You Must Change Your Life

curated by Tom Morton

June 26 – August 7, 2026
54 White Street, New York, NY (US)

Alexander Tovborg / Elinor Stanley / Sophie Ruigrok / Sara Rossberg / Jhonatan Pulido / Ken Kiff / Matthew Day Jackson / Ted Gahl / Gabriella Boyd / Anderson Borba / Kinga Bartis / Mahesh Baliga / Charles Avery

Enquire for availability

Alexander Tovborg’s oeuvre testifies to a consistent artistic project in which he insists on humanity. He consistently calls for our contemplation and critical reflection as he pokes at our greed, hostility, mercy and self-righteousness – regardless of whether these things are structured by a specific faith or based on a completely personal ideology.

Tovborg graduated from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Cophenhagen (DK) in 2010 and the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Karlsruhe (DE) in 2009.

Elinor Stanley’s paintings feature nudes adrift in painterly spaces of uncertain depth and ambiguous boundaries. The relationships between her figures are as elusive and open to interpretation as the environments they inhabit. With a sensuous, fluid quality, the figures seem both substantial and weightless—sometimes floating toward the viewer, obscuring the perspective, or sinking into an alternate realm. Through her use of painting, Stanley enhances the viewer’s experience, shifting focus in ways that mirror the disorienting movement of the eye. This creates a feeling of imbalance or vertigo, anchored by a deliberate, weighted gaze. Her recurring subjects and ideas seem to loop endlessly, as if trapped in an ongoing cycle of reflection and perception.

Stanley graduated from the Royal Academy Schools, London (UK) in 2023.

Sophie Ruigrok’s paintings and drawings often explore the dynamics between humans and nature through surrealism and symbolism. Her imagery is devised from a large archive of source material, including screenshots of YouTube videos, scenes from art history, photos of her friends, Tarot cards, Miranda July’s disconcerting short stories, observational drawings, strangers’ holiday photos found in junk shops, and dreams. By merging these disparate elements when devising a composition, she seeks to comment on the cyclical and illusory nature of time and the collective unconscious.

Ruigrok's writings can be found in frieze, Dazed, and Confused Magazine. She graduated from The Royal Drawing School, London (UK) in 2019 and was selected for New Contemporaries 2020.

Sara Rossberg’s figurative paintings explore human vulnerability, emotion, and resilience through an intuitive and deeply personal process. Drawing from observed life rather than narrative, historical, or literary references, she transforms anonymous faces and everyday moments into universal reflections on the human condition. Her work seeks to evoke feeling rather than tell stories, emphasizing presence, introspection, and the quiet strength found within ordinary experience. Through a painstaking technique of building translucent layers of acrylic pigment and medium, Rossberg creates richly textured, object-like paintings that invite close, immersive viewing. Combining figurative imagery with an intense focus on color, materiality, and perception, her paintings aim to achieve a profound emotional resonance and meditative stillness.

Jhonatan Pulido’s practice, deeply rooted in painting, explores Colombian architecture, the traditions of rural communities, and their relationship to socio-cultural conflict. His work references the multi-layered, richly coloured residential and commercial walls of buildings in his native Colombia, where memories of graffiti left by guerrilla and paramilitary groups are often hidden beneath layers of paint. He works through a continual application of material that produces bold fields of colour and form that interact and overlap to explore the vibrancy of painting today alongside the evocation of memory and reparation of trauma lodged in the past.

He received an MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art, London (UK) in 2019 and completed his BFA at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Bogotá (CO) in 2014.

Ken Kiff was a celebrated British artist known for his visionary and distinct painting practice. His oeuvre continues to influence a younger generation of artists. 

Kiff grew up in England during the second world war and was deeply impacted by the death of his father when he was only six years old, the effects of which would remain present throughout his life and art. He trained at the Hornsey School of Art and went on to teach at Chelsea School of Art and the Royal College of Art, London (UK) where over thirty years he influenced generations of artists. Kiff gained prominence in the 1980s, he was elected Royal Academician in 1991 and he was Associate Artist in Residence at the National Gallery, London (UK), 1991-1993. Although recognized during his lifetime, he carved a solitary path, maintaining a commitment to the pictorial and symbolic values of modernism at a time when Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art dominated. In recent years there has been a renewed interest in his work in the context of contemporary figurative painting, with many younger artists turning to Kiff’s work for inspiration. 

Matthew Day Jackson’s diverse practice encompasses sculpture, painting, collage, photography, drawing, video, performance, furniture design, and installation art. The concept of connectivity is at the core of Jackson’s work. He investigates a wide range of philosophical, scientific, and historical themes that he interweaves with his personal narrative.

The artist employs intensive research and production processes to create objects that coincide with a reassembling of history. He views the combination of materials and references to disparate time periods as a metaphor for interconnectivity. His use of materials reflects the idea that our evolution is not only found within the slow adaptation of our bodies, but it is, “also present in the materials we use to express our humanity over time, the evolving process of the creation of society, and the performance of culture.”

Ted Gahl creates serial artworks free from any signature style. His practice includes experimental sculptural assemblages constructed from a sprawling range of materials and canvases of tightly focused subjects painted with a traditional brush. Gahl explores the possibilities of painting throughout history and the potential of the medium in the contemporary moment.

In 2010, Gahl received his MFA from Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, RI (US) and in 2006 he received his BFA from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY (US).

For Gabriella Boyd, painting is an act of translation, from the interior or verbal to the exterior and visual. Her paintings give form to internal sensations, memories, narratives and spaces held in the mind. Boyd explores and collapses the distinction between interior and exterior states by bringing together representational motifs with purely symbolic structures or diagrammatic forms. Working in the vein of psychoanalytic and Surrealist tradition, her forms emerge from the unconscious drift of association: an inward turn toward the body as the site of knowing. 

Boyd studied at Glasgow School of Art from 2007 to 2011 in Glasgow (UK) and Royal Academy Schools from 2014 to 2017 in London (UK). In 2027, Boyd will present a solo exhibition at the Yuz Museum, Shanghai (CN). 

Anderson Borba’s practice bends and broadens the material and conceptual possibilities of wood in freestanding totems, or hanging wall reliefs. Aiming for textural ambiguity, the artist colors his pieces with oils and varnishes, coats them in collages of distorted pictures, covers them in grooves and notches, and burns the volumes’ surfaces. A distinctive trait in Borba’s approach is the synthesis of traditional craft and contemporary modes of expression, such as digitally manipulated imagery. Taking cues from both art-historical canons of sculpture and the self-taught craftsmen of inner Brazil, the artist’s process-oriented approach results in tactile abstractions that set off bodily allusions as one circles the space around them, shifting our perception of proportion, mass and shape. In unbalancing the distinctions between matter and image, Borba’s objects acquire an animistic aura and mischievous ritual connotations.

Kinga Bartis is widely recognized for their evocative and emotive paintings that explore themes of identity, longing, love, mourning and more. Their work is rooted in philosophical and psychological frameworks that question how we perceive, understand, and navigate our sense of self and the world around us. Bartis envisions painting as a means of breaking free from the habitual ways of defining our being—instead they look towards a multidisciplinary, open approach. Their work is characterized by their distinctive use of colour and texture, often blending figurative elements with abstract forms. The paintings evoke a sense of mystery and psychological depth in which they employ a muted, sometimes haunting palette, thus creating works that are introspective and reflective.

Bartis graduated with an MFA from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Copenhagen (DK) in 2018.

Mahesh Baliga’s work explores memory, perception, longing, and the fragile boundary between observation and imagination. Drawing inspiration from what he calls the “ignored everyday,” he transforms ordinary moments, rituals, and encounters into emotionally resonant scenes that reveal the extraordinary within the familiar. Figures, animals, trees, and objects function as poetic protagonists in his compositions, carrying stories that move between personal experience and shared human emotions, particularly themes of love, loneliness, loss, and the passage of time. Working in casein tempera and natural mineral pigments associated with the Indian miniature tradition, he creates atmospheric images in which the clearly seen dissolves into memory, desire, and dream. Through subtle surreal interventions and luminous, filmic surfaces, Baliga invites viewers into contemplative spaces where perception, recollection, and emotion intertwine.

Baliga received a postgraduate diploma in painting from the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, Vadodara (IN) in 2007, and a BFA from Chamarajendra Academy of Visual Arts, Mysore University (IN) in 2005.

Over the course of his career, Charles Avery has dedicated himself to a singular world-building project through the depiction of an imaginary island. Titled The Islanders, this project describes the formation of Avery's extensive fiction through drawings, writing, objects, architecture, and design.

The Island at the center of Avery's constructed world is located on an archipelago. The gateway to the Island is the town of Onomatopoeia, a highly-textured metropolis that bears the hallmarks of an evolving urban landscape. Once the stepping off point for the pioneers who first came, the town experienced rapid transformation from a colonial outpost, to a boom town, bustling metropolis, depression-ravaged slum, and finally a regenerated city of culture and tourist destination. The culture and fabric of the Island continue to evolve, further illuminated with each successive work.

With special thanks to all participating artists and their representing galleries.

For enquiries regarding the featured works or for more information,
please email enquiry@grimmgallery.com

Tom Morton is a British curator, writer, and regular contributor to frieze magazine, ArtReview, and Art Basel Stories. He has curated over 70 exhibitions, both as a curator at the Hayward Gallery, London (UK) and Cubitt Gallery, London (UK) and as an independent curator. His major shows include A Room Hung With Thoughts: British Painting Now, the Green Family Foundation, Dallas, TX (US), 2025; The Kingfisher’s Wing, GRIMM, New York, NY (US), 2022; Äppärät, The Ballroom, Marfa, TX (US), 2015; British British Polish Polish: Art from Europe’s Edges in the Long ‘90s and Today, co-curated with Marek Goździewski, CSW Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw (PL), 2013; and British Art Show 7: In the Days of the Comet, co-curated with Lisa Le Feuvre, Hayward Gallery, London (UK) and touring, 2010-11. Morton is the author of numerous monographic catalogue essays, on artists including Glenn Brown, Rashid Johnson, Pierre Huyghe, Christian Marclay, Tal R, Tschabalala Self, Tino Sehgal and Rose Wylie, among many others. He is based in Cambridge (UK).