Memorial Day has come and gone, and now we’re in the midst of a summer of tremendous change. Young artists today, as they have done throughout history, are processing their times into new and visually exciting creations.

This month, we’ve picked five artists from around the world who have new works on view, both online and in person. 

Daniel Gordon, “Night Pictures” at James Fuentes

Daniel Gordon, Artichokes and Pizza (2020). Courtesy of James Fuentes.

Lens, France-based photographer Daniel Gordon plays with the tensions and overlaps between analogue and digital photography. He often he manipulates images found on Google searches, printing out and then re-working these digital files in 3-D space, only to photograph them once again.

After a recent venture into abstraction, Gordon’s “Night Pictures” series can feel like a return to the everyday juxtaposition of his now decade-old Thirty-One Days (2009). In these works, the tableaux of the apartment still life have reemerged in vignettes as Gordon implements his digital interventions onto the imagery of household items—a pizza, an N-95 mask, some books on a table. At first glance, the works seem to offer a coveted glimpse into the artist’s private abode, but, upon closer inspection, they winkingly reveal themselves to be fantasy projections of life in quarantine. 

“Daniel Gordon: Night Pictures” in on view at James Fuentes through July 30, 2020.

Chris Engman, “Looking” at Luis de Jesus Los Angeles

Chris Engman, Acrylic on Paper I (2020). Courtesy of Luis de Jesus Los Angeles.

Artist Chris Engman makes photographic works that investigate the divide between how we see and what we believe we see. His images record illusory sculptures and installations that he has staged through elaborate processes that involve manipulating materials and constructing architectural spaces, which then unexpectedly culminate in the flatness of a photograph. 

“Chris Engman: Looking” is on view through June 20, 2020, at Luis de Jesus Los Angeles.

Wang Jiajia, “Elegant, Circular, Timeless” at SPURS Gallery

Wang Jiajia, Sun Is Down It’s Freezing Cold (2020). Courtesy of SPURS Gallery.

Wang Jiajia scours the internet for “readymade” digital imagery that serves as a jumping-off point for his layered, vibrant final creations. These works joyfully attempt to meld the worlds of popular culture with the classical canons in a mishmash of references and styles.

In this, his second exhibition with SPURS Gallery, Wang debuts his “face-painting” works, characterized by cartoonish, oversized pairs of eyes that stare out at viewers from below layers of energetically applied, richly saturated marks of pain, to an effect that feels at once both comic and jarring.

“Wang Jiajia: Elegant, Circular, Timeless” is on view through June 21, 2020, at Spurs Gallery.

Shagha Ariannia, “It’s A Date” at Meliksetian | Briggs

Shagha Ariannia, Janey’s Hair, Janey’s Chair (2020). Courtesy of Meliksetian | Briggs.

In Los Angeles-based artist Shagha Ariannia’s first show with Meliksetian | Briggs, she presents a powerful new series of paintings which together form a non-linear visual narrative centering around the female body and its desires in relation to culturally encoded power dynamics.

The works draw from the artist’s own lived experiences. Born in Iran in the mid-1980s, Ariannia moved to Los Angeles as a young teenager, and her paintings, full of contorted body parts that merge with objects of the domestic interior, can be seen as an act of cultural translation.

“Shagha Ariannia: It’s A Date” is on view through July 18, 2020, at Meliksetian | Briggs. 

Sina Oberhaensli at Tony Wuethrich Galerie

Sina Oberhaensli, Ohne Titel (2020). Courtesy of Tony Wuethrich Galerie.

Basel-born artist Sina Oberhaensli paints intimate, closely framed portraits of young women, many of whom are her friends. The women in these images are confident, seemingly intelligent, and perhaps already a bit melancholic and jaded. At times they seem like characters from a 100 years ago, brought suddenly into the present. This might be due in part to Oberhaensli’s decidedly cool color palette—the subjects’ theatrically pale complexions bring to mind Henri Toulouse-Lautrec’s Montmartre revelers—but also more contemporary influences, including the works of Elizabeth Peyton and Marlene Dumas.

Works by Sina Oberhaensli are on view through June 27, 2020, at Tony Wuethrich Galerie.