Supporting structures, vantage points and trompe-l’oeil are combined across materials in the practice of New York-based artist Brad Kronz. His cryptic sculptures and wall-based works are at once seducing and resisting full explanation; they solicit attention to what has been overlooked, discarded or emotionally saturated. Kronz’s new works for Art Basel Hong Kong 2026 cite his recent institutional solo exhibition at Artists Space, New York, US and Kunsthalle Friart, Fribourg, Switzerland, where subtle gestures exploit human tendencies to imbue objects with meaning.
Toad Hall, 2026, plays with the misty boundary of nostalgia and hope, imitation and recreation, delving into the nuances of art as both process and product. Staging the innocence of found oil painting, produced to mimic Impressionist works, Kronz purposefully structures ambiguity, transformation, a diversion from reality and homage. Mounted onto board and surrounded by gold leaf, it carries visible seams of its imagined past – tape, staples, cardboard joints – Toad Hall becomes less about the pleasing pastoral scene it depicts. Kronz allows his works to circulate notions of the brittleness of personal relics, collective memory and cultural history.
Assembled with abstract intention, Facing the other way, 2026, presents the reverse of a found painting by an unknown artists, manipulated by Kronz with painted and colour pencil, then cradled in a hand-folded card frame with silver leaf. Here, history and meaning is disrupted through interruption and refusal, material and narrative curiosity ascend. In Food in the power outlet, 2026, Kronz’s gesture consists of inlaid spalted maple, removing sections of wood grain, rotating and replacing, forming a pseudo-domestic wooden veneered wall panel. As an investigation into the properties of design and spatial relationships, inner and outer perception, Kronz recalls the geometric forms of Josef Albers’ series Homage to the Square. Sealed in perspex, his delicate pencil drawing, Untitled, 2026, attracts a similar notion of mystified interiority.
Lewis Hammond, in parallel, operates in spaces between appearance and disappearance, existence and inertia, where the symbolic and the real fold into one another. The new oil paintings of the celebrated British artist continue his ongoing critical scrutiny of subjectivity, materiality and the legacy of representation. Weaving together art historical, personal and collective registers, psychological states shaped by the anxieties of our contemporary world, Hammond extends his symbolic Rabbit series.
He notes, “animals often function as stand-ins for aspects of the human psyche – instinctual, primal forces, suggesting something more instinct-driven. I’m interested in how animals exist alongside us: domesticated, industrialised, spiritually symbolic. They have a powerful tactile presence – smell, touch, physicality. There’s also a silence in animals, a gap in communication, which mirrors the introspective quality of the figures in my paintings.”
His compositions, a palette of muted earth tones and chiaroscuro, reference tonalities of Caravaggio, Goya and Zurbarán. Akin to Renaissance painting, idyll (world without end), 2026, unfolds but does not settle into a stable allegory. Several rabbits, gathered in a softly contoured landscape of hills and grass, move towards a human figure – a composition that is at once intimate and theatrical, imbued with the complexity of human interiority. Rendered with patient precision, the rabbit carries a dense symbolic history; an emblem of fertility, longevity, prosperity, innocence and vulnerability, a site of almost devotional observation and the paradox of purity and generation.