10 Artist-Run Galleries Around the World You Should Know https://ift.tt/12rRvVi

Running a gallery is a tricky enough task. Add to that an active art practice, and you have what might seem like a recipe for creative overload.

Yet around the world, artist-run galleries have been flourishing for years. Their programming and client relationships are often strengthened by the unique experience of having someone at the helm who’s navigated the art world system from an artist’s perspective.

Whether platforming overlooked talent in underserved neighborhoods in Thailand or building a tight-knit community of repeat visitors around an annual summer show on a Greek island—or simply navigating experimental formats in major art cities like Berlin and New York—we’ve selected 10 artist-run galleries with vastly different approaches to operating a space.

Taken together, they’re united in their commitment to providing a level of care and support to artists that they themselves often haven’t experienced in their careers.

Escat Gallery

Based in Barcelona

Founded by: Pau Escat

Before launching his namesake gallery, artist Pau Escat got his start running the pandemic-era creative space Casa Studio Granados alongside his artist wife, Alicia Gimeno. When that project evolved into a more formal operation in 2024, Escat quickly established himself as a solid presence in Barcelona’s gallery scene.

Now spanning three distinct locations, Escat Gallery includes a main space in Trafalgar, southwest Spain, an experimental offshoot in Sarrià (in Barcelona), and Lab Studio, a private research residency in Mahón, Menorca. There, one artist is invited each year for a slower and more concentrated engagement with their practice. Previous residents have included German painter Moritz Berg and, most recently, the Argentine abstract artist Tete Alurralde.

Aurora, 2025
Tete Alurralde
Escat Gallery

This long-term approach to care and development traces back to Escat’s own artistic background, yet the founder and director balances care with the commercial reality of running a gallery.

“There are moments where pragmatic decisions have to be made—often precisely those that my earlier ‘artist self’ would have questioned,” he told Artsy. “I don’t think that tension needs to be resolved. If anything, it’s important that it remains active. Escat exists, in part, within that negotiation.”

The Charoen AArt

Based in Bangkok

Founded by: Bryce Watanasoponwong

Occupying a former home on Charoen Krung Road—the first modern roadway in Thailand— in Bang Kho Laem, The Charoen AArt is embedded in one of Bangkok’s oldest neighborhoods, in a part of the city where access to art remains uneven.

For founder and street photographer Bryce Watanasoponwong, the distance from Bangkok’s thriving gallery circuit is a feature, not a flaw. “Getting here takes time, and the building carries its own history, so the journey and the house become part of how people encounter the work,” he told Artsy.

Lens of Emotion, 2024
Bryce Watanasoponwong
The Charoen AArt

That ethos extends to the programming. Shows like Illya Skubak’s “STRATUM,” which used discarded urban materials and fragments to speak to survival and resilience without relying on familiar images of Thai identity, typifies Watanasoponwong’s approach. “I do it because I care about what it carries, and how it might quietly reach someone standing in front of it,” he said.

Since opening its doors in 2024, the audience that gathers there is small but dedicated—one that “grows gradually, one visit, one conversation, and one moment of recognition at a time.”

Queens Park Railway Club

Based in Glasgow

Founded by: Patrick Jameson and Ellis Luxemburg

Occupying the former ticket office and waiting rooms of the active Queens Park train platform in Glasgow for more than a decade, Queens Park Railway Club (QPRC) is as unorthodox a gallery as they come.

Co-founders Patrick Jameson and Ellis Luxemburg both emerged from the city’s artist-run gallery scene—Jameson through the artist-led exhibition space Glasgow Project Room, Luxemburg through Haunt, an open-air space down an alleyway in Trongate.

Burning palms, 2024
Patrick Jameson
Queens Park Railway Club

City of the future, 2005
Sam Ainsley
Queens Park Railway Club

“That experience and the skills you develop doing that are very much manifested in what we do now,” Jameson told Artsy. The duo has leaned into QPRC’s very public location: a memorable Rob Kennedy exhibition in 2013 that transformed the gallery into a live radio station, with music and spoken word poetry broadcast on the platform during rush hour.

Though once “a wee bit off the beaten track for the Glasgow gallery circuit,” the area has since filled with artists and gallerists, turning the QPRC into one thread in a larger communal tapestry in the city’s art scene.

Rancho Kaya

Based in Mykonos

Founded by: Alexander Mignot and Tzima Dimitra Tsitampani

“At the end of the day, Rancho Kaya is not a gallery; it’s our home,” explained Alexander Mignot, the artist and painter behind the Mykonos-based nonprofit art initiative. His words aren’t hyperbole. Mignot and his wife, Tzima Dimitra Tsitampani—an architect who helped design the space—spent four years constructing Rancho Kaya before opening it as an experimental model in artistic community-building.

Once per summer, Mignot’s studio becomes the site of a sprawling group show drawing an invite-only crowd of repeat visitors and international artists—a deliberate counterpoint to the transient, party-centric atmosphere that overtakes Mykonos, Greece, each summer.

La Soledad del Mar, 2023
Alexander Mignot
Rancho Kaya

Hermanas, 2024
Ivan Daniel Cova
Rancho Kaya

It’s a novel concept that favors something far more domestic. The invited artists become houseguests, having breakfast together, cooking in the kitchen, and spending time with Mignot’s family as they work on the show. Previous exhibitions have included works by Venezuelan street artist Harif Guzman and American painter Magnus Sodamin.

“The relationships we built with the artists become friendships, not business,” Mignot said. “We don’t see [Rancho Kaya] as just a house, but as a sculpture that changes and transforms over time with every artist who comes through it.”

Chilli Gallery

Based in London

Founded by: Aubrey Higgin

In London’s Chalk Farm neighborhood, Chilli Gallery stands out. Occupying a former Japanese restaurant just steps from an underground station, it’s defined by a DIY spirit and a collaborative approach to programming, informed by the active artistic practices of founder Aubrey Higgin and assistant director Max Rumbol.

“Artists are more willing to give us a chance as a gallery, knowing that we have been in their shoes and have a deep interest in their work beyond the business side of things,” Rumbol told Artsy. “It’s more just a bunch of artists working together on a vision for the overall show, putting that front and center.”

Chilli features a tiled kitchen-turned-exhibition space in the basement, plus a ground-floor room with street-facing windows. The gallery draws a genuinely mixed crowd that isn’t afraid to give refreshingly honest feedback.

“Hearing a non-art audience give their ‘unfiltered’ take—good or bad—is one of the best parts,” Rumbol said. “Their perspectives are often way more refreshing than what you hear in the usual art circles.”

Dotted Line LA

Based in Los Angeles

Founded by: Margaux Rocher

Opened this past February in Inglewood’s Beacon Arts Building—a longtime creative hub for local artists—Dotted Line LA is the project of French sculptor and painter Margaux Rocher, whose ties to the neighborhood led her to the gallery’s assistant curator, Jacob Barr. With Dotted Line LA, Rocher aims to create a space that explores the full artistic process, moving beyond showing only the finished work.

In practice, this has meant that artists like Dena Novak—who was in the inaugural exhibition—are free to teach an impasto painting course that deepens participants’ understanding of her technique.

Of Course, Still Here #5, 2026
Zengyi Zhao
Dotted Line LA

“As the space finds its footing, we’ll keep following the artists’ lead,” Rocher told Artsy. “They know what they want to transmit; our role is to create the conditions for that to happen.”

This exploratory approach to running the space has also been a boon for Rocher’s own interdisciplinary practice: “Being a person who brings art and people together has opened my eyes to a 360-degree view of the world of art and exhibitions,” she said. “I experience art from every angle: writing, curating, shaping space, programming, and the dialogue with artists. All of it feeds back to its source: artmaking.”

BBA Gallery

Based in Berlin

Founded by: Renata Kudlacek and Vishal Shah

“Building BBA over the last decade hasn’t been a linear path; it has been a 10-year experiment,” noted Renata Kudlacek, the gallery’s co-founder. Kudlacek launched the gallery with Vishal Shah, a fellow artist and Royal College of Art alumnus, in 2015. The duo describes the gallery’s mission as “art over background,” prioritizing the urgency of a message over market logic.

Central to this mission is the BBA Prizes, open calls for art and photography inspired in part by the duo’s own experience as working artists. “We know how rare it is to be discovered and how even fewer artists can actually sustain a living from their work,” Kudlacek told Artsy. “Our goal is to break the painful barriers of the market and give talented, passionate artists the nurture and visibility they need to reach a turning point in their careers.” Previous recipients of the prize have included photographers Luca Ortis, Pierre-Yves Cruaud, and, in 2025, Taiwanese artist Chung-Kun Wang.

Field -2023, 2023
Chung-Kun Wang
BBA Gallery

Operating amid Berlin’s tumultuous cultural climate has only sharpened their conviction. “It is a constant challenge to find sponsors in this climate,” Kudlacek said. “When the local government stops prioritizing culture, the smaller, independent spaces and emerging artists suffer first.”

Stanek Gallery

Based in Philadelphia and Miami

Founded by: Katherine Stanek

Founded partly in response to the closure of local Philly stronghold Rosenfeld Gallery in 2016, Stanek Gallery was built not on a traditional model, but on a diagnosis of what the city’s art scene was missing.

“Opening a gallery using a traditional structure did not make sense to me,” founder and figurative sculptor Katherine Stanek told Artsy. “There was already plenty of that in the city, and much of it was falling short.”

A decade on, the gallery’s success has exceeded her expectations. “Stanek Gallery is not what I originally imagined,” she said. “It’s stronger, more responsive, and ultimately more impactful.”

Room Full of Mirrors, ca. 2010
James Brantley
Stanek Gallery

Central to its survival during the pandemic, for instance, was the Master Artist Series, launched to provide a platform for underrepresented artists whose community influence had outpaced their market recognition—including printmaker John Dowell and painter James Brantley.

The program was inspired, in part, by Stanek’s own experience: “As an artist who studied with several of the Master Artists in the program, I was directly influenced by their example. The goal was to share those stories so other artists could benefit in the same way I did, while also reminding collectors of the importance, influence, and quality of these artists’ work.”

Uncool Gallery

Based in New York City

Founded by: Carolina Paz

This Was When It Started, 2025
Paige Mostowy
Uncool Gallery

When Uncool Gallery opened in 2024, it began as a genuine experiment in collective ownership: its founding board of over 10 artists shaped the gallery’s vision, positioning, and partnerships. But it has since dissolved as the costs and overhead of maintaining this structure proved too much to bear.

This rocky beginning proved instructive for the gallery’s founder and director, Carolina Paz: “Uncool Gallery is a living thing,” she told Artsy. “The format is adaptable and has changed from its inception, but the level of commitment and collaboration remains the same.”

The philosophy echoes the Brazilian artist’s other venture, Uncool Artist, a grassroots network of resources and opportunities for artists worldwide. As part of its quarterly Solo Show Open Call program, Uncool Gallery has provided a $1,000 stipend and given a two-week solo show to young talent, including a recent show of works by architect and artist Campbell Brod for spring 2026.

Directing both ventures has strengthened Paz’s own practice. “Helping artists bring projects into form and supporting that process seriously feeds my own work. The two things strengthen each other,” she said.

ILY2

Based in Portland, Oregon

Founded by: Allie Furlotti

Portland’s ILY2 began as a direct response to local artists’ needs. When the gallery opened in 2020, its founder, Allie Furlotti, handed the keys to whoever needed space, paid the rent, and let them run it however they wanted.

“As a young artist, she experienced the barriers to grants and funding, and she wanted to break down that bureaucracy in her own way,” senior director Jeanine Jablonski told Artsy.

Now with spaces in Portland and New York, ILY2 is built on a philosophy of long-term care that meets each artist where their specific needs are, which, as Jablonski noted, “sometimes isn’t relevant to the work they are making, but is always relevant to how they thrive.”

Untitled, 1978
Bonnie Lucas
ILY2

Some Favorite Things, 2018
Bonnie Lucas
ILY2

In practice, this has meant going to the fourth-floor walk-up studio of Bonnie Lucas, a 75-year-old New York artist, to help clear out old works she couldn’t move herself, so she could make large-scale pieces again for the first time in years.

“We go above and beyond because we genuinely want the people we work with to have a better experience than we’ve had,” Furlotti told Artsy. With Lucas set for her first institutional show at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in 2027, the ILY2 approach has paid off.

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10 Must-See Shows During Paris Gallery Weekend 2026 https://ift.tt/VPTuabE

Hyphae 3, 2026
Ines Katamso
Galerie Droste

There’s no best time of year to be in Paris, but late spring is especially magical. The flowers are in full bloom, the museums present their biggest shows, and terraces teem with activity and pichets of rosé thanks to extended hours of sunlight. Paris Gallery Weekend arrives before summer heat hits the city, with three days of programming from May 29th to 31st.

The weekend celebration, organized by the Comité Professionnel des Galeries d’Art, marks its 14th year as 73 galleries across the Marais, Matignon, and Saint-Germain-des-Prés, as well as nearby Belleville, Pantin, and Romainville, organize artist talks, performances, vernissages, and exhibition walkthroughs. A selection of galleries have given carte blanche to writers, museum leaders, critics, professors, artists, and curators to organize special shows.

Among the highlights are Waddington Custot’s inaugural exhibition at their new Paris outpost featuring work by Les Nabis artists, and American-born, Australia-based painter Amber Boardman’s stirring show at Brigitte Mulholland.

Below, Artsy selects the 10 can’t-miss shows of Paris Gallery Weekend.

“All That She Holds Inside”

Galerie Droste

Through June 13

Alabaster Dreamin, 2024
Anna Virnich
Galerie Droste

This group exhibition features work by five women artists—Anna Virnich, Nada Elkalaawy, Ines Katamso, Julie Legouez, and Karla Leyva—who explore matrilineal inheritance. Women are invariably marked by the memories, strengths, and deferred dreams of prior generations, and these artists untangle such complex legacies.

In particular, the show explores how grandmothers act as stabilizing, central, and sometimes overlooked forces in a family. Berlin-based artist Anna Virnich presents Alabaster Dreamin (2024), a textile composition layered with silk, velvet, cotton, and satin on screen nettle. It both reveals and conceals a delicate, lace-like figure that peeks from behind transparent swathes of fabric. The piece suggests how materials absorb and transmit charged emotions like anger, fragility, or sadness. Franco Indonesian artist Ines Katamso also uses fabric as a means of storing memory. Hyphae 4 (2026), her work on cotton, features smeared soil the artist collected from Java, Indonesia, Bali, and France to explore the relationship between humans and ecology.

Kishio Suga

Mendes Wood DM

Mar. 26–June 4

Japanese sculptor and installation artist Kishio Suga is known for his site-specific installations and assemblages made from natural, everyday materials such as stones, wood, metal, wire, and concrete. As a member of the Mono-ha movement, a group of Japanese artists who rose to prominence in the 1960s and ’70s for prioritizing such humble objects’ natural properties, Suga calls his works “situations” rather than “compositions.”

Now in his eighties, the artist, whose work is seldom shown in France, is the subject of a monumental, career-spanning exhibition at Mendes Wood DM that takes place across both their locations in Paris and New York. In their space on the Place des Vosges, a selection of Suga’s two-dimensional works and three-dimensional situations from the 1970s through the 2010s are on view: The artist arranged a small wall of stones across and beside the limestone steps of the Haussmannian staircase, while a constellation of wooden boards at 90-degree angles extend across the tile floor above. Upstairs, Boundary of Marginal Scenery (1994–2026) features a floor-to-ceiling grid of wooden planks that restrain a spread of painted beams projecting from the gallery’s corner.

Michel Jocaille

“Lily of the Valley”

Galerie Les filles du calvaire

Through June 20

Lily of the Valley, 2026
Michel Jocaille
Galerie Les filles du calvaire

“Lily of the Valley” marks Michel Jocaille’s first solo exhibition in Paris. Jocaille hails from a region in northern France rich with textile tradition, which informs the theatrical sculptures and installations he creates with wax, glass, and printed velvet panne. He employs techniques that he learned growing up, like crochet, weaving, and knitting. They’re also common to the region’s mills, and Jocaille creates a dialogue between industrial and cultural heritage.

The show reframes these traditions, which are too often seen as decorative or too feminine. Jocaille has titled his show after a flower praised for its tender beauty, which also symbolizes the fight for workers’ rights. In France, the lily of the valley, with its delicate cascade of white bells and green fronds, is also handed out on Labor Day as a symbol of good luck, good fortune, and the good of the collective. In Muguet crochet (2026), an assemblage of these crochet lilies of the valley is mounted atop metal stems, which poignantly rise from a tangle of black crochet atop a wooden podium. Jocaille’s work also features in the gallery’s concurrent group show, which marks its 30th anniversary.

Aude Herlédan and Eleanor Lakelin

“In Light and in Shadow”

1831 Art Gallery

May 29–June 30

Sous le Soleil Exactement II, 2024
Aude Herledan
1831 Art Gallery

Lidded Vessel #3, 2024
Eleanor Lakelin
1831 Art Gallery

A chance encounter brought artists Aude Herlédan and Eleanor Lakelin together a decade ago. Now, the friends are presenting a two-person show at 1831 Art Gallery’s space in Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Herlédan is a French multidisciplinary artist whose gestural, lyrical paintings feature decisive brushstrokes and take inspiration from poetry. British sculptor Lakelin carves sculptures from sequoia and burr, accentuating the wood’s scars and its natural “memory.”

“In Light and in Shadow” is the result of ongoing collaboration. This past fall, the artists immersed themselves in each other’s studios. They each produced new work that directly responded to the other’s practice. These pieces will appear in the show alongside the works that inspired them. The exhibition continues a dialogue between the artists, first explored in a similar show at New York’s Rosenberg & Co. earlier this year.

Richard Nonas

Galerie Christophe Gaillard

Through June 20

Untitled, 2003
Richard Nonas
Galerie Christophe Gaillard

Untitled, n.d
Richard Nonas
Galerie Christophe Gaillard

American Postminimalist artist Richard Nonas made modular sculptures from raw wood, stone, and steel, which he believed to carry deep philosophical meaning. The artist initially trained as an anthropologist and carried out field research on American Indian tribes across Canada and the American Southwest. He turned to sculpture in his mid-thirties and became a part of the early 1970s downtown New York art scene alongside Richard Serra, Sol LeWitt, Keith Sonnier, and other artists. His anthropological background informed his sculptures, which used negative space as a material and highlighted how objects and sculpture itself can activate an environment. In the Marais, Galerie Christophe Gaillard presents a selection of Nonas’s small-scale sculptures and works on paper, all made between 1983 and 2016 (the artist passed away in 2021). An untitled, floor-based sculpture anchors the show.

Paula Rego

“Drawing from Life”

Galerie Lelong

Through July 11

Life Room III, 2005
Paula Rego
Galerie Lelong

Scarecrow III, 2006
Paula Rego
Galerie Lelong

Galerie Lelong presents drawings and lithographs by Portuguese visual artist Paula Rego, which the artist made in her London studio during an intense period between 2005 and 2007. Shortly after her 70th birthday, Rego turned to prints, which she could execute faster than her layered paintings. The dark, complex works on view draw on fairytales and folk legends to explore hierarchies, oppression, and interpersonal dynamics. Some take inspiration from The King of Pigs, a 16th-century Italian fairytale by Giovanni Francesco Straparola about an anthropomorphic pig, while others use the work of playwright and director Martin McDonagh as a catalyst. Upon seeing McDonagh’s 2003 play The Pillowman. Rego asked him for more dark, twisted stories, and he shared a series of unpublished manuscripts. Rego united his narratives with memories of her childhood in Portugal under fascist rule. The resulting works are extraordinarily imaginative attempts to grapple with the complexities of human nature.

Arcangelo Sassolino

“Aux abord du séisme”

GALLERIA CONTINUA

Through May 30

La consistance du vide, 2026
Arcangelo Sassolino
GALLERIA CONTINUA

The title of Italian artist Arcangelo Sassolino’s latest solo show at GALLERIA CONTINUA translates to “on the verge of the earthquake.” It’s an apt title for a presentation that investigates the physical limitations of matter and its precarity when subject to significant force. New and existing works are on view, and many will transform over the course of the show. In Damnatio memoriae (2016), for instance, a marble bust of a Roman torso sits on a metal plinth while an industrial apparatus with a spinning round saw slowly shaves down the sculpture. A new work, La consistance du vide (2026), features a large slab of black marble placed atop a floating sheet of glass. Its gargantuan weight bends the pane, which threatens to shatter.

Lee Mingwei

“Lorsque la beauté paraît”

Perrotin

Through May 30

In his first exhibition with Perrotin in Paris, Taiwanese-born American artist Lee Mingwei presents seven works, created between 1995 and 2005, which question our relationship to beauty. Curator Thierry Raspail has organized the show, which includes the participatory work The Mending Project (2009–2026): The artist sits at the end of a long table and invites visitors to bring him their damaged garments, which he patches and repairs with colorful threads. Throughout the exhibition, the mended items remain laid out with fragments of threads still attached. Mingwei demonstrates that damage should not be hidden, but celebrated for its capacity to transform. Also on view is a selection of the artist’s “breath drawings,” for which he places droplets of sumi calligraphy ink on thin alabaster tablets. He meditates, then breathes on the droplets, invoking the internal and external to make the compositions.

Khalif Tahir Thompson

“Beautiful Land”

Zidoun-Bossuyt

May 29–July 18

Brooklyn-based multidisciplinary artist Khalif Tahir Thompson is on the rise. For his second solo show with Zidoun-Bossuyt, he presents “Beautiful Land,” a suite of new compositions made with oil and acrylic paints, handmade paper, papyrus, and oil pastels. The artist’s layered portraits of Black figures (family, friends, and imagined characters) give art historical styles a contemporary update. His layered canvases take inspiration from Fauvist masters Henri Matisse and André Derain, German Expressionists Emil Nolde and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, and the luminous canvases of Harlem Renaissance painter Beauford Delaney. In addition to his representation with Zidoun-Bossuyt, Thompson joined Victoria Miro’s roster last month. He’ll present his first solo show in London with the gallery this fall. Thompson was recently the subject of a solo exhibition at the Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Arts + Culture in North Carolina, and his work belongs to collections including the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History & Culture, the Pérez Art Museum Miami, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, among others.

Szabolcs Bozó

“Antidote”

Semiose

May 23–June 20

Jupiter, 2026
Szabolcs Bozó
Semiose

A Dog's Dream, 2026
Szabolcs Bozó
Semiose

Hungarian-born, London-based painter Szabolcs Bozó returns to Semiose for his second solo show with the gallery. He presents new works that feature his technicolor cartoon characters in states of motion. While past works have depicted an ensemble of these googly-eyed creatures against punchy, static backgrounds, the new paintings appear more frenetic, relying on Bozó’s spontaneous, brazen brushstrokes. A year after the artist began making art between shifts at a London restaurant, a Spanish gallery discovered the artist on Instagram in 2018 and offered him a residency in Mallorca, Spain. He presented his first show with Semiose in the summer of 2020, featuring raw, playful paintings that perhaps call to mind Hungarian folklore; now, thanks to the recent onset of war and unrest, the work has become more sinister. In Cold Landing (2026), an acrylic and sand depiction of a dancing elephant, the subject remains largely in focus while its chaotic environment betrays its hopeful gaze. And in Jupiter (2026), a grinning mouse takes a fighter’s stance.

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India’s Kiran Nadar Museum to stage major South Asian art exhibition at Christie’s London. https://ift.tt/nqFstZG

The Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA) will present a major exhibition from its collection at Christie’s London this summer, marking the first time the auction house’s annual exhibition series has been dedicated to a South Asian institution.

Titled “The Meeting Ground: Scenes from the KNMA Collection,” the exhibition will run from July 16th through August 21st at Christie’s King Street headquarters. Organized in collaboration with the auction house, the exhibition will feature works from the New Delhi–based museum’s collection spanning modern and contemporary art, alongside folk and Indigenous artistic traditions from South Asia. Works by artists including M.F. Husain, Sayed Haider Raza, F.N. Souza, and Jangarh Singh Shyam will be featured.

KNMA was founded in New Delhi in 2010 by Kiran Nadar, one of India’s most prominent collectors and a key figure in shaping the country’s institutional art landscape. KNMA was the first private museum of its kind in India and offers free public access to its collection.

The presentation comes as the institution undergoes a major expansion. It is currently developing a new standalone complex in New Delhi that will span more than one million square feet and serve as a multidisciplinary cultural space for visual and performing arts.

“Since its founding, KNMA has been committed to situating South Asian artistic practices within broader international conversations,” Kiran Nadar, chairperson of KNMA, said in a statement. “International engagement is a pillar of our vision, opening up new frameworks for dialogue and scholarship.”

Akansha Rastogi will curate the exhibition along with Preeti Bahadur, Avijna Bhattacharya, Premjish Achari, and Srinivas Aditya Mopidevi. The show will be organized into a series of narrative vignettes that explore the diversity of artistic production in South Asia from the 1950s to the present.

Anthea Peers, president of Christie’s EMEA, described the exhibition as “a landmark exhibition for Christie’s London and for our summer programme at King Street.”

Damian Vesey, Christie’s international specialist for South Asian modern and contemporary art, said the exhibition reflects the growing global interest in South Asian art. “This exhibition marks the first time Christie’s London has dedicated its summer exhibition to South Asia, as well as to a single institution,” he noted.

A three-day course, organized by Christie’s Education and KNMA, focused on South Asian art and the themes explored in the exhibition will accompany, running from July 28th through July 30th.

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Maddy Inez’s Mystic Ceramics Tell the Hidden Stories of Ancestral Plants https://ift.tt/uPbcfIl

Root Worker, 2026
Maddy Inez Leeser
Megan Mulrooney

For ceramist Maddy Inez, the art-making instinct might be hereditary.

Inez is the daughter of the American artist Alison Saar and the granddaughter of assemblage pioneer Betye Saar. “We always say art is in the blood,” she said during a recent phone call. “Art is how I was taught how to process the world.”

The Los Angeles native makes hand-built biomorphic ceramic sculptures rooted in mysticism and ancestral knowledge. Over the past few years, these works have shifted into larger scales, catching the attention of the art world. Last week, Inez opened “Nascence,” her first solo exhibition with Megan Mulrooney in Los Angeles, on view through June 20th. The show features 20 ceramic vessels and wall works, all made in the past year, and each dedicated to a distinct plant variety.

Benne Blessing, 2026
Maddy Inez Leeser
Megan Mulrooney

Za' atar Pistil, 2026
Maddy Inez Leeser
Megan Mulrooney

Inez’s use of clay originated, in part, from her grandfather, the late ceramist Richard Saar. “My grandfather is one of the reasons I’m attached to it,” she said.

While her creative lineage runs deep, Inez says the biggest familial influence on her work might actually be gardening. “Gardening has always been a major part of family life. It was part of daily life,” she shared. “My grandma still has a garden, and I help her in it every week.”

For Inez, gardening and growing food are among the most ancient forms of familial caregiving. In “Nascence,” she has created near-humanoid sculptures inspired by plants, including okra, black-eyed peas, and hibiscus. Her forms are sturdier and more earthbound than in the past, and seem almost alien. In Benne Blessing (2026), a sculpture inspired by the West African sesame plant benne, for instance, two pods resemble armor-clad legs on a botanical warrior.

Sibyl Seedlings, 2026
Maddy Inez Leeser
Megan Mulrooney

Beholder, 2026
Maddy Inez Leeser
Megan Mulrooney

Inez devotes a great deal of time to researching these plants and their histories before she ever sets her hands on clay. She keeps notebooks filled with watercolor studies of blooms, alongside notes and scribbles about their histories, folklore, and medical and culinary uses.

She started making these intensive investigations into plant life in her earlier series “Fire Followers,” which she made in the aftermath of the 2025 L.A. wildfires. (Fire followers are plants that germinate in heat.) During that time, the artist, her brother, her mother, and her grandmother were all forced to evacuate their homes, along with their menagerie of pets.

“We had six dogs, two bunnies, two tortoises, and my cat. At that point, I had my grandma’s tortoise in a bucket,” she recalled.

Through the experience, Inez witnessed both systemic failures and community support. At the time, Inez’s studio was her mother’s garden. Over time, plants emerged as a language for expressing both grief and hope. “I started really thinking about soil and how we’ve lost the language of how to care for it. Fire follower plants heal soil,” she said. “They became my little vision of hope for the future.”

Heart Healer, 2026
Maddy Inez Leeser
Megan Mulrooney

Al 'Ouna, 2026
Maddy Inez Leeser
Megan Mulrooney

Now, this interest in native ecology has expanded outward into questions of displacement, colonization, and survival. In this show, Inez dives deep into the stories of plants associated with the slave trade, referencing her family’s own connections to plant histories along the way.

In the aftermath of the fires, Inez was archiving documents belonging to her grandmother, Betye Saar, kept at the artist’s Laurel Canyon home. While sifting through photographs and papers, she discovered a certificate of midwifery belonging to her great-great–great-grandmother, Hannah Mays, a native of Louisiana.

During slavery, Black midwives were sought-after practitioners who melded Western and African medical knowledge with indigenous herbalism. After Emancipation, some of these women became officially certified and remained highly sought-after healers.

“I began to wonder what kind of plants my great-great-grandmother would have used in her practice,” Inez said. “From there, my interest expanded all over the world, as I realized in real time how agriculture was being weaponized during colonization that lasts until today.”

The stories can be strikingly powerful. “Enslaved people braided okra seeds in their hair to make sure that wherever they went, they would have the control and ability to care for each other,” Inez shared.

Crimson Kin, 2026
Maddy Inez Leeser
Megan Mulrooney

Wanderer, 2026
Maddy Inez Leeser
Megan Mulrooney

The sculpture Heart Healer (2026), meanwhile, is inspired by the hibiscus flower, popular in North Africa (particularly Sudan) and used to make karkadé, a tea, and healing remedies. In folklore, the flower is tied to the tale of two separated lovers. When one dies in battle, his beloved cries tears of blood, and wherever the tears hit the ground, a hibiscus blooms.

Inez’s own family life is a testament to the resilience of native plant knowledge even in diaspora. “Black-eyed peas symbolize luck. That tradition goes all the way back to Africa,” Inez noted. “On New Year’s Day, my family has soul food—black-eyed peas, greens, sweet potato. Every pea left on the plate is a tear you’ll shed the next year. Don’t leave any behind.”

Inez acknowledges that the exhaustive research into these histories may not be obvious to someone looking at them in a gallery setting—and she’s okay with that.

“This is all my little meditative healing practice,” she said. “I love seeing people come in and react to them.”

In botanical terms, the exhibition title “Nascence” refers to the moment right before a bud blooms. “It’s the signs of potential beauty, of a potential future,” said Inez. “Right now, I think we’re in the nascence of a revolution and, as an artist, I believe there is room for beauty in revolution.”

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