New Painters to Know, From New York to LA
A trifecta of exhibitions left me with new favorites.
Lots happening these days — fairs, openings, everything in between. With all the contemporary art churn, it feels like a great time to find new favorites rather than revisit old friends. Here are three artists I didn’t know but will keep an eye on for years to come.
Blurry Bodies in LA
In the faraway land of Los Angeles, Hauser & Wirth is showing new work by British painter George Rouy (up until June 1). This was the first time I’d heard of him, but I suspect it won’t be the last— not only is The Bleed, Part II already his second solo show at Hauser by age 31, but the works are genuinely, strikingly good.
The canvases are like a dream, or nightmare, where you recognize something but can’t quite grab on to it. A tangle of bodies blurs together, with limbs or bellies or clutching hands emerging from the chaos only to disappear again. The works feel like the historical and the contemporary have been mixed together, given a good shake, and poured out again — which makes sense when you learn that Rouy aims to depict the human form seen through the thoroughly contemporary “distorted reality” of screens, yet also has an abiding interest in art history (canonical works like Goya’s The 3 May 1808’ (1814) or Gericault’s The Raft of Medusa (1818) are directly referenced in the show’s text). That “distorted reality” is evident in the way the paintings look like a roiling mass from far away, and coalesce into human bodies up close, such as in III (2025) or Absentee (2025). But rather than feeling violently fragmented, akin to the way male Surrealists liked to chop up the female form, the figures fade back into the mass from which they came. Are they rejoining something, or trying to escape? Are they becoming, or disintegrating? These deeply human questions are backed up by Rouy’s technique of using varying degrees of realism for each figure. It’s an effective approach: not only do you ponder the human condition, but your eye stays engaged as it tries to make sense of what you’re looking at.
Some of the more defined body parts are rendered with a grace and beauty that’s reminiscent of Greek sculptures. The weight and volume of a tiptoeing leg or pointing hand is remarkable, with a play of light and shadow that draws you into the abstracted bodily haze. Most of the works are in color, leaning heavily on browns and reds, but the best ones are in monochromatic gray. In The Great Silence (2025), thighs, stomachs, and calves materialize to create an unlikely feeling of contemporary chaos frozen in old-fashioned grisaille, a method of imitating stone in paint that was favored by 15th century Flemish painters. The result is monumentalization of our harum-scarum digital age, a fast-moving tumult commemorated in the same way saints and martyrs used to be.
Part of the paintings’ dramatic impact is attributable to their sheer size. The canvases are large, nearly 9 feet across, which suits the cavernous, light-filled space in Hauser’s gallery complex in downtown LA. It’s a space for Big Art, no tiny paintings here — fitting for a city with what feels like endless space to this New Yorker.
Environmental destruction meets medieval technique at Frieze
Back in square footage-hungry New York, the smaller, more delicate paintings of Malo Chapuy at the mor charpentier booth were some of my favorite works at Frieze. Chapuy replicates forms that are familiar from late Middle Ages religious paintings — triptychs with docile Madonnas and dainty angels, gentlemen in tight stockings and luxurious robes, saints slaying dragons and healing the sick. His twist is to include ugly elements of contemporary environmental destruction that surrounds these otherwise medieval saints and maidens. In Vierge Allaitant (2024), a Madonna holds baby Jesus in front of a background of beautifully-rendered smokestacks. In Saint George (2024), the dragon is a winding industrial pipe snaking into the ground. In Cylindre O’Neil (2024) worshippers fall before a gothic gold construction onto gray and dead earth, animated by nothing but the skeletons of trees and a dried river.
Chapuy is not the first artist to attempt a similar combination of Middle Ages/Renaissance styles with contemporary subjects. What sets him apart, however, is his technical skill. The original works by artists like Giotto, Fra Filippo Lippi, and the Sienese painters are so extraordinary because of the artists’ ability to depict details like facial expressions, the weight of fabric, and richly patterned architecture and textiles in a way that’s both realistic and dramatic. They painted in tempera on wood panels, a mix of pigments and egg yolk, which dries quickly and allows for precise lines and vibrant, matte colors. Chapuy, also working in tempera and painting on wood panels, has this same skill. As a result, the fabrics, colors, and expressions at first glance are almost mistakable for works from the 15th century, not the 21st, which makes the symbols of environmental destruction all the more disturbing.
Korean Modernism in Chelsea
In Chelsea, Tina Kim Gallery opened a beautiful show on Korean modernism: The Making of Modern Korean Art. The exhibition features four artists: Kim Tschang-Yeul, Kim Whanki, Lee Ufan, and Park Seo-Bo, and will leave you wanting to know more about their work and their legacy. You’ve got until June 21 to pop by the gallery’s Chelsea location.
The thesis of the exhibition is that in the aftermath of the Korean war, the exchanges between the four artists shaped the course of Korean modern art. It’s a successful argument. Unlike western abstraction, Korean abstract painting finds its roots in the natural world and meditation. Each artist in the show has their own distinct style, but the works share a powerful meditative repetition and connection to the natural environment.
My favorite works are Kim Tschang-Yeul’s Tao-influenced water drop series. Realistic groupings of droplets drip down the canvas, bead on the surface, or fall in a lonely, perfect tear. Anyone familiar with Taoism or Buddhism knows the metaphor of human lives and water drops. We separate from the ocean or the clouds for a fleeting moment, then rejoin the source. We don’t disappear, but simply become something else. In his work, Tschang-Yeul seizes the brief, ephemeral moment that we hold a unique form, even as the moment passes. In Genesis (1986), a large canvas of five rivulets, the water soaks into the canvas while the droplets fall, and we know they won’t remain there for long. Showing these paintings is an effort to make Tschang-Yeul’s water drop stay a little longer — he isn’t a well-known name, and this exhibition is a push to make his spiritually-grounded work more visible.
Lee Ufan is the biggest name in the group, incidentally the only artist still living, and is featured through his monochrome series of disappearing blue lines. They are seemingly simple but completely mesmerising, with the lines’ dissolution on the canvas speaking to Ufan’s focus on temporality and rhythmic meditation. They bring to mind contemporary artist Lee Bae’s monochrome black charcoal creations, which also speak to the cycle of life and the passage of time. My one qualm with the show was that it didn’t make the evolution with contemporary artists more obvious. Given the show’s argument is that these artists shaped modern Korean art, examples of contemporary connections would be helpful to an audience to see.
All images courtesy of the rights holders