“Trending Now” is a monthly series focused on the artists with a significant growth in followers on Artsy from one month to the next. The 10 artists featured in the chart above are making waves across auctions, gallery exhibitions, fairs, social media, Artsy engagement, popular culture, or major publications. All numbers are based on Artsy user engagement from March through April 2023. Below, we spotlight three of this month’s trending artists.
Kyle Dunn
B. 1990, Livonia, Michigan. Lives and works in New York.
Kyle Dunn’s seductive, cinematic figurative paintings of queer masculinity are making waves at P.P.O.W, where his latest, nearly sold-out exhibition “Night Pictures” is on view through May 13th. Queer angst is a theme throughout Dunn’s practice, evident both in the longing gazes of his subjects, and the dynamic color palette of his paintings that evoke nighttime encounters on the street or in the bedroom. His paintings feature characters that are composites of the artist, his partner, and men from art history and culture at large.
If cinema is driven by feeling, then Dunn’s cinematic impulse is driven by eroticism, which elicits drama across his narrative paintings. Featuring a slew of nude or semi-nude men, each painting drips with melancholy as lovers are portrayed separated, or in various states of longing for an absent someone. In this way, Dunn’s work references the eroticism of early queer cinema, where lonely men experience sexual bliss by retreating to their subconscious, as seen in films like Kenneth Anger’s Fireworks (1947) or Jean Genet’s Un chant d’amour (1950).