Artist Dominique Knowles’s Muse Is Also One of His Greatest Loves: Horses

Dominique Knowles's adoration of horses began in childhood, when he started riding in the Bahamas. “I drew horses because I desired horses,” the 27-year-old artist says. Perhaps this bond is the genesis for the movement, yearning, and mark-making that present themselves as something of a spiritual trinity in his work.

When the artist turned 14, he became immersed in the community of artists that orbited his uncle’s contemporary art gallery, Popopstudios International Center for the Visual Arts, in the Bahamian capital of Nassau. “Painting offered an alternative way of living that the horse stables did not,” he explains. “I can be emotional in the paintings. It’s a different sense of community that is a bit more self-governing, eclectic, and unique.”

Fueled by this early exposure, Knowles found his way stateside, earning a BFA and MFA in painting at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he completed his studies in 2020.

Today, the artist’s paintings could be described as character studies that explore, with spiritualistic dedication, a single being or act. Every brushstroke arcs and billows so that Knowles’s central figures appear at once to be moving and melting—rendered in a palette of rustic, almost prehistoric oranges, browns, and reds.

“My Beloved,” his most recent show, which ran this past summer at Hannah Hoffman Gallery in Los Angeles, was an homage to Knowles’s horse, a lifelong companion who died in 2021. The show featured eight works bearing the same title—The Solemn and Dignified Burial Befitting My Beloved for All Seasons, 2023.

The artist painted the windows of the gallery an earthy ochre, bathing the space in warm light to create a cathedral-like hush. Indeed, one painting felt almost reminiscent of an altarpiece.

In Knowles’s swirling atmosphere of death and rebirth, mourning seems to be a requirement for engagement. “The most important thing,” he says, “is the intimacy in the painting, the intimacy between the painting and the viewer, or between the artist and the expression— it’s this alchemy of intimacy."

For more about CULTURED's 2023 Young Artists, read our features with Adraint Khadafhi Bereal, Emma Stern, and Oscar yi Hou.