Untitled Art

For Untitled Art, Houston 2026, Hollis Taggart Downtown’s booth presentation brings together the work of four contemporary artists: Dana James, Osamu Kobayashi, André Hemer, and Elizabeth Abel. Though their visual languages are distinct, each artist shares a strong, intentional engagement with color as a central means of expression. Viewed together, their works reveal a heightened sensitivity to chromatic relationships shaped through gesture, mark-making, and the physical act of applying material to canvas. Like earlier twentieth-century artists who freed color from figuration to evoke transcendence and a sense of the infinite, James, Kobayashi, Hemer, and Abel approach abstraction on their own contemporary terms. Through processes that balance careful consideration with intuition, each artist builds layers of color in ways that prioritize sensation over representation. Color becomes both an expressive and structural element, rewarding slow viewing and active interpretation. 

Dana James’ practice openly reveals its own making. Straight lines and geometric contours carve through amorphous pools of color, while other areas of canvas are left raw and exposed. Her process is driven by an exploration of dualities that shape both painting and lived experience: transience and permanence, darkness and light. A sense of nostalgia runs through James’ work, with color schemes and titles referencing Sailor Moon and other female princess and warrior-themed stories of the artist’s youth. James adds and subtracts layers, creating and then erasing or blurring marks made with materials as varied as acrylic, crayon, pastel powder, and wax. Traces of the artist’s hand and body movement remain visible, imbuing the canvases with a physicality and boldness that sits in tension with the luminosity of her pastel palette and the lighter marks that pepper her paintings. 

Osamu Kobayashi balances playfulness and control through a rich, vibrant use of color and precise line. He creates his sweeping forms using large-scale utility brushes – as many as 30 brushes affixed to a single piece of molding – which he maneuvers with his entire body. The resulting gestures feel choreographed, almost dance-like, and recall the raking of sand in Japanese dry gardens. Kobayashi’s practice is in dialogue with Color Field painters and postwar experimental abstract artists such as Ed Clark and Frank Bowling, who also use unconventional brushes. Within these carefully structured compositions, Kobayashi often introduces small, unexpected moments of bold color, adding surprise and visual delight. 

André Hemer’s work fuses digital scanning with the physical manipulation of thick layers of acrylic paint. Pigment is built directly on a flatbed scanner, left exposed to both natural and artificial light. This process reflects a contemporary moment in which the boundaries between the real and the manufactured have become increasingly blurred. While the resulting works are ostensibly abstract, they often register as quietly representational. Motifs of flora, sky, and paint itself emerge within the printed layers, with a richness of color and compositional framing that recalls Renaissance frescoes. Yet, through this unique combination of digital and material processes, Hemer’s finished works resist traditional definitions of painting. 

Elizabeth Abel’s process is deeply instinctual in nature. Color is chosen quickly and often applied directly from tube to canvas, with abstraction emerging from the flow of thoughts, feelings, and emotions present in the moment. Much like the Abstract Expressionists, Abel locates meaning in spontaneity and improvisation, emphasizing process as a core component of the work. For Abel, painting is cathartic, a physical release in which she allows emotion to guide the hand. While her palette consists of richly saturated hues, the presence of raw canvas introduces a sense of erasure and fragility, creating a quiet tension between intensity and restraint.

For more information on the gallery's booth presentation, please contact us at +1 212.628.4000 or info@hollistaggart.com