Black Mid-Century Artist Felrath Hines Is Finally Getting His Due for His Luminous Abstractions https://ift.tt/9fuDnIj

He was a member of the Spiral Group, the pioneering collective of African American artists in the 1960s, and an artistic peer to Romare Bearden and Emma Amos. Georgia O’Keeffe so admired his talents that she hired him as a personal conservator to her paintings.

But, today, artist Felrath Hines, who died in 1993, is largely unknown—even in the art world.

“Hines was strongly devoted to abstraction and pursued it with a very independent and persistent attitude,” said Andrew Schoelkopf, the owner and founder of New York’s Schoelkopf Gallery. Right now, the gallery is presenting an intimate showcase of Hines’s works, on view through August 21st.

The exhibition includes five key paintings by the artist from the 1950s and ’60s, decades when he produced evocative abstractions painted in bold but sensuous brushstrokes. The exhibition is part of the gallery’s ongoing effort to shine new light on Hines’s career, and builds on a 2022 solo presentation of his work at ADAA: The Art Show in New York.

The jewel of this exhibition is The Bush from 1962, a gestural abstraction painted in foggy passages of greens, purples, and grays, like a landscape seen in the distance of a misty shore. The work is emblematic of Hines’s best paintings of the 1960s. “You can see how his brushwork is the work of an adept painter. It’s rich and layered, which creates a certain luminosity in the surface. I also find his sense of color to be tremendously skillful and alluring,” said Schoelkopf.

Bouquet, 1957
Felrath Hines
Schoelkopf Gallery

Landscape, 1953
Felrath Hines
Schoelkopf Gallery

The gallery first became interested in Hines’s works while researching the Spiral Group, a collective of African American artists who explored the role of art in relation to society and the Civil Rights Movement. “As a member of the Spiral Group, he was a prominent figure in the New York City art world and the Black creative scene of the time,” added Schoelkopf. Still, unlike other Black artists of the era, such as Bearden or Jacob Lawrence, Hines’s story has remained largely untold.

Born Samuel Felrath Hines Jr. in Indianapolis in 1913, the artist had his first forays into art as a teenager, after receiving a scholarship for classes at the John Herron School of Art Saturday School. Following high school, he worked as a firefighter, and as a railway waiter, earning money to support classes at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. By 1946, he had moved to New York where he studied with the Russian-born American painter Nahum Tschacbasov, while also taking classes at New York University and Pratt.

By 1951, Hines had started working at a frame shop in the city. His skill as a painter and his knowledge of framing eventually led him into a career as a conservator at New York’s Fine Arts Conservation Laboratories.

His career as a conservator and his practice as an artist were side by side for most of his life. Over the years, he took major positions at the Museum of Modern Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, and the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery. Early in his conservator career, he helped conserve one of Claude Monet’s “Water Lilies” paintings for MoMA, an experience that informed his own luminous palette and layered approach to abstraction (the influence is evident in a work like The Bush). Later, Georgia O’Keeffe would bring on Hines to lead the conservation of her personal collection, as well as the care of her works in private and museum collections during the 1970s.

Distant View, 1962
Felrath Hines
Schoelkopf Gallery

Sea Shell, 1962
Felrath Hines
Schoelkopf Gallery

Hines’s painting style continued to evolve. His gestural abstractions, now on view at Schoelkopf Gallery, later gave way to geometric abstractions influenced by De Stijl and Piet Mondrian. While Hines was an active participant in the Spiral Group, he always maintained a very individualized artistic vision.

“Despite his predilection for looking at art in exhibits and galleries, he never painted with other artists,” wrote historian Rachel Berenson Perry in her defining monograph of the artist, The Life and Art of Felrath Hines: From Dark to Light.

The artist wasn’t one to seek the limelight, either. “He was a regular social presence in the New York art world, especially in Black creative circles, but he didn’t like to draw attention to himself,” said Schoelkopf.

Throughout his career, Hines also resisted being classified primarily as a Black artist and believed his work, and abstraction, were universal languages in their expression and reach. As such, he turned down invitations to exhibit in shows focused on the work of Black artists alone, including the major exhibition “Contemporary Black Artists in America” at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1971. These decisions may have contributed to his relative obscurity.

His career as a conservator, at times, detracted from his art practice, too. “He was very dedicated to his work, but he went through long periods of time where his ‘day job’ as a conservator prevented him from spending any time working on his personal creative practice,” said Schoelkopf. A 1979 article described Hines as having “two careers: executing his own art and repairing the art of others.”

In 1984, he retired as the chief conservator of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, and devoted the last years of his life entirely to painting, creating some of the most significant works of geometric abstraction in his career. He continued to believe in the power of art, despite never reaching widespread fame. In 1983, he said in an interview, “In my view, an artist’s work is to rearrange everyday phenomena so as to enlarge our perception of who we are and what goes on about us.”

Today, Hines’s reputation is steadily growing (Schoelkopf Gallery has placed his works with institutions including the Cincinnati Art Museum). Schoelkopf says that with Hines one can’t help but notice “how razor-thin the margin is between the type of success Georgia O’Keeffe had” and that of “an artist as well educated, well trained, intelligent, and important as Felrath Hines.” The art world, he thinks, may soon be catching up.

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Prado Museum digitally transforms masterpieces by Velázquez, Rubens, and others ahead of August solar eclipse. https://ift.tt/xEeY8aI

The Museo Nacional del Prado in Madrid has released an AI-assisted video, titled “The Prado by the Light of the Eclipse,” that digitally alters 11 paintings in its collection to show how their scenes might look under the dimming light of a solar eclipse. The one-minute piece, soundtracked by “Summer” from Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons, is timed to Spain’s total solar eclipse on Wednesday, August 12th. The eclipse—which will also pass over parts of the Northern Hemisphere—will be the first to cross Spain in more than a century, with totality expected to last under two minutes.

The video opens with Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas (1656) swept into shadow, and goes on to darken Francisco Goya’s El Quitasol (1777) and La pradera de San Isidro (1788), Peter Paul Rubens and Jan Brueghel the Elder’s La Vista (1617), and Albrecht Dürer’s self-portrait, among other works by José de Ribera, Corrado Giaquinto, Claude Lorrain, José Casado del Alisal, and Carlos de Haes. In a statement, the Prado described Las Meninas’s spatial complexity as owing partly to “the multiplication of the light sources,” while El Quitasol points to Goya’s “mastery at painting light and shadows,” the same qualities the new video sets out to manipulate.

The project was produced by the Madrid studio AMB Piensa, which combined AI video-generation tools with traditional animation and manual review. According to the museum, the technology was used to simulate the eclipse’s gradual darkening, along with shifting shadows and reflections across each painting’s figures, landscapes, and architecture. Every sequence was checked and adjusted by hand to preserve the works’ original composition and technique. The Prado has also framed the effort as a tool for cultural outreach, aimed particularly at audiences who don’t typically visit museums.

This week’s eclipse is the first of three (two total, one partial) forecast to cross Spain and Portugal between now and January 2028, drawing tourists to the Iberian Peninsula for what astronomers describe as a rare run of visibility. It also continues a long tradition of art responding to eclipses. In 1918, the American painter Howard Russell Butler was commissioned by the U.S. Naval Observatory to capture an eclipse on canvas, working from mere seconds of direct observation. Eclipses have also featured in Christian iconography for centuries, tied by some biblical interpretations to the crucifixion.

The Prado’s works span several Old Masters traditions, from Velázquez’s Spanish Golden Age portraiture to Rubens’s Flemish Baroque and Dürer’s Northern Renaissance printmaking. The museum’s eclipse video underscores how radically shifting light can transform even familiar paintings.

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Indian Gallerist Sundaram Tagore Credits Friendships for His International Success https://ift.tt/J1Y78p6

“Art is wealth we must share,” said Sundaram Tagore. “And that has been my mission for the last 25 years: to find artists and share them with the world.”

Tagore founded the eponymous Sundaram Tagore Gallery in 2000. It now has spaces in New York, Singapore, and, most recently, London. But his career has always extended beyond the gallery: He is a writer, scholar, collector, filmmaker, and above all, a friend to art and artists. “I don’t follow the market,” he added. “I follow instinct. And friendships.” His faith in friendship—and in art as something carried between people—began long before he opened a gallery.

Born in 1961 into one of India’s most culturally influential families, Tagore grew up around Jorasanko Thakur Bari, the family’s ancestral home in Kolkata, eastern India, before moving between the towns of Santiniketan and Delhi. Jorasanko was also the birthplace of his great-granduncle Rabindranath Tagore, the poet, educator, and painter who, in 1913, became the first Asian and first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.

“Kolkata, once the capital of British India, was exceptionally cosmopolitan,” Tagore recalled. “Not many people know that the first Bauhaus exhibition outside Europe was staged in the city in 1922, with works by Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky shown alongside leading modern Indian artists.” His childhood home drew a steady procession of intellectuals, political activists, and cultural leaders.

His father, Subho Tagore, was part of that world. “He was a poet, a painter, and a rebel of a kind,” Tagore said. In 1943, Subho helped form the Calcutta Group, an early modernist art collective that rejected Romanticism in favor of a more urgent, socially engaged visual language. Its artists sold work to raise funds amid World War II, India’s independence movement, and the Bengal famine of 1943—a catastrophe, exacerbated by British colonial policies, that killed millions.

“There was always an understanding that whatever resources you possessed, whether money, education, influence, or knowledge, you had a responsibility to use them in the service of others,” Tagore noted.

The lesson stayed with him. Drawn to art from an early age, Tagore studied in the United States before pursuing doctoral research at Oxford University on how modernism traveled between cultures. “Unlike European modernism, Indian modernism did not reject tradition. We went back to it,” he said. “We didn’t reject figuration for abstraction; we embraced it.” Indian modernists including Amrita Sher-Gil, M.F. Husain, S.H. Raza, and F.N. Souza absorbed international styles and movements while remaining rooted in their own histories. “We found a synthesis,” he added. “That has been our greatest civilizational strength.”

Yet when he moved to New York in the ’90s, working on exhibitions and later joining Pace Gallery, Tagore became increasingly aware that modern and contemporary art in the West was still presented as a largely European and American story dominated by white men. He opened his own gallery on Greene Street in SoHo as an experiment in synthesis—a place where artists across countries, movements, and generations could be brought into conversation.

Early exhibitions championed Indian-born artists and Minimalists including Sohan Qadri and Natvar Bhavsar alongside overlooked women of the New York School, such as Susan Weil, Merrill Wagner, and Joan Vennum. Tagore formed close friendships with artists, gaining a deeper understanding of their work. By sharing that understanding, he helped them claim space in art historical conversations on their own terms. Weil, for example, was often known primarily as Robert Rauschenberg’s wife, but she herself was a master of mixed-media painting. “She had an extraordinary ability to make time visible, to hold movement, memory, and the passage of a single moment within one composition,” he said.

The same instinct led him to show works by Japanese artist Hiroshi Senju after encountering his monumental waterfall paintings at the Japan pavilion at the 1995 Venice Biennale. He later added Pakistani American artist Anila Quayyum Agha, known for elaborately patterned steel cubes that transform entire rooms through shadow and light, and American painter Judith Murray, whose large, colorful abstractions combine raw energy with a sense of the sublime. The gallery was already internationalizing the New York art world, carrying forward the cross-cultural curiosity and adventurous spirit of Tagore’s childhood home. “I was interested in artists who expanded my understanding of the universe,” Tagore said.

After several years in SoHo, the gallery moved to its current Chelsea home on West 26th Street. Tagore opened a Hong Kong outpost in 2007, which ran until 2020, followed in 2012 by a space at Singapore’s Gillman Barracks, where it became the district’s first New York gallery. A permanent London presence followed, and a new space in the upscale district of St. James’s opened earlier this year.

The gallery’s expansion coincided with the rapid globalization of the art market. “I showed at art fair after art fair. It was the most democratic way to understand which artists and ideas audiences and collectors resonated with,” he said. From Art SG, Kiaf SEOUL, Zona Maco, and EXPO Chicago to Art Mumbai and Abu Dhabi Art, Tagore built relationships with an increasingly nomadic collecting community moving across the global cultural calendar. Only around 10 percent of his collectors, he said, are Indian. The rest are spread across the United States, the United Kingdom, Asia, and the Middle East.

But that globalization, particularly from the 2010s onward, brought its own excesses. “There was a time when New York galleries stayed open until midnight on Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays, or when the street outside a Jasper Johns exhibition would be packed,” Tagore said. He remembers an art world in which artists, gallerists, and collectors “experimented more,” and gallery-going was part of the city’s social and intellectual life. “It’s a lot more commercialized now,” he said, adding, “including friendships.”

Still, Tagore remains rooted in the values that brought him this far. Beyond exhibitions, the gallery hosts poetry readings, films, musical performances, book launches, and conversations, programmed “not to please, but to connect with purpose.”

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BBC launches art-dealing TV competition series featuring Artsy. https://ift.tt/ZQlphB0

U.K. TV channel BBC Two will premiere a new six-episode competition series centered on art dealing this week.

Titled The Big Deal with Steph McGovern, the show will air on Thursday, August 13th. The premise pits 14 contestants with little to no art-market experience against one another as they try to turn a profit dealing contemporary art. Presented by broadcaster Steph McGovern, the series airs at 8 pm on BBC Two and the streaming platform iPlayer, with an earlier premiere on BBC Northern Ireland on August 12.

Artsy features prominently in the fourth episode, in which contestants source artworks from two emerging artists in Berlin—Argentine painter Celeste Najt and duo 44flavours—and sell them via an Artsy Auction. Artsy vice president of marketing Ani Petrov is a judge on the episode.

The Artsy auction is one of six real-world sales challenges contestants face in the series. Other episodes send contestants to auction off work by Royal College of Art graduates, furnish two luxury homes to a client brief, and sell prints and limited editions in Margate alongside artist Margo McDaid. They are also tasked with curating a collection for the cabaret bar aboard the cruise ship Queen Anne, pitching a high-end sculpture to industry insiders at Frieze London, and selling at the Affordable Art Fair.

The winning pair will take home some £50,000 ($67,520) worth of art. Other judges throughout the series judging contestants’ efforts are series expert Cordelia de Freitas, alongside guest specialists including gallerist and curator Matt Carey-Williams, McDaid, and Petrov.

McGovern, a business journalist known for hosting daytime talk show Steph’s Packed Lunch and news program BBC Breakfast, has described the format as “The Apprentice for the art world, but the deals are all real, and it’s as much about the hustle as it is about art.” She has a personal connection to the subject: her father is an artist and a graduate of the Royal College of Art. “My dad was the first person I called when I got this job,” she said.

BBC Arts head Suzy Klein said the series aims to “pull back the curtain” on the art market, offering “a fresh insight into how art is discovered, bought, and sold.”

The show is produced by Stellify Media, the Belfast-based company behind the project since it was first announced under the working title The Art Game at the 2023 Belfast Media Festival. It was co-commissioned by BBC Arts and BBC Northern Ireland as part of the Hot House initiative, with support from Northern Ireland Screen.

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Uffizi Galleries in Florence announce $57 million transformation. https://ift.tt/FJQ7VIR

Florence’s Uffizi Galleries have announced a two-year, €50 million (roughly $57 million) transformation of the Uffizi Gallery, Palazzo Pitti, and Boboli Gardens, which the institution has described as an operation “without precedent” in scope.

Uffizi director Simone Verde unveiled the plans this week, saying the roughly 40 individual projects will allow the museum to “present an even better image to the world than it does today,” according to a statement reported by The Art Newspaper.

Rather than closing the museum, the work will proceed in stages so visitors can continue to see the storied collection throughout construction. With the revamp, the Uffizi is rethinking how it presents its holdings, and galleries are being reorganized chronologically and geographically. The museum’s star attractions will also receive more devoted space. The museum has already offered a preview of that approach with its redesigned rooms devoted to Sandro Botticelli, where The Birth of Venus (1486) and La Primavera (1477) now face each other in new hermetically sealed cases meant to improve both conservation and viewing conditions.

Other planned work includes a new introductory exhibition space on the history of the collection at the Uffizi, budgeted at €2.4 million ($2.8 million), along with a lighting overhaul in the Palatine Gallery and new air-handling systems and accessibility upgrades across the complex. At Palazzo Pitti, the largely unused “Piano degli Occhi,” a 1,000-square-meter space on the palace’s top floor, will be converted into new exhibition galleries for €4.9 million ($5.7 million). In the Boboli Gardens, the 17th-century “amphitheatre” and the Fountain of Neptune will undergo a €3 million ($3.5 million) restoration.

Half of the budget will come from ticket sales, and half from the Italian government’s culture ministry, The Art Newspaper reported, with the various projects initiated or planned since Verde took over the Uffizi’s administration in 2024. Additional elements have already been completed include the restoration of the Flemish Masters rooms, which reopened in July 2024. A spokesperson for Verde told the publication that finished projects were included in the announcement “out of a sense of seriousness, to avoid triumphalist communications before concrete results had been achieved.”

The transformation follows other recent changes across the complex. These include a new entrance at Palazzo Pitti that opened in July and the reopening of the Vasari Corridor, the elevated Medici passageway connecting the Uffizi to the Pitti across the Ponte Vecchio bridge, after an eight-year restoration completed in December 2024. The Uffizi separately announced a €50 million ($57 million), eight-year masterplan for the Boboli Gardens in 2022, focused on climate resilience and accessibility, distinct from this new initiative.

The investment underscores the challenge facing one of the world’s most visited museums: preserving centuries-old architecture and masterworks by Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael, Titian, and Caravaggio while accommodating millions of visitors each year.

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Our Favorite Artworks under $2,500 at Foundations https://ift.tt/5ckXhMO

Every art collection starts with one work—and Foundations 2026, Artsy’s annual showcase of emerging art, is the perfect place to start. Here, you’ll find original paintings, photography, sculpture, and prints by more than 240 rising artists at over 85 galleries worldwide, all priced to put a first artwork—or a new addition to a growing collection—within reach.

Buying your first piece doesn’t need to be complicated. It can be as simple as finding a piece that stops you: a color that matches a memory, a subject that makes you laugh, a texture you want to live with. After all, art is, and should be, intensely personal.

Here, our team has combed Foundations for the works under $2,500 we can’t stop thinking about.

Under $1,000

Vanessa McKernan

Embrace, 2025

Presented by Abbozzo Gallery

Price: $850

Embrace, 2025
Vanessa McKernan
Abbozzo Gallery

If I’ve learned one thing in this life, it’s that there’s nothing better than a hug when things get tough. This exquisitely colored painting by Canadian painter Vanessa McKernan captures an embrace that fully conveys why they can be so transporting. Resting in each other’s arms, the two central faces—parent and child, perhaps—have their eyes closed, their expressions intimate and peaceful. Between the expressionist figures in the center and the floating orange flowers, I find the whole scene immensely calming: something from a dream in which everything works out okay in the end.

McKernan is based in the Ottawa Valley countryside, where she says the surrounding nature influences her work. Personally, I can see the influence of Pierre Bonnard in her color choices, as well as in the abstract gestures toward greenery in the background.

—Josie Thaddeus-Johns, associate director of content

Under $2,000

Maremi Andreozzi

Genevieve Estelle Jones, 2026

Presented by Adah Rose Gallery

Price: $1,200

Genevieve Estelle Jones, 2026
Maremi Andreozzi
Adah Rose Gallery

Featureless silhouettes are the subjects of Maremi Andreozzi’s series “A Life Well Lived.” Genevieve Estelle Jones (2026) is one such protagonist. Even though the painting’s face doesn’t have eyes to catch yours, you can still feel her stare. I quickly discovered that Jones was an amateur woman naturalist in the 1800s, often called “the other Audubon,” referring to the famed American conservationist. Andreozzi lifted details from existing portraits of Jones—the perfect collar, the dangling earrings—and dropped them into this surreal portrait. The silhouette is surrounded by symbols of what Jones was all about: crisscrossing twigs and delicate bird eggs accompany her silhouette, a nod to her overlooked legacy. I chose this work because I love all things Victorian, and Genevieve Estelle Jones is a reminder that there’s always a surprising figure or fact (the more obscure the better) that can light up my day.

—Sydney Gelman, copywriter

Maja Sisse

Trout Circle, 2024

Presented by Galleri Zeuthen

Price: $1,750

Trout Circle, 2024
Maja Sisse
Galleri Zeuthen

I’ve always had a soft spot for sculptures that play with our sense of perception. That’s why I was immediately drawn to Trout Circle (2024) by Danish artist Maja Sisse, on view in Galleri Zeuthen’s Foundations presentation. Three ceramic trout chase one another nose-to-tail, forming a near-perfect ring, enmeshed in what could be a synchronized swimming routine. Their wide, glassy eyes and slightly gawky expressions make the whole arrangement feel as though they might break formation at any moment.

What I love most is Sisse’s handling of the ceramic surface. Mottled blues, greens, creams, and rusty browns give the fish the weathered look of something dredged from the bottom of a river, while the carefully rendered scales and fins give each one a wonderfully tactile presence. Caught in this circle, these trout seem destined to keep following one another forever. It’s the kind of sculpture I’d happily let swim circles on my shelf.

—Arun Kakar, senior art market editor

Under $2,500

House of Goblin

Yon Oak, 2025

Presented by Cob

Price: £1,500

Yon Oak, 2025
House of Goblin
Cob

I was drawn to this perfect ceramic sconce, an outlier among the works in Foundations, for the way it marries form and function. Shaped like an oak leaf with fluid, biomorphic lines—reminiscent of 20th-century artist Jean (a.k.a. Hans) Arp—it feels timeless and a little strange, spare yet whimsical. I’ve only just learned about House of Goblin, the English artist collective behind it, whose hand-built ceramics merge utilitarian and sculptural approaches. They source many of their glaze materials from natural sites across the U.K.; here, glazes interact, as a matte, mossy green gives way to a bubbly texture, like a pale minty foam.

The title adds another layer of charm: Yon Oak references Alfred Tennyson’s 1889 poem “The Oak,” which follows a tree through the seasons as a metaphor for aging and the strength we gain over time. It’s a lot for one small object—and still, it’s a lovely perch for a candle.

—Casey Lesser, director of content

Polina Osipova

Arrow from archives, 2025

Presented by JO-HS

Price: $2,500

Arrow from archives, 2025
Polina Osipova
JO-HS

I first learned of Polina Osipova from a video of the artist operating Pearl Mechanism 2 (2020), a whimsical contraption she’d made with strings of pearls. The video was mesmerizing, delightful, and the perfect introduction to her nontraditional practice.

Born in Russia, Osipova now lives and works in London, and she had a solo exhibition, “A Living Inheritance,” with JO-HS in New York earlier this year. Osipova comes from a Chuvash family, a Turkic ethnic group with a long, complex history in Russia and Central Asia, whose culture and language were shaped by Mongolian, Arabic, and Persian influences.

Arrow From the Archives (2025) is emblematic of her most recent works and based on this heritage. Here, the artist transforms imagery from family photographs into childlike objects. She uses embroidery and needlework from Chuvash traditions as a way of stitching her ancestral knowledge into these works. I particularly like Arrow From the Archives because its plush softness is counterbalanced by the sharp point of the arrow. The bow and arrow are objects of childhood imagination, as well as of protection.

—Katie White, senior staff writer

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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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