Photography (Photography)

Ponderosa Pine IV belongs to a series of large-scale photographs of trees taken by Graham and depicts a particular species that live in Northern California. The photograph is framed upside down; these “inverted trees” follow Graham’s early experiments with the camera lucida, a room-sized pinhole camera that dates back to ancient times and which he has used to photograph trees from various regions. Through these works Graham looks back at the history of photography while making the viewers aware of their own retinal experience.

Photography (Photography)

Tree on the Former Site of Camera Obscura (1996) belongs to a series of large-scale photographs of trees taken by Graham and depicts a particular species that lives in Northern California. The photograph is framed upside down; these “inverted trees” follow Graham’s early experiments with the camera lucida, a room-size pinhole camera that dates back to ancient times. Through these works Graham looks back at the history of photography while making the viewer aware of his or her own retinal experience.

Painting (Painting)

The ongoing “Sea Paintings” series is central to the practice of Jessica Warboys. The series plays with the notion of ritual, performance, nature and consequence. The artist realises her “Sea Paintings” on the Zennor coast, near St Ives, where she emerges the canvas in the seawater, allowing the waves and the wind to mix the raw mineral pigments that have been applied by hand to damp folded canvases.

Painting (Painting)

His Deck Painting I recalls the simplistic stripes of conceptual artist Daniel Buren, or the minimal lines of twentieth century abstract painting, but is in reality a readymade, fashioned from repurposed fabric of deck chairs. Alexandre da Cunha reinvents found objects in surprising ways that combine the material characteristics of Arte Povera with the concerns and techniques of painting. Da Cunha’s work often features flags—either as a found material per se or as a constructed form—that reflect the artist’s interest in issues of nationality, governmental politics, allegiance, and culture.

Painting (Painting)

In the “Black Paintings” series, although the human body is only suggested, it plays an important role. Some body parts are absent, mostly the faces which are usually an affirmation of the individual. The characters recall ghosts testifying as to the traumas of war.

Painting (Painting)

His untitled paintings express his concern regarding perception in abstract form. Made with bleached denim, stock images of flames and gold leaf, these works embody “human cultures as ghosts.” The gold serves as a reminder of religious paintings, and the denim as emblematic of Western capitalist waste. When describing his paintings, the artist states, “The idea of what Painting is or could be became somehow akin to the image of the earth, as seen from above, from the viewpoint of a drone or a spirit.

Painting (Painting)

Reeder’s works often start with language—and his Pasta Paintings are no different. After the phrase for the title came through his head, the artist set about trying to figure out how to make a mark with pasta. These paintings are the result, made using the pasta as something of a stencil, with the paint being applied after the noodles have been scattered on the painting’s blank surface.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Bowers’ Radical Hospitality (2015) is a sculptural contradiction: its red and blue neon letters proclaim the words of the title, signaling openness and generosity, while the barbed wires that encircle the words give another message entirely. Meant to hang from the ceiling, Bowers’ neon is further weighed down by long wind chimes made of aluminum pipes and wooden wind catchers that drip unsteadily from their anchors. Poetic but frantic in its juxtapositions, Bowers’ work captures a certain paradoxical energy that echoes the current political climate—it is hopeful but hindered, cacophonous but well intentioned, uncertain but ominous.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

A Splinter (Study for Painting) is a large graphite work on paper by Hernan Bas that was intended as a study for a later painting. The composition features three unfinished figures, all of whom appear to be observing something unrendered or external to the picture plane. Around the group of figures roughly framed by the outline of a triangle, is a frenzy of loose marks and smudged lines that juxtapose the delicate features of the figures’ faces.

Painting (Painting)

Human Quarry is a large work on paper by Leslie Shows made of a combination of acrylic paint and collage. Both through its title and formally—through how the shapes in the composition resemble a mountain or natural formation—the piece relays us to a mineral quarry or a deep mining pit where materials are extracted. Interspersed among the block-like figures and rocky textures, we also see several human silhouettes, either cut-out, or as if they were whited out by a shining light, or lost in the shadows.

Textile (Textile)

Formed from pillowcases, each of which contains an embroidered calligraphic text as well as drawings depicting dreams, Ali Eyal’s Painting Size 80 x 60 cm is part of a long-term project which records and indexes such dreams. “I rode on my cousin’s back, laughing until the heaviness of my body weighed his to the floor. At the time I was with him on their large farm that he always dreamed of visiting.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Eric Dizambourg’s film presents a bucolic and ludicrous world used as a background for a character who is an actor as well as a performer. This character comes and goes throughout the countryside, the barn and an urban setting, a world of odds and ends where objects often seem to be used for other purposes than their original ones.

Painting (Painting)

Like the film Le Mouton noir, this dimension is counterbalanced by a burlesque element. The piece of fabric on the rat’s paw or ‘graft’ becomes a patchwork made out of colorful geometric shapes recalling a Harlequin costume, thus referring directly to the burlesque tradition. This leitmotiv creates a contrast with the dull colors, the humility of the countryside, and makes the figurative scene look unreal to reveal its superficiality.

Painting (Painting)

Kapwani Kiwanga’s Linear Painting series (2017) reflect the artist’s research into disciplinary architecture, including schools, prisons, hospitals, and mental health facilities. When they were presented together, the paintings were arranged according to a black horizontal line placed at 160 centimeters from the floor, which traced the entire perimeter of the gallery. According to hygiene standards in Europe, this would mark the height below which walls should be washed in order to prevent the spread of illnesses.

Painting (Painting)

Chris Johanson’s Untitled (Painting of a Man Leaving in Boat) (2010) pictures a canoe drifting toward an off-kilter horizon line, which demarcates the cobalt sea from the cerulean sky. An orange-haired figure, oar positioned in mid-stroke, looks ahead—whether toward an edge or an infinite expanse, it is impossible to tell. Echoing a trope that recurs in Greek epic poetry, transcendental painting, and current-day reality television, the character is alone with nature.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

A sly sense of humor is key in Pablo Helguera’s long-running Artoons series, one that includes ~1500 drawings made over ten years. It’s no secret that the artworld tends to take itself too seriously, so it’s no surprise that Helguera’s project has developed a large following over the past decade—providing much needed comic relief.. Helguera grew up making and exchanging drawings like these with his father and brother, but never made drawing a part of his public practice until in 2008, when he began periodically posting what came to be known as ‘Artoons’ on Facebook. The series caricatures and lampoons agents and events in the artworld, combining just enough visual reference along with a caption.

Painting (Painting)

In Seven Deadly Sins (2006), Shen utilizes abstraction to produce complex topographies of color that evoke associations with violently tumultuous landscapes. Streaks of blue and burgundy paint scatter across a peach colored silk backdrop, dripping into rough floral and botanical forms. At once both diffuse and dense, Shen’s compositions feel both expansive and contained, the colors overlaid atop another with a seemingly free spontaneity that belies more ordered and considered deliberation.

Painting (Painting)

“When Pope. L shakes his head he makes drawings that keep him from laugh-­crying to death,” writes Helen Molesworth about William Pope. L’s Skin Set Drawings .

Painting (Painting)

The series Clouds paintings by Benoît Maire features oil on canvas works in varying format, in which the artist depicts clouds, using a variety of tools, including a spray gun, paintbrush, or palette knife. The cloud motif in this series of paintings questions the limits of abstraction by playing with the concept of pareidolia—a psychological phenomenon by which we recognize familiar shapes in landscapes, clouds, or ink stains. Through his careful composition and use of pentimenti, Maire invites the viewer to project their imagination onto these colorful clouds.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Paint and Unpaint is an animation by Kota Ezawa based on a scene from a popular 1951 film by Hans Namuth featuring Jackson Pollock. At first glance, due to the oversimplified silhouettes Ezawa employs, the connection between his animation and Namuth’s film may not be obvious. However, when seen side by side, Ezawa’s piece is a faithful reproduction of the scene—up until a point in which his sequence begins playing in reverse, effectively unpainting every brushstroke.

NFT (NFT)

Radical Digital Paintings is a collection of 239 works that were painted from 2016–2021; one exemplary image from the series is #98 . This painting was made after Scudder did the first ever Radical Digital Painting show, a hybrid performance/painting/lecture that brings together his painterly and pedagogical interests. In Scudder’s work, it is often difficult to pick apart what is a painterly effect versus an artefact of a lens-based or computational process.

Residencia Milan 1 is a painting of a house surrounded by lush forest. The image depicted is both photorealistic and creates the illusion of an unfolded piece of paper, with creases and discolorations. In referring to the circulation of images, the painting raises questions of a viewer’s relationship to the image of a beautiful house: as icon, wish, or standard of beauty.

Painting (Painting)

Zbigniew Rogalski territory extends from painting to photography. Here , the artist turned his attention towards the photographic qualities in painting and towards the pictorialism found in photography . As the artist mentions on his website,” this work is about flying and the experiences connected with it – the person floats under the ceiling like a balloon, being hunched in a position recommended during an emergency landing”.

Painting (Painting)

In his evocative Landscape Paintings, McMillian uses second-hand bedsheets, sourced from thrift shops, as his starting point. Calling up the unknown intimacies of these objects, McMillian upends their usual orientation, placing them directly on the wall to serve as paintings, rather than covers. Layering over the repurposed textiles with hardware store paint, McMillian transforms the sheets into canvases, creating abstract landscapes on top of the traces of human bodies intact in the fabric.

Painting (Painting)

The title of the painting refers to the fact that the figure’s behind is raised upwards and the face is found at the bottom of the painting, thus inverting the way in which people are normally seen. Bottom’s up is also a pun, a nod to the English toast. Quarles draws on a number of sources of inspiration, including comic book imagery, the influence of which sits alongside elements of her practice informed by life drawing classes.

Painting (Painting)

Arima’s free brushstrokes gesture towards traditions in Expressionist painting. As with the acrylic painting Ticket (also 2015), Person in Red Sweater could be seen as an attempt at “pure painting” in which the aesthetics of the medium supersede content. But if his portraits resist social commentary, they nonetheless challenge conventional standards of beauty through a decided embrace of decayed forms and colors.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

This work, a large oil painting on canvas, shows a moment from Amorales’s eight-minute two-channel video projection Useless Wonder (2006). The video is based on Edgar Allen Poe’s 1838 novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket . The painting, derived from an image from a different, preexisting work, represents the artist’s continued interest in realizing particular subject matter in alternative forms, thereby imbuing it with new meanings and interpretations.

Photography (Photography)

Through a hand-painting process, Shi Guowei created Manufactured Landscape . At first glance, the painting appears from afar as a landscape photograph. Yet, upon closer attention, the work reveals itself as a landscape painting thoroughly hand-colored by the artist onto a photograph.

This work, a large oil painting on canvas, shows a moment from Amorales’s eight-minute two-channel video projection Useless Wonder (2006). The video is based on Edgar Allen Poe’s 1838 novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. The painting, derived from an image from a different, preexisting work, represents the artist’s continued interest in realizing particular subject matter in alternative forms, thereby imbuing it with new meanings and interpretations.

Installation (Installation)

Ambiguous Gestures takes as its point of origin a film Gmelin discovered in his father’s archive. Filmed from a fixed point, it portrays his father in an intimate performance of body painting with a woman unknown to Felix Gmelin. The discovery of this footage was obviously disturbing.