Jenia Artyanes

13/06/2026

His major retrospective at Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris closed only nine months ago, but there are still several places where you can see his work today:

1. Tropicana Pool, Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel (Los Angeles)
The most literal way to enter Hockney’s world: the Tropicana Pool features a mural painted by David Hockney, and yes, it is still a real pool you can swim in. It is a mythological experience and the Hockney vocabulary as a lived environment.

2. Serpentine North (London)
David Hockney: A Year in Normandie and Some Other Thoughts about Painting runs until 23 August 2026 and is free to visit. This is now the major pilgrimage point.

3. Salts Mill (Saltaire, West Yorkshire)
Salts Mill remains one of the most important places to see Hockney in relation to Yorkshire. The current exhibition 20 Flowers for 2025 And Some Bigger Pictures runs into January 2027.

4. Tate Britain (London)
Tate Britain is still the essential stop for canonical Hockney works, including A Bigger Splash and major portraits. This is where Hockney sits inside the national collection.

5. Turner Contemporary (Margate)
David Hockney: Sunley Window 2026 runs until 1 November 2026. A large-scale window work based on a Normandy sunrise, it turns light itself into a public Hockney image.

6. Walker Art Gallery (Liverpool)
Walker holds Peter Getting Out of Nick’s Pool, one of the key pool works from 1966. It is one of the strongest places to understand Hockney. Check display status before travelling.

7. Westminster Abbey (London)
Hockney’s Queen’s Window is permanently installed in the north transept. It is a rare and fascinating encounter with Hockney inside sacred architecture.

8. Portland Art Museum (Oregon)
David Hockney: Works from the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and His Family Foundation runs until 26 July 2026. A strong option for seeing Hockney through an important private collection.

10/06/2026

08/06/2026

07/06/2026

In the Soviet and Eastern European system, the foundation of the artist was academic mastery: years and years of drawing from life, studying form until it begins to live inside you, training the hand until you can build almost anything without leaning on a reference as a crutch, and only after that were you expected to become conceptually free.

In the Western system, the hierarchy was almost completely reversed. Concept and experiment came first. Personal vision, the courage to break form — all of that was placed at the centre, while technical mastery became secondary, and sometimes even suspicious.

As a contemporary art curator who was born and educated inside one of these systems, and then moved as a teenager into the other, I am going to say this very clearly: each of them, when left alone, damages and mutilates the artist in its own way.

The artist begins inside.
The work is born first as an inner necessity, an impulse, a way of seeing that demands form — but that is not enough.

The artist is a translator. The entire task is to translate that inner impulse into visual form with enough precision that another human being can actually receive it.

And the quality of how that impulse is received depends on how well you command your visual language and your hand.

And this is not about realism.

You can paint abstraction and still command your medium at an extremely high level. This is about whether your hand is actually capable of carrying the weight of what is happening inside you.

So yes, both systems are right, and both are wrong. But if you place one against the other, art remains half-born.

And more than that — I am actually a firm believer in the idea that the artist should not use references for the final work.

But that is a separate war, and you are going to destroy me in the comments for it, so we will leave that for the next post.

Your art curator,
Jenia

03/06/2026

It’s pretty toxic, of course, but I have to admit that a big part of my so-called achievements came from exactly this kind of mindset.

Maybe this is simply the natural course of things - growing up, personal evolution, and realising that it is okay to stop building your life through constant inner struggle and just chill out a bit?

02/06/2026

As part of an ongoing curatorial collaboration with Kunstraum Heartspace, and a growing longer-term framework of support for artists within the space, I’m very happy to share the next two workshops in this series.

The first, Building Your Collector Circle, is a practical workshop on collector psychology, identifying and approaching your potential collectors, and building a long-term collector circle around your work using professional strategies adapted from galleries and dealers, so you can hold far more control over your career and sales.

The second, Public Image, Reputation & Audience for Artists, is about building a stronger identity around an artistic practice: audience, reputation, communication, symbolic consistency, public opportunities, and long-term trajectory. We will speak about artistic archetype, visual self-presentation, tone of voice, interviews, thematic coherence, PR logic, publications, collaborations, and the process by which an artist becomes more recognisable, more coherent, and more strategically positioned in public space. And yes, we will also speak in much greater detail about how all of this can be applied through social media.

Both workshops will take place offline in Berlin at Kunstraum Heartspace, with the possibility to join online via Zoom.

All participants will receive:

* the recording
* a full transcript
* and a workbook with practical exercises afterwards.

Dates:
June 14 · 16:00 CET
June 21 · 16:00 CET

Registration is now open via the link in bio.

31/05/2026

The artist begins with an inner necessity — yes.
But the artist must eventually command the hand well enough to give that inner spark exact form.

I could have the most beautiful poetry being born inside me in English, but if I lived in Japan and my Japanese was at the level of a three-year-old child, then the depth of what I mean would never survive the translation.

30/05/2026

I have been wanting to return to YouTube for a long time, because some thoughts simply need more space than Instagram can give them.

So I decided to begin with something very foundational: several principles of thought that have helped me, over the past five years, not to give up and to keep building my path in art — from self-taught artist to curator.

The video is now live on my YouTube. The link is in my bio.

I would genuinely love your thoughts, your support, and your wishes for the next videos