How One Painting Set This Seoul Art Collector on a Lifelong Journey https://ift.tt/z5xFS0v

When Mr. Seunghue Lee moved into his new home in Seoul, he knew the bare walls staring back at him needed populating. He bought a painting by renowned Korean painter Kim Tschang-Yeul. Recurrence (1993) features hyperrealistic water drops overlaid on densely printed Chinese characters.

“I looked up the artist after liking the image of the work I’d seen and found out that he was one of the first to travel to Paris from Korea, and ended up living in France,” Lee told Artsy. “The cultural blend in the painting reflected how the artist lived his life, which felt like a perfect match.”

Seven years after buying his first painting, Lee has built a collection of nearly 200 works spanning Korean modernism, post-war abstraction, and contemporary art from across the globe. Its first public exhibition, currently on view by appointment in Seoul’s stylish Samcheong-ro district, arrives at a revealing moment.

Lee’s taste is still evolving; his ambitions remain deliberately open-ended. Titled “What the Surface Remembers,” the show is a snapshot of a collector learning how to connect instinct, scholarship, and cultural identity, featuring works by Philip Guston, Lee Bul, Rashid Johnson, Kelly Akashi, and others.

How Seunghue Lee caught the collecting bug

Lee, who works in finance, wakes up each morning to a Sean Scully painting in his bedroom. In his living room hang works by George Condo, Lee Ufan, and Florian Krewer: works that inspire him in this place he spends most of his time.

Lee’s interest in art began after visits to the Vatican and the Louvre during a university backpacking trip, but his initial acquisitions were driven by feeling. “I never thought about the context of where a work might fit into a collection, because I never thought that I would be a collector,” he said.

His collection is now too large to fit into his private residence. “I have two kids, aged three and one, and it’s important that my family can enjoy the work we have at home,” he said of selecting pieces for his home. “I’d love to open up my home one day, but with young children it can be chaotic, which is why we’re showing at an exhibition venue.”

Today, his buying approach is characterized by rigorous research into an artist’s life, provenance, and materials. Lee engages with artists over years: studying their careers and observing their practice during studio visits.

“Art is like wine,” he noted. “Learning the basics gets you interested in it, but as you go deeper, it gets more complex and fascinating.”

He’s learned that collecting is not a solitary pursuit. Leaning on other collectors, galleries, artists, and museum patrons has taught him far more than he could have learned on his own. Now, with a global network of industry peers, he’s sharpened his eye.

Toyin Ojih Odutola, for instance, is one such artist whom Lee hopes to engage with more deeply. Her nearly 3-meter triptych Time, Energy, Resources (2024–25) provides a statement introduction to his exhibition: Visitors must circle the freestanding work to experience the scale of the artist’s commentary on power and human agency. “I fell in love with her work because it captures all these fictional characters as portraits, and I feel there are some Asian aspects in her work, too,” Lee said.

Leiko Ikemura is another whom Lee has met with several times during travels and studio visits. Her patinated bronze sculpture Usagi Girl (2002/23) is one of four pieces Lee owns by the Berlin-based Japanese artist. The hybrid rabbit-human figure, with a hollow bell-shaped “skirt” for a body, suggests a sanctuary of incubation that feels almost maternal. “I’m mesmerized by the quasi-abstract, figurative work and how it captures a sense of spirituality across her paintings and sculptures.”

Building a borderless collection

In Lee’s hallway sits Olga de Amaral’s multimedia sculpture, Aqua Plata (2012), “silver water.” As the natural light changes throughout the day, crisp blue tones give way to metallic reflections, revealing the work anew.

Lee has come to expect similar changes in his own sensibilities. “I thought I knew what my taste in art was, but that was completely shattered as I grew and learned more,” he reflected. “Now, I have more of an appreciation for things I previously may not have.”

His collection initially gravitated towards artists who represented Korea on the world stage, from traditional ink paintings to the Dansaekhwa movement led by Park Seo-Bo in the 1970s.

“I wanted to put Korean artists in context with what’s happening elsewhere around the world,” he said. His collection often pairs Korean and international artists working in similar periods: Works by Ed Clark, David Hammons, and Huguette Caland sit alongside their Korean contemporaries.

Lee sees his collection as bridging geographies and facilitating an international exchange between works. “Korean art can be found all over the world, not just in Korea,” he said. “Today, it’s really hard to tie artists of any nationality to just one location, and it's important that my collection reflects that.”

One of his latest acquisitions encapsulates how much Lee’s taste has evolved. Following an encounter with artist Ryan Gander in Seoul, he bought I’ve felt everything I'm going to feel - The Unspeakable World (2026), a small sculpture featuring an animatronic mouse. “I love that it’s subtle and unexpected and introduces a layer of wit, but also reflection for the viewer,” he said of the work’s placement in the exhibition among historical paintings by the likes of Clark and Philip Guston.

This marks the first time the public will encounter the breadth of Lee’s collection, from large-scale tapestries by Otobong Nkanga to Mark Bradford mixed-media works. But he sees the show less as a culmination than an early milestone.

“This exhibition has allowed me to take stock of my collection so far, connect the dots between the works, and get clear on what I want to do in future,” he said. “I know this isn’t going to be perfect because I’ve never done it before, but this is not the end of my collection. I just want to share where I’ve gotten to so far.”

He remains deliberately undecided about what form the collection might eventually take. “What I like most about collecting is that you never know what’s coming next,” he said. “What I do know is that this is something I will do for the rest of my life.”

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New York‘s High Line announces fall 2026 commissions by Alvaro Barrington, Marianna Simnett, and more. https://ift.tt/3nB9Cpk

High Line Art has announced its fall 2026 season of commissions, with new sculptural works by Marianna Simnett, Amol K. Patil, and Alvaro Barrington, alongside a billboard by Christopher Williams. The works will open throughout September and November and continue themes of bodies, labor, and infrastructure that have run through the park‘s 2026 program.

Opening in September at 30th Street near Hudson Yards, Simnett’s Interlude (2026) installs a pair of concession stands. In one stand, a video loop shows a food vendor preparing stadium hot dogs under fluorescent light while singing an eerie, melancholic song. The Berlin- and New York–based artist is known for multidisciplinary work blending horror, humor, and theater to explore vulnerability and metamorphosis. With this work, she turns an ordinarily invisible worker‘s shift into what High Line Art describes as “a powerful and humanizing performance of agency, despair, and survival.”

Patil‘s The Voices Cast in Dust (2026), opening at 24th Street near Chelsea in early October, is a monumental bronze sculpture depicting a mass of human figures merging into a single form, limbs jutting outward in what reads alternately as collective striving and a fight for survival. Patil, a conceptual and performance artist based between Mumbai and Amsterdam, draws on a family history of working-class advocacy—his grandfather was a folk poet, his father an avant-garde playwright who chronicled the struggles of Mumbai‘s mill and sanitation workers—to bridge labor conditions in Mumbai and New York.

In November, Barrington will present Western Beef-High Line (2026) at 14th Street near the Whitney Museum of American Art, a work constructed with a steel-framed billboard strung with colored plastic vinyl strips of the kind used in supermarkets and butcher shops, framed by plastic milk crates. The work engages the sunset views over the Hudson River once painted by the Hudson River School. “We are best served as an immigrant nation, in dialogue with each other,” Barrington wrote of the piece, which he called a “contemporary ‘stained glass’ proposition.” Barrington, who was raised between the Caribbean and Brooklyn, is primarily a painter whose tactile, multimedia practice incorporates burlap, textiles, and industrial materials such as chain-link fencing.

“Each of this fall‘s commissions considers our relationships to various forms of labor and each other, in revealing and startling ways,” said Cecilia Alemani, director and chief curator of High Line Art, in a statement. “Marianna Simnett’‘s concession stand with a video of a solitary vendor transforms a routine work shift into a powerful performance of survival. Amol K. Patil bridges the distance between Mumbai and New York with a bronze sculpture depicting a multitude of figures, a monumental tribute to the labor that supports city life. And Alvaro Barrington‘s luminous composition stands as a public celebration of heritage and shared humanity.”

Williams‘s billboard, MODEL (High Line Billboard, 18th Street and 10th Avenue, New York, 10011) (2026), meanwhile, opens in September at 18th Street in West Chelsea. Built from an object in his enamel-on-glass series, the sign appears industrial from a distance but up close reveals handmade brushwork. Its texture recalls the woodchip-patterned Rauhfaser wallpaper common in 20th-century European working-class interiors—a pointed juxtaposition against the luxury towers now surrounding the High Line.

The fall lineup follows the April opening of Tuan Andrew Nguyen’s 27-foot sandstone Buddha sculpture on the High Line Plinth, and joins current-season works by Katherine Bernhardt, Patricia Ayres, and Derek Fordjour.

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Sliman Mansour, Palestinian artist of land and memory, has died at 79. https://ift.tt/rvszuX7

Untitled, 1988
Sliman Mansour
Gallery One

Sliman Mansour, the Palestinian painter whose depictions of farmers, hill villages, and embroidered dress are some of the most widely circulated in modern Arab art, has died at 79. His family announced the death on Monday, August 24th, in a story post on Instagram. He died at his home in Jerusalem. “We lost a father, our source of love, strength, and home,” the family wrote.

The family gave no cause of death, although Al Jazeera reported that Mansour had been ill for some time.

Mansour was born in 1947 in Birzeit, Palestine, north of Ramallah, and studied art and design in Jerusalem, graduating in 1970. He came to prominence in the 1970s as part of a generation of Palestinian painters, writers, and poets who were assembling a visual vocabulary out of land, labor, and household objects.

His best-known painting dates from that decade: a 1973 oil of an elderly porter carrying the city of Jerusalem on his back, usually given in English as The Camel/Carrier of Hardships. Mansour painted several versions of the subject, with a 2005 acrylic version selling for his record auction price of $257,000 in 2015 at Christie’s. Often reproduced, the painting signifies the struggle of the heavy weight of Palestinian history,

Untitled, 2002
Sliman Mansour
Zawyeh Gallery

Mansour drew on Canaanite, Pharaonic, and Assyrian antiquity as well as Islamic and Arab traditions of calligraphy and geometric ornament in his work. He used these techniques to depict scenes from village life in the hills around his birthplace. Olives and oranges feature as symbols of the land throughout his rich and bold compositions. He often portrayed doves, too, that evoke his hope for peace in the future.

Mansour was also a key figure in the Palestinian art community, co-founding the League of Palestinian Artists, which he led for several years. In the late 1980s, Mansour helped found the New Vision group; after Palestinian artists boycotted Israeli-made art supplies, its members worked instead in mud, straw, wood, leather, henna, and natural dyes. He returned to clay decades later in The Portrait (Portrait of a Man) (2017 and 2019), made in clay and acrylic on wood.

Mansour exhibited widely in the Arab world and internationally, and his work is held in museums and private collections like the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi and the Barjeel Art Foundation in Sharjah, UAE. Among his awards was the UNESCO-Sharjah Prize for Arab Culture, which he received in 2019.

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From Serena Williams to John McEnroe, 6 Tennis Icons Who Collect Art https://ift.tt/JLhsySt

John McEnroe, Flushing, NY, 1979
Walter Iooss, Jr.
Bruce Silverstein Gallery

Serena Williams, Scottsdale, AZ, 2003
Walter Iooss, Jr.
Bruce Silverstein Gallery

Tennis has long carried associations with wealth, style, and exclusivity. Its pristine courts, private clubs, and well-dressed spectators have helped cultivate an image of the sport that extends far beyond its competitions.

As its biggest players become global celebrities, their tastes off the court—from fashion and watches to architecture and design—have attracted nearly as much attention as their serves.

For several tennis stars, that interest extends to contemporary art. Some have quietly built significant collections; others have developed close relationships with artists, galleries, and museums. A few have even crossed into the art business themselves.

Here, Artsy looks at six tennis stars who have made art an important part of their lives.

Venus Williams

Few tennis players have had as broad a cultural impact as the Williams sisters. Both Serena and Venus have separately achieved a level of fame comparable to that of few athletes in the modern era.

Beyond her achievements on the court, Venus Williams has built a career encompassing fashion, design, philanthropy, and, increasingly, contemporary art.

Venus is a member of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Vanguard Council, a group of collectors and patrons who support the museum’s contemporary art programming. In 2024, she also collaborated with the Carnegie Museum of Art on a six-episode podcast tied to its exhibition “Widening the Lens: Photography, Ecology, and the Contemporary Landscape,” interviewing participating artists including Xaviera Simmons and Skye Hopinka.

Serena Williams

Serena Williams, Key Biscayne, FL, 2006
Walter Iooss, Jr.
Bruce Silverstein Gallery

Serena Williams, 23-time Grand Slam winner, has developed a substantial contemporary art collection, with a particular emphasis on Black artists.

When she opened her Florida home to Architectural Digest in 2021, art was central to the interiors. Large-scale works by Radcliffe Bailey, Leonardo Drew, Titus Kaphar, and Nick Cave appeared throughout the house, including in a soaring central space that Williams described as an “art gallery.”

Serena has also appeared on the other side of the artist-collector relationship. In 2022, Toyin Ojih Odutola created Serena, a portrait in pastel, charcoal, and graphite commissioned by the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery for its Portrait of a Nation Award. Venus was honored in the same project with Rob Pruitt’s Venus Williams, Double Portrait (2022), made with crayon, pastel, and coffee wash.

Together, the Williams sisters have become unusually visible advocates for contemporary artists, bringing their influence as athletes and cultural figures into museums, galleries, and private collecting.

Reilly Opelka

When Venus Williams cohosted a soiree with Pace Gallery during Art Basel Miami Beach in 2023, the attendees included the American player Reilly Opelka.

Opelka belongs to a younger generation of athletes for whom contemporary art has become an increasingly serious pursuit.

He is a regular at art fairs and artist studios and has developed friendships across the art world. These include German painter Friedrich Kunath and Belgian gallerist Tim Van Laere, whose branded pink tote bag he took onto the court for a 2021 U.S. Open match (he was fined $10,000 for failing to cover it up). Van Laere was a college tennis player and runs the TVLG Art x Tennis initiative in partnership with tennis equipment brand Tecnifibre.

Like Venus, Opelka has said that he buys largely on instinct rather than working with an advisor. His collection includes works by artists such as Rinus Van de Velde, Jonathan Meese, and Kati Heck. The relationship with Heck has even moved in the opposite direction: She made Opelka the subject of Jungs III – Goldene Hand (2022), shown in her exhibition “Legends” at Tim Van Laere Gallery.

By 2023, Opelka told GQ that he had “no wall space” left at home. It apparently has not stopped him from collecting.

John McEnroe

John McEnroe, Tatum O'Neal and Baby Kevin, 1986
Andy Warhol
Hedges Projects

Long before contemporary athletes became regulars at art fairs, John McEnroe was buying—and selling—art.

The seven-time Grand Slam singles champion opened the John McEnroe Gallery in New York’s SoHo in 1994. Though the gallery lasted only a few years, McEnroe’s involvement with art has proved much more durable.

Over the decades, he has cultivated relationships with artists including Eric Fischl and Jonas Wood. In 1986, Andy Warhol famously made a portrait of McEnroe and his then-wife, actress Tatum O’Neal.

His collection reflects both his longevity in the art world and an appetite that extends well beyond blue-chip names. Alongside works by Jean-Michel Basquiat, Ed Ruscha, Warhol, Glenn Ligon, Oscar Murillo, Kara Walker, Bob Thompson, and more, McEnroe has collected works by self-taught artists such as Henry Darger, Acharya Vyakul, and Bill Traylor.

For McEnroe, art has never been merely an athlete’s side interest. He has spent decades operating as a collector, dealer, and art world insider.

Maria Sharapova

Since retiring from professional tennis in 2020, Maria Sharapova has become increasingly visible in the worlds of art, architecture, and design.

Her collecting sensibility tends toward restrained, process-driven work, informed in part by the years she spent traveling as a professional athlete. Sharapova has spoken particularly about the influence of Japanese craft and design traditions on her taste, an interest also reflected in her collection of furniture.

Her Los Angeles home includes works such as a painting from Joe Goode’s “Ocean Blue” series, a black-and-white photograph of Basquiat by Christopher Makos, and an abstract painting by Chris Gwaltney. Sharapova has credited her friendship with Gwaltney with helping ignite her interest in collecting.

That interest extends beyond fine art. Her interiors include furniture by designers and craftspeople such as George Nakashima and Jean Touret, and she has collaborated with Canadian furniture company Rove Concepts on her own designs.

For Sharapova, collecting is less about assembling recognizable names than creating a coherent visual environment where art, furniture, architecture, and craft are closely intertwined.

Wojciech Fibak

Polish tennis champion Wojciech Fibak has taken an equally committed approach to art, building a collection and gallery practice largely around artists from his home country.

Fibak, who reached world No. 10 in 1977, turned increasingly toward the art world after his tennis career. In 2001, he founded Galeria Fibak in Warsaw, focusing largely on 20th-century and contemporary Polish art.

His private collection follows a similar emphasis. Alongside works by international figures such as Basquiat and Jean Dubuffet, Fibak has collected art by major Polish artists including Mela Muter, Magdalena Abakanowicz, Piotr Potworowski, Stefan Gierowski, and Tamara de Lempicka, as well as works by contemporary artists such as Andrzej Nowacki.

That sustained focus has made Fibak not simply a celebrity collector but an advocate for Polish art, using his profile and resources to promote artists both at home and internationally.

Shop Artsy’s curated collection of tennis-themed artworks here.

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Why Contemporary Painters Are Obsessed with Tennis https://ift.tt/4rjp6lN

When Eric Ravilious was selected to represent English culture at the 1937 Paris International Exhibition, he designed a vast mural based on his earlier triptych, Tennis (1930), in which men and women in immaculate whites dart across a red-clay court bordered by a brilliant green lawn. Since modern tennis emerged in mid-19th-century England and spread abroad, artists have been drawn to its clean geometry, kinetic rhythms, and associations with leisure. Edward Hopper captured the game’s elegant choreography in his energetic watercolor Tennis Players (1916–20), while Andy Warhol transformed champion Chris Evert into a Pop icon in 38 silkscreen portraits.

Today, the sport is enjoying renewed prominence, both on and off the court. Participation in the United States has risen 54 percent since 2019, reaching a record of 27.3 million players in 2025, according to the United States Tennis Association. Tennis-core has inspired interiors, fashion lines, and films like Luca Guadagnino’s box-office hit Challengers. Museums too have followed suit. The Newport Art Museum recently traced the game’s visual history in “The Court: Art in Play,” while Pérez Art Museum Miami’s current “Get in the Game: Sports, Art, Culture” includes many racket-centric works. This past June, 32 artists competed on a painted court at the inaugural Casa Axis International Open in Valencia, Spain; the winner earned a residency and the chance to reimagine the court for next year’s event.

Alcaraz and Sinner Conquer New York, 2025
Shaun Ellison
ART FOR CHANGE

While tennis’s graphic simplicity and country-club history remain part of its appeal, contemporary painters including Jonas Wood, Sheena Rose, Honor Titus, Rachael Bos, and Shaun Ellison have embraced the sport’s recent reinvention. Using familiar forms such as the divided court, the net, the uniform, and the lone figure, artists are revealing how differently the game is played, watched, and pictured today.

Brooklyn-based painter Shaun Ellison knows the sport’s changing public image firsthand. A former Division I player who competed internationally as a junior, the South African artist once associated the game with “white privilege” and a rigid perfectionism he wanted to escape. Returning years later, he found a more diverse and expressive roster of stars—including Coco Gauff, Frances Tiafoe, Naomi Osaka, and Felix Auger-Aliassime—whose backgrounds and distinctive styles disrupted the conventionally elite mold and opened the once-insular environment up. “There’s definitely more freedom to be oneself,” he told Artsy in an interview.

Ellison pictures that accessibility by treating the court as a theatrical stage shared by players and spectators. In his “Grand Slam” paintings, fans appear as individuals distinguished by their gestures and attire. More recent works collage matches amid sunflowers, swimming pools, airplanes, city skylines, and other evidence of life unfolding beyond the baseline. In the hand-embellished edition US Open, Federer vs. Nadal (2025), Ellison tempers the imagined match’s “life-or-death” intensity with a giraffe peering over the bleachers and a man in a fluorescent vest and hard hat carrying a traffic cone. “There’s tennis here,” he said, “but it’s not everything.”

While painting helped to repair Ellison’s relationship with tennis, painting its female champions helped to heal Sheena Rose’s relationship with her body. Diagnosed with lupus, a chronic autoimmune disease, the Barbados-based artist could no longer cycle or kickbox as she once had. Still, she could channel her energy into paintings of Black athletes in motion. “It started as a kind of wish fulfillment,” she told Artsy. “I hid their faces so I could imagine they were me or that they could be any Black woman who wanted to play.”

Rose spends hours studying images of her subjects’ matches, searching for telling positions and postures. Although oversized cumulus-shaped afros obscure their features, her players remain identifiable through their signature stances. “It’s like a fingerprint,” she said, citing Venus Williams’s raised foot and other players’ characteristic leaps.

Lately, Rose’s flat, Technicolor compositions have centered on moments of compassion rather than competition between opponents. Surreal interventions like a shower of shimmering asterisks or, in Good Omen (2024), a kaleidoscope of monarch butterflies commemorate the visibility and permission that a generation of Black all-stars have established for the younger athletes coming up behind them. “It’s as much about their energy and connection as it is the game,” she said.

Aim Higher, 2024
Sheena Rose
Johansson Projects

Chicago-based painter Rachael Bos is likewise an avid researcher, though her investigations often begin with a player’s kit. She traces each outfit to a specific match, then searches the footage for the right pose. Uniforms “serve a utilitarian purpose,” she said, while also representing so much: “an athlete, a nation, an era.” In J. Dokic (2022), Jelena Dokic’s polka-dot skirt set turns her torso into a dense field of pattern, while C. Evert (2023) renders Chris Evert’s silvery, semi-sheer dress in hyperreal detail, down to the spandex shorts visible just beneath the pleated skirt.

Many of her portraits exclude everything above the mouth and below the knees. For Bos, the tight-cropped framing evokes the public gaze that elevates athletes into symbols that transcend the individual. Social media has shifted that dynamic, she observed: Not only do fans have greater access to players, but athletes have a platform to speak for themselves. That visibility is helping tennis stars acquire the “rock-star” status long afforded athletes in other major American sports. Their kits, she adds, carry the game’s enduring traditions into its pop-culture present.

The bold patterns covering Bos’s outfits seem to expand across Jonas Wood’s paintings. The Los Angeles–based artist began painting tennis courts—or, more precisely, images of courts appearing on screens in his home and studio—in 2011. Their standardized layout allows for endless variations on the same form. “My paintings of tennis courts are about an interest in abstraction, and how the court becomes a geometric puzzle,” he has said.

For his recent eponymous exhibition at Gagosian Beverly Hills, Wood based each painting on a photograph or collage of a televised match, preserving the foreshortened view from behind the baseline. The court sits inside a horizontal television screen, itself sometimes nested within a vertical phone screen: a frame within a frame within a frame. Because the viewpoint remains fixed, differences in palette, surface texture, and signage identify each tournament: rust-red clay in French Open with Wood Grain (2025), brilliant purple set within charcoal gray in WTA Finals Riyadh (2025). The repetition makes the court something like scales for a pianist—a way, Wood has said, to “keep practicing something I like, and continue to get better at it.”

As both a player and a painter, Los Angeles–based artist Honor Titus knows the comparison firsthand. “They’re both intensely psychological,” he told Artsy, “while also being chiseling endeavors.” First shown at Timothy Taylor, his richly colored compositions feature debonair Black players lunging and serving across manicured courts. Rippling muscles and kinetic postures convey their athleticism, while narrowed eyes and slackened jaws register intense concentration.

In Down the Line (2020), a man in a polo, slacks, and adidas Originals Rod Laver sneakers reaches to return a ball over a scrollwork fence, his gaze fixed just beyond the painting’s right edge. By centering Black players within rarefied settings, Titus, like Rose, revises a visual tradition long shaped by racial and class exclusion.

His court’s stark geometries dramatize these tensions. “Separation and confinement are already built into the architecture of the court,” Titus said. “The lines, the net, what’s in, what’s out, who belongs on which side.” The ornamental wrought-iron fences and white colonnades that cut across the compositions evoke private clubs and gated estates, wherein beautiful design doubles as a barrier. His compound perspectives further unsettle the divisions, collapsing foreground and background until the painted boundaries seem to shift beneath the players’ feet.

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Painter Werner Bronkhorst to unveil largest exhibition to date at Berlin skyscraper in October. https://ift.tt/QVRYrHg

South African painter Werner Bronkhorst has announced “HIGH,” his largest exhibition to date, opening October 2–4 at the Atrium Tower on Marlene-Dietrich-Platz in Berlin’s Potsdamer Platz.The show marks his European debut and will present more than 40 new paintings inspired by the energy and open possibility of the sky.

Bronkhorst is known for his painting technique in which thick, heavily applied layers of paint are built up to create richly three-dimensional backgrounds. He then paints in hyper-realistic miniature figures and objects with exacting detail.

The resulting works, which are part abstract expressionism, part trompe l’oeil, invite viewers to imagine themselves as tiny people inside a vast, textured world, inspired, he says, byAndy Warhol, Willem De Kooning, Keith Haring and René Magritte. Bronkhorst organizes his output into a series of thematically linked collections that contain hidden cheeky references to the slogan of “Sex, Drugs and Rock and Roll.”

Country Road, 2026
Werner Bronkhorst
FairArt

For instance, “White Lines” explored snow and winter; “Forbidden Grass” centred on sports and park life; “Wet” turned to water. A separate body of charcoal drawings of speeding cars reflects a parallel fascination with movement and black-and-white photography, and includes an ongoing series devoted to the Porsche 911.

“HIGH” moves the focus skyward, with planes crossing distant horizons, hot-air balloons adrift in cloud, and skydivers suspended in open air. The centrepiece is Come Up For Air (2026), a human-size canvas populated by 25 individually detailed hot-air balloons floating across a sunset.

Bronkhorst, who has almost 2 million followers on Instagram, has built his fanbase almost entirely through social media, where he shares his process in real time. Born in Pretoria, South Africa, he moved to Sydney in 2020, initially working as a bespoke furniture designer. Though he sells his artwork primarily through timed drops, original artworks by Bronkhorst have sold for over six-figure sums at auction. In December, he set an auction benchmark of $460,000 at FairArt online auctions for Tiebreak! (2025). This year, exhibitions of his work have been displayed at Clifton Gallery and WEART.

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Rising Painter Nengi Omuku Dreams of Utopia Through Painting https://ift.tt/JkD1ryG

For many years, the artist Nengi Omuku believed that her artworks were hopeful conjurings of a yet-unrealized world, her personal utopias. “I thought I was dreaming of a future,” she recently said on a video call from her studio.

The artist, who splits her time between London and Lagos, creates ecstatic, colorful oil paintings on sanyan, a traditional, pre-colonial Yoruba textile found in Nigeria. She has risen through the art world over the past decade with her spectacular scenes, which present abstracted figures in an Edenic natural world. These visions propose moments of reconciliation, community gathering, and natural beauty following years of international turmoil.

Omuku paints onto strips of gessoed sanyan, the finished works hanging from wooden dowels, like banners that move in the air. Her paintings have earned acclaim with presentations at The Armory Show and 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair, along with solo shows at Kasmin, New York (2024), and Hastings Contemporary and Arnolfini in the U.K. (2023–24). In 2025, she joined the inaugural Artist Council of the Museum of West African Art, Benin City, Nigeria.

Lately, however, Omuku has started to understand her work differently. Earlier this summer, she opened “The Gathering” at the de Young Museum in San Francisco—her first solo museum exhibition in the U.S. The exhibition, curated by Natasha Becker and on view through May 14, 2028, brings together eight oil paintings made over the past six years. Omuku’s works are installed within the museum’s African art gallery, as part of an ongoing exhibition series focused on cross-generational juxtapositions.

Omuku’s paintings appear alongside 19th-century guardian reliquary sculptures from the Obamba people, 20th-century Asante Kente cloths (historically worn by royalty), and ceremonial masks and costumes. For Omuku, seeing her own works alongside centuries-old artworks and objects has been eye-opening.

“Seeing the historical sculptures in the space, I felt like some sort of ancestral knowledge that had been passed down without me knowing,” said Omuku. “It felt like a kind of remembering that I was not conscious of.”

Omuku was caught off guard by her reaction. “It wasn’t until this show that I started thinking about my works as ancestral memory,” she said. “Grappling with the concept of memory was, on some level, scary for me, but very real. When I walked into the room, there was a kind of conversation. It felt like there was a communion that Natasha [Becker] had orchestrated for the work to come and meet each other.”

In recent years, amid a period of global tumult, she had been struggling to understand the significance of her work in the world. Her paintings suggest nature as a site of reprieve and place of beauty. Florals, inspired by the artist’s mother’s work as a florist and gardener, factor heavily into her works, with figures often dwarfed by botanicals.

“For a long time, I thought, what right do I have as a Black African woman making work today and painting flowers? I felt there was much more that’s pressing to be discussed,” she said. “Now I see my work through a different lens. I’m trusting myself a bit more, now knowing that while it still goes back to nature, it also goes back further than my own consciousness.”

Omuku’s material choices have been changing alongside her shifting conceptual framework. Some of the more recent works in the exhibition, made in 2025, use newly woven sanyan fabric, commissioned by sewing weavers the artist found in the Middle Belt of Nigeria. Previously, the artist had worked almost exclusively with vintage sanyan repurposed from dresses and other articles of clothing. For instance, a few works in the show are painted on sanyan taken from vintage wrap skirts. The shift to newly woven sanyan has liberated her painting from the confines of bodily scale.

The largest painting in the show, New Haven (2025), is made on new sanyan, and the work marks new territory for the artist, who found herself able to “go beyond and start dreaming even more through painting.” In the composition, an apocalyptic-looking, multicolored sky looms above a sprawling landscape. Plants tower over figures, with yellow fuel cans scattered about. The image is inspired by a collage of press photographs of people queuing for fuel in Lagos, where scarcities are common though the nation produces oil. “I wanted to create this landscape where these people have walked into this very strange space and have left jerry cans behind,” said Omuku. “They’re leaving their woes behind and wandering into this new space, but it’s also flat and unreal, from a dream.”

As in this work, Omuku’s works sometimes reimagine scenes from contemporary Lagos in aspirational ways. She sees herself moving further into this dream world. Lately, she’s embraced bright, layered colors and an approach she describes as almost pointillist. Her process is meditative. “I realized that as an artist, I actually have to first take care of myself and my mind through the process of making art, for it to truly be effective,” she said, “and for people to truly feel the things that I’m trying to say.”

A growing part of her practice happens outside the studio, in community building. In 2019, she founded The Art of Healing, a charity that supports mental well-being for Nigerians.

“We install art in intensive-care psychiatric wards, and we do workshops every month as well, as a form of therapy,” the artist explained. “I realized I had been overburdening my paintings with the task of healing the world. Extracting this part from my practice and having it be a real-world application solved that problem for me and allowed my painting to have its own autonomy and exist however it chooses to materialize.”

Now, the artist is leaning into her instincts as she prepares for two more upcoming U.S. museum shows: an exhibition of figurative works, “There We Sat Down,” at the SCAD Museum of Art in Savannah, Georgia, and an exhibition at the Frye Art Museum in Seattle rooted entirely in landscape.

With one show looking back at the figures she painted before, and one pressing further into the dreamed-up worlds she paints now, Omuku is testing her ability to innovate and honor cultural memory all at once.

from Artsy News https://ift.tt/AO8Ddya