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Taymour Grahne Projects is pleased to present Blue Hour, an online group exhibition bringing together an international cohort of artists exploring the swimming pool as a site of leisure, memory, intimacy and social encounter. The exhibition presents a multiplicity of perspectives on pools and aquatic spaces, examining their psychological, architectural and cultural resonances through scenes that move between the public and the private, the familiar and the dreamlike.
The exhibition features work by Dalal Al-Obaidi, Dan Attoe, Katherine Bradford, Shaun Ellison, Mark Entwisle, Michael Gac Levin, Christian Sleiman, Sarah McEneaney, Cara Nahaul, İhsan Oturmak, Sikelela Owen, Jake Sheiner, and Mikey Yates. -
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Taymour Grahne Projects springs into summer with Blue Hour, a group exhibition of thirteen contemporary painters, each presenting meditations on the swimming pool as a social setting. Across a dramatic kaleidoscope of narratives - hotel pools, backyard pools, municipal swimming baths and seaside settings - we’re invited to dive into the water in pools worldwide, throughout the course of the day from the white heat of the morning to fragrant twilight, when daylight softens, colours deepen and the sun’s heavy heat on the water diffuses into a mysterious warm night.
In these paintings, we encounter figures in crowds, small groups or none, either in crisp, clear relief or ghostly half-remembered forms. Ducks, birds and strange indefinable beasts wade the water’s edge. Trees line horizons or encroach into the heart of the composition. A swimming pool, in this exhibition, becomes a site of unexpected encounters, social interactions or moments of private contemplation . In this series we explore the many particular ways humans play in and around water.
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SHAUN ELLISON
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New Yorker Shaun Ellison’s Living water in the wilderness (2026) joyfully references the artist’s family links to South Africa, inspired by a card he painted for a family member who had recently returned to California from an African safari. He focuses closer to home in Inside Out in NY (2026), sparked by the local YMCA swimming pool, linking his inner interpretation of this everyday scene with a reflection of the paradox of a public space, filled with people each of whom are engaged in the spiritual, solitary activity of swimming.
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DAN ATTOE
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Dan Attoe’s paintings address themes spanning isolation, intimacy, masculinity and the way we build perceptions of our surroundings. His figures often appear emotionally disconnected, placed within environments that dwarf or expose them. Combining realism with surreal or cinematic elements, Attoe’s spare, large spaces emit vivid psychological tensions.
In Beachgoers (2025), two figures stand physically close but emotionally separate beneath a heavy sky. The simplified forms and stillness recall Edward Hopper and Alex Katz, while the wide horizon and empty space only underline the unfathomable psychological if not physical distance between the characters. Overlook Pool (2026) meanwhile, references The Shining and suitably, features a glowing swimming pool inside a vast mountain landscape. The contrast between artificial leisure space and expansive wilderness reflects Attoe’s recurring interest in scale, insignificance and contemporary life within nature. The work has an almost sci-fi feel, touching on the artist’s love of the form. -
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JAKE SHEINER
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For Jake Sheiner, pools can become settings for awkward social moments, places where, amidst the lapping wavelets and scent of chlorine, there can be isolation, uncertainty and alienation, all rendered with piercing social observation. In Bozo Party (2023), a late-night group of figures stand awkwardly around an empty pool under artificial light and skewed perspectives, creating a scene that feels both funny and uneasy. An Art Fair to Remember (2026) could be any art fair in the world with a distant crowd hobnobbing within the anonymous glamour of a five-star hotel pool, Sheiner managing to weave his characteristic sense of distance and loneliness beneath the surface. Meanwhile, Portrait of Two Artists (Pool with Two Figures) (2025), has a touch of Hockney’s 1960s works, with all their silent suburban stillness - a quotidian moment caught, a deeper narrative lurking just beneath the barely-rippling surface.
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DALAL AL-OBAIDI
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Dalal Al-Obaidi’s pastel works reverberate with a very specific sense of atmosphere, place and memory. In Afterglow and Chalet Poolside, palm trees, empty lounge chairs and glowing water flicker beneath the windy Kuwaiti skies. Her compositions are inspired by the chalets by the pools she remembers from childhood, where long, leisurely family gatherings would take place. Here, in works infused with the memory of those summer evenings by the water, it’s the absence of any figures that focuses attention. Instead, her use of intensified colours signifies emotional weight, while details are softened, to acknowledge the passing of time.
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SARAH MCENEANEY
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Sarah McEneaney’s paintings are rooted in everyday life. In Dubai Pool (2026) painted after a trip to the emirate, she views a rooftop pool overlooking the Dubai coastline. Here, McEneaney builds subtle visual drama with rich layers of blue, shaping pool, ocean and sky into one continuous space. Like McEneaney’s depictions of life in Philadelphia, she captures the stillness of the scene, while balancing openness with intimacy. Second Summer (2025) comes from that home territory, capturing the joyfulness of a happy dog, delighted to be with its owner in their backyard garden with small inflatable pool glowing in warm evening light. This work exemplifies McEneaney’s penchant for turning fleeting, ordinary moments into something emotionally resonant.
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MICHAEL GAC LEVIN
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Michael Gac Levin’s ‘automatic pools’ shimmer on the canvas, thanks to the artist’s characteristically loose, energetic approach. In his contributions to Blue Hour, he uses automatic drawing against the surface of a swimming pool, to create textured canvases, evanescing with the changing reflections and rhythms of water and light. His technique makes objects almost startle the unsuspecting viewer – for example, in Automatic Pool 2 (2026) the ornate white chair pops vividly against bright blue water. Incidentally, empty chairs appear time and again across his works, depicting an absence, the impression someone has just left the scene.
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CHRISTIAN SLEIMAN
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Christian Sleiman’s whimsical paintings, fruit bowl (pool), just jump and pool brunch rendered in acrylics and oil pastels, present vividly bizarre scenarios. This is partly due to the persona adopted by the artist when creating them, Sleiman explaining “These pieces emerge from my painting practice through the persona of a pirate - a traveler who drifts through ever-changing landscapes, meeting different creatures along the way”. The effect is joyously strange - in eye-popping colour, we encounter giant fruits sunbathing, beasts, ducks and swans cavorting, splashing, reclining and diving.
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İHSAN OTURMAK
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Turkish-born artist İhsan Oturmak’s richly detailed, yet ambiguous compositions evoke deeply personal memories of childhood. Forced Leap (2026) is based on memories of a municipal pool, “Küpeli”, local to the artist in childhood in Diyarbakir’s Sur district. But to Oturmak, this wasn’t a site of splashing fun and games. Rather, the artist draws out the pool’s claustrophobic architecture as an arena, where boys are lining up to take challenging dives in front of an audience of their peers. The competitiveness, pressure, fear and hesitation turns the act of entering the water into something impossibly brave. Meanwhile, in the surreal Empty Pool (2026), the unsentimental rendering of childhood speaks of uncertainty and social obligation. Oturmak’s psychologically charged compositions bristle with references to Edward Hopper, David Hockney, Giorgio de Chirico and Balthus.
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CARA NAHAUL
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Cara Nahaul’s works return to the recurring theme of Blue Hour - meditations on seemingly tranquil, recreational spaces. In Dreams of Tioman and Walking in Serralves, her Impressionist-like approach to water and greenery evoke the likes of Bonnard and Giorgio Morandi. In Dreams of Tioman her palette is bright and lush, yet the mood is melancholic. There is a sense of blankness in the pool’s suspended stillness that speaks of imminent or recent human presence. Like so many works in this group show, Nahaul’s pieces brilliantly evoke the potential of liminal spaces, those environments that feel psychologically charged through absence.
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SIKELELA OWEN
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Sikelela Owen's three contributions to Blue Hour are rooted in the tenderness of everyday life. In Water Fountain Fun (Kaiden and Aunt Mary in Kings Cross) (2026), Owen turns a familiar urban moment into something expansive: a woman and young child at a city fountain become a meditation on public space, access and the improvised joys of summer in the city, where fountains stand in for pools and pavements become playgrounds. Poolside Play (2026) draws in closer still, its figures only partially described against open, unresolved ground, as though the scene is still being recovered from memory rather than observed from life. In Seaside Construction (2026), Owen weaves together photographs of two children - her niece in New Jersey, her son in Essex - into a single, sun-warmed imagined scene. It's a painterly act that captures something true about family and memory: gathering fragments across distance and time into moments that feel, as Owen puts it, "both real and imagined."
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Image courtesy of Reece Straw
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KATHERINE BRADFORD
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Blue Hour also features four works by New Yorker Katherine Bradford, whose paintings of swimmers and pools are among the most recognisable in contemporary figurative painting. In works such as Dark Pool in the Sky and Small Pool Under a Moon, pools become dreamlike nighttime spaces, with hazy figures floating through pools, here depicted as glowing fields of colour. Bradford’s paintings balance playfulness with vulnerability, capturing the deep emotional pull that water and nighttime swimming can hold in memory and imagination.
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MIKEY YATES
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Filipino-American artist Mikey Yates skews towards an autobiographical perspective, drawing on a massive personal archive of family photographs and videos, pop culture and portraiture. He approaches his work with a hip hop musician's magpie mind, "sampling" elements from disparate sources to create a rich, dynamic new work. Sprinkler (2026) is characteristic of this deeply personal vision: based on a childhood memory of running through a sprinkler with his brother, the painting captures the resourceful joy of cooling off without a pool. Two figures move through a field of scorched golden grass beneath a darkening sky, the arc of water catching the last of the light, and there is something both exhilarating and tender in the image, a summer afternoon distilled into pure sensation. This work speaks quietly to a broader truth that runs through much of Blue Hour - that water, in whatever form it finds us, has a way of marking the moments we carry longest.
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MARK ENTWISLE
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Acclaimed British painter and illustrator Mark Entwisle’s pieces are meticulously executed yet carry undertones of mystery. In Bathers II (2017), the pensive figures staring away from each other are remarkably disconnected, alone together. The understated palette feels natural and unforced - and yet, we can’t help wondering what has just happened. Works such as Caleta and Chaise longue continue this tranquil mood but deliciously deepen the mystery. Entwisle frames pools at the base of seemingly unremarkable settings. But is everything here quite as it appears?
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Together, these thirteen artists reveal the swimming pool to be far more than a site of leisure. It is a mirror, a stage, a threshold - reflecting the light of the sky above and the complex, often contradictory currents of human experience below. Across continents and across time, from the chlorine-sharp clarity of a municipal bath to the dreamy shimmer of a moonlit pool, Blue Hour maps a world of encounter and solitude, childhood and memory, belonging and alienation. Water, in all its restless changeability, becomes the perfect medium through which to explore what it means to gather together. As the blue hour itself dissolves into night, these works linger, quietly asking us what we see when we look into the water.
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Blue Hour
Past viewing_room
