2026 Spotlight Artists
Henry Blond
Blond Contemporary
Born in 1974 in Liverpool, England, Henry Blond’s diverse creative background has taken him on a journey through music, graphic design, and the visual arts. He earned a BA Honors degree in Jazz Studies from the City of Leeds College of Music and worked as a professional musician for more than 15 years. Following a decade running his own graphic design business, he now focuses full-time on painting.
Integrating his varied creative practices, Blond successfully weaves these artistic disciplines into his painting. His rhythmic brushwork, strong compositional sense, and dynamic use of color intertwine to create a powerful, expressive, and arresting style.
Blond is a direct painter, working in the alla prima style of paint application and favoring a spontaneous, energetic quality in his finished works. Passages of semi-realism contrast with loose interpretation, allowing form to emerge from stark settings to skillfully engage the viewer’s eye.
Kim Chesney
Gallery Anderson Smith
Kim Painter Chesney is an award-winning American artist and author known for her luminous encaustic paintings, which blend an ancient technique with a fresh contemporary feel. Encaustic is a centuries-old art form that uses pigment mixed with molten beeswax, allowing Chesney to create richly layered works filled with depth, texture, and glowing translucency.
Drawing inspiration from nature and history, Chesney incorporates extraordinary materials from around the world, including handmade papers from Japan, Thailand, and Mexico. Using an open blowtorch to fuse each layer of wax, she creates surfaces that feel both timeless and modern.
Her paintings invite viewers to look closer, revealing subtle textures, hidden details, and a sense of discovery that changes with the light. Collectors are often drawn to the warmth, movement, and almost magical glow of her work. As both an artist and storyteller, Chesney brings emotion and narrative into everything she creates. Her work is designed not simply to hang on a wall, but to create atmosphere, spark conversation, and leave a lasting impression.
Alejandro De Narvaez
Art Saat
Alejandro De Narvaez is a Colombian kinetic artist and sculptor with more than 35 years of experience, whose practice has evolved between figurative sculpture and contemporary abstraction. He works with movement, integrating materials such as bronze, aluminum, iron, wood, and thread into his sculptures and installations.
His work transcends the conventional limits of representing the visible or immediate. It is an open exploration that blends art with monumental sculptural works demanding attention through their imposing presence.
Mr. De Narvaez has presented six solo exhibitions in Colombia and Ecuador, and his work has appeared in more than 50 group exhibitions throughout Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, Canada, and the United States. His work has also appeared in museum exhibitions including the Metropolitan Museum in Quito, Ecuador; the Museum of Modern Art in Bogotá, Colombia; the Museum of Modern Art in Meriden, Colombia; and the Boca Raton Museum of Art in Florida.
Sam Halaby
Corridor Contemporary
Born in Daliyat al-Karmel in 1989, Sam Halaby stands out as one of the most vibrant and singular voices in contemporary Israeli art. A self-taught painter and multidisciplinary creator, Halaby has cultivated a unique immersive visual language that resists easy categorization.
By the age of thirteen, he was already painting commissioned portraits to help support his household. Over time, he developed a practice grounded in intuition, manual dexterity, and an unyielding devotion to color as a form of expression, remembrance, and transformation.
Halaby’s work now spans painting, sculpture, and large-scale site-specific installations. An approach aligned with action painting lies at the heart of his practice, drawing comparisons to Jackson Pollock. Gesture overflows from canvas to object, from object to space, until architecture itself becomes a surface of inscription.
The result is a baroque chromatic field—unrestrained, layered, and saturated—where color spills beyond the edge of the frame and becomes atmosphere, pulse, and rhythm.
Julian Lennon
Fremin Gallery
Julian Lennon is an English musician, photographer, author, filmmaker, and philanthropist. He is the son of Beatles member John Lennon and his first wife, Cynthia. Julian inspired three Beatles songs: “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” “Hey Jude,” and “Good Night.”
After photographing his half-brother Sean’s music tour in 2007, Lennon developed a serious interest in photography.
He has been featured in six solo photography exhibitions beginning in 2010 with Timeless: The Photography of Julian Lennon at the Morrison Hotel Gallery in Los Angeles. His Alone collection was featured at ArtBasel Miami Beach in 2012 to raise money for The White Feather Foundation. His Horizon series was exhibited at the Emmanuel Fremin Gallery in New York City in 2015, and his Cycle exhibit was featured at the Leica Gallery in Los Angeles in 2016.
In 2021, Lennon became the first fine art photographer featured at the Aston Martin Residences Gallery in Miami. In 2023, his ATMOSPHERIA photo show appeared at the William Turner Gallery in Santa Monica. In 2024, Lennon released a photography book titled Life’s Fragile Moments.
In addition to his visual art career, Julian Lennon is a Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter who has released seven albums and 38 singles since 1984, including the chart-topping hit “Too Late for Goodbyes.”
Henry Orlik
Windsor Birch
Henry Orlik was born in 1947 in a displaced persons camp in Germany, the son of Polish parents. By age twenty-five, he had exhibited at the Acoris Surrealist Art Centre in Mayfair alongside Magritte, Dalí, Ernst, de Chirico, and Matta. Disillusioned by dealers and the commercial art world at the time, he walked away.
For the next forty years, he painted only for himself. The paintings, he told the few people who saw them, were too precious to let go.
He spent five years painting in New York City during the early 1980s. In these works, Central Park becomes a dreamscape populated by mermaids, Wall Street bends and pulses, and the Manhattan skyline fights the sky. They are distinctly American paintings, created by the son of European refugees who looked at America in the 1980s and saw something no American painters saw.
Orlik is now seventy-nine and has not painted since suffering a stroke in 2022. One work has entered a public museum collection, while others are held by major private collectors in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe, and Asia.
Up close, the surfaces are alive, the paint itself seems to move. Orlik built each canvas from thousands of tiny spiraled brushstrokes—sometimes applied with only a few hairs on a paintbrush—which he called “excitations.”
Mel Ramos
Louis K Meisel Gallery
Mel Ramos (1935–2018) was an American figurative painter best known for his paintings of female nudes within the context of commercialism and sleek graphic design. Born in Sacramento, California, his work became synonymous with iconic depictions of superheroes and voluptuous female nudes bursting through banana peels, stepping out of candy wrappers, or lounging in martini glasses.
In 1957, his first exhibition at the Crocker Art Museum featured early figurative abstractions in a group show titled Seven Painters Under Thirty. As one of the first artists to paint imagery derived from comic books, Ramos exhibited at LACMA in 1963 alongside emerging Pop artists including Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol, placing him among the founders of Pop Art in America.
Following the more abstract style of his mentor Wayne Thiebaud, Ramos developed a distinctive approach that reinvented the classic female nude as a form of beauty, playfulness, and irony. His work became closely associated with California artists of the era, especially the “Cool School” movement of the 1970s.
His most notable Pop Art works brought comic book superheroes into new contexts of power and play. Combined with his signature nudes, these paintings were featured in the 2012 retrospective Mel Ramos: 50 Years of Superheroes, Nudes and Other Pop Delights at the Crocker Art Museum—the site of his first exhibition.
Over a sixty-year career, Ramos participated in more than 120 solo and group exhibitions worldwide, establishing himself as a major international artist of the 20th and early 21st centuries.
Ramos originally exhibited with Leo Castelli. Ivan Karp later introduced his work to art dealer Louis K. Meisel, whose gallery represented Ramos beginning in 1971.
His work can be found in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Norton Simon Museum, and the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C.