The Artsy Vanguard 2027: Mmangaliso Nzuza https://ift.tt/KtVdEGv

Mmangaliso Nzuza wants his paintings to give off the feeling of home.

One canvas in his Cape Town studio, As the Red-eyed Dove Sings (2025), takes its title from a bird whose song he remembers hearing as a child. “I wanted to almost capture that memory that it held for me,” he told us. “I want them to feel like what I feel when I think about home.”

His paintings, which primarily depict human figures, are built from bold, angular forms that nod to Cubism. Nzuza became interested in how Picasso, Braque, and other Cubists drew on African masks and sculptural traditions. “This has almost been a way of reclaiming that into my culture,” he reflected.

Held Voices, 2026
Mmangaliso Nzuza
Southern Guild

Assembly, 2026
Mmangaliso Nzuza
Southern Guild

During breaks from painting, he takes long walks, gathering impressions of his surroundings before returning to his studio in Woodstock, where Table Mountain rises in the distance. There, he prefers to dive straight into painting rather than plan his compositions. “Going straight onto the canvas allows my innermost emotions to flow,” he explained.

Nzuza’s rise has been swift. He began painting in earnest during the pandemic in 2020, when his mother bought him paints and encouraged his artistic inclinations. He started sharing his work on Instagram, and it quickly drew attention. He later connected with Southern Guild, which presented his first solo exhibition in Cape Town in 2024.

Hymn in Iridescence, 2025
Mmangaliso Nzuza
Southern Guild

In April 2026, his exhibition “Ballad of the Peacock” helped inaugurate the gallery’s new Tribeca space and marked his U.S. solo debut. His work has since appeared at Frieze London and The Armory Show and entered the collections of the North Dakota Museum of Art and the Montecito Contemporary Art Collection. He’ll also be featured at Art Basel Miami Beach in December.

We caught up with Nzuza in his studio, where he shared his work, process, and inspirations. “I would describe my work as something that invokes a feeling, a memory,” he said. “Most importantly, I want it to feel familiar.” Watch the video above and explore The Artsy Vanguard 2027.

Departure II, 2025
Mmangaliso Nzuza
Southern Guild

Video credits:

• Executive producer: Casey Lesser
• Creative director: Molly Gottschalk
• Director/DP: Lola Dollimore
• Editor: Jack Kuczala
• Designer: Douglas Escalante

About The Artsy Vanguard

Now in its ninth year, The Artsy Vanguard is our annual celebration of 10 of the most promising artists working today. Spanning painting, sculpture, ceramics, photography, and more, the 2027 cohort brings together a new generation of artists making work that feels fresh, urgent, and distinctly their own. Through an original 10-part video series, we visit each artist in their studio and city, offering an intimate look at their creative processes, inspirations, and what it means to be an emerging artist today. Together, these are the talents shaping what’s next in contemporary art.

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7 Contemporary Artists’ Tips for Surviving the Winter https://ift.tt/aTGo13H

Shinjuku Gyoen in Winter, 2024
aryon
Kyoto Art Gallery

As winter approaches, the days grow shorter, leaves disappear from the trees, and falling temperatures invite us to retreat indoors. With the clocks turned back and darkness arriving earlier, the changing season feels especially pronounced. But while the natural world slows down, the art world moves in the opposite direction.

The exhibition calendar remains busy as the year draws to a close, with galleries, museums, and auction houses bustling with activity. For artists, the colder months can bring intense productivity and mounting deadlines, even as the world outside their studios begins to quieten.

Artist Mark Dion, who works in an upstate New York studio surrounded by forest, notes the contrasting rhythms. “In the rhythm of the natural world, everything is shutting down in the fall: Animals start to hibernate, and trees take all of their energy out of the leaves,” he said. “We are, however, back to work.”

Yet for many artists, the changing seasons also bring fresh inspiration and opportunities to reconsider their relationship with the studio. “I start by collecting thoughts from my walks and wanderings, observing how the seasons change the landscape, how the way we dress shifts, and what nature is growing and offering,” explains New York–based artist Ian Ha.

River side, 2024
Vahram Meliqsetyan
Vayer Art Gallery

For London-based painter Bex Massey, cooler temperatures are a welcome relief. “The disgusting levels of heat have abated, and I am keen to get paintings to a point of resolution for the new year,” she said.

The changing atmosphere can also find its way into the work itself. For Rodolpho Parigi, who recently relocated from São Paulo to New York, the cooler, darker months echo the chromatic world of his paintings. “There’s something cooler, more ambiguous, slightly metallic about their atmosphere,” he said.

Others see the season as a reminder to pause. London-based sculptor Magali Reus encourages making the most of the fleeting sunshine before winter sets in, while fellow artist Amba Sayal-Bennett offers a simpler piece of advice: “And the most important tip, I think: rest!”

Artsy asked seven artists how they navigate the changing rhythms of the colder months, from the demands of the exhibition calendar to finding moments to slow down.

Rodolpho Parigi

B. 1977, São Paulo. Lives and works in São Paulo and New York.

“Now that I’ve been living in New York for the last three months, the connection between my work and my studio has become much more apparent. Unlike São Paulo, New York has very distinct seasons. The shifts in temperature, light, and atmosphere are much more pronounced, and I find that these changes inevitably become part of my work.

“The temperature of the studio, the quality of the light, and the landscape I encounter on my way to my studio inside the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts all somehow find their way into the paintings.

Black volumen Bestiaire # 32, 2024
Rodolpho Parigi
Nara Roesler

“At the moment, I’m developing a series of blue paintings, and I can already sense a relationship between their atmosphere and the environment in which they’re being made. I am working on a collaborative show between Nara Roesler and Anton Kern galleries for November, so having an exhibition ahead of me makes my priorities very clear.”

Bex Massey

B. 1985, Newcastle, U.K. Lives and works in London.

“I spend the majority of my time in the studio, and my work has heaps of layers, so this works well with drying times. A chicken-and-egg situation, maybe?

“The season means cooler temperatures, so reverting to a dreamy studio life. Now that my paintings at Seventeen Gallery’s Frieze London booth are out, I will be in the studio a bit less.

William, 2022
Bex Massey
Unit

“To be more productive, I think you just need to ask yourself what kind of work and when works best for you…and try not to get thrown off by what other people are doing.”

Magali Reus

B. 1981, The Hague, Netherlands. Lives and works in London.

“I try to find time for tidying and reorganizing my Shoreditch studio at the end of each working day. It is something I don’t enjoy doing, but I find it a helpful practice for working in a focused and careful way. It helps avoid damage and gives me more of an overview. That, and it feels great returning to a tidy space early the next day.

“It is all dependent on what’s in the calendar. At the moment, it is quite a lot.

Clementine (Sleepy Soils), 2024
Magali Reus
Galerie Greta Meert

Apricots, 2021
Magali Reus
Mai 36 Galerie

“There’s the exhibition ‘Swimming by Night’ at The Perimeter in London, with a new publication. There was a small book exhibition opening at Tenderbooks, Cecil Street, with all of my printed matter as well as some design objects I’ve been making. I designed a menu for Toklas, the delicious London restaurant; I showed work at Frieze London with The Approach and at Art Basel Paris with Mai 36 Galerie. And, lastly, I am opening a large-scale solo exhibition, ‘Tenant,’ at the Kunsthalle Wien in late November, where I will be showing over 80 works, all new or recent.

“This exhibition will also feature a new publication, which we’re finessing at the moment. So, in short, a very busy time of year! No complaints, though; it has been, and is, all wonderfully enjoyable and very rewarding!”

Amba Sayal-Bennett

B. 1991, London. Lives and works in London.

“My relationship with my studio in Deptford is less seasonal and more project-based. Between shows, I spend a long time researching, which means I can work from anywhere. It’s towards the end of this process that I’m in the studio more consistently.

“I’ve been developing a body of work exploring material afterlives within Western allopathic medicine. I’ve been particularly interested in how waste is governed and recuperated within this context. For example, I’ve been tracing how redundant National Health Service patient X-rays have been sold to the Royal Mint to be stripped of silver, converted into bullion, and then processed into jewelry. Some of this work was presented at Frieze London with Carbon12, and also as part of my solo show, ‘Vark,’ at Indigo+Madder in London.

Webber, 2018
Amba Sayal-Bennett
LUNDGREN GALLERY

Taj, 2018
Amba Sayal-Bennett
LUNDGREN GALLERY

“I really enjoy autumn and its change of pace; I tend to feel more focused once it starts to get colder. I teach at University of the Arts London, so autumn marks the new academic year and a busier season. I tend to be more productive the busier I am and find that moving between different work and projects can be really generative.”

Ian Ha

B. 1997, Yong-in, South Korea. Lives and works in New York.

“There is a sense of anticipation, especially when there’s an exhibition, ‘MacGuffin: Five Korean Artists and Five Writers from Art Omi’ at Space ZeroOne in New York.

“I’m currently in the process of moving, so my studio feels less like a single, defined space and more like a collection of scattered islands, each ‘island’ serving a different purpose in my practice. There’s a certain beauty in working across these different stations; moving between them allows me to make unexpected connections and discover how each environment contributes something of its own to the work.

We didn't mean to go to sea, 2023
Ian Ha
PLATO Gallery

Lost, 2023
Ian Ha
Fragment

“I encountered and read Nadia Owusu’s Aftershocks, and it organically unlocked a new layer of meaning in the work I had made earlier this spring. I realized more fully how time and seasonal shifts have a way of reframing the work. Connecting with Nadia grew into a layered exchange, and that collaboration is coming to life with our MacGuffin exhibition.

“My tip to readjust to the new season is to find the right music, and adopt a plant.”

Sophie Treppendahl

B. 1991, Louisiana. Lives and works in New Orleans.

“My studio has frequently been a muse in my own paintings. Each year, I typically create one large painting of my studio space to capture the year’s work. The studio paintings include the work I have in progress at the time and the books of artists inspiring my current work, and serve as a time capsule of my state of mind during that period. Some paintings are bright and cheerful, others are quieter and more subdued. For me, these paintings function as a series of self-portraits over the years.

“Right now I am finishing up paintings for a solo exhibition at SOCO Gallery in Charlotte [North Carolina] opening in November, and a few pieces for Art Basel Miami with Philip Martin Gallery. Each New Year after my busy season, I clean the studio thoroughly and repaint the studio floor. It’s a nice way to purge the previous year and have a momentarily clean space.

Living Room, Evening, 2021
Sophie Treppendahl
Romer Young Gallery

“My year-round studio hack is audiobooks. I listen to cheesy thriller audiobooks while I work. There is something about the ‘whodunit’ book that keeps me focused while I paint. I strive for work-life balance even during the busiest times. When I leave the studio, I try to leave my entire work brain behind. I go on long walks with my toddler at the park after my workday and count down to the joy ahead—finishing deadlines and seeing family for the holidays.”

Mark Dion

B. 1961, Massachusetts. Lives and works in Copake, New York.

“I’m a really big birdwatcher, so I try to take advantage of the migration season, which is always a little melancholic, as fall is, because instead of saying hello to birds like you do in the spring, now is the time to say goodbye to them until the springtime. There is undoubtedly a kind of melancholic aspect to this season.

“This is the time when I’m gathering pine cones, acorns, chestnuts, and all of these things which are now mature and dropping from the trees. They come in handy later on at the studio.

Some Recent Plagues (framed), 2025
Mark Dion
Obee Editions

“I live in an upstate town called Copake, surrounded by forest. My studio actually was one of my sculptures, one of my follies from the exhibition I did at Storm King, ‘The Field Station of the Melancholy Marine Biologist.’ This was a freestanding wooden house that you could not enter, but could look through the large windows and see everything inside, which was filled to look like a marine biologist’s laboratory. Fall is, however, a tricky time because the structure is not insulated or heated, so we are in the final weeks that I can use my studio. Then my dining room table becomes my studio until spring.

“My new solo exhibition, ‘Eccentric Collectors Like Us,’ at Concord Museum in Massachusetts, displays objects from almost a thousand repurposed boxes that filled my studio. Each of them contains toys, old wooden tools, game pieces, and ceramic bits. I lined them with felt or antique paper and found the right object to put inside.”

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The Artsy Vanguard 2027: Donyel Ivy-Royal https://ift.tt/iJyal7u

From street corners and vintage cars to his family’s home,Donyel Ivy-Royal paints the world that’s close to him.

The Brooklyn-based artist transforms everyday subjects into large, layered paintings, giving each what he calls “their own monument.”

His process begins with his own snapshots of his neighborhood and his family, and he isn't particularly concerned with getting the perfect shot. “I like the ones that come out blurry, overexposed, or underexposed. It works for what I’m doing,” he told us. In the studio, he builds up and scrapes away layers of paint until familiar scenes take shape, resembling the hazy quality of memory.

Highway 101, Southbound, 2026
Donyel Ivy-Royal
Jack Shainman Gallery

Born in Portland, Oregon, Ivy-Royal came up in the city’s DIY music and art scene, and his practice spans painting, photography, music, poetry, and installation. A four-track recorder is not far from his canvas and paints, and music is often part of his studio routine. The rhythms of the music carry into the gestures of painting.

Ivy-Royal’s career has gained momentum recently. In January 2026, he joined Jack Shainman Gallery’s roster after working there as an art handler. Soon after, he had his first New York solo exhibition at David Peter Francis, and in May, he presented a buzzy solo booth with Jack Shainman at Independent. On November 5th, he opens his debut solo with Jack Shainman Gallery, “By the time the rain comes, we will be home,” in Chelsea. The exhibition features new paintings and an installation that turns a wall in the gallery into the front of a building, a nod to the surfaces he drew on as a child.

Tedi’s gourds that look like birds, 2026
Donyel Ivy-Royal
Jack Shainman Gallery

There is a warm rain, that becomes a flower, 2026
Donyel Ivy-Royal
Jack Shainman Gallery

We caught up with Ivy-Royal at his Brooklyn studio, joining him for a morning walk with his dog before heading into the studio. “My process is so much an appreciation of my own life,” he told us. “I hope that people leave and appreciate their own thing, and feel inspired to take pictures, or go tag their neighborhood, or paint a picture, or leave the hood, or don’t leave the hood and make art.” Watch the video above and explore The Artsy Vanguard 2027.

Video credits:

• Executive producer: Casey Lesser
• Creative director: Molly Gottschalk
• Director/DP: Jack Kuczala
• Editor: Jack Kuczala
• Designer: Douglas Escalante

Toy, 2026
Donyel Ivy-Royal
Jack Shainman Gallery

About The Artsy Vanguard

Now in its ninth year, The Artsy Vanguard is our annual celebration of 10 of the most promising artists working today. Spanning painting, sculpture, ceramics, photography, and more, the 2027 cohort brings together a new generation of artists making work that feels fresh, urgent, and distinctly their own. Through an original 10-part video series, we visit each artist in their studio and city, offering an intimate look at their creative processes, inspirations, and what it means to be an emerging artist today. Together, these are the talents shaping what’s next in contemporary art.

from Artsy News https://ift.tt/QGg2mWC

Julie Curtiss Paints a Twisted Love Letter to New York City https://ift.tt/sdk1Yma

Julie Curtiss is finally painting her metropolitan fever dream. “It’s a New York painting story,” said Curtiss, during a recent conversation at her East Williamsburg studio. On the studio walls were her most recent paintings: scenes of faceless women doing yoga in small apartments, the neon lights of storefronts, a laundromat.

“I decided the show would be a little vignette of life in New York, and of what it is to feel like you’re getting older in the city,” she said.

The artist has earned acclaim over the past decade for her distinctive style synthesizing Pop and Surrealist sensibilities with the bold patterning and controlled sensuality of Chicago Imagists like Christina Ramberg. She is a painter of glistening coils of long hair, of rippled shellfish, and of fur-covered food in the lineage of Meret Oppenheim.

Born and raised in Paris, she is the only child of a French librarian mother and a Vietnamese technical photographer father. But New York has been her home for the past 16 years, and the backdrop of a career from early jobs as a studio assistant for KAWS and Jeff Koons to her 2017 breakout at Spring/Break Art Show, followed by exhibitions at prominent galleries including Anton Kern Gallery and White Cube. She married and became a mother in the city. Today she lives just a short walk from her studio.

Now, for the first time in five years, she’s opening a New York solo show—and in grand form. “Unreal,” which opens November 10th, will mark Curtiss’s first New York solo show with Gagosian. It is her first New York solo exhibition since “Somnambules” at Anton Kern Gallery in the fall of 2022.

But the exhibition is not an uncomplicated love letter to New York. Instead, Curtiss leans into the chaos, control, and excess that define a city acclaimed architect Le Corbusier once described as a “fairy catastrophe.”

“We get here in our twenties and thirties, full of energy and ambition,” she said. “Then, as time goes on, the city wears you out. You make all those attempts at renewal, and it becomes about maintenance, about just trying to keep up with that crazy pace.”

Curtiss’s last solo exhibition, “Maid in Feathers,” which opened at White Cube in Seoul in November 2025, dealt with the transformation and complex realities of early motherhood rendered in gothic-feeling black-and-white paintings of breast pumps, bassinets, and bath times. Here, she found herself grappling with a more vague sense of identity.

“That show [“Maid in Feathers”] practically painted itself. It was very cohesive: the same palette throughout, all about motherhood, very dreamy and surrealist,” she said. “This show was different. It was the New York show, where everybody was going to be and see it. I felt I had to do something great and I went in a lot of different directions.”

Ultimately, Curtiss arrived at a language that she describes as “magical realist” as opposed to the Surrealist visions that appeared in earlier works. While the comically macabre images of monstrous, manicured claws and heads on platters of her earlier works are absent, a winking sense of strangeness still abounds.

“It’s everyday life, and where it meets unreality,” she said. “It’s also about thinking about our relationship to images right now—you can’t trust images representing the world. These paintings are very mundane scenes, but they all have something a little off about them, something slightly funny or an unexpected juxtaposition.”

In the painting Grand Street (2026), neon lights illuminate a Chinatown storefront in which a Peking duck hangs in the windows next to tanks of clams, crab, and fish. But these animals are not oblivious to their circumstances. Instead they stare out at the viewers with hyperaware urgency. “Everything [in the show] is imbued with so much projection,” she said. “The animals carry so much human projection. They become stand-ins for human emotion, or for humanity.”

The paintings often take inspiration from scenes in Curtiss’s everyday life—her local bodega, a window strung with Christmas lights on her block, and a nearby psychic’s parlor. “My life is very local,” said Curtiss. “My life is studio, home, park, studio, home, park.” But in these familiar stomping grounds, a sense of urgency and intensity exist.

“It’s this ‘only in New York’ energy, with crazy stuff happening all the time. There’s the constant contrast of the high and the low, socially and economically,” said Curtiss. “With all that friction, there’s always something coming out of it. It’s also exhausting, but it’s alive.”

Her female figures, faces always obscured, become a stand-in for this tension between urban luxury and decay. A hole appears in the stocking of an elegantly clad woman, for instance. In the painting Makeover (2026), two women in fur coats and oversized sunglasses, their hair perfectly coiffed and nails manicured, face away from the viewer. One smokes a cigarette. Their faces are swathed in the white bandages that immediately signal recent plastic surgery. They are elegant and mangled at once.

“For a while, in my social media feed, I was getting mostly skin-care tricks to take care of your skin and limit the damage of life. The façade. It’s funny, because a few of these paintings are about that never-ending, high-maintenance work,” said Curtiss.

Curtiss’s women—practicing yoga, getting nipped and tucked, and playing the perfect housewife—try to wrest control from the unpredictability of aging and life in a city with its own out-of-date infrastructure.

But Curtiss is also finding new freedom within this push and pull of chaos and control. Her process for these works has been much more intuitive than in the past, with the artist sometimes discovering her subject matter as she works through it in some cases. Her works have become more nuanced, too. Whereas Curtiss often used to leave her backgrounds empty, here she plunges viewers into complex spaces. Her airtight control of pattern has given way to movement—plumes of smoke, sheens and reflections of washing machines and windows.

“Maybe it’s just natural development, but things become a little more complex—themes are a little deeper, and my frame is getting a little wider, too,” she said. “I used to be really focused on a single object, and it was a bit like boom, boom, boom. Now I’m playing more with composition. Everything is more sophisticated.”

Those shifts are, perhaps, the result of living and working in a city that is constantly asking its people to grow and adapt. Curtiss, for one, is energized by the thought of sharing this work in the city and, in typical New York fashion, getting some honest opinions back. “New York people are very driven; you can’t live in New York if you’re not really driven,” she said. “These people engage with the work and give you thorough feedback. New York people are pretty serious when it comes to art.”

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Stella McCartney and Yoshitomo Nara unveil limited-edition collection. https://ift.tt/tZQn54P

Designer Stella McCartney and artist Yoshitomo Nara have teamed up for a third limited-edition collaboration. The collection, themed around a "rock'n'roll forest," spans ready-to-wear, handbags, shoes, and accessories, featuring Nara's childlike figures and animal motifs across artisan knitwear in responsibly sourced wool, organic cotton jersey separates, handcrafted vegan bags, and graphic-printed trainers.

The partnership extends McCartney and Nara’s ongoing creative partnership, which the brand describes as rooted in a shared commitment to nature, animals, and individuality. The collection is made with what McCartney describes as “100 percent responsible” materials.

The collaboration also includes four exclusive, made-to-order styles produced in very limited quantities by the brand’s atelier, including vegan handbags, framed hand-crocheted portraits based on archival Nara artworks, and hand-knitted scarves and jumpers.

The framed portraits are individually crocheted and then embroidered to build texture and dimension. The jumpers, embroidered with Nara's Cutie in the Puddle (2024), combine multiple yarns, stitches, and both hand and machine techniques, with each piece taking more than 60 hours to complete. Meanwhile, each scarf requires roughly 40 hours of artisanal work.

The collection also includes anStella McCartney x Yoshitomo Nara adidas SPW64 sneaker. The sneaker reworks the Tokyo 64 track shoe in lightweight recycled materials printed with Nara's artwork, with a tongue inspired by a 1956 Melbourne Olympics shoe design.

In Shinjuku, Tokyo, a four-week pop-up will open November 11th at the gallery Isetan The Space with an installation and activations on view through December 8th. The Isetan pop-up will release a different exclusive Nara sticker each week, while select Stella McCartney boutiques internationally will offer their own city-specific sticker designs.

The limited-edition collection launches globally on November 11th on the Stella McCartney website and at boutiques and retailers worldwide, following an exclusive presale. Select exclusive styles will also be available in Japan and at the brand's SoHo boutique in New York, with further location-specific availability to be announced.

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The Artsy Vanguard 2027: Aiza Ahmed https://ift.tt/Kjh6LT4

There’s an infectious energy to Aiza Ahmed’s work, from her fluid, expressive figures to the humor and theatricality she brings to explorations of masculinity and belonging.

It all begins with blind-contour drawing: putting pen to paper without looking down, trusting her eyes to observe and her hands to sketch away.

Over the past year, Ahmed took part in the Fire Station artist residency in Doha, Qatar, where she was immediately drawn to the waterfront and the men she encountered around the city, from boatmen to Uber drivers. “I was noticing a very different kind of masculinity that was more tender, that was soft, something that I hadn’t experienced before,” she told Artsy. She began capturing their likenesses.

How to build a man, 2026
Aiza Ahmed
Nature Morte

Those drawings become the foundation for paintings, textile installations, and carved wood sculptures. Across her practice, Ahmed explores the Indian subcontinent, its borders, migration, and histories, drawing on real narratives while imagining her own.

The art world is taking notice. Ahmed’s work has recently been acquired by ICA Miami, Qatar Museums, and the Pérez Art Museum Miami. In February 2026, she presented a new body of work at the inaugural Art Basel Qatar, where she was the youngest artist with a solo presentation. She also recently participated in New York’s closely watched Silver Art residency program. This week, she’s featured in Fire Station’s inaugural Artists Intensive Study Programme exhibition, curated by Egyptian artist Wael Shawky, and soon she’ll have a show in Paris with MASSIMODECARLO.

We caught up with Ahmed at her studio in Doha before joining her for a day of drawing, which took her through the city in an Uber to the waterside, where she discussed some of the men who have inspired her work. Watch the video above and explore The Artsy Vanguard 2027.

Video credits:

• Executive producer: Casey Lesser
• Creative director: Molly Gottschalk
• Director/DP: Sunny Dave
• Editor: Jack Kuczala
• Designer: Douglas Escalante

The grand rehearsal, 2024
Aiza Ahmed
Rajiv Menon Contemporary

About The Artsy Vanguard

Now in its ninth year, The Artsy Vanguard is our annual celebration of 10 of the most promising artists working today. Spanning painting, sculpture, ceramics, photography, and more, the 2027 cohort brings together a new generation of artists making work that feels fresh, urgent, and distinctly their own. Through an original 10-part video series, we visit each artist in their studio and city, offering an intimate look at their creative processes, inspirations, and what it means to be an emerging artist today. Together, these are the talents shaping what’s next in contemporary art.

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5 Standout Shows to See at Small Galleries This November https://ift.tt/7VFpoDH

Y el agua cae otra vez/And the Water Falls Again〈水再次落下〉, 2026
Ana Teresa Barboza
NUNU FINE ART

In this monthly roundup, we spotlight five stellar exhibitions at small and rising galleries.

“Afterglow: From the Residue of a Departed Sun”

Tabari, at No. 9 Frieze Cork Street, London

Through Nov. 21

Barzakh #11, 2025 -2026
Mohamed Monaiseer
Tabari

Will the Gods Belong?, 8, 2023
Maitha Abdalla
Tabari

“Afterglow” brings together the work of four artists—Maitha Abdalla, Omar Kholeif, Mohamed Monaiseer, and Randa Maddah—as they explore the porous border between life and death through painting, spoken word and poetry, installation, mixed media, and sculpture.

These works draw on diverse cosmologies, from Emirati folk narratives and the African trickster myth to Islamic metaphysics. Egyptian artist Monaiseer presents delicate, constellation-like paintings of botanical forms on cotton fabric, while Emirati artist Abdalla paints gestural mythic scenes that blend animal and human forms. Kholeif, who is best known as a curator and author, paints reverie-like abstractions that hover at the edge of legibility, hinting at landscapes or figuration. Kholeif was born in Cairo to Egyptian and Sudanese parents, and raised between Glasgow and Los Angeles, among other places. His works are shaped by these diasporic experiences. Syrian Maddah, who was born in the occupied Golan Heights in 1983, paints mythic, mysterious paintings of women beings who merge into birds and trees. Maddah, who also creates puppets, films, and other media, imagines figures shaped by weighty psychological burdens.

Presented at Dubai gallery Tabari’s London space, the exhibition brings together an evocative range of creative voices from across the Middle East looking at mysteries of life, death, and the hereafter.

Tony Huynh

“Heaven or Las Vegas”

Galerie Christian Lethert, Cologne

Nov. 6–Dec. 18

As Days Go By, 2026
Tony Huynh
Galerie Christian Lethert

American painter Tony Huynh makes his European solo debut with “Heaven or Las Vegas,” his first show with Galerie Christian Lethert. His small-format oil paintings on wood draw from centuries of art history, particularly outsider art, as well as techniques from Japanese printmaking. Working in a restrained palette, Huynh portrays playful, almost childlike visions—a woman in a blue dress reading, a cow in a bucolic landscape, or a small child with a toboggan—that carry an air of solitude and loneliness. In one painting, As Days Go By (2026), a woman is shown from above resting fully clothed on a bed. Her face is blank and featureless, and her bed appears almost book-like in its form. The painting echoes the pithy and poetic works of Milton Avery.

Huynh was born in 1986 in San Francisco and lives and works in Sacramento. He earned his BFA at the California College of the Arts. His previous solo exhibitions include “Magical Thinking” (2025) at PABLO´S BIRTHDAY in New York, “A Summer’s Dream” (2024) at Scroll NYC Gallery in New York, and “Bay Vistas” (2023) at Bryant Street Gallery in Palo Alto, California.

Ana Teresa Barboza

“A Message From Water”NUNU Fine Art, New York

Nov. 6–Jan. 9

Camino a la montaña/Path to the Mountain〈通往山的路〉, 2026
Ana Teresa Barboza
NUNU FINE ART

Entre las hojas/Between the Leaves〈在葉子之間), 2026
Ana Teresa Barboza
NUNU FINE ART

Peruvian artist Ana Teresa Barboza draws from the landscape of her homeland in her fourth exhibition with NUNU FINE ART—her second in New York. Her mixed-media textile works render botanical forms from alpaca wool, Peruvian cotton, agave fiber, bronze, and photography.

Barboza has structured this exhibition as a visual diary, tracing an eastward journey across Peru, from the forests of the Utcubamba Valley to Gocta Waterfall in the Amazonas region. She has extensively studied traditional methods of producing plant-based fibers and natural dyes from local communities. Her dyes come from native plants that she pulverizes and boils, tying the works back to the ecosystem they came from. The centerpiece of the exhibition is Y el agua cae otra vez/And the Water Falls Again (2026), a massive, vividly colored textile work with a cascading form that evokes a waterfall moving through the cloud forest.

Barboza was born in 1981 in Lima. She studied at the Faculty of Art of the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru and has completed residencies in Melbourne, Geneva, Paris, and Taipei. She won first prize in the Central Reserve Bank of Peru’s Second National Painting Competition in 2010 and the MAC National Art and Innovation Award in 2019.

Peter Mohall

“När blommorna blommar”

QB Gallery, Oslo

Through Nov. 29

Blomsterstilleben på en odde, 2026
Peter Mohall
QB Gallery

Untitled (brushstrokes painting), 2026
Peter Mohall
QB Gallery

Norwegian Swedish artist Peter Mohall juxtaposes landscapes and still life in uncanny compositions. Here, vases of flowers sit directly on rocks in the terrain or in front of windows that offer a panoramic view of nature.

These landscape paintings, made with acrylic composite and painted in egg-oil tempera are purposely artificial, with their exaggerated and oversaturated hues. On the edge of several paintings is a control strip–like bands of color to each of the works, as if they were printed, underscoring their constructed nature. In two untitled works, the artist paints these test strip–like squiggles of color on otherwise bare linen canvases, heightening this photographic effect, reading like two blank negatives.

Mohall was born in 1979 in Löddeköpinge, Sweden, and lives and works in Nesoddtangen, outside Oslo. He graduated from the Oslo National Academy of Fine Arts and received a 2015 grant from the Ellen Trotzig Foundation at the Malmö Art Museum. He has had solo exhibitions with Luce Gallery in Turin, Koki Arts in Tokyo, Pablo’s Birthday in New York, and QB Gallery, and his work is in the collections of Fondazione 107 in Turin, the Central Bank of Norway, and the JP Morgan Chase Collection.

Quim Bové

“Levitation”

Bonner David Galleries, Scottsdale, Arizona

Nov. 5–Dec. 19

"The Horizon is Not Too Far II", 2026
Quim Bové
Bonner David Galleries

"Levitation XII", 2026
Quim Bové
Bonner David Galleries

Quim Bové creates bold compositions in pigment, acrylic, and resin, often pairing target-like patterns with gestural splashes of color. Bové has said that he hopes these paintings invite an emotional response rather than a fixed interpretation. “When you feel, you don’t think,” he said in a gallery statement.

Bové has been working for more than three decades and his works pull from philosophy, metaphysics, science, music, and drawing. His interests in classical music, jazz, and improvisation are foundational to his intuitive approach in which gesture becomes a way of thinking. Now living in the American Southwest, Bové also takes inspiration from the terrain’s vastness, intense light, and silence.

Born in Catalonia, Bové taught himself to paint. He has had more than 30 solo exhibitions, and his work has been shown across the United States and Europe, including his recent series “Architecture of the Universe.” In 1995, he founded the conceptual art group Andorran Currency.

from Artsy News https://ift.tt/ZAbz8VW