Born in 1992 in Seattle, Washington, Brandon Elijah Johnson lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

As we step into Johnson's world, somewhere between imagination and reality, we become a part of his visual diary. A collector of images, from photographs found on the internet to snapshots taken with his phone, Johnson reinterprets familiar ordinary scenes in his paintings and drawings, perhaps in an attempt to freeze a moment in time. He takes reference images from his direct environment and intentionally - or not - offers a representative picture of today’s world. His vivid compositions draw from pop culture, embrace pastiche, and remain attached to the here and now. As part of a generation willingly returning to figurative painting, Johnson moves away from pure representation, at times infusing a touch of playfulness, and distancing himself from painterly conventions. Between fiction and documentary reality, Johnson’s works reveal a part of our collective memory.

Brandon Elijah Johnson

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indoor5

Painting

Daydream

Born in 1991 in Toronto, Canada, Shantel Miller lives and works in Boston, Massachusetts.

Miller is a storyteller. As the daughter of Jamaican ministers who immigrated to Canada, she takes viewers on an intimate and spiritual journey, shedding light on representations of race, gender, and belief systems. As she documents everyday life and shares with us her ordinary surroundings, her re-imagined spaces specifically depict moments of black life. With oil paints and delicate details, she questions authority, existence, and contemplates what it means to be human. As we enter her meditative space, we find ourselves engaged in a conversation about both the beauties and the limitations of our contemporary visual culture.

Shantel Miller

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How Long Does it Take to Heal

Born in 1977 in Helsinki, Finland, Elina Salminen lives and works in Brussels, Belgium.

Salminen’s works are hybrid. They are both paintings and objects, sculptures and installations, light and shadow, floating and barely palpable, yet we are drawn to unveil what lies behind them or else, within the color itself. Salminen surprises us as viewers and we question what we see. Her works play with space and time, they move beyond the surface and reflect on her fascination with color as an intangible source of light. With her paintings, Salminen delicately applies monochromatic hues on edges and corners, then covers the emptiness with translucent materials such as cloth or glass. There is no paint on the surface of the painting, only a reflection of the color that hides behind. Utterly romantic, her works engage us in a conversation about protection and warmth. They are abstracted minimalist compositions that entail infinite meanings, each altered with time and space.

Elina Salminen

Born in 1995 in Birmingham, England, Molly Kent lives and works in Edinburgh, Scotland.

Through the traditional medium of rug tufting, Kent reflects on her doubts as a young individual living in an internet-driven digital world consumed by both technology and epidemics. Moving beyond the craft that traditionally bears a domestic and ornamental quality, Kent creates objects that awaken our senses and challenge our perception while alluding to the struggles one can have with mental health. Her rugs often take on organic shapes, while her colors and patterns are intrinsically inherent to the aesthetics of glitch art. Inspired by unexpected blasts of pixelated jagged lines that sometimes appear on digital screens, she applies these visual glitches to her weaves. The sense of discomfort that she intentionally creates is sometimes reinforced by her use of disruptive and ambiguous words, delicately interwoven in the fiber. The softness and malleability of her objects come to act as a cushion to the doubts and emotional fatigue that have taken over herself and her generation.

Molly Kent

Born in 1993 in Lisbon, Portugal, Pedro Ruxa lives and works in Brussels, Belgium.

Ruxa is enamored with painting and inspired by words. It is through painting, but also through objects and bits and pieces of poems that Ruxa attempts to communicate with his senses and sensibility. His works create an intimate dialogue, be it actually between himself and the paint, or us and the words. Through a reconstructed language that is his own, shapes, colors, letters, and sentences become his subject matter. Ruxa constantly creates ever-changing clouds of words and imagery and sticks them on his studio walls, making them the starting point to his oeuvre. Yet, he simultaneously explores the restraints of this same language: what is happening before or after what we see? The more Ruxa tends to take control over his words, his sight, and his emotions, the more he is unable to contain it within the realm of comprehension. But all this is exactly at the core of his aesthetic language and it is undeniably touching, both visually and emotionally.

Pedro Ruxa

Born in 1988 in Tehran, Iran, Reihaneh Hosseini lives and works in Vienna.

Born and raised in Tehran, Hosseini studied philosophy before emigrating to Vienna in 2014, where she currently resides. Trained under Austrian abstract artists including Christian Schwarzwald and Gunter Damisch, Reihaneh soon returned to figurative painting, her favored style for reflecting on the world that surrounds her. As a storyteller, she is inspired by her friends and her everyday life experiences, yet she portrays them with a dysmorphic rendition, exaggerated proportions, grotesque, and distorted features, and an incongruous palette. Her strong sense of corporeality coupled with the absurdity of the scenes that she depicts reveal a psycho-emotional approach to life and painting. The figures that populate her works oscillate between beauty and ugliness, they have a cartoonish appearance that adds a glimpse of humor and playfulness to her compositions, yet they are imbued with philosophical subtleties. Hosseini’s paintings take us to a dreamlike world where each of her characters evokes our unconscious thoughts, our inner child, as well as our mental and social imagery.

Reihaneh Hosseini

Following a voluntary hiatus from the art world, Katayoun Vaziri started painting again, mainly on Sundays and more regularly throughout the pandemic. Her 'Sunday paintings' are her personal visual diary. Vaziri depicts ordinary people, often including herself in ordinary settings, completing everyday activities. With her Memories of a Bourgeoisie Series and her Repetition Series amongst others, Vaziri reflects on each individual as equally a subject and an object of capitalism, as political agents of social transformation who are nonetheless subjects to socio-economic inequalities. With her oeuvre, she reflects on how ordinary people may have to forego their ideals for the sake of survival. Somewhere between empathy and critique, her miniature works are playful, yet engaged, like postcards filled with familiar references that tell the story of each and everyone of us.

Born in Tehran and now living and working between New York City and Mexico City, Katayoun Vaziri graduated from Yale University in 2009 with an MFA in Painting. Since her graduation, Vaziri has had solo and group exhibitions in New York, London, Mexico City and Dubai and has invited to prestigious residencies including the Skowhegan School of Painting and Drawings in Maine and Eyebeam in Brooklyn.

In continuity with the source of inspiration for her artworks and her active social engagement, Katayoun Vaziri has committed to hold no monetary gain from the sale of her artworks. The artist's proceeds will be donated to carefully selected and vetted community building organizations. For any further queries regarding these causes, please contact us.

Katayoun Vaziri

Born in 1994 in Massachussets, Waltham-based Meghan Murray received her BS in Studio Art from Skidmore College in 2016 and her MFA in Painting from Boston University in 2022. Her representational painting practice embodies and simultaneously intervenes upon historical tradition. Murray’s oeuvre is a continued investigation into intergenerational American ideals and clichés as viewed in the mid-century family photo album. Her paintings examine her preoccupation with nostalgia as she finds inspiration in midcentury photographs that she collects. She is a recipient of the 2022 Blanche E. Colman award for New England artists and was awarded second place in the 2023 Miami University Young Painters competition by juror John Yau. Murray currently lives and works in Waltham, MA.



Meghan Murray

Nick Farhi (b. 1987, New York) is an artist, poet, and theorist. 

Developing a wonky and uniquely a-skewed visual grammar through the labor of painting, Farhi's works are often large scale representational oil paintings that depict everyday objects and reflect on the rhythm of life. Through an interplay between visual research, spanning from found imagery and autobiographical photography, to an internal intuition for cinematic figuration, Farhi makes his painterly mark by elevating ordinary objects to the status of memento mori. A piano, a glass or a coffee machine become symbolic tropes that act as a reminder of the inevitability of nostalgia.

 

Nick Farhi

Born in 1997 in Shenzhen, China, Baoying Huang lives and works in Long Island City, NY. Huang uses art as a portal to tell her story of living between two cultures: being a citizen of China, and a resident of the U.S. Living in the ongoing pandemic and the antagonism between the two nations, Huang’s paintings depict the compartmentalized environments that she lives in, and her emotional connection with domestic themes as she raises questions about the meaning of home.

Huang considers her paintings as containers of “nomad” thoughts. The aspiration of wanting to express herself through language and conversation is compromised and compressed into painting materials and visual forms. Colors in these paintings are filtered and dimmed, which points to a sense of coldness she observes in her repetitive living patterns during the pandemic– being trapped in a humanless land and only able to see the traces she left in a space. The distinction between the air-tight surface and scratchy brush marks represents the paradox between hyperrealism and a gauzy, blurred romanticism. Huang believes in the power of painting because of its open-endedness communication. She is pointing at the mundane which all human beings can perceive, and hopes the spark in the dark can eventually make a good blaze. Painting is a practice to process the melancholy that comes from the present disconnect and allergy to the past; painting is Huang’s reconciliation to the outside world and the reflection of the internal mind.

Baoying Huang

Born in 1992 in Seoul, South Korea, Arang Choi lives and works in Vienna, Austria. A recent graduate of Vienna’s Academy of Fine Arts under famed professors such as Daniel Richter, Choi’s body of work interrogates our understanding of existence. Her signature anthropomorphic and mythical creature, called Emulb (meaning "Flower" in reverse German) appears in a variety of forms throughout Choi’s work. This hybrid alter ego invokes a metaphysical notion of animism that positions humans, animals and nature on equal planes. Otherworldly and fantastical, Choi’s compositions bring together the definable and undefinable in a narrative of mystical fiction inspired by her infinite dream stage. Choi's works are featured in collections internationally, and were recently acquired by the permanent collection of a leading art institution in Vienna, Austria.

Arang Choi

Born in 1994 in St. Louis, Missouri where she currently lives and works, Palestinian-American artist Saj Issa explores vital topics, including cultural erasure, dispute, displacement, capitalism and climate change. The regional transition between Palestine, Los Angeles and St. Louis, Missouri where she is currently based, has had a significant influence on her practice, fueling her exploration of the current social context and the contrasting realities between these places. A standout of Issa’s works are the incorporation of Western languages, brands and logos – each a highly commercial aspect – layered before ornate ceramic tiles that have traditionally been tools to represent less atheist concepts. Saj Issa's commitment to documenting the social context and her surroundings remains steadfast, creating art that resonates with audiences worldwide.

Saj Issa

Born in 2001 in Ulaan Ude, Buriad-Mongolia, Yuma Radne currently lives and works in London, UK where she is completing her degree at Slade School of Art. Radne previously studied in Saint Petersburg and Vienna. Her work explores the relationship between humans and nature, and narrates the connection between the two. Mythological, fantastical, energetic and incredibly unique, Radne creates her own myths to explore, and operates with the idea that nothing is supposed to have an answer and anything can be any color you want it to be.

Yuma Radne

Born in 1996 in Svitavy, Czech Republic, Eva Yurková lives and works in Vienna, Austria. Yurková graduated from Painting and Printmaking at the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig and later on, from Vienna’s University of Applied Arts where she studied Graphics and Printmaking. Known for her multifaceted work with collaging linocut, woodcut, colored papers and oil, she creates figurative landscapes, with both realistic and fantastical environments into which she sets her characters. With streamlined body forms, her figures are often female identifying, who are either alone or seen interacting with bodies similar to themselves. Set against surreal scenes with overlapping  floral and environmental elements, Yurková's dream-like landscapes evoke enraptured fantasy. In this way, Yurková portrays moments of public intimacy, but also a rejection of the systematic norms in which the gaze towards the female body is embedded.

Eva Yurková

$1,000 and under

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$1,000-$2,000

$2,000-$5,000

$5,000-$8,000

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Austria

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Belgium

Canada

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Olusanya Ojikutu is a Nigerian-born artist, technologist, and co-founder of BluChipArt based in Washington, DC. An avid collector of contemporary and classical African art from the continent and its diaspora, his collection spans from the first millennium to present day. Olusanya, who is largely influenced by traditional African art in his own practice, often draws inspiration from his Yoruba cultural heritage juxtaposed with visual metaphors and allegories of social, cultural, and political issues. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts with First Class Honors from the University of Obafemi Awolowo University in Ile-Ife, Nigeria, as well as a Master of Science degree in Cybersecurity Policy from the University of Maryland University College.

Olusanya Ojikutu

Artworks in the collection

Daydream

How Long Does it Take to Heal