Let life be beautiful like summer flowers, 2026
Iris Yehong Mao
LATITUDE Gallery New York
“Artists on Our Radar” is a monthly series focused on five artists who have our attention. Utilizing our art expertise and Artsy data, we’ve determined which artists made an impact this past month through new gallery representation, exhibitions, auctions, art fairs, or fresh works on Artsy.
Kayode Ojo
B. 1990, Cookeville, Tennessee. Lives and works in New York City.
Stillpass Zoe Kaia Mango (Wyndham, HK), 2026
Kayode Ojo
M+M Gallery
¥90000 (Silver Taldrex HK), 2026
Kayode Ojo
M+M Gallery
American artist Kayode Ojo is one of the most compelling artists working in sculpture and installation today. He is best known for his seductively staged assemblages which toy with concepts of social status, wealth signaling, and the visual thrill of consumerism. These works often incorporate glitzy, but inexpensive, pieces of fast fashion: costume jewelry, for example, or faux fur coats. Ojo turns these low-cost materials into something prestigious and high value by incorporating them into artworks.
Currently, Ojo’s work is featured in the two-artist exhibition “Every Good Boy Does Fine” alongside artist Buck Ellison at M+M Gallery in Hong Kong, where he is showcasing a series of his high-low assemblages. Here, Ojo uses silver folding sheet music stands as the armature for wigs, sequin dresses, crystal pendants from chandeliers, toy handcuffs, and more. Together, these creations hover like ghosts of a tawdry, but nevertheless alluring, glamour.
A graduate of the School of Visual Arts, New York, the artist had his first solo exhibition with Galerie Balice Hertling in Paris in 2018. Recent solo exhibitions include “An angel is just a messenger” at Maureen Paley in London in 2025 and “Me & U” at Sweetwater in Berlin in 2024. He’s also exhibited at David Zwirner’s 52 Walker space in New York.
Iris Yehong Mao
B. 1976, Shanghai. Lives and works in Los Angeles.
A Sea of Night-Blue Blossoms, 2026
Iris Yehong Mao
LATITUDE Gallery New York
Iris Yehong Mao paints fantastically colorful floral visions. These lush scenes call to mind Monet’s “Water Lilies” and the impastoed vigor of Van Gogh—but in a near-psychedelic color palette. The artist’s work is currently featured in the two-artist show “Inner Landscapes” at LATITUDE Gallery in New York.
The longer one looks at Mao’s oil-and-acrylic paintings, the more pleasurably disorienting they become. As blossomy bits of landscape give way to sweeps of color, unseen horizons give the paintings the sensation of a fever dream. The painting Fallen stars in the rain forest (2026) feels like looking at plant life underwater, the plants slowly swaying in tides.
Now based in Los Angeles, Mao graduated from Shanghai Academy of Arts and Crafts in 1996 and School of Fine Arts, Shanghai University in 2000. Recent group shows include “Unbridled: Horsin’ Around” at LATITUDE Gallery in 2026, “Earth to Sky” at SHRINE in New York in 2025, and “Rosebuds and Sidewalk Ends” at Real Tinsel and Evil Twins Gallery in Milwaukee in 2024.
Nabilah Nordin
B. 1991, Singapore. Lives and works in Los Angeles.
Deadweight, 2026
Nabilah Nordin
island
Phrase, 2024
Nabilah Nordin
Neon Parc
Singaporean-Australian artist Nabilah Nordin makes topsy-turvy abstract sculptures that sometimes look like energetic notebook scribbles brought off the page and into three dimensions. Made intuitively, these sculptures often seem to teeter with idiosyncratic drama. Bright and colorful, their surfaces are anything but uniform, alternately rough, drippy, and porous. At times, the Los Angeles–based artist also works with unlikely materials such as deflated balloons and epoxy-covered bread.
Based in Los Angeles, Nordin currently has a solo exhibition “Deadweight” at island in New York. The exhibition follows her breakout 2025 exhibition “Scripts” at Neon Parc in Brunswick, Australia.
Carlos Idun-Tawiah
B. 1997, Takoradi, Ghana. Lives and works in Accra.
Home Sweet Home, Accra, Ghana, 2022.
Carlos Idun-Tawiah
Alta
Ghanaian photographer and filmmaker Carlos Idun-Tawiah creates cinematic, retro-inspired photographs of African life. The artist, who is based in Accra and is represented internationally by Alta, has emerged as a standout in contemporary African photography over the past few years. The artist’s most famous series, “Hero, Father, Friend,” was inspired by his late father, who died when the artist was 18 years old. Wishing he had had more photographs of them together, Idun-Tawiah created a fictionalized archive of images of fathers and sons. The resulting images are a tender celebration of Black fatherhood.
Other series include “Sunday Special,” which draws from the artist’s childhood memories and the rituals of growing up in a Christian Ghanaian household, and “Boys Will Always Be Boys,” which subverts traditional masculine narratives, offering innocent and sweet moments of boyhood in Ghana. Last year, the artist opened his solo exhibition “I’ll be Here to Remind You” at Galería Alta. This summer, he is an artist-in-residence at Studio Voltaire in South London.
Sophie Smorczewski
B. 1999, London. Lives and works in London.
Draped in this whispered hour, 2025
Sophie Smorczewski
SETAREH
Mid Sky, 2026
Sophie Smorczewski
Chilli Gallery
Rising artist Sophie Smorczewski is known for her luminous, delicate paintings based on intimate observations of gardens and landscapes. Other times, she paints fleeting, vulnerable moments of figures sleeping or embracing. There is an ephemeral feel to these images, as if, like a memory, they could quickly dissolve. She often paints on paper, installing her works in wood frames, adding flowers or shells to create small arrangements. Other times, she paints oil directly onto irregular forms of oak wood.
Cycles of growth and decay are central to her work, and the artist grinds organic materials to create her pigments, which continue to change over time. Smorczewski graduated from Manchester School of Art in 2021, receiving the Manchester Academy of Fine Art Prize, and received her MFA in painting from the Slade School of Fine Art in 2025. This month, her work features in a duo show “Soft Evidence” at Chilli Gallery, following group shows at other tastemaking London spaces Soho Revue and Arusha Gallery.
