Venice Biennale 2026 announces curator Koyo Kouoh’s theme “In Minor Keys.” https://ift.tt/kL2pxqC

The Venice Biennale has announced its theme for 2026: “In Minor Keys.” The announcement was made on May 27th by the leaders of the Venice Biennale, including Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, the organization’s president. Last year, Koyo Kouoh was announced as the curator of the 2026 Venice Biennale. Tragically, she passed away earlier this month at the age of 57. The Biennale, however, will continue with the theme she created for next year’s edition, which will proceed on its original schedule.

Kouoh’s curatorial team shared her vision for the exhibition, which will open on May 9, 2026. “In Minor Keys” will focus on the ideas evoked by its musical metaphor. Music performed in minor keys is often associated with a strange or melancholic atmosphere. The curatorial team also referenced jazz as an inspiration, noting its unpredictable nature as an inspiration for next year’s show.

The announcement made it clear that the Venice Biennale 2026 would follow the blueprint laid out by Koyo Kouoh. “Koyo is absent, but present from elsewhere,” said Buttofuco in his speech. “We are realizing her exhibition as she designed it.” According to the exhibition’s leaders, Kouoh had already begun working on commissions and artist selection before she passed away.

“‘In minor keys’ are sequences of exhilarating journeys that address the sensate and the affective, inviting visitors to marvel, meditate, dream, revel, reflect, and commune in realms where time is not corporate property nor at the mercy of relentlessly accelerated productivity,” said Gabe Beckhurst Feijoo, one of Kouoh’s curatorial advisors. Several writers whose work would inform the next Biennale—such as James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and Édouard Glissant—were cited.

The previous edition of the Venice Biennale was in 2024, when its main exhibition, curated by Adriano Pedrosa, was entitled “Foreigners Everywhere.” The Biennale, one of the most significant art exhibitions in the world, is known as a summary of the moment in contemporary art. Many countries present exhibitions in national pavilions in tandem with the main exhibition, though these are not affiliated with the curatorial theme.

The artist list for “In Minor Keys” will be announced next year. However, several national pavilions have already announced their chosen artists for 2026: Yto Barrada will represent France, while Lubaina Himid has been selected for the United Kingdom, Abbas Akhavan for Canada, and Maja Malou Lyse for Denmark. The Biennale also announced that it would be sponsored, for the next three years, by Italian fashion brand Bulgari.

The announcement ceremony closed with a poem written by Kouoh herself: “We are all tired. The world is tired, even art itself is tired,” she wrote, in a verse dated 2020. “We need the radicality of joy. The time has come.”

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Finnish gallery Makasiini Contemporary will open a new gallery space in Helsinki. https://ift.tt/RtSJf8d

Finnish gallery Makasiini Contemporary has announced that it will open a new location in Helsinki this fall. After eight years in the regional capital of Turku, the gallery will now add another space in the Finnish capital. On September 19th, the gallery will inaugurate the new space with three simultaneous exhibitions, including concurrent solo exhibitions by Spanish painter Jorge Galindo and Canadian painter Cindy Phenix, as well as a group exhibition featuring a selection from the gallery’s roster.

The new gallery is located in Pasila, at Helsinki’s historic Train Factory, an industrial site that was revived as a cultural center last year. The approximately 8,000-square-foot venue will feature three exhibition spaces, as well as a private showroom.

Makasiini Contemporary was founded in Turku, Finland in 2016 by Frej Forsblom. The gallery’s flagship is located in a massive yellow building, known as the former governor’s stables, which was built by architect Charles Bassi in 1832.

The Finnish gallery currently mounts around 10 exhibitions a year, featuring an internationally diverse roster of artists. Some artists include Argentine artist Fabian Marcaccio, Spanish artist Jordi Alcaraz, American artist Jacob Hashimoto, and Zambian artist Jack Kabangu, among others.

“After eight years in Turku, this move to Helsinki felt like a natural next step,” Forsblom said in a statement to Artsy. “We’ve been looking for the right space for years—and this one immediately felt right. The architecture, the volume, and the natural light make it ideal for ambitious exhibitions.”

A formidable presence in Finland, Makasiini Contemporary also represents the country’s art scene at art fairs around the world. In the last year, the gallery has participated in Untitled Art Miami Beach, Atlanta Art Fair, and Art SG. Meanwhile, the gallery is known for its robust online programming, which is helping shape the online art world.

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Meet the Artists Reinventing Pointillism, the 19th-Century Technique https://ift.tt/n89MDwy

A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, 1884-1886
Georges Seurat
Art Institute of Chicago

When Georges Seurat debuted A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte at the 1886 Impressionist exhibition in Paris, the reaction was far from positive. Art critic Arsène Alexandre coined the term “Pointillism” with a sneer, mocking the artist’s obsessive application of tiny dots of color. To skeptics, Seurat’s bathers and bourgeois strollers seemed stiff, even lifeless—as if his precision had drained the painting of humanity.

Yet Pointillism has always been more than the sum of its parts. Seurat and fellow Neo-Impressionist Paul Signac were responding to new color theories and ideas about visual perception, proposing a style that imposed order on the loose, spontaneous brushstrokes of their Impressionist predecessors. Rather than blending colors, they split images up into discrete, unmixed points of pigment, allowing the viewer’s eye to do the mixing. The effect, when successful, increased the paintings’ luminosity: Dots of pure colors, when juxtaposed, mutually reinforced the others’ brilliance. Perception, these painters seemed to suggest, was subjective and fragmentary.

Today, a new generation of artists is revisiting Pointillism, embracing its visual language and expanding its conceptual underpinnings. No longer solely about the science of perception, Pointillism has become a tool for exploring identity, memory, history, and materiality. These Neo-Pointillists have adapted the techniques used by Seurat and his peers in service of more layered and wide-ranging meanings, breaking down their images as a means of inquiry.

One such artist is Alioune Diagne, a 39-year-old Senegalese painter who borrows methods learned from his grandfather, a teacher of the Quran, to transform scenes of everyday life into meditations on history and culture. Instead of dots, Diagne’s works use small, meticulously painted calligraphic symbols as building blocks for large-scale figurative depictions of Black communities. At a distance, his painting All Voices (manifestations) (2024), for instance, depicts a crowd of protesters calling for “power to the people.” Up close, it dissolves into an impenetrable codex of signs that represent no specific language while evoking written letters.“These signs convey emotions, memories—everything intangible,” Diagne told Artsy.

All Voices (manifestations), 2024
Alioune Diagne
Templon

Filles de Dakar, 2019
Alioune Diagne
We Art Partners

By depicting modou-modou—Senegalese workers who have moved away from the countryside and settled in major cities to support families they left behind—and moments of everyday life in Dakar, the artist creates a “living archive” that captures the complexity of cultural identity. His Pointillist forms aren’t about visual illusion, but about bearing witness. He combines his meticulous abstract symbols with “other, more explicit forms of writing: protest slogans on placards, inscriptions, newspaper collage, or symbols drawn from Senegalese culture,” he said. “Everything carries meaning. Nothing is there by chance. It’s my way of saying that behind every detail, every sign, lies a message or a fragment of memory.”

If Diagne employs Pointillist techniques to preserve living histories, Indigenous Australian artist Daniel Boyd uses them to reexamine the past. His paintings, often based on archival imagery, are made up of protruding dots of clear glue layered on top of oil paintings. “Each point is a transparent lens,” Boyd told Artsy. “It’s about perception and multiple points of view…an opportunity to give the audience a different sense of authorship when they stand in front of the works.”

Untitled (INYIM), 2021
Daniel Boyd
STATION

Rather than presenting a complete image for the viewer, Boyd invites his audience to navigate gaps and distortions—what’s visible and what’s missing. Gestalt psychology, a 20th-century school of thought suggesting that the human brain fills in gaps to create a whole image, is a conceptual backbone of Boyd’s practice. When we look at an incomplete image, “we automatically fill in those gaps and create something,” said Boyd. His work asks, “How do we let the thing be without projecting too much onto it?”

Boyd’s interest in this perceptual framework relates to his own educational experience. Growing up in Australia, he often felt that the history he was taught excluded his Aboriginal culture entirely. “The narrative that was presented didn’t involve me and my people,” he told Artsy. By connecting Gestalt principles to these omissions, Boyd uses his work to question what is shown, what is not, and how the gaps leave room for historical distortions.

Boyd is attuned to the legacy of British colonialism beyond his own country. For instance, his painting Untitled (INYIM) (2021) is based on an archival image of Queen Elizabeth II dancing with Ghanaian political leader Kwame Nkrumah in the 1960s, which at the time was seen as a symbolic gesture of goodwill and a recognition of Ghana’s independence. However, in Boyd’s work, both faces are nearly imperceptible. The work subtly reflects how imperial power cloaked itself in pageantry while leaving behind fragmented and selective histories.

Los Angeles–based painter Gwen O’Neil’s approach to Pointillism, meanwhile, is more intuitive than critical: She embraces dots to explore the emotional rhythms of the environment. Her large-scale paintings are characterized by a lyrical, kaleidoscopic use of color that evokes a pulsing natural world. Originally a landscape photographer, O’Neil turned to painting as a way to capture the atmosphere of Southern California. Her Pointillist marks break down the landscape into its simplest parts, creating dense constellations of pigment that abstract familiar scenery into fields of color and motion.

In Wild Mountain Thyme (2023), for instance, gold ridgelines blaze against a sky that pulses with violet and blue spirals, as if the landscape itself is vibrating. Dots of purple, orange, green, and blue ripple across the canvas, giving the terrain a sense of constant transformation, whether from wind, water, or heat rising from sun-scorched ground. In “A Glimmer in the Shade,” O’Neil’s recent exhibition at Almine Rech in New York, her paintings drew inspiration from the Santa Ana winds.

Coincidentally, that exhibition coincided with the devastating wildfires that spread across Los Angeles in January, fueled by the Santa Ana winds. Through their attentive rendering of nature’s vibrancy and volatility, O’Neil’s paintings also advance a message about the environment. “I want to share the beauty and the fragility of the natural world,” O’Neil told Artsy. “Painting in this way allows me to do both. These deceptively ‘pretty’ paintings are a gentle reminder of what we are going to lose unless we protect our environment.”

New York–born painter Jessica Cannon, too, draws on natural beauty in her Pointillist-esque work. She doesn’t paint with spots, but her work still evokes the style. “Sometimes people think I work with dots,” she said, “but the part that might be seen as dots is actually one of the layers underneath a veil of mark-making.” In Night Pleats (Triptych) (2023), for example, radiant bands of pale violet fan out like beams of moonlight, while soft circular forms hover above a snowy white ground. Cannon arrives at this pixelated effect by delicately layering paint over luminous bases.

Cannon generally works in a more introspective register. Her fragmented paintings build spatial ambiguity, encouraging the viewer to pause, adjust, and look again. Darker strokes sit atop luminous grounds, producing a subtle backlit quality that feels atmospheric and calming. Her work extends “an invitation to viewers to be present in their subjective experience of being alive and looking at something,” she told Artsy from her Brooklyn studio.

Night Pleats (tryptich), 2023
Jessica Cannon
Gavlak

South Korean artist Ilhwa Kim, meanwhile, pushes Pointillism into three dimensions, taking materiality itself as her subject. Her wall works are constructed from thousands of hand-dyed paper units she calls “seeds,” each one rolled, cut, and shaped by hand before being individually organized. She gently places the pieces into tight clusters before gluing them together. From a distance, the works seem to hum, evoking the optical vibrations that Seurat sought. Up close, they shift: The surface becomes topographical.

Kim’s methodology offers a materially inventive version of Pointillism’s core aim: stimulating perception through repetition and relation. “Every single paper unit…plays as a sculpted brush stroke,” she said. In Territorial Matter (2024), spirals of pale green and blue seeds undulate across the surface, interrupted by rhythmic pulses of coral and lavender. The work suggests a forested, mountainous landscape from a bird’s eye view. For Kim, as for her Pointillist predecessors, the contrast between discrete elements is key. “My work does not hide or erase the individual live presence of all the surface units,” she said.

Birth of a Tear, 2024
Ilhwa Kim
Maybaum Gallery

The Pointillists’ fragmentary approach responded to late 19th-century advancements in the study of perception. But, in a way, it’s perfectly suited to the contemporary moment, when the world around us seems so irrevocably fractured—our attention spans, our politics, our connection to the environment, our historical memory. While they represent a wide range of cultures and artistic concerns, today’s Neo-Pointillists are all finding the technique to be an effective tool for expressing their individual points of view.

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New Frida Kahlo museum to open in Mexico City. https://ift.tt/eS5py8b

A new museum dedicated to the life and legacy of Frida Kahlo will open later this year on September 27th in Mexico City. Museo Casa Kahlo, as the new space will be known, will be located in Casa Roja, a residence next to the artist’s famed home, Casa Azul. The museum intends to offer a personal perspective on Kahlo’s early life.

Casa Roja was originally acquired by Kahlo’s parents and later passed through the family to her grandniece, Mara Romeo Kahlo, who has donated it to the museum. Unlike Casa Azul, which focuses on Kahlo’s relationship with Diego Rivera, the new space will explore her early years and the influence of her father, Guillermo Kahlo, a photographer. The museum is being designed in part by Rockwell Group and managed by a trust, Fideicomiso de los Museos Diego Rivera y Frida Kahlo. The museum will be an important new addition to Mexico City’s art scene, which has been growing in stature in recent years.

Frida Kahlo’s grandniece, Mara Romeo Kahlo, and her great-grandnieces, Mara Deanda Kahlo and Frida Hentschel Romeo, traveled to New York to publicize the institution on May 21. The announcement was made at the Park Avenue residence of high-profile art collectors Christine and Stephen Schwarzman.

“For the first time, the voice of the family will be at the heart of how Frida’s story is told,” Hentschel Romeo told Vogue. “This museum isn’t just about her work—it’s about her world. It’s about how the people closest to her shaped who she became. And it’s also about the living family—those of us who carry her legacy forward.”

Adán García Fajardo, currently academic director at the Museum of Memory and Tolerance in Mexico City, has been appointed as director of Museo Casa Kahlo. The project is being supported by Fundación Kahlo, a nonprofit founded by the family and based in New York. The foundation plans to launch two programs: the Kahlo Art Prize, a biennial award for contemporary artists, and Las Ayudas, a grant initiative.

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Anna Perach Brings Monstrous Women to Life in Tufted Textiles https://ift.tt/D5gWS7Q

In E.T.A. Hoffmann’s short story “The Sandman” (1817), a gothic tale of psychological unraveling, a young man called Nathaniel is haunted by visions of a nightmarish character who steals children’s eyes. Nathaniel, believing the Sandman has murdered his father, becomes unable to distinguish fantasy from reality, eventually falling in love with a mechanical doll named Olympia. When he sees Olympia torn apart by her creators, her eyes strewn on the ground, he has a complete breakdown.

For Anna Perach, an artist whose work explores how myths and other cultural narratives shape our ideas about ourselves, reading “The Sandman” felt like rifling through a treasure trove of material. She was especially fascinated by Olympia, interpreting her as a symbol of the often-repressed “monstrous feminine”—the chaotic and irrational aspects of the self that have been rigorously controlled and denied in patriarchal societies. “Storytelling is my main interest,” the Ukraine-born artist told me during a recent visit to her studio at Gasworks in South London, where she had her first institutional exhibition last year. “I identify as a woman, and I often work with women, so the themes and content I am drawn to tend to be related to that experience.”

Since graduating in 2020 with an MFA from Goldsmiths in London, Perach has speedily built an impressive resumé with group and solo shows at galleries including Edel Assanti in London and ADA in Rome. Her research-heavy projects have taken on subjects such as the Victorian side-show fixture of “spidora” (half-spider, half-woman) and 18th-century female wax cadavers known as “anatomical Venuses.” Perach riffs on these sources, often by creating most “wearable sculpture”: colorful life-sized figures, heads, and bodily appendages made from a textile called tufted yarn. Several of these are on view through June 24th in “A Leap of Sympathy” at Richard Saltoun in London (the show will later travel to the non-profit East Gallery in Norwich). The sculptures can be displayed statically in the gallery or activated through performance—an idea that Perach thinks may be rooted in her brief post-BA studies in classical theater and acting.

Initially, Perach was intimidated by how extensively “The Sandman” had already been explored by others, not least Sigmund Freud, who used the story as a key reference in his famous essay on The Uncanny. Then she came across Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori’s 1970 essay, “The Uncanny Valley,” which describes how we switch from empathy to revulsion when we encounter robots that look almost human, but not quite. This fascinated Perach, who has long been preoccupied with psychology—she has a diploma in art therapy and counselling and still maintains a therapeutic practice. Her current show’s title is borrowed from philosopher Henri Bergson, who argued that it was through a leap of intuition or “sympathy,” rather than empirical knowledge, that we apprehend other people’s humanity. What is reality, anyway?

Olimpia, 2025
Anna Perach
Richard Saltoun

Central to the exhibition is Olimpia (2025), a work comprising two matching wearable sculptures: female figures in flouncy Rococo-inspired dresses. Tufting, a technique which Perach first came across at Goldsmiths, is more often used in carpet-making than dress-making. But Perach was attracted to it, she said, because it reminded her of the “Soviet-inspired home,” lined with carpets on the walls and floors, where she grew up. She was also interested in the textile’s associations with feminine-coded domesticity, and the notion of “sweeping things under the rug”—in other words, repression.

The paired sculptures could be interpreted as representing Nathaniel’s two love interests in “The Sandman”: Olympia and Clara, his fiancée since childhood. The latter is presented as a paragon of Enlightenment-era rationality, cheerfully and unremittingly sane in her continued assurances to Nathaniel that his fears are all in his mind. “The dichotomy between rationality and intuition, the mind and the body, is a link in a lot of my work,” Perach said. For the exhibition, she worked with a team of recurring collaborators—including choreographer Luigo Ambrosio and composer Laima Leyton—to develop a performance in which the two figures engage in a kind of pas de deux. One of the bodies is worn by a live performer, Maria Sole Montaci, while the other is animated using robotics.

A Leap of Sympathy, 2025
Anna Perach
Richard Saltoun

Spinning further away from the source material, the show also features a series of haunting watercolor assemblages that reimagine Olympia’s plot, casting her as a pair of twins separated in childhood. Perach described the images as “a visualization of the process of repression in which the self is split into two parts.” (Perhaps, then, the two tufted figures are both also Olympia—the viewer is left to decide.) A series of tufted heads mounted on wooden poles, collectively titled “The Uncanny Valley,” allude to another monstrous female: Baba Yaga, a wicked, child-eating witch from Russian folklore whose home is surrounded by severed heads on sticks.

Just as creepy is a pair of life-sized ribcages (Ribs 1 and Ribs 2, both 2025) made from pale pink glass with dark red splotches like dried blood. The sculptures are presented “face to face” in recessed spaces on opposite sides of the gallery: the imagined hard interiors of the soft, tufted sculptures. As Freud argued, the uncanny is not always easy to define—but, as Perach’s work proves, you know it when you see it.

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Marina Abramović to premiere new “erotic epic” reenacting folk rituals. https://ift.tt/abeUYAo

This fall, Marina Abramović will bring sex, ritual, and the supernatural to the stage in a provocative reenactment of Balkan erotic rites. Balkan Erotic Epic (2025) was commissioned by Factory International, the cultural organization in Manchester, England that runs the Manchester International Festival. It will debut at Manchester’s Aviva Studios on October 9th and run until October 25th. Featuring more than 70 performers, the performance will be Abramović’s largest to date.

Balkan Erotic Epic is rooted in Balkan folklore and ancestral customs, exploring themes of desire, spirituality, and the body. Its 13 choreographed scenes and interactive vignettes will be performed by dancers, singers, and musicians.

“In our culture today, we label anything erotic as pornography,” Abramović said in a press statement. “Balkan Erotic Epic is the most ambitious work in my career. This gives me a chance to go back to my Slavic roots and culture, look back to ancient rituals and deal with sexuality, in relation to the universe and the unanswered questions of our existence. Through this project, I would like to show poetry, desperation, pain, hope, suffering, and reflect our own mortality.”

The rituals to be performed include “Fertility Rite,” in which performers will writhe on the ground in a call for fecundity, and “In Scaring the Gods,” which reenacts a ritual of baring one’s body to the sky to dispel storms. In another, “Massaging the Breast,” women performers enact symbolic gestures intended to “awaken the earth” at burial sites, according to a press release.

Abramović will give a talk on October 11th at Aviva Studios to commemorate the performance’s world premiere. Following its inaugural run, Balkan Erotic Epic will travel, beginning in Barcelona in January 2026.

“This new performance work offers an unmissable opportunity for audiences to experience the next chapter of [Abramović’s] creative life—bold, immersive, and on a scale that’s truly unprecedented,” said John McGrath, artistic director and chief executive of Factory International, in a press statement.

Abramović’s other upcoming projects include the launch of a new NFT project, which she discussed on The Artsy Podcast.

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London Stylist Sarah Corbett-Winder on Creating a Maximalist, Art-Filled Home https://ift.tt/sd1CoJj

For stylist and fashion designer Sarah Corbett-Winder, art isn’t confined to frames on the wall—it’s everywhere. She sees it in the bold stripes that run through her North West London house, in the curated chaos of her handbag wall, even in a single lost loafer perched lovingly atop a painting. There are also striking contemporary works thoughtfully placed throughout the joyful home she shares with her husband, Ned, their children, and their dachshund, Margaret.

With a background in fine art, a fashion label of her own, Kipper, and a flair for playful maximalism, Corbett-Winder has created a space that’s deeply personal, ever-evolving, and full of stories. Here, she shares how she collects, displays, and lives with art—from treasured finds, paintings, and prints, to the children’s drawings that make her house feel like home.

Tell us a bit about where you live.

Our house is in North West London, Willesden Green. She’s a mock Tudor and semi-detached. Our house is a large work in progress—like a big canvas, that we all, as a family, add to and work on. It’s a collection of memories, places we’ve visited, things we love, and art that we have created. Our home really is our world. Things are constantly changing, being moved around, and added to. We want you to feel like you leave the outside work behind you when you come into our home.

What role does art play in your home?

Art plays an enormous part in our home. Firstly, what isn’t art? I feel pretty much everything is art; our house is filled with art. I see my wardrobe and my wall of bags as art. Art is an amazing way to express yourself. I actually studied fine art at the Slade, so for me art has always played a hugely important role in my life. It brings me great joy to be able to collect art. Arranging a shelf or putting cushions on a sofa in a certain way is art. I see putting an outfit together as art. Your home is simply the frame for all your art to be created and lived in.

Do you have different philosophies about art in different rooms?

Listen to the room. Also think about what you want to see and when. We have an amazing Slim Aarons edition hanging above our bath. Ned and I see it at the start and end of our days. We both want to be there—our minds escape there and it’s magical! One day we must visit our dream.

We also use one color to decorate some of our rooms—our kids’ bathroom is purely red, thus only red art can hang in there.

We also see art as a way to start conversation. We have the wonderful photograph of a man I’ve named “Keith” hanging in our hallway—he evokes so many questions from our guests! We also wanted there to be a big statement at the entrance to our house; Keith is like our own security guard.

What’s the first piece of art you ever bought?

A Hugo Guinness print of a pair of big black glasses. I have always been a huge fan of his work, and pride myself in having a great glasses selection, so it sort of seemed rude not to have it in my life. I saved up for her, and love her so much. She makes me smile, she reminds me of me, and brings me a lot of joy—which is what life is all about, isn’t it? Her hanging position is forever changing—and I think she likes it that way.

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

I love our Claudia Valsells—we are actually super lucky and have three, but we don’t have them hanging together. They are all in our kitchen but spread out—two on our “gallery wall,” but far apart from each other, and one is opposite leaning on our kitchen surface. It’s up to you how and where you hang your art: remember you make up the rules! I love them in our kitchen, because we all get to enjoy them a lot, also the light changes the colors they are. I adore the very chic earthy color combinations. If I was art I’d like to be one of these pieces!

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

We are always collecting—bringing things home from our travels. I even see our fridge as a piece of art, we always collect fridge magnets from our travels.

We have no rules on what goes in a frame —the Starbucks coffee cup my husband proposed to me on, the napkin I kept from our first date. Our son’s missing navy loafer sits on top of a painting—why can’t that be art? It can, and it reminds of the moment that I accidentally threw away one of his shoes.

Our kids’ art gets framed and that encourages them to create art. We have a desk for them all, near the kitchen, where they paint or draw every morning before school. They get great joy from seeing their art framed. Also, the freedom children have in their art is what adults are always longing for, isn’t it?! Art for us is a lot about memories, and capturing and savouring moments that we want to remember. Shells, rocks, postcards, invitations, they all get framed, or sit on our bookshelves. Our house is full to the brim—I like to call it organized clutter! If it makes us smile, it stays in our house!

How has your taste evolved over time?

I guess I have become more confident with my taste in art. I am much more open to new ideas and new pieces. And I have definitely become more focused on what I love than what I think other people will love. At the end of the day, it’s you that has to look and live with it!

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

Oh my gosh, totally the same! We try not to invest in too many trends, and try to really ask ourselves if we really love the piece and if it will work in our home. My main question is, does it bring you joy? And will you get bored of it over time? Or will it be your forever friend? I refer to my wardrobe as my family—and anything new coming in needs to fit with the rest of my wardrobe/family. I use this for new art coming into our home—it needs to be friends or related to what you already have.

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

It’s instinctive but very much done with my husband, luckily we work well together and agree! Having said that, I appeared once with a green buoy—Ned thought I’d gone mad!

I think when you really love something you will find it a home. There is always room in your house for new art.

When it comes to housing your new finds, it doesn’t always have to be hung. We just navigate and live with it, but are never afraid to move things around. Ned always hangs our pictures lower than I would, but I’ve learned to love it. They’re more in one’s eye line, so you enjoy them more.

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

I have recently discovered Florence Houston—I’m obsessed with all her jelly paintings—I’m determined to get one into our house! Imagine a wall filled with her jellies! Sensational!

I am longing to own an Alma Berrow. I love the reaction Alma’s pieces create, also the joy they bring. I hope one day to have one in our home; they are a serious masterpiece.

What advice would you give to someone looking to start buying art? Especially someone who doesn’t know where to start.

Don’t be overwhelmed: art can be anything. It’s up to you what art is. There are NO rules; you make the rules. Be guided by what you like, and what you want to surround yourself with. It’s your art collection and thus you make the rules.

What are some of your favorite works on Artsy right now? Can you share a few works you’re drawn to?

Oh my gosh! Yes, please. I’m drawn to things that make noise and make me smile.

When I set my eyes on you, nothing else could do, 2025
Anuk Rocha
Nibelungen Gallery

Bananas, 2021
Jonas Wood
Craven Contemporary

Watermelon, 1997
Mose Tolliver
Just Lookin' Gallery

Vintage Sky Polaroid, ca. 1990
Nobuyoshi Araki
Galleria 13

Candy Time, 2025
Sandra Salamonová
SalamonArt

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