The shortlist signal. Artist

This week we spotlight Candy Bassas, turning pools and nocturnal waters into uneasy rituals where cyanotype and oil collide; Ailyn Lee, whose layered canvases scrape and conceal to build fragile yet fierce architectures of memory; and Jie Zhang, painting gardens as living thresholds where past, present, and future overlap.

How do artists get featured on Munchies art club? They ask Kurt

Fresh ideas and urgent voices, these are the artists on our mind in Radar #11.

Candy Bassas – Contemporary Painting between Barcelona and Berlin

Candy Bassas paints the tension between silence and sound. Cyanotype merges with oil across her canvases, figures moving through pools and nocturnal waters where comfort slips toward warning.

Read her in depth article and explore her work

Born in Barcelona and now based in Berlin, her work spans painting, printmaking, writing, and music, with recent solo exhibitions at LiTE-HAUS and Kunstraum Reuter and inclusion in the Dorothea Konwiarz Stiftung ’24 duo show Things Fall Apart.

Candy Bassas, Mimosa, 2025, oil, acrylic and ink on canvas, woman surrounded by yellow flowers, contemporary figurative painting. — **Candy Bassas:** *Mimosa*, 2025. 90x100 cm. Oil, acrylic and ink on canvas. Image courtesy of the artist

Follow her Berlin-based practice through exhibitions and her Instagram presence.

**Candy Bassas:** On the left: *Seeking Nature II* and on the right: *Seeking nature IV,* 2025, 70x100 cm. Oil monotype print. Images courtesy of the artist

What’s the pulse in her pools?
Silence and noise collide. Figures appear mid-shift, caught between ritual and rupture.
Why water, why now?
Because water never settles. It flips comfort into alarm in a single look.

Candy Bassas, oil on canvas, solitary figure in pink and green nocturnal water, contemporary art — **Candy Bassas:** *Uncertain sense of liberty IV*, 2024. Image courtesy of the artist

👉 Dive deeper into Candy Bassas’ work →

Ailyn Lee – Painting from Seoul

Ailyn Lee explores painting as both construction and concealment. Her canvases are grounded in raw gestures and fragmented images that echo architecture and memory, never fully resolved.

Trained in fine arts in Seoul, her work develops through layering and scraping, building a visual language that resists simple reading.

Ailyn lee, depicts a wall sculpture with what looks like A human headed butterfly cut open surgically, wall sculpture — **Butterfly Butterfly Infirmary**, organ-pink butterfly relief wired with an IV loop; stone clay, paraffin wax, pastel, acrylic, ceramic teeth, mother-of-pearl, Hanji paper, thread, gauze, glass beads, wooden drawer/stool, ink, epoxy, heart lock, **10×10×8 in**. Image courtesy of the artist.

Group shows in Korea and abroad have placed her paintings within conversations of process and perception.

Follow her evolving investigations via exhibitions and her Instagram.

**Ailyn Lee:** On the left: **Dream Sipper** - a spindly totem on a stool with mannequin parts and bottle; stone clay, fur fabric, gemstone, wooden table leg, shoe expander, acrylic, string, IV line, ribbon, **35×20×70 in**. and on the right we have: **Lunar Incubation****, 2025** Graphite, acrylic, pastel, test tube with glass beads, epoxy, Korean **Hanji** paper, **Nobang** silk, butterfly specimen, thread on canvas, **10 × 8 in each** (diptych).

What makes her paintings hum?
Layers scraped, built, hidden. Fragile yet fierce on the same surface.
What happens when she erases?
Absence glows as bright as paint itself.

A tender yet perilous vision: a seated figure threaded with diagrammatic lines, framed by talismanic crescents and candles, while a hot-pink pomegranate glows like a heart. Memory, ritual, and desire condense into one charged emblem. — **Ailyn Lee,** **Poisonous Pomegranate****, 2025** Acrylic, **Hanji** paper, **Nobang** silk, lace, thread, pastel, graphite on canvas, **60 × 36 in**.

👉 Dive deeper into Ailyn Lee’s work!

Jie Zhang – Painting gardens as thresholds of time

Jie Zhang turns gardens into spaces where past, present, and imagined futures overlap.

Her paintings stage thresholds of memory and time, where plants and paths suggest shifting states rather than fixed scenes.

Jie Zhang garden painting in what looks like a field of green with light blue flowers with a woman that looks like the artist — **Jie Zhang :** *Was, am, will be, In the garden* 2023 oil on canvas 60x50cm. Image courtesy of the artist

Trained in both China and Germany, she works with oil on canvas to hold transient atmospheres, showing how cultivated landscapes can act as living archives.

Recent exhibitions highlight her approach to painting as a meditative passage.