Luxury Atelier by Avalon Ashley Bellos celebrates the Israeli painter’s luminous world with an intimate exhibition and a night above the city.
Karina Lumière wants her paintings to be felt. Their color reaches toward something more intimate than recognition: the tenderness of a memory without a clear beginning, the ache of wanting, the sudden pleasure of feeling alive to something beautiful. Before the mind begins its familiar search for meaning, her canvases offer another possibility—to remain with the sensation, allowing it to deepen without demanding an explanation.
On October 22, The Colorful Language of Becoming, presented by Luxury Atelier by Avalon Ashley Bellos at EMCEE in Tribeca, gave that invitation a physical presence. Helping cultivate the occasion was Alina Bairamova, founder of Human Creative Services, whose involvement with Lumière began with the artist’s 2025 New York debut. Their combined efforts brought a private vernissage and rooftop soirée into being, with the painter’s sensibility at its heart.
Lavender deepens into violet with an almost bruised tenderness. Pink meets green in passages that seem to swell and recede, while pearly white creates breathing room within the intensity. There are suggestions of flesh, flowering forms and landscapes remembered through the body rather than the eye. Yet these associations remain wonderfully unsettled. A shape can approach familiarity and dissolve again, leaving behind the feeling that made it recognizable in the first place.
Perhaps that freedom is among the works’ most seductive qualities. Nothing requires a correct response. A passage that carries exuberance for one person might awaken longing in another; a pale expanse can offer reassurance or expose an unexpected vulnerability. Lumière permits these encounters to belong entirely to the person standing before the painting. Interpretation can wait.
The circumstances behind this collection make its radiance profoundly affecting. The Israeli artist created these works in the midst of war, while her son was fighting. Fear entered the studio with her: the anguish of a mother whose child was in danger, the helplessness of being unable to secure his safety, the strain of continuing through hours freighted with uncertainty. Painting became a place where that inner turmoil could take another form, where apprehension might give rise to something more generous than despair.
“I consciously wanted to create something full of light,” Lumière explained.
Within that declaration lies the collection’s extraordinary resolve. Hope persisted through the very act of making, taking shape in gestures and colors that allowed her imagination to reach beyond what she feared. The warmth of these canvases carries the force of a maternal longing for life to remain abundant, for beauty still to be possible. Their luminous surfaces hold the complexity of that desire without asking the viewer to know its history. Once understood, however, the joy within them becomes almost unbearably poignant.
Her process gives such feeling room to develop. Working without a predetermined image, Lumière follows instinct through layering, scraping and rebuilding, allowing each composition to emerge rather than imposing a conclusion upon it. Traces of that searching remain. A sumptuous passage can hold a quieter ache; an exuberant gesture can reveal its fragility. The title, The Colorful Language of Becoming, finds its resonance here, within paintings that preserve the unfinished, deeply human work of carrying on.
At EMCEE, the venue at 401 Broadway, the Atelier created a setting in which this body of work could command attention on its own terms. Among those attending the vernissage were Flying Whale Wine founder Maba Ba, fashion icon Tinu Naija, real estate mover and shaker Linette Semino, veteran journalist Tom Murro, art dealer Gene Lunz, artist Robin Cofer, Dawn Delikat of Pen + Brush, and Niall Brandon. Sponsors GENart and Flying Whale Wine supported the celebration.
The rooftop soirée, meanwhile, had other ideas about how the evening should end. Upstairs, DJ Dayah Modo supplied the music for an after-party with considerably less interest in restraint. The paintings had already done the seducing; an early departure would have been terribly unimaginative. After all, a serious relationship with art can survive a little flirtation after dark. Contemplation had enjoyed its moment. Now came the delicious business of letting the night unfold.
For Luxury Atelier, there is more to come. Further exhibitions, private salons and cultural partnerships are taking shape, extending Bellos’s appetite for occasions with intellectual substance and a sense of possibility. Tribeca offered a glimpse of that vision, allowing the gravity of an artist’s experience and the pleasure of gathering around her work to inhabit the same evening.
Still, the most personal exchange required only a viewer and a canvas. Lumière leaves space for whatever arrives there, including emotions that resist articulation. A painting may find someone before the words do. There is exquisite generosity in allowing that encounter to remain theirs.
