Gianpaolo Pagni, Matematica Double Flash 003, (ink pen, ballpoint pen, graphite, rubber stamps on mathematics handwritten sheets), 2024 [© Gianpaolo Pagni]

Gianpaolo Pagni, STORIA DELL'ARTE ITALIANA VOL.1 – n.046, (rubber stamp, pencil, ballpoint pen, fountain pen, and fluorescent highlighter on school book), 1987+2026 [© Gianpaolo Pagni]

Esther Ferrer. Pliegue y proceso, Text by Beatriz Martínez Hijazo, Design by This Side Up, Museo Casa de la Moneda, Madrid, 2025 [Art: © Esther Ferrer]

William Butler Yeats, The Wild Swans at Coole, (2), Cuala Press, Churchtown, Dundrum, 1917 (1919 The Macmillan Company edition here) [Yale University Library, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, New Haven, CT]

Taro Okamoto (1911 - 1996) was eighteen years old in 1929 when he moved from Japan in the Far East, to Paris, the world center of art. Taro despaired of the other Japanese artists he met who had traveled to Paris to study, only to congregate together, painting conventional landscapes and dreaming of triumphant exhibitions on their return to Japan. Instead, he was determined to make himself self-sufficient within French society, becoming a boarding student at a private school, improving his French and adopting Western culture. Later he opened his own studio in the Montparnasse district of Paris, enjoying unique experiences for more than ten years before he returned to Japan in 1940.

In 1933 he became the youngest member of the Abstraction-Création group, producing several series of works, such as Kuukan (Space) and Contrepoint etc. In 1937 he submitted his Itamashiki ude (Sad Arm) in the Salon des Surindépendants and gradually moving away from Pure Abstract art, he left the Abstraction-Création group. This work was highly praised by André Breton and the following year he was invited to participate in the first Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme (Paris). He deepened his relationship with members of the Surrealism movement such as Max Ernst, Alberto Giacometti, Man Ray, Raymond Tanguy, etc. and in this way, rare for an artist, Okamoto participated at the forefront of two major avant-garde art movements in real-time.

High Summer II

Wenceslaus Hollar

Shell, tonna galea, 1644 - 1652

Jamie Nares is a contemporary British artist known for large calligraphic paintings. Inspired by Roy Lichtenstein’s iconic depictions of brushstrokes, Nares’ paintings are intuitive and gestural, created in a single swipe of the brush. She may erase and attempt the same stroke over and over again, continuing until the desired precision is achieved. “A lot of it had to do with reinventing the brush, the surface, and the paint,” she explained of her process. “They're pretty simple, the ingredients to my paintings. I like to think of it as like making bread or something. A little change in the recipe and you get something completely different.”

Born in 1953 in London, England, Nares went on to study at the School of Visual Arts in New York, soon becoming an integral part of the late 1970s downtown Manhattan art scene, initially working in film and creating a series titled No Wave. Nares lives and works in New York, NY.

Pan Inkhoo (潘英豪, b 1998) is a Japanese artist, known for her serene, atmospheric Nihonga-style paintings. Pan Inkhoo works with mineral pigments, sand, and soil on Washi paper attached to panels painting dreamlike, quiet landscapes, often featuring cats, birds, and rabbits.

While painting was one of Danielle Mckinney’s passions, she was a photographer by profession. Growing up, a camera was always her tool of choice, and she completed an MFA in photography at the Parsons School of Design in 2013. After graduating, she kept pursuing photography, contacting galleries and other establishments to publicize her art. She worked weddings. From the streets of New York or in parks, she’d photograph what she called “people in gestures,” because she was “fascinated by humanity and movement.”

Shut inside her New Jersey home during Covid-19, Mckinney (b 1982) hit a breaking point. She marched into the local Michaels arts and crafts store, bought some cheap canvases, turned her headphones on and hid away in her attic. And she couldn’t stop painting.

“I wasn’t thinking,” Mckinney said. “And that’s what the creative act does when you can take ‘you’ away.”

She came to a conclusion: Maybe, her lady just doesn’t want to go outside.

As a self-professed “extreme homebody,” who hardly leaves the house except to go to the studio, Mckinney can relate. In some ways, painting her lady inside is just what’s familiar to her.

Even as the idea of lockdown becomes a distant memory, her work still reads as a testament to rest and one’s own abode. As all her ladies are Black, that element of the work might feel especially revolutionary for other Black women.