Author: Brynn Calloway

The contemporary art world is fond of résumés that begin at the academy and ascend by predictable steps. Lisa Tahar’s does not. Born in Leipzig in 1963, she spent decades in other professions, raised four children, and only after retiring in 2018 picked up a brush in earnest. Within a few years her oil-on-canvas landscapes were hanging in galleries from Bremen to Paris. Late starts are often romanticised. In Tahar’s case the lateness reads as an advantage: she paints without the anxiety of influence or the need to be fashionable. The Bob Ross Question Tahar names the American television painter…

Oenone Hammersley’s paintings occupy a productive tension between seduction and disturbance. At first encounter, their saturated chromatic fields, sweeping forms, and expansive compositions appear to offer an exuberant vision of the tropical world. Look longer, however, and the paintings begin to feel less like straightforward celebrations of landscape than unstable environments: places in which water, vegetation, geological forms, and atmospheric effects are continually shifting. Hammersley uses the visual pleasures of painting to draw attention to what is increasingly precarious. Born in England in 1957 and now based in Florida, Hammersley has developed a practice informed by theatre design, extensive travel,…

Adamo Macri’s artistic practice is rooted in transformation. Working across sculpture, photography, painting, video, performance, and drawing, Macri approaches art as an evolving process rather than a fixed category. His projects frequently move between mediums, allowing an idea that begins as a sculptural object to develop into a performance and eventually exist through photographs or video stills. This fluid movement between forms reflects his broader interest in the relationship between materials, the body, identity, and the essence of an artwork. Rather than allowing medium to determine the meaning of a work, Macri places the concept at the center of his…

James Day has spent twenty-five years building a body of work that refuses to sit still. Since graduating in the summer of 2001, his practice has moved through painting, photography, sculpture and, most recently, diorama making, each shift bringing a new way of looking at the world without ever fully abandoning what came before. From Bright Colour to Photorealism The paintings Day made in his early career were bold and bright, the kind of work that announces itself with colour before it asks anything more of the viewer. Over two and a half decades, that approach gave way to something…

For most of her career, Lib Mason painted for other people. As a commercial illustrator whose work appeared in publications like Rolling Stone and Time Life Warner, and later as the creative force behind several artist-branded licensed product lines, her subjects, deadlines, and even her palette were often dictated by someone else’s brief. Today, as a contemporary oil painter working in a technique borrowed from the Flemish masters, Mason answers to no one but the painting itself, and the results are stranger, funnier, and more unsettling than anything a client could have commissioned. From Assignment to Inquiry Mason’s training began…

Karla Ochoa Pesantez did not arrive at painting through art school or a slow accumulation of formal training. She arrived at it through the body. Before she ever picked up a brush with intention, she spent years training as a competitive Olympic gymnast in Ecuador, a discipline that demanded exact control over every muscle, every angle, every fraction of a second. Between the ages of seven and fourteen, she won multiple national championships, and in doing so absorbed a kind of physical intelligence that most artists never have the chance to develop. That intelligence, it turns out, translates surprisingly well…

There is a particular kind of silence that settles over a server room, a hum so constant it becomes invisible. Yi Zhu’s paintings ask what happens when that hum enters the body. In his ongoing series 201 → 429 → 503, the Beijing-based artist borrows the vocabulary of internet infrastructure and folds it into something older and more urgent: an inquiry into how a person survives being endlessly connected. Yi Zhu did not arrive at this language by accident. His formative years unfolded during a period of dramatic transformation in China’s economy and society, and that instability appears to have…

There is a particular kind of photograph that does not simply record a place but decides, quietly and deliberately, what the viewer is allowed to see. In the black-and-white work of Antonio Rana, an Italian photographer, this decision belongs almost entirely to light. A doorway half in shadow, a staircase catching a single diagonal beam, a figure crossing a street just as the sun clears a rooftop these are the moments Rana waits for, and they form the foundation of a visual language he has been building for less than a year. A Late Beginning, A Fast Education Rana is…

There is a particular kind of stillness that settles over a room when someone truly looks at another person not glances, not scans, but looks, with the patience of someone trying to understand rather than merely see. This is the stillness that Sylvianne Blum Cassereau builds into every portrait she creates. Working from soft pastel, a Mexican artist whose practice has traveled far beyond her studio in Mexico City, Blum Cassereau has spent years refining a visual language centered on one enduring subject: the human being. Not humanity as an abstraction, but individual people, their particular eyes, their particular history,…

There is a particular kind of artist who does not need an exotic subject to make an exotic picture. Jane Gottlieb belongs to that category. For more than three decades, she has pointed her camera at the world most of us walk past without noticing and returned with images that feel closer to invention than documentation. A stack of fruit, a wall of neon, the sweep of a building’s steel skin: in her hands, the familiar becomes strange again, and the strange becomes beautiful. An Eye Trained on the Overlooked Gottlieb’s photographs rarely announce themselves as reportage. They are built,…