For This Couple, Falling in Love Sparked a Lifelong Journey of Art Collecting https://ift.tt/I0r3wBs

In some ways, Johanna and Friedrich Gräfling have grown up together while collecting.

Today, the Frankfurt-based collectors, now in their thirties, hold nearly 650 works in their collection, including pieces by major names such as Alicja Kwade, Michael Sailstorfer, and Laure Prouvost.

But when their collecting journey began more than 15 years ago, they were still university students, newly dating. The couple met at a party hosted by a mutual friend in London. Friedrich was living in London, where he was a student at the Architectural Association. Johanna was visiting, then an art history student studying abroad at the Sorbonne in Paris. “At that time, I wanted to work in the art market, which I always found super fascinating,” she told Artsy. “I spent all my time at museums.”

Friedrich had become involved in the street art scene as a teenager in North Bavaria. By the time he met Johanna, he was spending his free time going to studio visits, exhibitions, and hanging out with artists in his circle.

Soon, the young couple was traveling back and forth between Paris and London.

“We clicked through this interest in art,” said Johanna. “Art was always something that connected us from the very beginning. From the moment our relationship began, Friedrich asked me about art and showed me what he was interested in. We began to discover artists together.”

For the Gräflings, collecting has never been simply a matter of acquisition. It has become a way of building long-term relationships with artists, living closely with their work, and inviting others into that experience. What began as a shared curiosity between two young students has since grown into a broader ethos of art as something to be lived with, shared, and supported over time.

A communal collection

In 2013, the couple founded Salon Kennedy, an impromptu apartment salon staged in one room of their home.

“We’ve always liked to entertain in a way, to have people over, cook for them, to bring people together. Historically speaking, we liked the idea of the salon culture,” said Johanna. “We shoved all the furniture away, invited the artists to hang their works, and invited people over who we thought could be relevant for them to get to know the artists’ works.”

Salon Kennedy still exists, in a more formalized way, as a permanent exhibition space in the couple’s Frankfurt apartment. Today, Johanna and Friedrich also run Gräfling, a Frankfurt-based design studio that works across architecture and design, as well as Kunstverein Wiesen, a nonprofit art institution in rural Germany, focused on a slower rhythm of making and connecting with art.

“You actively have to decide to come to drive out to Wiesen, in the countryside, to visit the exhibitions,” said Friedrich, “It’s a different way of looking at art when you don’t have anything else to distract you.”

Collecting with consideration

Despite busy schedules and two children, the couple never rushes to collect. Instead, they’ve cultivated a rigorous process of purchasing art that prizes deep connection over fleeting thrills. Purchasing a first work by a new artist can take the Gräflings years to decide upon.

“We don’t buy works in a moment of passion,” said Friedrich. “There’s a long journey until we are committed, and we know we are 100 percent sure we want to follow this artist as long as we can financially.”

The aim is never to own just a single work but to grow alongside an artist, collecting their oeuvre in depth. Today, the Gräflings hold deep collections of works by artists including Sailstorfer, Paul Czerlitzki, Kwade, Jorinde Voigt, Prouvost, Grace Weaver, Christian Jankowski, Gregor Hildebrandt, and Sung Tieu. They continue to discover new artists through exhibitions, fairs, and other artists, some of whom have become friends.

But while the couple espouses an intellectual approach to building their collection, art has found its way into the most intimate moments of their lives.

“In the dining room, we have a huge painting by Grace Weaver, which is very colorful and very personal because this was our wedding gift,” said Johanna. “She painted the scenery of our wedding in her way. This is the most dominant piece in the dining area.”

Meanwhile, in their bedroom, among works by Prouvost, Andreas Gursky, Taryn Simon, and Kwade, are two paintings by Hildebrandt, made as presents for the births of their children.

The couple doesn’t limit themselves to a single medium or aesthetic when collecting, but focus on works by contemporary artists that they believe will be of historical significance well into the future.

The Gräflings acknowledge that the way they live with art is continuing to evolve. The couple once lived with a Petersburg-style hanging, the apartment’s walls covered in art. After redoing the space, they pared back, putting some work in storage. Now, the work has begun to accumulate again. “The works keep coming,” Johanna said, with a laugh.

This deep pleasure is what has inspired, and continues to inspire, the Gräflings to welcome potential collectors into their home. “It is always nice if we can encourage or transmit the spark we have for art and for buying art and for living with art to people who haven’t had that so far,” said Friedrich.

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London ranked best city in the world for art, according to Time Out survey. https://ift.tt/MCnxUvX

London has been named the best city in the world for art galleries in Time Out’s latest global survey of cultural destinations, ahead of Paris and New York.

The ranking was based on responses from more than 24,000 people worldwide about culture in their cities. Some 81.1 percent of surveyed Londoners said art galleries were what their city did best, compared with 67.9 percent of respondents in Paris and 67.7 percent in New York.

London also placed third for museums, with 88.4 percent of residents praising the city’s offerings, behind Paris and Madrid. Many of London’s leading public institutions, such as the British Museum and Tate Modern, offer free access to their permanent collections, broadening public access to art across periods and media

The ranking comes during a significant year for London’s cultural landscape. The city has welcomed new institutions including V&A East and V&A East Storehouse, the Quentin Blake Centre for Illustration, and the Museum of Youth Culture.The London Museum is also scheduled to open its new location this November in Smithfield, East London.

London’s current exhibition calendar also includes several major presentations. Tate Modern is staging “Frida: The Making of an Icon” an exhibition examining how Frida Kahlo shaped her public identity and became a globally recognizable cultural figure. The Hayward Gallery is hosting a major Anish Kapoor exhibition, while Kew Gardens has installed more than 30 works for “Henry Moore: Monumental Nature.”

Other highlights include “Marilyn Monroe: A Portrait” at the National Portrait Gallery, the Royal Academy of Arts’ 258th Summer Exhibition, and “Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art” at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Tate Modern is also presenting “Tracey Emin: A Second Life,” billed as the largest survey yet of the British artist’s four-decade career.

The art ranking forms part of Time Out’s 2026 guide to the world’s best cities. London placed fourth in the publication’s overall city ranking but took the top position when the results were narrowed to cultural offerings.

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Why Artists Can’t Stop Reinventing the Tarot Deck https://ift.tt/yB8q4oK

Tarot has worn many guises over the centuries. Today, the tarot card deck is considered a divinatory tool, associated with mysticism and the occult. But its origins were anything but witchy; it was born as a courtly game played in the halls of Renaissance Italy.

“Tarot! Renaissance Symbols, Modern Visions,” a new exhibition on view at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York, traces the fascinating transformations and visual evolutions of the tarot. It covers everything from its earliest origins as expanded sets of standard playing cards to its mystical use as a divinatory system to today, when contemporary artists are endlessly reimagining the possibilities of the tarot’s visual archetypes.

The Morgan Library & Museum is a particularly fitting venue for the exhibition. J. Pierpont Morgan, the founder and financier of the library, was a devotee of the occult who frequently consulted astrologers to read his charts. He was an inveterate card player, to boot. In 1911, Morgan acquired 35 lavishly decorated 15th-century playing cards, known as the Visconti-Sforza cards. From that early acquisition, the Morgan Library has continued a tradition of collecting tarot-related materials, much of which is included in the exhibition.

“Tarot!” is divided into two parts, “Renaissance Visions” curated by Joshua O’Driscoll and “Modern Visions” curated by Claire Gilman. “Modern Visions” brings together works by Surrealist artists such as Leonora Carrington and Salvador Dalí, alongside recent creations by Alison Saar, Marcel Dzama, and new commissions by Chris Ofili. Unlike their Renaissance counterparts, modern and contemporary tarot decks have become a popular medium for expressing spirituality, politics, and identity.

How Surrealist artists reinvented tarot

By the mid-20th century, the tarot had become the sphere of predicting occultists. The famous Rider-Waite-Smith tarot deck, created in 1909, was conceived as a collaboration between artist Pamela Colman Smith and British poet Arthur Edward Waite, both of whom were members of the Golden Dawn, a British mystical organization.

The Surrealists changed that, adapting the motifs and symbols of the tarot deck to express their own interests in the unconscious, magic, and a sense of imagination unchained from the strictures of rationality. “The Surrealists associated rational masculinist thinking with the traumas of the war and they turned to the occult—and tarot specifically—as an alternative way of understanding the universe, one that embraced hidden, enigmatic meanings rather than straightforward, unidirectional thinking,” explained Gilman.

Famously, in 1940 and 1941, while André Breton and other Surrealists were stranded in Marseille awaiting exit visas during the war, these artists came together to create Le Jeu de Marseille, a tarot deck that replaced the traditional suits. Flames, wheels, stars, and locks symbolized love, revolution, dreams, and knowledge, respectively—and they recast court cards as geniuses, sirens, and mages associated with figures they admired, like Sigmund Freud and famed French psychic Hélène Smith. The exhibition includes Le Jeu de Marseille, as well as preparatory drawings.

Other Surrealist examples in the show highlight how artists adapted the tarot to create personal mythologies. In Victor Brauner’s painting The Surrealist (1947), the artist pictures himself as the magician from the Tarot de Marseille, an iconic deck that developed in France during the 17th and 18th centuries. Artists like Carrington and Remedios Varo, meanwhile, utilized archetypes from the tarot within their unique symbolic worlds to represent occultism, alchemy, and spiritual transformation. “The tarot Arcana are open-ended, their meaning dependent on who is reading them, who is receiving them, and in what context. This kind of openness appealed to the Surrealists,” Gilman added.

These works expanded the meaning of the tarot into a more widely recognized cultural language: a series of symbols.

Tarot in contemporary art

Today, contemporary artists have stretched tarot’s expressive possibilities even beyond the Surrealist imagination. Many of those in the exhibition have adapted the tarot deck to tell stories of people, histories, and spiritualities previously unseen in the canonical decks.

Among these is Indianapolis-based artist Courtney Alexander’s Dust II Onyx: A Melanated Tarot (2017). Alexander admired the way tarot managed to combine symbolism from across spiritual traditions, but was acutely aware that, as an African American woman, she did not see herself represented in the cards. With Dust II Onyx: A Melanated Tarot, Alexander created a deck that incorporates a wide range of figures from the African diaspora, from popular-culture icons such as Grace Jones and Willow Smith, along with images of the Mursi and Maasai peoples of East Africa and the Asante of West Africa.

French Martinican artist Elizabeth Colomba, meanwhile, first encountered tarot through a reading on Los Angeles’s Venice Beach boardwalk, where she was moved by the way the woman was “channeling an entire lineage of myth, psychology, and intuition.” The artist has recently started a series that focuses on the “positive outcome cards” from the Major Arcana, depicting Black women in regal settings.

Also included in these reimaginings of the tarot’s representation are Alison Saar’s drawings for Skowhegan Tarot Swords cards (2016), which similarly draw on the archetypes of the Rider-Waite-Smith while incorporating divine Yoruba orishas and figures from African American history.

Tarot in political art

While tarot has long been associated with otherworldly realms, some contemporary artists are using the language of tarot to address the social and political realities here on Earth. Artist Cristy C. Road’s The Next World Tarot (2020), for instance, reenvisions the tarot deck through contemporary social issues and social change, picturing protests and scenes of anti-colonialism.

Meanwhile, American artist and trans-rights advocate Edie Fake’s diptych Two of Wands (2025) explores a single card. Associated with forward motion, the card inspired Fake as a way to address anti-trans politics in the leadup to the 2024 election.

Ofili’s 2026 commission for the exhibition tackles fraught histories as well. The British artist has imagined a tarot deck through the lens of Trinidad Carnival, tapping into the lineage of masquerade as a form of resistance. In Diablo (2026), Ofili recreates the tarot’s devil card to play with the racist history of Trinidad’s Carnival. The “Jab Molassie” depicted wears a blackened face, just like white masqueraders who pretended to be enslaved Black Trinidadians, who were banned from attending the 17th- and 18th-century carnivals.

“I think the impetus for the turn to tarot in the contemporary moment and among artists in particular is similar to the reason the Surrealists turned to tarot,” said Gilman. “In times of social and political uncertainty, we seek new ways of understanding our existence and alternative means of navigating the world.”

Artists using tarot for personal cosmologies

Many other contemporary artists in the exhibition had adapted tarot as a mutable symbolic system for representing inner states, dreams, ecology, and personal memories.

Several decks in the exhibition were created during the COVID-19 lockdowns, like Nicolas Bruno’s Somnia Tarot (2020), which filters tarot through his personal experiences with sleep paralysis at the time. Likewise, German artist Kerstin Brätsch’s “PARA PSYCHIC” drawings (2020–21) combine tarot with plant medicine, maps, medieval books, and esoteric knowledge systems.

These works, and many others in the exhibition, emphasize the adaptability of the tarot. “Tarot lends itself to new interpretations. Indeed, it is in its very DNA. And so it provides a framework that artists can modify and innovate, and that can accommodate multiple communities and perspectives,” said Gilman.

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Lynda Benglis inspires the Dior Haute Couture show in Paris. https://ift.tt/GpigEtr

For Dior’s fall/winter 2026–27 haute couture show in Paris, creative director Jonathan Anderson took inspiration from the materially inventive sculptures of American artist Lynda Benglis. Over more than 50 years, Benglis has redefined the boundaries between painting and sculpture, transforming industrial materials like plaster and latex into viscous, amorphous forms.

Presented during Paris Haute Couture Week, the collection—which was Anderson’s second couture collection for the French fashion house—translated many of Benglis’s signature gestures, including knotting, pleating, and draping, into sculptural garments. “I think she’s one of the most important living sculptors in America—in the world,” Anderson told the New York Times.

Many of Benglis’s sculptures begin with materials that are folded, twisted, or molded into three-dimensional forms—a process that Anderson has likened to haute couture, in which fabric is transformed into sculptural silhouettes through handwork. Dior’s ateliers echoed the artist’s practice in metallic textiles, iridescent finishes, richly embroidered surfaces, and soft silver netting designed to evoke the appearance of chicken wire.

The collection also draws on places that have shaped Benglis’s artistic practice. Bright floral embellishments and beadwork reference her “Peacock” series, inspired by time the artist spent in Ahmedabad, India, beginning in the late 1970s. The collection’s palette also evokes the desert landscape of Santa Fe, New Mexico, where Benglis maintains a home and studio. Antique fragments of 18th-century Indian chintz and indienne textiles were incorporated into miniature Lady Dior and Petit Dîner handbags.

Lucky Strike, 2024
Lynda Benglis
Pace Gallery

Coinciding with the collection, Dior presented “Grammar of Forms,” a temporary installation in the sculpture garden of the Musée Rodin that explored the dialogue between Benglis’s sculpture and couture. The collaboration builds on Anderson’s longstanding admiration for Benglis. He first encountered her work at the Hepworth Wakefield in 2015 and later included her sculptures in the 2017 exhibition he curated there, “Disobedient Bodies.” During his tenure at Loewe, he featured Benglis’s work in runway presentations and collaborated with the artist on a jewelry collection in 2024.

The fashion collaboration arrives as Benglis receives renewed institutional attention. Pace Gallery will present a survey of sculptures spanning more than five decades of her career this fall, while a major 2027 retrospective organized by the Kunstmuseum Basel will travel to Tate Modern in London and the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark. Together, the exhibitions underscore the growing recognition of Benglis as one of the most influential post-war American sculptors, whose experimental practice continues to shape conversations across both contemporary art and fashion.

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Fashion Designer Stacey Bendet on Turning Her Manhattan Home into a Living Art Installation https://ift.tt/yGC4XQN

Stacey Bendet founded New York fashion label ALICE + OLIVIA in 2002, initially in pursuit of the perfect pair of pants.

More than two decades later, the brand is synonymous with exuberant femininity: lace, florals, and bold patterns. Bendet serves as founder, CEO, and creative director, and her instinct for color and personal storytelling does not stop at the runway.

She lives in the iconic Dakota Building on Manhattan’s Upper West Side with her husband, film producer Eric Eisner, and their three daughters. Her home is every bit as considered as her collections.

Renovated under the creative direction of Swedish designer Louise Kugelberg Schnabel, the apartment reads as a living art installation. A monumental fresco by Italian artist Francesco Clemente anchors the living room; Bendet’s daughters sleep in hand-painted beds; and a 12-foot table made of hand-painted tiles by Lola Montes Schnabel (Julian Schnabel’s daughter) commands the dining room. A portrait of the three girls, painted by Julian himself, is the first thing visitors see at the door.

For Bendet, collecting isn’t about investment or status. It is about friendship and preserving memories through stories that make a house a home. Here, she shares her approach to living with art.

Tell us a bit about where you live.

Since 2022, I have lived at the Dakota on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Every inch of the apartment was renovated with extraordinary attention to detail and a vision to maintain the building’s authenticity.

The art and furniture were mostly custom-made. The portrait of my three daughters was painted by my friend Julian Schnabel and is the first piece of art you see when you enter my home!

What role does art play in your home?

My entire home is a giant art installation!

My daughters’ beds are hand-painted works of art; the dining room table is 12 feet long and made of hand-painted tiles by Lola Montes Schnabel. I curated the art to feel personal. This is my family's home, and I wanted it to invoke a sense of being a family space.

Do you have different philosophies about art in different rooms?

Certain spaces just feel right to you. You just kind of feel the energy, and that guides you to what type of art makes the most sense for the space.

In the bedroom spaces, the art is more tailored to the individual, while family rooms are a little more grandiose and meant for a wider audience. For example, the living room has a giant fresco by Francesco Clemente, while the bedrooms have artwork that is more personal to each girl, like the colorful painting by Lola Montes Schnabel hanging in my daughter Eloise’s room.

Can you share a favorite piece in your collection right now?

It’s so hard to pick one…I could answer differently on any given day! My collection is about my family and my life. So much of it has been created by friends, and most of our pieces have meaning, so it’s impossible to choose! The tree of life painting from Clemente definitely holds a special place in my heart.

Any meaningful stories or rituals around how you’ve acquired pieces?

Many pieces that I have in my collection come with stories.

Close friends like the Schnabels or Clemente have created pieces specially for my family and me, full of color and texture. Art is really something that brings people together. It’s a story, a memory—and that’s what I love about it.

How has your taste evolved over time?

My taste has broadened. I used to favor decorative pieces, but now I’m more adventurous. I like younger artists, different mediums, even sculptures like the giant Haas Brothers’ sculpture that is in my office at work!

I’ve learned to make interiors that are more about the whole. Where is the space? What is the space? How do we lean into that location?

Do you approach collecting art similarly to how you approach your own creative work?

Ever since I started asking some friends in the art crowd to paint jeans for ALICE + OLIVIA, I realized the powerful synergy between art and fashion.

Over the years, we have collaborated with numerous artists like the estates of Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring, bringing their artwork to life through a different medium.

We are all artists. We just create ours at a faster pace than someone who is creating a painting.

What’s your process when choosing a new piece for your space?

Choosing art for a family home is deeply personal. Sometimes it’s bought on a whim; other times it’s slow and intentional. It was really important for the art in the rooms not to just reflect what I like.

I wanted it to feel like it reflects the tastes of my family.

Are there any artists or artworks you’re currently excited about?

I would love to collect older artwork, Old Masters, and even antique tapestries. I would like to collect Rashid Johnson’s amazing ceramic work, and I am a huge fan of collecting and framing antique dresses. Anything original Zac Posen is true art!

What advice would you give to someone looking to start buying art?

Buy something that you love, not that someone else tells you to love! There are no mistakes in choosing art. Just start with something that moves you, and you can’t go wrong.

Visit galleries, art fairs, and artist studios. Follow artists whose work excites you, and consider supporting emerging artists!

What are some of your favorite works on Artsy right now?

Ethidium Bromide Aqueous Solution, 2005
Damien Hirst
Fine Art Mia

Air, 2007
Francesco Clemente
Pace Prints

Charles the First, 1982/2005
Jean-Michel Basquiat
Taglialatella Galleries

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5 Artists on Our Radar in July 2026 https://ift.tt/t8dVW6R

Let life be beautiful like summer flowers, 2026
Iris Yehong Mao
LATITUDE Gallery New York

“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.

Kayode Ojo

B. 1990, Cookeville, Tennessee. Lives and works in New York City.

Stillpass Zoe Kaia Mango (Wyndham, HK), 2026
Kayode Ojo
M+M Gallery

¥90000 (Silver Taldrex HK), 2026
Kayode Ojo
M+M Gallery

American artist Kayode Ojo is one of the most compelling artists working in sculpture and installation today. He is best known for his seductively staged assemblages which toy with concepts of social status, wealth signaling, and the visual thrill of consumerism. These works often incorporate glitzy, but inexpensive, pieces of fast fashion: costume jewelry, for example, or faux fur coats. Ojo turns these low-cost materials into something prestigious and high value by incorporating them into artworks.

Currently, Ojo’s work is featured in the two-artist exhibition “Every Good Boy Does Fine” alongside artist Buck Ellison at M+M Gallery in Hong Kong, where he is showcasing a series of his high-low assemblages. Here, Ojo uses silver folding sheet music stands as the armature for wigs, sequin dresses, crystal pendants from chandeliers, toy handcuffs, and more. Together, these creations hover like ghosts of a tawdry, but nevertheless alluring, glamour.

A graduate of the School of Visual Arts, New York, the artist had his first solo exhibition with Galerie Balice Hertling in Paris in 2018. Recent solo exhibitions include “An angel is just a messenger” at Maureen Paley in London in 2025 and “Me & U” at Sweetwater in Berlin in 2024. He’s also exhibited at David Zwirner’s 52 Walker space in New York.

Iris Yehong Mao

B. 1976, Shanghai. Lives and works in Los Angeles.

A Sea of Night-Blue Blossoms, 2026
Iris Yehong Mao
LATITUDE Gallery New York

Iris Yehong Mao paints fantastically colorful floral visions. These lush scenes call to mind Monet’s “Water Lilies” and the impastoed vigor of Van Gogh—but in a near-psychedelic color palette. The artist’s work is currently featured in the two-artist show “Inner Landscapes” at LATITUDE Gallery in New York.

The longer one looks at Mao’s oil-and-acrylic paintings, the more pleasurably disorienting they become. As blossomy bits of landscape give way to sweeps of color, unseen horizons give the paintings the sensation of a fever dream. The painting Fallen stars in the rain forest (2026) feels like looking at plant life underwater, the plants slowly swaying in tides.

Now based in Los Angeles, Mao graduated from Shanghai Academy of Arts and Crafts in 1996 and School of Fine Arts, Shanghai University in 2000. Recent group shows include “Unbridled: Horsin’ Around” at LATITUDE Gallery in 2026, “Earth to Sky” at SHRINE in New York in 2025, and “Rosebuds and Sidewalk Ends” at Real Tinsel and Evil Twins Gallery in Milwaukee in 2024.

Nabilah Nordin

B. 1991, Singapore. Lives and works in Los Angeles.

Deadweight, 2026
Nabilah Nordin
island

Phrase, 2024
Nabilah Nordin
Neon Parc

Singaporean-Australian artist Nabilah Nordin makes topsy-turvy abstract sculptures that sometimes look like energetic notebook scribbles brought off the page and into three dimensions. Made intuitively, these sculptures often seem to teeter with idiosyncratic drama. Bright and colorful, their surfaces are anything but uniform, alternately rough, drippy, and porous. At times, the Los Angeles–based artist also works with unlikely materials such as deflated balloons and epoxy-covered bread.

Based in Los Angeles, Nordin currently has a solo exhibition “Deadweight” at island in New York. The exhibition follows her breakout 2025 exhibition “Scripts” at Neon Parc in Brunswick, Australia.

Carlos Idun-Tawiah

B. 1997, Takoradi, Ghana. Lives and works in Accra.

Home Sweet Home, Accra, Ghana, 2022.
Carlos Idun-Tawiah
Alta

Ghanaian photographer and filmmaker Carlos Idun-Tawiah creates cinematic, retro-inspired photographs of African life. The artist, who is based in Accra and is represented internationally by Alta, has emerged as a standout in contemporary African photography over the past few years. The artist’s most famous series, “Hero, Father, Friend,” was inspired by his late father, who died when the artist was 18 years old. Wishing he had had more photographs of them together, Idun-Tawiah created a fictionalized archive of images of fathers and sons. The resulting images are a tender celebration of Black fatherhood.

Other series include “Sunday Special,” which draws from the artist’s childhood memories and the rituals of growing up in a Christian Ghanaian household, and “Boys Will Always Be Boys,” which subverts traditional masculine narratives, offering innocent and sweet moments of boyhood in Ghana. Last year, the artist opened his solo exhibition “I’ll be Here to Remind You” at Galería Alta. This summer, he is an artist-in-residence at Studio Voltaire in South London.

Sophie Smorczewski

B. 1999, London. Lives and works in London.

Draped in this whispered hour, 2025
Sophie Smorczewski
SETAREH

Mid Sky, 2026
Sophie Smorczewski
Chilli Gallery

Rising artist Sophie Smorczewski is known for her luminous, delicate paintings based on intimate observations of gardens and landscapes. Other times, she paints fleeting, vulnerable moments of figures sleeping or embracing. There is an ephemeral feel to these images, as if, like a memory, they could quickly dissolve. She often paints on paper, installing her works in wood frames, adding flowers or shells to create small arrangements. Other times, she paints oil directly onto irregular forms of oak wood.

Cycles of growth and decay are central to her work, and the artist grinds organic materials to create her pigments, which continue to change over time. Smorczewski graduated from Manchester School of Art in 2021, receiving the Manchester Academy of Fine Art Prize, and received her MFA in painting from the Slade School of Fine Art in 2025. This month, her work features in a duo show “Soft Evidence” at Chilli Gallery, following group shows at other tastemaking London spaces Soho Revue and Arusha Gallery.

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