Tomm El-Saieh
Tomm El-Saieh, “Spiraling Siren” detail (2024) Acrylic on canvas 72 x 48 inches (182.9 x 121.9 cm)
© Tomm El-Saieh; Courtesy of the artist, CENTRAL FINE, Miami Beach, and Luhring Augustine, New York. Photo: Dawn Blackman.
As much as attending an art fair can be overwhelming – there’s so much to take in, often at a frenzied pace – it’s also an ideal setting to home in on the lesser known works, made by emerging, emerged or widely known artists alike. To get you started, we’ve pulled together a roster of esoteric names to keep an eye out for...
Tomm El-Saieh, Luhring Augustine
Meet Haitian artist Tomm El-Saieh, a returning favourite who cemented his status in the city way back in December 2017, when he aired his ICA Miami exhibition. Born in Haiti, he left the island aged seven, but has since riffed on its cultural cues, including Voudou. Splicing the trippy sensibilities – redolent of a trance – with abstraction, his work shares affinities with modern art classics, such as Kandinsky and perhaps in a more contemporary vein, the likes of Jawara Alleyne’s favourite, Caymanian artist Bendel Hydes. Of course, El-Saieh’s work is all his own, deploying an amped-up palette that almost breathes on the canvas. Richly layered with labyrinthine patterns and several coats, the oil paintings recall oil slicks or phosphenes. At the fair, he’s showing a work called “Spiraling Siren”. “[It’s] an anthem for hybridity and/or the ‘third space’,” he explains. “Sounds called from the depths, where myth and memory entwine, spiraling above and below waters, mapping what was and will be.”