Liste Art Fair 2023: Five Artists to Watch

1. Erin O'Keefe at Seventeen Gallery, London, and Kendall Koppe, Glasgow

Originally trained as an architect, Erin O'Keefe makes work that plays with our sense of spatial perception.

The Bronxville-born artist creates puzzling juxtapositions of colourful abstract forms that could almost be mistaken for paintings—in reality, they are photographs of objects she has carved and painted.

In Act Natural (2023), O'Keefe's wavy wooden blocks are captured in such a way that it is hard to see where one piece begins and another ends.

The curvature of one block shows off O'Keefe's eye for light and shadow with a glowing orange surface, while the black and blue side of another brings out the texture of the wood.

O'Keefe's presentation at Liste follows her solo exhibition Nonfiction (20 April–27 May 2023) at Seventeen in London, and her group presentation Evening of the Day (28 April–3 June 2023) at Galerie Julien Cadet in Paris this year.

2. Sasaoka Yuriko at PHD Group, Hong Kong

Sasaoka Yuriko is an Osaka-born artist based in Shiga, Japan.

She creates fantastical worlds in her immersive video installations, performing as different characters to unravel narratives relating to identity, gender, culture, and history.

At Liste, PHD Group presents Sasaoka's Gyro (2018), a single-channel video revealing a world of demon figures, hand puppets, and painted body parts. The artist's world feels at once alien and familiar; supernatural creatures made from human hands and ears inhabit a landscape with temples, flora, and fauna typical of Japan.

Extending beyond her film work, Sasaoka presents exercise objects like stability balls and mats featuring animals and demons from Gyro. While the film plays, the demons recite 'exercise, exercise'. The artist implies the disaster of floods and earthquakes ravaging the world is a result of demons exercising.

3. Patricia Domínguez at The RYDER Projects, Madrid

Chilean artist Patricia Domínguez is interested in experimental ethnobotany, the study of Indigenous plants and how people of a given culture use them.

Domínguez's most recent work Matrix Vegetal (2023), brings together video, sculpture, watercolour, and analogue photography to investigate the power of sacred plants.

Domínguez's cosmic shrine—a totem-like triangle structure lit up with LED lights and a video screen—encourages us to recontextualise and 'worship' the vegetal world and the spiritual animals and healing objects it houses.

Specially commissioned for Liste, this is the first time the installation Matrix Vegetal will be on view publicly.

4. Cecilia De Nisco at VIN VIN, Vienna

Vienna-based Italian artist Cecilia De Nisco creates soft, partly luminescent paintings of suburbanites in ambiguous scenes.

Though we meet anonymous characters whose faces are obscured or blurred, the paintings still convey a sense of voyeurism.

In Being in love, but merely for a night (2023), we see a figure urinating in public. De Nisco's intriguing use of paint illuminates details in the work with a viridescent glow. The selective lighting and close cropping create an image that feels instantaneously pedestrian, disturbing, and dangerous.

Hot on the heels of her solo presentation with VIN VIN at Liste, the artist will present work at Blanc Art Space in Beijing in Autumn 2023.

5. Danica Lundy at Super Dakota, Brussels

Brooklyn-based Canadian artist Danica Lundy's figurative paintings speak to the abrupt transformations and intimate emotions of adolescence.

In sink/sister I (2023), Lundy enlivens her subject with thick, expressive strokes, which contrast areas of smaller, repetitive brushwork, all in a palette of pastel purples and blues.

The painting, which shows a young woman lying despondently with her head resting against a bathroom sink, weaves intricate outlines with eager, heavy applications of paint in a complexly layered composition that reveals new details on every viewing.

The artist joined White Cube's roster in July 2022. Her presentation at Liste with Super Dakota will see her work displayed alongside artists Yein Lee, Chris Dorland, and Janne Schimmel.