JAKUPSIL

Jakupsil is pleased to present a three-person presentation by Anikoon, Adam Handler, and Raymond Ishii at Future Fair 2026, taking place at Chelsea Industrial in New York. Bringing together three painters working in cross-cultural contexts, the booth is organized around a shared preoccupation: the prepared surface as the origin of meaning. Each artist has developed a distinct process—dense gestural accumulation, sandblasted layers, and mineral filler layering—through which the physical constitution of the canvas becomes inseparable from what the work proposes conceptually.

Adam Handler (b. 1986, USA) constructs his canvases through careful, gesture-driven application of acrylic, oil stick, and dense pigment, leaving thick accumulations of color that register the body's movement. His spectral cast—ghosts, wide-eyed girls, cats, figures dissolving into ground—is rendered with a deliberately imprecise mark: the bulk of the oil stick resists fine control, and Handler treats this as method rather than limitation. Through layering, density, and tactile mark-making, Handler investigates the rhythms of perception and presence, using the behavior of paint itself as a conduit for expression.

Anikoon (b. 1980, Korea) develops his paintings through a labor-intensive process of repeated layering and sandblasting, gradually revealing strata of pigment that produce a weathered, metallic patina—a technique biographical in origin. Growing up alongside iron foundries in 1980s Korea, he absorbed a material environment that now structures his pictorial method: each paint layer accumulates and is worked back, producing surfaces that resemble oxidized metal, making the history of their making legible in the physical constitution of the picture plane. From these textured grounds emerge robotic faces that appear both mechanical and subtly human, reflecting the layered masks individuals carry. His process emphasizes materiality, transforming layered surfaces into spaces where abstraction and figuration coexist with psychological resonance.

Raymond Ishii (b. 1993, Japan) works through a method in which acrylic mineral fillers, binding polymers, and pigment are applied to wood panels in discrete color zones—each limited to a single color, assembled like a puzzle, never blended across boundaries—so that differences between material properties remain structurally visible rather than dissolved. The resulting topography, concave and convex, physically instantiates the work's conceptual argument: that coexistence does not require assimilation. Where Gutai pursued coexistence through collision, Ishii proposes coexistence through separation—a model for diversity grounded in simultaneous, uncompromised presence.

Jakupsil is a transdisciplinary collective with a nomadic gallery program based in New York and Seoul. The Korean term jakupsil refers to a studio, atelier, or laboratory—a space of making through which the collective activates vacant urban sites with exhibitions and artist-led interventions that intersect art, architecture, and cultural production, with the aim of expanding the scope of architectural and curatorial practice.