5 Artists on Our Radar in August 2026 https://ift.tt/Rb90v8L

No hay sol en el Verano, 2026
Almo Talud
Eric Firestone Gallery

Summer Bloom, 2026
Alex Maceda
Half Gallery

“Artists on Our Radar” is a monthly series focused on five artists who have our attention. Utilizing our art expertise and Artsy data, we’ve determined which artists made an impact this past month through new gallery representation, exhibitions, auctions, art fairs, or fresh works on Artsy.

Alex Maceda

B. 1989, San Francisco Bay Area. Lives and works in New York City.

Downward Dog, 2026
Alex Maceda
Half Gallery

Artist Alex Maceda draws from her Filipina heritage and devout Catholic upbringing in her small-scale biomorphic paintings. The artist has likened these works to domestic shrines or altars, intended for meditative purposes. Now in “Sun Salutations,” the artist’s first solo exhibition with Half Gallery, on view through August 13th, Maceda takes inspiration from transcendental women artists such as Hilma af Klint and Agnes Pelton who pursued spiritual dimensions through artmaking.

Maceda lived and worked for a time in California’s Joshua Tree, finding, like many other artists before her, serenity in the solitude of the desert. In “Sun Salutations” the sunburnt colors of that landscape are on full display in 10 joyful paintings rendered in the dawn-like hues of yellows, pinks, and reds. The show’s title refers to the yoga sequence of poses traditionally performed at sunrise, synchronizing the breath with movements to awaken the body and build internal heat. She seeks a similar rhythmic alignment through her artworks.

Maceda holds an MFA in painting from the New York Studio School (2026), an MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business (2018), and a BA in classical studies from Dartmouth College (2011). She has had solo exhibitions at Herron House (2024); Dorado 806 Projects (2024); Upper Market Gallery (2024); and 29 Palms Art Gallery (2023). This year, her works have been featured in the group show “Austin Friends Fair” at Half Gallery and “Disappearing Boundaries” at Harper’s.

Almo Talud

B. 1985, Miami. Lives and works in Medellin, Colombia.

Viaje al Guamo, 2026
Almo Talud
Eric Firestone Gallery

Artist Almo Talud paints folkloric scenes that consider Latino identity through a queer lens, offering masculinity, memory, and fantasy. The artist was born in Miami, but grew up in the small city of Manizales, Colombia. His paintings depict men in celebratory moments, dressed in colorful attire and surrounded by horses. The images draw from his childhood memories, but challenge dominant patriarchal culture that surrounded him through his use of soft hues and thin lyrical marks of acrylic paint and pastel.

“I approach memory as a living material, imprecise, mutable, and charged with affection,” the artist has said. “Within this process, error, distortion, and formal synthesis become essential tools for revealing deeper layers of identity.”

Talud completed his secondary education in Bogotá, and then moved to New York, where he studied at the Art Students League of New York for four years. His works are inspired by self-taught artists, such as the Colombian artist Noé Léon. Talud’s work was recently on view in the group exhibition “General Assembly” at Eric Firestone Gallery and was also presented by the gallery in a two-artist installation with ceramics by Torben Gammelgaard at NOMAD Hamptons 2026.

Tony Dongfang Zhao

B. 2002, Beijing, China. Lives and works in New York.

Tower, 2026
Tony Dongfang Zhao
C24 Gallery

Drive My Car, 2025
Tony Dongfang Zhao
C24 Gallery

New York–based artist Tony Zhao paints vignettes of daily life, cropped to focus on minute details—empty seats on a train, a bracelet around a wrist, a light fixture. These seemingly mundane scenes take on a filmic quality in his oil on canvas compositions, thanks to his considered framing and his constrained, brooding color palette. Currently, his work is on view in the two-artist exhibition “Contact Points” at New York’s C24 Gallery through September 4th.

Born and raised in Beijing, Zhao received his BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2024. Before that, he worked as an independent curator and educator at UCCA Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing, where a group exhibition of his own work was held in 2020. He also had a solo exhibition, “Lake House,” at A/W Space in London in 2024, and has been included in group shows at Union Street Gallery in Chicago and Gelman Gallery in Providence.

Heidi Howard

B. 1986, New York City. Lives and works in New York City.

Self- Rauschenberg Pink Periwinkle, 2026
Heidi Howard
David B. Smith Gallery

Bonnard Redon Bouquet, 2026
Heidi Howard
David B. Smith Gallery

New York artist Heidi Howard grew up surrounded by creativity as the daughter of avant-garde composer Earl Howard and installation artist Liz Phillips, shaping the way she approaches artmaking. Known for her still lifes, en plein air landscapes, and particularly her portraits, Howard sees art as inextricably tied to daily life. Before painting a portrait, Howard typically gets to know her model for months or even years, developing an understanding of their personality and aesthetics. She most often paints these portraits in person, in her home, even cooking meals for her models after the session is finished. Her paintings are characterized by their Dayglo palette, dancelike brush strokes, and embrace of irresolution.

In recent years, Howard’s practice has expanded beyond the confines of the canvas to include site-specific wall paintings, indoor and outdoor sculpture. Her work is currently on view in “Pistil Forms,” a duo exhibition with Esteban Cabeza de Baca at David B. Smith Gallery, the pair’s second collaboration at the gallery, following 2024’s “Night & Day Dreams.” Howard has also exhibited at Wave Hill Garden and Cultural Center, the Queens Museum, the Hunterdon Museum of Art, James Cohan Gallery, and Gaa Gallery, and has held residencies including the Terra Summer Residency, the Rauschenberg Residency, Carrizozo AIR, and Palazzo Monti. Her first monograph, Colors make us do vibrant deeds!, launched in 2024.

Michael Bühler-Rose

B. 1980, New Brunswick, New Jersey. Lives and works between New York City and Mysore, India.

Lichtenstein Brushtroke (Flowers), 2025
Michael Bühler-Rose
New Discretions

USM, Summer '26 (01), 2026
Michael Bühler-Rose
Halsey McKay Gallery

Artist Michael Bühler-Rose brings the Renaissance technique of wood intarsia and inlay to contemporary art, using the intricate medium to create deeply personal works that memorialize individual collections such as stacks of books, ritual paraphernalia, and print boxes.

Since his teenage years, Bühler-Rose practiced Vaishnavism, a branch of Hinduism devoted to the god Vishnu, and has devoted himself to the study of Sanskrit. Simultaneously, he was involved in the punk and hardcore music scenes in the Northeast. At 17, Bühler-Rose first traveled to India, becoming a Hare Krishna, renouncing his earthly possessions. Now, 25 years later, living as a layperson, the artist’s works reflect upon the value of objects in our lives and their role in ritual, image worship, religious practice and as art objects.

As he told Another Magazine, his work draws “parallels between the artist as priest, art object as a deity, the gallery as a post-Enlightenment temple, and the installation of the artwork as a ritual.”

Right now, Bühler-Rose’s work is currently on view in “Halo in a Haystack,” at Halsey McKay Gallery in Easthampton, his first solo exhibition with the gallery. These works are inspired by the Studiolo of the Ducal Palace in Gubbio (1478-82), a wooden study, intended for meditation and study, now in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The studio is filled with illusionistic books, instruments, armor, and curiosities rendered through the art of the inlay technique intarsia. In the show, the artist focuses on one of his long-ago forfeited possessions: a copy of Halo in a Haystack, the debut LP by the New England hardcore band Converge, which has now become a sought-after collectors item.

Bühler-Rose’s work has been gaining new attention of late. Earlier this year, he presented a solo booth with Brussels’s Stems Gallery at Independent Art Fair. In 2024, he opened the solo exhibition “I Want Your Skull,” with New Discretions. His works have also been featured at NADA Miami 2025, NADA Miami 2023, NADA Miami 2022, and Future Fair 2022 with that gallery.

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Yoshitomo Nara to present two-gallery New York exhibition at David Zwirner in October 2026. https://ift.tt/iXPj1Tn

David Zwirner has announced a solo exhibition of works by Japanese artist Yoshitomo Nara, spanning the gallery’s two Chelsea locations at 537 West 20th Street and 533 West 19th Street in New York. Opening in October 2026, the show will be Nara’s first solo presentation with David Zwirner since it took on representation of the artist last November and his first major solo exhibition in New York in nearly a decade.

The exhibition brings together new paintings and drawings, recent sculptures, and early works selected by the artist, tracing four decades of the artist’s practice. His childhood encounters with nature, folklore, and children’s stories in rural northern Japan, alongside a self-built radio that introduced him to popular music, have shaped a visual language he has developed since the mid-1980s. His signature figures, rendered with large heads and wide eyes, were recognized in the 1990s as carriers of raw emotion with the spirit of punk music. Over time they have become cultural touchstones, functioning for many viewers as mirrors of their own vulnerabilities.

New paintings at the gallery’s 20th Street location demonstrate a significant development in Nara’s color palette, with more muted, nuanced tones and increasingly diffuse brushwork. A second group of works introduces a new technique for the artist: figures sketched in colored pencil, then developed with washes of translucent acrylic. Large-format monochrome drawings made with industrial oil-based paint sticks, meanwhile, show the range of his two-dimensional practice. Early works from the 1980s, also featured in the show, will provide a historical counterpoint.

At Zwirner’s 19th Street location, 13 bronze heads from 2024—enlarged 10 times from palm-sized clay prototypes—will be on view. Coated in white urethane paint, the monumental sculptures recall the snow “monsters” of Nara’s childhood winters.

Nara has seen a string of major museum shows over his career. Most recently, a major solo exhibition of the artist was shown at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Spain, as well as Museum Frieder Burda, Baden-Baden, Germany, and the Hayward Gallery, London.

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Ms. Lauryn Hill has curated a new commission by Lauren Halsey on London’s Piccadilly Lights. https://ift.tt/fz2uRj6

Rapper and singer-songwriter Ms. Lauryn Hill has curated a new site-specific commission by Los Angeles artist Lauren Halsey for Piccadilly Lights, the digital billboard overlooking London’s Piccadilly Circus, timed to the U.K. debut of Hill’s Diaspora Calling! music and arts festival.

The commission, a short animated film drawing on the imagery and symbols of the global African diaspora, played on the screen on the night of August 5th for a one-night-only presentation, ahead of the festival. The project was realized in close dialogue with London-based curator Lisa Anderson. Hill and her former Fugees bandmate Wyclef Jean stood in the circus surrounded by fans. “The crowd was captivated,” Hill told the Associated Press. Jean called the moment “surreal.”

The unveiling comes as Diaspora Calling! marks its 10th anniversary and travels outside the U.S. for the first time. Hill launched the festival in April 2016 at Brooklyn's Kings Theatre, opening with a gallery co-curated with MoCADA, Nader Haitian Art, and the Haiti Cultural Exchange, and a concert featuring Machel Montano, Stephen “Ragga” Marley, and Mr. Eazi, among others. She has described the project as a way of foregrounding “a resounding collective voice” across the African diaspora rather than a single narrative.

The anniversary performance will take place Friday, August 7th, at the National Bowl in Milton Keynes, hosted by Dave Chappelle, with Hill and Jean performing the Fugees’ “The Score” in full for its 30th anniversary, alongside sets from Erykah Badu, YG Marley, Zion Marley, Giggs, and Fireboy DML.

For Halsey, the Piccadilly Lights commission extends a run of major public projects. Her monumental sculpture park “sister dreamer,” presented by the Los Angeles Nomadic Division (LAND) and curated by Christine Y. Kim, has been on view in South Central Los Angeles since March, with support from the Mellon Foundation and backers including LeBron James, Brad Pitt, and Larry Gagosian, whose namesake gallery represents Halsey.

In 2023, she realized a rooftop commission for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and in 2024 she presented work as part of the 60th Biennale di Venezia. Halsey has also had solo exhibitions at the Serpentine in London (2024), the Seattle Art Museum (2022), the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2021), and the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris (2019).In 2020, she founded the Summaeverythang Community Center, which distributes free produce in South Central Los Angeles.

Following Friday’s concert, Diaspora Calling! is expected to continue expanding internationally; Hill told the AP she hopes to stage further editions.

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Meet the Gallerist Bringing World-Renowned Artists to a Tiny Greek Island https://ift.tt/soXvb9C

On a rocky outcrop on the small Greek island of Antiparos, a waist-high bronze statue of a rabbit sits on the edge of a turquoise infinity pool. Wearing a large, tented skirt, it faces the windswept Aegean Sea from the terrace of a private home. The scene could be from a Greek dream right out of the Odyssey; except the artwork, inspired by Japanese animism, is by renowned artist Leiko Ikemura.

Good Rabbit (2018–24) is one of several works by major international artists gathered in this remote Cycladic setting for “Melting Beauty,” a summer exhibition organized by Thea Montauti d’Harcourt Lyginos, founder of Geneva gallery L’Appartement. The surprisingly remote location of Antiparos, Greece, is a nod to her Greek husband and years of family summers on the island. Like her gallery in Geneva, the choice of location doubles down on Montauti d’Harcourt Lyginos’s philosophy of using residential spaces for art exhibitions.

Placing art in a domestic setting

Inside the house, a patchwork seascape by Sean Scully hangs opposite a 5-meter-long mural by Amy Sillman. A gigantic raw-canvas triptych by Martha Jungwirth occupies the living room; paintings by younger artists appear in the kitchen and bedrooms. Right next to the archaeological site of Despotiko, the house is in an out-of-the-way spot for a show of such high-profile names; others include Yinka Shonibare, Joan Snyder, Kennedy Yanko, and Liliane Tomasko under the fluid theme dreamed up by curator Craig Burnett.

Destination art shows are hardly new in the art world. Mega-gallery Hauser & Wirth has a permanent space in Menorca, Spain, for instance, while DESTE Foundation, an art organization run by Greek collector Dakis Joannou, has staged projects on nearby Hydra for well over a decade. More recently, galleries have become increasingly interested in meeting collectors where they are vacationing, whether at new art fairs in Ibiza and Saint-Tropez, or through pop-ups like this one, which runs through August 31st. During the exhibition’s opening days, the gallery directors, artists, and collectors dropping in suggested that its approach was working.

Everyone, it seems, wants to be part of the dreamy Greek island lifestyle, including artists. Snyder, the acclaimed American painter, for instance, created one of her “Pond” works specifically for the show, drawn in by Burnett, with whom she’s worked for years.

“It sounded intriguing to be in a show in Greece that [Burnett] was curating,” she said. “Of course I said yes.”

Artworks on the theme of “Melting Beauty”

Deep Pond, 2026
Joan Snyder
L'Appartement

Deep Pond (2026) is a muddy taupe square with a sticky acrylic void at its center. It’s dotted with tiny collaged green and pink blobs. For curator Burnett, it encapsulates the concept of “Melting Beauty.” Throughout the show, he explained, he chose works that seem in the middle of disintegration to evoke the sensual qualities that are so present in the Greek landscape beyond the residence’s borders. “It really suits the setting in terms of the title of the show—in terms of melting, the sense of liquefaction, but also the sense of the sensuality of emotion,” he said.

Alongside the renowned names are several rising artists. A painting of flowy female figures byKonstantina Krikzoni fills the kitchen while Amorelle Jacox’s gauzy symbolist canvases hang in the master bedroom.

“The show is invested with this kind of feeling of eros,” Burnett said, pointing to a copy of Schiller’s On the Aesthetic Education of Man. In the book, Schiller contrasts “melting” beauty, which relaxes our minds, with the taut, rigid kind, which energizes us. A small, tabletop sculpture by Kennedy Yanko, made using her signature paint-skin and metal technique, offers a case in point. Its pink, folded form slumps sensually on its plinth, unexpectedly elegant.

L’Appartement’s first off-site

The island project makes more sense in light of Montauti d’Harcourt Lyginos’s career. She began at Sotheby’s in London, before moving to Geneva to work for Gagosian. When she established her own gallery in the Swiss lakeside city in 2024, she set out to create the kind of space she'd always wanted to visit: somewhere welcoming, with the feel of an apartment.

“I never envisioned this sort of multinational white cube, with many spaces around the world,” she said. “That was never the ambition.” Instead, she wanted a place where visitors could sit down and talk—something she felt Geneva lacked. On Antiparos, she’s translated that vision into a real home.

But why this specific island home? For Montauti d’Harcourt Lyginos, that connection starts with her name. “Thea” means goddess in Greek—a name her mother gave her, inspired by her love of ancient Greece. Then she married a Greek man, and the tie deepened. For the past decade, the family has spent its summers around the Aegean: Antiparos and nearby Paros as well as Schinoussa. “It’s really my second home,” she said.

When the opportunity arose to stage an exhibition in a newly built private residence on Antiparos, she didn’t hesitate. The island, she noted, already had the right audience.

“Historically, Antiparos always brought a very artsy crowd,” she said, adding that major gallerists Eva Presenhuber and Dominique Lévy both have connections to the island. It’s a haunt for Hollywood names, too: Tom Hanks and Sofia Coppola both vacation there.

But the gallerist isn’t sticking around beyond summer. Montauti d’Harcourt Lyginos is already considering another off-site project, this time in Turin, Italy. “I’m 100 percent Italian,” she said with a grin. But that will be at least two years before that happens.

Wall Sky Blue Grey, 2026
Sean Scully
L'Appartement

Flirt, 2024
Arlene Shechet
L'Appartement

Her first off-site exhibition taught her that such projects require more time than expected—most importantly to allow artists to create new commissions. The gallery may have escaped the white cube, but it has not escaped the logistical challenges of mounting an international exhibition.

After all, “Beautiful things are difficult, right?” she said, smiling.

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Ethiopian Painter and Artsy Vanguard alum Tesfaye Urgessa joins White Cube. https://ift.tt/MlTFDZB

White Cube has announced representation of Ethiopian painter and Artsy Vanguard alum Tesfaye Urgessa. The gallery will present his work at Frieze Seoul 2026, where his painting Fiber of grace (Schutz) 2 (2025) will be on view, ahead of his debut solo exhibition at White Cube Hong Kong, opening September 9, 2026.

Urgessa lives and works between Addis Ababa and Nürtingen, Germany, and was the first artist to represent Ethiopia in its inaugural national pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2024. His first solo museum presentation in Asia is currently on view at Red Brick Art Museum in Beijing, through August 9, 2026.

Describing himself primarily as a draughtsman, Urgessa begins each day with drawing before turning to painting on his studio floor, working with a long brush to build densely populated compositions in which bodies appear pressed against one another, at times enmeshed with their domestic surroundings.

His visual vocabulary draws on Ethiopian iconographic traditions and German Expressionism, as well as Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud, whose work he has studied closely. He attributes this breadth to a formative encounter with European art after relocating to Germany to study at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Stuttgart, an experience that also brought him into contact with forms of racial and social difference new to him. Migration, familial relations, and community are recurring concerns in his work, shaped in part by his wife’s work with newly arrived migrants.

In 2023, Urgessa was selected in The Artsy Vanguard, the annual selection of the most promising artists working today. “I want my figures to have almost an emotional vulnerability,” he told writer Emily Steer in an interview.

The White Cube Hong Kong exhibition will bring together new paintings and works on paper made over the past year. Urgessa’s works are held in institutional collections including the Brooklyn Museum, New York; Castello di Rivoli, Turin; and the Uffizi Galleries, Florence.

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5 Artists to Follow at Foundations 2026 https://ift.tt/z42gR1G

Vegetable Venus, 2026
Xanthe Burdett
Wilder Gallery

This month on Artsy, Foundations 2026 has launched: a curated showcase highlighting artists at the beginning of their careers. With over 240 artists from around the world, this edition of Foundations is the perfect chance to discover emerging talents and buy fine art at an accessible price.

At Artsy, we’ve spent the last week poring over the showcase to find our favorites. We’ve handpicked five artists whose works are worth a second look, from abstractions made of seashells and tapioca beads to cake-laden paintings of consumption.

Charlene Tan

B. 1982, Houston. Lives and works in San Francisco.

Works available at: re.riddle

Homage to Kappi (Crab), 2025
Charlene Tan
re.riddle

Homage to Kappi (Crab) Abalone and Rhinestones, 2025
Charlene Tan
re.riddle

Artist Charlene Tan was born in Houston, but she spent three years of her childhood living with her grandmother in the Philippines. There, the artist remembers visiting an indoor market in Manila and seeing stalls full of freshwater pearls, beads, and rhinestones.

Now based in San Francisco, Tan’s artworks are in many ways inspired by that experience, as well as her grandmother, who was a seamstress and embroiderer. Tan creates abstract works that are inspired by tribal weaving traditions of the Philippines. Tan digitally scans found images of traditional weavings, edits them down to the essential pattern, and then retraces them by hand. The artist then adorns these patterns with pearls, iridescent shells, and Filipino food staples like ube powder or thousands of tiny pink tapioca balls.

Tan has described interpreting traditional Filipino weavings as decolonizing her mindset. Tan holds a BA in history and theory of contemporary art from the San Francisco Art Institute. Her work has been shown across the U.S., including solo shows “Warp/Weft” at re.riddle in 2024 and “Remembering” at Sarah Shepard in 2023. She has also been a visiting artist at Minnesota Street Project Studios in San Francisco.

Xanthe Burdett

B. 1995, Devon, England. Lives and works in London.

Works available at: Wilder Gallery

They came upon a clearing, 2026
Xanthe Burdett
Wilder Gallery

Like bees, I feel them brush softly against me, 2026
Xanthe Burdett
Wilder Gallery

British artist Xanthe Burdett paints strange, spectral female figures that appear at once human and botanical. Painted in thin veils of green hue, these women appear translucent, even ghostly, with vines and flowers twisting through their bodies.

In her painting Vegetable Venus (2026), a phantom woman reclines like an odalisque, greenery running through her body like a circulatory system. She seems to emerge from the foggy green landscape behind her. This imagery draws both from her personal memories and art historical inspirations, such as the medieval “Devonshire Hunting Tapestries” in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Burdett has described the works as concerned with “this idea of memory and history being caught in the ground and the earth beneath us—this space of the mythological animal world, but also this really fertile place that we can’t look into as humans.”

Burdett graduated with an MA in painting from the Royal College of Art in 2024, after studying education, English, and drama at Cambridge. She opened a solo exhibition “Psychopomp" at Palo Gallery in New York last fall. Her work was recently on view with Wilder Gallery at Echo Soho in London.

Kriss Munsya

B. 1986, Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo. Lives and works in Vancouver.

Works available at: Galerie Robertson Arès

Syracuse, 2022
Kriss Munsya
Galerie Robertson Arès

Even - Washed Out. Genetic Bomb (framed | avec encadrement), 2022
Kriss Munsya
Galerie Robertson Arès

Photographer and filmmaker Kriss Munsya creates vibrant, staged photographs inspired by his experiences and dreams as a Black man navigating the world. Born in Kinshasa, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Munsya moved to Belgium as a child. He was raised in Brussels and later relocated to Vancouver, where he lives and works today.

As a young man, Munsya embarked on an influential hitchhiking trip from New York to Rio de Janeiro, a sojourn that became the basis of his 2014 debut feature film, Us and Them. His experiences on the road reshaped his understanding of the world, including its normalized, sometimes violent racism, and his sense of self.

A self-taught artist, Munsya turned his focus to photography nearly a , coinciding with his increased involvement in social and ecological activism. His richly saturated color photographs picture Black people in gestures of intimacy and affection. He obscures his models’ faces with flowers, sequins, and fabric, anonymizing and universalizing them at once.

Munsya’s work is included in the collections of Canada Council Art Bank. He was a 2021 Hopper Prize finalist and one of ArtConnect’s Artists to Watch in 2023, with work featured in The New Yorker, The Guardian, and The Nation, among others.

Olivia Sterling

B. 1996, Peterborough, England. Lives and works in London.

Works available at: Nibelungen Gallery

Cartoon Logic, 2025
Olivia Sterling
Nibelungen Gallery

Are we about to Kiss?, 2024
Olivia Sterling
Nibelungen Gallery

British artist Olivia Sterling paints the language of consumption—one slice of cake at a time. In her paintings, hands dig into frosted, sugary cakes, devouring the confections with a frenzied intensity. Her style is informed by children’s comic books as well as satirical illustrations, and her work often hints at the politics of race and class.

Sterling received her BA in fine art from the University of Derby in 2018 and her MA in painting from the Royal College of Art in 2020. That year she presented her solo show “It Clings Like a Leech” at Guts Gallery, London, and had a solo presentation, “White Bread,” at Cob in 2021. Her work has appeared in more than 50 group exhibitions in the U.K. and internationally, including at White Cube and the Saatchi Gallery.

Julia Policastro

B. 1992, Buffalo, New York. Lives and works in Philadelphia.

Works available at: Blah Blah Gallery

Lydia, 2025
Julia Policastro
Blah Blah Gallery

Cecily, 2025
Julia Policastro
Blah Blah Gallery

Artist Julia Policastro makes three-dimensional artworks that could be defined as both sculpture and painting. In these plaster, foam board, canvas, and oil works, hands emerge from pillow-like forms, holding flowers or grasping a letter between fingertips. Using a technique inspired by the 14th-century Italian quilting technique of trapunto, each of these works bears a woman’s name: Gina, Cecily, Janet.

The gestures they depict are seemingly mundane, but otherworldly, reminiscent of Robert Gober’s haunting handmade sculptures. Policastro has painted these works pale hues of whites, pinks, and yellows, giving them a faded, ghostly appearance. Her inspirations range from late medieval and early Renaissance Sienese artists to the works of Ken Price and David Hockney. Policastro received her BFA from Tyler School of Art. She has been included in group shows at Blah Blah Gallery, Deep Space Gallery, and Fleisher/Ollman, among others.

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Daniel Arsham to create whiskey-inspired performances during Frieze Seoul 2026. https://ift.tt/IihWsSY

Artist Daniel Arsham has collaborated with Scottish distillery The Balvenie on a new whiskey collection entitled “Dawn of Our Spirit,” which will be unveiled on September 1st in partnership with Frieze Seoul. The collection will be introduced through an immersive, sensorial performance directed by Arsham.

The performance draws on the meditative process of turning barley grain on a malting floor, an important step in the preparation of whiskey. Arsham visited the distillery’s own malting floor in Speyside, Scotland, which opened around 1931 and remains unchanged. “The distillery itself is so materially rich: the barley grain, the copper stills, the wooden casks crafted in the cooperage, combined with an array of evocative time-infused scents and ambient sounds,” Arsham said. “I’m looking forward to expressing this through our performances during Frieze Seoul.”

The Balvenie’s malt master Kelsey McKechnie, who conceived the collection, called it “a true celebration of master craftmanship and the creative power of time,” adding that Arsham’s “artistic storytelling will bring the treasured and fundamental aspect of The Balvenie’s Home Malting Floor to a world stage.”

The project extends Arsham’s long list of brand collaborations, which include Dior, Adidas, and Rimowa, as well as an ongoing partnership with Tiffany & Co. dating to 2021. Arsham also serves as creative director for the NBA team Cleveland Cavaliers, for whom he redesigned the team’s logo.

His gallery artistic practice has continued alongside this commercial work. His most recent exhibition “Various Thoughts” closed at Perrotin New York in April, coinciding with the release of his autobiography, Future Relic.

The Balvenie x Arsham unveiling arrives during a packed week for the Korean capital. Frieze Seoul returns to COEX in Gangnam for its fifth edition from September 2nd to 5th, hosting more than 125 galleries from 30 countries. The fair will run concurrently with Kiaf Seoul, the country’s longest-running international art fair, which will welcome 175 galleries for its 25th edition, also at the COEX.

Following its Seoul debut, “Dawn of Our Spirit” will travel to New York, Shanghai, and Taipei.

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