4 Rising Art Stars Sophia Cohen Is Seeking Out This Fall

These artists are worth planning a special trip to the Armory Show in New York this September, according to CULTURED's Arts Editor-at-Large.

Art world insiders love to grumble about art fairs—the relentless travel, the ticketing snafus, the champagne lounges planted in all the wrong places. But as August’s languor drags on, I find myself feeling that back-to-school tingle.

My daughter is only four months old, so it will be some time before this anticipation includes shopping for backpacks and school supplies. For now, I’m looking forward to being surrounded by faces old and new in the halls of the Javits Center, home to the fair that kicks the art world into an untiring gallop until June of next year. As I settle back into life as a full-time New Yorker (having returned from LA last year), the Armory Show is a great opportunity to remind myself how exciting it is to be in an impossibly art-filled city during a week when the rush of possible discovery becomes supercharged.

That said, it always helps to know what you’re looking for as you pursue said discoveries. That’s why I canvassed galleries near and far for the up-and-coming names to watch at the Armory Show, which runs from Sept. 24–27. I spoke to four of them: Larissa Lockshin, whose luminous landscapes on hand-dyed satin play with the shifting nature of memory and perception; Gonçalo Preto, whose distortions of the quotidian create an uncanny optical reality; Lily Ramírez, who puts color and texture in dialogue to create a visual vocabulary for things ineffable; and Kevin Reinhardt, whose experiments with material and process challenge the sterility of empirical botanical illustration.

I came away from these conversations with a deeper sense of their practices—as well as their aspirations and own art-world grumbles. I hope you’ll seek these painters out as you make your way through the fair, and find revelations of your own along the way. 

Larissa Lockshin
Age: 34
Based: New York
Booth: Nazarian / Curcio

The work of Toronto-born, Queens-based Larissa Lockshin brings new meaning to the word “handmade.” She mixes her own pigments, stretches silk over frames she makes herself, and applies color to surfaces directly with her hands. Lockshin received her BFA from Parsons School of Design in 2014 and has shown her meditative paintings at James Cohan Gallery in New York and Tyler Park Presents in Los Angeles. 

You paint on hand-dyed satin, which you dye and stretch over canvas, and build your own frames. Can you tell me a bit about how you arrived at this process?

As soon as I learned how to stretch my own canvas, I was full of ideas about what else I could use—I wanted a material that would blur the demarcation between image and object. Walking around aimlessly in the garment district was and continues to be a huge hobby of mine. It didn’t take long to cycle through hundreds of experimental material combinations, but I kept coming back to the satin: it’s luxurious, shiny, and glitters like a pond of cool water waiting for you to throw a pebble at. More than anything, it was some kind of impulse to make something with a physical presence—something that people would want to look at, but also want to live with. 

What does satin let you do that canvas alone doesn’t?

Canvas usually requires priming, and functions as an invisible base to a painting, not really participating in the final image or experience. My satin is unprimed, so while much of it is obscured by oil pastel and matte soft pastel, the small sections of fabric that peek through the composition create a sort of back-lit effect. The luster of the fabric catches the light and, depending on the angle, time of day, or the type of lighting, allows the painting to breathe and glow. The experience can’t be entirely captured in a single photograph, so it looks like a painting, but acts like a sculpture.

There is a tension between the controlled nature of your process, and the formal softness that emerges in your paintings. Can you talk a bit about this contrast?

I think this is part of having such a rigid base format combined with a lack of rules for working within that format. Not wanting to fall into the trap of making the same piece over and over again, but wanting coherence. Once my surface is ready, the work becomes completely intuitive. The way the satin can almost simulate a weather system moving across a landscape by catching the light at different angles is a major element of that softness, like a landscape at dusk or dawn, or a break in the clouds after a thunderstorm.

Tell me about the work you’re showing at the Armory Show.

My newest pieces are getting larger and more dramatic. The work at Armory is a continuation and expansion of my existing process—having fun with really saturated colors and more complicated, dense compositional elements. I am always trying to find the perfect balance between landscape and abstraction—the feeling of a place but maybe just a hazy memory of that place.

Describe your work in three words.

Dream come true… or… escape from reality?

What’s an underrated studio tool you can’t live without?

The Daily Racing Form. Each painting is named for a different racehorse. Because no name can ever be repeated twice, ever, they have become these random, poetic pairings of words. All the horses are the same, but also, all the horses are special.

Is there a studio rule you live by?

Don’t be too hard on yourself (hopefully one day I’ll manage to actually follow this rule).