Artists to Watch
Intimate Worlds, Fresh Perspectives

Monilola Olayemi Ilupeju (b. 1996) unpacks memory with a sharp, searching tenderness. The Berlin-based Nigerian-American artist and writer moves across painting, sculpture, text, and installation, folding personal narrative into political and spiritual lineages. Her work asks what can be recovered from histories fractured through the tensions between intimacy, trauma, innocence, and desire. In “BloodLetter,” her first institutional solo at Kestner Gesellschaft, Hannover, from November 2024 to March 2025, poems, diary entries, and drawings surfaced alongside large-format leather paintings and carved wood forms—each a site of rupture and repair. Working at the edge of language and carnality, Ilupeju asks what it means to write a body back into belonging.

Anna Calleja (b. 1997) paints with intimacy and unease, fusing the visual language of devotion with the textures of contemporary life. The Maltese artist’s interiors are steeped in personal history and the weight of cultural inheritance—tender gestures, rooms lit by glowing screens, and the echo of religious symbolism. A residency at Palazzo Monti in Brescia in late 2024, followed by her first UK solo show at Sim Smith and a group exhibition at Alison Jacques in early 2025, revealed a painter attuned to both stillness and rupture. Figures curl inward, cats hover as silent witnesses, and cords stretch across canvases like lifelines—each suggesting a portal into the nuanced psychological terrain of domesticity.