5 Artists on Our Radar in January 2024

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

Akea Brionne

B. 1996, New Orleans. Lives and works in Detroit and Kansas City.

Dreamy Afro-surrealist visions emerge from Akea Brionne’s layered works, which blend lens-based media, collage, and vibrant tapestries. Brionne’s practice delves into American and Caribbean colonial history, examining the lasting consequences of migration and displacement, and their impact on contemporary Black experiences of identity and belonging. Brionne’s influence is undeniable: She was recently named to Forbes’s 30 Under 30 list for 2024 in the Art & Style category.

This recognition coincided with a solo exhibition, “Trying to Remember,” at Library Street Collective in Detroit. Among the works on view was The Paradox of Eve (2023), a surrealistic portrait into which Brionne weaves biblical references. The forbidden apple held by the titular character becomes a lens through which the artist examines complex questions of morality and women’s self-discovery, rooted in her experience of growing up in a strict religious household.

Personal history also animates Mississippi Goddamn (2022), which combines archival and contemporary footage in a film set in Brionne’s familial home of Columbus, Mississippi. The artist’s body of work lends a voice to the untold stories of the American South, preserving memories that echo within marginalized communities today.

Brionne received her BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art and her MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art, where she was awarded the Gilbert Fellowship. Her work has been exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum and is held in the collections of the Baltimore Museum of Art and the Cranbrook Museum of Art, among others.

—Adeola Gay

Jo Dennis

B. 1973, Forres, Scotland. Lives and works in London.

Jo Dennis’s current show at Newchild Gallery in Antwerp, “Town Hall Disco,” is certainly a stunning display of abstract painting and sculpture, but it’s more. Sure, the hulking canvases and three-dimensional textile works resonate with Abstract Expressionism and the draperies of Sam Gilliam; yet Dennis’s practice is wholly her own—and extends far beyond painting. Steeped in memory, her work is shaped by both her itinerant upbringing in a military family and a keen interest in the memories embedded in forgotten places and materials.

“Town Hall Disco,” on view through January 25th, is rife with the energy and promise of its title. Paintings and sculptures made from the fabric of surplus military tents, as well as found wood and metal, are covered in swipes and swathes of crimson, periwinkle, mauve, and burnt orange, bursting with the effervescent energy of a teenage dance. That energy speaks to another of Dennis’s strengths—capturing the space between control and chaos. Past bodies of works have revolved around photography and installations that poetically revive and preserve the past lives of derelict buildings in London and abroad.

Despite the freshness of her work, Dennis is no newcomer to the art world. A graduate of Goldsmiths and the Royal College of Art, Dennis has also co-founded the artist-led spaces Asylum and AMP Gallery in London, the curatorial project Pigeon Park, and the photography festival Peckham 24. In addition to the current show at Newchild, her work has been shown in recent exhibitions at Sid Motion Gallery, Alma Pearl, and Cromwell Place.

—Casey Lesser

Rachelle Dang

B. Honolulu, Hawai’i. Lives and works in New York.

Artist and educator Rachelle Dang is best known for conceptual works that delve into the environmental repercussions of colonialism, intertwining botanical research, personal and intergenerational histories, and visual allegories ripe with poetic symbolism.

Among eight artists featured in the Curated section at the Miami edition of the New Art Dealer’s Alliance (NADA) fair last month, Dang captivated throngs of fairgoers with her somber, site-specific floor installation Botany is Ancestry (2017–23), presented with New York–based Someday Gallery. In an arrangement of patinated copper and spray-painted cinder blocks—a cheap building material commonly used in schools, prisons, industrial facilities, and urban housing projects—Dang mimicked the architectural blueprints of her childhood bedroom in Honolulu, Hawai’i.

Scattered throughout the installation were ceramic sculptures made to resemble breadfruits, a ubiquitous tree fruit found throughout the islands of Hawai’i. Embodying various states of decay, some works are plump and dimpled, as if just plucked from a branch; others wilt inward, suggesting imminent collapse and destined to be enveloped back into the earth. Some are glazed with blossoming flares of turquoise, ochre, and indigo, while others are left bare to highlight the earthy materiality of their rich, chocolate-brown clay.

Together, the cinder blocks and breadfruits serve as potent symbols, emblematic of Dang’s overarching themes of ecological degradation, economic hierarchies, and disenfranchisement.

Dang received her MFA from Hunter College, City University of New York. In the years since, she has exhibited widely in the United States. She was awarded the Museum of Arts and Design’s Artist Fellowship in 2022, and currently serves as a critic at the Yale School of Art. Later this year, she will be included in a group exhibition at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum.

—Jordan Huelskamp

Rachel Lancaster

B. 1979, Hartlepool, England. Lives and works in Newcastle upon Tyne, England.

Rachel Lancaster’s paintings capture the elusive and often overlooked moments of everyday life. With a keen eye for detail and a penchant for the mundane, Lancaster elevates ordinary scenes into enticing, memory-like narratives. Her approach involves extracting and reinterpreting “stills” from various moving images and personal photos. These fragments range from domestic interiors to close-ups of inanimate objects and people—rendered with an ethereal soft focus.

Her technique involves meticulously layering thin glazes of oil paint to create textures that converge, resulting in blurred edges. This pull of the figurative toward the abstract is a hallmark of her work, exemplified by her first solo exhibition at WORKPLACE, “In The Wake,” which is on view in Newcastle until January 24th. The artist also made an impression as part of WORKPLACE’s group presentation at NADA in Miami last month.

Lancaster earned her MFA in fine art at Newcastle University in 2011. Since then, she has exhibited in group shows hosted at WORKPLACE, which represents her, as well as Elysium Gallery and Newcastle Contemporary Art.

—Maxwell Rabb

Chris Oh

B. 1982, Portland, Oregon. Lives and works in New York.

Chris Oh’s works will likely look familiar, since his practice involves meticulously recreating details of great paintings from the Northern Renaissance onto a range of appropriated objects. While earlier works repurposed emphatically contemporary items that contrast with Oh’s Renaissance-style brushwork—such as a package hastily sealed with U.S. Homeland Security–branded tape—the artist has more recently worked with natural materials.

“I want to use materials that grew over time,” the artist wrote regarding his current exhibition, “Passage,” on view at Capsule Shanghai through January 13th. The show features scenes from Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s “The Series of the Months” painted onto wooden burl slabs, among other works on seashells and antique sculptures. Collectively, these mixed-media objects draw together historical theories of beauty, both natural and man-made.