Yoshitomo Nara’s endearing paintings, drawings, and sculptures are inspired by intimate encounters with people and the environment, and are often characterized by both thoughtful introspection and meditation on global socio-political issues. The delightful Miss. Smooth-Flat (2021) demonstrates Nara’s proficiency in conveying human expression using a diverse range of materials. Indeed, it transcends the classic two-dimensionality of Japanese painting traditions while preserving the beloved caricaturesque style of the Neo-pop movement with which Nara aligns himself.

Oakland-based painter Muzae Sesay’s vivid landscapes of colliding shapes and colors arise from his fascination with the fragmentation of memory, especially that of places we call home. Through the vibrant Peacemaker Performative Circus (2021), Sesay explores through an unusual architectural arrangement the way in which many of us truly experience memory: as a blending of vignettes and emotions, rather than as a single, acutely detailed image.

Renowned American artist Keith Haring is remembered today as a pioneer of both pop art in the 70s and 80s as well as contemporary street art at large. Reminiscent of his earlier work, Untitled (1989) captures a mature utterance of Haring’s vocabulary of simple but iconic imagery derived in large part from mass media and international cultures. Haring’s beloved line drawings often recall stylistic elements from Asian calligraphy and pre-Columbian hieroglyphics, reflecting his call for the joyous merging of cultures and his advocacy for “art for everyone”.

Yayoi Kusama is a renowned multi-hyphenate artist at the forefront of 80s pop art and minimalism in the United States. The form of a pumpkin is central to many of Kusama’s best-known works, and the magnificent Pumpkin (L) (2016) champions its shape in gleaming bronze. Apparently charmed by the pumpkin’s “unpretentiousness”, Kusama claims to be reminded of tender childhood memories when she paints them. Pumpkin (L) is decorated with the artist’s characteristic dot pattern in black, creating dense moments of obscurity on top of a mirror-like backdrop.

German photographer Wolfgang Tillmans is celebrated for his innovative and investigative photography and its engagement with contemporary social critique. Paper Drop (Friend) (2007) belongs to a series of images of sheets of thin photographic paper which, when folded and viewed from the side, form three-dimensional teardrop-like shapes. Through this transdimensional exploration, Tillmans questions the very nature of photography by bending light and shadow to create illusions of materiality.

American artist Jack Whitten’s rhythmic Loop (In And Out) #4 (2012) is an ode to excavation and memory. Whitten laid a piece of string across the surface, manipulated its loops to create a single calligraphic line, and then completely covered the paper in pulverized magnetite and acrylic in order to leave only the stark white silhouette of the string. This work functions geographically and autobiographically – Whitten describes the string as a “mapping device” used to mark and honor significant locations across both his upbringing and mature life.

Widely considered one of the world’s foremost sculptors, Tony Cragg is perhaps best known for his explorations of unconventional materials, including plastic, fiberglass, bronze, and Kevlar. Craggs’ sculptures embody a frozen moment of movement, resulting in swirling abstractions, as in Untitled (2018). He understands sculpture as a study of how material and forms affect and form our ideas and emotions, explaining: “Making a new form gives us a new word, gives us a new term, gives us a new emotion. Sculpture expands the possibilities of our own horizons and allows us to expand our imagination.”

Critically-acclaimed American artist Marilyn Minter is perhaps best known for her provocative and hyperrealistic paintings that simultaneously capture candid instances of the human body and the human condition. The intoxicating Sauna (2017) is a remarkably photorealistic painting that captures the artist’s propensity towards sensuousness and the subversion of the traditional objectification of female subjects in art. A woman is partially concealed behind translucent, hazy glass clouded with the tangible density of a sauna, withholding from the viewer while also remaining an object of desire.

In this fun collaboration with the client’s interior designer Monica Cardanini, Brookstone Builders and Jessica Silverman Gallery, we brought in this bright, geometric painting by Turkish-American artist, Hayal Pozanti, which beautifully complemented the soft pink space of this room. Image courtesy of David Duncan Livingston.

Tschabalala Self’s work examines the intersectionality of race, gender, and sexuality, focusing particularly on the iconographic significance of the black female body in contemporary culture. She creates exuberant, multilayered characters that celebrate the complexities of black life that are often obscured in the American imagination by stereotypes. Most of these avatars are constructed from machine-sewn fabric scraps that Tschabalala collects over time as seen in the work above, “Out of Body”.

Irish artist Padraig Timoney’s exceptionally diverse practice encompasses photography, painting, collage, sculpture, assemblage, and performance, frequently utilizing disparate styles and techniques in his approach. In his vivid Battle Royale (2016), abstraction and figuration never seem too far apart, often appearing on the verge of collapsing into one another. This work sings in our clients’ Hampton home.

Widely considered one of the most influential photographers of his generation, Richard Misrach was instrumental in pioneering the use of color photography and large-scale format in the 1970s, a practice that is widespread today. For over forty years, Misrach has photographed the dynamic landscape of the American West through an environmentally aware and politically astute lens. Untitled (November 12, 2012, 11:55am) (2012) documents an aerial perspective of human interaction and isolation; taken from the balcony of his hotel room in Honolulu, it conveys our relationship to the sea, carefully balancing the minutiae of human gesture against the grand scale of the sea.

Best known for his monumental and evocative large-scale installation art, Olafur Eliasson constructs magical visual effects through his sharp manipulation of simple elements like light, water, and mirrors. Mirror my calmness Buddha in me (2021), a collection of overlapping hand-blown glass circles, reflects his recent fascination with the representation of depth and motion in two-dimensional mediums.

Using drawings, photographs, sculpture, and video, Charles Gaines played a central role in the expansion of the 70s Conceptual Art movement. Numbers and Trees, Tiergarten Series 3: Tree #1-#6 (2018) belongs to a series by Gaines in which the artist photographs trees from meaningful locations – in this case, the Tiergarten in Berlin – and plots them against a grid in order to investigate the way humans respond visually to systems.

For Yayoi Kusama, works like NETS I (1997) are a vital form of personal therapy. The repetition of these persistent curved brushstrokes offer Kusama both a self-soothing mechanism and a means of organizing her emotions in a brilliantly expressive way. One of Kusama’s most vivid hallucinations from childhood involved a “universe covered with red flowers” – she has rendered NETS I in the same exhilarating red as her original vision and, in doing so, pays powerful homage to the genesis of her enduring Infinity Nets series.

Gerhard Richter’s stylistic versatility drove him to experiment with the medium of watercolor at the midpoint of his career. The richness of Untitled (10.3.91) (1991) was achieved through the meticulous layering of moderately diluted watercolor, culminating in a remarkable exploration of the opacity and saturation of paint.

A pivotal figure in German contemporary art, Gerhard Richter is lauded for his innovative and prolific investigations in painting. His multimedia output has spanned the likes of photorealism, abstract painting, photography, and even glass sculpture.

Tokyo artist Sohei Nishino combines photography, collage, cartography and psychogeography to create large prints of urban landscapes. Diorama Map of San Francisco (2016) belongs to his famous Diorama Map series, the production of which involves Nishino’s walking of the streets of a city with a camera for several months before compiling the views to form a grand tableau.

Interior designer Monica Cardanini & Brookstone Builders. Image courtesy of David Duncan Livingston.

Former aerospace engineer Fred Eversley is an important exponent of postwar contemporary American art. Untitled (parabolic lens), (1969) (2018) is a product of Eversley’s fascination with color and numerous meditations on the optical mechanics of human sight. Eversley’s obsession with the parabola recalls the parabolic curve as the only shape that is able to direct all energy to a single focal point.

Since the 1970s, Richard Prince has been dismantling and questioning American archetypes and institutions through an art style characterized by the appropriation of various imagery. His continuing obsession with the American cowboy prototype and its proximity to the culture of Western masculinity reveals itself in Untitled (2020). Prince layers a joke about “two men at a bar” over highly saturated cowboy imagery, referring to the artist’s Jokes series that speaks to white, middle-class America’s sexual fantasies and frustrations in the 80s.

A leading innovator in postwar American painting, Sam Gilliam rose to prominence in the late 1960s creating his idiomatic stained canvases and continued to pursue endless avenues of artistic expression. Untitled (2014) exemplifies his long history with the Washington Color School, whose members were celebrated for their experimentation with novel painting techniques and emphasis on color, process, and materiality.

Best known for her enigmatic sculptures and installations that explore concepts of space, time, science, and philosophy, Berlin-based Alicja Kwade creates immersive experiences that actively encourage viewers to question their perception of reality. Rain (15 minutes/30 cm) (2019) is part of a larger mixed media work, in which a series of white boards is showered with clock hands and single millimeters cut from a folding ruler in varying volumes. The middle board, with the densest concentration of both elements, represents a storm at its most powerful, and the interference of the two systems: time and distance, clock hands and millimeters. Both the cut ruler and clock hands are visually reminiscent of raindrops, simultaneously restricting and expanding their symbolic power.

Samuel Levi Jones’ practice centers around the disassemblage and deconstruction of encyclopedias, reference books, and other informative texts that have excluded minorities and women from the historical narrative. Stand Up (2019), made up of the covers of art historical texts and portfolios, is an exemplar of Jones’ process, which involves stitching the exposed book bindings together into grids that expose their flaws and physically dismantle their authority. As he refashions them into works of art, they become a critique on the need for an inclusive, global art history.

Mandy El-Sayegh (pronounced el-say-yegg) is a Malaysian-born London-based artist, who forges her layered paintings from pages of the Financial Times and mundane advertisements to Arabic calligraphy. Net-Grid (notice) (2020) belongs to El-Sayegh’s series of Net–Grid paintings, which recall raised-relief maps. The surfaces of the Net-Grid paintings ripple and buckle beneath the weight of their matter – layers of glue and paint, studio rags, newspapers, and printed images from Theresa May to victims of unknown disasters to mundane advertisements.

Paris-based artist Liam Everett’s abstract, mixed-media paintings and sculptures explore the process of art making as he builds, shapes and manipulates raw materials into work abundant with human traces. The construction of Untitled (witches butter) (2019) involved layering oil and acrylic on canvas and subsequently repeatedly stripping and sanding the surface of the work. Inspired by dance, theater, and philosophy, the smears and smudges in his works on panel and fabric reflect Everett’s elaborate, labor-intensive method.