#contemporary-painting

#contemporary-painting

Whether working on large-scale commissions or more intimate drawings, sketchbooks remain Wymer's primary jumping-off points. "I've been keeping sketchbooks since middle school, when I filled them with graffiti tags, local DIY show flyer ideas, and zine layouts," Wymer tells Colossal. "Over the years, they've evolved from casual notebooks into an essential part of my creative process. I carry one with me at all times, and without it, I feel pretty untethered."

Under skies heavy with storm-gray clouds, the architectural ruins in Lee Madgwick's paintings seem to exist somewhere between reality and imagination. His works are not just landscapes but psychological portraits-of solitude, fragility, and the strange poetry found in decay. With a style that merges surrealism and realism in equal measure, Madgwick transforms the familiar English countryside into a dreamlike world that's quietly charged with tension.

Gerhard Richter turned 93 this year, and has still been hard at work. Though he officially gave up painting in 2017, with a final sequence of elaborate abstracts, he has recently been turning out small, exquisite, painterly works on paper. And now the full range of his very long career, from his breakthrough photographic paintings of the 1960s to last year's ink-cloud drawings,

"Water is important to people who do not have it," Joan Didion wrote, "and the same is true of control." She was talking about California, and the impressive machinery-"the aqueducts and siphons and pumps and forebays and afterbays and weirs and drains"-that has, since the early 20th Century, made American life as we know it to be plausible in the West.

A new body of work exploring moments when spaces shift and time overlaps by Paris-based artist Sophie-Yen Bretez. "The Unsaid Remains Remembered" represents what Bretez calls a "dramaturgy of passage." Working with shaped canvases and large-scale compositions, she turns everyday objects into symbolic thresholds guiding the viewer between intimacy and vastness, presence and absence. Horizons of changing skies and seasons coexist with traces of the body-reflections, bite marks, stains-where ambiguity unsettles.

The exhibition gathers three strands - haircuts, still lifes, and a storefront - into a single season, a climate of attention for small, ordinary acts. In the haircut series, intimacy is staged at close range: a pair negotiating blades and trust, one seated in vulnerability, the other holding the shears. The vertical format elongates the encounter, turning an ordinary trim into something ritualistic, even a little dangerous. Flesh tones are chalky, almost earthen, as if the body were drawn from the ground.

Only Lovers began with the idea of theatre. I built myself a nest of hours on the stage: a place where everything is carefully planned, placed and rehearsed. Every character is aware of the viewer, posing with emotions from a script of confessions and fantasies. The scenes are set by the sea, on various beds, with pareidolic jokes making their shy appearances.

Caleb Hahne Quintana paints in the sun-bleached palette of his native Colorado. From afar, his canvases seem effortless in their clarity; up close, layers of paint dragged, blended, and muddied into hundreds of subtle shades resolve into a single limb or a patch of sky. His latest series, A Boy That Don't Bleed, on view at Anat Ebgi through October 18, 2025, pushes this concern with paint into new psychic terrain.

Murni or I Gusti Ayu Kadek Murniasih, to go by her full name was a Balinese artist who shrugged off all the norms and expectations that life chucked at her and instead made art with total abandon. By the time she died aged 39 in 2006, taken by ovarian cancer, she'd left behind a body of ultra-simple, mega-bold, hyper-colourful painting that functions as a testament to a life lived honestly, independently and very, very hornily.

Water, for Rawles, is never neutral. In the lineage of scholars like Christina Sharpe and Saidiya Hartman, the artist considers water to be a charged site and vessel for memory. Along with references to texts by Audre Lorde, Octavia Butler, and Albert Camus, among others, she presents this philosophical grounding as a way to consider the inevitability of change and how transformation can inspire hope. "What is the artist's role in moments of crisis?" she asks.

I love how welcoming the Bay Area arts community is. As a self-taught artist, I didn't have much guidance on how to initiate my work being shown in galleries. I started by showing up at openings hoping to meet and engage with other artists. I've noticed how kind and supportive everyone has been, and I've made genuine friendships along the way,

The sculpture that we have here in Dolores Park is pretty chill, like, 'Oh, I did it. Everything is over,'

Earlier this year, we took a tour of the V&A East Storehouse, the Victoria and Albert Museum's vast new complex in East London. This week, it opens the David Bowie Centre, a space dedicated to the music icon. It is the permanent repository of thousands of items from Bowie's archive, which are on display and also available for personal study. Ben Luke explores the displays at the centre with the curator, Madeleine Haddon.

Themes+Projects presents Light Bodies, a solo exhibition by Bay Area artist Bill Kane.

In Bless Babel, each painting builds around a singular central niche, suggesting the absence of a subject. Confronted with this vacancy, the viewer finds themselves at the center of Kleberg's geometric abstractions. Influenced by architectural and ritualistic spaces, the works in Bless Babel investigate the tropes through which conception is framed by institutional or personal belief. Kleberg's paintings are not interested in objective truth, but rather in how belief transforms our relationship to space and objects.

Hiroya Kurata's paintings isolate the quiet intensities of the everyday, depicting figures often alone in moments of drift or stillness, amidst gently distorted environments.