Happy New Year
In 2022, we have seen an increasing integration of digital and technology-based art into the mainstream art world. There has been a tremendous growth in the resources and platforms available for digital art, including online exhibition spaces like Vortic and Art At A Time Like This. Artists and collectors who have been active in the art NFT space for the past several years are looking for new opportunities to dive deeper into art history while creating more meaning within different mediums and movements. We hope to continue encouraging dialogue between the crypto, digital space and the more traditional art spaces in 2023. Wishing you love, health and happiness in the new year.
CURATORIAL RECAP
MARCH 2022
We travelled to Dubai for Block Party, a NFT exhibition at Christie’s Dubai presenting the world’s leading NFT art experimentalists brought together for the first NFT exhibition by a global auction house in the region during Art Dubai, the Middle East’s leading international art fair.
OCTOBER - NOVEMBER 2022
Digital artist Andrés Reisinger with director and visual artist Sam Mason presented ANY DAY NOW, a digital artwork exhibited in London at W1 Curates digital exhibition space, W1 Immersive, a unique gallery that uses state-of-the-art technology to showcase the most innovative digital creations.
OCTOBER - DECEMBER 2022
A collaboration with Vortic, a sustainable digital exhibition ecosystem for the art world, Fever Dream presented an evocative series of abstract and figurative works by 13 international artists brought together for the first time through a unique, and ultimately enabling digital experience.
HIGHLIGHTS
FAVORITE EMERGING ARTISTS
HIBA SCHAHBAZ
Hiba Schahbaz, a participating artist in our Fever Dream show, was born in Karachi, Pakistan and lives in Brooklyn, NY. Traditionally trained as a miniaturist, her arrival to New York proved transformative for her practice as she magnified her miniature practice to produce life-size portraits of women.
FRANCESCA MOLLETT
London-based artist Francesca Mollett makes abstract paintings that react to space and context. Her works are reflections of light and surface formed over a long, fluid and precise process composed through addition and subtraction. Often influenced by literature, Mollett reveals a deep relationship between the ethos of life and of time, elusive and unable to be articulated through representation alone.
FAVORITE ACQUISITION: ‘GREEN LACE’
This large scale painting by Angela Heisch titled 'Green Lace', a key work from her recent solo exhibition at the Grimm Gallery, was acquired by the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam with the generous support of my dear friend, client and human rights activist, Amar Singh.
FAVORITE PARTNERSHIP: ART AT A TIME LIKE THIS
Art at a Time Like This supports artists and curators in the 21st century, presenting art in direct response to current events. Founded on March 17th, 2020 by independent curators Barbara Pollack and Anne Verhallen, this non-profit, digital first, arts organization presents art in public spaces --online and offline--as a direct response to social and political events. Their mission is to show that art can make a difference and that artists and curators can be thought-leaders, envisioning alternative futures for humanity. (Image: Latifa Zafar Attaii, From the exhibition Before Silence: Afghan Artists In Exile)
FAVORITE ARTIST INTRODUCTION: LA II AT D’STASSI ART
It was our pleasure to place Puerto Rican street artist Angel Ortiz, better known as LA II with a new gallery, D’Stassi Art in London. Discovered by Keith Haring at the age of 12, LA II had a new solo show titled King of Hearts on view at the gallery in October of 2022. “This show [was] Ortiz’s first in the UK in over 40 years, and as such, it tends to tell a story of leaving the past behind and standing still in the present.” (Widewalls) (Left Image: Corazon, 2022. Paintmarker and spray paint on canvas, 48 x 48 in. / Right Image: Dance Party, 2022. Paintmarker and spray paint on canvas, 48 x 48 in)
FAVORITE SHOWS
AT A FOUNDATION: JENNA GRIBBON AT COLLEZIONE MARAMOTTI
Collezione Maramotti in Reggio Emilia presented Mirages, the first solo show in a European art institution by American painter Jenna Gribbon, who has conceived a new group of ten works specifically for their Pattern Room. Gribbon’s figurative paintings draw inspiration from personal memories, art history and everyday experience, fluidly combining different styles in each piece. Working from photos she has taken with her phone as a way of “capturing ideas”, the artist creates scenes and portraits that have a cinematic feel, hovering between reality, fiction and imagination.
AT A MUSEUM: WILLIAM KENTRIDGE AT THE ROYAL ACADEMY OF ARTS
Last fall, the Royal Academy of Arts in London featured global creative powerhouse William Kentridge, South Africa’s most celebrated living artist, in the biggest exhibition of the artist’s work in the UK. With a practice spanning across multiple mediums like etching, drawing, collage, film and sculpture to tapestry, theatre, opera, dance and music, this Johannesburg-born artist developed his early work during the apartheid regime of the 1980s, and his electrifying large-scale productions and animations have since been shown across the world.
AT A GALLERY: BODYLAND AT GALERIE MAX HETZLER
Curated by Lauren Taschen, BodyLand at Galerie Max Hetzler in Berlin was a liberation of the female form and reemergence into the outside world. With a focus on the natural, both land and body, Taschen says "[t]his group of mostly young and mostly female artists are united in the consistency of the interest, and they afford aspects of their relationship with nature and landscape as well as their relationship to the female body in their artistic practice," she says. (Cultured Mag)