The group exhibition a door left ajar: diambe, michael ho, thiago hattnher, at kurimanzutto gallery in New York shakes up what we know about landscape painting. The three artists featured create paintings that eschew a landscape orientation in favour of canvases in ‘portrait mode’. Using the vertical orientation traditionally associated with portraiture, the artists draw focus to the subjecthood of their viewer and creator. They are invested in drawing out memories, dreams and unconscious interpretations from the landscapes they depict rather than arriving at faithful recreations. Brazilian artist Thiago Hattnher creates frames within frames; Diambe, also working in São Paulo, employs organic shapes in his sculptures and paintings, pushing them into the realm of the fantastical and imaginary. Michael Ho, based in the Netherlands, develops a special paint application technique, allowing him to layer and contrast an image with the distorted, blurred memory of it.

Curator Malik Al-Mahrouky, also a partner at kurimanzutto in the United States, planned the exhibition after seeing the painting Étant donnés (1996) by Marcel Duchamp. It is an assemblage visible only through a pair of peepholes, depicting a nude woman lying on a hill, her legs spread and face covered. In a conversation with STIR, he said, “It planted a seed of this idea of viewing something outside in, something that you have a very familiar relationship with, but suddenly becomes unfamiliar…Then I was travelling around Brazil last summer and I saw Thiago's work…and I was thinking how similar it was in terms of this feeling of otherness.”

Hattnher’s practice is based on juxtaposition, challenging notions of what a painting must be or what it can do. His artworks take scenes that are different in tone, style and period and put them into dialogue with each other and the viewer. With no title and no clear focus, the paintings resist being settled into fixed meanings. Featuring atmospheric plains of colour, wilting flowers, blurry treelines and what could be sea or sky, the paintings are perhaps more reminiscent of Piet Mondrian’s abstract art than the work of landscape masters. With their moody, desaturated colours and depictions of seemingly empty rooms and fields, Hattnher’s compositions exist primarily in the tears, seams and gaps between their constituent parts.

In Untitled (2025), for example, the background, which suggests a treeline, is covered in a scratchmarked glaze with the appearance of a yellowing patina. Beneath, blurry blue flowers, yellow and their petals fall away, invoking a still life perspective. At the focal point of the image is a flat, sky-blue rectangle, almost like an error message pop-up blocking the ‘view’. Through juxtaposing these elements, Hattnher prompts viewers to ask: What is the focus of this painting? Must a painting have a recognisable focus?

In paintings by Ho, a second-generation Chinese artist, disparate subjects are layered directly over each other, with ghostly imprints of foliage and hands contrasted with the sharp lines of dark branches. Archival images inspire his art, alongside motifs and symbols from Chinese art and mythology and his own life and heritage. Ho uses a special technique to achieve a layered effect. Al-Mahrouky says, “The texture has this kind of eerie or haunting feeling of a mental state of pain…it has this grainy consistency that you can tell has not been traditionally applied. He pushes the paint through from the back to the front, where there are layers of tape. The different shapes and motifs [are realised] through this time-consuming layering process. Michael produces the paintings almost as sculptures; you find them hanging [like] skins in his studio.”

All three artists work across mediums, though this is perhaps most obvious in multimedia artist Diambe's work. Their bronze sculptures form sinuous, organic shapes that borrow from natural forms, proposing both aesthetic and ornamental ends. This approach also extends to their paintings, Al-Mahrouky elaborates, “The indentations, marks and patina of the sculpture, you also see in the paintings and there is this peculiar cross-medium exercise that happens.”

Some of Diambe’s paintings seem like more traditional, if stylised, landscapes at first, until one is drawn to a loop in the top left corner containing a window into a different landscape, or notices how the curved lines that move across the canvas also divide it into a grid. Their signature brushwork—short, saturated brushstrokes jittering across the canvas—adds a subtle geometry and interrupts the painting’s continuity. Through small changes in organic forms, Diambe’s works form a vibrant, imaginary ecosystem. They invite viewers to consider this process of transformation as it applies to ecology in the anthropocene and to imagine how it could be redirected to a different end. 

Multiple reference points and histories collide in these artists’ practices, lending themselves to the design of the exhibition. “Michael, interestingly, was a trained architect and now also works in film…Even the way in which he makes paintings is definitely an architectural methodology that's very systematic in terms of layering surfaces and this three-dimensional sculptural approach. The same with Diambe, they paint but also work with sculpture and there are research-based installations and performances and I think you see that in the work—this kind of promiscuity,” says Al-Mahrouky.

Al-Mahrouky was cognisant of the artists’ disparate backgrounds when organising the show and welcomed the possibilities it would open up. By subverting the orientation and shapes of their landscapes, the artists of a door left ajar are able to create dreamlike works that explore subjecthood, the limitations of memory, the complexities of the psyche and collective memories that linger beneath the surface. They find new ways to create tactility, narrative and a relationship with their viewer outside the bounds of naturalism, bringing landscape painting into a postmodern world and the milieu of contemporary art. 

The exhibition ‘a door left ajar’ will be on view at kurimanzutto gallery in New York from June 12 – August 1, 2025.