Mario Dávalos (b. 1978, Santo Domingo) is a Dominican artist, writer, and cultural producer whose practice across painting and photography is grounded in a sustained philosophical inquiry into nature, perception, and the conditions under which we have come to simulate rather than inhabit the natural world. Educated in Fine Arts and Illustration at CHAVÓN La Escuela de Diseño, and holding a BFA from Parsons School of Design at The New School in New York, Dávalos began exhibiting in the late 1990s and has since shown in the Caribbean, the United States, and Europe, including solo presentations in Havana, New York, and Santo Domingo, group exhibitions at Contemporary Istanbul and Art Hamptons, and fair participation with Heliconia Projects at Hotel Warszawa Art Fair in Warsaw. He recently inaugurated his first major museum solo show “All the Manifestations of Water” at the Museo de Arte Moderno in Santo Domingo (2026). His photographic practice takes him to some of the planet’s most ecologically exposed territories such as the Arctic not only as documentation, but as a form of contemplative encounter.
Dávalos’s paintings engage deeply with the phenomenological tradition, drawing on Bachelard’s concept of reverie and Byung-Chul Han’s critique of a transparency-obsessed, efficiency-driven culture. He conceives of the canvas as a site of resistance to that logic: painting as something that cannot be optimized, accelerated, or quantified. His abstractions suggest pools, weather systems, and interior landscapes forms that exist in control and dissolution. Beyond visual art, Dávalos has published five books including “Yugen: siete viajes por Alaska and Africa”, he was also a founding member of the influential “Shampoo” collective, and produced the documentary “Pico Duarte” (2025). His is a practice that refuses easy categorization, operating with equal rigor at the intersection of ecology, philosophy, and image-making.
Adelisa Selimbašić (b. 1996, Karlsruhe, Germany) is an Italo-Bosnian artist based in New York whose painting practice navigates the charged terrain of the body and cultural belonging. A graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice, where she completed her Master’s in Painting in 2021, Selimbašić has developed a figurative language that is intimate and structurally ambitious; compositions built from layered bodies, often faceless, that resist singular readings of gender, ethnicity, or desire. Her canvases adopt the cropped, photographic framing of social media, yet subvert its logic: rather than producing legible identities, she dissolves them. Figures merge at the edges, skin tones bleed into one another, and the viewer is left not with a fixed image but with the sensation of closeness itself. She aims to create a world where the feeling of inadequacy doesn't exist. Chromatic intensity is central to the work: color is handled with a sculptural deliberateness, building tactile surfaces that push the paintings toward something almost material.
Selimbašić has developed a dynamic international presence with solo exhibitions at Lubov Gallery in New York (2026), z2o Sara Zanin Gallery in Rome (2026), Tommaso Calabro Gallery in Milan (2025), z2o Sara Zanin Gallery in Rome (2024), Ipercubo Gallery in Milan (2023), Fridman Gallery in New York (2023), and Marsèll Paradise in Milan (2023). Her work has also been featured in significant group exhibitions at Bradley Ertaskiran (Montreal), Nicodim Gallery (Los Angeles), Harkawik (New York), Rhodes Contemporary (London), Giovanni Bonelli Gallery (Mantova), and numerous institutions and project spaces across Europe and North America.
She has participated in major art fairs including Artissima, Art Brussels (solo presentation with z2o Sara Zanin), Arte Fiera Bologna, and multiple editions of Untitled Art Miami Beach (with Fridman Gallery and Kates-Ferri Projects). Her work is held in prominent collections such as the Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Foundation, the Maramotti–MaxMara Collection, and Soho House Rome.
Selimbašić has completed residencies at Fountainhead (Miami), IFITRY (Morocco), VIR Viafarini (Milan), Kates-Ferri Projects (New York), Dolomiti Contemporanee, and others, and has received notable recognitions including the Fountainhead Residency Prize at Untitled Miami Beach (2023) and finalist nominations for Premio Cairo (2024) and the Combat Prize (2022). Her work has been featured extensively in international press, including Vogue Italia, D La Repubblica, Artnet (“8 Painters to Watch”), i-D Magazine, Artribune, and Collater.al.