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    Pastoral Landscapes Brim with Patterns in Luminous Paintings by David Brian Smith

    “And nature smiled” (2025), oil on herringbone linen, 66 7/8 x 55 1/8 inches. All photos by Ben Deakin. Images courtesy of the artist and Ross + Kramer Gallery, shared with permission

    Pastoral Landscapes Brim with Patterns in Luminous Paintings by David Brian Smith

    November 19, 2025

    Art

    Kate Mothes

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    Easter egg-like clouds, glowing sunrise gradients, and myriad vibrant patterns are just a few of the elements comprising David Brian Smith’s otherworldly landscapes.

    Smith grew up in rural Shropshire, England, and his ancestral ties to the region’s agricultural traditions became a major influence on his work after he relocated to London. His works evoke British landscape painting of the likes of the Norwich School of painters, a group of self-taught, working-class artists who self-organized an art society in the early 19th century.

    “All around the Wrekin” (2025), oil on linen, 78 3/4 x 70 7/8 inches

    Smith departs from historically more academic styles of oil painting to create works “re-envisioned through a hallucinatory, technicolor lens,” says Ross + Kramer Gallery, which presents the artist’s solo exhibition, All around the Wrekin. In his starkly contrasted rolling hills, farm buildings, and bulbous trees, Smith also evokes the bucolic yet faintly uncanny paintings of American Regionalist artist Grant Wood (1891-1942).

    “Rooted in the English pastoral tradition yet boldly contemporary in vision, Smith’s paintings explore ideas of place, belonging, and time through radiant color, intricate brushwork, and layered symbolism,” the gallery says. The title of the show references the name of a hill in Shropshire called the Wrekin, distinctive for its conical shape and a popular place to take walks.

    Within the sky, fields, rivers, and forests, hundreds of little hatch marks, flowers, starbursts, and other thematic motifs dance across the surface. He also often incorporates gold and silver leaf to add an even further ethereality to the large-scale, luminous canvases, tapping into the power of color and light to evoke nostalgia and a kind of psychedelic utopianism.

    All around the Wrekin continues through November 22 in San Francisco. Smith’s work is also on view as part of Inner and Outer Worlds, an exhibition of international contemporary painting that runs through April 12 at the Ju Ming Museum in Taiwan. See more on the artist’s website and Instagram.

    Detail of “All around the Wrekin”

    “Jackfield” (2025), oil and gold leaf on herringbone linen, 66 7/8 x 55 1/8 inches

    Detail of “Jackfield”

    “A Dragons Eye” (2025), oil and gold leaf on herringbone linen, 82 5/8 x 70 7/8 inches

    Detail of “A Dragons Eye”

    “A place of my heart” (2025), oil on linen, 78 3/4 x 70 7/8 inches

    Detail of “All around the Wrekin”

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    Memory and Novelty Converge for Manuela Solano, Who Adopted a New Process After Losing Her Sight

    “Orlando” (2025), acrylic on canvas, 215 x 215 centimeters. All images courtesy of Manuela Solano, shared with permission

    Memory and Novelty Converge for Manuela Solano, Who Adopted a New Process After Losing Her Sight

    November 19, 2025

    Art

    Grace Ebert

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    When Manuela Solano delineates a cheekbone or shapes the chiseled torso of a cowboy standing tall, precisely placed nails, tape, and pipe cleaners offer guidance. The artist, who is blind, works intuitively, feeling out the areas she and her team have marked and trusting that together, the desired imagery will emerge. “I try to force myself to keep [the shapes] faster and looser, which feels great,” she adds. “It makes the process more playful.”

    At just 26, medical malpractice in her HIV treatments caused Solano to lose her sight. She’s since adapted to new ways of working, as she taps into both her memory and imagination to produce paintings that reflect her concerns and joys. “My work is always, on some level, about myself. I make work about either my taste, my yearnings, or something I see of myself in someone else,” she says.

    A beautiful film by Barbara Anastacio for T Magazine—which was made in 2018 before the artist’s gender transition—visits Solano’s then-studio in Mexico City and glimpses her process in detail. We see the artist flip through work made before she lost her sight in 2014 as she traces her practice from art school to the present.

    Snowy scenes and portraits appear throughout the sketchbook and offer a visual throughline to her work today. Recent paintings like “Walking on Water” retain the vast landscapes of her earlier pieces as ripples pulse across the sea’s surface. “Me and my team are constantly figuring out the best way to paint textures or effects we haven’t painted before. In that way, we are continually learning,” she adds.

    Similarly, a collection of self-portraits presented in her solo show Egogénsis, held earlier this year in Madrid, reflects a complex evolution of identity through a variety of tender portraits. Gender is fluid in this body of work, and the connection between humans and nature is intrinsic, as parts of the environment seem to imprint themselves onto her figures.

    While Solano does pull from memory, she’s quick to clarify that this process isn’t unique to her practice. “I’ve heard that memories change every time we revisit them,” she says. “This means everybody faces the problem of remembering things a different way than they actually look.”

    “Dinosaurio” (2025), acrylic on canvas, 215 x 215 centimeters

    Having recently relocated to Berlin, Solano incorporates parts of her daily life into much of her practice, allowing her ongoing experiences and dreams to mix with imagery from the past and produce new compositions. She explains:

    Nowadays, I am making a lot of work about my current comings and goings, all of it things I obviously have never seen. I think there is a common misinterpretation that my work is perhaps about memory, that I am painting the things I saw. And this often comes with the rather ableist worry that someday I might run out of memories to paint. But this is not the case at all. I am originating new images and putting them in my work all the time.

    Solano is also a writer and often pens poems and stories to accompany her paintings. A recent piece, which she refers to as a manifesto, will accompany her new Blind Transgender and Wild series. If you’re in Mexico City, you can see the artist’s pop-culture works through January 4 at Museo Tamayo, before the exhibition travels to CAAC Sevilla in 2026. Find more of her work on Instagram.

    “Cowboy” (2025), acrylic on canvas, 215 x 215 centimeters

    “The Childlike Empress” in process

    “The Childlike Empress” (2024)

    “Walking on Water” (2022)

    “Functional Leather” in process

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    Domestic Life Dissolves into Blooming Gardens in Sarah Ann Weber’s Works

    “Out of the oak” (2025), watercolor and colored pencil on paper, framed, 24.75 x 32.75 inches. All images courtesy of Anat Ebgi Gallery, shared with permission

    Domestic Life Dissolves into Blooming Gardens in Sarah Ann Weber’s Works

    November 17, 2025

    Art

    Grace Ebert

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    Through dense thickets of florals rendered in watercolor and colored pencil, a woman attempts to find her footing. Enmeshed in vines and leaves, this nude protagonist can be seen cradling a child or tending to another matter, her surroundings obscuring the particulars of her body and actions.

    These vibrant works are part of a semi-autobiographical series by Sarah Ann Weber, who marks two momentous occasions: the birth of her daughter and her move from Los Angeles, where she lived for a decade, to her hometown of Chicago. Titled I Know Her, this body of work refers to the artist herself, her child, and the stark differences between the two landscapes.

    “Wake up bright” (2025), watercolor and colored pencil on paper mounted to linen over panel, 36 x 48 inches

    Weber explores these significant changes through works teeming with growth. Whereas Los Angeles is dry and warm much of the year, Chicago cycles through all four seasons, sometimes seemingly within the same week. Contrasts between these locales arise through bright, tropical palettes alongside muted, winter fields in shades of gray and blue.

    Within these lush atmospheres, splotches of watercolor and vivid florals subsume any definitive boundaries. Drawing on the traditions of window paintings and portraits depicting mother and child, the artist nests architectural structures and tender, familial moments within her largely botanical scenes. All seem to acquiesce to the rapidly evolving environment, nodding to the inevitability of change and renewal inside and out.

    I Know Her runs through January 10 at Anat Ebgi Gallery in Los Angeles. Find more from Weber on her website and Instagram.

    “My crocus in a hidden garden” (2025), watercolor and colored pencil on paper, framed 24.75 x 32.75 inches

    “Apple blossom” (2025), watercolor and colored pencil on paper, framed, 24.75 x 32.75 inches

    “The era of small pleasures” (2025), watercolor and colored pencil on paper, framed, 32.75 x 24.75 inches

    “Night Blooming Jasmine” (2025), watercolor and colored pencil on paper, framed, 41 x 53 inches

    “A tree you come home to” (2025), watercolor and colored pencil on paper, framed, 41 x 53 inches

    “Star up my sleeve” (2025), watercolor and colored pencil on paper mounted to linen over panel, 72 x 36 inches

    “Keeps climbing higher” (2025), watercolor and colored pencil on paper mounted to linen over panel, 48 x 36 inches

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    Layers Upon Layers Root in History in Li Songsong’s Impasto Paintings

    “Boundless Longevity” (2025), oil on canvas, 210 x 270 centimeters. All images courtesy of Pace Gallery, shared with permission

    Layers Upon Layers Root in History in Li Songsong’s Impasto Paintings

    November 14, 2025

    Art

    Grace Ebert

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    Li Songsong (previously) has long centered his practice around translating archival imagery, whether it be a portrait printed in a newspaper or still from a film. The Chinese artist is broadly interested in the ways that memories morph over time and how, when we’re reflecting on a moment well in the past, our clarity over the particulars can be hazy.

    His new body of work, History Painting, takes a similar technical approach, although rather than interpret a specific scene, Li ventures into the abstract. Wide, impasto layers of oil paint cloak the large-scale canvas, creating a cacophony of color and texture that seems to swell upward while simultaneously pulling downward. As a filmed studio visit shows, the artist works from top down, adding one thick mark atop another in a sort of grid.

    “History VII: Snake Year” (2025), oil on canvas, 120 x 120 centimeters

    Pace Gallery, which represents Li, shares that History Painting reflects more on his relationship to the medium than any specific visual source, although, given his past work, it’s difficult not to try to find definition within the composition. The clustered ridges of paint, for example, might evoke bodies huddled together in mass, their backs to the viewer as they move toward an unknown destination. For Li, these brushstrokes, while abstract, do retain a sense of action and autonomy, and he describes them as “agentive and idiosyncratic” even as they’re covered again and again.

    History Painting is on view through December 20 in New York.

    “Revolution” (2025), oil on canvas, 210 x 210 centimeters

    Installation view of ‘Li Songson: History Painting’ (2025)

    “History IX: Mercy” (2025), oil on canvas, 120 x 120 centimeters

    “History IV: Sacrifice” (2025), oil on canvas, 120 x 120 centimeters

    Installation view of ‘Li Songson: History Painting’ (2025)

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    Radiant Sculptures by Arghavan Khosravi Meditate on Subconscious Terrain

    All images courtesy of Arghavan Khosravi, shared with permission

    Radiant Sculptures by Arghavan Khosravi Meditate on Subconscious Terrain

    November 14, 2025

    Art

    Grace Ebert

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    Known for addressing issues of censorship and inequality, Iranian artist Arghavan Khosravi (previously) has long utilized her bold, fragmented works to confront large-scale problems relevant around the world. Her alluring color palettes and delicate motifs catch the eye and are paired with distinct symbols of tension: a chain lock, cords binding body parts, and roiling flames.

    While her concerns are global, Khosravi has always considered her practice somewhat of a balm that helps her cope with trying times. And so the inward turn of her latest body of work perhaps ventures farther into this territory as she allows herself to delve deep into a personal and collective subconscious.

    The past year has engendered a period of introspection, which the artist translates into a collection of smaller, altar-esque pieces. She refers to them as “intimate constructions where interior space carries its own symbolism. It’s been a way to move inward for a moment, allowing ideas to surface without a predetermined destination.”

    Both the subconscious and symbolic have long figured prominently in her work, and recent pieces are similar. Many layer seemingly disparate components into surreal scenes, with recurring imagery of long, flowing hair, bright orbs of light, birds, and patterns from historic Persian architecture and design. Whereas earlier works frequently incorporated windows, doorways, and other portal-like structures, Khosravi’s newer pieces peer outward from inside, inviting the viewer into a new realm.

    The artist is in the early stages of preparing for an upcoming solo show at Uffner & Liu in New York next year. Until then, follow her practice on Instagram.

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    Glass Flora and Fauna Flutter in the Delicate Work of Kate Clements

    Detail of “Solarium.” All images courtesy of the artist, shared with permission

    Glass Flora and Fauna Flutter in the Delicate Work of Kate Clements

    November 13, 2025

    ArtNature

    Kate Mothes

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    Combining painted panels with delicate planes of kiln-fired glass, Kate Clements explores the nature of fragility. Glass is “a material defined by its capacity to hold tension,” she tells Colossal. “It can break, shatter, or shift at any moment. That awareness of impermanence has long been an undertone throughout my work: a nervous hum beneath the surface.”

    Clements works with a granular substance called frit, which she composes into forms like leaves, insects, and birds directly onto a kiln shelf. When fired, these colorful drawings fuse into wafer-thin panels, which she then applies to painted panels or suspends in installations. Often incorporating patterns evocative of wallpaper and motifs that suggest architectural structures or niches, she plays with relationships between rigidity and fluidity and the artificial and the organic.

    “Solarium” (2022), kiln-fired glass, hardware, and paint on panel, 63 x 83 inches. Photo by Will Preman

    “The material has become almost an extension of my hand and my body through mark-making and scale,” Clements says, sharing that the process is quite meditative. “It’s about precision and intuition coexisting—knowing how to shape the material and when to let the glass move on its own terms in the kiln.”

    The versatility of the medium, balanced with its inherent changeability, continues to fascinate Clements—especially the tension between control and risk. Like any material fired in a kiln, it has the potential to react in surprising ways or transform differently than expected. And once assembled into large-scale works through a process the artist likens to collage, the thin panels appear very delicate, like sugar sculptures, as if they could crumble or break with the slightest touch.

    “Earlier pieces leaned into that unease,” Clements says. “I was drawn to the way glass can induce anxiety—the uneasy power of beauty that could, at any instant, turn on its head. That instability felt like a mirror of the world around us: alluring, dangerous, and unpredictable all at once.” More recent works build upon this sensitivity while emphasizing the ethereal qualities of the translucent medium, suspending delicate panels from the ceiling to create more solid, architectural forms.

    Clements’ sculpture titled “Acanthus,” reminiscent of a gleaming triumphal arch, is on view at the Nelson Atkins Museum in the group exhibition Personal Best through August 9, 2026. New work is also in NOCTURNES, a solo show in the art gallery of Kansas City Community College, which continues through November 14. Find more on the artist’s website and Instagram.

    “Siren” (2025), kiln-fired glass, paint, and hardware, 54 x 33 inches

    Detail of “Siren”

    “False Principles” (2022), kiln-fired glass, paint, and pins, 101.5 x 83 inches. Photo by Will Preman

    Detail of “False Principles”

    “Verdant” (2022), kiln-fired glass, hardware, and paint on panel, 100 x 84 inches. Photo by Will Preman

    Detail of “Verdant”

    “Orpiment I” (2025), kiln-fired glass, paint, and hardware, 48 x 30 inches

    Detail of “Orpiment I”

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    Gilberto Rivera’s ‘Jailbirds’ Imagine Freedom Within Confinement

    Left: “Jailbird #15” (2024), acrylic, mixed media, and collage on wood, 28 x 21 5/8 x 2 inches. Right: “Jailbird #16” (2024), acrylic, mixed media, and collage on wood, 28 x 20 5/8 x 2 inches

    Gilberto Rivera’s ‘Jailbirds’ Imagine Freedom Within Confinement

    November 10, 2025

    Art

    Grace Ebert

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    At the Center for Art & Advocacy, a solo exhibition by Gilberto Rivera meditates on the material conditions of both confinement and liberation. Jailbirds presents a series of mixed-media collages that map the prison cell onto wood panel, with a variety of avian species as their protagonists.

    Incarcerated for two decades himself, Rivera draws on the concept of recidivism and the derogatory term for someone who’s habitually imprisoned. He invokes a sort of cyclical migration pattern that entraps people and returns them to carceral facilities again and again. The titles of the works—”Jailbird #12″ and “Jailbird #13,” for example—similarly nod to the dehumanization of the penal system, which refers to people as numbers rather than their names.

    “Jailbird #12” (2022), acrylic, mixed media, and collage on wood, 38 1/2 x 39 5/8 x 2 inches

    Given their ability to fly, birds are often symbols of freedom, with a special status reserved for the eagle as the national emblem of strength and pride in the U.S. On the other hand, fowl are also kept in cages when domesticated or bred for consumption or commercial use, making the creatures an apt representation of incarceration.

    In Jailbirds, Rivera presents parrots, herons, pelicans, pigeons, and others in architectural environments teeming with activist imagery. Snippets of magazines, newspapers, protest signs, archival footage, and even text clipped from an Instagram story cover the walls of each cell, transforming the otherwise austere concrete-and-steel setting into a space of possibility.

    For many people inside, world-building of the kind the artist visualizes is a necessary act of survival. Books, magazines, and other materials are often passed from one person to another with imagery displayed within the cells as a stark contrast to the drab interiors. Liberation, for Rivera, is rooted in both this act of creation and the material conditions that make up our lives, whether inside or out. Through his layered, typographic paintings, he envisions the possibilities of imagination within confinement and the fundamental need to create the world we want to live in.

    Jailbirds, Rivera’s first solo exhibition, is on view in Brooklyn through February 15. Find more from the artist on Instagram.

    “Jailbird #13” (2022), acrylic, mixed media, and collage on wood, 38 1/2 x 39 5/8 x 2 inches

    “Jailbird #2” (2022), acrylic, mixed media, and collage on wood, 48 x 38 1/2 x 2 inches

    “Jailbird #8” (2022), acrylic, mixed media, and collage on wood, 36 1/4 x 48 1/8 x 2 inches

    “Jailbird #4” (2022), acrylic, mixed media, and collage on wood, 48 x 26 1/2 x 2 inches

    “Jailbird #19” (2025), acrylic, mixed media, and collage on wood, 76 x 76 1/2 x 3 inches

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    In ‘Inward,’ Cinta Vidal Folds Time and Space in Perspective-Bending Paintings

    “Den” (2025), oil on wood, 31.5 × 31.5 inches. All images courtesy of the artist and Thinkspace Projects, shared with permission

    In ‘Inward,’ Cinta Vidal Folds Time and Space in Perspective-Bending Paintings

    November 10, 2025

    Art

    Kate Mothes

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    Known for her perplexing compositions of domestic interiors, Cinta Vidal continues to mesmerize with a new body of paintings at Thinkspace Projects. The artist’s solo show, Inward, continues her exploration of what she describes as “un-gravity constructions,” in which space and time appear folded or warped.

    In Vidal’s dizzying compositions, people occupy different areas of invented apartments and homes. Perhaps each tableau represents a different period of time; perhaps they are parallel universes. “For Vidal, depicting macro and micro levels of inverted apartment buildings and city structures illustrates the various ways the world is experienced by a mass population,” the gallery says.

    “Flat” (2025), acrylic on wood, 31.5 x 31.5 inches

    “The word ‘inward’ speaks to both layers of interiority: the shared indoor spaces we inhabit and the private, inward-facing state we enter when we disconnect from what surrounds us,” Vidal says. A sofa, for example, can be a place of togetherness or quiet retreat. “These scenes reflect that subtle coexistence: being together, yet each within their own space,” she adds.

    Inward continues through November 29 in Los Angeles. And as a complement to the exhibition, Vidal painted a new mural on the side of a local frame shop called Sherman Gallery in Marina del Rey. See more on the artist’s website and Instagram.

    “Side by Side” (2025), acrylic on wood, 23.6 x 23.6 inches

    “Meet Up” (2025), oil on wood, 31.5 x 31.5 inches

    “Condominium” (2025), acrylic on wood, 31.5 x 31.5 inches

    “Bond” (2025), oil on wood, 27.5 x 27.5 inches

    “Brerhen” (2025), oil on wood, 27.5 x 27.5 inches

    “Sofascape 1” (2025), acrylic on wood, 35.4 x 35.4 inches

    “Attic” (2025), acrylic on wood, 31.5 x 31.5 inches

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