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The Must-Visit Exhibitions happening in Mumbai during Art Mumbai Week

November in Mumbai marks a vibrant moment for the city’s art scene. Now in its third year, the Art Mumbai Fair will take place from 13 to 16 November 2025 at the Mahalaxmi Racecourse.

Alongside the art fair, galleries unveil new exhibitions and institutions highlight both established and emerging talent. The city comes alive during this week, drawing visitors from across India as well as an ever-growing international audience eager to experience Mumbai’s creative energy. LVH Art presents a curated guide to six unmissable gallery exhibitions on view in Mumbai during the Art Mumbai Fair. These standout exhibitions promise to inspire, engage, and draw you into the dynamic energy of Mumbai’s art scene.

Gallery Rooshad Shroff, Mumbai
Beyond Form
9 November — 15 November 2025

Beyond Form brings together works by sixteen leading international artists including Rita Ackermann, Peppi Bottrop, Salvatore Emblema, Sam Gilliam, Brice Guilbert, Ha Chong-Hyun, Camille Henrot, Donna Huanca, Poppy Jones, Anish Kapoor, Kristy Luck, Kylie Manning, Marina Perez Simão, Sean Scully, Ryan Sullivan, and Stanley Whitney, alongside distinctive contemporary design pieces by Rooshad Shroff. At a time when visual culture is saturated with figurative imagery, the exhibition turns deliberately toward abstraction, focusing on colour, form, process, and materiality rather than fixed narrative. By highlighting artists who stretch the limits of figuration or dissolve it entirely, Beyond Form uncovers new visual languages rooted in perception, gesture, and the material presence of the work itself. Together, these artists reveal how abstraction continues to evolve as a vital means of expression, inviting viewers to look beyond representation and engage with the sensory and emotional depth of form.

Jhaveri Contemporary, Mumbai
Of Dreaming and Remembering: Ramesh Miro Nithiyendran
11 November — 20 December 2025

Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran’s Of Dreaming and Remembering at Jhaveri Contemporary presents the Sydney-based artist’s most ambitious exhibition in India to date. Bringing together a vivid ensemble of ceramic and bronze sculptures, Nithiyendran merges figuration and vessel-making into dynamic, hybrid forms that pulse with ritual energy and contemporary sensibility. His works reimagine the vessel as a site of transformation, where body and object, myth and material, converge in acts of reinvention. Drawing from South Asian visual traditions, Tamil ritual forms and diasporic narratives, Nithiyendran animates clay, bronze and wood into speculative deities that embody the performative, the spiritual and the queer, situating ancient craft within a bold, contemporary imagination.

Chemould Prescott Road, Mumbai
The Geometry of Ash, Anju Dodiya
31 October — 26 December 2025

In Politics of Pause, Anju Dodiya transforms stillness into an act of quiet defiance. Working from her Ghatkopar studio, she layers fabrics, collages, and painted fragments into restless tableaux that mirror the fractures of our times, social, political, and personal. Figures twist, mourn, and reflect within divided surfaces, their gestures oscillating between tenderness and tension. Inspired by the spectral presence of trees and the myth of Daphne, Dodiya’s new works meditate on transformation, grief, and the fragile pursuit of joy amid chaos. Refusing spectacle, these paintings invite us to linger , to pause, in a world that demands constant motion.

Galerie Isa, Mumbai
Amorphidian, Christian Achenbach
11th November — 22rd December 2025

Christian Achenbach’s Amorphidian at Galerie Isa marks a vibrant continuation of the German artist’s inquiry into colour, rhythm, and abstraction. At the heart of the exhibition lies Kreola, his most ambitious five-metre work to date, inviting viewers into richly layered worlds pulsing with movement and emotion. Drawing from diverse art historical and musical influences, Achenbach’s paintings vibrate with energy, their vivid surfaces revealing a dialogue between structure and spontaneity. Each painting unfolds like a symphony in colour, where landscapes dissolve into rhythm and hue echoes like music.

æquō Gallery, Mumbai
Tidal Fragments, Inderjeet Sandhu
11 November 2025

At æquō, the exhibition India Heritage traces the origins of India’s mother-of-pearl craft to the shores near Puri, where the sea once layered shells along the coast. Dutch designer Inderjeet Sandhu, of Indian heritage, collaborated with artisans Kinkar Ghosh and Souvik Roy to transform this story into form during a residency in central India. Working in Æquō’s workshop surrounded by nature, they created monumental vases through an act of accumulation, joining and polishing fragments until they seem to have grown organically from the material itself. The resulting pieces, both marine and architectural, reflect Æquō’s vision of connecting worlds through craft and allowing material histories to resurface as contemporary design.

Nature Morte, Mumbai
Ashes and Diamonds, Mona Rai
9 October — 8 November 2025

For over five decades, Mona Rai has expanded the language of abstraction through bold material experimentation and intuitive gesture. In Ashes and Diamonds, her first solo exhibition at Nature Morte’s Mumbai gallery, Rai presents new works on canvas and paper that trace a dialogue between texture, light, and emotion. Metallic tones, glitter, and layers of pigment coalesce into surfaces that shimmer and scar, evoking both resilience and fragility. Guided by repetition and rhythm, her compositions invite quiet immersion, transforming materiality into meditation.

Experimenter, Mumbai
No Race, No Colour, Pushpakanthan Pakkiyarajah
11 November — 20 December 2025

Pushpakanthan Pakkiyarajah’s No Race, No Colour at Experimenter Colaba in Mumbai marks the Sri Lankan artist’s first solo exhibition in the city. Bringing together new and recent works spanning drawing, sculpture, sound, and animation, the exhibition delves into the interconnectedness of human and ecological trauma within postwar and postcolonial landscapes. Pakkiyarajah’s practice, rooted in the soil life and climate of his native Batticaloa, intertwines organic materials such as jute, wood dust, and thread to reflect on regeneration, memory, and coexistence. Through works like Diary of Wounded Flowers, Hidden Mycelium in a Wounded Land, and Charred Hyphal Mat, the artist meditates on resilience and renewal amid cycles of violence and environmental devastation, inviting viewers to reimagine the interdependence between the natural world and collective healing.

The Influence of Jazz on Stanley Whitney and Sam Gilliam

‍“I can’t stand to sing the same song the same way two nights in succession,” Billie Holiday wrote in her autobiography, Lady Sings the Blues. To her, performing the same song without variation drained the idiosyncratic magic out of music, reducing it to automation. In the same way, we can think about Stanley Whitney’s paintings as a variant of the same motif: his iconic coloured grid, which is interpreted and represented differently in each of his canvases through different colour combinations, maintains the same structure that the artist is famous for. At the same time, when we look at Sam Gilliam’s work, we can feel that sense of rhythmic fluidity that has come to define the basis of much jazz music. Like Whitney, Gilliam comes back to the same improvisatory approach to abstraction, revelling in the infinite possibilities contained within the same process.

Jazz emerged from a distinctly African American sensibility. Drawing on a rich cultural heritage that had developed over centuries, African Americans combined African rhythmic and percussive styles with more European forms of harmony and structure. Jazz was also unique in its focus on improvisation, allowing for unprecedented freedom of expression through music.‍ Like a jazz player riffing on the same chord or melody, both Gilliam and Whitney, African American artists active during the Civil Rights era, have frequently spoken about the influence of jazz in their work.

Sam Gilliam B. 1933, Mississippi, US.

“Jazz leads to the acrobatics of art,”—Sam Gilliam

When Gilliam relocated to Washington, DC, in the early 1960s, he organized concerts that brought the Modern Jazz Quartet and Marian Anderson to the city during the Civil Rights era. Painting in his DC studio, Gilliam listened to the vanguards of bebop: radical improvisers who pioneered a liberated Black musical aesthetic rooted in African and African American cultural history. Gilliam has talked about his associations with John Coltrane’s music and the aural impression of his “sheets of sound”—a conscious visual metaphor for Coltrane’s innovations in jazz harmony and rhythm. “Coltrane worked at the whole sheet,” Gilliam has remarked, “He didn’t bother to stop at bars and notes and clefs and various things, he just played the whole sheet at once.”

Gilliam has compared his artistic practice to the performance of jazz musicians, saying, “jazz leads to the acrobatics of art.” His words evoke a kinship with the physical and emotional intensity of a musician like Coltrane, caught in the exhilarating, improvisational “acrobatics” of each note.

As is well documented, Gilliam remained wholly committed to abstraction in the 1960s and 1970s, at a time when the Black Arts Movement (BAM) sought to frame Black art through a “socially responsible aesthetic” that was rooted in figuration and realism. Gilliam’s abstraction allowed him to move more fluidly through questions of race and self-identity, and he chose to relate to them freely as one element among many, rather than as a matter of fate. His engagement with jazz was similar; it is not always explicit in his work, but it is central to the mosaic of his artistic identity. His statement that “before painting, there was jazz” is revealing in this context. As French philosopher Gilles Deleuze has observed about the painterly process, “It is a mistake to think that the painter works on a white surface,” by which he means that the blank canvas is already filled with the ideas that the artist brings to the painting. Deleuze calls this “the painting before the painting.” Gilliam’s decisive “before painting, there was jazz” compels us to interpret the aural trace of jazz influence in his work.

Stanley Whitney B. 1946, Philadelphia, US.

“Music was always there for me as a kind of rhythm – getting in rhythm, having a rhythm.” – Stanley Whitney

A lifelong music lover, Whitney’s intuitive painterly process draws parallels to the free-flowing and improvisational style of his favourite jazz musicians. From Miles Davis to Nina Simone, Whitney cites the nature of jazz music as a major source of inspiration from childhood to today. The Philadelphia-born, New York-based artist often cites experimental jazz , Roman architecture, Egyptian hieroglyphs, and Gee’s Bend quilts as influences on his practice.

‍Today, any viewer of Stanley Whitney’s paintings is immediately attracted to the magnetism of his irregular grids in vibrant, saturated hues. What is not so immediately apparent is the influence on Whitney’s work from his African-American heritage and the jazz clubs he would frequent both in Philadelphia and New York. Describing the analogy between music and his paintings, Whitney likens his process to the call and response structure characteristic of the music he loved. He explains, “I start at the top and work down. That gets into call and response. One colour calls forth another. Colour dictates the structure, not the other way around.” Whitney has also described the influence of Ornette Coleman’s 1959 album, The Shape of Jazz to Come, on both him and his approach to painting. He said, “It wasn’t easy. It was something totally different. A bigger part of the world. And that was where painters tried to take their painting.” As the artist Adam Pendleton has observed, Whitney’s enduring engagement with the grid explores “how to break down visual order and imbue it with music, with life, with a kind of poetic.”

Since 1996, Whitney has returned to the same format for his paintings: stacks of colourful rectangles arranged within a large square of canvas. His colours are brilliant and expressive, with jolts of tangerine oranges, drippy reds, and meditative azures. Each canvas follows its own off-beat rhythm, with three or four horizontal bands dividing each square into quirky grids.

When asked about the impact that jazz music has had in his art, Whitney, in an interview with Louise Neri, responds: “By the time I was in high school, around 1964, I was listening to Ornette Coleman’s Shape of Jazz to Come, John Coltrane’s Love Supreme, Thelonious Monk, Charlie Mingus, and others; these musicians were great revelations to me. Before that, I was thinking about joining the army! But when I discovered jazz, I realised that there was a whole other world. So when I first went to art school, I thought of Cézanne in terms of Charlie Parker and the rhythm. After five years at art school in the Midwest, looking at Munch and Goya, I came to New York and went to jazz clubs — Five Spot, Village Gate. I wanted to hang out with the musicians.”

The Artists Redefining the Language of Abstraction

This month, LVH Art presents Beyond Form, a new exhibition on view at Gallery Rooshad Shroff in Mumbai from 9 to 15 November. Bringing together artists from diverse generations and backgrounds, the exhibition examines what it means to move beyond representation, engaging with visual languages grounded in material, process, and perception. In this article, we take a closer look at the artists featured in Beyond Form, tracing the ideas, gestures, and experiments that inform their unique approaches to abstraction.

Discover all the works from the exhibition by clicking below
Private View of Beyond Form

Beyond Form highlights artists who move away from dominant figurative imagery, focusing instead on abstraction and the limits of figuration. The exhibition prioritises formal qualities like colour, form, process, and materiality over fixed narratives.

Many artists explore unconventional materials and processes. For example, Salvatore Emblema unweaves his jute canvases to reveal light and structure through absence. Peppi Bottrop combines industrial and organic materials, while Poppy Jones uses suede to emphasize texture. Rita Ackermann’s chalkboard paintings layer gesture and erasure. Sam Gilliam blends painting, sculpture, and architecture through improvisation and material exploration. Ha Chong-Hyun pushes paint through canvas to create sculptural textures. Anish Kapoor engages with material and void to create immersive experiences. Donna Huanca uses paint and texture to evoke transformation rooted in the body. For other artists in the exhibition, moving “beyond form” happens within the composition. Kylie Manning’s works hover between abstraction and figuration, while Marina Perez Simão evokes surreal landscapes through colour and shape. Sean Scully and Stanley Whitney focus on rhythm, structure, and colour’s expressive power. Abstraction here offers an open-ended, introspective mode of expression, accessing inner consciousness and the intangible aspects of human experience.

Artist List
Rita Ackermann, Peppi Bottrop, Salvatore Emblema, Sam Gilliam, Brice Guilbert, Ha Chong-Hyun, Camille Henrot, Donna Huanca, Poppy Jones, Anish Kapoor, Kristy Luck,  Kylie Manning, Marina Perez Simão, Sean Scully, Ryan Sullivan, Stanley Whitney.

Rita Ackermann

Rita Ackermann (b. 1968) is known for a practice that oscillates between figuration and abstraction, memory and erasure. Having relocated to New York from Budapest in the early 1990s, she became a central figure in the downtown art scene, drawing on influences from graffiti, film, and underground culture. Over the past three decades, her work has evolved from raw figurative compositions depicting adolescent energy and chaos to complex abstractions that explore the instability of image, gesture, and recollection. Ackermann’s paintings often carry traces of what has been covered, wiped away, or transformed. Working with layered compositions of oil, chalk, and pigment on canvas or board, she constructs and deconstructs images in a continual process of making and unmaking. Figures emerge only to dissolve into the surrounding surface, as if memory itself were collapsing under the pressure of time and gesture. 

Ackermann’s work included in Beyond Form is from her Chalkboard Paintings series, which she began in the early 2010s, marking a pivotal shift in her artistic practice. Using chalkboard paint as both surface and metaphor, she created works that evoke the classroom as a site of learning, repetition, and erasure. Onto these dark, matte grounds, Ackermann draws and scrapes with oil, chalk, and pastel, layering gestures that recall the spontaneity of drawing while maintaining the density and depth of painting. In her process, Ackermann transforms the language of drawing into a meditation on impermanence. Her work resists closure, remaining perpetually open to revision and reinterpretation.

Peppi Bottrop

Peppi Bottrop (b. 1986) is from a generation of artists whose work engages deeply with the changing landscape of post-industrial Europe. He graduated as Meisterschüler from the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in 2014, where he studied under Albert Oehlen, Andreas Schulze, and Jutta Koether. He comes from Germany’s Ruhrgebiet, the country’s industrial heartland. Once a center of coal mining and steel production, the region has since been transformed as the mines closed and nature gradually reclaimed the landscape. The coexistence of human industry and natural regeneration lies at the core of Bottrop’s work. 

Bottrop’s compositions often recall the spatial logic of maps, architectural plans, and urban grids, yet they remain open and intuitive. In the work included in the Beyond Form exhibition, he employs graphite, charcoal, and metal pigments to create layered networks of lines that oscillate between meticulous precision and expressive spontaneity. The visual language that emerges in his works moves between construction and dissolution, figuration and abstraction, suggesting a psychological landscape as much as a physical one. This rhythm of building, erasing, and rebuilding becomes a reflection of the historical and emotional cycles that define Germany’s Ruhrgebiet, the region in which he grew up.

Salvatore Emblema

Salvatore Emblema (b. 1929, d. 2006) was born in Terzigno, at the foot of Mount Vesuvius. He forged an artistic language inseparable from the landscape of southern Italy. The eruption of 1944, which covered his town in volcanic ash, left a lasting impression on the young artist, instilling a lifelong sensitivity to how light, matter, and time shape perception. The materials he used in his works such as raw jute, oxidised metals, volcanic sand, leaves, and earth pigments were taken directly from his environment. As Emblema explained, “My main concern was to have a direct relationship with truth.. Leaves and sackcloth were truth to me.” A central focus of Emblema’s career was exploring transparency, absence, space, and light. As art historian Giulio Carlo Argan observed, his work is “space which serves no purpose other than to be space.” From the late 1960s onward, he explored these ideas through the meticulous technique of detessitura, removing threads from the woven jute to let light pass through the canvas. By subtracting material, he paradoxically generated new forms, turning absence into a creative force that shaped the work.

Working in relative isolation in the Neapolitan countryside, Emblema remained distinct from the dominant currents of postwar Italian and American art. Yet his work resonates with a wider exploration of perception and materiality that characterised the period. While Arte Povera artists pursued dematerialisation and Minimalists explored serial form, Emblema discovered his own language of reduction: one rooted in the Mediterranean landscape, in its heat, luminosity, and tactile earth.

Sam Gilliam

Sam Gilliam (b. 1933, d. 2022) was a leading artist in postwar American abstraction. Emerging in Washington, D.C. in the mid-1960s, he was associated with the Washington Color School yet soon expanded beyond its compositional and chromatic restraint. By adopting a process-oriented and improvisational approach, Gilliam challenged the conventions of traditional painting. His radical Drape paintings of the late 1960s, made by suspending unstretched, paint-soaked canvases from walls or ceilings, redefined the relationship between painting, sculpture, and architecture. For Gilliam, the physical liberation of the canvas mirrored a broader pursuit of creative and personal freedom at a time of social and political transformation in the United States.

Throughout his career, Gilliam’s work remained in constant evolution. He treated colour as a living substance, shaped by gravity, gesture, and material chance. Inspired by the improvisatory energy of jazz, his paintings and works on paper evoke rhythm and movement through layered chromatic harmonies. Even as his methods changed from staining to folding, draping, and later collage, his art consistently sought to reconcile spontaneity with structure.

Brice Guilbert

Brice Guilbert (b. 1979) combines figuration and abstraction in a practice that explores landscapes, particularly the volcano motif. Guilbert’s compositions often evoke elemental forces, light, air, and temperature, through colour and movement rather than clear figuration. The materiality of the oil stick, which he often employs, plays a crucial role in Guilbert’s process: its dense, waxy texture gives his works a physical presence that feels at once drawn and painted. By using oil stick on paper or canvas, he achieves a balance between immediacy and reflection: beneath the apparent simplicity of his marks lies a quiet intensity shaped by rhythm and repetition.

His work is deeply rooted in personal and lived experience, drawing inspiration from his Creole heritage and childhood on Réunion Island. The work included in the show is titled Fournez after the local pronunciation of Piton de la Fournaise, the volcano located on Réunion Island, which the artist recalls from his childhood. He has created countless works featuring this title and motif. As Guilbert noted, “The volcano is part of an unconscious, a space I lived and grew up in. The subject represented is an eruption, a projection, a sensation projected to the surface of every painting. Every work of art is the projection of an effect and of an idea.”

Ha Chong-Hyun

Ha Chong-Hyun (b. 1935) is one of the most significant figures in post-war Korean art and a central member of the Dansaekhwa movement, which redefined painting in Korea during the 1970s. His practice developed in the decades following the Korean War, a period marked by rapid reconstruction and cultural change. Ha sought to redefine a language of painting grounded in process, discipline, and the inherent qualities of his chosen materials. While in the 1950s he was still exploring Art Informel and geometric abstraction, by the 1960s he had shifted toward a more physical and meditative approach, in which process became the central focus of his practice.

In 1974, Ha began his Conjunction series, a lifelong body of work that would come to define his career. The series is based on the artist’s unique technique known as bae-ap-bub, or the “back pressure method,” in which thick layers of oil paint are pushed from the reverse side of hemp cloth so that they permeate and emerge on the surface. Through this process, Ha transforms painting into a physical act of negotiation between the visible and the hidden. The pigment fuses with the weave of the hemp, creating a field that is at once tactile and meditative. The result is not an image placed upon the canvas but a surface that embodies the tension between control and release.

Camille Henrot

Camille Henrot (b. 1978) is a New York based artist whose work draws on sources ranging from anthropology and mythology, to literature and psychology. Henrot explores how individuals navigate the overwhelming accumulation of information, emotion, and cultural narrative in contemporary life. A graduate of the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs, Henrot began her career in animation and video, before expanding into an interdisciplinary practice that merges research and intuition. Her projects often begin with a process of collection and comparison, bringing together ideas, images, and materials from disparate contexts. As the artist has remarked, she approaches knowledge “with the curiosity of the amateur,” transforming research into a poetic and at times contradictory visual language.

The meaning in Henrot’s paintings are not always obvious; however, there is always a deeper layer informed by her prior research. Notably, the title of the work included in the show reveals the conceptual nature of Henrot’s practice. Anguille sous roche, literally translates to “eel under the rock,” a French idiom meaning “something hidden beneath the surface.” This also reflects Henrot’s interest in the instability of perception.

Donna Huanca

Donna Huanca (b. 1980) is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice explores the intersections of the body, nature, and material transformation. Huanca’s practice often incorporates live performance and the human body as a living canvas. Models covered in layers of pigment, clay, and natural materials that she applies to their bodies perform among her paintings, becoming extensions of the surrounding works. This performative element underscores her interest in impermanence and transformation and the body. 

Huanca’s process typically begins with images of her painted performers, which she then enlarges and prints onto canvas. Over this frozen snapshot, she applies successive layers of paint or other materials, allowing time to accumulate within the surface of the work. “Everything always goes back to the body, ” Huanca says. “And that’s such an important part for me to start, because I feel like everything I do is collage work. It’s based on taking something and combining things that don’t necessarily belong together. The paintings wouldn’t exist without the live body. I’m not really interested in painting on something that has no history or is just blank.”

Poppy Jones

Poppy Jones (b. 1993) creates paintings that distil the fleeting impressions of daily life into moments of quiet intensity. Her work often begins with her own photographs, capturing interiors, and still objects, that often focus on the play of light and shadow. These images act as repositories of mood and memory from which Jones constructs a visual language that balances figuration and abstraction, and transforms something familiar into something poetic and elusive. Jones’ process is guided by intuition. Her compositions evolve through slow observation and material experimentation, revealing a deep sensitivity to surface and light. She works on silk, suede, or cotton, often repurposing garments or fabrics she has collected herself. The texture and absorbency of each support influence the final image, mirroring the tactile qualities of the scenes she depicts and reflecting her interest in the relationship between image and object. Although her practice is often grounded in figuration, her work in the exhibition gravitates towards abstraction, capturing atmosphere and emotion through subtle shifts in tone, texture, and light.

Anish Kapoor

Anish Kapoor (b. 1954) is internationally acclaimed for a practice that investigates perception, materiality, and the metaphysical dimensions of form. Although best known for his monumental sculptures and mirrored installations, Kapoor’s works on paper reveal a more intimate aspect of his exploration into colour, space, and the void. These pieces distil his sculptural concerns into concentrated meditations on presence and absence, inviting reflection on how the material world can contain the immaterial. Kapoor’s gouaches are not preparatory studies but self-contained inquiries into the tension between surface and depth. Using dense layers of pigment, he creates fields that appear to hover between expansion and collapse, emergence and absorption. The act of painting becomes both a physical and philosophical gesture.

Kristy Luck

Kristy Luck (b. 1985) creates paintings that inhabit the space between the figurative and the abstract, where organic forms and psychological landscapes intertwine. Her practice is rooted in an intuitive process that translates emotion and memory into layered compositions. Her paintings often suggest fragments of flora, anatomy, or interior architecture, yet resist fixed interpretation. Each composition develops through a balance of precision and spontaneity and is often executed in a style influenced by surrealism. Luck’s works feel elusive and dreamlike, as if they exist in a space between memory and imagination, inviting viewers to explore their own interpretations. Through her handling of paint, Luck transforms natural motifs into psychological symbols, using forms as a means of expressing feeling rather than depicting motifs accurately.

Kylie Manning

Kylie Manning (b. 1983) works are built from layers of gestural energy that evoke the natural world and the human condition. Working primarily in oil on linen, Manning constructs visual fields that feel atmospheric and corporeal, where figures and landscapes dissolve into one another. Her practice is deeply informed by the dramatic environments of her upbringing between Alaska and Mexico, places that both feature unique light and terrain. These early experiences fostered a sensitivity to the rhythms of weather, water, and shifting horizons that continues to shape her visual language.

Marina Perez Simão

Marina Perez Simão (b. 1981) is a Brazilian artist whose compositions emerge through layered washes of colour, fluid transitions, and rhythmic curves that suggest horizons, rivers, and skies without ever resolving into representational form. Working primarily with oil and watercolour, Perez Simão builds her compositions through a process of accumulation and erasure. Transparent layers overlap to create depth and luminosity, allowing colour to become the primary vehicle of expression. The artist’s use of fluid, gestural forms conveys an inner rhythm that recalls the natural world. In her work, landscape becomes a site of imagination rather than direct observation.

Perez Simão’s work embodies a distinctly Brazilian sensibility, attuned to the interplay between light, nature, and emotion. Her landscapes are not literal depictions but poetic meditations on perception and place. For Perez Simão, painting is a process of discovery rather than representation. Her colours appear to vibrate and merge, creating an illusion of movement and dreamscapes. Each work exists as part of a larger constellation, what the artist describes as “a dance between paintings”: individual yet interconnected, open to change and dialogue.

Sean Skully

Sean Scully (b. 1945) is one of the most significant painters of his generation, known for his rigorous exploration of abstraction through rhythm, structure, and colour. His work bridges the geometric clarity of Minimalism with the emotional depth of painterly gesture, creating compositions that feel architectural and at the same time human made. Throughout his career, Scully has worked across painting, printmaking, sculpture, and works on paper, using each medium to investigate how structure can convey emotion. Known for his stripes, blocks, and grid works, he uses these repeated forms not to impose order but to create a language of tactile resonance. They evoke a sense of stability intertwined with fragility, capturing the tension between control and imperfection inherent in his work.

Ryan Sullivan

Ryan Sullivan (b. 1983) is a New York based artist whose practice centres on a continuously evolving language of abstraction. Each work becomes a trace of its own creation, recording the forces and conditions that shaped it. Rather than applying paint in a conventional manner, Sullivan manipulates chemical reactions, temperature, and gravity, allowing his materials to determine their final form. How works are made from a constant dialogue between control and chance, structure and entropy.

Working with industrial materials such as resin, fiberglass, and epoxy, Sullivan captures processes that are usually invisible or fleeting. His surfaces appear simultaneously geological and gestural, evoking natural phenomena like erosion or sedimentation while also reflecting the artist’s deliberate manipulation. Through these material explorations, Sullivan reimagines abstraction as an act of transformation, revealing painting as a living process rather than a fixed image.

Stanley Whitney

Stanley Whitney (b. 1946) is celebrated for a lifelong engagement with colour and rhythm. Rooted in abstraction yet deeply influenced by the improvisational structure of jazz, his paintings construct visual harmonies through the repetition and variation of chromatic blocks. Since the 1990s, Whitney has refined a distinctive compositional format composed of vibrant squares and rectangles arranged in rhythmic balance that serves as both structure and improvisational score. In his works, the surface’s geometric grid like structures are softened by fact that you can clearly see the artist’s hand, where slight imperfections animate the forms and imbue them with human touch.

Working without preliminary sketches, he builds each composition colour by colour, responding to the energy and resonance of the previous hue. The spaces between blocks, often defined by thin lines or shifts in tone, act like intervals in music, allowing the eye to move and rest in turn. His work draws equally on the legacies of Colour Field painting and African American cultural traditions. Whitney demonstrates how colour can serve as both subject and structure, emotion and intellect. His art transforms the grid into a field of rhythm, turning painting into a temporal experience, a visual music of light, movement, and freedom.

Donald Judd’s ‘Specific Objects’ and how they Revolutionised The Art World

Donald Clarence Judd (1928–1994) is regarded as one of the most influential figures of twentieth-century art. Born in Excelsior Springs, Missouri, he studied philosophy and art history at Columbia University and attended the Art Students League of New York between 1946 and 1947. From 1959 to 1965 he wrote extensively for Arts Magazine, producing a body of criticism noted for its analytical precision and intellectual independence. These writings articulated the principles that would define his later practice: clarity of form, avoidance of illusion, and a conviction that art should exist as an autonomous physical reality.
 
Judd began as a painter and was still working in two dimensions in 1961, but that year, influenced by artists like Rauschenberg, Chamberlain, and Kusama who were transforming the art world, he began creating shallow reliefs that shifted into three-dimensional space. By 1962, his objects had moved off the wall and into space, initiating a decisive shift away from painting and toward works rooted in real spatial presence. These early reliefs marked the start of a new direction in his work, representing a formative period defined by steady and persistent exploration. Through 1963 and 1964, Judd engaged in extensive sketching, experimentation, and a process of trial and error. He was developing a language that, although he may not have fully understood it at the time, had no clear precedent. His goal was not to refine existing forms, but to create something fundamentally new.

In 1964 Judd formalised his position in the essay Specific Objects, which proposed a new category of art defined by material and spatial exactness. He argued that the conventional divisions between painting and sculpture were obsolete, and that the work of art should be understood as an independent object defined by proportion, scale, and light. While his work was later associated with Minimalism, Judd himself rejected that classification, emphasising that his works were not reductive but specific, conceived to engage the viewer through direct physical experience rather than symbolic meaning.
 
Judd’s decision not to title his works reflects his intention to avoid narrative or metaphorical interpretation. Each piece exists as a self-contained entity whose meaning lies in its structure, materials, and spatial relationships. He sought a condition of absolute visual and conceptual clarity in which proportion and surface could determine the work’s identity.
 
Fabrication was central to Judd’s methodology. His father, a skilled carpenter, assisted in constructing early wooden works and transmitted a respect for precision that informed Judd’s later collaborations with industrial workshops such as Lippincott Inc. in Connecticut and The Bernstein Brothers in New York. These partnerships enabled him to achieve a level of accuracy unattainable by hand fabrication. Although produced using industrial techniques, the works were not products of mass production but unique objects made to exact specifications. As Judd observed in 1987, “I like the quality of mass production, but I want them to do one or two, and that just makes a mess.”

Judd employed a wide range of materials including galvanized iron, stainless steel, copper, brass, anodised aluminium, and natural woods. Each was selected for its intrinsic qualities—surface, reflectivity, colour, and weight—rather than as a neutral support. He avoided any treatment that would disguise the material, allowing it to define the visual outcome. As curator Barbara Haskell has noted, Judd’s approach “substantiated his implicit claim that every material possessed formal properties that belonged to it alone, and that the artist must limit himself to those properties to allow the materials to speak.”

Donald Judd developed several key series that defined his artistic practice and embodied his philosophy of clarity, precision, and spatial presence. Among his most iconic forms were the stacks, which could be composed of either single or multiple units mounted vertically on the wall, evenly spaced to integrate the wall itself into the work. These began with galvanized iron and later included coloured Plexiglas, which introduced light and transparency as active components. For Judd, the stack was not merely a repeated format but a conceptual framework. Donald Judd once wrote that an artist’s primary challenge is to find “the concatenation that will grow,” meaning an artist must discover a formal or conceptual pursuit capable of sustaining ongoing development rather than fading after just a second or third iteration. For Judd, the stack offered a stable structure that supported continual experimentation, making it a form he could return to throughout his career. Although he worked within a repeated format, he believed each piece should be entirely distinct, defined by precise variations in material, and colour. This focus on specificity informed his use of the term “specific objects,” emphasising how a single form could generate a wide range of visual and perceptual experiences.

Another key series was the progressions, typically horizontal floor or wall works based on mathematical systems such as arithmetic or Fibonacci sequences. These works often featured L-shaped aluminium profiles or rectangular blocks that changed incrementally in size or spacing, creating a sense of logical progression. The boxes, another essential series, consisted of floor-based rectangular forms, often presented singly or in rows, that asserted their presence as independent objects in space. These works highlighted Judd’s interest in spatial autonomy and the idea that the floor and room were integral to the work’s perception. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Judd developed the multicoloured works, where he applied industrial enamel paints or anodised aluminium finishes in bold colours to his forms, emphasising colour as a structural and spatial element rather than a decorative one. He also extended his visual language into furniture design and large-scale, site-specific installations, most notably in Marfa, Texas, where he created permanent environments that unified art, architecture, and landscape.

As Judd moved into larger spaces, first the five‑story cast‑iron building in Soho, New York in 1968 and later the vast landscape of Marfa, Texas, his work expanded in both scale and intention. The New York loft allowed him to permanently install his work and explore its relationship with the surrounding space, and today it is preserved by the Judd Foundation. Marfa provided the freedom to create monumental, site-specific pieces that transformed the idea of sculpture. Apart from the permanent installations in Marfa and SoHo, Judd did not demand a fixed context for displaying his work, though he remained deeply attentive to the conditions in which it was experienced. Judd believed his work should be given the room enough room to exist at its fullest potential, to resonate, to breathe. 

Donald Judd’s legacy lies not only in the physical clarity and rigor of his work but in his radical redefinition of what art could be. By rejecting illusion, narrative, and traditional boundaries between mediums, he forged a new path focused on material, space, and perception. His insistence on specificity over symbolism, and his embrace of industrial processes without compromising individuality, positioned his practice as  a break from the past. Although Judd rejected the title of designer, his formal vocabulary has had a lasting influence on architecture, furniture, and contemporary industrial design. As art critic Jerry Saltz observed, “You know Donald Judd’s work even if you don’t know you know it. He is in the buildings we live in, the furniture we sit on, our workspaces, even iPhone design.” Judd’s concern with structure, measurement, and honesty of materials has extended far beyond the field of art into the visual language of modern life.

In Conversation with Dustin Emory

For the Urban Dwellers exhibition curated by LVH Art, we interviewed Dustin Emory about his exploration of isolation as a central theme, his decision to work exclusively in black and white, and the work he made for this show.

Dustin Emory (b. 1999) is a self-taught American painter based in Atlanta, whose work explores isolation by rendering familiar everyday moments strangely unfamiliar and subtly absurd. His paintings often feature solitary figures sharply lit within interior settings, intensifying feelings of introspection and quiet tension. These seemingly ordinary scenes carry a charged atmosphere, as if something troubling has just occurred or is about to unfold. Emory amplifies this unease through distorted perspectives and unexpected viewpoints. Using oil, acrylic, gouache, and pumice stone on canvas, he builds rich, monochromatic surfaces that draw viewers deep into these intense moments. His muted palette and textured layers invite a visceral connection with the psychological spaces his figures occupy, capturing the complexities of solitude in modern urban life. Through his distinctive treatment of light, colour and perspective, Emory challenges viewers to reconsider the hidden emotions embedded within everyday experiences.

LVH Art: Can you walk us through your creative process? Do you usually begin with a plan or sketch, or does each painting develop more intuitively?

Dustin Emory: My process begins with a very quick sketch, usually in my notes app as it allows me to jot it down quickly as the idea forms in my head. I then take the sketch into 3d modeling software and build out the scene. A lot of times this will be the longest part of the process as most of the decision making happens here. I’ll often make animations of the scene that I can then pull from to create a more natural feel. Once the composition is decided, I shift my focus to layering, creating textures and surfaces on the canvas.

LVH Art: Are the figures in your work based on real-life references, drawn from people you know or pictures found online, or are they entirely imagined scenes and people?

Dustin Emory: The figure in the paintings started out as a reference to my father. I think now the figure has become a stand-in that allows me to explore all angles of isolation and constraint. 

LVH Art: Your artworks frequently feature solitary figures set against interior backdrops, evoking a sense of isolation and resilience. What attracts you to this theme, and what aspects of the human condition does it allow you to explore?

Dustin Emory: I’ve been interested in isolation and, more specifically, confinement ever since I was a kid. It started when my father first became incarcerated. That became a jumping off point for me to dive headfirst into the subject, and I’ve explored it almost exclusively since. I’ve found that invention usually happens once I’ve given myself strict constraints to work under. I want my process to be influenced by the narrative and vice versa. 

LVH Art: Your palette is entirely monochromatic. When did you choose to make this shift away from colour, and why?

Dustin Emory: I’ve been working with a monochromatic palette for around 4 years now. Early on I was much more drawn to compositions and textures rather than color. Giving myself this parameter has made me question the negative connotation “limitation” generally receives. Creation hasn’t ever been invigorating to me if I have every tool at my disposal. 

LVH Art: Are there any artists, writers, or other creatives who have inspired or influenced your practice? If so, what about their practice or ideas resonates with you?

Dustin Emory: I’ve recently been reading about and looking at Robert Therrien a lot and have been quite enamored with his ability to make inanimate objects feel like they’ve had a past life. 

LVH Art: Could you share more about your painting which will be part of the Urban Dwellers exhibition? We would love to hear about the inspiration or some of the references that you looked at for this work.

Dustin Emory: The figure in my work exists in an introspective world, with the walls of his environment appearing to be the extent of his life. Our current reality can be so individualistic that even moments surrounded by others can feel increasingly isolating. 

In Conversation with Lucas Dupuy

For our upcoming exhibition Urban Dwellers, LVH Art sat down with London based artist Lucas Dupuy to discuss his process and inspirations.

Lucas Dupuy (b. 1992) is a London-based artist whose work explores the intersection of language and form, inspired by the bold geometry of 20th-century Brutalist architecture. He plays with perspective, composition, and light, capturing fleeting moments as he builds, erases, and reworks surfaces. Using acrylic or gouache on raw materials like hessian or canvas, Dupuy layers paint intuitively to create subtle, elongated brushstrokes. For Urban Dwellers, we commissioned him to paint a wooden door in the main exhibition space as a response to the environment. He is also contributing an additional artwork to the show, and discusses both pieces in the interview.

LVH Art: Your work often sits at the edge of language and form. When you start a work, do you map a structure first, or let the composition emerge through layering, erasing, and return?

Lucas Dupuy: I work on many drawings in the studio, and these often evolve into larger paintings. The process is somewhat obsessive, I’ll crop, layer, and project parts of these smaller studies to arrive at a final composition. It’s rarely about mapping everything in advance; instead, it’s a process of discovery through repetition and alteration. Each new layer can shift the work’s direction entirely.

LVH Art: You’ve completed several commissions in the past, but was this the first door you’ve ever painted? What was the experience like working in the space? Were there any thoughts or inspirations going through your mind during the process? Did you approach this commission differently from your usual practice?

Lucas Dupuy: It’s the first door I’ve ever painted, yes! The space itself has a lot of history, and that immediately affected how I approached the work. The light moves through the room in such a beautiful, shifting way throughout the day. I found myself constantly taking photos of reflections and shadows. They became a kind of visual language that helped guide the painting process. James Turrell’s work kept coming to mind while I was painting, particularly the way he treats light: “For me it was important for people to come to value light. To value light as we value gold, silver, objects, paintings.” This quote has always resonated with me, and it returned to me strongly in this context. The space itself felt almost spiritual like a chapel or a concert hall, especially with the high ceilings and the way light moves around within it. I definitely approach commissions differently from my studio practice. When working in a specific location, I think a lot about how the piece will interact with its surroundings. For this project, I focused on creating a composition that felt as though it was meeting in the middle, radiating outward from a central point. It was about allowing the work to live within the space rather than simply occupy it.

LVH Art: You’ve spoken about dyslexia shaping how you see words as shapes and symbols. How does that experience guide your use of grids, fragments, and “unreadable” marks today?

Lucas Dupuy: That experience has definitely played a role in how I think about visual language. When I was younger, dyslexia made reading a very physical experience. Letters and words didn’t always appear as stable, fixed forms but as shifting shapes or abstract patterns. I used tinted overlays to help focus on sentences. That early experience informed a lot of my mark-making. I began to see language less as text and more as image.

Over time, that has evolved into a broader interest in abstraction, using fragments and marks that echo written forms but resist direct readability. These gestures still carry a sense of communication, but they move away from literal language toward something more open-ended, influenced now by both nature and architecture.

LVH Art: Brutalist architecture and city structures recur in your paintings. What aspects of those forms — their mass and rhythm — are you translating, and where do you allow them to dissolve into atmosphere?

Lucas Dupuy: I’ve always been drawn to Brutalist structures. There’s something fascinating about how these massive concrete forms can simultaneously feel monumental and fragile, depending on how light hits them or how they weather over time.

In my paintings, I try to translate that sense of rhythm and presence. I often begin with a clear grid or structural form, but as the painting develops, it becomes clear its moving between precision and ambiguity, just as the city itself does.

LVH Art: You frequently work with gouache and acrylic on raw supports like hessian. What about that material attracts you and your practice?

Lucas Dupuy: I’ve always been interested in the tension between fragility and durability. Hessian has this rough, open weave that absorbs paint in unpredictable ways. That unpredictability becomes part of the work’s energy. I like how the surface interacts with the medium and how areas of paint can sink in deeply or sit on top. It exposes the process, allowing you to see where decisions have been made. That tactile quality feels essential to my practice.

LVH Art: What was it about the theme of Urban Dwellers that first attracted you, and how do you feel your work connects to it?

Lucas Dupuy: The quote from Martin Wong used in the show’s text, his view of the city was incredibly inspiring (“Everything I paint is within four blocks of where I live, and the people are the people I know and see all the time.”-Martin Wong). His ability to see poetry and humanity within urban spaces has always been very important to me. Growing up in London, I’ve always found the city to be an endless source of inspiration — not just for its architecture but for its constant movement and energy. The city is a kind of living organism. I hope that’s reflected in my work, it’s moving, but it also attempts to hold qualities of stillness.

LVH Art: Can you speak in detail about the artwork that you created for Urban Dwellers? What were some of the ideas or themes you were exploring while creating it? How did the work evolve during the process? Did it change from your original idea?

Lucas Dupuy: For Urban Dwellers, I wanted to explore how architectural and organic forms could merge — how the language of the city could be reinterpreted as something softer. I reflected on the wall painting and how this work responded to the space, bringing some of that same energy into the studio, as I made both works during the same period. I was thinking about the scale of the space and felt this long, thin format would lend itself well to the building, this also helped inform the mark making.

In Conversation with Paul Robas

Ahead of LVH Art’s Urban Dwellers exhibition, we spoke to Vienna-based Romanian painter Paul Robas about how his process turns distortion and layering into intimate portraits of fading memory.

Paul Robas (b. 1989) is a Vienna-based Romanian artist whose work explores memory, perception, and the shifting relationship between the real and the imagined. Working primarily in painting, he begins with found or digitally altered photographs which he subjects to a process of layering, distortion, and surface manipulation. Blurred faces and textured grounds emerge as portraits that feel both intimate and elusive, evoking the sensation of fading memories. Imperfections and surface disruptions are not hidden but embraced, becoming essential to the meaning of the work. Through this painterly language, Robas challenges traditional notions of portraiture and creates a space where figures seem suspended between personal history and universal experience.

LVH Art: Could you share a bit about your creative process? Are there any specific routines, rituals, or habits that help you get into a creative flow?

Paul Robas: I don’t have a strict creative process or fixed ritual. Mostly, I go out, talk to people, interact, take walks. In these random moments ideas come unexpectedly. I try to stay open and keep an eye out for interesting things. As soon as I see or think about something I could use, I either take a photo or write it down so I don’t forget. Then comes the processing phase, but the initial phase is really as open as possible.

LVH Art: Do you sketch, or do you mainly take photographs?

Paul Robas: I write down a description of an idea: how the work should look and approximately how I’ll compose it. I write it in words — that’s the first thing, because I’ve forgot so many ideas in the past. Afterwards I do sketches of roughly how I think it should look. Then comes computer work: I compose the reference images digitally.  I try to get it as close to the final image as possible — not colour-wise, as colour is a separate process, but in terms of the composition.

LVH Art: The figures in your paintings often originate from photographs. Do you source these images from archives and found material, or do you also take your own photographs?

Paul Robas: It’s a bit of both. I used to use more archive images, but I always modify them a lot: distorting or processing them in Photoshop to achieve a certain look. Recently I’ve photographed friends, and I’ll continue doing that. I studied photography for a while, so I enjoy controlling the light and gently directing how the person moves — but I try to keep it spontaneous, not theatrical. I’m also thinking to mix these two worlds: found images with my own photographs and see what comes out. I don’t want to limit myself to one approach.

LVH Art: Could you tell us more about the work Kill Switch, which will be included in the show? Where did the inspiration come from, and are there any interesting facts about the work?

Paul Robas: Kill Switch is based on a found image, I’m not sure of the origin. The original context and source is not important in relation to my work. I am always interested in the image itself and what interested me was the lost gaze of the person, almost as if they’re experiencing a mental crash. I’m fascinated by how painting can shift psychological states with just a small change: a line or a colour can move a figure from ecstasy to despair. The title ‘Kill Switch’ comes from the technical term for a mechanism that shuts off a system to protect it from damage. I made an analogy to the human mind reaching a breaking point and instinctively switching off. The tear in the eye and the distant gaze suggests an endpoint, but also the possibility of a new beginning.

LVH Art: Colour plays a significant role in your work. Do you approach colour instinctively, or is it a carefully planned and structured element in your process?

Paul Robas: My sketches and collages are mainly for composition; I can’t really fix the colours at that stage. When I start painting, many decisions are made instinctively along the way. I never have everything fixed at the beginning. It’s hard to explain, but I need to see it in my head, then on the canvas. For example I might start with a base layer of orange or yellow and then think: what works next to this?

I prefer to build colour directly on the canvas by painting transparent layers. This approach lets the colours blend optically, right before your eyes, creating tones and nuances you simply can’t achieve by pre-mixing the end result feels more vibrant and complex. You can really lose yourself in the layers, discovering new shades and subtle details the longer you look.

LVH Art: Many of your works carry a dreamlike, even unsettling atmosphere. Is this something you actively seek to create, or does it emerge naturally through your process?

Paul Robas: It’s very intentional. I’ve always been fascinated by the fragility of perception, and how memory begins to distort the moment almost as soon as it passes. With time, memories slip further into obscurity and even become directed narratives of our own making. And even in real time, perception is rarely precise. Light bounces, colours blur, shadows interfere; we never truly see a perfectly clear, stable image. Photography can freeze clarity under certain conditions, but that feels too staged, almost theatrical. My paintings aim to capture the unstable nature of both memory and experience — fleeting, imperfect, and layered.

LVH Art: Are there any writers or artists who inspire you? Any particular art movements?

Paul Robas: I’m not really a fan of specific movements, but I do come across painters whose work I like. Sometimes I’ll see a painting that interests me and then research the artist further. For example, I like the Belgian painter Léon Spilliaert for his atmospheric, almost monochromatic compositions. I recently saw works by Vilhelm Hammershøi in Copenhagen. He paints interiors and fragments of buildings with reduced, vibrating colours, and I was fascinated to experience his work in person for the first time. From Monet and Turner, I take a deep fascination with light itself — whether it is dissolving in mist, scattering off water, or thickened into abstraction, their treatment of atmosphere continues to shape how I look at the world. I’ve also admired Victor Man since I first saw his work in 2015.
 

In Conversation with Samuel Haitz

For our upcoming exhibition Urban Dwellers, LVH Art sat down with artist Samuel Haitz to discuss how personal and collective memory shape his approach to found materials, and how art and literary history continue to inform his visual language. 

Samuel Haitz (b. 1997) is a Zurich-based artist whose work engages with the legacies of literature and queer history as a framework for thinking about desire, memory, and artistic production. Drawing on a variety of archives, printed matter, and cultural history, from classical poetry, to mid-century gay journals and overlooked ephemera, he reconfigures found material into paintings, prints, and assemblages. These works foreground both the persistence and fragility of cultural memory, asking how histories can be preserved, re-imagined, and made visible today. His practice reflects critically on questions of originality, reproduction, and authorship within contemporary art.

LVH Art: Your work engages deeply with literature and art history. What first drew you to these archives as a starting point for your practice?

Samuel Haitz: I think what draws me to literature and art history is what Roland Barthes describes in Death of the Author: the way something, for example a text, slips free from its origin and becomes available for projection, desire, misreading. My practice sits where the archive is not a fixed authority. I might recognise myself in these materials, even if only partial, fragmentary, or imagined. They were not made “for me” but become mine in the act of reception. That’s what an archive is for me: not something fixed, but unstable, re-readable, and re-writable.

LVH Art: You often work with printed matter such as magazines, books, and journals. How do you choose which sources to bring into your work?

Samuel Haitz: My choice is never purely conceptual; it emerges from a combination of affinity, serendipity, and the material’s capacity to be (re)contextualized. I often use texts and images created decades ago. By choosing to work with them, I assert their relevance for our time.

LVH Art: Desire is central to your work, not only as a theme but also as a way images and texts connect. How do you think about desire in relation to artistic production?

Samuel Haitz: I think that Pasolini got it completely right in his film Teorema: when the handsome, mysterious guest who has intimate encounters with the whole family leaves their house, they all go crazy. After his sudden departure, he leaves behind emptiness and mental chaos, which the mother, father, daughter, and son try to compensate for in diverse and sometimes absurd ways. The son, Pietro, begins abstract painting and develops conceptual ideas about painting and artistic technique.

LVH Art: Could you share more about your work Anthology (Rimbaud, p. 78–79), 2024, which will be part of the Urban Dwellers exhibition? We would love to hear about the inspiration behind the work and what shaped its creation.

Samuel Haitz: This piece was part of my solo exhibition Hermeneutics at Triangolo, which consisted of 23 re-photographed page spreads in which Kathy Acker traces the romance between poets Rimbaud and Verlaine. Kathy Acker’s In Memoriam to Identity (1990) is an experimental novel that defies clear categorisation, merging fiction, autobiography, and literary critique. In her signature punk, postmodern style, Acker dismantles conventional narratives of identity, authorship, and desire, all themes that I address in my work. The work you selected is the first page of chapter two of Kathy Acker’s In Memoriam to Identity. On it, I digitally marked two lines and physically collaged four snapshots: a chapel in Berlin designed by James Turrell, a poem by Frank O’Hara, a bar in Brussels, and the view from a plane window.

LVH Art: What tells you that a work has reached its point of completion, and how do you recognise that moment in your process?

Samuel Haitz: Working with found materials, the media and devices I use set a framework of restrictions that shape the work. In the end, I hope it declares its own sufficiency: not polished into infinity, but held together by the right tension of intention and openness.

In Conversation with Jameela Stenheden Gordon-King

For the upcoming exhibition Urban Dwellers, LVH Art sat down with London-based artist Jameela Stenheden Gordon-King to discuss how movement, rhythm and gesture animate her practice.

Jameela Stenheden Gordon-King (b. 1998) works primarily across painting and drawing, treating line as an active force whose speed, rhythm and intensity register the motion of her own body. Figures in motion recur throughout her canvases and works on paper, where gesture becomes inseparable from image. Combining charcoal, oil paint and distemper, often with pigments she grinds herself, Gordon-King tests the boundaries between drawing and painting, grounding her images in earthy tonalities while allowing sound and music to shape the scale and cadence of her compositions. This interplay of material, sound and motion underpins works such as Blue Note (2025), which will be included in the Urban Dwellers. Our conversation traced these concerns, exploring how Gordon-King translates internal and external rhythms into visual form and how presence and process converge in her studio.

LVH Art: Can you describe your creative process? Do you have any rituals or habits?

Jameela Stenheden Gordon-King: I wouldn’t really say I have any specific rituals. I do tend to listen to music while I work, usually it would be Jazz – lots of Nina Simone and Alice Coltrane. It ends up being part of my environment. I have also started to do collaborations with musicians, which stemmed from the listening of Jazz and interactions with live music. 

LVH Art: How do these collaborations with musicians work, and what do they bring to your practice?

Jameela Stenheden Gordon-King: The collaborations are a conversation, a back and forth. The musicians that I have worked with most regularly are Arnold, who plays clarinet, and Avila who plays the drums amongst many other instruments. They respond to my drawing, and I to them playing. With the tapping of the charcoal and notes from their instruments informing each other. I record these sessions, then listen back to them when painting.

LVH Art: Are these collaborations mainly for drawing or painting? How do drawing and painting relate in your practice?

Jameela Stenheden Gordon-King: Most of the collaborations with musicians have been with charcoal drawings because the medium is immediate and doesn’t require a slowing down to think about colour. Drawing and painting have a cyclical relationship in my work. When I was living back home in Sussex, I’d go for walks by the river and fill a sketchbook with quick studies. Later, I’d take those sketches to the studio and develop them into larger ink or charcoal works. The paintings in my degree show were documentations of the act of drawing itself, of the body in motion as it makes mark. For me, drawing and painting are on equal footing; they inform each other.

LVH Art: Does music influence your painting as well?

Jameela Stenheden Gordon-King: Yes, it’s in everything I do, rhythm. For Blue Note I listened to a recording from a collaboration with Avila and Arnold while painting. But with painting, I sometimes need silence to focus, especially when I’m working with colour. Its bursts of energy followed by stillness. It really depends on the moment.

LVH Art: Can you tell us more about your work Blue Note which will be included in Urban Dwellers?

Jameela Stenheden Gordon-King: Blue Note started again as a documentation of the collaborations and of the body. I listened back to recordings from one specific session from earlier this year, and wanted to allow for the sound to come through into the painting: in parts writing a kind of musical language, dictionary of sound. The painting brings together different types of making marks and arranging of space, it feels it’s a culmination of all the knowledge I’ve gathered so far.

LVH Art: How does working with colour affect your process?

Jameela Stenheden Gordon-King: Colour adds another layer of complexity. I’m always thinking about how each colour or tone relates to the others. With Blue Note and similar works, I use oil, alongside distemper, which dries quickly and requires mixing each colour from pigment. You can’t just squeeze it from a tube, so you have to work in sections rather than layering everything at once. There’s a kind of time pressure, because the paint dries fast, and you have to be decisive. I like that it forces me to slow down and think, even as I’m working quickly. I remember listening to Andrew Cranston talk about the sectioning that distemper pushes you to adopt before I’d tried it, and it really rings true.

LVH Art: Why do you often return to charcoal as a medium?

Jameela Stenheden Gordon-King: I started using charcoal for quick drawings, I like the immediacy and the fact that it is a completely natural substance. Its relevance grew after being involved in the coppicing of trees for a charcoal company in Scotland. Their process is slow and sustainable, as they wait seven years for each plot of trees to grow before processing. The charcoal itself is uncompressed and comes in large sticks, sometimes half a meter long. I love the materiality of it: the way you can make big, physical marks, and even the smell of the fire in the charcoal. It’s a very direct, tactile medium, and I’m drawn to that.

LVH Art: Movement is a key part of your practice, both in the physical act of painting and in the figures, you depict. How do you think about movement in your work?

Jameela Stenheden Gordon-King: Movement is central, especially in large-scale works. I started making big circular marks with my whole body while listening to jazz, which led to more physical drawing that engages the whole body. I had the chance to use the Bloomsbury Theatre whilst ay Slade, a huge paint frame that’s about 10 meters long and almost as tall. The circles began as a way to loosen up and activate the composition. Sometimes I document these sessions to use as references for figures in my work. The act of moving, responding to music, and making marks becomes a kind of dance, and that energy is captured in the finished piece.

LVH Art: What tells you that a painting has reached its point of completion, and how do you recognise that moment in your process?

Jameela Stenheden Gordon-King: There’s just a moment when I feel it’s done. I don’t like to overwork pieces, but I am obsessed with the idea of concealing and working over, so if I do go too far theres usually a way to bring it back. The time it takes to finish a work can vary from a few days to a few months. Sometimes I’ll leave a painting in the studio for a long time and come back to it later, adding to it whilst working on other pieces so they are in dialogue with each other.

LVH Art: Are there any artists, writers, or other creatives who have inspired or influenced your practice? If so, what about their practice or ideas resonates with you?

Jameela Stenheden Gordon-King: Right now, Goya is a big inspiration, especially his Black Paintings and the way he depicts the weight and movement of bodies. I’ve spent a lot of time with his work here in Madrid, and I hope to see his drawings in the archives. I also look at Cy Twombly, for the way that he understands the materiality and substance of paint, you can feel the speed of his hand when looking at his paintings. But also, for his use of mythology, how he is able to distil stories into these compositions that don’t bear everything at first glance, you have to work to draw out knowledge. They’re like musical scores or notes.

LVH Art: How has your work evolved in the last years?

Jameela Stenheden Gordon-King: Collaborating with others has changed my practice, making it less singular and more dynamic. I used to think of painting as a solitary activity, but working with musicians and other artists has opened up new possibilities. Both are necessary, to be alone and to be in a conversation. Working more consciously with movement too, being aware of how it guides the body has also shifted things significantly.

In Conversation with Yooyun Yang

For our upcoming exhibition Urban Dwellers, LVH Art sat down with Yooyun Yang to talk about how her paintings capture the solitude, tension, and fleeting moments of urban life.

Yooyun Yang (b. 1985) is a South Korean painter whose work transforms fleeting and estranged moments of daily life into enigmatic visual excerpts. Trained in oriental painting, she works with diluted acrylic on jangji, a traditional Korean handmade paper made from mulberry bark. This paper is more absorbent than others, allowing her smoothly rendered brushwork to blend seamlessly with its fibers. Her compositions begin with photographs she takes herself, which she crops and distorts into close-up fragments. This technique allows the familiar to shift into the uncanny. Figures often appear partially hidden, faces blurred or turned away, and gestures abruptly cut, creating a sense of solitude and psychological tension. Yang’s work captures what she calls the “age of anxiety,” revealing the alienation and emotional pressure commonplace in urban life.

LVH Art: Can you walk us through your creative process? Do you have specific rituals or routines that help you when you’re creating?

Yooyun Yang: I usually think about what kind of painting I want to draw in my head first, and then start drawing right away. In the past, I used to make esquisses or small sketches in my drawing book before beginning the main work, but these days, I just do a very simple pencil sketch and get started right away. I think that a painting has the potential to change throughout the process, so I try to stay open to those possibilities as I work.

LVH Art: Many of your paintings begin with photographs you’ve taken yourself. What qualities do you look for when selecting an image to develop into a painting? Can you describe your process of translating a photograph into a painted work, and what tends to shift, disappear, or emerge in that transformation?

Yooyun Yang: I habitually take photos of moments I come across in everyday life. I don’t like to stage scenes or deliberately construct images that I want to draw. I frequently return to photos taken a long time ago because the subjects and themes I want to draw at each time are different. Sometimes, parts of an image that I didn’t notice before suddenly catch my eye when I look at it again after some time has passed. Rather than following the original photo exactly, I tend to crop out unnecessary parts, and exaggerate or alter the elements that left an impression on me or that I want to emphasize. Because of this process, what disappears or changes in each work is always different.

LVH Art: Many of your works feel as if they’re seen from a specific, sometimes hidden or bizarre viewpoint. How do you think about perspective and the act of looking when composing a work?

Yooyun Yang: This is a very important question for me. At the beginning of my work, I wanted to find hidden points or gaps that people generally don’t notice. Since long ago, I have had a habit of focusing not on the centre of a landscape or object but on its edges or corners, or looking at things askew rather than straight on. Perhaps this was an effort to see things differently. This way of observing has naturally been reflected in my work since I was young. Until now, the results of my attitude toward subjects have influenced my paintings. However, recently, I have been more concerned with the cause and process behind that attitude rather than the results. In the process of observing and interpreting a subject, we often encounter misunderstandings. I believe these misunderstandings are not negative but rather necessary. From them, new interpretations arise, which sometimes become the foundation for new works.

LVH Art: The cinematic quality of your work often makes everyday details appear uncanny. Do you think urban life itself already carries this sense of the strange?

Yooyun Yang: I could say that. I was born and raised in the city. The constant noise and changes in the city naturally influenced my life. The city itself has many different personalities. I was born in an old part of town but spent my childhood in a newly developed area, and after becoming an adult, I returned to live in the old town again. The two parts of the city looked very different and had distinct environments. For me, having grown up in a planned and organised new town, the old district felt faintly familiar yet strikingly unfamiliar to me. Tangled power lines like a spider’s web, a power plant that seemed asleep during the day but appeared menacingly awake with its red lights at night, ever- present construction sites, and the way old buildings quickly disappear and are replaced new ones in the blink of an eye — all of these urban scenes deeply influenced my early work.

LVH Art: You’ve described your paintings as being like “a thorn in the mind” or “a gentle fever.” Could you expand on what you mean with these metaphors, and how they reflect the kind of experience you hope to create for the viewer?

Yooyun Yang: Since I was young, I have thought, “Others will paint happy and pretty pictures well, so I will paint pictures that are not like that.” From childhood, my natural temperament has drawn me closer to darkness than brightness, and to negativity rather than positivity. Each of us has our own dark parts or secrets that we cannot reveal. Even if we share them with others, I believe there are some parts that are difficult to convey in words and thus cannot be fully empathised with. The word “melancholy” is a single word, but the feeling of “melancholy” is different for every individual. Emotions are like waves — they cannot be held in one’s hands, they cannot be defined by a single colour, and they constantly shift and change every moment. Perhaps what I wish is to make people look into the corners of their own hearts that they had forgotten, or tried to turn away from. I value the moments when we confront those emotions.

LVH Art: You often work with diluted acrylic on Jangji paper. What draws you to this material?

Yooyun Yang: When I was in middle school, I first encountered Hanji, traditional Korean paper. Among the many types of Hanji, Jangji was the one I used. Compared to regular drawing paper, Hanji has a distinctive texture and absorbs water very well, qualities that suited me perfectly. While preparing for art college entrance exams, everyone around me was using standard drawing paper, but I was the only one using Jangji. Because of this, I naturally chose Oriental painting as my major in university. During my college years, I painted using traditional pigments instead of acrylic paints. Traditional pigments are delicate and sensitive, making them challenging to work with. Around the time I graduated, I started using acrylic paints, which were easier to handle than traditional pigments. I also felt that the opaque and muted colours of acrylics suited my work better than the clear and transparent tones of traditional pigments. Since then, I have continued to use acrylic paints.

LVH Art: Can you speak in detail about Seeing (2024). What were some of the ideas or themes you were exploring while creating it? How did the work evolve during the process/ Did it change from your original idea?

Yooyun Yang: This work reflects my thoughts on the act of simply looking, as the title suggests. At some point, we began to look into the small screens in our hands countless times throughout the day. When we gaze at these screens, others can observe us in an unguarded state. Conversely, I observe others in their unguarded moments. They show different faces when looking at their small screens compared to when they make eye contact with someone else. I often enjoy observing people in this state. This work is also part of a series created sequentially after a work titled ‘Taking’. We constantly capture something with small objects in our hands throughout the day, habitually looking at those tiny screens. These small devices, which never leave our hands, are paradoxical: they represent the widest world to us while simultaneously confining us to the smallest spaces. I wanted to express these thoughts that often come to me while using my phone through this series.