Curator on the Go

“I believe that painting with my hands transmits positivity and hope in the artwork. I like to touch and feel the paint that has an energy the paintbrush can’t transmit. The brush is too cold.”
– Ángel Ricardo Ricardo Ríos
 
Ángel Ricardo Ricardo Ríos Angel Ricardo Ricardo Rios was born in Cuba in 1965. Employing a direct application of pigment to canvas, Ríos expresses in vibrant colors. His work has an eagerness to it, a blur of boundaries within the space that it occupies. The mixing and intertwining of subjects give way to explosions of color, texture, and shape. 

To understand Ríos’ work, one must acknowledge two essential elements. The first is a playful, joyful and intimate relationship that takes the form of an intense, frenzied sexual nature within the composition.

Angel’s paintings often blend organic, vegetal forms with allusions to fantastic displays of excess. Expressed in vibrant colors with a quick, sure hand, or made using his body to apply paint, these expressionist and neo-baroque explorations appear part abstraction and part dreamscape, recalling the theatrical presence celebrated in the Spanish Baroque.

Elena Wuest Elena Wuest is a contemporary visual artist whose multidisciplinary practice encompasses painting, large-scale murals, sculpture, and illuminated art objects. Her work is distinguished by vibrant colour palettes, expressive abstraction, and a unique fusion of classical artistic training with contemporary visual language.

Born in 1977 in Karaganda, Kazakhstan, Wuest developed a passion for art and creative expression from an early age. She pursued formal studies at the Faculty of Art at the University of Lipetsk, Russia, where she received rigorous training in classical painting techniques. At the age of 24, she relocated to Germany with her family and continued her artistic education at the BTK University of Art and Design in Berlin, expanding her practice through exposure to contemporary art and design.

Deeply inspired by spirituality, nature, and human connection, Wuest creates immersive works that invite reflection and emotional engagement. Whether through paintings, murals, sculptures, or light-based installations, her art explores themes of transformation, energy, and harmony. Bridging traditional craftsmanship with contemporary expression, Elena Wuest’s work offers viewers a dynamic visual experience that is both uplifting and profoundly meaningful.

In love with Mariko Kobayashi's work 😍

Mariko Kobayashi Mariko Kobayashi / 小林万里子 (b. 1987, Osaka, Japan) graduated with an MA in Fine Art Textile at Tama Art Universi- ty in 2012. The artist depicts various connections in the world through textile techniques such as weaving, dyeing, knitting, and stitching. Her artistic concept is based on the awareness of being conscious in the present moment, as we continue our lives as mortal beings. Kobayashi’s work traces the long journey of how the flesh, the physical body that separates humans and animals, returns to the earth, and continues a new life after reincarnation. Her exploration attempts to unravel the essential form of life, which is rendered in chaos created by the overlaying of colours and shapes from different materials.

More and more of my time belongs to Emily these days. She’s constantly on the move, curious about everything, and somehow manages to find the one thing in the room she’s not supposed to touch. I feel like I need eyes in the back of my head at all times.👀

I’m also still learning to make peace with doing less. Some days I feel behind. Some days I wonder if everyone else is somehow managing it all better than I am. But most days, when I look at Emily’s smile or watch her discover something for the first time, I’m reminded that slowing down isn’t falling behind.🐣

If you’ve been thinking about booking a consultation and getting guidance on your art career, know that your support means even more to me this time as I navigate this beautiful, exhausting, and very full season of motherhood. 🙏🏻

David Smalling (b. Kingston, Jamaica) is a New York City-based artist who
explores how taboos and cultural hierarchies shape the way we see ourselves and others.

“I’m interested in how beauty, shame, and aspiration get encoded into the image and how the surface of a painting can reveal the deeper mechanics of desire and fear.

I draw from the language of Old Master portraiture and the theatricality of fashion and mise-en-scène. The figures in my paintings often hover between sincerity and satire, parody and confession. They come from my own life (from friendships and betrayals, from intimacy and ambition) refracted through the aesthetic systems I grew up revering and resisting.

The paintings are, in a sense, self-portraits of negotiation: between histories, between the person I was taught to be and the one I became. I think of my practice as a kind of reconstruction. Each work borrows from Mannerism and the Dutch Golden Age — traditions built on illusion — but I use those same techniques to undo the illusions themselves. Within the lacquered surfaces and artificial light, I’m searching for something closer to truth: a recognition that artifice, too, can be honest.”

A baby will make you realise -
How loved you are, and how tired you are.
How soft you are, and how strong you can be.
How much you are needed, and how much you need.

How far you would go, and how little you really know.
How much time you don’t have, and how many important things you do.
How happy you can be, and how low some days find yra.
How perfect you are to someone,
and how much you need to work on for them.

A baby will make you realise things you never knew about yourself,
but that you really needed to know, and take all of that, and love you for it.
Because you are their realisation, every day,
of what it is to be loved.

-Emma Heaphy, ‘Motherhood to Me’ book

Yujeong Hwang is a Seoul and New York City-based artist and educator who blends traditional techniques with contemporary themes.

Yujeong works across various mediums to create visual pieces that explore personal narratives, memories, and their connection to layers of space and time. Through her art, she seeks to inspire dialogue and invite viewers into a shared space of reflection and discovery.