5 Artworks That Made Our Heart list This Week

At Arts to Hearts Project, we never know what the heart list will look like until the week is almost over. We just pay attention to what stops us what gets sent around the team, what we find ourselves going back to, what is still sitting with us by Sunday.

And plenty gets seen before it gets there. Between submissions, the community, and the quiet late-night corners of Instagram, a lot of art passes in front of us in a week so the pieces that keep pulling us back, the ones nobody can quite scroll past, are the ones that end up here. Some weeks they share a mood or a medium and the list almost writes itself. Other weeks they have nothing to say to each other at all, and we’ve stopped trying to make them.

This was one of those weeks. Five artworks that had no business being on the same list different countries, different styles, different reasons for stopping us and somehow belong there completely. We won’t tell you what connects them, because honestly nothing does. We’ll just let each one speak for itself.

This is our heartlist for this week.

01. Dirty Martini (in Acid Green) by Kevin Sabo @kevin__sabo

Dirty Martini (in Acid Green) by Kevin Sabo opens our heartlist this week and it is exactly as good as it sounds. Against a punchy acid-green backdrop, a sleek Deco-styled woman in deep reds and rust leans into an oversized martini glass, her long limbs curving around the stem until she and the drink almost become one elegant shape.

The olives sit their mid-glass, the whole thing streamlined and sensual like a 1930s poster that decided to loosen its tie. It is glamorous and a little decadent, but there is real wit in it too the way the figure melts into her martini tells you everything about the mood he is after.

Kevin is a New York based painter known for his surrealist, retro-tinged figures and his queer performance work, and this piece is part of his solo show Cosmopolitan at Kate’s-Ferri Projects in the city.

Follow him, his whole world is glamour, colour and just the right amount of mischief.

02. Tipping Point by Poppy de Havilland @poppydehavilland

Second on our heart list this week is Tipping Point by Poppy de Havilland and the calm on her face is exactly what makes it so unsettling. A woman hangs upside down against a bare grey backdrop, her chest bound in white cloth, her long dark hair spilling toward the floor, and a big yellow satin bow tied around her neck as though she has been wrapped up and presented like a gift.

Her face is calm, almost serene, which somehow makes it stranger the stillness and the strain sitting right on top of each other. Everything feels suspended, caught in the half-second before something gives way, which is exactly what the title promises.

Poppy is a London-based British painter, born in 1996, whose work lingers on these poised, improbable moments that hint at ritual or aftermath without ever spelling out the story. Drawing on the clarity of early European painting, she builds images that look controlled and calm but hum with unease.

Her page is worth your time, she has a real gift for making stillness feel like it is about to break.

03. Arriving by Xue Ruozhe @ruozhe

Our third pick this week is Arriving by Xue Ruozhe it’s a weightless, blurred, and impossible to look away from. A young woman in a silvery slip dress hovers just off the ground, arms opened wide, toes pointed, her whole body weightless against a soft grey haze.

Her face is blurred almost to nothing, smeared into motion, so you read everything from her posture instead the openness, the stillness, the sense of someone caught between leaving and landing. At more than two metres tall the painting genuinely surrounds you, all muted greys and silver with barely a hard edge in sight. The title says arriving, but it could just as easily be lifting off , that in-between feeling is the whole point.

Xue was born in Xuzhou, China in 1987 and works in Beijing, having trained at the Central Academy of Fine Arts and the Royal College of Art in London. She is known for these suspended, grey-washed figures that sit right on the line between realism and something far stranger.

Go find her and take your time, her work rewards every second you give it.

04. Kalaban by Fred Battle @fred_battle_zoerism

Kalaban by Fred Battle lands at number four on our heart list this week and it is the most joyful thing on this list. Classic rounded Citroëns are stacked one on top of another like a scrapyard tower, all pale blues and lilacs, set against burning purple mountains and a lavender sky.

Down in front, figures in brilliant yellow, orange and red boubous move among the wrecks one bent over an engine, another striding past with fabric flowing behind him and the warm and cool colours crash together so hard the whole scene almost hums. It is a Malian setting the title points to Kalaban, near Bamako, where these old French cars live long second lives and Fred paints it with real affection for the everyday object.

Trained as a product designer in Paris, he built a whole practice which he calls Zoerism, around manufactured things and the forms we make and discard. This piece comes from his exhibition Retour sur Terre.

His page is full of work this vibrant and this carefully made, go spend some time there.

05. Artwork by Alpay Aksayar @alpayaksayar

And the last one on our heart list this week is this beautiful figurative work by Alpay Aksayar, a table full of men mid-celebration and every single one of them someone you feel like you already know. Men in fezzes, turbans and old sashes, heads thrown back laughing, glasses and a spoon raised high, one on his feet with his arm up in a toast.

The table spills over with food and a tall copper pot, and the floor is a happy mess of kicked-off shoes, a jug and scattered playing cards. Alpay paints it all in warm, old-master realism, but the mood is pure comedy and warmth every exaggerated grin feels completely genuine.

He captioned it “for those who can always find something to celebrate,” which is exactly the spirit of the thing. He is a Turkish painter, born in 1986 and based in Istanbul, working in this rich, classical figurative style with a real gift for faces and feeling.

Follow him as his figures feel like old friends you have not met yet.

These five artists made our week better just by making what they make. And that is worth acknowledging out loud. Go find them. Spend time on their pages. Share the painting that stayed with you. Leave a comment that actually means something because behind every piece on this list is a real person who put real effort and real feeling into something and sent it out into the world hoping it would land. It did. Go let them know.

And if this week’s list made you want to make something yourself Arts to Hearts Magazine Issue 15: Where I Am is open right now and closes October 5th. A collaboration between Arts to Hearts Project and StudioToGallery, built around the theme of home, belonging, migration, solitude, identity wherever that takes you. Open to artists everywhere at every stage. One week left.