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Hot new artist: Henry Curchod, worthy heir to the Nabis
Who are the hot new artists to follow this season? And who are the collectors’ favorites? As the 56th edition of the Art Basel fair is taking place this week, Numéro art has invited six leading figures from the art world to share their latest favourites. Today, focus on painter Henry Curchod, art collector and Docent founder Hélène Nguyen-Ban’s favorite.
By Anya Harrison.
Published on 18 June 2025. Updated on 7 July 2025.
Henry Curchod, a painter heir to the Nabis
“Controlled chaos, vibrating with intuition.” This is how collector Hélène Nguyen-Ban describes the brightly-colored, multi-perspective paintings and drawings by the Californian-born Swiss-Australian artist Henry Curchod. The young painter, who studied fine art in Australia and now lives and works in London, portrays fantasy-like worlds whose overall effect is destabilizing.
Scored with gestural marks in oil, charcoal, and gouache, Henry Curchod‘s images reveal anonymous characters, actors in this strange play that is life, where seemingly everything is in constant flux.
“His brushstrokes are nervous, almost musical, a kind of mental calligraphy linking the figurative with something deeper, almost unconscious,” adds Nguyen-Ban, for whom Curchod’s painting evokes the Nabis, “especially Bonnard and Vuillard, in the subtle way he incorporates the human figure within the overall movement of the canvas while never detaching it from the background.”
The new darling of the Clearing gallery
Curchod’s 2024 exhibition at Clearing in New York was a remarkable illustration of this: he showed a series of works in which foreground and background are almost indistinguishable.
It is hard to discern the human figures hidden behind horizontal bands that recall Venetian blinds – Strapped to Your Wheel (2023) or So Not Rainbow Rhythms (2023). For Hélène Nguyen-Ban, these paintings capture “fleeting moments, fragments of emotion, as if the artist were opening a crack in reality and inserting memories into it”.
Henry Curchod is represented by the Clearing gallery.
Some of the artist’s artworks are currently exhibited by the gallery at the Art Basel fair as part of the exhibition Maison Clearing, from June 15th to 21st 2025, Bannwartweg 39, Basel.
