The Curators Are Catching Up to What I've Always Painted

Every January, Artsy asks a group of leading curators what they think the coming year in art will look like. This year's edition, "16 Leading Curators Predict the Art Trends of 2026," landed in my feed last week, and two answers stopped me.

Jess Baxter, assistant curator at Tate Modern, said she's watching artists "increasingly exploring trans-temporalities and past wounds (physical, personal, or societal), to look at how memory fractures and how time loops back in on itself." A few paragraphs later, Roxana Marcoci, senior curator of photography at MoMA, described art in 2026 as maintaining "a dialectical relationship with its own history," process-driven work where craft, memory and material sit alongside whatever technology throws at it, rather than being replaced by it.

Reading that, I felt a bit like someone had been looking over my shoulder in the studio.

Memory has never been a subject I add to a painting after the fact, it's the material I start with. A composition rarely begins as a picture of something; it begins as a feeling left over from somewhere, worked out in paint until the memory and the mark-making become the same thing. That's what Baxter means, I think, by "fracture": the past doesn't arrive whole, it arrives in pieces, and the painting is where I try to see what those pieces add up to.

It's a strange thing to have curators at two of the world's biggest institutions independently name, as a coming trend, work you've quietly been making for years without a trend attached to it. I don't think that means I was ahead of anything, more that this pull toward memory and process is one artists have always felt, and it just happens to be catching institutional attention again right now. Either way, it's good company to be described by.

You can read the full piece, with all sixteen curators, on Artsy: 16 Leading Curators Predict the Art Trends of 2026.