Middag Son Maak Min Verskil (midday sun makes little difference)
2022
Wooden, acrylic coated, plastic, glass, stone, bone and metal beads, mixed braid, polyester and nylon ropes, fabric dye, threading wire, and cotton twine

Duister Omsingel
2021
Wood, plastic, stone, glass and shell beads, polyester and nylon rope, chain, cotton twine

Igshaan Adams (b. 1982) was born in Cape Town, South Africa. In his tapestries and textile installations, Adams engages with the gaps—the information that is seemingly absent, overlooked or rendered invisible in the spaces we inhabit individually and collectively. Through the beads, shells, glass, rope, wire and found objects he uses to compose his weavings, Adams highlights the material aspects of lived spaces along with the personal stories held within them.

Adams’s hometown, Bonteheuwel, South Africa, is a key source of inspiration. This predominantly working-class township in southeast Cape Town was founded in the 1960s as part of the forced segregation during the Apartheid era. Adams approaches Bonteheuwel both as a deeply personal space, imbued with childhood memories and a network of familial relationships, and a politically charged space, shaped by violence and generational trauma. Neither can erase the other; both are always present.

Voice of Wind 103*
1994
Acrylic and lead collage on paper
80 x 60”

Junji Amano (b. 1949) is a Japanese Asian modern and contemporary painter known for his “Field of Water” series that features layers of acrylics and mineral pigments.

My Nympheas #3
2020
Embroidery and gel medium on canvas

Sindy in Pink-RFGA
2015
Acrylic, embroidery and gel medium on canvas

Ghada Amer (b. 1963) was born in Cairo, Egypt, and moved to Nice, France, when she was 11 years old. She remained in France to further her education and completed both of her undergraduate requirements and MFA at Villa Arson École Nationale Supérieure in Nice (1989). She also studied abroad, in 1987, at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. In 1991, she moved to Paris, to complete a post-diploma at the Institut des Hautes Études en Arts Plastiques. Following early recognition in France, she was invited to the United States in 1996, for a residency at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She has since then been based in New York.

Amer’s wide-ranging practice spans painting, cast sculpture, ceramics, works on paper, and garden and mixed-media installations. Further, she often collaborates with her long-time friend Reza Farkhondeh. Recognizing both that women are taught to model behaviors and traits shaped by others, and that art history and the history of painting in particular are shaped largely by expressions of masculinity, Amer’s work actively subverts these frameworks through both aesthetics and content. Her practice explores the complicated nature of identity as it is developed through cultural and religious norms, as well as personal longings and understandings of the self.

Beaded Curtain
2010
Oil on canvas
94 1/2 x 59"

Red White and Blue
2018
Acrylics on paper

Hurvin Anderson (b. 1965) is a British painter. He was born in Birmingham, United Kingdom, to parents of Jamaican origin, and was educated at Wimbledon College of Art and The Royal College of Art, both in London. Anderson often works from photographs and his own memories to create works that range from delicate paintings on vellum to large canvases that can consume an entire wall. His paintings and works on paper “depict places where memory and history converge” and engage with issues of identity and representation. His depictions of lush Caribbean landscapes and urban barbershops explore themes of memory, place and the indelible connection between the two.

Wave Park 5
2008
Monoprint on Hiromi handmade Kozo triple thick paper

Polly Apfelbaum (b. 1955, Abington, Pennsylvania) combines concepts from Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism and Pop art to create distinctive prints, ceramics and hand-dyed fabric floor pieces she refers to as “fallen paintings.”

Apfelbaum’s kaleidoscopic works feature lively color, geometric forms and nonrepresentational subjects, yet she rejected the aggressive masculinity of the Abstract Expressionist movement. Her work incorporates textiles, clay, found objects and other tactile elements traditionally associated with craft and domesticity.

Apfelbaum studied painting and printmaking at the Tyler School of Art in Pennsylvania, receiving a BFA in 1978. She moved to New York City, where she was inspired by installation art and worked to find a middle ground between sculpture and her two-dimensional training. She was influenced by artists including Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis and Jackson Pollock, but Apfelbaum’s style incorporates energy, playfulness and wit, as well as her love of popular culture and affirmative view of femininity.

Rules and Cylinders
2012
Bronze
97 x 73″

Flower in Vase
2009
Screenprint
58 x 58"

Donald Baechler (b. 1956, Hartford, Connecticut) is an American artist. He attended the Maryland Institute College of Art from 1974–1977, and the Cooper Union from 1977–1978. Baechler's source material draws broadly on classical art history, the New York School, contemporary art, folk art, outsider art, pop culture and childhood. Baechler's creative process begins amidst a vast collection of popular images and objects, the archives of years of photographing, looking and gathering. His paintings are condensed versions of that cumulative process, built in fragments and layers to create what he calls an "illusion of history." The artist cites Cy Twombly and Giotto as his primary influences.

Amagansett Diptych
2008
Oil on two canvases
108 x 216"

Jennifer Bartlett (1941–2022) was born in Long Beach, California, and died in Amagansett, New York. She was a painter whose process‑oriented works have defined her distinct and shifting style. After earning an MFA at Yale University in the 1960s, Bartlett moved to New York, and soon became part of the artistic conversation of the late 1960s and 1970s. Influenced by Sol Lewitt's, "Paragraphs on Conceptual Art," Bartlett's early work was fastidious and geometric, with abstract subject matter and unpredictable color palettes. Over her 50-year career, Bartlett's work transformed in size, technique and subject matter.

The Dance
2019
Polyurethane resin, raw Virginia cotton, housedresses, kaftans, t-shirts, du-rags, altered housedresses, altered kaftans, altered t-shirts, altered garments, and stainless steel fasteners

Beasley is known for sculpture that incorporates found materials–especially clothing–and casting materials like resin and foam. While these materials cure or set into their final state, Beasley works them with his body, a process that points to his interest in sculpture that traces of the artist's body while retaining a bodily, fleshy quality of its own. Many of his sculptures also contain audio equipment or are used in sound-based installations or performances.

For Beasley, cotton is not just a material, it is a theme that touches on politics, social relationships, and of course, economics and reparations. “It all just unfolds and is laid out,” he says. At his show at the Whitney, Beasley constructed a series of sculptural works, comprised of various materials, that he calls “slabs.” He says: “They become ways of telling stories.” In his works, Beasley takes control over not just a material, but the systemic repression of Black people and artists, to construct something new.

“Being a Black person in this current state, that’s what you’re encouraged to do—is to move on. Like, ‘Ok, there’s been time. There’s been space,’ right? It’s a false narrative. But it also is one that you feel the pressure from.”

The Dance is a two sided piece.

La Rivoluzione siamo Noi
1972
Silkscreen with handwritten text and stamp

Joseph Beuys (1921–1986) was born in Krefeld, Germany, and grew up during the Nazi Party’s rise to power, first joining the Hitler Youth, and in 1941, enlisting in the German Air Force. When his plane crashed on the Crimean Front in 1944, it provided the artist with the seeds of the story that proved to be one of his most fantastical and enduring creations. Bad weather forced the plane down, killing the pilot and injuring Beuys, who was rescued by a German search party and convalesced in a military hospital for several weeks.

In a fabulist feat, perhaps inspired by the effectiveness of the Nazi propaganda of his youth, Beuys later claimed he had been discovered by nomadic Tartar tribesmen who wrapped him in layers of animal fat and felt, and saved his life. The artist’s version of events became so widely accepted, it was published by The New York Times in his obituary in 1986. After the war, he became a professor at the Staatliche Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, and cultivated a distinctive fashion style—always wearing a fishing vest and felt hat—the latter both in a nod to his imagined saviors and to hide scars from injuries sustained in the crash.

As Beuys’s origin myth alchemically reinvented the trauma of his wartime experiences into a kind of artistic rebirth, he idealistically aimed to similarly transform the whole of post-war German society into a democratic utopia. He believed in creativity as a guiding principle—that both art and education were essential and a universal right for all—famously declaring that “every man is an artist.” He was an early practitioner of performance art. His intense and ritualistic actions included spending three hours explaining his art to a dead rabbit and living alone for a week with a wild coyote in a New York art gallery. He was an environmentalist decades ahead of his time; one of his most enduring performances was planting seven thousand oak trees in the countryside of his childhood.

The artwork, La rivoluzione siamo Noi [We Are the Revolution], is a silkscreen of a photograph taken by Giancarlo Pancaldi, which was first used on a poster for Beuys’s exhibition at Modern Art Agency in Naples in 1971—hence the Italian title. The concept of working in multiples was an essential facet of the artist’s work; his goal was to democratize access to his art by making it as available to as many people as possible.

dna:study
2021
Ink, oil paint stick, and paper on board

healing:work
2020
Graphite, ink, and paper

McArthur Binion (b. 1946, Macon, Mississippi) combines collage, drawing and painting to create autobiographical abstractions of painted minimalist patterns over an “under surface” of personal documents and photographs. From photocopies of his birth certificate and pages from his address book, to pictures from his childhood and found photographs of lynchings, the poignant and charged images that constitute the tiled base of his work are concealed and abstracted by grids of oil stick. The complexly layered works, from a distance, appear to be monochromatic minimalist abstractions that have led many to compare his work to that of Jasper Johns, Robert Ryman or Brice Marden.

However, while his contemporaries focused more on materiality, abstraction and, in some cases, the social and political climate of the time, Binion’s works are intensely personal and deeply dedicated to the rigorous process of making a painting. Upon closer inspection, these monochromatic abstractions come into focus: Binion’s gridded compositions impose rational order to the layers of personal history, allowing only fragments of information from his birth certificate to be read, or details of his mother’s face to be identified—but never enough to be immediately legible.

Having begun his career as a writer, Binion is highly influenced by language and music, as can be seen in his titles and the ways in which he layers information to be “read” rather than simply seen. The tension that exists between the grid and the artist’s visible gestures is not unlike that of jazz music, which merges improvisation with the order of a musical composition.

Bird’s Eye View II
2008
Oil on linen
48 x 40”

#1 The Lake and #2 The River
1981
Oil on canvas
71 x 72”

Ross Bleckner (b. 1949, New York, New York) received a BA from New York University in 1971, an MFA from Cal Arts in 1973, and has taught at many of the nation's most prestigious universities. His subject matter ranges from abstracted strands of DNA and cancer cells to flowers and birds. His paintings refer to biology and mortality, operating as memento mori.

The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum held a major retrospective of his works in 1995, summarizing two decades of solo shows at internationally acclaimed exhibition venues. For ten years, Bleckner served as president of the AIDS Community Research Initiative of America (ACRIA), a nonprofit community-based research and treatment education center. More recently, he has been working with the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime in Northern Uganda to help rehabilitate and raise money for ex-child soldiers. In May 2009, Bleckner was awarded the title of Goodwill Ambassador by the United Nations.

Nile Geese
1974
Acrylic on canvas

Frank Bowling (b. 1934) was born in the riverside town of Bartica, in North-Central Guyana, the son of a police district paymaster and a dressmaker. At the age of 19, he moved to London, interested in pursuing a career in the arts. Influenced by Rembrandt and Goya, Bowling’s early work was representational, figurative and narrative. Excluded from a number of exhibitions in London, because of his skin color, in 1966, Bowling relocated to New York, where he experienced an artistic epiphany and his career took off—he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1967, and had a solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1971.

Abstraction was slowly creeping into Bowling’s work, but he felt uncertain about aligning himself with a tradition that had almost exclusively been the preserve of Caucasian men. However, the critic and abstraction-evangelist Clement Greenberg encouraged him, saying, “In America, there is no no-go area for anybody.” By the early 1970s, figuration was gone from his work and Bowling had devoted himself to exploring his materials and experimenting with color and process.

Untitled (SPCFFATS)
2023
Oil, acrylic and archival glue on canvas

Born in Cairns in 1982, the Sydney-based artist studied at the Australian National University’s School of Art and Design in Canberra. Of Kudjala, Gangalu, Wangerriburra, Wakka Wakka, Gubbi Gubbi, Kuku Yalanji, Bundjalung, and ni-Vanuatu heritage, Boyd has described how his great-great-grandfather was kidnapped from Pentecost Island in Vanuatu and enslaved on Queensland’s sugar-cane fields. His grandparents were part of Australia’s Stolen Generations, in which First Nations children were forcibly removed from their families as part of the government’s policy of assimilation from 1910 to the 1970s.

This history makes its way into Boyd’s work through the use of personal photographs, memories, archival imagery, and historic portraits as sources for his paintings, which are covered with translucent, reflective dots of archival glue. ‘Even though the visual language is reminiscent to the First Nations of Central Australia, I actually don’t have a connection to that part of the country,’ the artist explains. The use of these dots, or ‘lenses’, as Boyd refers to them, is a signature of his work and employed across installations, moving images, and paintings. ‘For me the circle acts as a lens, so it’s about perception and multiple entry points into specific ideas of things that I wanted to work through’, Boyd explains.

Excerpt courtesy of post-ism

All Souls’ Eve
2014
Oil on linen
12 1/2 x 15”

Blueberries on Horseback
2009
Oil on linen
12 1/2 x 17”

Cecily Brown (b. 1969, London, England) is a British painter who relocated to New York, in 1995. She works primarily in oil on canvas, using brushes specially made of squirrel and ox hair to create lush, tactile paintings. Broadly inspired by the history of painting from El Greco and Rubens to Willem de Kooning and Joan Mitchell, Brown’s work transcends traditional boundaries of representation and abstraction, simultaneously concealing and revealing. She is known for her opulent application of lush gobs and smears of rich color, building up the surfaces of her paintings, and generating a tensile surface energy.

Treble X
2013
Welded found steel
18" x 46" x 3"

American artist David Buckingham (b. 1958), based in Los Angeles, uses found metal as his artistic medium. The making of his sculptures and wall reliefs are a profound journey of discovery and adventure. Sheet metal is scavenged from abandoned cars and trucks and other machinery that Buckingham finds in the California desert. These battered relics are carted to a dusty studio in downtown Los Angeles, where they are muscled into works of art with a bewildering array of power tools and sheer force of will. All colors are original as found; David Buckingham is an artist, not a painter. His artistic philosophy is to challenge, humor and create work that has a universal appeal.

Door
1973
Digital pigment print
22 x 16"

Coleman’s Cafe
1967
Digital pigment print
16 x 22”

Window
1973
Digital pigment print
22 x 16"

5 Cents — Demopolis, Alabama, from the Portfolio: Ten Southern Photographs
1978
Pigment print mounted on Dibond
42 7/8 x 53"

Palmist Building
1961-1968
Twenty digital pigment prints
8 x 10” each

William Christenberry (1936–2016) was a photographer, painter and sculptor born in Hale County, Alabama, and died in Washington, D.C. He earned both his BFA and MFA from The University of Alabama and taught at the Corcoran College of Art and Design in Washington, D.C., beginning in 1968.

Whether working in photography, painting, drawing or sculpture, Christenberry’s interest in the themes and traditions of the rural American South translates into simple yet monumental iconography. On both formal and conceptual levels, his work focuses on the prolonged study of a place. For example, in the process of documenting the evolution of a building and its surroundings over time, Christenberry provides a chronicle of that structure’s evolving identity. His work not only captures the essence of a particular region’s heritage, it is also a meditation upon the universal experience of stasis and change.

Keith 1
1981
Pressed pulp paper
35 x 25”

Self Portrait
2007
200 color silkscreen
80 x 60”

Chuck Close (1940–2021) was born in Monroe, Washington, and died in Oceanside, New York. He was an American painter and photographer who achieved fame as a photorealist through his massive-scale portraits. Close was known for using creative and intricate patterns to portray a human portrait. Though a catastrophic spinal artery collapse in 1988 left him severely paralyzed, he continued to paint and produce work that remains sought after by museums and collectors. Chuck Close is renowned for his highly inventive techniques of painting the human face, and is best known for his large-scale, photo-based portrait paintings.

Footsteps, Harlem
1961
Gelatin silver print

Pops
1985
Gelatin silver print

Shadow
2009
Archival pigment print, printed 2009

Black Umbrellas, Harlem
1961
Gelatin silver print

Malcolm X, 115th Street
1962
Gelatin silver print

Three Shadows
1960
Gelatin silver print

Mick Jagger and Mary in Rio Eating Cotton Candy
1968
Gelatin silver print

“For me, the artist’s responsibility is to keep the temple (body, mind, and spirit) clear, clean and open by being aware and by keeping watch over what enters it mentally and physically. When it is so tuned, the creative impulses can be fully received and reflected to the highest degree, where line, form, and color define a space that the viewer can feel with the heart, explore with the eyes, and contemplate with the mind.”
–Adger W. Cowans

Adger Cowans (b. 1936), was born in Columbus, Ohio, and is a fine arts photographer and abstract expressionist painter who has experimented with myriad mediums over his artistic career. Renowned in the world of photography and fine art, his works have been shown by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, International Museum of Photography, Museum of Modern Art, The Studio Museum of Harlem, The Cleveland Museum of Art, Harvard Fine Art Museum, Detroit Art Institute, James E. Lewis Museum and numerous other art institutions.

After attending Ohio University where he received a BFA in photography, Cowans furthered his education at the School of Motion Picture Arts and School of Visual Arts in New York. While serving in the United States Navy, he worked as a photographer before moving to New York, where he later worked with LIFE magazine photographer, Gordon Parks, and fashion photographer, Henri Clarke.

Dream Fruit
2020
Acrylic on canvas, sewn

Sarah Crowner’s (b. 1974, Philadelphia) diverse practice ranges from paintings and ceramics to sculpture and theatre curtains. Her bold and colorful paintings and tile works incorporate forms found in architecture, nature and in the history of 20th-century art and design. Her stitched paintings are created by using an industrial sewing machine to sew painted and raw irregular panels of canvas together, simultaneously revealing the painting’s composition and construction. Sections are painted in saturated primary colors to imply a form, a presence, a possibility. The stitched seams remain visible, like plant veins or arteries, reflecting her interest in systems and patterns, production and reproduction, in culture and nature.

At times the seams, and forms they suggest, recall hard-edged paintings of the 1960s, and in others, curved lines conjure biomorphic abstraction. She treats the past, the natural world and popular culture as a medium; zooming in, rotating, reversing, cropping, repeating, mirroring, shrinking and enlarging the familiar to engage the viewer, revealing connections between micro and macro, individual and context.

S.O.S. (Sam on Sill)
2020
Neon, vinyl siding, laminate, plywood, house paint, foam, velvet, hardware

Alex Da Corte was born in Camden, New Jersey, in 1980 and lives and works in Philadelphia. The artist received his BFA from the University of the Arts in 2004, and an MFA from Yale University School of Art in 2010. Da Corte creates vibrant and immersive large-scale installations, including wall-based works, sculptures, and videos. Colorful and surreal, his work combines personal narrative, art-historical references, pop-culture characters, and the glossy aesthetics of commercial advertising to reveal the humor, absurdity, and psychological complexity of the images and stories that permeate our culture.

Untitled
2019
Adobe, acrylic, graphite, enamel, linen, jute, wood and aluminum support

Untitled
2019
Adobe, pigment, enamel, acrylic, linen, Styrofoam, jute

N. Dash (b. 1980) was born in Miami Beach, Florida, and earned a BA from New York University in 2003, and an MFA from Columbia University, in 2010. Dash’s work in sculpture, painting and photography is the product of a unique, multipart creative practice that seeks to register lived experience and bodily intelligence through material. Her works, primarily made of natural items such as linen and adobe, give physical form to the intangible and the imagined.

As she moves through the world, Dash always carries a small piece of cloth, which she obsessively works between her fingers until it nearly loses all structural integrity, and she must take up a new piece of fabric to begin the process again. Dash then arranges these delicate artifacts and photographs them; the resulting abstractions function as the origin of her practice, or what the artist calls her “primary source material.” Her Commuter series (2011– ) is an ongoing project in which the artist repeatedly folds, unfolds and refolds a piece of paper during her daily subway ride. Once coated with oil, pigment or graphite powder and hung flat on the wall, these works hover in the indeterminate zone between planar fields and sculptural objects.

288-IV/PL
2015
144 used plastic shoe soles on wood
35 1/2 x 47 1/4 x 1 1/2"

Gabriel de la Mora (b. 1968) was born in Mexico City, and believes the artwork already exists before the artist, and therefore, it is not his role to either create or destroy, but merely to transform. By repurposing debris salvaged from flea markets and antique shops, de la Mora creates alchemical works that both reference the original object and are something altogether new.

Worn soles of shoes, damaged photographs, matchboxes and found paintings are passed through a process of pentimento—of reworking, erasing and altering—to convey the passage of time and the effects of use and natural elements. With a working methodology that is as mystical as it is disciplined, de la Mora’s use of repetition connects with notions of Zen philosophy, whereby recurrent actions lead to a meditative practice. Gabriel de la Mora lives and works in Mexico City.

It's the End of the Evening
2011
Acrylic + sand on canvas
72 x 72"

Winter Robe
1980
Etching
40 x 30"

Jim Dine (b. 1935) was born in Cincinnati. After studying at the Boston Museum School, he moved to New York City in the late 1950s, where he took an active role in many of the performance artworks of the era, called “Happenings,” collaborating with artists Claes Oldenburg and Robert Whitman. For a time, he shared a sensibility with the Pop art movement, and has remained devoted to the depiction, incorporation and celebration of everyday objects and motifs in his artwork.

Dine's method involved repeating his theme again and again, often in several mediums. Through a process of exploration and reinvention, the common image lost its place in the public domain and was stamped exclusively with the artist's signature, becoming his vehicle for communicating a range of emotional and aesthetic intentions.

Sunlight on Floor + Door
2013
Oil on masonite

For over fifty years Dodd (American, b. 1927) has painted her immediate everyday surroundings at the places she has chosen to live and work – the Lower East Side, rural Mid-Coast Maine and the Delaware Water Gap. Dodd’s small, intimately-scaled paintings are almost always completed in one plein-air sitting. Her subjects include rambling New England out buildings, lush summer gardens, dried leafless plants, nocturnal moonlit skies and views through interior windows. She often returns to familiar motifs repeatedly at different times of the year with dramatically varied results.

The critic Roberta Smith wrote in March 2013: “Ms. Dodd loves the observed world, the vagaries of nature and the specificities of old Maine houses: the way they cleave to the ground, or fill a picture frame, or shine, lights on or off, in the moonlight. She always searches out the underlying geometry but also the underlying life, and the sheer strangeness of it all.”

Lois Dodd studied at the Cooper Union in the late 1940s. In 1952 she was one of the five founding members of the legendary Tanager Gallery, among the first artist-run cooperative galleries in New York. Dodd is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the National Academy. In 1992 she retired from teaching at Brooklyn College. Since 1954 her work has been the subject of over fifty one-person exhibitions. In 2012, The Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art organized a retrospective of Dodd’s work which traveled to the Portland Museum of Art in Maine. In 2017 she was the subject of a monograph published by Lund Humphries with text by Faye Hirsch.

Untitled, Elevation #2 Chicago
2022
Acrylic on canvas

Dyson, who was born in Chicago and is now based in Beacon, New York, is known for a wide-ranging practice that is grounded in painting but extends to sculpture, installation, and performance. Her work is concerned with examining the structures and infrastructures of society, particularly the ways in which those systems have historically controlled the movements of Black and brown people, as a way to envision new spaces for liberation.

In a statement, Dyson said, “Every move, every step—I am always thinking about and imagining all of the spaces where people, Black people in particular, headed toward and moved to save themselves. With different geographies, there are different elevations to deal with. Chicago has personal meaning to me and is also fertile ground for my ongoing research and studio practice into water and spatial liberation.”

Untitled
1970-1973
Pigment print

Over the course of nearly six decades, William Eggleston (b. 1939) has established a singular pictorial style that deftly combines vernacular subject matter with an innate and sophisticated understanding of color, form, and composition. His photographs transform the ordinary into distinctive, poetic images that eschew fixed meaning. His 1976 solo exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, curated by John Szarkowski, marked one of the first presentations of color photography at the museum. Although initially criticized for its unfamiliar approach, the show and its accompanying catalogue, William Eggleston's Guide, heralded an important moment in the medium's acceptance within the art-historical canon, and it solidified the artist's position as one of its foremost practitioners to this date. Eggleston's work continues to exert an influence on contemporary visual culture at large.

Text courtesy of David Zwirner

White Grounds (Youth)
2022
Oil and mixed media on canvas with silkscreened collaged elements

Mandy El-Sayegh’s process-driven practice investigates systems of order, be they linguistic, bodily, political, or other. She combines unexpected imagery using silkscreen, painting, and collage to create heavily layered canvases. El-Sayegh begins each piece with found fragments, such as clippings collected from newspapers, advertisements, and notebooks. She then, in her words, “sutures” these parts together on the canvas, superimposing disparate materials to construct new narratives. She often incorporates pages from the Financial Times, due to its subject matter and flesh-like color. In her ongoing “Net-grid” series, she paints grids over silkscreened layers that are meant to symbolize the limitations and confines of language.

Traumerei
2016
Oil on linen

9/11 Redux
2013
Oil on linen

Louise Fishman (1939–2021) was born in Philadelphia, into an artistic family and died in New York. Her mother, Gertrude Fisher-Fishman, and her paternal aunt, Razel Kapustin, were both working artists. Fisher-Fishman took her daughter to the Barnes Foundation and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, as well as the occasional life-drawing session. Kapustin, a well-known painter in Philadelphia, studied under Mexican painter David Alfaro Siqueiros (Jackson Pollock was one of her classmates).

Fishman voraciously read her mother’s art books and magazines, finding Abstract Expressionist painting particularly compelling because of the evident athleticism. Fishman was a sportswoman herself, playing basketball in high school, and baseball on the boys’ team.

She studied at the Philadelphia Museum School of Art, going on to earn her BFA in painting and printmaking, and a BS in Arts Education from Tyler School of Art in 1963. After completing her MFA at the University of Illinois in Champaign/Urbana in 1965, she moved to New York City, where she continues to live and work.

At first, she struggled to find her path, but soon her involvement with feminist and gay and lesbian causes helped her find community, and her artistic voice. Fishman’s quest to divest herself of the patriarchal legacy of the art historical canon led to a complete overhaul of her materials and process. She experimented with craft (sewing and dying fabric) as well as incorporating text, and ultimately found her way back to abstract painting, with a clear vision, on her own terms.

Reflections IX
1995
Lithograph on paper
20 x 15"

Helen Frankenthaler (1928–2011) was born in Manhattan, and died in Darien, Connecticut. She was an American abstract expressionist painter, and a major contributor to the history of postwar American painting. Having exhibited her work for over six decades (early 1950s until 2011), she spanned several generations of abstract painters while continuing to produce vital and ever‑changing new work. She was an early pioneer of the technique of pouring intentionally diluted paint onto her canvases to soak in rather than build up, staining rather than coating, becoming at once both color and form. Frankenthaler began exhibiting her large-scale abstract expressionist paintings in contemporary museums and galleries in the early 1950s.

Numbers and Trees, Central Park
2015
Acrylic, inkjet print, plexiglass
95 x 126 1/2 x 5 3/4”

Numbers and Trees: London Series 2, Tree #8, Vine Street
2022
Acrylic sheet, acrylic paint, lacquer, and wood

Librettos
2016
Printed ink stained paper and lightjet on acrylic
66 x 47 x 3 1/2

Charles Gaines (b. 1944, Charleston, South Carolina) is an American artist whose work interrogates the discourse relating aesthetics and politics. Taking the form of drawings, photographic series and video installations, his work consistently invokes the use of systems as generative parts of the artist’s practice. His work is rooted in Conceptual Art, and he is committed to its tenets of engaging cognition and language. There is a strong musical thread running though much of Gaines’ work, evident in his repeated use of musical scores as well as his engagement with the idea of indeterminacy as developed by John Cage.

Ground Rules
2015
Wood flooring
78 1/4 x 100 x 2 1/2"

A Hill Far Away
2015
Wood, roofing substrate, copper and paint
24 x 28 1/4 x 5 1/8"

Theaster Gates (b. 1973, Chicago) is an artist whose work includes sculpture, installation, performance and urban interventions that aim to bridge the gap between art and life. Gates works as an artist, curator, urbanist and facilitator. His projects attempt to instigate the creation of cultural communities by acting as catalysts for social engagement that leads to political and spatial change.

Gates has described his working method as “critique through collaboration”—often with architects, researchers and performers—to create works that stretch the idea of what we usually understand visual-based practices to be. Gates trained as both a sculptor and an urban planner, and his works are rooted in a social responsibility and underpinned by a deep belief system. His installations and sculptures mostly incorporate found materials—often from the neighborhoods where he is engaged—that have historical and iconic significance.

Any Minute Now
2020
Acrylic on canvas
96 x 96 x 3 3/4"

Member
1967
Acrylic, dye pigments and aluminum powder on canvas with beveled edge
90 x 43 3/4 x 2"

Sam Gilliam (1933–2022) was born in Tupelo, Mississippi, and died in Washington, D.C. Internationally recognized as one of the foremost contemporary color field painters, Gilliam moved to Washington, D.C., after receiving his MFA from the University of Louisville in 1961. He joined the Washington Color School and, influenced by abstract expressionism, experimented with methods of applying pigment, often pouring paint, staining canvases and folding them while still wet.

Gilliam’s discovery that painting could be three-dimensional led him to innovate with draping and suspending canvases. He applied paint in ways that added dimensionality and texture to the surface, for example, by employing shaped and beveled stretchers. Gilliam’s work as an artist and teacher, and his bold commitment to creating paintings with sculptural, architectural and textile properties made him an influential presence in modern art.

Silvery Blue Realm
2005
Acrylic on canvas
60 x 60"

Jimi Gleason (b. 1961) is an American visual artist. He has had numerous gallery and museum exhibitions, including at the Bentley Gallery at Bentley Projects and at the LewAllen at the Santa Fe Railyard. Gleason has spent his career exploring the reflective possibilities of a painterly surface. Mixing nontraditional materials such as silver deposit with acrylic paints, Gleason’s surfaces are highly reactive to light and shifts in the viewer’s position. Rather than focusing on the surface as an end in itself, his paintings track the play of light and the movement of the viewer across the surface, thereby acting as a mirror onto the external world. Through this movement, Gleason hopes to induce a meditative experience for his viewers.

Drawing
Acrylic on canvas
38 1/2 x 30 1/2“

Sidney Goodman (1936–2013) was born and died in Philadelphia. He was one of the preeminent contemporary American painters and draftsmen exploring the still-fertile ground of art based on the human form. For over three decades, the style that he forged out of direct observation, creative imagination and prolonged study of European and American masters has demonstrated the continuing vitality of figurative art. But Goodman’s embrace of metaphor and the metaphysical has set his brand of figuration markedly apart from that of other major artists of his generation, including Philip Pearlstein, Alfred Leslie and Alex Katz.

Map Tracing #8 - US
2021
Copper pipe and wood

Shilpa Gupta’s ‘Map Tracings’ are outline maps made up of metal tubing, twisted to form three-dimensional linear sculptures. They render the familiar outlines of nation-states into peculiar forms, using shadow and illusion across architectural space to produce an oscillation between recognition and perplexity. Started in 2012 with the India Map, the work is adapted to each exhibition site, according to the country in which it is shown. Depending on the viewers’ movements and their position in the space, the well-known shape becomes a strange line that literally twists our vision and reminds us that the nation is an artificial construct, and what it maps first and foremost is the way it imagines itself.

A nation is an artificial construct, and what it maps first and foremost is the way it imagines itself. The reality along a border ultimately has little to do with the outlines of the maps imposed by states. 'Map Tracing' has been presented in Belgium, Germany and France, each time taking on the outline of each country. 'Map Tracing' disrupts the viewer's contemplation of an image that is nevertheless familiar.

- Nada Raza

How Do I Get You Aloe
2019
Glass beads, waxed paracord, steel

Since founding The Haas Brothers in 2010, twin brothers Nikolai and Simon (b. 1984) have spurned arbitrary artistic boundaries and hierarchies, creating a playful and provocative world that merges art, fashion, film, music and design. Their work explores aesthetic themes related to nature, science fiction, sexuality and psychedelia in materials that range from brass, porcelain and fur, to highly technical resins and polyurethane.

Bangsite
2012
Acrylic on canvas
24 x 24”

The Acrobat
2012
Acrylic on canvas
24 x 24"

Charles Christopher Hill (b. 1948, Greensburg, Pennsylvania) is an American artist and printmaker. Hill lives and works in Los Angeles, and was married to the late Victoria Blyth Hill, an art conservator. He has been artist-in-residence at Cité International Des Arts, Paris, France, at Chateau de La Napoule, La Napoule, France, and at Eklisia, Gümüslük, Turkey (1994).

(series of emojis) JH753
2023
Oil on linen
96 × 90”

Alpha4
2014
Oil on linen
90 x 100”

Born in New Orleans, Jacqueline Humphries (b. 1960) is an abstract painter who lives and works in New York. Over the course of her 30-year career, she has emerged as a singular force in contemporary art, an influential “artist’s artist” known for her signature abstract works in metallic and ultraviolet pigments. Her mark-making techniques serve her preference for the image to remain unresolved—she applies pigments one on top of another and then scrapes them away to reveal an enigmatic, layered picture plane. Describing her process, Humphries has said, “I start a painting by finishing it, then may proceed to unfinish it, make holes in it or undo it in various ways.”

Malouiniere with Blue Chairs
2013
Egg tempera on gessoed linen
46 x 48”

Jane Irish (b. 1955, Pittsfield, Massachusetts) is an artist, painter and ceramicist. Painting in egg tempera on large-scale canvas, paper and Tyvek, she infuses sumptuous interiors with reflections on colonialism and Orientalism. Sometimes her painting surfaces feature raised text: Vietnamese War poetry or historical protest writing.

The text on the surface of her ceramics includes collaborations with prominent art critics like Vincent Katz and Carter Ratcliff, and poetry from Vietnam War veterans. Irish’s inspiration comes from history, her own experience and personal connections. Irish received her MFA from Queens College–CUNY and is represented by Locks Gallery. Irish lives and works in Philadelphia.

Untitled Mask Collage
2017
Vinyl, spray enamel, oil stick, black soap, and wax

When Spring Comes Again
2012
Black soap, wax and spray enamel on branded red flooring

Seascape “The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea”
2021
Oil on linen

Surrender Painting “The River”
2022
Oil on linen

Rashid Johnson (b. 1977, Chicago) is an artist who works in a wide range of everyday materials, including wax, wood, steel, brass, shea butter, ceramic tile and found objects such as books, records, VHS tapes, live plants and CB radios. Johnson first received critical attention at the young age of 24 when he was included in a Thelma Golden curated exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem. His work has since been exhibited around the world and is held in collections of many leading art museums. He is known for combining various science with black history so that his materials, which are formally independent, are augmented by their relation to black history.

M'AHL
2011
Acrylic on wood
20 x 14 x 4 1/2"

Tobi Kahn (b. 1952, Washington Heights in Manhattan) is an American painter and sculptor. His work has been shown in more than 50 solo exhibitions, and 60 museums and group shows since he was selected as one of nine artists to be included in the “New Horizons in American Art: 1985 National Exhibition” at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. In September 2011, “Embodied Light: 9-11” was commissioned by the Educational Alliance of New York to commemorate the tenth anniversary of September 11, 2001 (9/11).

Suite of 3
2012
Screenprint

Alex Katz was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1927. In 1928, at the outset of the Depression, his family moved to St. Albans, a diverse suburb of Queens that had sprung up between the two world wars. Katz was raised by his Russian émigré parents, both of whom were interested in poetry and the arts, his mother having been an actress in Yiddish Theater. Katz attended Woodrow Wilson High School for its unique program that allowed him to devote his mornings to academics and his afternoons to the arts. In 1946, Katz entered The Cooper Union Art School in Manhattan.

At Cooper Union, Katz studied painting under Morris Kantor and was trained in Modern art theories and techniques. Upon graduating in 1949, Katz was awarded a scholarship for summer study at the Skowhegan School for Painting and Sculpture in Maine, a grant that he would renew the following summer. During his years at Cooper Union, Katz had been exposed primarily to modern art and was taught to paint from drawings. Skowhegan encouraged him to paint from life, which would prove pivotal in his development as a painter and remains a staple of his practices today. Katz explains that Skowhegan’s plein air painting gave him “a reason to devote my life to painting.”

Beginning in 2010, Katz re-framed his subject matter, employing more drastic cropping of individual portraits. He also began composing multiple portraits using tightly cropped images of the same subject sequenced across the linen. Since 2015, Katz has frequently begun his process by taking photographs with his iPhone, which he then prints out, cuts, and collages into compositions. From these maquettes, he may make painted studies or go straight to making a large-scale cartoon, from which he paints an oil on linen.

Drawing for Waiting for the Sybil (I have brought news)
2020
Indian ink, pencil and charcoal drawings on found pages

William Kentridge was born in 1955 in Johannesburg, South Africa where he currently lives and works. Often drawing from socio-political conditions in post-apartheid South Africa, William Kentridge’s work takes on a form that is expressionist in nature. For Kentridge, the process of recording history is constructed from reconfigured fragments to arrive at a provisional understanding of the past—this act of recording, dismembering and reordering crosses over into an essential activity of the studio. His work spans a diverse range of artistic media such as drawing, performance, film, printmaking, sculpture and painting. Kentridge has also directed a number of acclaimed operas and theatrical productions.

Wer jetzt kein Haus mehr hat, baut sich keines mehr (Who Has No House Now, Will Never Build One)
2018–2019
Emulsion, oil, acrylic and shellac on canvas

This piece takes its name from a passage by the German poet, Rainer Maria Rilke. In the 1960s, a teenage Kiefer had his first encounter with Rilke’s words when he discovered his monograph on the French sculptor Auguste Rodin. The phrase “Who Has No House Now, Will Never Build One” comes from the poem Autumn Day (1902), in which Rilke uses the motif of autumn to explore the melancholy of life’s transience and the seasons’ broad symbolism. In the centre of the painting, the faint structure of a door frame alludes to the house that may never be built before winter arrives. Rilke’s lament on the passage of time and the changing seasons drawing us closer to the year’s end is particularly resonate for Kiefer, whose art frequently considers the natural cycle of death and new life, endings and beginnings. In this painting, Kiefer’s autumnal palette erupts from the surface of the canvas in heady strokes that are at once sumptuous and beautiful while on the verge of decay, paving the way for winter and the renewal of spring.

This translation is by Edward Snow 1991:

Autumn Day (Herbsttag)

Lord: it is time. The summer was immense.
Lay your long shadows on the sundials,
and on the meadows let the winds go free.

Command the last fruits to be full;
give them just two more southern days,
urge them on to completion and chase
the last sweetness into the heavy wine.

Who has no house now, will never build one.
Who is alone now, will long remain so,
will stay awake, read, write long letters
and will wander restlessly up and down
the tree-lines streets, when the leaves are drifting.

Seitenflugel
2012
Single channel video installation
42 x 24"

Simon Lee (b. 1956) works in photography, video and installation. His work is said to often be “a powerful metaphor for the random flow of history and a low tech formal tour de force” (Holland Cotter, The New York Times).

Eve Sussman (b. 1961) is a Brooklyn-based artist who incorporates film, video, sculpture and architecture in her work. Her 89 Seconds at Alcázar, a mesmerizing video re-creation of the painting of Diego Velázquez’s “Las Meninas,” was a breakout hit of the 2004 Whitney Biennial. Sussman is a 2010 recipient of the Anonymous Was A Woman Award and 2008 Creative Capital grantee.

Sussman and Lee together co-founded the Wallabout Oyster Theatre, a micro theater space run out of their studios in Brooklyn and the Rufus Corporation, an ad hoc think tank of collaborators.

Winter Branches #1
1953
Ink on paper
26 x 40”

Winter Branches #2
1953
Ink on paper
26 x 40”

Night Light
1956
Oil on canvas
29 5/8 x 58 5/8”

Norman Lewis (1909–1979) was born in Harlem and died in New York. He knew he wanted to become an artist at the age of 10 after seeing a Black woman making paintings on the street in his neighborhood. In school, he studied commercial design and drawing and by the early 1930s, he had begun working with local sculptor Augusta Savage. Lewis went on to teach at the Harlem Community Arts Center and by 1934, he was accepted into the Works Progress Administration/Federal Art Project. Because making a living as an artist (especially as a Black man in the mid-20th century) was challenging, he continued to drive a taxi to supplement his income until the late 1960s.

His painting style evolved over the years from social realism in the 1930s, through semi-representational Cubist and Surrealist-influenced works in the 1940s, culminating in the abstract style for which he would ultimately be most known. By the end of the 1940s, he was represented by the prestigious Marian Willard Gallery and was well connected with other working abstract artists of the day. In 1950, he participated in the history-making Artist’s Sessions at Studio 35 with other New York School artists including Louise Bourgeois, Willem de Kooning and Robert Motherwell. He was the only Black artist present.

Much of Lewis’ work shows abstracted crowds of figures. Art historians have variously interpreted these crowds as parades (like the West Indian parades in Harlem in the 1940s and 1950s), as carnivals or festivals (from his travels in South America), or as protests. Lewis was an active participant in the 1963 Civil Rights Movement and participated in the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom as well as many other demonstrations.

Wall Drawings 790A–D: Irregular Alternating Color Bands
1995
Graphite, ink washes

Sol LeWitt (1928–2007) was born in Hartford, Connecticut, and died in New York, New York. He was an American artist linked to various movements, including Conceptual Art and Minimalism. LeWitt came to fame in the late 1960s with his wall drawings and “structures” (a term he preferred instead of “sculptures”), but was prolific in a wide range of media including drawing, printmaking, photography and painting. He has been the subject of hundreds of solo exhibitions in museums and galleries around the world since 1965.

Between 1968 and his death in 2007, LeWitt created more than 1,270 wall drawings. The wall drawings, executed on-site, often exist for the duration of an exhibition; they are then destroyed, giving the work in its physical form an ephemeral quality. They can be installed, removed and then reinstalled in another location, as many times as required for exhibition purposes.

Gondolinen (Thinking)
2022
Patchwork and acrylic paint on stretcher

The work of Romani artist, educator, and activist Małgorzata Mirga-Tas (b. 1978, Zakopane) addresses anti-Roma stereotypes and engages in building an affirmative iconography of Roma communities. Her work depicts everyday life: relationships, alliances and shared activities. Mirga-Tas’s vibrant textile collages are created from materials and fabrics collected from family and friends, which imbues them with a life of their own and a corresponding immediacy. Patchworks made of curtains, jewelry, shirts, and sheets, are sewn together to form so-called 'microcarriers' of history, just as resulting images revise macro perspectives.

Mirga-Tas’s portrayals take the perspective of 'minority feminism', which consciously advocates for women's strength while acknowledging the artist's cultural roots. Mirga-Tas was the official Polish representative at the 59th Venice Biennale in 2022–the first Roma artist to represent any country. Her vibrant works offer a rare opportunity to see the Roma on their own terms, both as a contemporary community and as a people with a rich heritage.

Dance Floor
2014
Oil on linen
60 x 50 1/4"

Kudzu
2009
Charcoal on paper
22 1/2 x 30 1/4"

John Moore (b. 1941, St. Louis) is an American contemporary realist painter whose work explores studio interiors, urban architecture and in his most celebrated work, the post-industrial landscape. While his paintings evoke a sense of realism, Moore’s masterful surfaces upon close inspection do not concede to the rigid glossy façade of photorealism, instead maintaining a uniquely felt touch. Using a variety of detailed brushwork, the surfaces are built up in luminous layers of contrasting hues.

The scenes presented in his work further subvert true realism, though based off of en plein air sketches, photographs and observational study in his studio. Moore reimagines each perspective by combining disparate elements from his observations of various sites, re-rendering architecture and the landscape to suit his sophisticated compositions.

Untitled
1960
Gouache on paper mounted on canvas
26.75 x 41.125”

Blueness of Blue
1974
Acrylic and charcoal on canvas
72 x 84”

Untitled
1966
Lithograph
22 x 17”

Poet’s Eye
1989–1990
Etching
25 x 3/8 x 30 7/8”

Robert Motherwell (1915–1991) was born in Aberdeen, Washington, and died in Provincetown, Massachusetts. He was an American painter, printmaker and editor. He was one of the youngest of the New York School (a phrase he coined), which also included Philip Guston, Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko. He was a major figure in the Abstract Expressionist art movement, well known for both his gestural “Elegies” series, which employed a limited palate and bold shapes, and his “Open” series of fragmentary rectangles, pioneering examples of conceptual abstraction.

100% Pure
2014
Oil, oil stick, graphite on canvas and linen
98 1/2 x 82 3/4"

Education, out of one of many people
2015–2016
Oil and oil stick on canvas and linen
76 3/4 x 76 3/4"

(untitled)
2017–2018
Oil and oil stick on canvas, linen and velvet

Oscar Murillo (b. 1986, Valle del Cauca, Colombia) is known for his large-scale paintings that imply action, performance and chaos. They are methodically composed of rough-hewn, stitched canvases that often incorporate fragments of text as well as studio debris such as dirt and dust. His paintings, video works and performances are tied to a notion of community stemming from the artist’s cross-cultural ties to London—where he currently lives and works—and Colombia, where he was born.

“100% Pure” relates to Murillo’s ongoing series of works based on the product imagery of Vita Coco coconut water, whose logo he has appropriated as a symbol of a kind of displacement he relates to—a product from a tropical part of the world now popular in metropolitan cities.

Red Setting
2012
C-print mounted on plexiglas
43 x 65"

The Field and the Plane
2007
C-print mounted on aluminum
32 3/4 x 34” 

Eileen Neff (b. 1945, Philadelphia) conflates physical and photographic space in artworks that challenge the ways in which photography mediates perception. Her interest surrounds the overlapping of landscape and studio space, inside and outside, as she questions the relationship between image and subject matter. When not in the landscape, Neff works in and from her studio, which she describes as not just a place but also a frame for a heightened form of attention. 

Blush
1978
Color lithograph
36 x 30”

Kenneth Noland (1924–2010) was born in Asheville, North Carolina, and died in Port Clyde, Saint George, Maine. He was an American abstract painter and one of the best-known American Color Field painters. Although, in the 1950s, he was thought of as an Abstract Expressionist, and in the early 1960s, he was thought of as a Minimalist painter. Though his famous motif—concentric circles—often resembles targets, the artist did not consider them as representations, but rather as visual devices to explore pure color. He was interested in the relationship between contrasting or complementary colors, and aimed to remove emotion and gesture from his work. Noland helped establish the Washington Color School movement. 

Dome of Discovery
2009
Ink, acrylic, spray paint, oilstick, fabric paint and collage
62 x 46”

The Abstract Nteligent (NTEL) was born in the classrooms of Ramstein, Germany, circa 1998. The name quickly became more of a “school of thought” than a title for an actual human being. Though NTEL had already experienced a world of different cultures, ideas, interests and experiences, by age 12, he grew increasingly bored with the “normal” steps that guide most peoples lives.

So, with a passion for art and knowledge, an overwhelming amount of imagination, motivation, energy—and even a little stubbornness—NTEL set out to prove to the world that dreams can come true. He has spent the last 15 years studying the world, and creating his art with what he has discovered, working to bridge the gap between Fine Art and Street Art.

Fortified
2018–2020
Limited edition print, #16

Karyn Olivier (b. 1968, Trinidad and Tobago) received her M.F.A. at Cranbrook Academy of Art and her B.A. at Dartmouth College. Her 2020 exhibit at the ICA, Everything That’s Alive Moves, offered the rare opportunity to examine the recent trajectories of her investigation into scale, public memory, and their relation to issues of inclusivity and acceptance. The exhibition built on several public projects and commissions created by the artist in recent years through which she continued to revise, rework, and expand on key works.

Works in this exhibition brought together two themes the artist focused on in recent years: larger-than-life scale and the minute, modest gesture. A brick wall built using discarded clothing as mortar, evokes memories of laundry and bundled lives carries overtones of refugee structures and traces of bodies, was constructed on site at the ICA, and special edition prints were created of it.

Olivier is currently an associate professor of sculpture at Tyler School of Art and Architecture.

Joggers 5
2015
Computer animation
22 x 22”

Julian Opie (b. 1958, London, England) is a contemporary British artist known for his distinct style of graphic figuration. The highly stylized treatment Opie gives his subjects—thick black outlines and with solid fills of flat color—is a blend of Pop art and Minimalism. His earliest works consisted of painted steel sculptures exploring the relationship between visual and spatial observation.

Over time, Opie has expanded his practice to include painting, installation and film. His work is part of the collections at The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the National Portrait Gallery in London, the Stedelijik Museum in Amsterdam and others. Opie currently lives and works in London, England.

Portrait of James Havard
1967
Oil on canvas
60 x 80” 

Elizabeth Osborne (b. 1936) was born and raised in Philadelphia. She is a painter known for her bold, color-drenched landscapes. Working primarily in oil paint and watercolor, her paintings bridge ideas about formalist concerns—particularly luminosity—with her explorations of nature, atmosphere and vistas. Osborne has exhibited extensively throughout the United States for over 40 years and was a professor at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) for 45 years. Her work is in many public and private collections, including the Philadelphia Museum of Art, PAFA and the Woodmere Art Museum. 

A Moment Too Late
2022
Oil paint and fabric collaged on canvas

Angel Otero was born in 1981 in Santurce, Puerto Rico, where he resided until moving to Chicago in 2004. He currently splits his time between New York and Puerto Rico. In 2009, Otero was included in the exhibition ‘Constellations’ at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, shortly after receiving his MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

In a reversal of the typical painting process, Otero begins each new work by painting the foreground scene on plexiglass first and then working backward, in layers, so the background, frequently inspired by historical abstract masterpieces, is painted last. He then builds in a layer of fabric to hold the entire structure together before scraping it off and fixing it onto canvas. Afterward, Otero continues to add to the surface, collaging images of items like pots and pans, window shutters, bingo tickets and folded paper fans from a repository of previously made works to create an entirely new, multilayered composition. In this way, the artist merges process and intent: through the skilled layering and mixing of fragments from different sources, he effectively emulates the ways in which our memories of the past, imprecise and frequently distorted, are pieced together to construct our present.

The Boat
2021
Watercolor on canvas

Silke Otto-Knapp (b. 1970) was born in Osnabrück, Germany, and majored in cultural studies at the University of Hildesheim. She received her MFA from Chelsea College of Art and Design in London. Otto-Knapp works in the medium of watercolor on canvas, and produces landscape paintings as well as paintings based on historical documentations of stage design and performance. Unlike traditional watercolorists, Otto-Knapp applies layers of watercolor that are washed down and then applied anew. These countless coats produce the coexistence of conflicting concepts of space—surface and depth, contour and corporeality, distance and closeness, reality and figurativeness—which give rise to a tension between the motif and the picture surface.

System of Display
2019
Silkscreen ink on plexiglass and mirror

Ok Dada Ok Black Dada Ok 2018
Silkscreen ink and spray paint on canvas
84 x 60”

Our Ideas #3 (set of 20)
2018
Silkscreen ink on mylar
40 3/8 x 31 3/8”

Adam Pendleton (b. 1984) was born in Richmond, Virginia, to a schoolteacher who loved books and a contractor who played jazz music in his spare time. Growing up, Pendleton worked his way through his mother’s library reading books by Audre Lord, Toni Morrison and Adrienne Rich. He developed an appreciation for language and theory that has directly informed his artwork. As a teenager, Pendleton spent hours studying art books and painting in his parents’ basement. He made pilgrimages to New York City galleries and museums alone and occasionally with his father.

When he turned 18, he moved to New York to become an artist. His father drove him and some of his paintings in the family’s van. He sent unsolicited slides of his work to galleries and one day walked into Gallery 128 on the Lower East Side of Manhattan with a painting under his arm. The owner, Kazuco Miyamoto, who also assisted conceptual artist, Sol LeWitt, put the work in her summer group show. When LeWitt stopped by the gallery to meet with Miyamoto, he saw Pendleton’s work. Impressed, he traded one of his gouaches for the painting. The following year, Pendleton developed a theoretical framework called Black Dada, which continues to provide the foundation for his practice today.

Though he used color in his early work, Pendleton has now limited his palette to black and white—not to connote racial categories but rather because he began to find color distracting. Working slowly and in ongoing series, he usually completes no more than 12 paintings a year.

Single cut
2018
Aluminum, titan, lacquer

Michail Pirgelis (b. 1976) was born in Essen, Germany, and his art making practice began at airplane graveyards in the deserts of California and Arizona. He repurposes detritus from discarded aircraft, from small ambiguous scraps to full circular fuselages complete with windows. Though sometimes polishing or grinding down cut portions, the artist does not usually alter the materials much. He leaves painted letters mostly intact, traces of wear and tear from flight, and desert sand and sun deliberately visible. His resulting two and three-dimensional works often resemble minimalist painting and sculpture with elegant enigmatic lines, but the occasional rivet or identifiable letter from a carrier’s name provide clues to their origins. As for the particular plane that served as source material for “Single cut,” the artist isn’t telling.

Untitled Photo Series
1970
Gelatin silver print

Composition
1983
Acrylic on paper

Sigmar Polke (1941–2010) was born in Oels, Silesia, (now Oleśnica, Poland)—the seventh of eight siblings—and died in Cologne, Germany. Forced to leave in 1945, during the expulsion of Germans from Silesia, the family relocated to East Germany. When Polke was 12, they escaped to the West on a train, where he feigned sleep to deflect attention from the authorities.

His father was an architect and the family had been affluent, but they left everything behind when immigrating, trading comfort for freedom. The dislocation was jarring for young Sigmar, who began spending his free time in Dusseldorf’s galleries and museums, and soon decided to become an artist. He landed a job at a stained-glass factory, where he worked until he was admitted to the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in 1961. It was an exciting time to study at the Academy. Joseph Beuys, Dieter Roth and Günther Uecker were professors, and fellow students included Gerhard Richter and Konrad Lueg with whom Polke formed the Capitalist Realism painting movement. A tongue-in-cheek provocation, the young artists’ concept alluded to both American Pop art and German Socialist Realism. Polke made paintings of men’s socks and sausages, among other proletarian goods, as well as of newspaper and magazine photographs.

Uninterested in a traditional career path, however, he stopped painting for much of the 1970s. He lived in a commune for a while, and travelled the world, experimenting with psychedelic drugs like mushrooms and LSD. He constantly took photographs, and in his typically irreverent way, often interfered with the resulting prints; folding, applying radioactive chemicals and drawing or painting on them.

Polke returned to painting in the 1980s, continuing his exploratory approach. The artist made little distinction between media, not only painting on photographs and paper, but experimenting with an alchemist’s array of materials from arsenic to jade to snail mucus. Polke continued to sample images too.

Happy Jack
2020
Bronze

Martin Puryear (b. 1941) was born in Washington D.C., the first child of a postal worker and an elementary school teacher. He attended a segregated public school until sixth grade when, shortly after desegregation, his family moved to a more affluent area.

His parents regularly took him to the National Gallery of Art, the Museum of Science and Technology, and the Museum of Natural History. Puryear developed an interest in the natural sciences early, and became an avid reader on a variety of subjects including Native American culture, archery and ornithology. He made drawings and paintings of bird and animal species and dreamed of becoming a professional wildlife illustrator.

His family encouraged his creative pursuits and he attended art classes given by a local artist once a week for four years during elementary school. After graduating college in 1963, he joined the Peace Corps and spent two years in Sierra Leone, where in addition to teaching science and languages, he studied with local woodworkers and basket weavers, developing a profound appreciation for their lived art and craft tradition.

Delilah
2021
Mixed media collage on canvas

Deborah Roberts was born in Austin, Texas, USA in 1962 where she continues to live and work.

Roberts' use of collage reflects the challenges encountered by young Black children as they strive to build their identity, particularly as they respond to preconceived social constructs perpetuated by the Black community, the white gaze and visual culture at large. Combining a range of different facial features, skin tones, hairstyles and clothes, Roberts explains that “with collage, I can create a more expansive and inclusive view of the Black cultural experience.”

Roxana Marcoci, Senior Curator at MoMA, New York, writes: “In her mixed-media works, artist Deborah Roberts acknowledges the syncretic nature of Black female identity. Debunking societal definitions of ideal beauty and dress, as well as stereotypes of social media, she questions the construction of race and the racializing gaze endemic to Western culture. Her collages and text-based works not only articulate a critique of accepted typologies of the unified self but also affirm the untold value of difference.”

Content via Stephen Friedman Gallery

Pond 6
1976
Oil on linen
60 x 60”

Pond 8
1976
Oil on linen
60 x 60”

Warren Rohrer (1927–1995) was born in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, and became one of Philadelphia’s leading abstract painters in the late 20th century. Coming from a Lancaster Mennonite upbringing, he strayed from conventional professional paths of becoming a farmer or minister when he began to pursue art and art education. Rohrer quickly embedded himself in the national contemporary art scene and would go on to teach for 25 years at the Philadelphia College of Art (now the University of the Arts).

moonrise. west. january
2004
Cast polyurethane, black
45 1/2 x 25 x 8 3/4”

moonrise. west. february
2004
Cast polyurethane, black
46 1/2 x 24 x 12”

Ugo Rondinone (b. 1964) is a Swiss-born mixed-media artist. His work frequently employs the experiential qualities of the everyday, often reflecting on the boundaries between fiction and reality. Rondinone emerged onto the international art scene in the 1990s. His signature incandescent colors and Pop references—as in his rainbow-hued and neon-lit sign pieces—recycle old catchphrases into repurposed cement or cast-off clothing. Similarly, his sculptures often transform everyday objects by casting them in bronze, giving them an artificial permanence that both underscores and denies their perishability. Rondinone lives and works in Harlem.

Space Element
2015
LCD screen and video
57 1/8 x 32 5/8”

Michal Rovner (b. 1957, Ramat Gan, Israel) is an artist whose work in video, sculpture, drawing, sound and installation has been exhibited in over 60 solo exhibitions. In 1978, she co-founded the Camera Obscura School of Art in Tel Aviv, the city’s first school for photographers. In 2006, Rovner began a series of monumental structures titled “Makom” (Place) using stones from dismantled or destroyed Israeli and Palestinian houses. She worked with Israeli and Palestinian masons to construct new spaces encompassing history, memory and time. In 2013, Rovner created the installation “Traces of Life” at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, in Oświęcim, Poland, devoted to the 1.5 million Jewish children murdered in the Shoah (Holocaust). Rovner lives and works in New York and Israel.

Wall
1988
Etching
51 x 41"

Doric Light
2010
Oil on aluminum
110 x 160"

Horizontals on Brown
1976
Oil on canvas
35 1/2 x 35 1/2"

Wall of Light Frieze
2000
Oil on canvas
85 1/4 x 95 7/8” 

Stack
2016
Corten steel
177 1/8 x 141 3/4 x 141 3/4”

The Gatherer
2014
Oil on aluminum
110 x 213 1/4”

Wall Arles
2016
Oil on aluminum
28 x 28”

Sean Scully (b. 1945, Dublin, Ireland) is an Irish-born American-based painter and printmaker who has twice been named a Turner Prize nominee. His work is collected in major museums worldwide. Scully's paintings are abstract and often made up of a number of panels. He paints in oils, sometimes laying the paint on quite thick to create textured surfaces. He frequently employs rectangular shapes in his compositions that he refers to as bricks. These visual building blocks were originally inspired by the Mayan ruins and the megaliths and stone walls of the artist’s native Ireland—examples of humankind’s enduring accomplishments, interconnectedness and our relationship to our ever-present past and future.

Trajectory #3
2005
Etching
47 x 35"

Extension #1, #2, #3
2005
Etching
47 x 35"

Esna
1991
Paintstick on screenprint
76 1/2 x 76 1/2"

Kepler
1999
Etching
59 1/2 x 47 1/2"

Richard Serra (b. 1939, San Francisco) is an American minimalist sculptor and artist known for working with large-scale assemblies of sheet metal. Serra was involved in the Process Art Movement. He is known for large site-specific sculptures that investigate spatial relationships, often challenging the viewer, forcing him or her into a participatory role while navigating the work. The artist’s works on paper operate similarly, albeit on a visual rather than physical level, pushing stark extremes of light and darkness to their respective extremes.

His work can be found in many international public and private collections, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. He lives and works in Tribeca in Manhattan, and on Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia.

Untitled Film Still #58
1980
Gelatin silver print

Growing up in Huntington Beach, Long Island, Cindy Sherman loved television and movies from an early age. She has fond memories of watching Hitchcock’s Rear Window and other classics on WOR-TV Channel 9’s Million Dollar Movie program that showed the same film every night for a week. She was a creative child who drew constantly and spent a lot of time playing dress-up, reinventing herself as an old lady, a witch, or a monster rather than a princess or ballerina (or any more typical imaginings of little girls). She did well in art class at school, going on to earn her BA from Buffalo State College in 1976. At college she studied drawing, painting, and photography, and experimented with costumes and performance art, attending parties dressed as Lucille Ball for example, and photographing the results. She usually dressed up as women, enjoying the myriad possibilities of wigs, fashion, and make up; she found male personas too limiting.

Sherman moved to New York City in 1977, and got a job as a receptionist at the non-profit Artists Space downtown. She went to work in costume occasionally, arriving dressed as a nurse, or a 1950s-era secretary. That fall, she photographed the first group of the series for which she has become widely known, the Untitled Film Stills. Inspired by the stylized aesthetic of directors like Hitchcock and Antonioni, Sherman created images in which women and their mise en scène appeared enigmatic – never smiling, rarely crying, mysterious. Each of the seventy Film Stills is a photograph of the artist herself, disguised as a stereotypical female movie character, generic but familiar from tropes of film: ingenue, big-city career girl, vamp, housefrau and more. Even characters that deliberately echo cinematic icons like Brigitte Bardot or Sophia Loren remain one step removed – a Bardot “type” but not a Bardot portrayal. The Film Stills never recreate or refer to real films; they are archetypes. Sherman’s photographs are all untitled to further embrace ambiguity; even her title numbering system is intentionally slightly out of order. The artist’s investigation of women’s identities is both personal – she is in every picture – and universal. Women’s roles have been culturally prescribed since society began, but Sherman upends normative stereotypes with deft re-envisioning.

Guitar Man
2021
Oil and cold wax on canvas

Gary Simmons references film, architecture, and American popular culture in paintings and drawings that address race, class, and memory on both personal and collective levels. In his 2010 exhibition "Midnight Matinee," Simmons used images of drive-in theater marquees and houses from vintage horror films to reflect on ghosts and abandoned pasts. Simmons has centered much of his practice on erasure. Early on he drew in white chalk on readymade chalkboards or directly onto slate-painted walls, then smudged the images with his hands, and in recent years he has adapted the process to canvas, using pigment, oil paint, and cold wax.

Beclouded
2018
Ink and screenprint on gessoed wood
108 x 96 x 1/1/4”

Lorna Simpson (b. 1960) was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, to parents who shared her love of art. Simpson started taking photographs before high school, after mailing in coupons from the backs of Kleenex boxes to get a free Polaroid camera. This first passion stuck with her through her time studying at the School of Visual Arts, where she majored in painting and photography. After pursuing an MFA at the University of California, she began exploring conceptual interweaving of text and photography.

Simpson’s later work was informed by found images, such as photos and text from old Jet and Ebony magazines found in her grandparent’s home. Simpson’s work also explores the colors blue, black and the cultural concept of “blue-black,” a descriptive term used primarily by African Americans to describe dark-skinned people. Simpson found inspiration in the works of poet Robin Coste Lewis, who shares her interest in the intersection of color theory and racial and cultural identity. Simpson included Coste’s poem about the Arctic on the wall of one of her shows.

Simpson continued this theme of the Arctic for several years, invoking a harsh place that is inhospitable to human life. The already dangerous environment is emphasized by her dramatic palette—deep blues and blacks—as if it is night. Through her works, Simpson expresses her belief that we are currently living in a dark period in American history, and questions how to survive.

Silver
2018
Oil on canvas

The Barnes Series VIII
2018
Oil on canvas

Pat Steir (b. 1940, Newark, New Jersey) developed an interest in art at a young age. She began her formal art training in 1956, studying graphic arts at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, where she eventually received her BFA in 1962. There, she was influenced by her teachers Richard Lindner and Phillip Guston, who encouraged her to find her own style rather than follow popular ideas and techniques. It was Steir’s training in graphic arts and illustration that allowed her to develop her eclectic visual vocabulary.

Though with her early work, Steir was loosely allied with Conceptual Art and Minimalism, she is best-recognized for dripped, splashed and poured “waterfall” paintings that she first started in the late 1980s. Steir is also profoundly influenced by Chinese painting traditions and techniques, especially the inky marks of the eighth- and ninth- century Yi-pin “ink-splashing” painters, and Taoist philosophy’s aspiration for harmonious, unfettered connections between man, nature and the cosmos.

Past Presence 057
2014
Gelatin silver print

Hiroshi Sugimoto (b. 1948, Tokyo, Japan) is a Japanese photographer currently dividing his time between Tokyo and New York City. His catalogue is made up of a number of series, each having a distinct theme and similar attributes. Sugimoto photographed this Seascapes series in locations all over the world using a large format camera and often very long exposures (in some cases up to three hours). He is compelled by the visual juxtaposition of the two essential life-giving elements of air and water—always forming the composition so their intersection bifurcates the pictorial plane. 

Last Glimpse (After Object)
2019
Oil paint, acrylic paint, acrylic polymers, ink, aluminum, archival paper, dibond, fabric, and wood

Sarah Sze (b. 1969) is an American artist and professor of visual arts at Columbia University. She has exhibited internationally and her works are in the collections of several major museums. Sze's work explores the role of technology and information in contemporary life utilizing everyday materials.

Sze draws from Modernist traditions of the found object, to build large scale installations. She uses everyday items like string, Q-tips, photographs, and wire to create complex constellations whose forms change with the viewer's interaction. The effect of this is to "challenge the very material of sculpture, the very constitution of sculpture, as a solid form that has to do with finite geometric constitutions, shapes, and content."

When selecting materials, Sze focuses on the exploration of value acquisition–what value the object holds and how it is acquired. In an interview with curator Okwui Enwezor, Sze explained that during her conceptualization process, she will "choreograph the experience to create an ebb and flow of information [...] thinking about how people approach, slow down, stop, perceive her art."

Chevalier
2021
Oil on canvas
60 x 48”

Honor Titus (b. 1989) is a multidisciplinary American artist who lives and works in Los Angeles. Since his first solo exhibition in 2019, he has quickly garnered international recognition for his painting practice, which weaves together a surreal, expressive iconography with references drawn variously from literature, art history, music, architecture and American advertising traditions.

Born in Brooklyn, New York, Titus came to prominence in the New York punk rock scene in the early 2010s, as the lead singer of the band Cerebral Ballzy. At this time, Titus also became known for his poetry through independent readings in New York City, where he became associated with the artist Raymond Pettibon. Titus began working in Pettibon’s studio, where he assisted in painting and developed an interest in stylized graphic art. Later, the artist, Henry Taylor, also mentored Titus and gave him his first solo exhibition, introducing him to the Los Angeles contemporary art landscape.

Since moving to Los Angeles in 2016, Titus has focused exclusively on his visual art practice, and his work has since received extensive critical acclaim in publications such as The New York Times, Frieze magazine, Artnet, Interview and Art in America. He is particularly known for his use of vibrant, painterly color and his distinct use of recurring motifs, such as the significance of solitude and a nostalgia for the pre-digital era. His work has drawn comparisons to the influences of Edward Hopper and the nineteenth-century French Symbolist group Les Nabis.

Rise and Fall
2019
Acrylic on linen
68 x 62”

Liliane Tomasko’s (b. 1967, Zurich, Switzerland) abstract paintings employ a distinctive, bold lyricism, with an equally unabashed sense of color. The artist often begins with a study of the personal effects of everyday domesticity such as bedding or clothing to create work that suggests a gateway into the realms of sleep and dreaming; delving into the gulf between what we understand as the ‘conscious’ and ‘subconscious.’ Recent paintings display an increasing vitality and assertiveness, articulating an abstraction that is rooted in the physical realm but attempting a departure from it. Intense color, subtle tone, shadows and painterly gesture are woven together in such a way that space comes in and out of focus, suspending one’s perception of them and emulating the clarity or lack thereof, of dreams and memories.

Liliane Tomasko lives and works in New York and Germany.

10 January, 1971
1971
Acrylic on paper
22 x 30”

Summer 88, No. 4
1988
Acrylic on paper
22 x 30”

Summer 97, No. 1
1997
Acrylic on paper
22 x 30”

Way I
1974
Acrylic on canvas
40.5 x 64”

"What is important to me is not geometrical shape per se, or color per se, but to make a relationship between shape and color which feels to me like my experience. To make what feels to me like reality."

An influential and prolific American artist, Anne Truitt (1921–2004) was born in Baltimore, and grew up in the coastal Maryland town, Easton. She died in Washington D.C. Originally trained in psychology, Truitt worked as a nurse and research assistant in psychiatry during World War II. Even though she didn’t pick up visual artmaking until the 1950s, she wrote poems and stories in her youth. She studied sculpture at the Institute of Contemporary Art and Dallas Museum of Fine Art in 1949–1950. By the early 1960s, Truitt had become a multifaceted artist fluent in painting, drawing and writing. After experimenting with a wide range of materials and techniques, she also started to produce her now signature sculptures painted in serene, dense colors that complement the shape of the rectangular, wooden structures.

Truitt’s works skillfully combine color and form in their truest essence, examining their connections and spatial characteristics in relation to one another. Her paintings and drawings also draw from this relationship to achieve the highest simplicity with the most meaning, this time on two-dimensional surfaces of paper and canvas. Both her sculptures and paintings reveal to the viewer an abstraction of various figures from Truitt’s own past, feelings and imagination.

6
2016
Oil on canvas
82 x 70"

10
2018
Oil and enamel on canvas
89 1/4 x 72 3/4 x 2 3/8”

Influenced by pop culture and corporate design from the 1980s and 1990s, American Garth Weiser (b. 1979, Helena, Montana) creates paintings that challenge perception with their grids and abstract geometrical composition. Heir to Modernist and Minimalist legacies, Weiser has created his own vocabulary of wheels, stripes and pixelated blocks of gradated color using techniques that vary from gouache to impasto. The optical nature of his works coupled with his process, notably beginning with three-dimensional models, lend Weiser’s paintings an architectural quality.

Inkjet Print 5237
2008
Inkjet print

James Welling (b. 1951, Hartford, Connecticut) has been questioning the norms of representation since the 1970s. His work centers on an exploration of photography, shuffling the elemental components of the medium to produce a distinctly uncompromising body of work. He is also intensely interested in cultural and personal ideas of memory in his work. He is known for his peripatetic practice, using diverse strategies to produce works that are at times representational, at times abstract, and often, paradoxically, both. In opening up the medium of photography for experimentation, Welling’s practice has influenced an entire generation of artists and photographers.

Welling’s fifth solo show at David Zwirner Gallery featured photographs documenting Philip Johnson's iconic “Glass House,” built in 1949, in New Canaan, Connecticut. Taken over the course of three years (2006–2009), these photographs were made using a digital camera, and the resulting images capture the architectural features of Johnson's 47-acre compound.

In a statement on “Glass House,” Welling elaborates on the physical and conceptual properties of his interventions: “Although the “Glass House” is symmetrical (the front is the same as the back), I prefer a frontal view because you can see through the house to the landscape directly west. This is the aspect of the house that is perhaps most fascinating to me. This big glass box, plunked down in the Connecticut landscape, seems like a conceptual sculpture, a gigantic lens in the landscape. When I realized I could make the glass red or add reflections to the face of this supposedly transparent house, my project became a laboratory for ideas about transparency, reflectivity, and color.”

Welling received his BFA and MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, California.

Gestural Disruption #9
1988
Acrylic on Fabriano paper

The Manhattan Repository
1988
Acrylic on canvas
48 x 82”

The Offering
1989
Acrylic on canvas on board
26 1/8 x 26 1/8”

Jack Whitten (b. 1939) was born in Bessemer, Alabama. Whitten credited his can-do DIY aesthetic to his mother, a widowed seamstress, whose resourcefulness and creativity influenced his approach to art and life. Whitten attended Southern University in New Orleans to study art. Inspired by the speeches of Dr. Martin Luther King (as well as a brief meeting with the man himself), Whitten joined the civil rights movement. He struggled to uphold Dr. King’s principle of non-violence when he was beaten with sticks during a march to the state capital and decided to leave the South for good, catching a bus to New York City. He enrolled in the Cooper Union to study painting.

Some of the first people he met in New York were well-known Black artists Romare Bearden, Jacob Lawrence and Norman Lewis. Whitten reinvented his style in New York, abandoning paintbrushes altogether. To create whole paintings composed of a single gesture, he devised a 12-foot-wide giant squeegee that he used to rake paint across canvasses. Though he lacked gallery representation and much money for paint, he scraped together enough materials to make a series of these large-scale paintings for a solo show at the Whitney Museum of Art.

Looking to reinvent himself again, he decided to go “into the woodshed.” A phrase borrowed from jazz musicians, “woodshedding” means rehearsing alone. Working solo, he stripped down his color palate and by the 1980s, he had started drying out sheets of acrylic to create “tessellae”—fragmented pieces of hardened paint that he affixed to the surface of his canvasses to catch and reflect the light.

Beginning in the early 1980s, and continuing for decades, he made a series of works called “Black Monoliths” as homages to black musicians, writers, artists and public figures who he considered to be in the cultural pantheon and who had contributed significantly to society. In each work, he tried to capture and memorialize the essence of that person.

Thomas
2006
Oil stick on lead paper

Mao Yan (b. 1968, Hunan Provence, China) is considered one of China’s premier contemporary artists. He began studying painting at an early age, mastering advanced techniques by the time he was a teenager. In 1991, after graduating from the Oil Painting Department at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, Mao Yan began teaching at Nanjing University of the Arts, where he began to delve into portraiture.

In his article, “Explorations in Realism,” renowned art critic, Li Xianting, named Mao Yan as the representative of Chinese Neo-Realism, stating that his works depict the "portraits of a generation whose emotions are gradually disappearing." Mao’s portraits eschew specific cultural or temporal signifiers, and his reduced palette of cool gray and blue tones is used as a compositional device, and which he deems a subject of the work in itself.

Prayer amid a battle
2021
Oil based printing ink and oil bar on canvas

In her paintings, artist Portia Zvavahera (b. 1985) gives form to emotions that manifest from other realms and dimensions beyond the domains of everyday life and thought. Her vivid imagery is rooted in the cornerstones of our earthly existence—life and death, pain and pleasure, isolation and connection, and love and loss. These deeply personal visions are realized through layers of vibrant color and ornate, veil-like patterns that the artist builds up into palimpsestic surfaces through a combination of expressive brushwork and elaborate printmaking techniques. Zvavahera’s compositions draw on particular traditions of figuration in past and present Zimbabwe, first expressed in the work of Thomas Mukarobgwa in the 1960s, while also pointing to postwar artistic practices that probe the nature of the human condition.

Zvavahera was born in 1985 in Harare, Zimbabwe, where she currently lives and works. She studied at the BAT Visual Arts Studio, National Gallery of Zimbabwe, from 2003 to 2005. She then received a diploma in fine arts from Harare Polytechnic in 2006.

Zvavahera’s work is held in the collections of the Johannesburg Art Gallery; Minneapolis Institute of Art; National Gallery of Zimbabwe, Harare; Pérez Art Museum Miami; Tate, London; University of Chicago Booth School of Business; and the Weisman Art Museum, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis.