Rise Art x Minor Attractions 2025 | Launch #2

“Paradise Lost by Ruby Chen – New York and London-trained, Shanghai-based Taiwanese artist Ruby Chen’s large-scale tripartite painting mashes up lots of symbols, giving the viewer a glimpse into the artist's lived experience. Canine teeth, a Chinese language character, an East Asian eye and a camouflaged motorcycle. It leaves me searching for more clues and inspires long looking”
– MARCELLE JOSEPH

“This artwork captures pure intimacy for me. The stillness, the sunlight that shines through the window whilst you are somewhere in the room, stuck in daydreams, whilst sipping the coffee.”
– NINA MARIA

“This one is just so beautiful in its simplicity. It leaves the door open for imagination, which I guess is the most important part.”
– NINA MARIA

“I love the design of these sculptures. It’s like a small home that you can put into your home, which is a beautiful thought.”
– NINA MARIA

“Masswerk II is a beautifully ambiguous object. It looks both ornate and folky; grand and vernacular. Its function – beyond simply being beautiful – is equally ambiguous: it could be a trophy, a candelabra or a hatstand. I love its slight lopsidedness and the way that the unpredictable, ornate top section (which, to me, slightly resembles a magnificently moustachioed face) grows from the evenly wood-turned base.”
– PHIN JENNINGS

“Somewhere between the mythical and the surreal, Arc depicts a four-legged ceramic creature with human-like arms and hands. With two bowed heads and a thorned back, its submissive posture hints at a being that is both vulnerable and dangerous, predator and prey. Its elongated, distorted limbs resist any clear human or animal classification, yet evoke something spiritual and almost celestial. The warped fingers and glossy, marbled surface in murky greens, blues, and browns, give the sense of something dredged from a riverbed in another realm — rescued, or perhaps captured.”
– DANI CHUKWUEZI

“In Discomfort, the artist layers pigment and dye to build a quiet sense of unease. A row of prints depicting a hunched, shadow-like figure sits unevenly across a decaying, weathered surface. The stark black against the tainted yellow heightens the tension between the work’s sombre tone and a colour typically associated with warmth and comfort. Stains and pools of dark pigment punctuate the surface, suggesting fragments of a complex emotional landscape, cut off and bleeding from the whole.”
– DANI CHUKWUEZI

“There’s something enticingly medieval about this painting: a tableaux across which multiple scenes play out, too many characters to count, each deeply enthralled in their own activities, involving birth, death and much in between. Emily Harter writes of her work that “in the Grand Drama everyone has their role,” and this arid and breathless scene, though modest in scale, is a panorama of such a drama.”
– PHIN JENNINGS

“High Tide on the Western Bank by Sarah Dwyer - I love how this spectacularly-hued abstract ceramic sculpture by London-based Irish artist Sarah Dwyer appears to have jumped out of one of Dwyer’s equally spectacular paintings!”
– MARCELLE JOSEPH

“To me, this small painting evokes a whole-body sensation of weightlessness. In its subject and medium, it embodies lightness, translucence and impermanence. It’s painted on voile, an impossibly thin material used for sheer curtains, and the stretcher bars are visible through it. Though the image itself is highly abstracted, I see two people blissfully floating in an expanse of water, their lower bodies distorted and almost disappearing under its surface. Everything about this artwork feels ethereal and ephemeral. It's a rare glance at a moment that will quickly disappear before our eyes.”
– PHIN JENNINGS

“The fuzziness of the spray paint as a figurative portrait, the speakers make it feel like the bass is reverberating through it. Just love the sensation it gives me looking at it.”
– ASHLEIGH KANE

“I love the colour compositions in this artwork. I love how it captures this beautifully curated chaos with elements that we all know. On top, it features my favourite food, sushi.”
– NINA MARIA

“Ferdinand Dölberg, a young German artist, paints cryptic scenes in quietly intense tones. Here, multiple characters’ limbs – all clothed in the same geometric pattern – blend into a single many-armed organism sprawling across the canvas. To me, his work immediately brings to mind the 20th century French Cubist Fernand Léger, whose scenes often convey a similar sense of studious manual labour using the same simplified, almost fungible bodies, arms and legs..”
– PHIN JENNINGS