Katie White

1 week ago | news.artnet.com | Katie White

If Swiss-born textile artist Silvia Heyden had had her way, she would have been a violin maker. Born in Basel in 1927, she was an avid violinist even as a child. While still a girl, she decided she wanted to learn to make the object that brought such beauty into her life, but she was born too soon for that life course. “Her dad took her around to a few violin makers. They said, ‘Oh, this is nothing for a girl or a woman.

1 week ago | news.artnet.com | Katie White

Will Cotton knows his sugary sweet fantasy world isn’t to everyone’s taste. “There’s been a fear of beauty and a fear of sincerity,” said Cotton during a conversation in his Tribeca studio. “Though I can’t say I’m one hundred percent sincere,” he added with a quiet smile. Behind the artist were monumental paintings of unicorns, cowboys, and glittering mermaids, all in their final stages.

2 weeks ago | news.artnet.com | Katie White

Lately, artist Ilana Savdie has been asking herself what it means to play dead. To camouflage oneself. To hide in plain sight. Over the past year, the Colombian-born, Brooklyn-based artist, known for her electrically colorful and tantalizingly biomorphic paintings, had been experiencing what she calls “a frantic paralysis.” In the face of global political and ecological crises, she’d felt frozen, unable to act. “I was experiencing this feeling and could sense it all around me,” Savdie explained.

3 weeks ago | news.artnet.com | Katie White

Brazilian artist Thalita Hamaoui only knew Romania through her grandmother’s vivid, colorful tales that played out in her imagination. “She had so many stories and they were all in my head,” said the artist during a recent conversation. Hamaoui, who was born in 1981 and raised in Saõ Paulo, is the daughter of a Romanian mother and Egyptian father. She had never seen the forests and houses, smells, and sounds her grandmother described.

3 weeks ago | news.artnet.com | Katie White

Amalia Küssner was born in small-town Indiana, daughter of immigrants, but rose to the heights of the Gilded Age international elite as a celebrated miniaturist artist prized for her dainty and dashing portraits. Born in 1863, Küssner would, in her lifetime, paint the likes of Russia’s ill-fated oligarchs Tsar Nicholas II and the Tsarina Alexandra.