Alex Červený presents a new commissioned work at Moderna Museet in Stockholm. The exhibition House of Nisaba: New Stories of Painting is on view from May 14 through August 30.

Guided by the question, “Which visual and symbolic vocabularies are artists developing in painting today?”, the exhibition approaches the allegories and iconographies in contemporary painting. 

The French expression Droit de Suite titles Červený’s work. In Brazilian Portuguese, it refers at the same time to the resale right and also translated as “right to move forward,” interpreted by the artist as “the elementary right to be.” “Thus, Droit de Suite is a votive painting, a devotional altarpiece to the freedom of being—the fruit of the immense pleasure I feel in the manual act of painting,” the artist comments. 

With large scale, the canvas is segmented into three circles, bringing together texts and iconographies revealed to the artist over the three years of its making: from the representation of visible stars in the Southern and Northern Hemispheres to the painterly pride of Byzantine painters Eutychios and Michael Astrapas, all the way to “the gentle impulses of eroticism, among many other things.”