Foundations is Artsy’s seasonal online fair spotlighting fresh works from galleries known for spotting and nurturing rising talent. Here, Artsy Editorial selects 10 emerging artists that caught our attention at the fair, each bringing a fresh take on materiality, technique, or subject matter.
Liv Tandrevold Eriksen
B. 1976, Oslo, Norway. Lives and works in Norway.
Space song I, 2023
Liv Tandrevold Eriksen
QB Gallery
Norwegian artist Liv Tandrevold Eriksen’s multidisciplinary practice spans canvas, sculpture, textiles, and social practice. She is known for her nomadic artist-exhibition venture, She Will Studio, which once found its home in an abandoned petrol station and car wash in Ski, Norway.
Exhibited in Foundations as part of a group show with her representing gallery, QB Gallery, Eriksen’s sewn canvas works feature a mesmerizing interplay of lines, fabric, and color, achieved using diluted acrylic paint applied on canvas, then cut, shaped, and arranged in large-scale assemblages. Some marks demand immediate attention with their vivid pigmentation and clarity, while others delicately dissolve into the canvas, imparting a subtle and ephemeral quality.
Warm Stone, 2023
Liv Tandrevold Eriksen
QB Gallery
Heavy Feet, 2023
Liv Tandrevold Eriksen
QB Gallery
In addition to her wall-based works, Eriksen ingeniously transforms painted canvases into freestanding sculptural pieces that exude a sense of weightlessness. Included in Foundations, the sculpture Warm Stone (2023) resembles a dollop of whipped cream gracefully resting on the floor. Its haphazard yet intentional shape conceals a structured interior scaffolding, crafted from concrete and steel.
Eriksen was educated at KHIO Institute in Norway, and her works have been acquired by numerous public collections, including Statens Kunstråd in Sweden, the Norwegian Culture Council, and Norway’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
—Jordan Huelskamp
Yang Bo
B. 1991, Hubei, China. Lives and works in Tokyo.
a passenger, 2023
Yang Bo
Yutaka Kikutake Gallery
River (forever), 2019
Yang Bo
Yutaka Kikutake Gallery
Using bright, confectionary colors and gestural brushstrokes, Yang Bo’s paintings approximate the hyper-stimulating conditions of contemporary life. In the Chinese-born, Japan-based artist’s work, everyday experience and consumed media collapse into each other: Heart-shaped canvases transpose online “likes” into physical objects, text becomes image, screens and landscapes converge.
In Yang’s Foundations presentation with Yutaka Kikutake Gallery, the Tokyo gallery with whom he has mounted numerous exhibitions, a quality of dreamy wistfulness is often disrupted by troublesome details. The aurora-like skies of a passenger (2023) are punctured by a hovering drone, while the painting’s subject—the rider of a moped, seen from a first-person perspective—zooms through a scenic cityscape, but is distracted by a phone mounted to his handlebars. In another pair of vibrant landscapes, River (forever) and River (and ever) (both 2019), the titular phrases appear on the surface of a river, soon to be washed away—a reminder of the transient nature of promises.
Yang completed his MFA in painting at Tokyo University of the Arts in 2019. In addition to showing with Yutaka Kikutake, he has exhibited around Tokyo at venues such as Capsule and Eukaryote.
—Olivia Horn
Dan Rees
B. 1982, Swansea, Wales. Lives and works in Berlin.
Artex, 2017
Dan Rees
Canopy Collections
Artex, 2015
Dan Rees
Canopy Collections
In Dan Rees’s practice, painting is a subversive way to speak about the politics of art: the relationships between viewer and artist, and between value and social function. To this end, previous bodies of work have seen the artist experiment with subjects and materials from his upbringing in working-class, suburban Wales, such as pebbledash, a gravel mixed with cement that often decorates houses in the U.K.
In two works, each entitled Artex (2015 and 2017), on view with Canopy Collections as part of Foundations, the artist reappropriates the plaster swirls that were common wall and ceiling treatments in British home renovation from the 1970s onwards. While the paintings’ splotches are reminiscent of mid-century gestural abstraction, they are named after this rather declassé material, questioning how we assess aesthetic value.
Over the past decade, Rees’s works have been exhibited extensively across galleries such as Tanya Leighton in Berlin and T293 in Rome, as well as in institutions such as Nomas Foundation in Rome and the Goss-Michael Foundation in Dallas. His work was also featured in the Thames & Hudson compendium Contemporary Painting, an anthology of the ways artists use painting in their practice.
—Josie Thaddeus-Johns
Marco Emmanuele
B. 1986, Catania, Italy. Lives and works in Rome.
Un gesto cinico, 2023
Marco Emmanuele
LABS Contemporary Art
ISO #144, 2023
Marco Emmanuele
LABS Contemporary Art
Marco Emmanuele’s latest works are canvases swirling with a shimmering palette of smoky blues, olive greens, ochres, pinks, and snowy whites. Some works are spare, poetic monochromes; others are somewhat abstract, resembling emotive landscapes or still lifes. These aren’t paintings in the traditional sense—rather, they’re built up from a combination of glass dust, rabbit glue, and sand. Some are finished with pebbles of frosty sea glass, stuck atop the upper edge of the canvas. This formula makes for supremely elegant, wondrous works.
A standout work by Emmanuele, featured in Foundations with the Bologna-based gallery LABS Contemporary Art, is Un gesto cinico (2023; “a cynical gesture”). The large piece takes on an organic form resembling a truncated pair of feet floating on the wall, undulating with swathes of green and beige.
The Italian artist comes from a background in research, music production, and architecture, and his works are filled with considerations of colonization, environmental decay, and humans’ impact on nature. Beyond this body of work, Emmanuele has an interdisciplinary practice, which ranges from transforming industrial materials, like glass and iron, to ceramics and performance.
—Casey Lesser
Julie Béna
B. 1982, Paris. Lives and works in Paris and Prague.
Eyes (Sad), 2023
Julie Béna
NıCOLETTı
Across a wide-ranging practice that encompasses sculpture, performance, and film, the French artist Julie Béna has built up a rich stable of recurring characters and symbols. Jesters, spiders, and floating body parts drift through her work, their whimsical forms bringing a sense of levity even as they stir up potent ideas about agency and embodiment.
An actor who was part of a touring theater company as a child, Béna often brings elements of stagecraft into her practice. In one series, pairs of cartoonish eyes made from delicate lacework hang from strings, like marionettes. Eyes (Sad) (2023)—featured in the Foundations presentation of London-based gallery NıCOLETTı, which represents Béna—is one such work, with striking blue irises and arched, feminine eyebrows. Spiderwebs drip from these eyes like tears, with flying phalluses ensnared in their fibers, giving the work a surrealistic edge.
Béna was educated at the Villa Arson in Nice, France, and the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam. She has exhibited and performed at prestigious venues in Paris including the Fondation Louis Vuitton, the Palais de Tokyo, and the Jeu de Paume. In 2018, she was nominated for an AWARE prize.
—Olivia Horn
Eman Ali
B. 1986, London. Lives and works in London and Muscat, Oman.
Malak, 2022
Eman Ali
Hunna Art
Light, shadow, and water punctuate Eman Ali’s celestial images, acting as gateways to new realms. Exhibiting at Foundations with Hunna Art, a rising gallery that champions women artists from the Arabian Peninsula, Ali presents transcendent images that deconstruct sociopolitical ideals within Khaleeji culture in the region. Her works examine the intersection of gender, religion, and power in the Arab world, sparking a dialogue around historical narratives.
In her series “Banat Al Fi’9a” (“The Silver Girls”), for example, Ali reflects on 1960s Oman under the rule of Sultan Said bin Taimur. Employing AI technology and elements of Arabizi—a romanized script used for digital communication—Ali examines womanhood and liberation through alternate realities.
Space, 2023
Eman Ali
Hunna Art
Water serves as a unifying motif in Space (2023) and Portal (2022), which feature hands and a floating figure under luminescent rippling currents. Each work captures the connection between humans and the natural world, unveiling a search for meaning and belonging.
Ali received a BA in graphic design from Central Saint Martins in 2008 and an MA in photography from the Royal College of Art in 2017. In 2020, her photograph Moza and the Pomegranates (2018) was a Single Image winner of the British Journal of Photography Female in Focus Awards.
—Adeola Gay
Noah Schneiderman
B. 1996, Mattoon, Illinois. Lives and works in Los Angeles.
The Observer , 2022
Noah Schneiderman
The Valley
Well Spring, 2022
Noah Schneiderman
The Valley
Los Angeles–based Noah Schneiderman creates mystical paintings that use natural dyes made from materials such as flowers, mud, and bark to bridge the gap between the canvas and the natural world. As a self-taught artist, Schneiderman approaches his work as a reflection of his inner world, embedding a spiritual significance to the visions and figures he depicts.
In Schneiderman’s Foundations presentation with New Mexico–based gallery The Valley, where the artist presented his first solo exhibition, his paintings are both an intuitive expression of his identity and a subtle commentary on our relationship with the environment. Well-Spring (2022), for instance, shows a hazy, dreamlike scene of trees under a muted sun. These obscured renderings evoke memory-like explorations where discovery is of the utmost importance. Other paintings, such as The Observer (2022), depict androgynous figures amid an abstract backdrop, seemingly stuck in static contemplation.
In recent years, Schneiderman has exhibited in several solo and two-person exhibitions, including “The Cosmic Game” at Solito Gallery in Naples, Italy, and “Old Fire, New Spring” at Gene Gallery in Shanghai. Additionally, his work will be featured in the group show “Arcadia and Elsewhere” at James Cohan in New York later this year.
—Maxwell Rabb
Mariana Rocha
B. 1988, Brazil. Lives and works in Rio de Janeiro.
É como ter centenas de línguas espalhadas nos braços e pernas I, 2023
Mariana Rocha
HOA
Tentáculos, intestinos, túneis, 2023
Mariana Rocha
HOA
Mariana Rocha’s bright, organic paintings in acrylic and oil pastels delve into her intimate understanding of her own self: As the artist told i-D, her works “start from the idea that there is a sea inside my body.” In a palette of contrasting shades, she evokes a range of natural subjects, from microbial life to underwater creatures, as tentacles creep across her canvases of cell-like forms. Weaving spiky shapes together with detailed, careful brushstrokes, her intuition-led paintings sometimes start from randomly created stains.
Comparing humans’ evolution with that of underwater creatures, Rocha surfaces feelings of interspecies connection—particularly with cephalopods—in her work. These links to marine life also relate to her understanding of her ancestral history as deeply shaped by the ocean via the Atlantic slave trade.
Last fall, Rocha’s works were shown in a solo show, “Enxergar na água escura [To See in the Dark Water],” at HOA, which represents the artist and is exhibiting her work in Foundations. The gallery’s well-received solo booth last year at Frieze London also featured Rocha’s work.
—Josie Thaddeus-Johns
Ji Won Cha
B. 1997, South Korea. Lives and works in London.
Blind Belief, Save Her Tears, 2023
Ji Won Cha
Wilder Gallery
Ji Won Cha envisions her paintings as a means to delve into the “anxious sublime,” a concept she developed to articulate the complex emotional landscape induced by 21st-century life. Her work—often vivid, bright renderings of animals or plant life—transforms natural landscapes into surreal worlds, where images blend into one another.
In her work Blind Belief, Save Her Tears (2023), on view from Wilder Gallery as part of Foundations, Cha depicts a fiery landscape overflowing with smoke and kaleidoscopic color fields. These fragmented landscapes, split by sharp color contrasts, evoke a sense of impermanence and anxiety that responds to our modern life. Other paintings are gentler, such as Moth’s Tears (2022), where the artist clearly illustrates a blue moth poised on a thorned branch. Yet it still stirs unsettling anticipation through its treacherous landscape.
Cha, formally trained at the Rhode Island School of Design and the Royal College of Art in London, presented at several shows in the last year, including “Dungeons and Daydreams” at Wilder, a two-person show with Alya Hatta.
—Maxwell Rabb
Frank Lepkowski
B. 1992, Pontiac, Missouri. Lives and works in Detroit.
Lupine Meadows, 2023
Frank Lepkowski
PLAYGROUND DETROIT
Dusk in Iowa, 2023
Frank Lepkowski
PLAYGROUND DETROIT
Diving head first into the digital world, American artist Frank Lepkowski explores the role of technology in modern life through an expansive oeuvre that includes software, installation, and painting. United by the centrality of human thought, his works often draw on digital phenomena and algorithms, which are embroidered, woven, and melded into dense, vigorous compositions.
In a trio of new inkjet-on-canvas works at Foundations with PLAYGROUND DETROIT, Lepkowski focuses on the natural world. Dusk In Iowa and Lupine Meadows (both 2023), proffer richly rustic scenes—the former depicting a serene, blue-magenta-hued skyline, the latter a sunny, textural woodland. Both works are typical of the artist’s approach to landscape—which he also explored in “Afterimage,” his last solo show with the gallery in 2021—with his use of inkjet droplets imbuing his paintings with a softened, meditative quality.
Lepkowski completed his BA in graphic design at Oakland University in 2014 and is a recipient of the 20/20 Emerging Artists Fellowship through PLAYGROUND DETROIT and the Knight Foundation. As well as a solo presentation and a two-person show at PLAYGROUND DETROIT, his work has been featured in two-person exhibitions at LVL3 Gallery in Chicago, and Skylab Gallery in Columbus, Ohio, as well as in group presentations internationally.
—Arun Kakar
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