5 Artists on Our Radar in March 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.

Nimah Gobir

B. 1993, Los Angeles. Lives and works in Oakland, California.

Nimah Gobir’s intimate portraits reveal the tenderness in quotidian moments of Black life. Drawing inspiration from autobiography and personal photo archives, her paintings often revisit childhood memories to surface themes of identity and belonging. Gobir’s works, which combine painterly brushstrokes with hand-stitched embroidery, are currently on view as part of a three-person exhibition, “Minted, Tinted,” at Johansson Projects, which represents her.

Included in the exhibition is Kensington (2023), a warmly lit, serene portrait of Afro hair care that celebrates the everyday rituals of domesticity. For Gobir, the hand-stitching that embellishes this and other works is deeply symbolic, representing the weaving together of fragmented narratives. Similarly, the artist’s use of found household textiles carries the weight of family history, evoking the familiarity of home.

Gobir earned a BFA in studio art, as well as a BA in peace studies, from Chapman University in Orange, California. She has exhibited her work in San Francisco at the Museum of the African Diaspora and SOMArts, and her work is included in the collection of the Crocker Art Museum.

—Adeola Gay

Maria Klabin

B. 1978, Rio de Janeiro. Lives and works in Rio de Janeiro.

Maria Klabin probes the mundane to extract, magnify, and exalt the rhythms of everyday existence. Her color-saturated paintings are both surrealistic and semi-autobiographical, featuring portraits of friends and family alongside motifs that come to the artist in her dreams.

At the heart of Klabin’s practice lies her near-constant assemblage of personal source materials: drawings, photographs, notes, and other fragments of daily life that serve as the backbone of her subject matter. According to the artist, her work unfolds like a story or a diary, documenting scenes that may be fictional yet resonate with our shared human experience.

Klabin’s paintings recently garnered attention at Frieze Los Angeles in a solo booth with Nara Roesler that explored themes of stillness, silence, and drowsiness. The presentation featured tranquil scenes peppered with peculiarities, suggesting the artist’s subconscious at play. In Helena (2023), for example, a dozing woman leans gently on an expansive aquamarine foreground that suggests a limitless sky meeting the mountain-like contours of her body. Gal (2023) shows an enigmatic day at the beach—the sun is shining, the sand is blue, and gargantuan ocean creatures glow fluorescent beyond the shoreline.

Klabin earned her BA in art history and visual arts at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, and her MA from Central Saint Martins in London. She has exhibited with Nara Roesler in New York, Galerie Ron Mandos in Amsterdam, and Galeria Silvia Cintra in Rio de Janeiro.

—Jordan Huelskamp

Nuria Maria

B. 1990, Limburg, the Netherlands. Lives and works in Rotterdam and Maastricht.

Born into a family of artists, Nuria Maria grew up improvising short, impressionistic compositions on the piano. Many of her recent abstract landscapes include visual references to such passages, composed based on the sounds of home—like the jingle of silverware being put away, a loved one’s footfalls in the next room, or perhaps a bird chirping on a branch outside.

Maria’s piano compositions are not only referenced but mirrored in her visual art practice, which is similarly improvisational and impressionistic. She paints over old canvases until she has conjured the mood of an exact place and moment in time. In a body of work on view through March 30th in “Tule Tänne,” a solo exhibition at Cadogan Gallery, those fleeting impressions are often drawn from long walks she took during a six-month stay in Wales. In works like August (2024), rendered in acrylic on linen, the artist’s feathery brushstrokes propel cloudlike forms across the canvas, as if the viewer were looking up at the sky just before rain.

Nuria Maria graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Maastricht in 2014 with a degree in fine arts. She has since exhibited in solo shows at Alzueta Gallery in Barcelona and Galerie Post+García in Amsterdam, as well as in group exhibitions in Paris and around the Netherlands.

—Isabelle Sakelaris

Lilian Martinez

B. 1986, Chicago. Lives and works in Los Angeles.

The appeal of Lilian Martinez’s vivid acrylic paintings is immediate. The women depicted are at leisure in their pink and green environments, relaxed amid their houseplants, pets, and bowls of fruit. The effect is both uplifting and inviting: The viewer longs to join them in their easy opulence.

Martinez made an impression this month with her solo presentation in OCHI’s booth at Frieze Los Angeles, where she showed a body of work entitled “Boundless Femininity.” Indeed, within her subjects’ worlds, male bodies are all but absent. In some ways, these paintings of women in domestic interiors tread traditional paths. Pooch in a Coupe (2023), for example, could be read as a contemporary spin on the odalisque. And yet, through her choice of colors, forms, and modern accoutrements, Martinez speaks a visual language that is entirely of the moment. She puts her subjects—significantly, all women of color—at ease, empowering them as the stars of their own paradigms.

Martinez completed her BFA in 2009 at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In recent years, she has had solo shows at OCHI in Los Angeles and Ketchum, Idaho; Taymour Grahne in London; and Gallery Commune in Tokyo.

—Isobelle Boltt

Julia Trybala

B. 1992, Melbourne. Lives and works in Melbourne.

Just looking at Julia Trybala’s paintings is enough to trigger claustrophobia. The Australian artist paints the body like she’s trying to zip an overstuffed suitcase, cramming her contorted figures inside the frame so that they bulge and buckle. In works like the monochromatic Feet of Clay (2023), boundaries between bodies seem to dissolve: Are they embracing one another, or themselves? Rendered in blood red, these works give off an erotic aura, but also a glimmer of violence.

Color is a main character in “Metabolism,” Trybala’s recent show at Singapore gallery Ames Yavuz—her first solo outing in Asia. The artist’s palette was inspired by The Dance of Life, Edvard Munch’s 1899 painting in which red, white, and black are used to represent different phases of life. Across Trybala’s canvases, these hues are both symbolically potent and visually arresting.