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#artcubeloves #MiaMiddleton who works in small-scale oil paintings that suspend ephemeral moments out of their context, inviting viewers into a psychological space poised between the conscious and the subconscious, desire and aversion, reality and fantasy. Each series begins with a slippery thought or feeling, with single-object still lifes and intimate freeze-frames serving as activators of dormant or concealed regions of the psyche, operating through the interplay of primal and domestic, somatic and cerebral elements. Her muddy, demure palette and monochromatic backgrounds locate subjects in a cloistered realm of pure interiority, building a visual language that wavers across emotions, generations, and chronologies without resolving into explicit narrative.
Middleton currently has a solo show at Roberts Projects in Los Angeles. @miamiddleton @robertsprojects

Three terms that are themes in or have been used to describe Middleton’s work: dualities, suspended time, threshold states

Mia Middleton is also included in our 2023 Discoveries Report, featuring the top 100 early-career artists ready to be discovered in 2023/2024 and beyond.

What tastemakers love (from our 2023 Discoveries Report):
‘Most of Mia’s works are small-scale with materials and textures taking the center stage. Her works are subtle and filled with intangible feelings and elusive thoughts. Looking at her works, I feel invited to reflect on my own internal world and engage with the enigmatic narratives she presents.’ - Chloe Chiu, Collector @chloechiu121

#artcube taken in Los Angeles, California by @artcube

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#artcubeevents around the world this week (10 must-see shows and other events):

1.Hudson (NY): Qualeasha Wood @qualeasha with @pippyhouldsworthgallery at @thecampusupstate
2. London: Maren Karlson @maren_karlson at @soft_opening
3. Los Angeles: Mia Middleton @miamiddleton at @robertsprojects
4. New York: Christine Safa @christinesafa at @bortolamigallery
5. New York: Jutta Koether at @galerie_buchholz
6. New York: Maia Cruz Palileo at @davidkordanskygallery
7. New York: Tania Franco Klein @taniafrancoklein at @yanceyrichardsongallery
8. Rome: Jay Payton @jpayton000 at @santandreadescaphis_
9. Venice: Marina Abramovic @abramovicinstitute at @galleriaaccademiafirenze
10. Vienna: Cecilia De Nisco @ceciliadenisco & Lydia Silvestri @fondazionelydiasilvestri at @vinvinvienna

This week, we’re happy to again feature artists who were in our previous Discoveries Reports, Maren Karlson, Mia Middleton, Jay Payton, and Cecilia De Nisco. Congratulations on your shows!

Did we miss an event? Let us know in the comments.

#artcube taken in London, United Kingdom by @artcube

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#artcubeloves #SaraAnstis who uses sensuous soft pastels and oil paint to build fantasy worlds populated by unruly feminine figures in surreal landscapes, strange creatures, and otherworldly plants, laying claim to erotic desire and bodily autonomy at a remove from heteronormative patriarchal conditions. Her lurid, bruise-like palette and simplified, elongated forms carry an atmosphere that shifts between vibrant revelry and melancholy on closer inspection, with figures who cavort, eat, cry, and grin manically in what reads simultaneously as escapist utopia and psychological undercurrent. Ecology, mythology, and personal narrative thread through her practice in equal measure, rooted in a childhood spent close to the sea and shaped by a sociology background that keeps questions of gendered subjectivity and misanthropomorphism at the center of her image-making. Anstis currently has a solo show at Olney Gleason in New York. @saraanstis @olneygleason

Three terms that are themes in or have been used to describe Anstis’s work: (mis)anthropomorphisms, personal mythologies, unidealised nudes

#artcubepeople meet some of the tastemakers highlighting the artist and give them a follow if you haven’t already:

+ Ambar Quijano (Curator & Art advisor, Mexico City) @ambar.quijano
+ Jessica Arb Danial (Art advisor, New York) @jessicaarbdanial
+ Lauri Firstenberg (Curator, Los Angeles) @laurifirstenberg

#artcube taken in New York, New York by @artcube

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#artcubeloves #MaxXenoKarnig who replaces classical mythological and religious subjects with icons of Western cinema, including Keanu Reeves, Nastassja Kinski, and the character Tadzio from Visconti’s Death in Venice, elevating them into the same hallowed space of projection, desire, and mimicry. His small-scale oil paintings on copper and aluminum panels achieve an intimate, contemplative surface that holds subjects at a formally suspended distance, with softened features, warm imprimaturas, and carefully built glazes sublimating their cinematic origins into a metaphysical realm. Satire and the absurd run alongside this reverence, with a tongue-in-cheek sensibility that usurps tradition by queering historical compositions and layering contemporary media representations against centuries of art historical longing. Karnig currently has a solo show at PEANA in Mexico City. @maximilanxeno @peana_

Three terms that are themes in or have been used to describe Karnig’s work: formally-suspended distance, layered temporality, religious iconography

Max Xeno Karnig is also included in our 2024 Discoveries Report, featuring the top 100 early-career artists ready to be discovered in 2024/2025 and beyond.

What tastemakers love (from our 2024 Discoveries Report):
‘Max Xeno Karnig’s paintings are full of mystery. His intimate studies are at once steeped in history, but brazenly fresh and confronting. Whether the subject is a cinematic icon - past or present - or a still life of fruits or flowers, the viewer is always left questioning formal elements and circumstances. A passion for researching literature and film build character and story, and a love and deep consideration of Western art history inspires his enigmatic settings, and exquisitely surfaces that literally glow from within.’ - Karyn Lovegrove, Art advisor @karynlovegrove

#artcube taken in Mexico City by @artcube

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#artcubeloves #VladislavMarkov who works across immersive installation, sculpture, and painting, using scanners, 3D printers, and imaging technology to shuttle objects between digital and physical states, rendering familiar things in an unfamiliar ontological condition that bewilders perception and hovers between the clinical detachment of hospitals and the charged atmosphere of everyday life. His practice offers an altered version of the readymade, not displacing recognizable objects outside of use but transforming them through dialectical shifts across media, with the resulting works conjuring the post-Soviet architectural bleakness of his childhood alongside the contrasting extremes of New York’s utilitarian and extravagant environments. Across a body of work where spectacle, power, and conspiracy intersect, he deploys immersive theatrical environments drawn from strip clubs, funeral gatherings, and domestic interiors to propose a way out of the sterile alternatives of multinational media or radical cult, carving out a third space more akin to ritual play. Markov currently has a solo show at MASSIMODECARLO Pièce Unique in Paris. @no.waves @massimodecarlopieceunique @massimodecarlogallery

Three terms that are themes in or have been used to describe Markov’s work: altered readymades, magic circle of play, radical cult

Vladislav Markov is also included in our 2026 Discoveries Report, featuring the top 100 early-career artists ready to be discovered this year and beyond.

What tastemakers love (from our 2026 Discoveries Report):
‘We’re struck by how Markov transforms his difficult experiences into environments that surround us and make us feel the weight of memory. We’re drawn to the way he uses technology to reveal fragility and imperfection, as if his distorted images were telling something broken yet still alive. We’re moved by how his troubled past resurfaces in mysterious, almost wounded figures and objects, conveying a rare and deeply human vulnerability.’ - Underdog Collection, Collector group @underdogcollection

#artcube taken in Paris, France by @artcube

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#artcubepeople our weekly feature of 10 individuals shaping the art world today:

1. Andrea Lissoni (Museum director, Munich) – Lissoni is director of Haus der Kunst, developing a transdisciplinary program that weaves together art, ecology, technology, and live practice. @andrea.lissoni

2. Irene Campolmi (Curator, Helsinki) – Campolmi is curator for Art, Technology and Society at Amos Rex, using art to probe the political & ethical stakes of technology through a decolonial lens. @irene_campolmi

3. Kibum Kim & Young Chung (Gallerists, LA) – Chung champions care and redistribution at Commonwealth and Council, centering queer artists and artists of color through shared funds and a community-first model. @commonwealthandcouncil

4. Michael Wellen (Curator, LA) – Wellen is chief curator at the Hammer Museum, championing Latin American & diaspora art histories and co-curating Made in LA 2027. @mikewellen

5. Rosario Güiraldes (Curator, Minneapolis) – Güiraldes is a curator at Walker Art Center, championing Global South perspectives & practices that treat art-making as knowledge production. @rosarioguiraldes

6. Rujeko Hockley (Curator, NY) – Hockley is a curator at the Whitney Museum, whose practice centers Black artists, radical women, and overlooked social histories across solo shows and biennials. @rjkhckly

7. Salma Tuqan (Museum director, Nottingham) – Tuqan is director of Nottingham Contemporary, building a program that foregrounds underrepresented geographies & the institution as an enabler of exchange. @stuqan

8. Shalini Passi (Collector, Delhi) – Passi is a collector & philanthropist championing Indian contemporary art through her foundation & MASH India, opening global pathways for emerging artists. @shalini.passi

9. Stuart Comer (Curator, NY) – Comer is chief curator of Media and Performance at MoMA, shaping how the museum collects and presents video, film, and performance across global contemporary practice. @stuartcomer

10. Xavier Hufkens (Gallerist, Brussels) – Hufkens champions long-term artist loyalty, with a generation-spanning roster that runs from major estates to carefully chosen emerging voices. @xavierhufkens

Give them a follow.

#artcube taken in London, United Kingdom by @artcube

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#artcubeloves #MeghannStephenson who works in oil, employing traditional techniques and dark theatrical backgrounds to explore enduring themes of gender, girlhood, and interpersonal relationships through a contemporary lens, with figures rendered in muted tones that inhabit undefined, dreamlike spaces evoking isolation and vulnerability. Drawn to the knife’s edge between the natural and the artificial, her works hold a jarring perfection that whispers self-destruction rather than screams it, with subtle surreal elements, symbolic objects, and intimate gestures mined from personal experience and art history. Her most recent body of work reimagines Dante’s nine circles of hell through a feminine framework, using still life and portraiture as allegory, with the apple, pearls, and the nightgown functioning as loaded symbols for the simultaneous expectation and suspicion surrounding feminine perfection. Stephenson currently has a solo show at Half Gallery in New York. @meghannstephenson @halfgallery

Three terms that are themes in or have been used to describe Stephenson’s work: female experience, self-destructive perfectionism, social expectation

Meghann Stephenson is also included in our 2026 Discoveries Report, featuring the top 100 early-career artists ready to be discovered this year and beyond.

What tastemakers love (from our 2026 Discoveries Report):
‘We love the chic restraint inherent to Meghann’s work, where enigmatic imagery is injected with wry humor. By deftly cropping and framing unresolved narratives, she leaves us with a sense of wanting more: And truly, who wouldn’t want more of her beautifully surreal, fabulous world?’ - Rob and Eric Thomas-Suwall, Collectors @theicygays

‘Meghann’s paintings feel like beautiful secrets. They seem gentle at first but carry a quiet emotional weight beneath the surface. I love visiting her studio to see what new avenue she’s exploring - a fresh reference, a clever detail, and something I never would’ve expected.’ - Theadora Karos, Art advisor @theadoramaria

#artcube taken in New York, New York by @artcube

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#artcubeloves #AntheaHamilton who works across sculpture, installation, photography, video, and performance, fusing found images, organic materials, fashion, food, and architecture in unexpected and playful ways, oscillating between kitsch and the sublime to produce immersive, site-specific environments rooted in multilayered research into cultural history, from 1970s disco and Japanese kabuki theater to Art Nouveau and radical Italian design. Inspired by Antonin Artaud’s concept of a physical knowledge of images, she prioritizes the bodily response of the viewer, deploying dramatic shifts in scale, surreal humor, and anthropomorphic materiality to shift familiar visual tropes into estranged and theatrical territory. Organic matter such as squashes, lichens, mushrooms, and dried flowers recur as markers of different qualities of time, with her work treating the natural world as both personal inheritance, rooted in her South London upbringing and her parents’ emphasis on gardening, and a philosophical framework for understanding change and impermanence. Hamilton currently has a solo show at Salon 94 in New York. @hamiltonanthea @salon94

Three terms that are themes in or have been used to describe Hamilton’s work: organic matter, anthropomorphic physicality, Surrealist look

#artcubepeople meet some of the tastemakers highlighting the artist and give them a follow if you haven’t already:

+ Alessio Antoniolli (Director of Gasworks, London) @alessio_antoniolli
+ Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn (Gallerist, Founder of Salon 94, New York) @jeannegr
+ Stella Bottai (Senior curator at Aspen Art Museum, Aspen) @stellabottai

#artcube taken in New York, New York by @artcube

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#artcubeevents around the world this week (10 must-see shows and other events):

1. Houston: Untitled Art @untitledartfairs
2. London: Wenhui Hao @wenhuiiihao at @simsmith_
3. Los Angeles: Ernesto Burgos @ernestoburgos at @fernbergergallery
4. Los Angeles: Xie Lei @xieleiparis at @francoisghebaly
5. Mexico City: Max Xeno Karnig @maximilianxeno at @peana_
6. Nassau (Bahamas): Anina Major @aninamajor at @terngallery
7. New York: Bea Scaccia @beascaccia at @gagosian
8. New York: Danh Vo at @whitecube
9. Paris: Vladislav Markov @no.waves at @massimodecarlopieceunique
10. Siena: Natsuko Uchino @uchinonatsuko at @palazzochigizondadari

This week, we’re happy to again feature artists who were in our previous Discoveries Reports, Wenhui Hao, Max Xeno Karnig, and Vladislav Markov. Congratulations on your shows!

Did we miss an event? Let us know in the comments.

#artcube taken in London, United Kingdom by @artcube

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#artcubeloves #BeaScaccia whose paintings investigate the cultural entanglement of feminine splendor and monstrosity, peopling her canvases with genderless, faceless characters engulfed by wigs, fur, jewels, lace, and ribbons that function simultaneously as costume, mask, and psychological symptom. Drawing on commedia dell’arte, Venetian wigs, Domenico Gnoli, Leonor Fini, and the ceremonial Sunday culture of her Italian childhood, she applies a sinister muted palette and chiaroscuro to build surreal tableaus in which ornamentation becomes unsettling, pearls transform into infestations, and the labor of beauty tips into grotesque excess. Her process, shaped by years working in stop-motion animation at Jeff Koons’ studio, treats the canvas as a stage in which identity is performed, masked, and destabilized, with each work read as a parody of etiquette and feminine decorum. Scaccia currently has a solo show at Gagosian in New York. @beascaccia @gagosian

Three terms that are themes in or have been used to describe Scaccia’s work: ageless characters, fairytale-inspired paintings, parodies of etiquette

#artcubepeople meet some of the tastemakers highlighting the artist and give them a follow if you haven’t already:

+ Andrea Festa (Gallerist, Founder of Andrea Festa Fine Art, Rome) @andreafestafineart
+ Angelica Semmelbauer (Art advisor, New York) @angelicasem
+ Francesco Bonami (Curator, Milan) @thebonamist

#artcube taken in New York, New York by @artcube

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#artcubeloves #OscarYiHou whose symbolist figurative paintings hybridize Western and Eastern iconography through his own iteration of the Chinese tradition of the ‘Three Perfections,’ merging poetry, calligraphy, and painting into dense, layered canvases populated by close friends, lovers, and the artist himself alongside cranes, Chinese characters, graffiti-like symbols, and color panes. Born to Cantonese immigrants and shaped by his diasporic upbringing between Liverpool and New York, his practice is rooted in queer Asian diasporic identity, drawing on Édouard Glissant’s theory of opacity and Frank O’Hara’s concept of Personism to frame portraiture as an act of relational love and mutual complexity. His visual language treats opacity and inscrutability as political stances, resisting complete knowability across cultures while building what he calls a coalitional politics in which human similarities are foregrounded despite difference. Hou currently has a solo show at James Fuentes in New York. @oscyhou @james_fuentes_llc

Three terms that are themes in or have been used to describe Hou’s work: poem-pictures, theory of Opacity, yellow iconicity

#artcubepeople meet some of the tastemakers highlighting the artist and give them a follow if you haven’t already:

+ Art-Bureau (Art advisors, New York & Hong Kong) @artbureau.advisory
+ Eugenie Tsai (Curator & Writer, New York) @eugenie.tsai
+ Pamela Hornik (Collector, San Francisco) @pamelahornik

#artcube taken in New York, New York by @artcube

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#artcubeloves #TomasHarker who sifts through online imagery to select subjects that he suspends in paint, treating high, low, iconic, and banal images with equal importance and deconstructing their hierarchies through a characteristically chalky palette, economy of brushstroke, and deliberate exposure of canvas. His practice examines how the relentless saturation of images online obscures meaning through sheer volume, with found contemporary imagery appropriated and repositioned to be given new meaning, while classical images are treated inversely by blurring and repressing their given historical significance. More recently his work has blurred the lines between fairytale and reality, with mythology functioning not as fantasy but as an entry point into the abstract network of thoughts underlying contemporary life, mapping a cosmic order growing increasingly disordered. Harker currently has a solo show at Nicodim in New York. @tomasharker @nicodimgallery

Three terms that are themes in or have been used to describe Harker’s work: contemporary confusion, hyperreal saturation, the uncanny

Tomas Harker is also included in our 2026 Discoveries Report, featuring the top 100 early-career artists ready to be discovered this year and beyond.

What tastemakers love (from our 2026 Discoveries Report):
‘Tomas Harker’s work navigates a shadow world between the real and the surreal, the historical and the contemporary, the formal and fluid. His paintings feel at once familiar, perhaps from dreams or an absinth fueled déjà vu, and unsettling, imbued with an electrifying decadence that would feel right at home at the Bar at the Folies-Bergère, had they all been on acid during the Belle Époque. It’s work that really speaks to me on so many levels through a lush haze of ambiguity.’ - Victor Benady, Collector @mrbenady

‘People and animals that play with the viewer with intense gazes on one side, observed scenes and paranormal compositions on the other. Tomas Haker’s works captivate with their unique style and strong recognizability.’ - Michael Preuss, Collector @thepreusscollection

#artcube taken in New York, New York by @artcube

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