Queer Art Now is Artsy’s Pride Month 2025 celebration spotlighting 30 LGBTQ+ artists meeting the moment and shaping the future of contemporary art. Nominated by leading figures across the art world—including curator and author Legacy Russell, photographer Catherine Opie, and art advisor Racquel Chevremont—these artists reflect the diversity and dynamism of queer creative expression today.
The featured cohort includes painters, photographers, performers, and sculptors showcasing the breadth of queer experience through their radical, boundary-pushing work. In tandem with this list, Artsy also invited curator and author Gemma Rolls-Bentley to reflect on some of the major themes she observes in queer art today.
Here are 30 LGBTQ+ artists defining queer art now. You can browse available works by the artists in the collection “Queer Art Now.”
Shadi Al-Atallah
B. 1994, Saudi Arabia. Lives and works in London.
Nominated by Ellen Jones
the tie that binds us, 2024
Shadi Al-Atallah
Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery
Shadi Al-Atallah’s paintings feature figures engaged in violent, passionate struggles. The viewer could see these characters as individuals or as symbols of the psyche in conflict. Their movements are inspired by the queer ballroom scene and folkloric dance traditions from the African diaspora. The space around the figures is off-kilter and unsettling. In some works, a fire rages in the background, while in others, scenes melt into a void. Al-Atallah’s most recent work explores holes as places of possibility, including black holes as opportunities for infinite transformation, and space in the human body as a genderless realm. His work touches on the experience of transitioning, inspired by queer art theorists such as Paul B. Preciado and Leo Bersani.
Born in Saudi Arabia and currently based in London, he graduated from the Royal College of Art in 2021 and has had solo exhibitions at Guts Gallery, Niru Ratnam, and Steve Turner. His work also featured in Goldsmiths CCA’s radical 2023 group show “Unruly Bodies.” —Emily Steer
Paul Anagnostopoulos
B. 1991, Merrick, New York. Lives and works in New York.
Nominated by Jeremy Steinke
Release the Weight, 2024
Paul Anagnostopoulos
Mama Projects
Desire is a passage to reverie in Paul Anagnostopoulos’s sun-kissed paintings. Depicted in captivating neon hues and grandiose silhouettes, his subjects—alluring, idealized men—are engulfed in erotic musings. In Release The Weight (2024), a nude man is shown in a “golden hour” moment, peering at the melting sun and anticipating its descent. In Too Late to Beg (2023) a rose’s lush charm captivates a youth, painted in fluorescent, Grecian form, who is pierced by its spiky thorns. In these works, there’s an interplay between human beauty and the mundane—these naked bodies are juxtaposed with earthly delights. A Generation Soaked in Grief (2024) is a blazing portrait of a godlike thinker, soaked in what may be the sea, rain, or his own tears. Eyelashes as sharp as blades and defined musculature render him unattainable, as water drips from his forest-thick beard.
After solo shows at Dinner Gallery and Leslie Lohman Project Space, Anagnostopoulos has participated in group shows at Mama Projects, RYAN LEE, and Hollis Taggart. The Hunter College MFA graduate mostly paints on wood panels, along with terracotta Grecian-style urns, all odes to a queer lineage that defies traditional links bound by geography and time. These works weave lifelines between men across history, united by a commitment to red-hot lust and devoted love. —Osman Can Yerebakan
Alex Anderson
B. 1990, Seattle. Lives and works in Los Angeles.
Nominated by Racquel Chevremont
Rose Sky Portal , 2025
Alex Anderson
Make Room
Alex Anderson’s sculptural and relief works have an irony that quickly turns to intrigue. Portal to Rose World (2024), for example, is a porcelain archway embellished with flowers and glazed in Emerald City green. While that sounds like an uplifting scene, the green lacquer globs over the flowers in a way that is slightly sinister, creating a nebulous feeling that something is amiss.
Such juxtapositions of ideas, aesthetics, and emotions are woven throughout Anderson’s burgeoning body of work. Having trained in the U.S. and at the Jingdezhen Ceramic Institute and the China Academy of Art, Anderson fuses Eastern ceramic techniques with Western production practices. He adds additional layers, incorporating references to camp and queerness, to produce works that are chimeric, sentimental, and quietly irreverent.
Altogether, Anderson’s work investigates themes of sexuality, self, illusion, and representation, and addresses the structures and systems that shape his lived experiences. Through this work, he challenges the belief that ceramics are primarily decorative, creating a new narrative in which beauty and profundity are not mutually exclusive. —Jewels Dodson
Alex Margo Arden
B.1994, London. Lives and works in London.
Nominated by Lauren J. Joseph
Alex Margo Arden sure packs a whole lot of academic pedigree into her practice. She survived a foundation course at Central Saint Martins, earned her BA at Goldsmiths, and completed her postgraduate education at the Royal Academy. These experiences influence her body of work, which is as witty, rebellious, and media-savvy as one would expect from such an education. Across video, installation, and performance, Arden investigates (and often critiques) the production of her artworks themselves through the processes of remaking and re-performance.
In Scene 6 (6 November 2023 National Gallery London) (2024), she recreated Diego Velasquez’s The Toilet of Venus (1651), including the hammer blows inflicted on it by climate protestors in 2023, foregrounding the damage done in the work’s ongoing history. In another work, Rock Paper Scissors (2023), she painstakingly recreated library books vandalized by the infamous U.K. queer theater duo Joe Orton and Kenneth Halliwell in the 1960s. Always expansive, often a little camp, Arden’s work contains an inescapable naughtiness along with a focus on historical context, making her uncanny interventions both action and archive. —Lauren J. Joseph
Lulu Bennett
B. 1995, Manchester, England. Lives and works in London.
Nominated by Gemma Rolls-Bentley
Always a Child, Never a Boy, 2022
Lulu Bennett
Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery
Lulu Bennett is a painter with a Pop art sense of composition and a contemporary baroque eye for color. Raised in Lancaster, England, Bennett studied at the Glasgow School of Art and the Slade School of Art. She states that her project is one of rejecting the “post-Brexit neocolonial British government.” Her work is, however, a lot more exciting than this mission statement might suggest and she has already won the Chadwell Award, the Bloomsbury Festival Art Prize, and the Stevenston Painting Prize at the Royal Scottish Academy’s “New Contemporaries” exhibition.
There’s a deep sense of nostalgia to her portraits, but it isn’t necessarily personal. In Untitled (Girl Grief) (2023), a young Princess Margaret is caught in conversation with an unseen interlocutor; in another, Feminist Criticism (2023), five little girls giggle at a slumber party sometime in the middle of the 20th century. Teasing and somewhat standoffish, Bennett’s combination of stark and sentimental scenes nonetheless opens up a killer dialogue on cultural history, gender, and the meaning of representation. —L.J.J.
Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley
B. 1995, London. Lives and works in Berlin and London.
Nominated by Legacy Russell
Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley’s enigmatic video games demand active participation, leaving their viewers feeling unnaturally exposed. In “The Soul Station,” a recent show at Berghain in Berlin, the artist presented an interactive installation that invited viewers to “deep-clean” their souls (still accessible today under the provocative URL yoursoulisdirty.com). Standing at towering digital screens, audiences were prompted by scrolling, red, all-caps commands to “open their reservoirs of guilt” and name the things they were ashamed of out loud.
Elsewhere, for the online project Black Trans Archive (2020), the artist explicitly created a pro Black trans space. Players are asked to state their identity as a condition of entering the site, and those who indicate that they are cis are shown a series of terms and conditions. “This is not a place where we make you feel better,” the game asserts, in Brathwaite-Shirley’s typical lo-fi aesthetic. Another work, Trans and conditions (2025), includes a website that asks users to fill out their reasons for supporting trans people as well as a ’90s-style animation currently on view on the video screens in London’s Piccadilly Circus. “Trans rights are human rights,” it yells, in letters as high as a double-decker bus.
PIRATING BLACKNESS/BLACKTRANSSEA.COM, 2021
Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley
Public Gallery
The artist’s paintings and drawings are more diaristic, conveying her despair and white-hot anger at the world through grotesque cartoons and radically vulnerable text. Brathwaite-Shirley confronts the horror of the conditions faced by Black trans people today and screams her demand for a better world.—Josie Thaddeus-Johns
Seba Calfuqueo
B. 1991, Santiago. Lives and works in Santiago.
Nominated by Jonathan Katz
LAWEN (Remedy), Chilko, 2024
Seba Calfuqueo
Galeria Marília Razuk
At the heart of Seba Calfuqueo’s multidisciplinary practice is their openness to the alchemic power of materials. Their work takes many forms—from natural pigment drawings to glazed ceramic and meditative performances—but always shows their dedication to telling nature’s stories. For example, the ongoing “Remedios” (or “Medicines”) series features intricate alpaca silver sculptures adorned with flowers and leaves. These are associated with the traditions of the Mapuche people, the indigenous South American group to which the artist belongs.
The Chilean artist’s malleable and collaborative approach results in a practice that is constantly transforming. Calfuqueo is one of the founders of the collective Rangiñtulewfü and the magazine Yene Revista, which publishes decolonial texts from various Indigenous groups. They also contributed to “Disobedience Archive,” a 56-artist project which features Calfuqueo’s video performance You Will Never Be a Weye (2015), and was shown in the 2024 Venice Biennale exhibition, “Foreigners Everywhere.”
TRAY TRAY KO, 2020
Seba Calfuqueo
Galeria Marília Razuk
Their 2022 video TRAY TRAY KO, meanwhile, was shown in the 2024 Whitney Biennial. In it, the artist is captured traversing a rich forest with long cobalt blue fabric, searching for a waterfall. When they finally reach the water’s delirious stream, it gushes onto the artist as well as the shiny fabric. —O.C.Y.
Amina Cruz
B. 1975, Los Angeles. Lives and works in Los Angeles.
Nominated by Catherine Opie
Amina Cruz’s photographs blur the line between documentation and world-building. Whether at raucous punk shows, in intimate bedrooms, or on vibrant street corners in Mexico City, Cruz consistently presents her subjects with a quiet honesty that honors the selfhood of each individual. Her tender yet powerful portraits of queer people of color from across the U.S. and Latin America capture what it means to have historically existed on the margins.
Growing up between Los Angeles and Tampa, Florida, Cruz came to photography after finding a camera her FBI agent father used for stakeouts. Photography became a way for the artist to document friends and fleeting moments within her community. Under the tutelage of Catherine Opie and other leaders in queer photography, Cruz has honed a distinct point of view using film and analog photo technologies. Her recent series “Our Desire is our Power” marks a point of departure as she pairs cyanotypes and landscapes with intimate portraits, masterfully creating a dialogue between the lines and shadows that accentuate her subjects and the unruliness of the natural world. —Jameson Johnson
Eva Dixon
B. 2000, Waratah, Australia. Lives and works in London.
Nominated by Gemma-Rolls Bentley
Gold Star, 2025
Eva Dixon
Soho Revue
Safety and peril coexist in Eva Dixon’s intricately constructed works. They insinuate domesticity and comfort through their tightly-arranged configurations. Yet, they also seem precarious, casting an alarming allure over their tactile surfaces. In some works, transparent—and sometimes clinical—fabrics stretch over wooden frames with heavy-duty clamps. Elsewhere, Dixon uses buckles in vaguely familiar arrangements of polyester and plastic. Function and experimentation bleed together in her practice, creating joyful oddities. Gold Star (2025), for instance, contains a hand-sewn yellow fabric stretched across a wooden base with an impossible-seeming elasticity. The title, along with the functional fashion aesthetic, contains coy references to contemporary lesbian culture.
Dixon walks the thin line between allure and repulsion. The artist, who graduated from Central Saint Martins in 2023, invests in her material’s immediate purpose, while breathing new life into it with her varied take on tactility. —O.C.Y.
Miles Greenberg
B. 1997, Montreal. Lives and works in Paris and New York.
Nominated by Artsy
HÆMOTHERAPY (I-δ), 2019
Miles Greenberg
The Watermill Center Benefit Auction
Through acts of intense physical endurance, Miles Greenberg is pushing performance art into new territory. Take Sebastian (2024), a defining piece staged during the Venice Biennale: For eight hours, Greenberg stood pierced with silver arrows, slowly rotating on a plinth as sugar syrup streamed down his painted body, a reference to the saint of the same name. The experience was unforgettable—equal parts agony and grace—and affirmed his place as a leading voice of his generation.
A mentee of Marina Abramović, Greenberg builds on her legacy while forging his own path: one that is slower, more sculptural, and focused on the body as both subject and medium. His performances often unfold over several hours in carefully constructed environments designed to heighten the viewer’s experience. He also creates marble sculptures that capture the essence of these works. Across his practice, Greenberg explores Black queer identity through presence and vulnerability—communicating through movement and sensation rather than words and explanation. His visceral, exacting work stays with viewers long after it ends. —Casey Lesser
Hugh Hayden
B. 1983, Dallas. Lives and works in New York.
Nominated by Adam Charlap Hyman
Hugh Hayden knows his way around a block of wood. His surreal sculptures of school desks, dining table sets, and whole, habitable cabins all appear to sprout branches, but are carved from continuous timber blocks. These works route the viewer through the thorniest patches of our collective unconscious via psychoanalysis, popular culture, and folklore: references to Pinocchio and Grant Wood’s American Gothic (1930) bump up against props from sports and policing. The sex and violence of American society are symbolically magnified as giant wooden truncheons and guns, or skeletons hung up like uniforms from a rail upon the wall.
As nightmarish as this all sounds, Hayden’s painstaking craftsmanship transforms objects of horror or banal cruelty into the kind of wondrous visions that visit us in dreams. Wood as well as feathers, gold leaf, and human hair lend an almost alchemical charge to his creations. Fetish isn’t just a matter of finish for Hayden: He’s installed his sculptures in toilet cubicles, as in his show “Hughmans” in 2024, encouraging viewers to cruise them like venues for public sex. —Evan Moffitt
Killion Huang
B. 1999, Hangzhou, China. Lives and works in Hangzhou.
Nominated by TM Davy
Shaanxinan Road, 2024
Killion Huang
NAN KE GALLERY
Killion Huang renders moments of solitude and connection in dimly lit interiors where figures linger in reflective, intimate scenes. Born in Hangzhou, China, and trained at the School of Visual Arts in New York, the 25-year-old artist draws on personal experience to create emotionally charged portraits that explore identity, longing, and connection across cultural contexts. In much of Huang’s work, queerness is neither dramatized nor hidden—it simply is. The quiet assertion in his paintings reflects his upbringing in a conservative environment, where, as he described in an interview with EDJI Gallery during his solo show, “Reflections,” queerness was “a discreet thing and unspeakable.” Painting became a way to challenge that silence. “I portray queerness and peaceful love in an ordinary way: personal but not so discreet,” he said. These lyrical, restrained paintings often depict figures in states of quiet pause—sitting on beds, gazing through windows, or staring into mirrors. Their gestures of vulnerability quietly affirm queer presence. —Maxwell Rabb
Hortensia Mi Kafchin
B. 1986, Galati, Romania. Lives and works in Berlin.
Nominated by Rob and Eric Thomas-Suwall
Battle Bots and Deep Anesthesia, 2023
Hortensia Mi Kafchin
P.P.O.W
Vibrant strokes of paint sweep through Hortensia Mi Kafchin’s surreal scenes, which bring together the fantastical and the everyday. The Romanian artist’s paintings are full of hybrid forms, reflecting on contemporary experiences of transness, technological advancement, and environmental collapse. Some paintings viscerally depict transitioning, as in Battle Bots and Deep Anaesthesia (2023), which features a rainbow-hued body lying on a surgical table surrounded by giant steely implements. Others present a more symbolic transformation, like the angelic wings sprouting from the subject’s back in Years of Bad Hair Day (2022–23). The surrounding terrain is often chaotic, full of human-made structures, with hot pink landscapes implying global warming.
Her techniques are richly informed by the Old Masters, as she fuses traditional processes with the politics and social constructs of our present and speculative future. She is represented by Galerie Judin and P.P.O.W, and her work has been featured in institutional group shows at the Centre Pompidou and the Palais de Tokyo. —E.S.
Vita Kari
B. 1994, Los Angeles. Lives and works in Los Angeles.
Nominated by Artsy
Vita Kari believes fine art should be accessible to everyone—and by everyone, they mean everyone online. Following the lineage of Andrea Fraser’s institutional critique films, Kari co-opts the visual language of “influencing” to make art that revels in the absurdity of the mundane and the surreal aspects of digital life. A few of the stunts they’ve captured in videos are: hand-embellishing their partner’s forgotten Cheetoh bag with rhinestones, printing out an image of their leg for an ad with Dove, and maintaining a long-running viral sketch riffing on “the craziest thing about being creative.”
As a queer and deaf/Hard of Hearing artist, Kari uses hypervisibility to talk about accessibility, bodily autonomy, and gender with over a million followers across their online platforms. Their internet presence is transmuted into analog forms through woven tapestries where memes, self-portraits, disembodied limbs, and other pop culture references are flattened into digitally rendered jacquard rugs with hand-applied embellishments. Inspired by the woven rugs found in their grandmother’s home, Kari considers each warp and weft like a pixel or grid with infinite possibilities. —J.J.
Young Joon Kwak
B. 1984, New York. Lives and works in Los Angeles.
Nominated by Alyssa Nitchun
During a political moment in which the rights and safety of trans people are increasingly under attack, multidisciplinary artist Young Joon Kwak contemplates concealment and metamorphosis as a means of survival. The lead performer of the experimental drag band Xina Xurner and co-founder of the collaborative performance platform Mutant Salon, which offers beauty services to queer and trans people of color, Kwak is dedicated to cultivating spaces for those often left on the margins of the art, music, and self-care industries.
Perception is an integral aspect of Kwak’s fine art practice, as illustrated by the titles of “To Refuse Looking Away from Our Transitioning Bodies,” a sculpture series, and “To See Yourself Reflected In Our Chameleonic Transformations,” a body of paintings. For To Refuse Looking Away from Our Transitioning Bodies (Me And My Fat *****) (2023) Kwak created a limbless and headless cast of their body, bedazzled with holographic rhinestones that simultaneously attract and refract the viewer’s gaze.
The inside of the cast presents a more intimate view of the artist’s body, rendered in grayscale and wearing a breast-form bra, waist trainer, underwear, and delicate chain necklace. Underneath the shimmering, camouflage-patterned armor is familiar flesh. Here, Kwak affirms trans bodies while inviting new ways of relating and connecting with one another. —Harley Wong
Wynnie Mynerva
B. 1992, Lima. Lives and works in Lima.
Nominated by Artsy
The incarnation of my sex, 2021
Wynnie Mynerva
Margot Samel
Bodies swirl like liquids and gases across Wynnie Mynerva’s canvases; sometimes the canvas itself swoops off the wall and drapes across the floor like the train of a gown. For the artist, these beautifully fluid human forms are a liberating vision of embodied sexuality and a powerful rebuke to the bias, homophobia, and harassment they’ve experienced. Mynerva’s art engages frankly with gendered and sexualized bodies, not only on the surface but internally: For a solo exhibition at New York’s New Museum in 2023, they included their surgically removed rib bone in a piece depicting a feminine alliance in the Garden of Eden. A 2024 exhibition of paintings and sculptures at London gallery Gathering, meanwhile, challenged the stigma associated with the bodies of people living with HIV, responding to the artist’s own diagnosis. Embracing self-expression, body modification, diversity, and connection, Mynerva’s organic forms call on our shared humanity without being prescriptive about the many shapes it takes. —Anna Gaca
Paul P.
B. 1977, Hamilton, Ontario. Lives and works in Toronto.
Nominated by Artsy
Untitled, 2013
Paul P.
Cooper Cole Gallery
The heyday of gay liberation has gone gorgeously hazy in the paintings of Paul P. Young men with mouths agape and long, fringed hair cascading over their glazed eyes materialize vaporously from his sfumato. Their names and identities are lost in the smoke—or perhaps to the spectre of AIDS—though we can’t be certain. Although tinged with melancholy, P.’s canvases are positively saturated with desire. Most impressive is the seeming ease with which P. is able to depict a lip or a brow, his brushstrokes so light they could be breath fogged up on a glass. By comparison, the artist’s coolly elegant furniture-shaped sculptures recall the early 20th-century designs of Charles Rennie Mackintosh. These may seem to sit at a remove from such outright sensuousness, but both sides of P.’s practice are products of the same extraordinarily refined hand. —E.M.
Sam Penn
B. 1998, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. Lives and works in New York.
Nominated by Doron Langberg
Favoring a compact film camera for spontaneous shots, photographer and model Sam Penn captures friends, lovers, and hidden glimpses of New York City in portraits and landscapes. These works combine Nan Goldin’s candid approach with the effortless elegance of fashion editorial. Penn came to attention in 2023 with “It’s Personal,” a group exhibition at the queer NYC gallery OCDChinatown, and a debut zine, Some Girls, a title inspired by Robert Mapplethorpe’s photo book Some Women. Penn’s references firmly anchor her work in a tradition of downtown Manhattan artists with one foot in the demimonde. Penn explores this fringe, female-coded world in images that carry us past the club bouncers and into bed the next morning. An exhibition for her second zine, Bad Behavior—after the title of a story collection by novelist Mary Gaitskill—opened at Paris’s Galerie Balice Hertling during fall fashion week 2024. Its photos of smoking, spanking, and smooching feel both lucid and intimate, hot and cool. —A.G.
La Chola Poblete
B. 1989, Guaymallén, Argentina. Lives and works in Buenos Aires.
Nominated by Artsy
Painter, performer, and multidisciplinary artist La Chola Poblete’s exhilarating watercolors have room for everything, from religious icons and Andean motifs to pop culture imagery and calligraphy. In these lively transhistorical remixes, cartoons and abstractions crowd into the frame and vibrate in negative space. The artist draws on ancestral memory and personal taste to critique colonial history, reclaim her Bolivian roots, and demand consideration for Indigenous, trans, and nonbinary artists like herself. (Greeting Spanish royalty at the art fair ARCOmadrid in 2022, the artist told the queen: “We meet again after 530 years.”)
In photographic self-portraits, she often stares directly into the camera. The La Chola persona is part of her practice itself, insisting on her own dignity and integrity as her work vaults to the highest echelons of the international art scene. La Chola Poblete received a Special Mention at the 2024 Venice Biennale and was named Deutsche Bank’s Artist of the Year in 2023. —A.G.
Sharmistha Ray
B. 1978, Kolkata, India. Lives and works in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and New York.
Nominated by Dawn Delikat
youpersistinmetothisday, 2020
Sharmistha Ray
SECRIST | BEACH
Not all of the saturated geometric forms that populate Sharmistha Ray’s work are pure abstractions. Sometimes, the artist builds them up from hours of automatic—or unconscious—writing, producing layers of handwritten text so dense that they become illegible fields of color. Raised across the Middle East, South Asia, and the United States, Ray brings a transnational perspective to their practice, which is shaped by queerness, migration, and spiritual inquiry. They originally took up automatic writing while working with a healer to address identity-related trauma, and ultimately used it as a formal strategy to integrate their art and writing practices. The method, which they have called “performative South Asian queer-feminist emotional-intellectual labor” asserts presence, visibility, and selfhood through the visual language of abstraction.
A vital extension of Ray’s work is Hilma’s Ghost, the feminist art collective they co-founded with Dannielle Tegeder. This project, named after spiritualist painter Hilma af Klint, bridges abstraction and mysticism. In 2025, the pair unveiled Cosmic Portal, a large-scale mosaic mural commissioned by the MTA and permanently installed in Grand Central Station in New York. The work is emblematic of how Ray transforms everyday spaces into portals for reflection and respite. —M.R.
Victoria Roth
B. 1986, Paris. Lives and works in New York.
Nominated by Doron Langberg
Victoria Roth’s abstract paintings are unpredictable but assured, exploring different approaches to belonging. With their mercurial appearance, the lingering, corporeal forms in her works evoke the human struggle between interiority and exposure to others. In Coast of Memory (2022), for example, biomorphic shapes settle into order, recalling the intimate workings of a body: both perfect and strange. Ever-explosive and occasionally guttural, the bulbous outlines encompass kinetic potentials of being out in the world and within the body. The Brooklyn-born painter never quite lands on any figures in her work, instead committing to enigmatic abstraction, yet her arresting color palette and evolving shapes reference queerness with a revelatory twist.
Roth has solo shows at Broadway Gallery and Brennan & Griffin under her belt. She has also shown her work in group exhibitions at Hesse Flatow, The Pit, and the Palais de Tokyo. —O.C.Y.
Ebun Sodipo
B. 1993, London. Lives and works in London.
Nominated by Gemma Rolls-Bentley
Ebun Sodipo studied at University of the Arts London and Camberwell College, and after she graduated in 2020, her work seemed—almost immediately—to be everywhere. Sodipo’s practice has a real Janus face, looking backwards at historical figures (and sometimes imagery) while incorporating modern media and themes. She works in video, performance, and installation to produce, as she puts it, “work for Black trans people of the future.”
Her recent series of collages, shown earlier this year at “An Ominous Presence” at Soft Opening in London, are sealed in epoxy resin on a background of reflective silver mylar. They are both cinematic and ghostly, hinting at a supernatural presence behind the material. This feeling echoes in the recurring motif of hands outstretched and open to the sky, which seems to underline the central question: When we make art, are we holding on or letting go? Her “fabulations” (as she calls her non-performance works) have been exhibited at Hauser & Wirth, Goldsmiths CCA, and as part of the Jerwood Survey, a major touring exhibition in the U.K. Meanwhile, her performances have been shown at the Performance Art Museum in L.A., the Turner Contemporary in Margate, England, and at Bergen Kunsthall in Norway. —L.J.J.
Leonard Suryajaya
B. 1988 in Medan, Indonesia. Lives and works in Chicago.
Nominated by Jonathan Katz
Mom and All of the Jewelries She Bought Herself with Her Own Money, 2015
Leonard Suryajaya
Chicago Artists Coalition
In Leonard Suryajaya’s rich and sensuous photography, thousand-textured objects and colorfully attired people enact tableaus with meanings hovering just out of reach. The scenes, which often feature Suryajaya’s partner and family members as models, are sometimes humorous or incongruous. Some are contemporary updates on religious imagery; others picture surreal, seemingly inscrutable power dynamics. Teeming with novelties and ripe with possible interpretations, Suryajaya’s work grabs the viewer at first glance and is stocked with underlying themes about how people like himself—openly queer, an immigrant, and a member of racial and religious minorities—define and redefine themselves in relation to their families and communities over time.
Suryajaya was recognized as a 2024 Guggenheim Fellow, and his work is included in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Museum of Contemporary Photography. Connection Lookup (2023), a jewel-box-like newsstand display featuring a portrait of the artist’s mother, is permanently installed at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport. —A.G.
Chiffon Thomas
B. 1991, Chicago. Lives and works in Inglewood, California.
Nominated by Alyssa Nitchun
Untitled (intravenous), 2024
Chiffon Thomas
Perrotin
In his sculptural assemblage works, Chiffon Thomas uses diverse materials to create a tactile language that speaks to cultural memory, personal history, and transformation. His casts of faces, torsos, feet, and architectural fragments draw parallels between bodies and buildings—both subject to cycles of deconstruction and reconstruction; both affected by their environments. These characteristics reflect the complexity of queer identities, where the body is both a site of strength and tenderness.
Thomas’s practice is robust, spanning sculpture, collage, and drawing. Recently, the artist began incorporating stained glass into his bronze work, layering fractured panes into casts of faces to symbolize the complex and dynamic nature of selfhood. Other materials in his work include clay, metal, wood, and found objects like home furnishings that carry a sense of history and relatability. In this way, Thomas builds connections between memory and reality, visibility and understanding. —J.D.
Zoe Walsh
B. 1989, Washington, D.C. Lives and works in Los Angeles.
Nominated by Artsy
In our eyes, on our tongues, 2023
Zoe Walsh
Yossi Milo Gallery
Visibility is often a unifying thread for queer artists—a gesture of bold defiance against the policing and shaming of our bodies, sexuality, and communities. Zoe Walsh’s technicolor canvases, though, rely equally on presence and absence. Their subjects are hidden between shimmering layers of silk-screened landscapes, shadows, and architectural motifs, from which queer scenes emerge with ghostly qualities.
For years, Walsh has pulled visual references from queer photography archives at the One Institute, the longest-running LGBTQ+ organization in the U.S. Currently, they are creating new work for an ongoing series inspired by gay rights activist and filmmaker Pat Rocco’s covert photographs (often featuring nude figures) taken at parks and other cruising spaces across L.A. in the 1960s and 1970s. Blending mediums and processes, Walsh digitally cuts and layers these archival images with photographs they take with their partner and friends in their garden. Here, scenes from L.A.’s queer past and present collapse, creating a sense of cross-generational community that would otherwise exist only in imagination. —J.J.
Willa Wasserman
B. 1990, Evanston, Indiana. Lives and works in New York.
Nominated by Jeremy Steinke
Mirror III, 2025
Willa Wasserman
Travesia Cuatro
Willa Wasserman’s ghostly paintings reflect the haziness of the dream world. Sometimes using unconventional materials such as brass and copper sheet in place of canvas, her paintings are a powerful representation of metamorphosis. This is in part due to her materials: linseed oils which age, and metals that oxidise or develop swirling patinas.
Many of her paintings have an iridescent glow from their metal backgrounds, creating the effect of a three-dimensional space that the viewer could slip into, rather than an enclosed flat surface. Her works are intimate and personal, featuring self-portraits of the artist and other figures in repose. These scenes bleed into the space around them, sometimes warping entirely into abstraction. Their changeable nature and illusive forms reflect the constant evolution of sexuality and the self, rejecting rigidly fixed positions. The New York–based artist has exhibited at a host of galleries around the world, including François Ghebaly and Michael Werner Gallery. Her show “Hart Island” is on view at Travesia Cuatro through July 25th. —E.S.
Dominique White
B. 1993, United Kingdom. Lives and works in Marseille, France, and Essex, England.
Nominated by Legacy Russell
For the better part of a decade, artist Dominique White has circled the motif of the ocean as a site of ancestral loss. More recently, her work has homed in on shipwrecks. Forged in iron, her large-scale sculptures reference the iron ballast often present in ships used to carry enslaved Africans along the Middle Passage, while anchors and harpoons further develop the maritime theme.
White’s 2024 solo show at London’s Whitechapel Gallery signaled the continued expansion of her ambitious practice. For that body of work, she realized a dream of submerging her sinuous sculptures in the sea, choosing to sink them off the symbolically potent shores of Genoa—the birthplace of Christopher Columbus. After a month underwater, the works emerged from the Mediterranean rusting and skeletal. White grapples with the Afrofuturist possibilities of surpassing a ship’s deadweight tonnage—the maximum total weight that it can carry—sinking it, and witnessing the wreckage that rises from the sea. —H.W.
Kiyan Williams
B. 1991, Newark, New Jersey. Lives and works in New York.
Nominated by Che Gossett
A Neoclassical building made of earth appeared to sink into the ground, an upside-down American flag waving from its pediment. This was Kiyan Williams’s iconic contribution to the 2024 Whitney Biennial, a stark subversion of the White House and its associated symbolism. The visual language of power—the triumphant, nationalistic pride associated with bright white columns and their curlicued Corinthian capitals—were shown decaying. With its cracking earth and collapsing form, the sculpture made a clear statement on the failure of institutions.
In this work, as elsewhere in their practice, Williams used natural materials to reference the land that forms the literal common ground of their country, creating a contemporary vision of the land art of the 1960s. With the earthen façade’s off-kilter placement, Williams evoked “queer and trans embodiment,” they told the New York Times. “Like a hip tilt or a bent wrist, that is the way I move through the world.”
Nearby at the Whitney, a silver-plated statue portraying trans activist Marsha P. Johnson provided a counterpoint. Williams’s inspiring monument, showing Johnson holding a cigarette and a sign proclaiming “power to the people,” nods to the strength of collective action. Combined, the works contained a seed of hope for the future: a way out of the crumbling nationalism they depict. —J.T-J.
Anthony Peyton Young
B. 1988, Charleston, West Virginia. Lives and works in Boston.
Nominated by Jeremy Steinke
Black Rush: Self Portrait with Vanitas, 2023
Anthony Peyton Young
CLAMP
Anthony Peyton Young employs historical ephemera from Black American life, literature, film, and his experiences growing up in West Virginia to evaluate systemic inequities. His collaged, composite drawings and paintings capture the eye, merging multiple faces and features to create a Picassoesque remix. Their subjects are sometimes searing, particularly in his ongoing series portraying people who have been killed by the police. The works’ titles contain the names and ages of the victims they depict—each one a reminder of how endangered Black bodies are. Many works specifically memorialize trans and nonbinary individuals whose intersecting identities make them especially vulnerable to violence.
Young’s materials give the work additional layers of meaning: He uses bleach, nodding to the social privilege granted by whiteness, as well as asphalt and gunpowder. His practice maneuvers between fear and the challenge of overcoming it enough to thrive. The latter condition is examined in his queer portrait series, in which he captures Black and brown bodies at home and at rest, celebrating them in an everyday way. —J.D.
Rafal Zajko
B. 1988, Białystok, Poland. Lives and works in London.
Nominated by Artsy
Rafał Zajko weaves together complex references: queer history, science fiction, pop culture, and speculative design all appear in his work. His ceramics, installations, and performances feel simultaneously nostalgic and future-facing. “The Spin Off,” Zajko’s current solo show at Focal Point Gallery in Southend, England, explores the changing nature of nostalgia and our current hunger for remakes of past films and fashions. Many of his works reference his own upbringing in post-communist Poland. He is particularly interested in the human connection made possible by factory labor and the way this phenomenon created a new entanglement between human and machine.
Zajko’s permanent sculpture Unwritten (2024) was recently installed at London’s Regents Park Estate, featuring four giant casts of gum chewed by local LGBTQ+ community members. The work is inspired by the secret gay bar and club in the crypt of a nearby church, which provided sanctuary to queer folks during the 1960s and ’70s.
Zajko was awarded the Abbey Fellowship at British School at Rome in spring 2024. His work has been shown in numerous institutions and public spaces, including Austria’s Kunshalle Wien and Queercircle in London. —E.S.
Browse available works by featured artists in the collection “Queer Art Now” and explore the full feature.
from Artsy News https://ift.tt/hHYAGm8
No comments:
Post a Comment