The Human Presence: Narratives in Figure and Form

Janet Rady Fine Art is pleased to present The Human Presence: Narratives in Figure and Form, an online exhibition opening on Friday, 1 May 2026, and running until Friday, 29 May 2026, on the gallery’s website and Artsy platform.

Bringing together thirty artists from across the globe, the exhibition considers the enduring relevance of the human figure as a site of narrative, emotion, and critical reflection. Spanning painting, photography, collage, printmaking, watercolour, and mixed media, the works examine the body not merely as subject but as a vessel through which personal histories, cultural identities, and collective experiences are articulated. All works in the exhibition are drawn from a significant private Lebanese collection, offering a cohesive yet diverse perspective on contemporary figuration.

The exhibition ranges widely in its approaches to figuration. Eva Beresin and Jordyn Fishman foreground the psychological and expressive intensity of the painted figure, while Jocelyn Hobbie and Mayumi Nakao bring an intimate, domestic sensibility to their portraits of women.
Joy Labinjo and Arghavan Khosravi root the body in cultural and political terrain — Labinjo through acrylic and oil pastel on paper, Khosravi through shaped canvases that fuse found textile with painted surface. Aaron Fowler embeds the figure within accumulations of personal material — shoes, fabric, hair weave, household objects — dissolving the boundary between body and biography.

Photography and lens-based practice occupy a distinct register within the show. Youssef Nabil’s hand-coloured gelatin silver prints draw on cinema’s visual grammar to construct idealised, elegiac self-portraits and portraits, among them a tender image of Louise Bourgeois made in New York in 2007. Sarah Meyohas contributes dye-sublimation works on aluminium that meditate on speculation, surface, and the gendered economy of appearance.

Across painting, figuration takes on a range of moods and registers. Hamish Chapman and Andriu Deplazes place their figures in landscapes suspended between the real and the symbolic. Henrik Godsk and Brittany Miller render presence through scale and painterly authority, while Romane de Watteville and Lorena Torres mine social ritual — the party, the secret, the aftermath — for their emotional residue. Zhao Gang and Carlos Noronha Feio cast a documentary eye on collective and historical identity, and Peter Linde Busk navigates myth and allegory through expressive, large-scale acrylic on linen.

Abstraction and the fragmented body find their place in the exhibition through Sanya Kantarovsky’s monotypes, Brandon Lipchik’s layered surfaces, and Benoît Platéus’s collage on canvas. Dave McDermott’s yarn and 23k gold on panel and William Scott’s intimate works on paper introduce further material eccentricity, situating figuration within a broader inquiry into craft, value, and mark-making. Tagreed Darghouth offers a stark meditation on mortality, presenting a skull rendered in acrylic at monumental 1:1 scale.

Throughout the exhibition, the human presence is continuously reimagined — vulnerable, performative, constructed, and contested. Themes of intimacy, displacement, desire, identity, and transformation recur across works made between 2006 and 2023, reflecting a contemporary condition in which the self is understood as fluid, layered, and perpetually renegotiated.