Best Of

Nina Hartmann, Sylvie Hayes-Wallace, Emma Kohlmann, Karice Mitchell, Gozié Ojini, Lyric Shen, Tommy Xie, Ang Ziqi Zhang

Silke Lindner is pleased to present Best Of, a group exhibition featuring works by each artist represented by the gallery.

Nina Hartmann’s multimedia practice explores the functionality and malleability of proof in a modern day information age. Resin sculptures, shaped panels of encaustic, and vinyl screens carry photographic information collected from a variety of sources including official government outlets, institutional archives and online forums. Through the use of AI and other methods of alteration, Hartmann manipulates the images she finds, questioning their legitimacy and challenging roles of authorship. Informed by an interest in mysticism, symbols, diagrams, and maps of peripheral belief systems, she develops her own symbolic language that breaks down hierarchies within systems of information.

Sylvie Hayes-Wallace’s sculptural practice explores the confinement of the self in its thoughts, feelings, and the body as a barrier between the inner self and exterior world. Mapping interior and outer existence, she pulls from an ever-evolving personal archive of markers of time, belongings, notes, and ephemera. Guided by the measurements of her own body, she incorporates these archives into wire and glass cages, curtains, columns, and collages that create a complex self-portrait without being representational. By taking inventory of the self, Hayes-Wallace attempts to understand, organize, and contain the chaos of the mind by mirroring the precarious constructs of our interior world and exterior surroundings.

Emma Kohlmann uses watercolor and painting to create a distinct universe in which anthropomorphous figures, flora, and fauna peacefully coexist in spiritual spheres. Visually informed by a variety of cultural references encompassing Greek and Roman mythology, modern painting history, folk art and DIY punk ephemera, her paintings manifest a cosmos free from hierarchies. A lack of relational scales translates the egalitarian belief system Kohlmann’s practice is rooted in. In evocative color schemes, Kohlmann’s palettes transcend from nature’s elements to the spiritual, mirroring the unique spaces she creates at the intersection of the earthly and fantastical.

Karice Mitchell is a photo-based installation artist whose practice uses archives of Black erotic publications and digital manipulation to explore the representation of the Black female body in popular culture and pornography. Through scanning, enlarging and cropping, Mitchell creates works that hover between explicitness and illegibility. By re-contextualizing existing imagery, she reframes Black womanhood and sexuality beyond the constraints of the white gaze, patriarchy and historical constructs.

Working primarily in sculpture and installation, Gozié Ojini’s practice employs careful gestures with found objects to explore the social significance and emotional resonance held within their history and materiality. Frequently manipulating and restructuring musical instruments and domestic objects, he echoes the language of sampling in hip-hop music production, translating the sonic into the physical. Through silenced objects coded with synesthesia, Ojini’s practice follows a poetic logic that meditates on inheritance, memory, non-performance and shifting systems of value.

Lyric Shen’s practice creates sites of diffusion by pairing ancient crafts like papermaking and casting porcelain with contemporary processes, such as inkjet printing and the use of digital images and videos. Primarily engaging with image, sculpture, and writing, Shen meditates on memory, exile, transference, and privacy.

Tommy Xie’s practice navigate the complexities of queer identity through the lens of his Chinese upbringing and the social and cultural experiences shaped by Western society. His paintings dwell in intimate moments where bodies, gestures, and sensations materialize into poetic and often surreal narratives. Through layered compositions in melancholic hues, Xie’s work examines the nature of selfhood and the collaborative acts of queer mothering.

Ang Ziqi Zhang’s paintings take shape within a push-pull relation that creates spaces between abstraction and subtle figuration, desire and control, rational and affect. Investigating semiotics of Eastern culture and Western Capitalist consumer society, the base structure of her paintings often develops by incorporating signs, symbols, diagrams and language. Dark and densely-layered, or light and blissful, Ziqi Zhang’s rhythmic compositions draw parallels to her engagement in club culture and her affinity for electronic music.

Nina Hartmann (b. 1990, Miami FL) lives and works in Queens, New York. She received an MFA from The Yale School of Art in Painting & Printmaking in 2023 and a BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2013. She has had solo exhibitions at Gathering, London, UK (2024); Silke Lindner, New York, NY (2023); and Gern en Regalia, New York, NY (2021). Her work has been included in group exhibitions at Daniel Faria Gallery, Toronto, CA (2025); Voloshyn Gallery, Miami, FL (2025); Clima, Milan, IT (2024); Rose Easton, London, UK (2024); Tara Downs, New York, NY (2022).

Sylvie Hayes-Wallace (b. 1994, Cincinnati, Ohio) lives and works in New York. She received her BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2017. She has had solo and two-person exhibitions at Silke Lindner, New York, NY (2024); Chapter NY, New York, NY (2024); In Extenso, Clermont-Ferrand, France (2023); A.D. Gallery, New York, NY (2022); Bad Water, Knoxville, TN (2022); Interstate Projects, Brooklyn, NY (2021); and New Works, Chicago, IL (2019), among others. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at Rose Easton, London (2024); Cob Gallery, London (2024); Chapter NY, New York, NY (2023); Simone Subal Gallery, New York, NY (2022); King’s Leap, New York, NY (2021); Annex de Odelon, Ridgewood, NY (2021); and Frontera 115, Mexico City (2018), among others.

Emma Kohlmann (b. 1989, The Bronx, NY) lives and works in Western Massachusetts. She received a B.A. from Hampshire College and has exhibited in the United States and internationally. Most recently she has had solo exhibitions at Silke Lindner, New York, NY (2025); V1, Copenhagen, Denmark (2024); Cooper Cole, Toronto, CA (2023); and Jack Hanley Gallery, New York, NY (2021). She has been included in numerous group exhibitions including shows at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tucson, Tucson, AZ (2016); Rose Easton, London, UK (2024); Venus over Manhattan, New York, NY (2022); and Andrew Edlin, New York, NY (2018).

Karice Mitchell (b. 1996, Toronto, Canada) lives and works in Vancouver, Canada. She received her BFA at York University in 2019 and her MFA at the University of Waterloo in June 2021. She has had solo exhibitions at Silke Lindner, New York, NY (2025); Franz Kaka, Toronto, CA (2024); Capture Photography Festival, Vancouver, CA (2024); Burrard Arts Foundation, CA (2023); and University of Waterloo Art Gallery, CA (2021). Recent two-person and group exhibitions include François Ghebaly, Los Angeles, LA (2025); Susan Hobbs, Toronto, CA (2022-23); the plumb, Toronto, CA (2023).

Gozié Ojini (b. 1995, Los Angeles, CA) lives and works in New Haven, CT. He holds an MFA in Sculpture from The Yale School of Art (2025), and a BA from the School of Art and Architecture at UCLA (2019). He was recently included in ‘Alice Coltrane: Monument Eternal' ’ at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, LA (2025). He has had solo exhibitions at Silke Lindner, New York, NY (2024) and In Lieu, Los Angeles, CA (2023). He has been included in group exhibitions at Michael Benevento, Los Angeles, LA (2025); Funkhaus, Berlin, Germany (2025); Kiang Malingue, New York, NY (2025); Et Al, San Francisco, CA (2023); and ‘Nomad’ at the Torrance Art Museum, Torrance, CA (2021).

Lyric Shen (b. 1993, Goleta, CA) lives and works in New York. She completed an MFA at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, MI, and received a BA in Book Arts at the University of California, Santa Barbara, CA. Solo and two-person exhibitions have been held at Silke Lindner, New York, NY (2025); Et al, San Francisco, CA (2023); and Canada, New York, NY (2022). She has been included in group exhibitions at University of Hartford, CT (2025); Rose Easton, London (2024); Jack Hanley Gallery, New York, NY (2024); and Marinaro, New York, NY (2022).

Tommy Xie (b. 1998, Chaozhou, China) lives and works in London. He received a BFA at Central Saint Martins in London in 2021. He has had solo exhibitions at Tureen, Dallas, TX (2025); Silke Lindner, New York, NY (2024), Ginny on Fredrick, London, UK, (2022) and Monti8, Latina, Italy, (2023). Selected group exhibitions include ‘, Grove, London, UK (2023).

Ang Ziqi Zhang (b. 1994, Brampton, Canada) lives and works in New York. She received her MFA in Painting and Printmaking from The Yale School of Art in 2023. She has had solo and two-person exhibitions at Romance, Pittsburgh, PA (2025); Neuer Essener Kunstverein, Essen, Germany (2024); Silke Lindner, New York, NY (2024); LVL3, Chicago, IL (2023); and Produce Model Gallery, Chicago, IL (2021). Her work has been included in group exhibitions at Chapter NY, New York, NY (2023); Derosia, New York, NY (2023); Jan Kaps Gallery, Cologne, Germany (2023); Apparatus Projects, Chicago, IL (2023); Lo Brutto Stahl, Paris (2023) and Good Weather, Chicago, IL (2022); among others.