Born in Stockholm to a Swedish mother, a teacher, and an Ethiopian father, an artist, Noah Beyene’s works often depict those close to him, friends and family, who are reimagined as though siphoned through the pulsating lens of the cinematic auteur. Beyene’s paintings often feel like tableau vivants in oil paint: they are unflinching stories, scenes, snapshots into a life, while always oscillating between the literal and the profound. Like us, Beyene knows the most present people in our lives well: the shape of a friend’s wrist, the drop of a grandmother’s shoulder, the arc in the heel of a lover still sleeping beside us. Like us, Beyene knows how much is at stake in an attentive life, and how much meaning can be tenuously held, like an over-heating valve, in the parts that keep us connected to those we love.