Author: Brynn Calloway
Contemporary figurative art continues to evolve through artists who discover new ways to interpret the human body and communicate movement, emotion, and identity. Nigerian artist Simon Ojeaga has developed a distinctive visual language rooted in repetition, rhythm, and expressive mark-making. Through his paintings, he explores the human figure using countless small, broken lines that come together to create bodies and forms filled with energy. Born in Edo State, Nigeria, Ojeaga is a figurative artist whose practice demonstrates how a simple visual element can become a powerful tool for artistic expression. Working primarily with acrylic on canvas, he uses lines that…
On Thursday night, Christie’s concluded its marquee May sales week with a blockbuster night of back to-back auctions. A sale dedicated to Impressionist and modern works from the collection of the late New York philanthropist and socialite Anne Bass was followed by another devoted to 20th century art. Together, the two sales brought in a staggering $831 million with buyer’s fees. Christie’s global head of Impressionist and modern art, Adrien Meyer, took to the auction podium to welcome another full room of spectators. First up were the works previously owned by Bass, who amassed her wealth during her marriage and subsequent divorce…
A word to the wise: no matter how frazzled you are while preparing to leave town for a family vacation, make sure you don’t forget anything on the sidewalk when you drive away. Especially if you are the type of family that takes valuable, framed artwork on road trips. Andrés Hurtado, a 57 year old man from Murcia, was visiting Seville with his family when an artwork leaning against a garage door caught his eye while on a walk around the city center. He picked it up, particularly taken by the wide gold frame. Unbeknownst to Hurtado, the painting belonged to a…
Barcelona Fixations per Minute is a new exhibition series presented by Fundació Joan Miró in collaboration with the Banco Sabadell Foundation at Espai 13 from February 10, 2023 to January 21, 2024. The project, curated by Yaby (Beatriz Ortega Botas and Alberto Vallejo), analyzes the concept of reading and its relationship to current artistic practices via the work of a group of local and international artists. Claudia Pagès, P. Staff, Jota Mombaça & Iki Yos Pia Narváez Funes, and Kandis Williams’ exhibitions use a variety of visual mediums to challenge some of the technical and rhetorical mechanisms of reading by exposing their…
Rather than deconstruct Western modernism or reinsert Islamic visual idioms, the artist loosens the grip of the grid. A visitor at Kamrooz Aram Infrequencies at Alexander Gray Associates (photo Hrag Vartanian/Hyperallergic) Kamrooz Aram was everywhere I happened to be these early months of 2026, and I’m all the luckier for it. He exhibited at Nature Morte in Mumbai for Mumbai Art Week, is currently on view at Alexander Gray Associates in Tribeca, and makes a rich appearance almost a mini-solo show in the 2026 Whitney Biennial. Aram, born in Iran and a graduate of Columbia’s MFA program, is known for his play with the grid.…
Rotterdam , Kunstinstituut Melly presents exhibition program for winter / spring 2023. The Kunstinstituut Melly in Rotterdam will open exhibitions comprising pieces by Dutch artist Jennifer Tee, German artist Anna Witt, and Indonesian artist ensemble Tromarama on Friday, January 20. Jennifer Tee’s solo exhibition is the first time the artist’s whole Tampan Tulip collage work has been shown in its entirety. Along with this exhibition, Dutch artist Sijben Rosa will begin a community driven project that will be displayed in December 2023. Two new artworks will be featured in the multi year activity based exhibition 84 STEPS: a large-scale light…
When Mernet Larsen was in her 70s, the project she had been working on her entire life met a moment. It was the 2010s, and painters everywhere were grappling with how the digital realm affected what we see. People seeing Larsen’s paintings for the first time often assumed that they were made using a computer, reading her signature blocky figures as robotic or pixelated something a machine would create. But they are not computational at all. What Larsen has spent 50-odd years exploring is, in fact, much more general: the systems by which we humans have translated 3D spaces onto 2D surfaces across…
New York , Architecture Now: New York, New Publics will be on display at MoMA from February 19 through July 29, 2023 Architecture Now: New York, New Publics, the debut installation of a new exhibition series that will serve as a platform to promote emerging talent and foreground landmark initiatives in contemporary architecture, opens at the Museum of Modern Art. The first iteration of the series, New York, New Publics, will be on display from February 19 to July 29, 2023, and will look at how New York City based practices have been actively broadening the relationship of architecture to…
Lyles & King, a taste making downtown New York gallery that’s been in business for just over a decade, announced on Thursday that it had closed. Its final exhibitions, a solo for Jessie Makinson and a three-person show for Cato Ouyang, Fernanda Galvão, and Ren Light Pan, closed on June 20. The gallery’s roster included artists like Aneta Grzeszykowska, Mira Schor, Jo-ey Tang & Thomas Fougeirol, Kathy Ruttenberg, and Lily Wong. A number of artists had exhibitions at Lyles & King before being included in major international exhibitions, like Grzeszykowska in the 2022 Venice Biennale, Shala Miller in the 2026…
The winds of change blasted through New York in 2025. Dealers fretted about the state of the market as galleries closed. Curators privately worried about what could and could not be shown as an oppressive President returned to power in Washington, D.C. Deep pocketed collectors died, raising questions who would take up their mantle, and longtime institutional directors vacated their posts. Everyone in the art world kept talking about uncertainty. There were many reasons to feel depressed over the state of arts and culture this year. Four artists from the roster of one mega-gallery received concurrent museum retrospectives during a single season. The Whitney Museum shamefully put its beloved Independent Study Program on hold amid a…