National Portrait Gallery announces a new programme of contemporary commissioning, supported by CHANEL Culture Fund

July 1, 2025

Today the National Portrait Gallery announces Artists First: Contemporary Perspectives on Portraiture, a new programme of contemporary commissioning made possible through a continued partnership with the CHANEL Culture Fund. The programme will see eight contemporary artists create new works in a variety of media that reclaim untold narratives for display alongside works from the National Portrait Gallery’s historic collection. Installation, textile, painting, collage, drawing and film works will be shown across galleries from 6 September 2025, coinciding with a programme of special events with participating artists.

Artists First: Contemporary Perspectives on Portraiture features artists all exhibiting at the National Portrait Gallery for the first time, including Helen Cammock, Giana De Dier, Mary Evans, Małgorzata Mirga-Tas, Ravelle Pillay, Mary Reid Kelley and Patrick Kelley, Soheila Sokhanvari and Charmaine Watkiss.

In dialogue with the Gallery’s Collection, the new commissions will respond to past and present histories, displayed alongside six centuries of portraiture, from the Tudor period to the present day.

Artists First: Contemporary Perspectives on Portraiture will be on display until August 2026. The programme builds upon the legacy of Reframing Narratives: Women in Portraiture, the National Portrait Gallery’s three-year partnership project with the CHANEL Culture Fund that enhanced the representation of women across the National Portrait Gallery’s displays.

photo: L-R: Helen Cammock © Alun Callender; Giana De Dier © Luna Wallace; Mary Evans © Mary Evans; Małgorzata Mirga-Tas © Hendrik Zeitler; Ravelle Pillay © Stephen White & Co; Mary Reid Kelley and Patrick Kelley © Mary Reid Kelley and Patrick Kelley; Soheila Sokhanvari © Tomos Davies; and Charmaine Watkiss © Charmaine Watkiss.

lbf contemporary now represents Gaia Ozwyn

June 24, 2025

LBF Contemporary is pleased to announce the representation of London-based painter Gaia Ozwyn. The artist’s debut solo exhibition, Incantations to a Vague Borderland, ran from 22 May to 19 June, 2025.

Gaia Ozwyn (b. 1991, Plymouth, UK) is a Caribbean-British artist, who completed an MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art in 2024, supported by the Sir Frank Bowling Scholarship. Originally trained as a biomedical scientist and in Medicine, she spent several years working as a doctor in the NHS before committing to a full-time painting practice. Ozwyn’s work explores transitional spaces - borderlands and peripheries - as sites of tension, transformation, and truth. Rooted in the shared experience of inhabiting a corporeal and shifting world, the paintings reflect a dynamic interplay between material presence and transience. Sculptural forms and gestural mark-making come together, in compositions where weight and motion are held in delicate balance. In 2025, Ozwyn was selected for the RCA BLK x Yinka Shonibare Foundation residency, held at the G.A.S. Foundation in Lagos, Nigeria.

photo: Nathan Grace for Artiq

Nara Roesler announces representation of Asuka Anastacia Ogawa

June 18, 2025

Nara Roesler is pleased to announce the representation of Asuka Anastacia Ogawa (1988, Tokyo, Japan) in collaboration with BLUM. Born in Japan, Ogawa spent part of her childhood and adolescence in Brazil, completed her studies in Sweden, and graduated from Central Saint Martins College in London. The cultural diversity that permeated her formative years greatly impacted her artistic production, incorporating different visual references, religions, and traditions.

Ogawa’s dreamlike paintings characteristically depict androgynous children with almond-shaped eyes that gaze far beyond the limits of the canvas and are set against vibrant monochrome backgrounds. Though the compositions do not have definite themes, Ogawa’s images mainly refer to her Japanese and Afro-Brazilian ancestry, in her words: "Although I don’t have a specific theme in mind when I paint, I’m always thinking about my mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother, and our ancestors’ beauty, strength, struggle, and love."

This ancestral legacy is visible through other elements of Ogawa’s paintings, such as clothing, adornments, objects, and animals juxtaposed in compositions that enigmatically portray everyday events, such as an individual doing laundry or a game between children. Ogawa engages with ideas of affection and spiritual rites, creating often ambiguous and mysterious settings charged with hybrid symbolism that echoes her diverse roots.

In March 2024, Nara Roesler São Paulo presented Melinha, Asuka Anastasia Ogawa’s first solo exhibition in Brazil, featuring a set of thirteen new paintings, the result of the artist’s most recent research developments. Between July and August of the same year, new works by the artist were part of the group exhibition 'Japan In/Out Brazil,' in dialogue with works by Tomie Ohtake and Lydia Okumura. From June to July 2025, the artist will participate in an artistic residency at Pivô Salvador. This will be the first time the artist produces works in the country.

photo: Hannah Mjølsnes

Perrotin now represents Nina Chanel Abney

June 10, 2025

Perrotin is thrilled to announce representation of Nina Chanel Abney (born Chicago, IL, USA; lives and works in New York). Her debut exhibition at Perrotin will open at the Paris gallery in September, marking Abney’s first exhibition in France since her large-scale exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo in 2018.

Combining representation and abstraction, Nina Chanel Abney’s paintings capture the frenetic pace of contemporary culture. Broaching subjects as diverse as race, celebrity, religion, politics, sex, and art history, her works eschew linear storytelling in lieu of disjointed narratives. The effect is information overload, balanced with a kind of spontaneous order, where time and space are compressed and identity is interchangeable. Her distinctively bold style harnesses the flux and simultaneity that has come to define life in the 21st century. Paying homage to the sophisticated color theories of Matisse, continuing the legacy of cubists, Picasso and Léger, and connecting with the synesthetic sensibilities of Harlem Renaissance greats, Douglas and Lawrence, Abney brings these historical movements into contemporary pertinence.

Perrotin will represent Nina Chanel Abney in collaboration with Jack Shainman Gallery and Pace Prints.

photo: Todd Midler

Jack Shainman announces representation of Elizabeth Neel

June 4, 2025

Jack Shainman Gallery is pleased to announce representation of Brooklyn-based artist Elizabeth Neel, in collaboration with Vielmetter, Los Angeles and Pilar Corrias Gallery, London.

Known for her abstract painting practice that merges diverse mark-making techniques with explorations of perception, knowledge and the psychological resonance of natural forms, she brings an impactful new voice to the gallery’s roster. Her work will debut with the gallery at Art Basel this year, ahead of a highly-anticipated solo exhibition set for February 2026 at the gallery’s flagship location in Tribeca, New York.

Over the past twenty years, Neel has created a new and distinct form of abstraction that expresses the tension between control and chaos particular to this historical moment. Using a wide range of tools and methods, including brushes, rags, rollers and mono printing techniques requiring human touch, Neel has developed an extensive lexicon of gestures. In her compositions, color, movement and form possess their own objecthood while at the same time serving as vehicles for
earthly metaphor and poetic suggestion.

Central to Neel’s practice is the gathering of images, texts and ephemera from the world around her. X-rays and biological schema interact with architectural plans, data visualizations and references to Medieval history, all of which Neel metabolizes and transmutes into the conceptual and emotive structures of her paintings.

photo: Brad Ogbonna

Hauser & Wirth announces worldwide representation of Cristina Iglesias

June 3, 2025

Iwan Wirth, Manuela Wirth and Marc Payot, Presidents of Hauser & Wirth, announced today the gallery’s worldwide representation of artist Cristina Iglesias.

Over more than four decades, Cristina Iglesias (b. 1956, Donostia-San Sebastián, Spain) has defined a unique sculptural vocabulary, creating immersive and experiential environments that reference and unite architecture, literature, psychology, mechanics, natural elements and site-specific content. Guided by a profound cultural and historical sensitivity, as well as a deep concern for the natural world, Iglesias’ works poetically redefine the viewer’s relationship to time and place.

Iglesias creates imaginative arenas, accessible to the viewer both psychologically and physically, to explore ideas of memory, reverie and refuge. Her formal language fuses manmade and organic materials to create structures ranging from screens, pavilions and latticed panels to tidal pools and deep wells. As the artist has said, ‘I am interested in the symbolic connotation of growth and metamorphosis. The growth of living creatures has its own rhythm and is unstoppable. However, we constantly affect the environments in which we exist, and not always in a positive way. The idea of slowing down proliferation, solidifying millennia of evolution within layers of hardened matter puts our temporal existence into perspective.’

Hauser & Wirth will present a new sculptural work by Iglesias at Art Basel from 19 to 22 June entitled ‘Entwined VI’ (2025). The artist’s first exhibition with Hauser & Wirth will open in London on 14 October 2025.

Almine Rech now represents Christopher Le Brun

Almine Rech is pleased to announce the representation of British artist Christopher Le Brun, in conjunction with Lisson Gallery and Albertz Benda.

The artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery will be on view at Almine Rech Paris, Turenne from 18 October to 15 November, 2025. The gallery will present works by Christopher Le Brun at Art Basel, Basel, June 2025.

Sir Christopher Le Brun (b. 1951, UK) is one of the leading British painters of his generation, celebrated internationally since the 1980s, making both figurative and abstract work in painting, sculpture, and print. He was an instrumental public figure in his role as President of the Royal Academy of Arts in London from 2011 to 2019. Since 1990 he has served as a Trustee of major British institutions at Tate, National Gallery, Dulwich Picture Gallery, National Portrait Gallery and was a founding Trustee of the Royal Drawing School. He was awarded a Knighthood (Knight Bachelor) for services to the Arts in the 2021 New Year Honours.

"There aren’t any reasons for painting. That’s what is special about it. It doesn’t need justification. It’s essential that it is not used for other purposes. All the things which will, as it were, take away from what is mysterious about it."

— Christopher Le Brun

His work is in many museum collections including Tate, London, UK; The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, US; Museum of Contemporary Art and Urban Planning (MOCAUP), Shenzhen, China; British Museum, London, UK; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, US; Victoria and Albert Museum, London, UK; National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh, Scotland; The Whitworth, Manchester, UK; Red Brick Art Museum, Beijing, China; Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, CT, US; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX, US; Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT, US. Le Brun’s public sculptures include Union (horse with two discs) at the London Museum, UK; City Wing on the site of the original London Stock Exchange, UK; and The Monument to Victor Hugo in Saint Helier, Jersey, UK.

photo: Maureen M. Evans

Lindsay Adams now represented by Sean Kelly

Sean Kelly is delighted to announce representation of Lindsay Adams.

Lindsay Adams, born in 1990 in Washington, D.C., is a visual artist whose practice is focused on painting and drawing. Employing her educational foundation as a social scientist, with a background in foreign relations, sociology, and cultural anthropology, her work systematically engages with precise critical analysis and a perceptive understanding of the complex fabric of social dynamics. Lindsay received BAs from the University of Richmond in both International Studies: World Politics and Diplomacy and Spanish, she has an MFA in Painting and Drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Embracing her intersectional identity, Lindsay’s work serves as a reflection of self, exploring personal and collective histories and the role imagination plays in mining the complexities and nuances of life. Her current body of work is a conceptual investigation of the balance between the known and the possible, examining themes of place, liberation, expanse, and freedom. Each mark intuitively invites a dialogue between reality and dreaming, as she mines through layers of gesture and color to build worlds. Adams alternates between abstract and representational forms, employing formal techniques that highlight the physicality of paint and the delicacy of gesture. In this way, she weaves multiple paintings within one, crafting a rich tapestry informed by interconnected experiences that invites reflection on the boundlessness of dreaming. Her work highlights her interest in constructing imagined ecologies—spaces in which rhythmic gestures and dynamic hues engage in a continuous dialogue.

Lindsay Adams had her inaugural exhibition with the gallery at Sean Kelly, Los Angeles in January 2025. On joining the gallery, Adams said, “I’m honored to join Sean Kelly Gallery, a program committed to vision, creativity, and artists who continually push the boundaries of their practice. This marks a pivotal moment for me—an opportunity to deepen the questions I’m asking, expand the scope of the work, and grow within a dynamic community that challenges and inspires.”

Lindsay Adams is represented by Sean Kelly, New York/Los Angeles in collaboration with PATRON Gallery, Chicago.

photo: Ray Abercrombie

GalleriesNow Partners with London Gallery Weekend as Official Navigation Partner

May 29, 2025

GalleriesNow is delighted to announce its partnership with London Gallery Weekend (LGW) as the official navigation sponsor for this year’s event (6-8 June 2025).

This collaboration brings together London’s premier gallery platform with the capital’s most significant contemporary art weekend to create an enhanced experience for art enthusiasts across the city.

“London Gallery Weekend showcases everything we love about the city’s art scene” said Tristram Fetherstonhaugh, co-founder at GalleriesNow, adding “being their navigation partner lets us help people discover exhibitions and events they might never have found otherwise”.

In the days running up to the event as well as for the weekend itself, the GalleriesNow app will serve as the event’s comprehensive digital companion, featuring all participating galleries’ exhibitions and events in one seamless platform.

The collaboration features a fully branded experience within the GalleriesNow app, including:

• Integrated LGW routes that guide visitors through carefully curated gallery trails across London
• Specialised bookable events calendar showcasing opening receptions, artist talks, and other events
• Complete exhibition listings from all participating Weekend galleries

The GalleriesNow app is available to download for free on iOS and Android platforms.

Participating galleries will also feature on the GalleriesNow Summer London Gallery Map with LGW.

Glasgow International announces Helen Nisbet as Festival Director

May 28, 2025

Glasgow International, Scotland’s biennial festival of contemporary art, has announced Helen Nisbet as its new Director. Nisbet will assume the post from summer 2025 ahead of the 11th edition of the festival, which takes place from Friday 5 to Sunday 21 June 2026.

Nisbet takes over the role from previous Director Richard Birkett. Her artist-led practice, which emphasises solidarity and representation, will build on Birkett’s open and embedded artistic and organisational vision for Glasgow International which saw the festival team work in close partnership with Glasgow-based and international artists and organisers to produce an acclaimed edition in 2024.

Nisbet’s appointment coincides with other key appointments within the Glasgow International Festival team: Pelumi Odubanjo (Curator) and Martel Ollerenshaw (Festival Manager). They join existing staff Siobhan Carroll (Open Programme Convenor), and Poi Marr (Curator).

Every two years Glasgow International presents an array of artists’ projects across Glasgow by international artists and those based locally, amplifying the city’s identity as a vibrant and distinctive centre for artistic production, presentation and cultural organising. These projects are selected through an open call by an invited panel of international and local artists, curators and producers and the Glasgow International Programme team. The open call for submissions to be part of Glasgow International 2026 closed on 26 May.

photo: Christa Holka

Art Basel, Qatar Sports Investments (QSI) and QC+ announce partnership to launch Art Basel Qatar in Doha

May 20, 2025

Art Basel, together with its parent company MCH Group, and leading Qatari organisations Qatar Sports Investments (QSI), a major investor in sports, culture, entertainment and lifestyle, and QC+, a strategic and creative collective specialising in cultural commerce, today announced a one-of-a-kind partnership that will include the launch of a new fair of modern and contemporary art in Qatar.

Debuting in Doha in February 2026, Art Basel Qatar will embed itself in Qatar's vibrant cultural landscape and the dynamic arts ecosystem of the MENA region, providing an unparalleled platform to showcase leading galleries and artistic talent from the Middle East, North Africa, South Asia and further afield. The inaugural edition of Art Basel Qatar will be held in M7 creative hub and the Doha Design District in downtown Msheireb, in proximity to world-renowned landmarks including the National Museum of Qatar.

photo courtesy of Art Basel

Annely Juda Fine Art announces move to 16 Hanover Square

May 15, 2025

Annely Juda Fine Art will be moving to 16 Hanover Square in the autumn of 2025, after 35 years on nearby Dering Street. The move not only celebrates the gallery’s near 60-year legacy in London, it will also provide a new space to cultivate and showcase their roster of both eminent and early-career artists. The new space will continue to be led by co-Directors David Juda – who founded the gallery with his mother Annely in 1968 - and Nina Fellmann, who has been with the gallery since 2003.

The inaugural exhibition in the Hanover Square space this autumn will be a series of recent work by one of the gallery’s longest standing represented artists; David Hockney. Combining both paintings and iPad drawings of the night sky from Hockney’s Normandy studio, this is the first time Hockney’s ‘Moon’ series (2020 – 2023) will be shown as a group in the UK.

Annely Juda Fine Art will take over the lease on the whole Grade II listed Georgian townhouse on Hanover Square, with two large floors of exhibition space including an exceptional former ballroom with a glass-domed ceiling. The gallery will also include a dedicated spotlight area for new and emerging artists.

Founded in 1968 by Annely Juda (1914 – 2006) and her son David Juda, Annely Juda Fine Art has been instrumental in introducing and promoting modernist movements, including Russian Constructivism and De Stijl, to the international art world from its London home for nearly 60 years. The inaugural exhibition in 1968, ‘Now Open: Important Paintings of the 20th Century and Young Artists’ set the tone for a legacy of showcasing definitive works of the 20th Century alongside groundbreaking contemporary art – something they continue to platform through new voices such as Nicola Turner whose large-scale work will debut at Art Basel Unlimited this June and whose solo exhibition will be at the gallery in 2026.

photo: Hugo Glendinning

Timothy Taylor announces representation of Lauren Satlowski

May 14, 2025

Timothy Taylor is pleased to announce the representation of Los Angeles-based artist Lauren Satlowski (b. 1984) in London and New York. The gallery will present a solo exhibition of the artist’s work in New York this October.

With her seductive photorealist oil paintings featuring uncanny still lifes and object studies, Satlowski investigates themes of perception, memory-both personal and collective-and the aesthetics of consumer culture. Drawing on the visual language of commercial photography, cinema, and 17th-century vanitas painting, her compositions offer ambiguous arrangements of found objects in glossy, hermetic spaces that suggest enigmatic narratives. Accumulated during travel or picked up along the course of daily life, some of the depicted objects are organic and ephemeral-flowers, beans, spiders, and scorpions-but many have an uncertain relationship to time, including plastic and otherwise fabricated knickknacks. Satlowski selects objects that might function as potent associative vessels for the viewer-dolls, ornaments, perfume, masks, hotel shampoo-photographing them in inscrutable configurations before painting them in preternaturally vivid detail. She is compelled by the notion of the souvenir and the idea that an object might be a proxy for experience, conjuring-and quietly interrogating-feelings of longing and nostalgia.

Often, Satlowski’s compositions feature refracted light. Channelling dramatic illumination through trinket prisms, plastic picture frames, Ziploc bags filled with water, scotch tape, and panes of glass, she plays with notions of transparency, illusion, and reflection. In this way, her scenes possess an intensely psychological dimension. Throughout the work, conflicting qualities-pleasure and fear, harmony and tension-are held together.

photo: Chantal Anderson

lbf contemporary now represents Lawrence Perry

May 13, 2025

LBF Contemporary announces the representation of London-based painter Lawrence Perry. Perry's debut solo exhibition 'They Shoot Horses, Don't They?' closed in February, 2025.

Lawrence Perry (b. Singapore, 1999) graduated from The Slade School of Fine Art in 2021. The London-based artist paints uncanny scenes loaded with a psychological charge and heavy dose of wit. Drawing from film, mythology, literature and fashion, Perry creates scenes that feel familiar yet surreal, interacting with the emotional states of the figures that populate them. Each painting is packed with subtle nuance and contradiction, leading to an uneasy environment in which the viewer is invited to question the psychological states of his characters or the authenticity of their narrative. Highlights of recent exhibitions include ‘After the Past’ at /THE PLATFORM, Antwerp, 2023 (Solo); ‘Don’t Tell The Boys’ at /THE PLATFORM, Antwerp, 2022 (Solo); The Bomb Factory Residents Show, The Bomb Factory Covent Gardens, London (Group). Lawrence first came to the public eye in 2016 when his work as an in-house artist for an anti-Brexit lobbyist group was picked up by British GQ, and since featured in Alessandro Michele’s A/W 2020 campaign for Gucci, ‘Gucci, The Ritual.’

photo: Isaac Lamb

Tallinn Photomonth 2025 announces its main programme

The 8th edition of Tallinn Photomonth, Estonia’s contemporary art biennial, will take place from 5 September to 31 October, 2025, activating sites across the capital. This year’s main programme features three exhibitions, each shaped by distinct curatorial approaches to image-making in an increasingly visual world. Opening the programme at Kai Art Center is a duo exhibition by Estonian artists Tanja Muravskaja and Sirje Runge. Other exhibitions include a public installation of photographic works in Tallinn’s urban space and a collaborative exhibition of Estonian and Finnish photographic artists at Hobusepea and FOKU galleries.

“The main programme of this year’s Tallinn Photomonth presents three distinct exhibitions, each exploring the evolving significance of photography in a world saturated with images. Photography permeates everyday life, yet art offers a space for reflection—an opportunity to cultivate visual literacy, which has become a crucial tool for navigating our image-driven world,” explains Kulla Laas, director of the biennial.“ Across its 2025 edition, Photomonth highlights the medium’s potential to elicit emotional, philosophical, and political resonances, inviting audiences to engage photography not only as a technology of representation but as a catalyst for new ways of seeing and sensing.”

Public art has become a defining feature of Tallinn Photomonth. This year’s exhibition in public space, curated by Kati Ots (Estonia) and Trine Stephensen (Norway), explores how photography can operate not only as a visual image but as a sculptural element that shapes space and intervenes in our experience of it. In an urban environment saturated with an overwhelming amount of stimuli, the project seeks ways in which art can offer moments of relief and open new perspectives on what we see and experience daily.

For the first time, the Estonian Union of Photography Artists (FOKU) collaborates with the Finnish Association of Photographic Artists (VTL) as part of the biennial. The joint exhibition, presented across Hobusepea and FOKU galleries, brings together works by artists from both countries, selected by a binational jury of professionals. The exhibition poses the question of what photography means within contemporary art today, highlighting how artists continue to challenge and expand the medium’s conceptual and material boundaries. From experimental techniques to unconventional formats, the exhibition offers a cross-section of urgent themes and approaches currently shaping photographic practices in the region.

The collaboration aims the long-term exchange between Estonian and Finnish artists working with photography, focuses on co-creation and shared curatorial approaches. The exhibition will be accompanied by a regional gathering and public panel discussion for professionals in the field. The initiative will continue in Finland in 2026.

In addition to the main programme, Tallinn Photomonth will host an expansive satellite programme and a series of public events designed to deepen engagement with photography and visual culture. The full list of participating artists and the extended programme of the biennial will be announced in the coming months.

Alison Saar awarded the Driskell Prize

May 12, 2025

Alison Saar has been awarded the David C. Driskell Prize in African American Art and Art History by the High Museum of Art. Saar is the 20th recipient of the annual award, and is recognized for her significant contributions to visual arts that honor and center African American experiences. She will receive $50,000 in unrestricted funds to use toward the furthering of her artistic practice, and will be celebrated at the Driskell Prize Gala at the High on Saturday 20 September.

Based in Los Angeles, Alison Saar is widely celebrated for her sculpture, installation and mixed-media works, which tell stories about the African American experience through references to American history, literature and mythology. Her works have been featured in hundreds of solo and group exhibitions worldwide, including at the High, which presented one of her first solo museum exhibitions, “Fertile Ground,” in 1993. She has work in collections at renowned institutions including the High, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among many others. In 2024, she was selected by the International Olympic Committee and the city of Paris to create “Salon,” a sculpture commissioned in honor of the 2024 Olympic Games, which is now permanently displayed in the Charles Aznavour Garden on the Champs-Élysées. Her installation “Soul Service Station” was featured as part of Desert X 2025 in Coachella Valley, California.

“Saar’s work delves deeply into the histories of the African diaspora and its artistic traditions, exploring how they influence and connect to cultural identity today. Her sculpture ‘Tobacco Demon’ has been a fixture in our galleries for decades,” said High Museum of Art Director Rand Suffolk. “We are honored to recognize her distinguished practice and myriad contributions to African American art with the 2025 Driskell Prize.”

The artist’s work is currently on view at L.A. Louver, Los Angeles, as part of an exhibition celebrating the gallery’s 50th anniversary.

Alison Saar: Sweet Life opens at Galerie Lelong in Matignon, Paris, on Thursday 15 May.

photo: Nicholas Lea Bruno

David Zwirner announces representation of Yu Nishimura

May 6, 2025

David Zwirner is pleased to announce the representation of Japanese artist Yu Nishimura. Zwirner currently has a solo exhibition of new paintings and works on paper by Nishumura on view at their East 69th Street gallery in New York. This exhibition is the artist’s first solo show in the United States, and the body of work on view was inspired by Nishimura’s recent trip to his hometown of Yokodai, where he spent his formative childhood and early teenage years in the 1990s. The artist also works with Sadie Coles HQ in London and Crèvecœur in Paris.

Combining traditional oil and tempera techniques with visual impulses borrowed from avant-garde postwar Japanese photographers, Nishimura’s multilayered paintings are steeped in everyday sources such as street photography, anime, and the diverse landscapes and built environments of the artist’s home country. Built up from dreamlike arrangements of simplified, semiblurred forms, his portraits and urban scenes achieve a stark sense of contemporaneity through their evocative palettes and spare and graphic compositional approach—yet at the same instant, they appear to exist in a nebulous realm of melancholic reminiscence that documents the passage of time.

David Zwirner states: "When my daughter Marlene introduced me to Yu Nishimura’s work, I was immediately intrigued. Yu manages to blend contradictory forces—namely the rigor of modernism with what I would call his own take on neo-romanticism. His works get under your skin. His sophisticated paint handling reflects a deep investigation of the genre, yet his voice is entirely contemporary. I’m excited to welcome Yu to the gallery and look forward to presenting his art to new audiences.

Yu Nishimura (b. 1982) was born in Kanagawa Prefecture, Japan, and he continues to live and work there today. In 2004, he graduated from the Department of Fine Arts at Tama Art University, Tokyo, where he studied oil painting.

photo: Takashi Homma for MARFA

Ames Yavuz inaugurates London gallery

May 1, 2025

Ames Yavuz is pleased to present Ellipsis by Isabel and Alfredo Aquilizan, inaugurating the new London gallery at 31-33 Grosvenor Hill. The 2,600 sq. ft ground floor space in the heart of Mayfair is the gallery’s first European base, and will feature an expansive new programme in 2025, including renowned contemporary artists from the gallery roster and beyond.

With galleries in Singapore (2010), Sydney (2019) and London (2025), Ames Yavuz embraces its diverse cultural background through a strong international focus and perspective. The gallery’s vision is underpinned by robust curatorial practices that form the core of our program and foster intercultural discourse on a global scale.

Representing a wide range of multidisciplinary artists across continents, Ames Yavuz aims to challenge, inspire, and reclaim through art. The gallery provides a platform for transformative and compelling artistic voices who bring care and attention to the most urgent conversations of our time, and celebrates storytelling with authenticity, innovation and wit.

photo: Eva Herzog