Issy Wood

American-born, London-based painter and musician Issy Wood paints grainy, often closely cropped surfaces and objects of everyday life. Despite this thread, the work is nothing but banal. Routine activities or quotidian objects assume a frisson of sorts, wherein a door handle, a leather car interior, or a parka jacket becomes infinitely seductive. Wood has declared that the overarching essence of her work is the terrifying nature of desire. Consumerism is front and center, in her depictions of all the absurd objects we think we depend on, rendered sometimes as surfaces or from bizarre or distorted angles. Her diaristic practice is decidedly of the internet age, informed by the way we see the world through our eyes as much as our iPhones.

In 2024, Aspen Art Museum presented Issy Wood’s Tasting It All, a portrait of a Diet Coke can so rotund it spilled off the canvas. The work was placed in cheeky dialogue with a sensuous portrait by the late Colombian painter Fernando Botero, known for his exaggerated human figures, as part of the Museum exhibition series A Lover’s Discourse. Wood’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Schinkel Pavilion Berlin and TANK Shanghai. Her work is in the collections of numerous institutions, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the National Portrait Gallery, London; Dallas Museum of Art; Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; Sharjah Art Foundation; and Tate, London.

Reggie Burrows Hodges

Reggie Burrows Hodges’s foggy human figures come out at night. The painter applies vibrant colors to black primed canvases, wherein darkness lends each work a sense of distance. The artist often paints from his world and memories, be they oneiric scenes from the swimming pool growing up in the 1970s in Compton, California, or figures listening to records from his travels to Poznań and Berlin. On tracks and in stadiums, figures leap, race, and reach—limbs akimbo in the heat of the action. While many bodies appear faceless, the dynamism in their gestures belies the sense of anonymity. There is a spirit—perhaps even a majesty—to their movement, present in Hodges’s athletes in the arena, his laborers who tend the California landscape, and even in his seated music listeners as they slouch atop their chairs.

Reggie Burrows Hodges (b. 1965, Compton, California) lives in the Bay Area. His work has been presented in solo exhibitions at, among others, the Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, New York (2025); Karma, Los Angeles (2025, 2023); and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2023–24). His work is held in the public collections of the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas; Dallas Museum of Art; Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, among other institutions.

Solange Pessoa

Solange Pessoa casts a magical gaze onto the natural world, creating paintings, installations, and sculptures that take inspiration from her native southeastern Brazilian homeland. Her works incorporate organic materials and found objects like moss, feathers, rocks, and other matter from her family farm in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais. Like her practice at large, her oil paintings consider the primal energies that surround us in nature. These striking canvases depict foliage and botanical forms, tracing the graphic outlines

of leaves, petals, and ferns. In their simplicity, the oil paintings nod to prehistoric symbols and ancient fossil imprints. In speaking about her paintings, Pessoa has noted, “It’s a combination of emotions and feelings. I pay a lot of attention to the sensible and symbolic relations that these spaces operate in culture, to the infinite plurality of feelings and indetermination, to the space-place, the territory.”

Solange Pessoa (b. 1961, Ferros, Brazil) lives in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. Her exhibition Pegar o sol com a mão (Catch the sun with your hand) is on view at Aspen Art Museum through October 29, 2025. Solo exhibitions of her work include Longilonge, Ballroom Marfa, Marfa (2019); Solange Pessoa, Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria (2023); and Pilgrim Fields, Tramway (2025). She has also participated in numerous group exhibitions in Brazil and abroad, including at Fondation Cartier in Lille in the 2022 Venice Biennale The Milk of Dreams.

Ugo Rondinone

For Ugo Rondinone’s Winter 2024– 25 exhibition the rainbow body, the Museum’s second-floor gallery was recast as a prismatic arena where fluorescent, lifelike sculptures of dancers sat at rest and in waiting. The show was a rumination on life, death, and human ephemerality, explored through the concept of the “rainbow body,” a spiritual rite achieved only by the most devout practitioners of Tibetan Buddhism, in which the body is transformed into light upon death. Rondinone’s wax dancers are meditative, captured in a moment of repose. Cast over ten years ago, these hyperrealistic nude figures depict bodies as they once were, captured in time. They are both a reminder of our mortality and a celebration of life itself.

Rondinone has worked with photography, painting, poetry, outdoor sculpture, and neon rainbow signage since the 1980s. His visual vocabulary often incorporates the natural and primordial world, where rocks, clouds, trees, and the sun are recurrent motifs. In his practice at large he considers human subjectivity and experience.

Ugo Rondinone was born in 1964 in Brunnen, Switzerland, and is now based in New York. His work has been the subject of recent institutional exhibitions at Belvedere, Vienna (2021); Museo Rufino Tamayo, Mexico City, Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt, Petit Palais, Paris, and the Scuola Grande di San Giovanni Evangelista, Venice (2022); Musée d’art et d’histoire, Geneva, Städel Museum, Frankfurt, and Storm King, New York (2023); and Museum SAN, Wonju, Museum Würth 2 and Sculpture Garden, Künzelsau, and Kunstmuseum Luzern (2024). In 2007 he represented Switzerland at the 52nd Venice Biennale. Rondinone’s moonrise.east.july was presented on the Aspen Art Museum Commons in 2017–18.

Jasper Marsalis

Jasper Marsalis is an artist and musician who explores the concept of spectacle in his expansive practice. He makes music under the moniker Slauson Malone 1, a position that informs his sculpture and painting. Garments worn while performing become fodder for installation. The artist also troubles the space between seeing and being seen, placing cameras in the gallery space to surveil his audiences, who are then confronted by images of themselves entering his rooms. In other sites, Marsalis mics up the floor, recording his viewers’ footsteps. His paintings depict abstracted objects and experiences from the stage—an ever-watchful eye or a beam of harsh spotlight. Perhaps most compelling are his intricate pieces made up of deconstructed disco balls, where each glimmering piece transforms into a reflective mosaic. In these meticulously rearranged constructions, the artist repurposes this material to simultaneously mirror and distort his viewer.

Marsalis’s exhibition Einschub is on view at Aspen Art Museum through June 2025. He was also featured in the 2025 exhibition Alice Coltrane: Monument Eternal at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Stadium, a site-specific anti-monument, at Malcolm Yards in Minneapolis, Minnesota (2020); and A star like any other— at Midway Contemporary Art in Minneapolis, Minnesota (2019), among other performances and exhibitions.

Janaina Tschäpe

Janaina Tschäpe’s abstract paintings and works on paper vibrate with a sense of momentum, intricate topographies that seem to breathe, with vibrant, gestural brushstrokes. Scribbles are layered in Twombly-like fashion, rendered sensuous in their fluorescence. Tschäpe makes paintings, drawings, photographs, videos, and sculptures that hone in on the space of fantasy and imagined mythical worlds. Often, her works evoke water, and the larger sense of consciousness and healing that shared bodies of water call to mind.

She has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Den Frie Centre of Contemporary Art, Copenhagen; Sarasota Art Museum, Florida; Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris; Museum of Contemporary Art Tucson; Kasama Nichido Museum of Art, Japan; Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, and the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis. Tschäpe’s work is found in public collections including Centre Pompidou, Paris; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, Massachusetts; Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, among others.

George Condo

George Condo works like a shapeshifter. His paintings, drawings, and sculptures invariably take on new styles and forms, yet remain wholly Condo. The artist has depicted his distinctive style of faces since the 1980s, juxtaposing abstraction and figuration with nods to Picasso, Guston, and Magritte. He inflects each work with a hint of psychological disturbance, apparent in an exaggerated, toothy grin or cartoon eyes that evoke pathos. Clowns, monsters, pop cultural icons, and fools make up his lexicon of portraits, each a study into humanity’s innate vulnerability. Many works look to art history, re-creating the mannerisms and technique of bygone eras with what the artist calls “fake old masters.” While riffing on Renaissance, Cubist, or Baroque aesthetics, these works are decidedly contemporary in their outlandish interpretation of Pop. 

Born in Concord, New Hampshire, in 1957, George Condo lives and works in New York City. His work is in the collections of the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Staedel Museum, Frankfurt; Tate Modern, London; the Broad Collection, Los Angeles; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and many more. 

Harold Ancart

Belgian painter Harold Ancart’s landscapes are hypnotic studies in color and scale. His icebergs float in red oceans, mesmerizing objects suspended in vivid swaths of unlikely saturation. On other canvases, flowers burst from the ground, pink moons hover perilously close to Earth, and barren branches cast off autumn’s final swansong. Ancart’s worlds are at once familiar and fantastical, depicting vistas so exquisite they might surpass our own. On his process, the artist has stated, “You never know what the painting is going to look like. You may have predetermined ideas, but those ideas are never to be reached, and that is the beauty of it—the privilege of entering new, unconquerable, unthinkable territories. This implies that one must be ready to get lost. That is what exploration is about. The untold, the unfolded, the unknown.” The worlds he creates are captivating in that unknown.

Born in Brussels in 1980, Ancart lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. In 2019–20, the Public Art Fund presented Harold Ancart: Subliminal Standard at Cadman Plaza Park, Brooklyn. Ancart’s work was also featured in a solo exhibition, Harold Ancart: Untitled (there is no there there), at the Menil Collection, Houston, in 2016. The artist has participated in solo and group exhibitions at the Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst (S.M.A.K.), Ghent; Centre Pompidou-Metz; Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; and WIELS Centre d’Art Contemporain, Brussels.

Works by the artist are included in the permanent collections of numerous institutions worldwide, including the Fondation Beyeler, Basel; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk; the Menil Collection, Houston; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among others.

Sara Flores

Peruvian artist Sara Flores noted that when she was born in 1950, her mother rubbed a special pigment on her umbilical cord to bring forth a life of artistic vision. And for much of her life, Flores has created textiles in the Kené tradition of her native Shipibo-Conibo People, an Indigenous group spread out alongside the Ucayali River. The sprawling Kené patterns are applied to fabrics and ceramics using a highly specialized tincture of tree barks harvested by the artists themselves from the region. The painting tradition is centered around never repeating the same pattern, mazelike, more than once. The best practitioners, like Flores, possess a visionary sense called Shinan that cannot be taught, though Flores works on her intricate fabric patterns with her daughters, following a matrilineal tradition. Visions are aided by shaman-led ayahuasca rituals, which connect contemporary artisans to their ancestors and ancient folklore. 

Sara Flores (b. 1950, Tanbo Mayo, Peru) has elevated the Indigenous visual language of Kené into the realm of contemporary art. Her work has been presented in solo exhibitions at the Museo de Arte de Lima (MALI), Lima, Peru (2025), where she became the first Indigenous woman artist to mount a solo exhibition; White Cube, London (2025); White Cube, Paris (2023); and C L E A R I N G, New York (2023). In 2025, she also collaborated with Dior on the Lady Dior Art Project, integrating Shipibo-Conibo design into global fashion. Flores’s work is held in the public collections of the Museo de Arte de Lima; El Museo del Barrio, New York; Museum Voorlinden, Wassenaar; New York-Presbyterian Brooklyn Methodist Hospital Contemporary Art Collection, New York; and the JPMorgan Chase Art Collection, New York, among other institutions.

Kevin Beasley

Kevin Beasley’s practice is rooted in accretion, and how that manifests within the American landscape and its material memory. Assemblage art, popular among Black artists on the West Coast in the 1950s and 1960s, marks a material variation on this concept. The artist’s slab works are a collection of cotton materials, found garments, seeds, and plant forms dipped in resin that solidifies. The objects resemble paintings, but are three-dimensional layers of material, hardened topographies that tell stories about American history, namely the legacy of cotton in the American South. Some of the cotton is harvested from Beasley’s family’s land in southern Virginia. The artist’s exhibition PROSCENIUM | Rebirth / Growth: The Watch / Harvest / Dormancy: On Reflection at Storm King (May–November 2025) presents his largest slab work to date, a four-panel work measuring one hundred feet long by eleven feet tall that considers the meaning of place, land stewardship, and colonial histories.

Kevin Beasley (b. 1985, Lynchburg, VA) lives and works in New York. Recent exhibitions include PROSCENIUM | Rebirth / Growth: The Watch / Harvest / Dormancy: On Reflection, Storm King Art Center, New Windsor, NY (2025); A view of a landscape Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2018–19; Kevin Beasley, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, 2018; Hammer Projects: Kevin Beasley, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, 2017; inHarlem: Kevin Beasley, Studio Museum in Harlem (2016–17). His work is in the collections of the Buffalo AKG Art Museum; Art Institute of Chicago; Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; Minneapolis Institute of Art; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate Modern, London, and many others.