Author: Adeline Brooks

Lisa Tahar has lived in Leipzig since she was born there in 1963, and the city has been the backdrop to a full life. She raised four children, who are now grown, and worked in a number of professions before retirement gave her something she hadn’t had in years: time. In 2018 she spent it on a canvas. It is a beautiful kind of story, the sort we tell ourselves when we worry we’ve left something too late. Tahar didn’t worry. She simply started. The Man with the Happy Little Trees Her inspiration, she says, came a long time ago…

James Day has spent a quarter century developing a visual language that resists easy categorisation, and the shape of that development says as much about his art as any single painting does. To trace his output from 2001 to the present is to watch an artist move steadily from expression through colour toward a more controlled, more deliberate surrealism, one built on precision rather than spontaneity. A Vocabulary Built Over Time Day’s earliest paintings were bright and immediate, favouring colour over detail. The photorealistic technique he later developed marks a considerable departure from that starting point, not because it is…

Roughly eight years ago, Lib Mason found herself facing a question most artists never get to ask cleanly: what would she paint if there were no client, no assignment, and no brand waiting for the final product? For decades, her working life as a commercial illustrator creating imagery for major publications including Rolling Stone and Time Life Warner, and later developing product lines and artist-branded licensed collections had been defined by other people’s needs. When that career ended, the silence that followed wasn’t empty. It was an opening. The Question Behind the Return Mason had studied editorial illustration at the…

Karla Ochoa Pesantez remembers her mother’s workshop the way some people remember a favorite room in a childhood home, not as a single image but as a collection of sensations: the smell of fabric, the sound of a needle pulling thread, the particular patience required to finish something by hand. She grew up in Cuenca, Ecuador, and spent much of her early years in the nearby town of Paute, where her mother, Sara Isabel Pesantez, worked as a local artisan and artist, painting, sewing, knitting, and decorating. Whatever free time Karla had as a girl, she spent nearby, watching. She…

Natalie Angel begins each painting without a plan. This is not carelessness; it is method. She lets emotion arrive first, unnamed, unsorted, and only afterward does the imagery form around it. The result is a body of work that reads less like a set of finished statements and more like a series of unfinished conversations between an inner life and the world that shaped it. This intuitive approach places Angel’s practice within a broader avant-garde sensibility, one less concerned with technical formula than with honesty. She paints identity, transformation, freedom and resilience not as abstract concepts but as felt experiences,…

Somewhere in a crowded street, a market stall, or the quiet interior of a café, a stranger’s face holds someone’s attention for a moment longer than politeness requires. Most of us let that moment pass. Sylvianne Blum Cassereau does not. The Mexican artist has built an entire practice around that instinct to pause to notice a person fully, to wonder about the life behind their expression, and eventually, to translate that noticing into portraiture rendered in soft pastel. Her work is not about faces in the abstract. It is about specific people: their worth, their dignity, their right to be…

Before there was a body of work, there was a decision. Jane Gottlieb did not arrive at her distinctive photographic style through a straight line from art school to gallery wall. She arrived at it the way most artists eventually do: slowly, through false starts, professional detours, and the gradual accumulation of confidence in her own instincts. From the Classroom to Madison Avenue Gottlieb’s foundation was academic. She studied at UCLA and later at Berkeley, institutions that gave her a grounding in the fundamentals of art before she ever set out to build a career around a camera. That path…

Chin Kong Yee is a contemporary Malaysian artist whose distinctive approach to painting explores the complex relationship between reality, memory, perception, and time. Through his unique artistic philosophy, which he calls Actuality Accorded Painting (AAP), Kong Yee investigates how people experience the world through observation and how a single moment of seeing can connect the past, present, and future. His paintings often create a surreal and cinematic atmosphere, combining realistic and unrealistic perspectives within the same composition. The result is a body of work that challenges conventional ways of representing reality while inviting viewers to consider how perception shapes their…

Anuar Dan is a Malaysian artist whose paintings explore the vibrant relationship between urban environments, natural landscapes, cultural heritage, and the passage of time. Through expressive brushwork, bold colors, and abstracted geometric forms, he creates compositions that capture both the energy of modern life and the enduring beauty of traditional surroundings. Working primarily with acrylic on canvas, Anuar Dan brings architectural structures and natural elements together in dynamic visual arrangements. His paintings often reflect the changing character of the environments around him, particularly the gradual transformation of traditional ways of life as modern urban development continues to reshape familiar landscapes.…

The objects, a stone mask and an intricate ceramic figure, are scheduled to be auctioned Thursday morning in New York The Mexican government has published a statement calling on Sotheby’s in New York to withdraw two pre-Columbian artefacts from its Art of Africa, Oceania and the Americas sale being held Thursday (18 June). Mexico’s secretary of culture, Claudia Curiel de Icaza, wrote on social media that the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) had analysed the works and determined that they are “part of the cultural heritage of the nation”. Curiel de Icaza said “necessary actions” were already taken to demand their withdrawal from the…