5 Artists on Our Radar in December 2022

“Artists on Our Radar” is a monthly series produced by the Artsy team. Utilizing our art expertise and access to Artsy data, we highlight five artists who have our attention. To make our selections, we’ve determined which artists made an impact this past month through new gallery representation, exhibitions, auctions, art fairs, or fresh works on Artsy.

Geoffrey Holder

B. 1930, Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago. D. 2014, New York.

Visionary polymath Geoffrey Holder is best remembered for his contributions to the performing arts, notably winning Tony Awards for his direction and choreography of Broadway production The Wiz in 1975. Yet his paintings—shown at Art Basel in Miami Beach by James Fuentes and on view in “Pleasures of the Flesh” at the gallery’s New York location through December 18th—form a legacy worthy of enduring attention.

Early works like Portrait of Carmen de Lavallade (1956) evoke Amedeo Modigliani in their elongated forms. Others, through Holder’s use of gleaming ochre tones, bring to mind the paintings of Paul Gauguin. Yet Holder’s ability to capture mood and atmosphere—a look in the eye, a glowing darkness—is uniquely his own, and becomes more defined in his later works.

Woman (1992), After Work I (1993), After Work II (1992), and People with Buildings II (1993) are clear highlights, all of which depict women on the edge of New York crowds. Here, the isolation and intimacy of modern life are rendered masterfully in the muted glow of streetlights at dusk.

Through his lifetime, Holder exhibited his work at galleries and institutes such as the National Arts Club, the New York Public Library, and elsewhere. In 1956, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in painting. His work can be found in collections across North America, including the Studio Museum in Harlem.

—Isobelle Boltt

Minyoung Kim

B. 1989, Seoul. Lives and works in London.

Minyoung Kim explores feelings of both anxiety and regret in dreamlike compositions, channeling personal experiences into her painting practice. In her London group exhibition at Taymour Grahne Projects this past November, her confessional works expressed the artist’s inner thoughts through playful imagery.

Kim’s paintings appear both eerie and lighthearted, featuring recurring motifs of moons, flowers, knives, and anthropomorphic characters. In Making a salad (2022), a mysterious hand holds a knife to a head of lettuce on a chopping board. By applying cartoon-like expressions to inanimate objects, Kim transforms scenes from everyday life into sinister moments.

There are elements of mystery in Kim’s narratives, conveyed through shadows, muted colors, and an almost blurred finish. In Goblin Trees (2022), a black cat emerges from a broken window, as the shadow of a large tree creeps across the roof of a house, mimicking an ominous figure. Her unsettling paintings echo her own personal cynicism, calling attention to the complexities of modern society.

Kim received a BA in painting and an MFA in printmaking from Sungshin Women’s University. She also holds an MFA in painting from the Slade School of Fine Art, but her process starts with drawings on paper before she begins applying acrylic paint onto unstretched canvases. In addition to Taymour Grahne Projects, Kim has exhibited her work at Woaw in Hong Kong and Ojiri Gallery in London.

—Adeola Gay

DeMarco Mosby

B. 1991, Kansas City, Missouri. Lives and works in New York.

DeMarco Mosby uses the vehicle of narrative in his paintings to examine and interrogate layers of the self. Fusing textural and compositional elements with historical symbolism, his work traverses through the worlds of myth and fantasy to explore themes of isolation and fragmented existence. The result is a nascent oeuvre of considerable emotional heft and depth.

In his joint exhibition with Hawaiian sculptor Rachelle Dang at Someday Gallery in New York, on view through December 17th, Mosby’s oil paintings depict figures suspended in anxious and occasionally violent scenarios. Drawn from indeterminate but familiar mythological pasts, they recall scenes from modern masters such as Francisco de Goya and Pieter Bruegel. His work was also presented by Torino’s Luce Gallery at this year’s Untitled Art, Miami Beach alongside the likes of February James, Johanna Mirabel, and Peter Mohall.

Mosby received an MFA from Hunter College, and trained in cartooning and illustration as an undergraduate at the School of Visual Arts in New York. His works have appeared in several group shows at galleries including Unclebrother, Regular Normal, and Lyles & King. This past July, he had his debut solo show, “Battery of the Machine,” at Luce Gallery.

—Arun Kakar

Lorena Torres

B. 1991, Barranquilla, Colombia. Lives and works in Bogotà.

Inspired by daily life in the Caribbean region of Colombia where she was born, Lorena Torres paints lyrical scenes of bodies engaged in outdoor rest and leisure. Many of her figures, who are tinged with red to suggest the sun’s touch on their skin, are dressed in bathing suits. A defined horizon, above which puffy white clouds float through idyllic blue skies, often anchors the paintings. The sun itself remains hidden, though, lest its position in the sky imply the passage of time—something from which these subjects seem peacefully inoculated.

Flora and fauna crowd Torres’s canvases, including those she recently showed with SGR Galería at Untitled Art, Miami Beach—earning the fair’s Last Resort Artist Retreat Residency Prize from a jury committee led by Hank Willis Thomas. These natural elements are folded into richly symbolic compositions. In one painting, MUJER SENTADA CON HOJAS SECAS / WOMAN SITTING WITH DRY LEAVES (2022), a seated female subject rests, head on hand, as moths perch on her chair and on the forehead of a goat in the background. The winged insects are memento mori, representing natural cycles of life and death. Meanwhile, the woman’s inflamed scarlet hands and ear signify that she has been engaged in the ultimate leisure activity: gossip.

In 2016, Torres earned a BFA from Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Bogotà. She has exhibited primarily in Colombia, and has also been included in group shows at The Room in London and Thierry Goldberg in New York. In 2023, she will complete her residency at Derrick Adams’s Last Resort Artist Retreat in Baltimore.

—Olivia Horn

TJ Rinoski

B. 1994. Lives and works in Richmond, Virginia.

Using intensely personal source material, including his own memories and writing, TJ Rinoski deftly toes the line between public and private. In his current two-artist exhibition “Cut” with Kaitlyn Eichwald at London’s Cob Gallery, Rinoski’s paintings create a space for both connection and introspection.

In Mom’s Jesus (2022), a gold necklace resting on a wooden surface occupies most of the picture plane. Painting directly onto un-gessoed canvas, Rinoski veils his subject manner beneath a hazy texture, blurring any details that might otherwise identify the necklace as a specific one. In doing so, he leaves room for viewers to recall scenes from their own lives.