Artists to Watch: Future Fair and 1-54’s Best Discoveries

Russian Palestinian artist Nadia Younes retraces the existential and infrastructural precariety she experienced growing up in Palestine through the lens of New York’s perpetually under-construction, rapidly gentrifying urban landscape. With a highly specific sense of space, her paintings collapse different registers of depth and compression, blurring the boundaries between exterior and interior, personal and public. A sense of spatial promiscuity forces an interrelational negotiation for survival, in war as much as in the density of a hyper-compressed city. Describing her works as hybrid painting-objects that collapse surface and structure, Younes reconsiders the spaces we often mute or overlook: ventilation shafts, barriers and infrastructural seams, zooming in on the elements that influence how we navigate and experience space. Lifting these scenes from the background of urban life onto canvas, she brings the quiet architecture that shapes movement, access and containment to the foreground of perception. The young and dynamic nomadic gallery OCD, a curatorial platform co-directed by Oscar Sunderland and Chloe Stewart, reported early sales, press attention and strong interest.