Interviews by Brainard Carey

Robert Janitz (b. 1962, Alsfeld, Germany) is a contemporary painter known for his bold, abstract canvases that balance humor, gesture, and materiality. After studying Sanskrit and art history in Germany, he lived in Paris for many years before relocating to New York and later Mexico City, where he currently lives and works.

Janitz is best recognized for his large-scale works featuring sweeping, textured brushstrokes that recall the motion of everyday acts—like buttering toast or polishing shoes—transforming mundane gestures into painterly abstraction. His practice often blends saturated color fields with playful surfaces, exploring perception, language, and the boundaries of painting itself.

Over the past two decades, his work has been exhibited internationally in museums and galleries, including solo and group shows across Europe, the United States, and Latin America.

His works are part of the permanent collections of the Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris, France; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, USA; Amorepacific Museum of Art, Seoul, South Korea; the Collezione Maramotti in Reggio Emilia and the Hall Art Foundation, Reading, VT, USA.

Robert Janitz, Studio Rats, 2025, Oil, wax, flour on linen, 25 × 20 inches (63.5 × 50.8 cm)

Robert Janitz, Masquerade in the Park, 2024, Oil, wax, flour on linen, 25 ½ × 19 ½ inches (65 × 50 cm)

Robert Janitz, Camino a Comala, 2024, Oil, wax, flour on linen, 51 × 39 inches (130 × 100 cm)

The artist photographed by Geoffrey Biddle.

Avital Burg studied at Bezalel Academy, the Hatahana School, the Slade School of Art, and the New York Studio School. Burg was the artist-in-residence at the Interlude Residency, NY, and the Peleh Residency, CA. Her works are in prominent collections, including the Louis-Dreyfus Family Collection (NY), and the Bank Leumi Art Collection.

Burg’s impasto paintings incorporate dry paint pieces from her palette into fresh layers, creating surfaces reminiscent of low-relief sculptures. Some canvases are painted over three or four previous works, signifying how each moment of creation encapsulates multiple points in time. The oil on canvas grows lush with life, prompting Burg to reflect on the impermanence of material existence and inviting guests into a rhythmic and meditative form of viewing. 

Cracks in the Pavement offers a glimpse into nature’s quiet cycles and beauty, often lost in the urban thrum of New York City. In Burg’s newest paintings, blue chicories push through the earth, wildflowers bloom in winter, then wither—making way for spring’s pink and lavender buds. The inevitability of impermanence is layered onto the canvas, with each painting titled after the street where the artist encountered the flower during walks to and from her Brooklyn studio.

Avital Burg, Harlemville Road Purple Loosestrife, 2024, Oil on linen mounted on wood, 10 x 8 in. Image courtesy of the Artist and Fridman Gallery

Avital Burg, Summer Crown Heights Flowers, 2024, Oil on linen mounted on wood, 10 x 8.5 in. Image courtesy of the Artist and Fridman Gallery

Avital Burg, TJ Hyacinth (Week 35), 2023, Oil on linen, 30 x 26 in. Image courtesy of the Artist and Fridman Gallery

Yatika Starr Fields, 2025. Portrait © Tom Fields 2025

Born in 1980 in Tulsa, Yatika Starr Fields is a member of the Cherokee, Creek and Osage tribes, as well as a member of the Bear Clan.

Yatika Fields studied landscape painting at the University of Oklahoma’s Sienna, Italy summer program before enrolling at the Art Institute of Boston from 2001 to 2004. While living on the East Coast, the artist developed a keen interest in street art. His dynamic, vibrant graffiti works quickly attracted attention, generating public and private mural commissions across the country from Portland to Oklahoma City, Phoenix, Santa Fe, and Bentonville.

In 2018, he completed Astonishment of Perception, a monumental site-specific mural in downtown Bentonville, as part of Crystal Bridges Museum’s Art for a New Understanding (2018–2019). Spanning the side of Cripps Law Firm’s two-story building, the work depicts lady justice peeking from behind her blindfold, highlighting the dissonance between America’s ideals and its judicial system in practice. Like many of Fields’s works, the mural blends abstract and stylistic elements, figuration, and allegorical narrative, all in a dynamic, saturated Pop-palette.

After joining the water protectors at the Dakota Access Pipeline in 2016, Fields began to give the Indigenous history of hope and struggle a greater focus in his work. In the 2017 series Tent Metaphor Standing Rock, the artist recovered tents after the infamous February 22, 2017 police raid on the protesters, sewing the recovered material into shapes resembling coffins, sleeping bags, or kites. Fields first worked with tents—a mainstay of middle-class camping holidays— after witnessing Seattle’s brightly colored homeless encampments. His interest only increased after noticing the structure’s role in modern protest movements. The artist recombines the vivid material into traditional Indigenous patterns, anti-pipeline slogans like “Stop the Black Snake,” and into dynamic, compelling abstract compositions. In its totality, the series blurs the boundaries between political polemic and abstraction, between distress, resistance, and hope.

The painting, America Realized (2017), also memorializes the experience at Standing Rock. The composition is explosive: Torrents of ice and fire swirl through prayer ties and collapsing tents, recounting the freezing weather, police force, and fires that the activists braved at Oceti Sakowin, the central camp in Cannon Ball, North Dakota. A surveillance drone flies across the top of the expansive canvas packed with razor wire, floodlights, and debris. The scale of the 6- by-6-foot composition allows for Fields to replicate the embodied, fluid performance of mural and street art. As in graffiti works, Fields blurs the line between abstraction and representation, creating stylistic compositions out of recognizable elements, and setting them against dynamic, swirling fields of color and twisting forms.

Fields has participated in over 43 solo and group exhibitions at venues across the United States and Europe, including: the Southern Plains Indian Museum, (2008, Anadarko, Oklahoma); Chiaroscuro Contemporary (2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, Santa Fe); BlueRain Gallery (2015, 2016, 2018, Santa Fe); Peabody Essex Museum, (2015–2016, Salem, MA); Rainmaker Gallery (2017, Bristol, UK); the Grand Palais (2018, Paris); the Philbrook Museum (2018, Tulsa); the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (Bentonville, 2019); and the Gilcrease Museum, (2019, Tulsa). Fields’s paintings are featured in the collections of many museums across the country, including: the Heard Museum (Phoenix); the Hood Museum (Dartmouth College); Oklahoma State Museum of Art; the Peabody Essex Museum; and the Sam Noble Museum (University of Oklahoma).

Yatika Starr Fields, Tahlequah, 2025 Polyester, nylon, aluminum rod and tyvek 67 x 50 inches 170.2 x 127 cm

Yatika Starr Fields, Impermanence, 2025 Polyester, nylon and mixed media 64 x 47 x 6 inches 162.6 x 119.4 x 15.2 cm

Yatika Starr Fields, Corrugated Landscape, 2025 Polyester, nylon and mixed media 89 x 102 inches 226.1 x 259.1 cm

Madeline Peckenpaugh (b. 1991, Milwaukee, Wisconsin) renders depth through iterations of adding and subtracting paint, creating a semblance of deep and flat space simultaneously. Probing the slips in perception between corporeal experience, memory, and imagination, she shifts the scale of everyday elements, interlaces components, and depicts forms in both single tones and fluctuating textures. The viewer’s trained perception of the landscape can become questioned, as monumental structures begin to vaporize, and natural forms become paper thin. There is a reconciliation of opposites: deep space of the real world with the flat space of the canvas.

Peckenpaugh received an MFA in Painting from Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI and a BFA from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA. Peckenpaugh’s work has been exhibited at Alexander Berggruen, New York, NY; Bremond Capela, Paris, FR; 1969 Gallery, New York, NY; F2T Gallery, Milan, IT; Andrew Reed Gallery, Miami, FL; PM/AM Gallery, London, UK; COMA, Sydney Australia; and The Rhode Island School of Design Museum, Providence, RI; among others. Her work is included in the public collections of the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, FL; the Woodmere Art Museum, Philadelphia, PA; Brown University, Providence, RI; and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA. She was recently an artist in residence at Palazzo Monti in Brescia, Italy. Peckenpaugh lives and works in Queens, NY.

Madeline Peckenpaugh, In Orbit, 2025 oil on canvas 77 1/2 x 100 in. (196.8 x 254 cm.) Copyright the artist. Courtesy of the artist and Alexander Berggruen, NY. Photo: Philipp Hoffmann

Madeline Peckenpaugh, Aries Moon, 2025 oil on linen 54 x 52 in. (137.2 x 132.1 cm.) Copyright the artist. Courtesy of the artist and Alexander Berggruen, NY. Photo: Philipp Hoffmann

Madeline Peckenpaugh, Spring, 2025 oil on canvas 70 x 65 3/4 in. (177.8 x 167 cm.) Copyright the artist. Courtesy of the artist and Alexander Berggruen, NY. Photo: Philipp Hoffmann

JD Raenbeau (b. 1985, Stony Brook, NY) currently lives and works in Rocky Point, New York.

He received his MFA from The School of Visual Arts where he received the Paula Rhodes Memorial Award for Exceptional Achievement in Art Practice.

He holds a BFA from Alfred University. Raenbeau has exhibited his work in New York, Brooklyn, Los Angeles, New Mexico, and the UK.

His work has been featured in New American Paintings, Artsin Square Magazine, and Sensitive Content Magazine.

He was recently an Artist in Residence at the Vermont Studio Center, The Golden Foundation for The Arts, and most recently was Artist in Residence at the Hafnarborg Museum in Hafnarfjordur, Iceland.

© JD Raenbeau, “Canopy,” 2025, Oil on panel, 24 x 30 inches, Courtesy of CLAMP, New York

© JD Raenbeau, “Full Moon,” 2024, Oil on panel, 12 x 16 inches, Courtesy of CLAMP, New York

© JD Raenbeau, “X,” 2024, Oil on panel, 16 x 16 inches, Courtesy of CLAMP, New York

Abby Lloyd (b. 1988) is a multidisciplinary artist and independent curator based in New York City. Her work utilizes humor and familiar motifs to confront themes of loss, memory, and the emotional charge of objects.

Lloyd’s recent solo exhibitions include On Display at Ptolemy (Queens, NY), Goodbye Dolly at Alyssa Davis Gallery (New York, NY), and Abby’s Room at Freddy (Harris, NY).

She has organized several events and exhibitions, including the recent Artists & Recipes at Marvin Gardens (Ridgewood, Queens), based on her 2020 cookbook of the same name featuring over 40 artists.

Her work has been featured in The New York Times, The Brooklyn Rail, Frieze, and Vice. She has performed and exhibited throughout the U.S. and internationally, including presentations at the Musée d'Art Contemporain (France), White Columns (New York), Kunsthall Oslo (Norway), Montez Press Radio (New York), and The High Line (New York).

Installation view, Abby Lloyd: On Display, Ptolemy, Glendale, NY, 2025

Abby Lloyd, It's fun, 2025 Acrylic on canvas 36 x 48 x 1 1/2 in 91.4 x 121.9 x 3.8 cm

Abby Lloyd, Smiley Face, 2025 Metallic pewter paint on foam 10 x 10 x 1 1/2 in 25.4 x 25.4 x 3.8 cm

Abby Lloyd, Jack, 2025 Foam, cardboard, acrylic paint, turntable 108 x 84 x 72 in 274.3 x 213.4 x 182.9 cm

Artist portrait courtesy of Julian Espino.

Born in San Francisco in 1986, Tony Huynh graduated from the California College of the Arts and now works from his studio in Sacramento, CA.

His paintings are part of international collections and have been included in solo and group exhibitions, including at the San Diego Museum of Art, CA; Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, CA; Marin Museum of Contemporary Art, CA; Pablo’s Birthday, New York, NY; Scroll NYC, NY; and Galerie Christian Lethert, Cologne, Germany.

Tony Huynh, Memento, 2025 oil on panel, in artist's frame 12 x 12 in 30.5 x 30.5 cm Image courtesy of Mikhail Mishin. 

Tony Huynh, Morning Ferry, 2025 oil on panel, in artist's frame 12 x 12 in 30.5 x 30.5 cm Image courtesy of Mikhail Mishin. 

Tony Huynh, Wish I knew, 2025 oil on panel, in artist's frame 10 x 10 in 25.4 x 25.4 cm Image courtesy of Mikhail Mishin.

Lexia Hachtmann (*1993 in Berlin) is a British-German artist. She completed her Art and Design Foundation Diploma in 2013 in Brighton and returned to Berlin to continue her studies in Fine Art Painting at Universität der Künste Berlin. Here, she obtained a Meisterschüler degree in the painting class of Prof. Mark Lammert in July 2021. Lexia Hachtmann is alumna of the 2022 Goldrausch Künstlerinnenprojekt and went on to study a Master of Fine Art (MA) in Painting at the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL London for which she received the DAAD Grant.

Working in both figurative oil painting and printmaking, Lexia Hachtmann's work deals with conceptions around miscommunication, identity and social hierarchies. To her, the area of the canvas presents a space on which to comprehend, reenact and visualize universal feelings of isolation, intimacy and longing. Lexia Hachtmann's protagonists often move through displaced rooms, stagelike spaces of colour that are neither located in- or outside but rather depict moments of the in-between. Her figures often seem introverted and disconnected from one another, each in their own space, their own mind; fragile yet present. She is engaged in these motives that point to the thresholds; the boundaries between the private and public realm. This could be a physical and/or emotional space. The use of ambiguous objects and situations on the canvas enable her to create banal and yet uncomfortable situations. She aims to retain a certain ambivalence in her chosen subjects so that they may speak to our current and complex times by using fragmented, cropped, blurred, awkward and/or heavily enlarged images. In this way notions of both the fragmentary and the monumental are important trajectories in her work.

Bella Donna, 145 x 130cm, Lexia Hachtmann

Out of Joint, 145 x 130 cm, Lexia Hachtmann

Präsentierteller, 51 x 45.5cm, Lexia Hachtmann

Iva Gueorguieva (b.1974, Sofia, Bulgaria, lives and works in Los Angeles, CA) received her B.A. from the Tyler School of Art, Philadelphia, PA.

She has had recent solo exhibitions at Night Gallery, Los Angeles, Bradwolff & Partners, Amsterdam, and Gavlak Gallery, Palm Beach, FL.

Her work is included in public collections such as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis, MN; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, CA, among others.

Iva Gueorguieva, Field 8, 2025 acrylic, charcoal and gauze on canvas 76.25 x 53 inches

Iva Gueorguieva Animal 12, 2024 acrylic and gauze on canvas 72 x 50.5 inches

Iva Gueorguieva, Kukeri: Birds, 2024 acrylic and gauze on canvas 78 x 50 inches

Sketchbook of the artist referenced in the interview.

Graham Durward was born in Aberdeen, UK and currently lives and works in New York. Durward attended the Edinburgh College of Art (both Undergrad and Graduate) and studied in the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program.

He has had solo shows at Maureen Paley, London; Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York; Peninsula, New York; Step sister, New York; Shrine, New York; White Columns, New York; Sandra Gering Gallery, New York; and more. He has also been featured in exhibitions at Peter Blum Gallery, New York; Gavin Brown, New York; and more. Durward’s work has been reviewed in Artforum, Art Newspaper, Art in America, and the New York Times.

Graham Durward, International Male, 2025 32 h x 28 w inches Oil on linen

Graham Durward, Jet Streaming, 2025 84 h x 60 w inches Oil on linen

Graham Durward, Angel walking a dog, 2025 64 h x 52 w inches Oil on linen