PLATO

Participating artists: Alex Sutcliffe, Erik Nieminen, and Karen Seapker.

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PLATO is thrilled to announce our participation in the NADA New York art fair from May 13 through May 17, 2026. At Booth E8, we will feature a three-person presentation dedicated to contemporary landscape. Uniting the past, present, and future of the genre, we will showcase Karen Seapker's dynamic semi-abstract compositions connecting natural cycles with a potential for social and political renewal; Alex Sutcliffe’s painterly mythological scenes inspired by the old masters, and Erik Nieminen's fluid tableaux of humans in nature, envisioning future possibilities for change both in artistic and physical landscapes. ​

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Alex Sutcliffe (b. 1997, Chicago, IL) is interested in painting as an ever-evolving historical archive. Using altered Old Master compositions as his springboard, Sutcliffe employs a layering method of repeated painting and successive masking of the surface with stencils. The forms are alternatively concealed, revealed, and interrupted. This method emulates digital processes in an innovative use of common painting conventions, reflecting on the construction and alteration of images today and across time.

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Erik Nieminen (b. 1985, Ottawa, CA) draws and paints his subjects after his sculptural clay models, and merges ancient mythology with AI's uncanny vision in his hand-painted canvases blending chaos with control, and entropy with creation. In an era where history is rewritten in real time, Nieminen's paintings serve as artifacts of both a distant past and a speculative future.​

 

Karen Seapker (b. 1982, Pittsburgh, PA) expands the canon of painting by depicting seasonal cycles blending abstraction and figuration, with titles referencing archetypal myths, natural phenomena, and feminist ideas. Seapker aims to tune the viewers' emotional state to the flow of her compositions, highlighting nature's ability to heal, provoke, and inspire.