Kevin Beasley
Synth IX, 2025
Polyurethane resin, raw Virginia cotton, fiberglass, altered t-shirt, altered housedresses, confetti t-shirt, confetti housedresses, confetti PPE
76 x 55 x 2” / 193 x 139.7 x 5.1cm

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Kevin Beasley
Synth IX, 2025
(alternate view)

Kevin Beasley’s (b. 1985, Lynchburg, VA) practice spans sculpture, photography, sound, and performance, while centering on materials of cultural and personal significance, from raw cotton harvested from his family’s ancestral property in southern Virginia to sounds gathered using contact microphones. Beasley alters, casts, and molds these diverse materials to form a body of work that acknowledges the complex, shared histories of the broader American experience, steeped in generational memories.

Synth IX (2025) is part of a new series of abstract ‘slabs,’ sculptural forms that draw from millennia-old traditions of relief sculpture. Raw cotton and altered housedresses, sourced from a former Harlem dress shop frequented for decades by Beasley’s grandmother and great-grandmother, are distilled in a semi-translucent plane of dyed resin that offers a view into and through the work. Foregoing recent pictorial narratives, Beasley returns to the abstract core of his practice. Colors bleed together in a cosmos-like spectrum of hues. Shredded material and splinters of fiberglass diffuse like static beneath the surface of the work. Like synthesizers generate sound by combining signals of varying pitches, Beasley recalls frequencies of overlapping histories.

Beasley’s site-specific installation at Storm King Art Center, New York, will be on view through November 2025.

Kevin Beasley
Synth IX, 2025
(detail)

Sydney Cain
Light #7, 2025
Acrylic, pigment, soft pastel and graphite on wood
24 x 36” / 61 x 91.4cm

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Sydney Cain
Light #7, 2025
(detail)

Sydney Cain’s (b. 1991, San Francisco, CA) practice is rooted in personal and collective genealogies. Their predominantly black-pigmented compositions recount the storied and arcane histories of the African Diaspora, rebuilding narratives within a reverential refuge. By creating space for ancestral reclamation and exploring territories of myth, spirituality, and the afterlife, Cain contemplates the lasting effects of subjugation on Black lineage. Using carbon-based and mineral materials like powdered metals, graphite, pigments, and chalk on wood, Cain explores experiences beyond a visible plane, tracing the collective consciousness of communities in what they call metaphysical landscapes.

In Light #7 (2025), a group of figures face away from the viewer within a shallow depth of field that is encased in swathes of dark pigments. A congealed blend of acrylic layers produces a dense, metallic surface across the composition, flattening the group into an otherworldly plane. They move as one through a hazy, reverent space, traveling towards the light that seeps in from the edge of the composition. Cain’s figures transverse a corporeal space between light and darkness, where the invisible can materialize through a process of healing. Individuals emerge from and recede into the group, blurring the boundaries between self and other. In the foreground, a genealogical tree appears to float on the surface of the work, anchoring the group to ancestors and communities seen and unseen. A central figure slips through the group encased in a beaded skin, a recurring image in Cain’s work. The static pattern suggests they are a channel for the living or the dead, acting as a guide on this journey to personal and collective discovery.

Cain will present their inaugural solo exhibition with the gallery in September 2025.

Judith Eisler
Margit 2, 2013-2024
Oil on canvas
39.5 x 55” / 100.3 x 139.7cm

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Judith Eisler
Margit 2, 2013-2024
(alternate view)

Judith Eisler (b. 1962, Newark, NJ) paints frozen moments in cinematic time, where the artist’s predominantly female subjects are caught mid-narrative, cropped, and re-contextualized by the fundamental elements of painting – color, form, and light. Beginning with photographs of her subjects as they appear on television monitors, her methodical process of working in small gridded sections of the canvas faithfully, and sometimes unconsciously, embraces the reflections, wavy distortions, and digital artifacts that her camera often produces. The resulting paintings of pictures include the moiré patterns and lens flares visible in the instant Eisler hits pause, resisting the clarity of conventional portraiture.

In Margit 2 (2013-2024), Eisler presents a close-up view of actress Margit Carstensen as she appears in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1973 television serial, World on a Wire. Carstensen’s cherry red lips, parted as if just about to smile or speak, hover in a pale halo of creamy skin underpainted with blues and greens, while fiery red brushstrokes lick at the edge of her cheek from the deep brunette of her softly rendered hair. These saturated, almost unnatural colors and blunted, hazy borders between areas of light and dark complicate Eisler’s depiction of Carstensen – we are barred access to a resolved, “real life” image of the actress. Almost as a consolation, Eisler freezes her subject in an endless moment before the action resumes, inviting our eyes to take pleasure in skating across the flat, screen-like surface of the painting and to perceive other narratives that the frame might hold.

Judith Eisler: Center of the Frame, a monograph published by Lenz Press, Milan, Italy, surveys the artist’s paintings from 1997 to 2024. The publication includes an interview with Wade Guyton, an introduction by Christopher Bollen, and an essay by Kirsty Bell.

Judith Eisler
Margit 2, 2013-2024
(detail)

Jonathan Gardner
Two Nudes, 2025
Oil on linen
62 x 40” / 157.5 x 101.6cm

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Jonathan Gardner (b. 1982, Lexington, KY) conjures images with a surreal approach to form and perspective. His distinct point of view constructs flattened tableaus into immediate, cinematic storylines steeped in mystery and wonder, where architectural devices and blocked horizons collapse space, creating discrete narratives threaded with ambiguity and interiority. Sublimating art historical touch points like Edward Hopper, Fernand Léger, and Giorgio de Chirico, Gardner mines observed sources and the unconscious alike to render his illusionary worlds.

In Two Nudes (2025), Gardner depicts a pair of invented, anonymous female figures reclining in a synthetic, stacked space resembling a bedroom. Though brimming with rhythmic and colorful patterns, a quiet stillness pervades the scene – the upper figure teeters on wakefulness, while the lower figure absent-mindedly looks away from her book, her attention floating elsewhere in the space beyond the edge of the canvas that truncates both figures’ legs. Above them, a portal-like mirror reflects the blankness of each woman’s detached stare. A recurring presence in Gardner’s visual grammar, the mirror not only alludes to a kind of surrogate self-portrait of the artist, but also to the fruitless, alienating search for self-recognition by the characters in his paintings.

Here, Gardner unravels the art historical paragon of the female figure to reassemble these women with elegant columnar necks and noses, plush coiffures, and rounded flesh like waning gibbous moons, yet their perfected contours and smooth shading are all displaced eroticism; the only desire is to paint women. Gardner’s subjects are hermetically sealed beneath layers of paint, untouchable, constructed like architectural models summoned from the archives of his personal visual landscape.

Jonathan Gardner’s work is on view in Master Class, a group exhibition of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago alumni at Secrist | Beach in Chicago, IL, through June 21, 2025.

Liam Gillick
Directed Screen, 2020
Powder coated aluminum
78.75 x 39.5 x 2.75” / 200 x 100 x 7cm

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Liam Gillick
Directed Screen, 2020
(detail)

Liam Gillick
Directed Screen, 2020
(alternate view)

Liam Gillick (b. 1964, Aylesbury, UK)’s practice spans over three decades and across installation, video, and sound. A theorist, curator and educator as well as an artist, Gillick’s work reflects upon conditions of production in a so-called post-industrial landscape including the aesthetics of economy, labor and social organization.

In the wall-based sculptures Gillick terms “wall screens,” he resumes an ongoing interest in production and secondary architecture. Directed Screen (2020) is comprised of multi-colored aluminum and plexiglass to create dynamic forms. Carefully engineered, the work engages the visual language of secondary architecture, while simultaneously playing on the history of minimalism and abstraction. As is common in Gillick’s practice, the “wall screens” exist in a serial and modular format, contributing to the artist’s discourse concerning the ever-shifting modes of manufacturing and distribution. The structures resemble pre-fabricated elements from the early stages of industrial production or readymade architecture with no discernible utility. Within this non-functional “middle space,” the artworks maintain an elusive and open-ended quality, perpetually asking “What If?” while refuting a definitive answer.

Gillick’s work can be seen in public art projects around the world, including A Variability Quantifier (The Fogo Island Weather Station), Fogo Island Arts, Fogo Island, Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada, and However Many Times We Ran The Model The Results Were Pretty Much The Same, in collaboration with Hito Steryl, Roddino, Italy.

Giorgio Griffa
Linee oblique, 1970
Acrylic on canvas
70.75 x 73.25” / 179.7 x 186.1cm

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Giorgio Griffa
Linee oblique, 1970
(detail)

For the last five decades, Giorgio Griffa (b. 1936, Turin, Italy) has developed a painting practice that records “the memory of material,” allowing brush, paint, and canvas to dictate the outcome of his work. By eliminating perspective and narrative, Griffa’s “fragments of space” transcribe the process of painting into simple repeated marks and groups of horizontal, vertical, and oblique lines.

For Art Basel in Basel 2025, Griffa presents Linee oblique (1970), a painting that emerges from the formative moments in his practice, during a period in which he established a logic of restrained gestures that became both distinctive and integral, driven by notions of time, rhythm, and memory. Griffa’s early, minimal compositions began with an “anonymous” sign – displaying the simple and repetitive movements of the paintbrush in order to create uniform, task-like marks, alluding to his notion that painting is “constant, and never finished.”

Starting with unprimed, unstretched raw canvas laid out on his studio floor, Griffa crouches and kneels, working slowly across the material in a way that aligns him with his tools: thinly mixed water-based acrylic paints that seep and bleed upon application. The rawness of the resulting color fields, along with large areas of unpainted canvas, grants Griffa’s paintings a provisional feel, emphasizing his convictions about the independent life of materials. The paintings are then displayed unframed, pinned to the wall with small nails along their top edge, and when not exhibited, are folded and stacked, creating an underlying grid for his compositions. Griffa approaches painting like a meditation of sorts—reducing his markings to a repetitive sequence of lines, gestures, and symbols dictated by the materials themselves and revealing nothing other than an action recording time within space.

In November, Giorgio Griffa will open his seventh solo exhibition at Casey Kaplan, Consistently Through Variation, including artworks from 1969 - 2025. His solo exhibition, Painting the Invisible, is currently on view at the Palazzo Ducale, Genova, Italy, through July 13th, 2025.

Brian Jungen
Splint Sit Splinter, 2025
Eames Molded Plywood Chair, wood arrows, carbon steel points, feathers, artificial sinew
47 x 23 x 23” / 119.4 x 58.4 x 58.4cm

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Brian Jungen
Splint Sit Splinter, 2025
(detail)

Brian Jungen
Splint Sit Splinter, 2025
(alternate view)

Brian Jungen’s (b. 1970, Fort St. John, Canada) practice dissects contemporary consumerism and its links to Indigenous narratives by deconstructing and reassembling commercial products into new forms. Inspired by the artistic vernacular of First Nations peoples and the artist’s Dane-zaa heritage, Jungen’s sculptural materials reflect the vast spectrum of his inquiry; there are quotidian finds like secondhand furniture, baseball bats, and gasoline jugs; coveted collectibles like antique tables, sports jerseys, and Nike Air Jordans; labor-intensive natural resources like elk hide and handmade arrows fletched with real bird feathers and sinew. The logos, laces, and other distinguishing features of these products remain legible as they are recast as art objects, placed under vitrines or mounted on pedestals, acknowledging the questions inherent to museological and ethnographic display.

In Splint Sit Splinter (2025), Jungen continues his exploration of the many uses and layered meanings of bird feathers in Indigenous cultures of North America through a performative archery process, highlighting the disappearance of natural resources as well as the inextricable relationship between warfare, technology, and design. Jungen prepares dozens of handmade wooden arrows with real bird feathers in a meditative practice, then drawing on his hunting and ranching background, shoots into the gently curved seat of an Eames Molded Plywood Chair. These distinctive bent pieces of plywood were originally developed in 1942 by Charles and Ray Eames while contracted by the United States Navy to create a lightweight leg splint that could quickly treat injured soldiers in the field. Over 150,000 orders were ultimately placed for their highly successful splint before the end of the Second World War, with the profits enabling the Eames’ to debut their now iconic lounge chair in 1946.

Inundated by a salvo of black feathers, Jungen’s chair likewise invites the viewer to consider Indigenous authority and self-defense, especially in the face of ongoing settler-colonial control. In the United States, it is prohibited to use, possess, or sell Bald and Golden Eagle feathers, even for Indigenous people, despite their profound religious and cultural significance. Only “eligible” members of federally recognized tribes can own eagle feathers, and the US government determines this eligibility. Jungen probes the complexities of such legal parameters, which protect endangered birds, but at the same time, undermine Indigenous sovereignty.

Jungen will be included in the 15th Shanghai Biennale, Does the flower hear the bee?, opening November 8, 2025. His work is currently on view in Sport and Spectator at the McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, Texas, and Future Imaginaries: Indigenous Fashion, Art, Technology at the Autry Museum of the American West in Los Angeles, California.

Caroline Kent
Untitled (words on the wall, words on the page), 2024
Acrylic on unstretched canvas
105 x 83” / 266.7 x 210.8cm

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Caroline Kent
Untitled (words on the wall, words on the page), 2024

Caroline Kent (b. 1975, Sterling, IL) engages in a language of abstraction through an instinctive approach to color and form. Her practice encourages a mutual exchange between maker and viewer by way of invented modes of communication. Through painting, drawing, sculpture, text, and performance, Kent stretches the limitations of language to create a meaningful space for both silence and sound, shape, and empty ground.

In Kent’s recent acrylic painting, Untitled (words on the wall, words on the page) (2024) (which was included in Flow States: La Trienal 2024, El Museo del Barrio, New York, October 10, 2024 - March 16, 2025), overlapping and colliding forms are distilled within a black backdrop of an unstretched canvas. The vibrant abstractions are derived from the artist’s geometric, colorfully painted paper cutouts—a daily, diaristic practice where by reusing and reconfiguring forms from her ongoing archive, Kent discloses the passage of time, along with the continuous evolution of her visual syntax.

Beneath these bold shapes, playful brushstrokes in emerald green hint at a schematic that evokes asemic writing—a wordless, open-ended form of expression that conveys meaning without sound. These indecipherable marks are accompanied by geometric shadows and semi-transparent dotted ribbons of paint, creating a secondary plane that invites the viewer to slip beyond the dominant architectural forms on the surface, and into a deeper, more elusive space.

Kent’s installation, titled Daydreaming at Union Station, Chicago, IL, is on view through November 2025 as part of the Art at Amtrak initiative. The artist is also included in Expanding the 50th: Shared Stories at the Smart Museum of Art, Chicago, IL with a site-specific commission. A short play about watching shadows move across the room, Kent’s monumental mural at the Queens Museum, Flushing Meadows Corona Park, NY, organized by Lauren Haynes, is on view through 2026. Kent is scheduled for a solo exhibition at Casey Kaplan in March 2026.

Jonathan Monk
This Painting (Genzken), 2022 (detail)
Acrylic and screenprint on canvas
63 x 47.25” / 160 x 120cm

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Jonathan Monk
This Painting (Genzken), 2022
(alternate view)

Self-reference and appropriation echo throughout Jonathan Monk’s (b. 1969, Leicester, UK) practice, whose artworks can often be seen and experienced as a reaction to and in interaction with the art of his peers that he is most interested in. Monk never considers a work entirely concluded, preferring his output to exist as a limitless continuation of earlier projects. He reinvents and reuses his own ideas, and more than occasionally the ideas of others. To Monk, the relationships between gallery and artist, collector and artist, as well as artist and artist, are as much materials to be experimented with as paint or a screen-printing press. Relationships and mediums are re-contextualized and reinterpreted throughout Monk’s oeuvre, which traverses sculpture, photography, film, painting, and more, in a compounding number of ways.

This Painting (Genzken) is part of a 2022 series of acrylic-based paintings, each emblazoned with screen-printed text that differs from one to the next, always beginning with the phrase “This painting should ideally be hung…” Abstractions and illustrative additions evocative of the artist’s humor and pursuit of play are intertwined with the screen-printed line, setting up an imagined reality by dictating a supposed “ideal” placement on the wall. With each set of location-centered instructions, Monk reconsiders the context in which a painting of his could be placed - at an art fair, inside a collector’s home, or on the wall of a museum - and the possibility that it could be hung next to an artist that he would himself like to own. By employing a screen-printing press in the creation of unique works, despite the press’ well-accustomed role in producing Warhol-like multiples, Monk imbues the process of making with a perennial theme of his practice: absurdity.

The artist is currently the subject of a solo exhibition titled Limited Company at Belvedere 21, Vienna, Austria, on view through September 21, 2025.

Estate of Marlo Pascual
Untitled, 2014
Digital C-print, Plexiglas, stone, red oak shelf Print:
20 x 30 x .6” / 50.8 x 76.2 x 1.52cm
Installation: 30 x 36 x 7.5” / 76.2 x 91.4 x 19.1cm

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Estate of Marlo Pascual
Untitled, 2014
(alternate view)

Marked by a distinct, sculptural approach to photography, Marlo Pascual’s (1972-2020, b. Nashville, TN) work reimagines found images through evocative interventions and interactions with her characteristic vocabulary of objects. Pascual culled images from online retailers and pawnshops, sourcing pet photography, yearbook portraits, and headshots to bolster between plexiglass, scale up dramatically, or otherwise disrupt with tears, folds, or double exposures. Physical objects like conch shells, stepladders, large rocks, and live plants interrupt glamorous women’s faces, while fluorescent light tubes, table lamps, and candle sconces illuminate other starlets, their gleaming gazes a kind of melancholic visual pun. In these psychological narratives, Pascual conjured a second life for her images that blurred the binary of photography and sculpture, expanding the possibilities of both.

For Untitled (2014), Pascual mounted a scaled-up vintage yearbook photograph under Plexiglas, then embedded a smooth, angular stone into the flat surface of the image, directly atop the subject’s face. Exposing only a sliver of an inconclusive jawline, the stone launches the appropriated photograph into its new life as a work of art, while preserving the anonymity of its old life like a censor bar protecting a witness in a documentary film. In Pascual’s own words, the stone “break[s] apart the image,” speaking to the subtle violence inherent in the artist’s disruption of the portrait — is the stone crushing instead of concealing, or is it a harmless pun? Pascual layers mischief and unease with an undercurrent of veneration by incorporating a shelf reminiscent of a mantelpiece, carving out a three-dimensional space that accentuates the eerie flatness of the almost buoyant stone hovering in the center of the photograph. With simple gestures, Pascual directs her own enigmatic cinema, pitching seamlessly between image and object to awaken new storylines in pictures of the past.

Marlo Pascual is included in Uncanny, a group exhibition on view at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington D.C., through August 10th, 2025.

Kaveri Raina
rarely in a straight line, 2025
Acrylic, graphite, oil pastel, burlap
75 x 60” / 190.5 x 152.4cm

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Kaveri Raina
rarely in a straight line, 2025
(detail)

Kaveri Raina
rarely in a straight line, 2025
(alternate view)

For Art Basel in Basel 2025, Kaveri Raina (b. 1990, New Delhi, India) presents rarely in a straight line, a new large-scale acrylic, oil pastel, and graphite abstraction on stretched and sewn burlap.

Raina’s paintings suggest the corporality of past happenings, both witnessed and visualized. Abstracted forms rendered from personal experience and inherited histories reveal generations of dislocation. Bodies at rest or in motion oscillate across textured surfaces, disrupted and reimagined mid-story. Her references–spanning chronicles of India’s colonial and contemporary history to the painting practices of Leon Golub (1922-2004) and Lee Lozano (1930-1999) – are both illuminating and tragic, intersecting her own somatic experiences with legends of warriors and stories of conflict.

A yellow figure emerges from layers of paint and pastel in the top quadrant of rarely in a straight line. Its “body” is bisected and interrupted by undulating forms of varying opacity. Vibrant gestures of memories, folk tales, and historical precedence converge in a single composition driven by the rhythmic physicality of Raina’s practice. Paint is pushed through the permeable weave of burlap from both sides of the work, creating textured, ghostly silhouettes. In other areas, paint forges impenetrable pools of color. Swirls of graphite trace intuitive rotations of the artist’s shoulder or wrist, forming orbs and ovals with no discernible start or endpoint.

Johanna Unzueta
Zwischi 2022, Berlin 2023, Zwischi 2023 I, 2023
Watercolor, pastel pencil, oil stick, needle holes on watercolor paper tinted with wild berries / Kratzbeere, plexiglass, wood
59.5 x 49.5 x 9” / 150.8 x 125.7 x 22.9cm
Paper size: 44.5 x 39.25” / 113 x 110cm

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Johanna Unzueta
Zwischi 2022, Berlin 2023, Zwischi 2023 I, 2023
(detail)

Johanna Unzueta’s (b. 1974, Santiago, Chile) work draws from the natural world and the balance between the earth and its living counterparts. Unzueta engages with her Chilean history through its landscape, communities, and labor practices, often working with organic materials that are indigenous to Latin America. In an interdisciplinary practice that spans drawing, weaving, installation, mural-making, and film, the artist uses common materials such as recycled wood, thread, felt, cotton, paper, and natural pigments to describe the social impact of grown and circulated objects within a belabored economy. In a shift towards the natural world, Unzueta pays homage to her environment and its effect on the human condition.

Unzueta presents Zwischi 2022, Berlin 2023, Zwischi 2023 I (2023), an intricate work on paper displayed upright, braced between two sheets of Plexiglas supported by wooden blocks, and informed by the Italian-Brazilian modernist architect Lina Bo Bardi’s (1914 - 1992) exhibition design for Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP) São Paulo, Brazil. Titled within its place and time of creation—between Zwischendeich and Berlin, the two German residences of the artist—each drawing in this ongoing series serves as a cartography of place and a bridge between maker and community. Unzueta’s work is manifested with intuitive expression, influenced by her cultural roots and in constant dialogue with the social and biological qualities of nature. Characteristic of her oeuvre, the paper is laboriously tinted with natural dyes—this time using wild berries (Kratzbeere). Hand-drawn with watercolor, pastel pencil, and oil stick, the work’s circular and elliptic forms are created from paper templates and embroidery hoops, and inscribed with traces of indigenous craft practices cultivated from her apprenticeship with Mapuche women in rural Chile. Delicate needle holes and cut-paper elements enhance the work’s sculptural quality, as the surrounding light interacts with and accentuates its spatial presence.

Johanna Unzueta is included in the Art Encounters Biennial: Bounding Histories. Whispering Tales., on view in Timi?oara, Romania, through July 13, 2025.

Ella Walker
Streetwalking, 2025
Acrylic dispersion, pigment, chalk and pencil, on linen
67 x 35.5” / 170.2 x 90.2cm

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Ella Walker
Streetwalking, 2025
(alternate view)

Ella Walker (b. 1993, Manchester, UK) channels art historical iconography and modern-day references to create contemporary, theatrical scenes of love, tragedy, and mystery. Immersed in medieval and Renaissance painting traditions, Walker wields an array of mediums including tempera, gesso, chalk, acrylic dispersion, and graphite to depict shallow “stage-like” depths of field. For the artist, the ritual of painting is reinvented against backdrops untethered in time, defying logic and disrupting binaries of old and new, high and low culture.

In Streetwalking (2025), Walker depicts two striding figures: one clad in a translucent Malachite Green vest and Venetian Red pants turns her confrontational gaze toward the viewer, while another nearly-nude figure stares ahead, flanked by two disembodied, mask-like faces. At left, facing opposite, a lone costumed actor stands on a stage below a Bohemian Green Earth and Raw Sienna façade of an imagined Giorgio de Chirico-esque skyline bathed in golden light. Walker layers her pigments onto the porous, paper-like paint surface in varying degrees of opacity, applying some areas thinly enough to see the scenery beneath the figures’ watery flesh or dappled clothing, or to leave evidence of a change in the planned composition, as in the faint, unrealized face peering out from the central figure’s hair.

This tension between transparency and concealment, seen and unseen, is alluded to in the painting’s title, Streetwalking, which describes the two figures’ movement as the street becomes another performative space. Here, Walker’s liminal characters, perpetually on display, negotiate their relationship with the audience, never truly asking the viewer to desire, judge, or pity them. Resisting any fixed readings, Walker probes the human condition within the unfolding drama of her painting, her emancipated iconography offering possibilities of stealth existences and broken binaries.

Ella Walker: Idolatrie, the artist’s first solo exhibition in a French institution, is on view at Le Château - Centre for Contemporary Art and Heritage of Aubenas, Aubenas, France, through September 21, 2025.

Amanda Williams
We’ve been waiting, imagine I’ve arrived, 2025
Innovation Blue pigment, Alabama red clay gesso, distemper, watercolor on wood panel
47.25 x 62.5 x 2” / 120 x 158.8 x 5.1cm
Two parts, each: 47.25 x 31.25 x 2” / 120 x 79.4 x 5.1cm

Amanda Williams
We’ve been waiting, imagine I’ve arrived, 2025
(detail)

Amanda Williams (b. 1974, Evanston, IL) deconstructs the physical and psychological systems of inequity associated with race. Informed by her architectural background, Williams’ command of space shapes her meditations on race, color, and value. With a multidisciplinary practice that spans painting, works on paper, photography, sculpture and installation, Williams communicates through a chromatic language of abstract and material means.

In 1927, George Washington Carver (b. 1864, Diamond, MO, d. 1943) patented a formula for a Prussian Blue pigment synthesized from Alabama red clay soil that was never realized to its potential. Over the last two years, Williams collaborated with chemistry and research students at The University of Chicago and Xavier University in New Orleans to reinterpret Carver’s patent and actualize her version of the pigment, called Innovation Blue.

For Art Basel in Basel 2025, Williams presents We’ve been waiting, imagine I’ve arrived (2025), from a new series of paintings that situate Carver’s use of local soil in his recipe for Prussian Blue within a lineage of Black innovation. Williams applies the soil as a foundation to wood panels, which are then joined and tilted to manipulate the pigment. In this work, varying viscosities of Innovation Blue spill from one section to the next, recalling Helen Frankenthaler’s soak-stained color field paintings. Pigment pools and stretches across the surface of the work, forging bodily, almost sentient forms that seem to reach for something just out of frame. Through an exploration of the relationship between soil and pigment, Williams resists the margins of the color blue in a meditation on Blackness.

Amanda Williams
We’ve been waiting, imagine I’ve arrived, 2025
(alternate view)

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