Insights, articles, and stories about contemporary art, collecting, and the art world.
By Takwa Sabry
Takwa Sabry starts each painting with a clear image in her mind — a composition, a color palette, something she can see but cannot touch. Then the middle layers arrive, and everything shifts.
By Natasha
Natasha makes large-scale paintings where precise architectural forms meet something harder to name. She's been at it for over a decade, and the mood hasn't shifted.
By Bellabstrait
Bellabstrait spent her early years painting what she thought would sell. Then she painted La Valkyrie, and the calculation stopped — with better results than the calculation ever produced.
By Cardamone Alessandro
Cardamone Alessandro has spent 25 years building a series from a single sketch made in a Paris café. The figures keep changing. The method stays sudden.
By Bisola Abdulrasheed
Bisola Abdulrasheed builds thread portraits around the fears women carry beneath composed surfaces. She wants the face to reach you before anything else does.
By Naemat Wardak
Naemat Wardak's oil paintings begin with Afghanistan and arrive somewhere harder to name — inside the person who has kept watching, long after the looking became exhausting.
By Eliza Leopold
Eliza Leopold builds paintings around a single destabilising element — and lets the rest complete itself in whoever is standing in front of it.
By Abraham Adewole
Working from Ogbomoso with discarded sawmill offcuts and old furniture, Abraham Adewole builds portraits that ask what we owe to what we throw away.
By Belinda Frikh
Belinda Frikh's stylised female figures hold their gaze across eras — from Art Deco to the 1980s — and never look away. The eyes, she says, are the thread that links every decade she moves through.
By ساحل
ساحل paints Persian carpet patterns in oil, but the carpet is never just the subject. A word written in Arabic inside an Iranian form tells you why.
By Almas
Almas paints countryside landscapes in oil and acrylic from Sharjah, working toward larger canvases and sharper light on moving water.
By Maja Kerin
Maja Kerin uses movement, exposure, light and timing to make photographs that capture a feeling rather than document a place.
By Daniel Abera
Daniel Abera's paintings begin in Addis Ababa's markets—rain, cold, traders waiting. What he builds on canvas is something else entirely.
By Mariana
Mariana builds symbolic digital worlds in Photoshop, one layer at a time. Her debut collection took a week or two per piece. She didn't count the masks.
By Marina Imar
Marina Imar is a Belarusian artist working in painting and graphic art. At the foundation of her method is a simple sequence: line → form → colour → space.
By Patience Adekunle
Patience Adekunle builds portraits from recycled electronic cables in Ibadan. At 28, she is making work that treats e-waste as both material and argument.
By Olamilekan Okunade
Nigerian painter Olamilekan Okunade builds his figures from geometric blocks of color, pixel by pixel, until a tech lady in a grey suit emerges from a library of dark books.
By Pierre Benjamin
Pierre Benjamin paints icons — Winehouse, Dean, Monroe — in oil on a warm ochre ground, chasing the private face behind the public one.
By Art Meštrović
Croatian painter Art Meštrović works from a home studio in Virovitica, scraping back oil paint until a helmet's reflection finally tells him when to stop.
By Metalhead Melankolis
Jakarta collagist Metalhead Melankolis keeps a face torn from a magazine he hasn't used in years. He's still waiting for the right moment.
