Sara Anstis, Only the Beach, the Sea, and the Two of Us (detail), 2019. New Now: Modern & Contemporary Art New York.
Sara Anstis
Sara Anstis, Only the Beach, the Sea, and the Two of Us, 2019. New Now: Modern & Contemporary Art New York.
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With gazes often directed at us, toward one another, or twisted in ephemeral bliss, Sara Anstis’ figures exist in ethereal landscapes. We tend to catch them preoccupied with their own delight in an anthropomorphic web of imagined mythologies and sapphic desire, exploring their world and bodies with enviable freedom. Anstis renders these scenes in colorful expanses of soft pastel that begin as abstractions in the artist's process before she gradually begins to explore her characters’ identities. “I tell myself that one day I’ll leave the abstraction as is — but that’s probably a lie,” Anstis has confessed. “I am too in love with aiming gazes and fleshing out bodies.”
A young artist hot on the rise, Sara Anstis grew up on the small Canadian island of Salt Spring before studying art and sociology at Concordia University in Montréal. She then earned an MFA at the Valand Academy in Gothenburg, Sweden, and further honed her skills in a postgraduate program at the Royal Drawing School in London. Her work has recently been seen in exhibitions at Kasmin in New York, Various Small Fires in Los Angeles and Seoul, and in several group exhibitions throughout Europe and the United States.
Clayton Schiff
Clayton Schiff, Bask, 2023. New Now: Modern & Contemporary Art New York.
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Dreamlike and alluring, Clayton Schiff’s paintings are frequently inspired by imagery from children’s books — often whimsical, even playful. But it’s a less naive sense of play than first meets the eye, with his style drawing comparisons to the imagery of Arnold Böcklin, Edvard Munch, and Leonora Carrington and the writing of Fyodor Dostoyevsky. In Bask, we encounter an otherworldly, animalistic figure relaxed against a tree in the nude, unaware of or unperturbed by our gaze. He appears to feel alone in the world, his enigmatic smile expressing the joy of his introspection. Like much of Schiff’s work, Bask toes the line between the pleasurable whimsy of a daydream and a more sinister, sparse dystopia — perhaps poking fun at both.
Schiff earned a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2009. His work has since been shown at the Rubell Museum and galleries including Harkawik, Real Pain, LOYAL, Fisher Parrish, Safe Gallery, Nevvan Gallery, and Gothenburg.
Daisy Parris
Daisy Parris, I'd Rather Get No Sleep Next To You Than Sleep Alone, 2022. New Now: Modern & Contemporary Art New York.
British artist Daisy Parris has admitted that they are “a very sensitive, emotional person — I feel everything to the extreme.” Such extremes are revealed in their colossal rendering of a psychological topography, I’d Rather Get No Sleep Next To You Than Sleep Alone — the first major work by the artist to come to auction. At nearly 15 feet wide, the work is assertive yet endlessly inviting, offering us a moment to slow down and reflect on the artist’s masterful use of gesture, texture, and composition to express the passion, ecstasy, worry, and past experience that they — and we as viewers — carry in our minds and bodies. When asked to describe their works in just a few words, Parris simply replied: “From the guts.”
Raised by an artist mother and Punk musician father, Parris was inspired as a child by discovering their mother’s student works, which she made before she had children and her priorities shifted. Now, as the young artist’s star rises, they can reflect on significant success as their highly personal abstract and text-based works have garnered solo exhibitions throughout the US and UK. Parris graduated from Goldsmiths with honors in 2014 and now divides their time between London and Somerset in the UK.
Violeta Maya
Violeta Maya, De donde vengo I y II, 2023. New Now: Modern & Contemporary Art New York.
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For Spanish artist Violeta Maya, the starting point is an impulsive collaboration with the will of her work’s surface. She begins each work by dousing her canvases in water before spreading them on the floor and applying acrylic paint and pure pigment, resulting in vaporous forms and enchanting hues. As humidity conditions impact the speed with which the canvases dry, this process ensures the artist is fully in the present and connecting with her environment in a creative process she has described as “meditative.”
Maya’s approach also alters the way the canvas accepts paint, freezing in time both her own state of mind and that hour’s atmospheric conditions. The final works are often presented within multiple frames, allowing our eyes to fill in the space between them, with the surrounding environment creating a kind of glow. Based in Madrid, Maya graduated from Central Saint Martins in London in 2015 and has since participated in solo exhibitions throughout Spain, Mexico, and New York.
Liliane Tomasko
Liliane Tomasko, Vestige, 2012. New Now: Modern & Contemporary Art New York.
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Liliane Tomasko’s enticing and softly blurred work Vestige is highly characteristic of the Swiss-born emerging artist’s works. Her dreamlike, glowing paintings from this period evoke the presence of an absence, taking source imagery from close-up Polaroids of worn clothing, slept-in bedsheets, or used mattresses. They show the traces of our existence that we leave behind in intimate interiors, executed with soft, sweeping brushstrokes of radiant color that seem to dance across the canvas like ghostly trails of light. In this sense, her works depict the sensation of an unseen someone rather than their figure.
Tomasko trained at the Chelsea College of Art & Design and the Royal Academy of Arts in London and now divides her time between New York and London, where she lives with her husband, the artist Sean Scully. Having been featured in solo exhibitions throughout Europe and the United States since 1998, Tomasko’s works are steadily gaining attention, featured in nine international solo and group shows in 2023 alone. Her work is held in the permanent collections of nearly 20 institutions, as far ranging as the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond, the Modern Art Museum of Forth Worth, The Albertina in Vienna, and the Kunstmuseum Bern.
Stephanie Temma Hier
Stephanie Temma Hier, On Those Blue Remembered Hills, 2020. New Now: Modern & Contemporary Art New York.
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Stephanie Temma Hier’s remarkably inventive practice sits at the intersection of ceramic sculpture and oil painting, seeming to forge a new genre along the way. Born in Toronto and now based in New York, the young artist’s works often feature edible fruits or vegetation depicted with paint and glazed ceramic sculptures of wildlife affixed to the edges of the canvas. The result is an astonishing depth and beauty clearly seen in the gently psychedelic On Those Blue Remembered Hills. She incorporates found imagery from the digital sphere into her process, taking artifacts from the fast-moving and endless scroll of the internet and social media platforms and rendering them permanent through a physical, considered process.
Her work has been shown in exhibitions and art fairs throughout North America and in Europe, including at The Armory Show in New York and Nino Mier Gallery in Brussels and Los Angeles, where the present work was first shown in 2020 amid a period of global isolation.
Mikey Yates
Mikey Yates, Tekken, 2019. New Now: Modern & Contemporary Art New York.
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Mikey Yates’ warm and inviting scenes of everyday life spent among friends and family come from the memories of his personal experiences growing up in the 1990s and early 2000s as a military child of Filipino-American heritage. Understanding the artist’s background helps explain the sense of comfort his works exude, coming from the mind of a creator who understands that the concept of home is not a fixed place. The artist often references the trappings of childhood in the ‘90s, including the game Tekken depicted here, but in a manner that is never tastelessly nostalgic. Rather, the experience of viewing his works gives us new tools to see details in our own memories that we may have forgotten.
The young artist holds an MFA from the University of Colorado, Boulder, and studied at the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture. Since 2020, Yates has seen continued success with solo exhibitions at Taymour Grahne Projects in London, RULE Gallery in Marfa, Texas, and Shulamit Nazarian in Los Angeles.
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