Foundwork

Foundwork Supporting access and recognition for contemporary artists globally.

“I’m always looking to work with really intensive processes that are somehow within lineages of traditional making, but ...
06/11/2026

“I’m always looking to work with really intensive processes that are somehow within lineages of traditional making, but then I want to engage with them from an oblique point of view to try to come to something unexpected. These [ceramic molds] are never meant to be objects that exist; they’re always destroyed. To stop a process midway is to look at something that’s not supposed to enter as a material in itself,” Foundwork’s 2025 Artist Prize winner Antonia Kuo tells 🌪 in their Dialogues interview. Read more about Kuo’s multifaceted investigations of duration and process at www.foundwork.art/dialogues.

Pictured here: “Negative Array,” 2025; 8 ceramic lost-wax investment molds (hollow), welded steel

“I’m working within the languages of painterly abstraction and thinking about painting. I think all the work sits really...
06/04/2026

“I’m working within the languages of painterly abstraction and thinking about painting. I think all the work sits really uncomfortably between a photograph, a painting, and a print. It’s never exactly any of those things,” our 2025 Artist Prize winner .kuo tells in their conversation for our Dialogues program. “The indexical element is extremely important to me, but, ultimately, I want them to function as paintings, as abstract paintings, and to be something that doesn’t really resolve itself, but also engages the idea of image-making and images.” Read their expanded discussion about materiality and perception at www.foundwork.art/dialogues.
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Pictured here: “Water Lilies,” 2024; unique photochemical paintings on silver gelatin paper, silver gelatin prints, powder coated aluminum, patinated cast bronze and ceramic relief in aluminum frame (9 panels)
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As we gear up to announce the jury and open call for our 2026 Artist Prize cycle, we’re so proud to share an outstanding...
06/01/2026

As we gear up to announce the jury and open call for our 2026 Artist Prize cycle, we’re so proud to share an outstanding Dialogues interview between our 2025 honoree, multidisciplinary artist Antonia Kuo (.kuo), and critic Drew Zeiba ().
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“There’s a sheer glut of images that we live among. The material of our time is images. I work mostly from my personal archive—everything is culled from that or cannibalized. Sometimes I’ll use a photograph over and over in the work, but it always turns out completely differently. It’s about addressing the materiality of images in a time when they’re more and more immaterial, and mining how they can be transformed through this really labor-intensive relationship I have with the process and material,” Kuo tells Zeiba in her Brooklyn studio this spring. Read the full interview at www.foundwork.art/dialogues.
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Kuo received an MFA from Yale University, her BFA from School of Fine Arts Boston and Tufts University, and a one-year certificate from the School of the International Center of Photography. Her work has been exhibited at , , and , New York; , Paris; , London; , Portland; , Seattle; , Taipei; and , PH, among others. Kuo has been an artist-in-residence at , Vermont Studio Center, , and was a fellow. Her work is included in collections of , , , and in Nusantara, Indonesia. She lives in New York.
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Drew Zeiba writes fiction and criticism, including recently for , , and . He is a contributing editor to . He lives in New York.
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Pictured here: “Solar Array,” 2025; unique photochemical painting on light-sensitive silver gelatin paper, x-rays, photogram on silver gelatin paper (4 panels)
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“Resin-coated image worlds, a mosaic of broken smartphones, videos made of photo bursts, and refit digital detritus. The...
05/20/2026

“Resin-coated image worlds, a mosaic of broken smartphones, videos made of photo bursts, and refit digital detritus. These are just a few manifestations of Maddie Butler’s () affective circuitry, as she encodes personal affects within technologically dominated ecosystems,” guest curator writes of the third artist she selected from our platform. “Under her charge, memes, data scraps, and salvaged gadgets collide and warp. This is all a matter of arbitration, as Butler seeks to totally distort origins, providing totally new perspectival courses. Alongside the cybernetic web, she hones in on the properties and conditions of light, using different methods of refraction and diffusion to recalibrate her visual fields.”
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Maddie Butler is an interdisciplinary artist originally from Minneapolis and now based in San Diego. Her work, which is concerned with the ways in which technology alters lived experience, has been shown at ’s Experimental Film Festival (Gyeonggi-do, Korea), , (St. Paul), , and (Miami). She has received grants from the Suraj Israni Center for Cinematic Arts, the Russell Foundation and the Andy Warhol Foundation via Midway Contemporary Art.
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Seen here: “The Inevitability of the Image,” 2025; 2024 Samsung Class DU6950 Series Crystal UHD4K Smart TV, assorted smartphones
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Congratulations to —our 2022 Foundwork Artist Prize winner—who opened her solo exhibition “All Great Powers Collapse fro...
04/28/2026

Congratulations to —our 2022 Foundwork Artist Prize winner—who opened her solo exhibition “All Great Powers Collapse from the Centre” earlier this year at .
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White’s practice “interweaves maritime mythologies of the Black diaspora with the undoing of hydrarchy through the object that unifies both Blackness and the nation-state: the ship. At the core of the works made for this exhibition is the term ‘shipwreck(ed).’”
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The exhibition, which is open through May 16, expands on themes White and critic discussed in their conversation for our Dialogues program—in particular, the possibilities in a worldview that centers the sea. You can find the interview at https://foundwork.art/dialogues/dominique-white
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Pictured: Dominique White, “All Great Powers Collapse from the Centre,” exhibition view, Kunsthalle Basel, 2026, photo: Philipp Hänger / Kunsthalle Basel.
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“As a multidisciplinary artist, Tianyi Sun () contextualises the dilemma of a generation drifting into the technosphere,...
04/21/2026

“As a multidisciplinary artist, Tianyi Sun () contextualises the dilemma of a generation drifting into the technosphere, unwilling to relinquish what it means to be human, theorist and curator Yana Kadykova (.kvs) writes about her third artist selection from our platform. “The shifting of her media seems as a position. Operating within a language that moves between the Symbolic, the Real and the Imaginary, transparency becomes central in any medium, both in materiality and semantics. Preservation and processing appear at once as liberation and confinement, as the question of what one chooses, and until which moment choice remains possible, stays inscribed.”
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Tianyi Sun is a multidisciplinary artist and researcher based in New York. Her work has been exhibited in NY, Los Angeles, and Beijing and she was recently an artist in residence at 99canal.nyc and .
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Seen here:Store in a cool dry place (下午), 2024. Heat treated Plexiglass, cast acrylic, silicone, jujube, goji berries, shiitake mushroom, Daoxiangcun pastry, American ginseng, osmanthus, lily bulb, anchovy, acrylic polymer, resin, wax, deconstructed stainless steel dim sum cart, steam. 31 x 28 x 17 in.
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“Anna Ehrenstein () works from a position she must continuously relocate. Moving between different cultures, across shif...
04/13/2026

“Anna Ehrenstein () works from a position she must continuously relocate. Moving between different cultures, across shifting power structures, she has come to understand collaboration not as a romantic ideal but as a matter of honest positioning,” writes theorist and curator Yana Kadykova (.kvs) aboujt the second of three artists she selected from our platform. “Her practice is fundamentally relational, built on the inclusion of people and the reciprocal work of learning from one another. What becomes visible is only ever the surface of something far more layered. Through an opulent material language, she traces and negotiates the flows that circulate between bodies and systems. Permeated by multinational codes, her work unfolds differently depending on who encounters it and from which position. No single interpretation exhausts it.”
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Anna Ehrenstein is an interdisciplinary artist weaving multipolar cosmogony between Berlin, Tirana, and the cloud. She is a professor in the photography department at HGB Leipzig.
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Seen here: “Melody For A Harem Girl By The Sea,” 2023. Work cycle encompasses Assemblage / Painting, Textile works, Lenticular Sculptures and Sculpture with Video Work in Phone. 700 x 800 x 800 in. 4:09.
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“alfatih’s () works require a counterpart. Not in the sense of an audience that observes, but rather a structural prereq...
04/10/2026

“alfatih’s () works require a counterpart. Not in the sense of an audience that observes, but rather a structural prerequisite. The work becomes complete only in the moment of encounter,” theorist and curator Yana Kadykova (.kvs) writes about the first of three artists she selected from our platform. “It is the active passage through the work, the act of engaging with it through specific actions or movement, that sets it in motion. His practice brings people together and breaks down the distance sometimes found in passive contemplation. Guided by expectation and irritation, familiar objects lose their original function and slip into the absurd. There lies its humor, and perhaps that is also where its joy comes from.”
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alfatih lives and works in Switzerland. He has presented interactive, installation and video works in institutions and spaces across Europe and abroad.
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Seen here: “Untitled,” 2025; rotating light box. Photograph Sandra Pointet.
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We’re excited to welcome our latest guest curator—Yana Kadykova (.kvs) who is an art theorist and curator based in Switz...
04/08/2026

We’re excited to welcome our latest guest curator—Yana Kadykova (.kvs) who is an art theorist and curator based in Switzerland and Germany. She serves as an Assistant Curator at and holds an engagement as curator at .contemporary in Leipzig. Her practice moves between exhibitions, listening formats, and editorial work, with a sustained focus on migration, language, and the politics of knowledge-making. She researches how different formats–readers, symposia, translation, and text–produce meaning and make contested social experiences discussable. She is currently developing a multilingual reader gathering voices from artists of first and second migrant generations across Europe.
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Yana selected three artists from our platform whose work especially resonated with her: alfatih () , Anna Ehrenstein (), and Tianyi Sun (). Read more about what stands out about each of their practices at www.foundwork.art/guest-curators.
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foundworkguestcurators

— who is among the 2026–27 Core Fellows at ’s Glassell School of Art—has much to celebrate this month. In addition to t...
03/17/2026

— who is among the 2026–27 Core Fellows at ’s Glassell School of Art—has much to celebrate this month. In addition to the 2026 Core Exhibition debut (the first public presentation of work produced during the residency), her solo show “All top teeth knocked out at once” opens on March 28th at in Los Angeles, where she’s also included in the group exhibition “The Body Does Not Explain Itself” on view through this Saturday 3/21.
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For a deeper dive on how the artist’s practice metabolizes lived experience through mark marking, from migration and motherhood to the eternal human struggle with the intricacies of perception and belonging, check out our 2023 Dialogues interview with Canedo de Souza and editorial director : https://foundwork.art/dialogues/june-canedo-de-souza
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Pictured here:
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Canedo de Souza in the studio, courtesy of the artist
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forest landscape painting, 2026; oil on canvas, courtesy of Nicodim Gallery
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