Kick Off 2021 With These Artists That the Artnet Gallery Network Is Watching in January

This month, we're looking at artists working in Johannesburg, San Francisco, and beyond.

At the Artnet Gallery Network, we make it our goal to discover new artists each and every month, searching through the thousands of talented artists on our website and selecting a few we find particularly intriguing right now. Though making bold resolutions (like ones about leaving the house) might seem a tad presumptuous after last year, if one of your goals is to keep an eye on interesting talents, you can do so from home by exploring the Artnet Gallery Network and looking out for our monthly round-up of artists to watch. 

 
Check them out below—and happy art discoveries for 2021!

We had the good fortune of connecting with James Austin Murray and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi James Austin, how do you think about risk?
Taking risks are essential if you want to grow and succeed. A number of years ago I was invited by Madison Gallery in California to do an artist residency there and have a subsequent solo exhibition. At the time I was just starting to get noticed and it was a dream scenario. So I bet the house. What I mean by that is I took my life savings, which was about $50,000 and I spent every dime of it on that show. I bought dozens of panels and an embarrassing amount of paint and supplies. I cleared out my accounts and went to work. By the time I arrived back home I was living on credit card debt and suddenly felt very poor. The solo exhibition was months away. I had done the work and now had a hard time continuing working because of funds. I believed in my work and felt confident, it was still a scary time.

Whitehot Magazine | Disclosures: Donald Martiny, or Figures Without Ground

By DONOVAN IRVEN, November 2020

The art of Donald Martiny exists somewhere between painting and sculpture. We are confronted with a singular brushstroke, huge, a seemingly spontaneous, lavish eruption of color and texture on the wall. It is the mark distilled from painting, the formerly minute detail writ large, what we usually discover as a hidden and obscured part of the whole is made to be the whole itself, the entire work a gesture on the wall. 

Such dramatic works are fit for public art – Martiny is currently preparing to install a large work on the exterior of a building in Raleigh, North Carolina and is well known for his permanent displays in the lobby of One World Trade Center in New York City. But they also lend themselves to powerful aesthetic experiences in more intimate galleries, as will be evident in upcoming solo shows in March 2021 at the Scala del Bovoli in Venice, Italy.

View images of our recent collaboration with REH Interiors at Tower 155 in Downtown Boca Raton!

This gorgeous residence includes work by Stanley Boxer, Gabriele Evertz, Max-Steven Grossman, Donald Martiny, James Austin Murray and Tigran Tsitoghdzyan.

Front Burner: Highlights in Contemporary North Carolina Painting

March 7, 2020 – February 14, 2021

East Building, Level B, Joyce W. Pope Gallery, North Carolina Museum of Art

 Throughout modern art history, painting has been declared dead and later resuscitated so many times that the issue now tends to largely be ignored. Despite any debate over painting’s viability, artists continue to persevere in keeping the medium fresh and new. Currently painting is enjoying a revival in the art world, and innovative North Carolina artists are helping to maintain its vibrant place on the front burner.

View images of our recent collaboration with Wecselman Design at One Park Grove, Miami.

This stunning model unit includes work by Lluis Barba, Stanley Boxer, Lynn Chadwick, Dan Christensen, Max-Steven Grossman, Jane Manus, Donald Martiny, James Austin Murray, Udo Noger, Ernest Trova, Tigran Tsitoghdzyan and Bernar Venet.

By Nancy Stetson

When Jane Manus can't sleep, she puts together shapes in various combinations in her head: straight lines, squares, rectangles. Never circles. Never anything with curves. The West Palm Beach sculptor is attracted to geometric shapes and angles and strong lines that may jut out straight or bend sharply. And her work reflects that.

“I don’t do circles,” she says. “I don’t have anything against them. It’s just not me.”

When she first began creating her abstract sculpture, she originally worked in steel.

“Over the years, I found my own signature,” she says. “When people look at the work, or have seen a number of my sculptures, they can tell a piece of mine from someone else’s.

“I was working with these different pieces of metal and I was able to do what I wanted to do with them, to express what how I wanted the works to look with these materials. The more I worked with them, there seemed to be more shapes I could create.”

Even after almost 45 years of being a professional artist, she hasn’t run out of different ways to juxtapose these elements.

Donald Martiny will participate in the inaugural Summer Residency at Tivoli New York sponsored by the Pfaff Foundation, Judy Pfaff, and M. David & Co, Michael David.

Judy Pfaff, who was born in London, received her MFA from Yale University where she studied with Al Held. Her work spans across disciplines from painting to printmaking to sculpture to installation. She has work in the permanent collections of MoMA, Whitney Museum of Art, Tate Gallery, Brooklyn Museum of Art, and Detroit Institute of Arts, among many others. She is the recipient of numerous prestigious awards including Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Sculpture Center, the MacArthur Foundation Award, and the Guggenheim Fellowship. Pfaff lives and works in Tivoli, NY.

Michael David has exhibited with Sidney Janis Gallery and M. Knoedler & Co. His work is in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Guggenheim Museum in New York, The Brooklyn Museum, The Houston Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles among many others. Additionally David has established and directed two successful galleries in Brooklyn: Life on Mars and M. David & Co.

Azure Development's $2,190,000 show house in Delray Beach hosts thirteen artworks from Sponder Gallery's roster of important artists.

Artists Include:

Stanley Boxer, Dan Christensen, Max-Steven Grossman, Kysa Johnson, Jane Manus, Donald Martiny, James Austin Murray, Udo Noger, Tigran Tsitoghdzyan and James Walsh

Visitors to the Edmond J. Safra campus of The Hebrew University of Jerusalem who walk by the Goodman Brain Sciences building will notice a statue by the world-renowned artist, the late Boaz Vaadia. This figure, titled Ahiam 2nd, will make most people stop and stare at this representation of humanity. The pose in Ahiam 2nd is contemplative and serene, creating an overall calm atmosphere, which Vaadia so often stated was an important goal. It is recommended to visit Ahiam 2nd in the middle of a hectic day at the office or the lab. Who knows, maybe his serenity will rub off on his visitors. 

Ahiam 2nd is an iconic sculpture for Boaz Vaadia, and perhaps one of his most seminal. The figure in Ahiam 2nd is in a reclining pose that Vaadia revisited frequently, starting in 1985 when he first began figurative work in the style for which he is internationally known. Vaadia later combined the same figural pose with a boulder, such as exists in Ahiam 2nd, when he moved to his Williamsburg, Brooklyn studio. Ahiam 2nd was completed in 2006.