her car insurance from California to New York. She pauses as she realizes she’s made a photograph of a brick smashing into a toy Corvette. It’s currently hanging in the Chapter NY show. Why did she make it? “I’m not sure,” she grins. “I guess to fulfill the dream I had a month and a half later.” She seems genuinely bewildered by this, but reasons, “I’m happy that my work still feels mysterious to me, that it doesn’t feel solved or like I’ve reached the edges, the contours of the thing.”

“IT’S A LOT OF MATERIAL-BASED DISCOVERY. I’M NOT YET WHO I WANT TO BE AS A PAINTER.”

Art historians are more than a little obsessed with the distinction between nudity and nakedness. Jo Messer, for her part, is obsessed with painting. “I just come in every day and start,” she says, which is rarer to hear from an artist than you might think.

Messer’s work is indeed focused on women’s naked bodies, but she’s not interested in representing the idea of a woman at all. It’s their guts, abstracted and perversely figured, that captivate her.

Earlier this year, the Cooper Union and Yale School of Art graduate, now 32, opened “EAT ME,” a solo show that took over both locations of Manhattan gallery 56 Henry. “There was a large painting of, mostly, women crouching in oyster shells. It was a play on Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, which is a really beautiful, virgin-like Venus,” says Messer of the show’s eponymous marquee work. “I did my dirty, slutty version.”

Using a palette of chaotic and warped blues, Messer welcomed the often-obscured realities of female sexuality into the light, letting everything hang out. Eat me, 2023, is a fitting representation of Messer’s oeuvre as a whole, in which bulbous limbs and overflowing bodies

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JO MESSER 32, NEW YORK

BY TIANA REID | PHOTOGRAPHY BY TOMMY RIZZOLI

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swell within the frame, threatening to burst free of the canvas that contains them.

“I begin a painting with nothing, just a color,” the artist says of her approach. “I don’t usually start with a clear direction, so the painting changes and evolves as I’m making it.” It is clear, when speaking to Messer in her Brooklyn studio, that the artist recognizes the multiplicity of interpretations that might arise from her work. She muses that the end goal is simply that. “I strive for [my paintings] to have some sort of openness,” she says, “and to be read in multiple ways.”

Lately, Messer has shifted her oil painting practice from canvas to wood panels, broadening her horizons in anticipation of a show at Morán Morán gallery in Mexico City next spring.

Given Messer’s subject matter, there is always more ground to cover, more flesh to touch. “It’s a lot of material-based discovery,” she explains.

“I’m not yet who I want to be as a painter.”

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OMARI DOUGLIN 31, LOS ANGELES

BY KAT HERRIMAN | PHOTOGRAPHY BY JULIE GOLDSTONE

For Omari Douglin, everything begins with a sketch. This includes the first paintings and sculptures the New York–born artist made at LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts, all the way up to the works that appeared in “Wave Gods 2” this past spring. For that exhibition at New York’s Ramiken gallery, a stack of Douglin’s character sketches of Black figures were transformed into a formidable papier-mâché army with the help of custom piñata makers in Mexico. The act of translation feels reminiscent of the exchange between Arte Povera conceptualist Alighiero Boetti and the Afghani weavers who turned his instructions into the tapestries that comprised his “Mappa” series, charting the globe’s disputed borders from 1989 to 1991.

Douglin doesn’t mention Boetti specifically, but art history is a preoccupation of his. In his paintings, he frequently cites passages from a canon that stretches from Édouard Vuillard and Martin Kippenberger to Aaron McGruder’s The Boondocks, putting them in dialogue with other signifiers and burnt ends. Douglin literally paraphrased peer Lukas Quietzsch during their doubleheader at Ramiken this fall, depicting his friend’s still-wet abstraction floating in a thought bubble.

Not every reference is as linear. Douglin’s work is often compared to artists like Kippenberger, Michael Williams, and Sigmar Polke because of the way these semi-abstract painters confuse the eye, obfuscating how the work was made to unnerving effect. The difference is that Douglin is not interested in automation (screen printing or otherwise) when it comes to painting. He wants to probe how the medium could address sculpture without the printer. This was a discovery the now 31-year-old made at Cooper Union where, like many of his classmates, he emulated Wade Guyton and Laura Owens by stacking images in Photoshop. “It was becoming this technique to maximize production,” says Douglin. “I have a duty in this field to advance it and to think about it in deeper ways. [In the end,] I realized that I didn’t need the computer.”

Douglin taught his hand how to layer like a machine: clean, purposeful. Almost digital, but still human.

Room 3557, his curatorial side-gig, is perhaps the largest manifestation of Douglin’s belief in hands-on engagement. The artistic equivalent of Hogwarts’s Room of Requirement, a fictional space that adjusts its nature to accommodate the vision of the inhabitant, the project is Douglin’s valentine to Los Angeles as a recent transplant, his way of diving headfirst into the city and making a place for art for its own sake.

“I HAVE A DUTY IN THIS FIELD TO ADVANCE IT AND TO THINK ABOUT IT IN DEEPER WAYS.”

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“I’M GOING TO CONTRACT—HUNKER DOWN AND ATTUNE MYSELF TO THE PLEASURE OF PAINTING.”

OSCAR YI HOU 25, NEW YORK

BY MEKA BOYLE | PHOTOGRAPHY BY JOSÉ A. ALVARADO JR.

Oscar yi Hou is in his poetry era. In his “poem paintings,” a private lexicon of hieroglyphs—cranes, the yin and yang symbol, Western spurs—serve as standins for the artist. “It’s the universe of the paintings, and it’s up to the viewer if they want to decipher it or not,” the New York– based, Liverpool-born painter says of the works, which have served as a means to document his relationships with loved ones over the years.

In one example, an ongoing conversation (and exchange of writing) between yi Hou and his close friend Elmo Tumbokon resulted in Old Gloried Hole, aka: Ends of Empire, 2022, an evocative commentary on American imperialism and queer identity that stands at nearly seven feet tall. On the canvas, Tumbokon strikes a commanding presence: His shadow is cast against the reimagined American flag’s red stripes, which are rendered in obscured text (a reframing of the welcome letter that the Filipino-born Tumbokon received when he became a naturalized U.S. citizen).

“Historically, minorities have always had to operate with a kind of subterranean semiotics, language, or codes,” says yi Hou, who was born to Cantonese immigrants in England. The 25-year-old found a kindred spirit in the late Chinese artist

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Martin Wong, who shared an interest in subversive forms of language, homoerotic imagery, and cowboys. “It’s important to keep Wong—who died of [complications related to] AIDS—and his generation of artists’ practices alive by reexamining them, by rearticulating them, by responding to them so that they still remain interlocutors within contemporary discourse,” he emphasizes.

The young artist’s mid-20s have been marked by a number of major milestones.

Last year, he published an eponymous collection of poetry, essays, and memoir with James Fuentes gallery that posed the question: “What is art after representation?” For his first solo museum show at the Brooklyn Museum, “East of sun, west of moon,” which ran until this September, he acted as the de facto curator, selecting works, writing wall texts, and fleshing out a thesis. With his premise outlined across museum walls, yi Hou freed himself from the burden of having to explain himself going forward.

Now, he’s beginning preparations for an upcoming show with James Fuentes in New York. “My life this past year has been undergoing a state of expansion,” he says. What’s next? “I’m going to contract—hunker down and attune myself to the pleasure of painting.”

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OLIVIA VAN KUIKEN 26, NEW YORK

“I THINK ABOUT THE QUESTION OF WHAT IT MEANS TO MAKE A FEMINIST PAINTING A LOT. WHAT DOES THAT LOOK LIKE?”

BY ELLA MARTIN-GACHOT | PHOTOGRAPHY BY TOMMY RIZZOLI

“The character is contemplating her pregnancy, like, ‘Do I give myself an abortion with a knife? Do I jump out the window?’” explains Olivia van Kuiken. The 26-yearold painter is giving me her elevator pitch for The Trumpets of Jericho, an experimental fable about an expectant young woman trapped in a tower. Its author—Unica Zürn, a Surrealist renegade often overshadowed by her other half, Hans Bellmer—wrote the text after giving birth to two children and going through a self-induced abortion.

Zürn and the 1968 novella have been a compass of sorts for van Kuiken since she first discovered the book as a freshman at Cooper Union. She turned to them once again this year in preparation for her first solo show with Château Shatto, which will open in time with Frieze Los Angeles next February. From her own turret in Queens, a second floor studio overlooking a mom-and-pop auto shop, the artist points to the themes—bodily alienation, linguistic abstraction, the “edges of experience”— that continue to rivet her and translate easily to her narrative-allergic body of work.

“I think about the question of what it means to make a feminist painting a lot,” she muses. “What does that look like?”

Growing up in New Jersey, van Kuiken was well aware of the traps a woman can fall into. “I was raised by the suburban moms there,” she remembers. “A lot of their husbands divorced them, and they would end up having to work at places like Petco. That made me crazy and really depressed as a kid.” In high school, she found some solace in black-and-white darkroom photography, hoping to follow postconceptual doyenne Liz Deschenes’s footsteps and pining to be in Rookie, from which her work was rejected for being “too abstract.”

The figure eventually made its way into her work, but van Kuiken isn’t interested in dwelling on its subjectivity. “When people are in my paintings, they’re like placeholders,” she explains. “Like bathroom signs, almost.” (The depictions of women on their deathbed that framed her solo show at Chapter NY earlier this year typify this depersonalization; in her panoramic treatment of their corpses, they became more landscape than life force.) Text, too, has surfaced in recent works, like a gestural hurricane of a painting stamped with “UNICA” in Cooper Black font.

Looking at it across the studio, van Kuiken says she’s aware the lay viewer won’t recognize her cherished inspiration’s first name. That’s the point.

“It’s kind of hard for me to even call myself a visual artist,” confesses Oshay Green over Zoom. “It’s a bit intimidating to me in a way … There’s an intention, and there’s a responsibility, to being one.” It’s not surprising that Green, who is based in Dallas, struggles with the moniker. The show notes for “This whole time I’ve been seeing the same shit I had seen in my dreams,” Green’s solo show at Blinkers in Winnipeg, Canada, last year, highlight his self-taught bonafides and his origins as a welder and sound designer. At 29, Green has been

“I’M WORKING OUT OF NECESSITY. I’M TRYING TO CREATE SOME SORT OF LIBERATION.”

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making music much longer than visual art—the materiality of sound gives him a language for his three-dimensional work.

The term “artist” only became relevant to him in 2018, when he started tinkering with metals, pallets, wood, and steel in a painter friend’s Dallas studio. Green simply thought, Why not?

His oblique relationship to the artist moniker is mirrored in his installations: assemblages composed of found materials that have not quite transcended their prior status as debris, the uncanny trace of their past lives an aura that hovers around them. Green uses materials such as concrete, ink, rope, obsidian, and charcoal to render industrial prisms through which the mythology of capitalism, decay, and mortality are refracted. Even the artist’s influences form a kind of layered collage—splashes of Madlib and J Dilla with a touch of Nam June Paik.

When I ask him why he makes work, Green mentions survival. “I’m working out of necessity. I’m trying to create some sort of liberation—I’m not talking about freeing the fucking world or anything,” he muses. “I am just looking for the key that opens a door to something else.”

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OSHAY GREEN 29, DALLAS

BY TIANA REID | PHOTOGRAPHY BY JONATHAN ZIZZO

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CASSI NAMODA 35, NEW YORK

BY GEOFFREY MAK | PHOTOGRAPHY

BY ANDRES ALTAMIRANO

“THERE NEED TO BE QUESTIONS WITH THE VIEWER. MAYBE YOU DON’T ANSWER ALL OF THEM.”

How do you learn a city? “The cadence is different,” says Cassi Namoda, who often travels to far-flung locales to paint. “And the light in every city is different.” In the summer of 2018, she was painting in a garage in Maputo, Mozambique, where mosquitoes came in to interrupt her at dusk and dawn. At night, after the heat cooled down, she took refuge in bars, where the dark of people’s clothes glowed under dim lights. Those nocturnal scenes appeared in her paintings for “Bar Texas,” her show at Detroit’s Library Street Collective later that year.

Born in Maputo, the 35-year-old has spent a large part of her life shuttling between Uganda, Kenya, and New York. When she was 16, living in Uganda, her photojournalist neighbor gave her an old Nikon. One day, she took a trip down to the Nile, which churned in front of her as monkeys scurried up trees. A Swahili proverb jangled in her head: “The day a monkey is designed to die, all trees become slippery.” Moved, she decided she wanted to make art about African stories, not like the paintings she saw in New York museums. She took a photograph that later hung on the wall in her first Los Angeles exhibition at François Ghebaly in 2019.

After studying cinematography at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco, Namoda transitioned to painting full-time in 2016. She was drawn to the medium’s approaches, both gestural and figurative, to stage compositions fraught with tension and longing. Sad and stupid desires, 2022, shows a man with knitted brows, smoking. His face is painted in broad brushstrokes. In his eyes, a pinprick of red harmonizes with the burning cherry at the tip of his cigarette. What is he thinking about?

Namoda has made a name for herself within a revival, in the last decade, of Black figuration, typified by painters like Toyin Ojih Odutola and Amoako Boafo, who, like her, saturate their subjects’ faces with psychological complexity. Recently, however, Namoda has turned toward abstraction with scenes that reference disaster and migration, on display earlier this fall in “A gentle rain is dying,” a show with New York’s 303 Gallery. Existential migrations in Mecufi, 2023, shows migrants wrapped in blankets, evoking a crossing that brings to mind the treacherous Darién Gap between North and South America. Their faces are planes of color without punctuation, unknowable. “There needs to be questions with the viewer,” she concludes. “Maybe you don’t answer all of them.”

DOMINIQUE KNOWLES 27, PARIS AND CHICAGO

BY TIANA REID | PHOTOGRAPHY BY GEORGIE HAMMOND

Dominique Knowles’s adoration of horses began in childhood, when he started riding in the Bahamas. “I drew horses because I desired horses,” the 27-year-old artist says. Perhaps this bond is the genesis for the movement, yearning, and mark-making that present themselves as something of a spiritual trinity in his work.

When the artist turned 14, he became immersed in the community of artists that orbited his uncle’s contemporary art gallery, Popopstudios International Center for the Visual Arts, in the Bahamian capital of Nassau. “Painting offered an alternative way of living that the horse stables did not,” he explains. “I can be emotional in the paintings. It’s a different sense of community that is a bit more self-governing, eclectic, and unique.” Fueled by this early exposure, Knowles found his way stateside, earning a BFA and MFA in painting at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he completed his studies in 2020.

Today, the artist’s paintings could be described as character studies that explore, with spiritualistic dedication, a

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single being or act. Every brushstroke arcs and billows so that Knowles’s central figures appear at once to be moving and melting—rendered in a palette of rustic, almost prehistoric oranges, browns, and reds. “My Beloved,” his most recent show, which ran this past summer at Hannah Hoffman Gallery in Los Angeles, was an homage to Knowles’s horse, a lifelong companion who died in 2021. The show featured eight works bearing the same title—The Solemn and Dignified Burial Befitting My Beloved for All Seasons, 2023.

The artist painted the windows of the gallery an earthy ochre, bathing the space in warm light to create a cathedral-like hush.

Indeed, one painting felt almost reminiscent of an altarpiece.

In Knowles’s swirling atmosphere of death and rebirth, mourning seems to be a requirement for engagement. “The most important thing,” he says, “is the intimacy in the painting, the intimacy between the painting and the viewer, or between the artist and the expression—it’s this alchemy of intimacy.”

“THE MOST IMPORTANT THING IS THE INTIMACY IN THE PAINTING, THE INTIMACY BETWEEN THE PAINTING AND THE VIEWER, OR BETWEEN THE ARTIST AND THE EXPRESSION— IT’S THIS ALCHEMY OF INTIMACY.”

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ADAM ALESSI 29, LOS ANGELES

BY GEOFFREY MAK | PHOTOGRAPHY BY JULIE GOLDSTONE

“[THERE’S] THE SENSE THAT, AT ANY MOMENT, A BALLOON BEHIND MY HEAD IS ABOUT TO POP.”

Julia Yerger wishes she still had her Photoshop fan art, the stuff she exhibited as a teenager in “naughty, guilty places on the Internet.” That early output would be generative fodder for the oil paintings that the 30-year-old artist is making now. In their compositional density, they resemble those early collages as well as the more sophisticated digital frescoes Yerger later made while studying at the Maryland Institute College of Art, and in Los Angeles after graduating.

These days, the East LA–based artist rarely spends studio time online, beyond the occasional use of a computer for sketching. But the screen’s influence on the work persists anyway, driving Yerger’s canvases toward acts of compression. “In painting, I try to translate the spirit of my digital work. There are super-close-up details and super-receded graphic ideas happening all at once,” she says. “I’m working through that in the painting, where it is a lot more challenging to make it what I want.”

“CARTOONS ARE GREAT ABSTRACTIONS. THEY ARE BEAUTIFUL BUT ALSO HAVE THE CAPABILITY TO HIDE SO MUCH.” CULTURED ABMB 2023

The intricacies of oil paint are ultimately what attracted Yerger to the medium. At MICA, she got her fill of idea-driven work that only required one or two decisions to cook.

Yerger consciously implemented the reverse approach, where each move begets the next three. It is in the fissiparous nature of semi-abstract art, the splitting and dividing of possibility into subsets of infinity, that Yerger has found a home.

That is not to say that there aren’t acts of simplification in the artist’s work. Cartoons are a major influence, although Yerger doesn’t watch them and never really did. “To me, cartoons are great abstractions. They are beautiful but also have the capability to hide so much,” she says. “It’s a combination of things I can’t really control but I am attached to. When I look at something, I turn it into a cartoon.”

As an illustrator, Yerger leaves a lot to her viewers’ imaginations, and it is this plastic ambivalence that leaves the door open to the sinister. This was the case with “Yard Problems,” her inaugural solo show with Clearing at the gallery’s Brussels compound this fall. The colors of Yerger’s abstracted landscapes were vivid, glowing from within, and still somehow foreboding. It made you wonder what might be hiding in plain sight, and what we can expect next from an artist so invested in the formal qualities of infinite potential.

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A faceless man whispers into a woman’s ear. Her face looks stricken, though the viewer will never know what she heard. Beholding this is like waking from a nightmare: You might not remember the dream, but you still feel the residue of dread hovering over your body.

Adam Alessi based Cruiser’s Creek, 2022—the titular artwork in a solo show at Clearing’s Brussels location last year—on a still from a 1985 music video of the same name by British post-punk band the Fall. The composition mirrors the frame, but the woman’s face was Alessi’s fabrication. The artist will often rework a face in his paintings until “it feels like it’s paying attention to you, it’s judging you.” These prying likenesses synthesize an almanac of references, from horror films to illuminated manuscripts to memories of his Los Angeles childhood.

Almost all of Alessi’s countenances sneer, leer, or grimace—creating the claustrophobic feeling of being watched. If affect theory and informational surveillance networks are the two dominant epistemes of our moment, the artist traffics in both. While the 29-year-old’s paintings resemble older traditions, like the works of Gustav Klimt and Aubrey Beardsley, the anxiety they provoke speaks to today’s conditions, where total scrutiny of civilian life has created an age steeped in self-consciousness. Alessi aims to trigger a feeling of “inescapable embarrassment,” not sexual so much as perverse.

When Alessi was growing up in Los Angeles, he couldn’t look at stacks of folded clothes, because he would see faces in the creases. Eerie visages, dumbstruck and skewed, populated his first solo show at Smart Objects in Los Angeles in 2020. He has since included grids and landscapes in two recent solo shows for Clearing—first in Brussels, then in New York this summer—displaying his signature palette of lilac, burnt umber, and moss.

In his Los Angeles studio, Alessi is tinkering with surreal ceramic cups, funky descendants of Méret Oppenheim’s fur-covered table setting. He’s also embarked on a series of grid paintings—patches of moody ochres, stone gray—that evoke the same sinister feeling of his goblins, but abstracted. He’s noticed that after an intense period of painting, he sleeps more deeply. The comedown of what he describes as an “anxiety-based practice” affords him, and by association the viewer, a kind of purge. The work, though, remains—continually bearing witness to these suspended moments of horror, the sense “that at any moment, a balloon behind my head is about to pop.”

JULIA YERGER 30, LOS ANGELES

BY KAT HERRIMAN | PHOTOGRAPHY BY JULIE GOLDSTONE

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“MY INTEREST IN GLASS IS AS A CONCEPTUAL VEHICLE.”

CHARISSE PEARLINA WESTON 35, NEW YORK

BY CAMILLE OKHIO | PHOTOGRAPHY BY DENZEL GOLATT

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In its raw form, glass embodies conflicting states of existence: hard, soft, sharp, smooth. It can be stiff and unyielding, yet delicate enough to interact with the most sensitive sites: the mouth, the eye, the hand. Shattered, it slices and severs. For Charisse Pearlina Weston, the material is a tool of resistance. Though synonymous with fragility and transparency, in her hands it becomes a means by which to obfuscate and protect. She molds it into a medium of refusal, a poem in physical form.

The New York–based artist first discovered glass in 2016, while searching for a way to layer text and photography. Her approach is straightforward: She relies mostly on slumping or hot-folding the material

while it is in the kiln. “I have been painted as a glass artist, though I am not formally trained,” says Weston. “My interest in glass is as a conceptual vehicle.”

Glass is one of several mediums within the lexicons of sculpture and writing that the 35-year-old uses to explore Black intimacy, mourning, memory, and interiority. When she injects it with images and words (often poems or found quotes), it serves to highlight the manifold ways in which Black safety and belonging are consciously degraded.

More specifically, Weston confronts police brutality, unsolicited interpersonal intervention, and the ways the Black body has been seized, used, and perceived nonconsensually.

In “of [a] tomorrow: lighter than air, stronger than whiskey, cheaper than dust,” a solo exhibition at the Queens Museum last winter, Weston suspended a large artwork, of the same name as the show, from the ceiling of a central gallery. Its installation was foreboding, intentionally confusing the movement and bodily autonomy of visitors, forcing them to change course. The work built on the gesture of defiance embodied by an unrealized resistance act proposed by the Brooklyn and Bronx chapters of the Congress of Racial Equality at the beginning of the 1964–65 World’s Fair, which was held where the museum now stands.

As she excavates the past through her work, Weston also sustains her momentum as a rising star in the conceptual art arena.

With sculptural works included in an upcoming show at Museum Folkwang in Essen, Germany, and new work unveiling this fall at MoMA PS1, she is turning to other materials, like canvas, to interrogate and dismantle strategies of oppression, while maintaining her connection to glass.

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S*AN D. HENRY-SMITH 31, AMSTERDAM AND NEW YORK

BY GEOFFREY MAK | SELF-PORTRAIT BY S*AN D. HENRY-SMITH

“The speaker of this poem is in a tizzy in a huffy & a 1/2, she’s feeling / down on her luck,” reads the first line of “earworm,” a poem from 2019. “I am her, I would do anything for her / survival,” it continues, setting up the catchy, propulsive pace the following lines will follow. The verses swerve from subject to object, destabilizing the “I” as a sovereign entity, liquefying into a rhythmic empathy that feels urgent, alive.

The sculptor of those words, S*an D. Henry-Smith, is a quiet revolutionary.

Through their collaborative, multi-disciplinary practice, the 31-year-old is out to destroy the myth of the artist as an individual genius. Like the prison abolitionist Mariame Kaba once said, “Everything worthwhile is done with other people.” Henry-Smith embodies this by using art to underline our interdependence.

In 2019, they published a cookbook in collaboration with poet Imani Elizabeth Jackson, under the moniker mouthfeel.

Consider the Tongue combines photography and poetry, featuring historically Black recipes, like gumbo and oyster stew.

They chose the format of the cookbook to explore food’s unique ability to bring people together. “A lot of the first oyster bars in New York were owned by recently freed slaves,” they explain. “It’s where abolitionists would meet.”

For years, Henry-Smith has refined the art of hanging out. “Portrait-making is an element of conversation,” they say, describing their snapshots of friends in Lunar New Year, a short film from 2021 for 47 Canal.

In front of the camera, poet Slant Rhyme and scholar Ryan Clarke pose with relaxed intimacy. Both are ravers. “The dance floor is an extension of our study,” reasons Henry-Smith.

Taking after Amiri Baraka’s poetry on John Coltrane, Henry-Smith has also looked to echo the music of their contemporaries, like the noise musician Dreamcrusher, who inspired Henry-Smith’s poem “Another Country.” This act of annotation has culminated in performances with co-conspirators like the techno DJ Shyboi, with whom Henry-Smith is currently working on a collaboration, titled what mosses!,

VIOLET DENNISON 34, NEW YORK

BY KAT HERRIMAN | PHOTOGRAPHY BY ALLISON LIPPY

“ART CAN HAPPEN VERY FAST. THAT IS HOW I WORK—DON’T LET THE PAINT DRY.”

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in conjunction with L’Rain and Justin Allen. Another musical project—a solo album under the name astringency principle of the looking drum— occupies a slice of the life they split between New York and Amsterdam.

If kinship is Henry-Smith’s medium, the rapture of a well-accompanied life is their subject.

Across their practice, the artist presents people not in collective struggle, per se, but in shared joy: at raves, dinners, poetry readings. In Henry-Smith’s hands, these practices become what they call “technologies of togetherness.” “Even when I’m working alone,” they assert, “I’m not actually.”

“EVEN WHEN I’M WORKING ALONE, I’M NOT ACTUALLY.”

Violet Dennison makes paintings with the precision and foresight of an installation artist. This is an affectation that the Bridgeport, Connecticut–born artist developed over nearly a decade of showing sculpture—frequently in Europe, where the young conceptualist found a following amongst kunsthalle directors with the resources and room to chase her ideas down the rabbit hole. Dennison, 34, fondly recalls arriving to install solo exhibitions with nothing but a “recipe”—no art—to execute. For her, “recipe” is a flexible-enough term to include serious acts of plumbing, as evidenced by her 2017 show “Transcend” at Jan Kaps gallery in Cologne. For Pipe Re-Route, one of the exhibition’s many interventions, the artist laparatomized the bathroom wall, redirecting the faucet to flow onto her longtime gallery’s floor. You knew when people washed their hands: The dribble became a gush.

At the New Museum Triennial a year later, Dennison arrived with bundles of Floridian seagrass. She liked the hydrophyte’s wellness-industry associations and its relentless impulse to ejaculate seeds and lasso passersby into becoming unwitting messengers in their odyssey back to the sea. At some point during the triennial, the curators decided the seagrass was a little too eager, and Dennison was obliged to glue the thalassic strands down.

As an artist, Dennison revels in unexpected results, like misbehaving seaweed. The element of surprise keeps her coming back day after day to her treehouse-like studio in New York’s Financial District. Lately, her experiments have been drifting toward her first love: oil paint. She reminisces about a devout high school art teacher who taught her to mix pigments, and an undergraduate experience at New York University that later turned her allegiances to conceptualism.

Today, her process hews more closely to the latter. It is preparation-intensive and finishes with a burst of athleticism. Some ideas start on paper, others on the screen, and then they switch, migrating from digital space to easel and back again until a satisfying composition arrives on canvas. “[When I was working on installations], I realized art can happen very fast. That is how I work,” says Dennison. “Don’t let the paint dry.”

This means not being too precious, even when her current subject matter is Ovidian mythology and the symbology of flowers. There are things in the pipeline as always, like a show at Jan Kaps this past summer, but it’s too early to know what direction the water is flowing just yet.

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JES FAN

33, HONG KONG AND NEW YORK

BY TIANA REID | PHOTOGRAPHY BY ALLISON LIPPY “The tears that you cry when you’re sad, when you’re happy, or when you’re yawning are actually different molecular compositions,” Jes Fan explains over Zoom. “Thinking about things at the molecular level excites me.” These are recurrent themes in the Hong Kong– and Brooklyn-based artist’s work: smallness, intellectual engagement, and the biological code that underpins and defines our turbulent emotional lives.

Fan was born in Canada and raised in Hong Kong before moving to New York in 2014 to study. In his almost 10 years in the city, the artist has developed a practice that harnesses installation, sculpture, and video to design, test, and even farm substances including oysters and plants.

Whatever the focus, Fan’s work of late has emphasized exploration, process, and continuity. Currently, the artist—who graduated with a BFA in glass from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2014—is at work on the third chapter of an ongoing series called “Sites of Wounding,” which began in 2020. The first chapter, which he presented at Hong Kong’s Empty Gallery earlier this year, took a local oyster species as its launch point, and included video works and large glass-embalmed shells, evoking the museumification of nature, body modification, and artifacts of global capitalism. The latest chapter will focus on soybeans and the process of soy milk–making, using the liquid as a video projection surface.

“I have a fascination with these underlying networks of labor and materials—it comes to me quite organically, because my family worked in factories, and my dad ran a factory in China,” he says. The simplicity of Fan’s persistent thematic inquiries (how is something made? Where, by whom, and for what purpose?) allows for a current of complex themes to emerge, which the artist prods at and unravels.

Fan’s sculptural interventions echo with the concepts at the heart of his work. In Bivalve I and Bivalve II, both 2023, bubbling, glass forms drip from shells made of resin.

The pieces are situated in an industrial frame, asking viewers to confront the ways that organic materials are embedded in complex systems of labor, and how they endure in the face of destruction and extraction. But though he confronts the viewer with these heady questions, Fan understands that he is implicated, too. “I extend these questions and apply them to myself,” he asserts. “How am I made? What am I made of?”

“I EXTEND THESE QUESTIONS AND APPLY THEM TO MYSELF. HOW AM I MADE? WHAT AM I MADE OF?”

CONNOR MARIE STANKARD 31, NEW YORK

BY GEOFFREY MAK | PHOTOGRAPHY BY AVA PELLOR

In the fourth grade, Connor Marie Stankard found an American Girl doll catalog in the mailbox of her New Jersey home. She begged her parents to buy her one, but the dolls were too expensive.

So she made her own, molding clay and stuffing it into a sock. “A cursed doll,” jokes Stankard. Today, she sees this as the crystallization of her art-making impulse: wanting something out of reach—an idol of some perfect girl, a simulation with no original—and making her own fucked-up version instead.

Stankard’s 2022 solo show at Lubov, “Ava, Chloe, Blair, Nicole,” presented paintings of girls with contorted and utterly possessed-looking faces. Chloe, 2022, bares eyes the shape of car headlights.

Taylor Jeanne, 2022, has sickly, lavender-tinted skin. As references, the artist uploaded images—of friends, strangers, Lily-Rose Depp—onto Artbreeder, online GAN software that can warp faces according to categories such as “emotion,” “earrings,” or “age.” Stankard’s subjects are vampiric, but too vapid to be lethal.

They’re glamorous, in the way that luxury aesthetics often tease danger (cuteness is for the middle class). And “they’re not self-portraits, but they are autobiographical,” she acquiesces.

The 31-year-old doesn’t make work about the Internet so much as she uses its methods of constructing meaning as the operational logic of her practice.

Screenshots from an eBay listing and Stankard’s Instagram “Explore” page served as two references for a painting I

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saw in her Chinatown studio for Night Gallery’s Frieze London presentation this fall.

That a woman isn’t an entity so much as an aggregation of circulating images—“a chimera”—feels uniquely digital.

As we stood in front of a naturalistic sketch of the writer Olivia Kan-Sperling, I winced when Stankard told me she planned to slice the image to create “some combination of half a face, and then [on] the next panel, abstraction, ultimately creating these exquisite corpses.”

It’s a pun on the parlor game, as well as a literal corpse: as if these effigies of downtown debutantes can serve as body doubles, taking the hit as corporate and misogynist fantasies, even violent ones, are flung onto them. Stankard says she wants to distill a kind of “build-a-girl” recipe, the myth that a combination of the right signifiers—a pouty lower-lip, a Dior anti-aging mask—makes a girl. Or rather, the image of one. So, why not butcher them? “Images can really take a lot of abuse,” she says. “This is the safe realm of an artwork—a fantasy which is not real.”

“IMAGES CAN REALLY TAKE A LOT OF ABUSE. THIS IS THE SAFE REALM OF ARTWORK—A FANTASY WHICH IS NOT REAL.” CULTURED ABMB 2023

It’s different.

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