As 2024 comes to a close, the Artnet News team has taken a moment to reflect on the year in art. From gallery shows and museum exhibitions to biennials and art fairs, we’ve seen it all.
Amid the whirlwind of creativity, some works stood out—whether for their extraordinary craftsmanship, profound meaning, or undeniable artistic virtuosity. Here’s what captured our attention—and our hearts—in 2024.
Srijon Chowdhury, Eye (Birth) (2022). Courtesy of the artist and P·P·O·W
Earlier this fall, while rushing to an interview, I was stopped in my tracks by a painting hanging in P·P·O·W’s storefront window on Broadway. The painting, titled Eye (Birth) (2022), and by artist Srijon Chowdhury, is a visceral, momentous depiction of childbirth. A mother appears, naked in a birthing, her face in ecstatic pain as the baby emerges. Two figures, a midwife, and perhaps the father, flank her like saints or angels.
This sublimely intense scene, meanwhile, is painted, tondo-like, in the iris of a massive eye, which occupies the rest of the canvas. This push and pull of scale and place, viewer, and subject, somehow capturing the out-of-body experience of witnessing new life. Chowdhury, who is based in Portland, Oregon, paints with sinewy, prismatic gestures and in saturated jewel tones that his paintings often take on this metaphysical beauty.
Eye (Birth) was on view at P·P·O·W in “Tapestry” the Bangladeshi-American artist’s debut with the gallery, earlier this fall, and it a remarkable exhibition of painting and sculptures, weaving together moments from the artist’s life, philosophy, religion, plant life, architecture and art history. Chowdhury has a way for conveying both the bloody and beautiful parts of life with a magical potency that I felt at times like I was walking within the pages of an illuminated manuscript.