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Arcmanoro Niles is a New York-based artist whose brightly hued paintings offer views of his daily life. He introduces little elements of hallucinatory surrealism into otherwise realist paintings through a dramatic play with color, texture, and light, as well as the integration of marginal characters he calls “seekers,” who reflect subliminal urges and desires. Often incorporating reflective paints and glitter to enliven the surface of his canvases and those depicted, Niles infuses his quietly mundane scenes with an electrifying vulnerability. “A lot of it is pretty intuitive, especially when it comes to the color, the construction of the composition, and how I want it to feel,” shares the artist. “But I think that, at the end of the day, I am a painter who is interested in color and stories that talk about who we are. Little moments that give us a glimpse into what life feels like.”

I Look Just Like My Mama With My Father’s Eyes (Can Time Heal The Guilty) depicts the artist standing in front of his kitchen sink, dressed in patterned lounge pants as he returns our gaze. Over a neon pink ground, the oil paints accentuate Niles’s features—in particular, his eyes—with a luminescent glow, a pinkish tint that recurs in the artist’s work, highlighting golden brown skin, glittery pink hair, and the bold, matte colors of the interior setting. The so-called seeker characters here include a strange little doll-like figure located in the bottom right corner, while an unfinished stick figure haunts the left edge of the canvas. These elements, along with the work’s personal title, move this self-portrait away from an exact representation and into a dreamlike scene, expanding the register of figurative painting and self-portraiture today.

One of the foremost painters of her generation, New York-based Avery Singer investigates the visual relationships between the digital and the analog in her complex, large-scale paintings. Singer believes that “the main goal of an artist is to test, explore, and go beyond the existing boundaries” of one’s medium. To accomplish this, she begins each painting with a three-dimensional architectural rendering of her subject matter using the program SketchUp, which allows the artist to experiment with perspective and planar relationships. Singer then transfers these drawings by hand onto her canvas via projection and applies paint with an airbrush, using paper stencils to layer tints and tones. In 2018, Singer began using an Art Robo, a computer-controlled robot most commonly used in the transport industry to apply paint to trucks and aircrafts. With these inventive techniques, Singer foregrounds her own interest in digital and internet cultures and technologies, and she achieves highly layered and crisp compositions that recall numerous art historical languages, including the angular forms of cubism and the mechanomorphic approach of constructivism.

In Technique, Singer presents a doubled self-portrait within a dynamic play of light, shadow, and pattern. Both figures appear encased and abstracted within and between geometric grayscale forms, while also being the surface onto which the abstracted shapes are projected. This complex shadow play demonstrates the artist’s close attention to the diffusion of her airbrushed paint, articulation of spatial relationships, and the graphic flatness to her intricate technique, building moments of density across her canvas, marking boundaries between forms and colors as well as confusing such distinctions. Altogether, Singer’s technique effectively blurs painterly grounds and generates a distinctive sense of depth and space through her singular union of digital and analog technologies.

Katherine Bradford is a painter and visual artist whose work fuses color-rich textures with abstract figuration in dreamy landscapes. Her subject matter is diverse, from depictions of water scenes and the night sky to obliquely rendered portraits of athletes and superheroes. Not formally trained in visual art, Bradford began working professionally as a painter later in life and now divides her time between New York and Maine.

Bradford’s approach to figurative painting eschews traditional portraiture in favor of an atmospheric treatment that leaves the work’s references and composition open. As the artist explains: “I’m interested in making paintings that are about something bigger than everyday life—something very universal.” In Motherhood, bold blocks of color create the everyday scene of a figure sitting on a blue sofa with two smaller figures. From the title, one understands these figures as a mother and two children, one seated on the mother’s lap, and the mother’s arms outstretched between them. The artist does not add details to their faces or clothing, but renders her characters in a loose treatment; here, the effect transforms this painting into a work that explores the feeling of motherhood, rather than a narrative event. Overall, Bradford uses luminous color and gestural brushwork to make “paintings about enchantment,” infusing her canvases with feelings of both tenderness and care, as well as melancholy and ambivalence.

One of the foremost American painters of our time, Amy Sillman pushes gestural abstract painting into new realms to examine the full range of human emotions. Known for active brushwork, improvisation, and riotous colors, Sillman’s work has been part of a reinvigoration of abstract painting alongside artists such as Laura Owens and Julie Mehretu. In addition to being a committed and skilled painter, Sillman is known for her mentorship of younger artists, her engagement with political criticism, and her three-decades-long career as a working artist. In 2013, the ICA presented Amy Sillman: one lump or two, Sillman’s first major survey exhibition.

Layered and supercharged, Split is a recent work by Sillman, painted during the summer of 2020 amid the Covid-19 pandemic and stay-at-home advisories. Predominantly goldenrod yellow with white, black, green, and deep purples, the painting displays many of Sillman’s distinctive moves, especially her use of visible gestures and scraping, to build up and then remove elements from the composition. Unique to this recent body of work is the presence of flowers, a motif the artist recounts as the subject of recent daily drawings made at her kitchen table. A purple blossom in the top left of Split gives way to vertical lines suggestive of stems. Describing the energy she hopes to capture through this body of work, Sillman writes: “The world’s ground was shifting, so I started concentrating on the fields behind the figures—patterns, plaids, and confusing figure-to-grounds, a purposefully destabilized signal-to-noise ratio.” Split appears to be bifurcated at an angle: the left side is marked with a certain clarity of dark horizontal lines painted with a wide brush, while the right side is obscured by a murky collection of shapes not yet or no longer visible. The two sides suggest differing views of the same scene, perhaps indicative of the divisiveness that marks our political sphere. The painting holds a feeling of being unfinished, with Sillman leaving parts highly detailed and yet abruptly cut off, as if she had thought to complete it but then decided against it. This sense of being in process or improvising a yet fully realized scene is perhaps one of Sillman’s most unique contributions to expressive painting today.

The labor-intensive, process-oriented works of artist and educator Stephen Hamilton aim to address the persistent lack of positive, multidimensional representations of Black life in American culture. Hamilton makes connections between historical and contemporary cultures by incorporating both Black American and West African traditions, combining figurative painting and drawing with techniques such as resist dyeing, weaving, and woodcarving.

Growing out of the artist’s research and interest in developing a program on West African cultural continuities in the African diaspora, The Founders Project is a series of nine multimedia paintings that reimagine Boston public high school students as the storied founders of West and West-Central African ethnic groups. Each life-size work combines painting with weaving and sculptural traditions specific to the ethnic group whose story is depicted. In Jahnae Wyatt as Queen Poku, Jahnae Wyatt, one of Hamilton’s former students is portrayed as Poku, legendary queen of the Baule people of modern day Ivory Coast. According to legend, when her people were fleeing the violent expansionist wars of the Ashanti people, they came upon a river too deep and wide to cross. Queen Poku offered her infant son to the river spirit in exchange for her people’s safe passage. After this sacrifice, hippopotamuses emerged from the river’s depths and her people were able to walk across the animals’ backs to safety. Wyatt is portrayed as Queen Poku at the decisive moment just before her sacrifice, flanked on either side by hippos emerging from the river. Painted on hand-dyed cloth and framed on either side by hand-carved wooden sculptures (all recalling elements of Baule culture), Queen Poku’s dress is a hand-woven passage of fabric. Hamilton weaves together past and present, creating a bridge between the ancient and modern worlds.

Steve Locke has established himself as a critical artistic voice in the representation of race and visual culture. Versed in the mediums of painting, drawing, installation, and sculpture, Locke examines subjects of race, sexuality, gender, and history, with a focus on cultural discussions of masculinity.

A notable departure from his more renowned portraiture and figurative paintings, and responding to Josef Albers’s series Homage to the Square in particular, Locke’s Homage to the Auction Block #15 is part of a series of paintings Locke created to challenge modernist forms and their assumed neutrality. Like Albers’s series, Locke’s paintings focus on the concentric meeting of line, color, and shape. Unlike Albers, Locke substitutes the visual search for the square with another form. Here, encased within a painted purple square within a burgundy square within a red square, is a yellow rectangle-like shape—Locke’s auction block motif. This cross-section schematic of the auction block, the public site where enslaved persons were sold as property, becomes the organizing principle around which the painting is structured. By placing the auction block at the core of his composition, Locke connects the history of chattel slavery and the slave trade with the origin of global capitalism and the invention of race and racial hierarchies. As Locke explains: “The use of the ‘auction block’ motif literally organizes these modernist relations around the central symbol of chattel slavery in the Americas. The work reframes the work of modernism around the shape that made it possible.” This significant body of work continues Locke’s interest in contending with the form of the auction block and its visual history, as well as its influence in cultural memory.

London-based Issy Wood straddles realism and surrealism in her paintings of everyday objects with tightly cropped compositions and evocative details. She is also an electronic-pop musician, featuring her own paintings on the covers of her EPs and singles, as well as her debut album My Body Your Choice (2022). In Go Daddy! (Out to get you), Wood paints two bucket seats of a car’s interior from a peculiar angle. The car interior is a recurring subject in Wood’s paintings. She considers it a masculine space, presented through advertising as a kind of escape and frequently populated by men. Painted with great detail, this interior is cast with an eerie green color that, when combined with the perspective, renders the mundane scene as surprising and perhaps disquieting. Except for a glint of white light, Wood eliminates any context, segregating the scene from the outside world and highlighting it as a private space. This interplay between a common object and a sinister psychology recurs in Wood’s work, producing a sense of detachment and humor. Her distinctive treatment of banal subjects as well as her painting on clothing and furniture has distinguished her work in the field of contemporary painting, confirming her as part of the conversation around reinvigorating the traditions of portraiture and still life.

For more than a decade, Deborah Roberts has explored constructions of race and gender, as well as popular depictions of Black childhood in the United States. She combines found and manipulated images with hand-drawn and painted areas to create large-scale, emotionally charged paintings that explore the real and the possible forms of representations of Black children. Roberts employs found media to contend with dominant portrayals and narratives of Black youth, narratives that she often subverts through her use of collage. “Wading through my work,” Roberts explains, “you must look through multiple layers, double meanings, and symbols.”

For many years, Roberts has focused on depicting young Black girls (a decision she connects to her personal experience), producing a body of work that addresses ideas of vulnerability and strength. A signature work by the artist, Becoming, which Roberts has described as a self-portrait, presents a single figure against a white background, her face composed of three black-and-white photographs and the rest of her body and clothing rendered in paint and oil crayon. The girl, appearing somewhat timid, is set off to the right side, knees knocking together, her raised arms crossing over her body. The relationship of the girl to her body, as the title suggests, is in a state of becoming, juxtaposed between the photographic and the painted, the known and the unknown, the girl and the woman. “The girls who populate my work, while subject to societal pressures and projected images, are still unfixed in their identity,” says Roberts. Through the dimensionality of her characters, Roberts critiques the narrow beauty standards and the prevalent and persistent emotional, physical, and sexual stereotyping of Black girls and women. By bringing small moments of Black girlhood to large-scale paintings, Roberts offers an important correction to the history of art and gives visual form to the rich terrain of childhood.

A prominent voice among a new generation of figurative painters, New York-based Doron Langberg has gained a reputation for vivid, luminous paintings that foreground intimacy and touch. Depicting himself, family, friends, and lovers, Langberg’s paintings center on lived experiences and the ways that painting amplifies the physical and emotional resonances of living.

Langberg’s process begins with small, observational studies made of graphite, oil paint, and colored pencil, which he translates into large-scale paintings. Rich with texture and color, the finished canvases evoke atmospheric moods that often privilege private, domestic moments and intimate gestures. Bather depicts a man immersed in a bathtub filled with water. Details such as various bottles and the rumpled clothes on the floor complete this everyday scene. A common subject in the history of art, the bather has appeared in the works of many artists, from Titian to Paul Cézanne, who frequently portray women bathers in idyllic landscapes or classical scenes. In this case, Langberg specifically references the French artist Pierre Bonnard’s painting Bather (1935), but importantly replaces Bonnard’s woman figure with an equally intimate portrait of a man—a continuation of Langberg’s centering of queer experiences and his commitment to expand the representation of queer sexualities. Speaking about his work the artist says: “Queerness for me is not just a sexual experience, but a way of being in the world which affects every aspect of my life. Using intense colors and different paint textures and marks to create these everyday scenes, I want to connect with a viewer by speaking to our most basic commonalities—our bodies, our relationships, our interiority—rather than the social categories that may separate us. In creating this connection, I want to make queer pleasure, friendship, and intimacy feel expansive and generative, embodying the full range of human experiences.”

Celeste Rapone is a Chicago-based, abstract figurative painter known for depicting her subjects (who are often women, and usually the artist herself), in outlandish, impossible, and even humorous compositions. Her style exceeds the traditional expectations and perspectival grounds of the canvas, drawing attention to the dynamic movements, colors, and details layered into her paintings. The artist relates her compositional choices to sub-narratives about anxiety, vulnerability, and freedom, especially in the lives of women: “There’s something about the idea of the women contained, occupying these impossible positions anatomically, but also in terms of expectations, ambition, defeat, and self-awareness.”

Rapone began Pack Animals with a specific color: the bright, rose pink that was her grandmother’s favorite color. From there, the artist drew from memories and individual experiences, working out the composition, patterns, and figures on the canvas without preparatory drawings. In this work, three nearly identical female-presenting figures—who appear to be wearing the same masked expression and hairstyle—gather on matching plaid blankets on a brilliant autumn day, a time of year the artist associates with the start of school and new beginnings. The three figures stretch and twist their bodies beyond realistic proportions and standard perspectives to give the painting a distinctive composition and sense of humor. The painting is populated with a remarkable range of objects (such as a football, a tote bag from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, a drone in flight, crocodile skin patterned boots, a pair of cleats, and a deflated soccer ball), which serve to inform viewers about Rapone’s subjects and her picnic scene. The individual attire and styling of each figure is cast against a fascination with fashion and trends. In both form and content, the painting displays the drama between the individual and group, or pack, as in the title. While the figures appear individually consumed in their own activities, they almost interlock with one another and the surrounding scene, which makes discerning their individual forms visually challenging.