James Fuentes is pleased to present Wayfaring Stranger, a group exhibition featuring works by Ned Armstrong, Zuzanna Bartoszek, and Dylan Solomon Kraus himself. Introducing three painters who share a dialogue around the narrative and atmospheric capacities of figurative painting. A deliberate flatness of painting and a restrained, meditative use of color inflect their uncanny tableaux with a highly personal interiority. The artists’ personal histories shape their retro-futurist storytelling, converging fragments of memory with elements of cultural imagination drawn from film and literary representations.
Despite their sustained artistic dialogue and shared approach to visual language, Armstrong, Bartoszek, and Kraus take distinct stylistic turns. Shaped by a childhood spent hiking and camping, Dylan Solomon Kraus’ paintings reflect human encounters with vast natural and cosmic systems. At first, Kraus’ crepuscular landscapes read as almost monochrome, before the eye acclimates to recognize chess pieces rather than silhouettes of ordinary buildings, and a rolling ocean of water instead of a calm hillside. Slowly, each shade of blue seems to hold another. This delayed legibility folds his interest in symbolism and diagrammatic thinking into a kind of visual riddle, where recognition is staged as an event in time rather than something given all at once.
Note from the artist:
Ned Armstrong's intimate paintings draw from his personal experience and locality. The view of St Pancras station painted from his studio window, tennis courts in a local park. Working in watercolours and oil paint the landscapes communicate a fallen atmosphere, where dim lit cartoonish characters seep and bleed into their surroundings. In recent works the past refuses to let go, be it through the ascendant spires of the gothic architecture of St Pancras Station, or in the form of a lover hovering in the background of Paris Chaos. Working with these deeply personal subjects Armstrong’s paintings speak to the intimate experiences that shape all of our lives, and the circling desire to make sense of it all.
As both a painter and poet, Zuzanna Bartoszek is largely self‑taught, learning from her painter father, peers, and the world itself. She treats images like “overpainted” texts, reflecting upon the ways in which contemporary life is shaped by image technologies by focusing on a single figure or gesture. Often resembling a film still or the afterimage of a dream, Bartoszek explicitly draws upon the tradition of existentialism, filtering it through self‑portraiture and domestic or transit interiors that become stand‑ins for the world at large. Using layers and erasures, the works communicate everyday life as a stage where deeply existential questions—freedom, responsibility, guilt, loneliness, and meaning—play out in small, intensely felt scenes.
Wayfaring Stranger is curated by Dylan Solomon Kraus.
Ned Armstrong (b. 1992, London) graduated from the Edinburgh College of Art (2016) and Turps Banana Painting Programme (2021). Recent solo exhibitions include Wake, South Parade (London, 2023), Eyeful, Mouthful, Peaceful, A.P.T Gallery (London, 2022), and All Over, Middlesex Presents (London, 2018). Selected group exhibitions include Recurrence, ASC Gallery (London, 2025), One Thing Touches Another, Maya Frodeman Gallery (Jackson, 2025), Paint Talk, Staffordshire Street Gallery (London, 2024), Hand in Glove, A.P.T Gallery (London, 2022), Laumulistastanstypan (Hrísey, Iceland, 2022), and Bloomberg New Contemporaries, South London Gallery (London, 2021).
Zuzanna Bartoszek (b. 1993, Poznań, Poland) lives and works in Amsterdam. Recent solo exhibitions include Film Noir, Klemm’s (Berlin, 2025), Show Room, Galerie Tenko Presents (Tokyo, 2024), Wax Kid, Stereo Gallery (Warsaw, 2024), and The Goose, The Soldier, And The Baby, Gaylord Fine Arts (Los Angeles, 2023). Select works have been included in Cabin Gallery (New York, 2024), Kunsthalle Zurich (2018), Cell Project Space (London, 2017), and the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw (2017). Her most recent book, 36 Pokoi (36 Rooms) was published with Hela Press in 2025. Bartoszek is a recipient of the ING Polish Art Foundation Prize (2021). She is currently in residence at Rijksakademie in Amsterdam.
Dylan Solomon Kraus (b. 1987, Ohio) lives and works between Berlin, DE and New York and graduated with a BFA from Cooper Union, New York (2015). Recent solo exhibitions include The Joys of Sacrifice, Almine Rech (New York, 2026), ExHypnosis, Peres Projects (Berlin, 2023), the inevitability of alignment, Peres Projects (Seoul, KR, 2022), Spotlight: Dylan Kraus' Corvus Cornix, Almine Rech (London, 2022), Holy Unrest, Peres Projects (Milan, IT, 2022), That Which Reveals Itself to Those It May Concern, Mamoth (London, 2020), and Dylan Kraus: The Shining, Entrance, (New York, 2018). Selected group exhibitions include Moonflower, Europa (New York, 2022), ∞, Y2K group (New York, 2021), Everything is Personal, Tramps (New York, 2020), and Horology, Jack Hanley Gallery (New York, 2019).
