Henrique Oliveira (1973, Ourinhos, São Paulo, Brazil) works with found materials, usually the discarded plywood used for tapumes (temporary fencing) in his native São Paulo, to create enormous sculptures that draw on themes of the intertwining of the urban and natural environments, the power of the organic world, and human reliance on nature, which we are often so quick to forget.
“The first thing that attracted me was the pictorial qualities I found in the wood. I started by taking sheets of plywood from dumpsters and painting them but, at some point, I looked at the natural surface and realised it felt like a painting already. They reminded me of brushstrokes because of how the wood fibres break down and the colours and textures that were in them. It had a sense of geometric abstraction,” states the artist.

Magnus Plessen (1967, Hamburg, Germany) is best known for a painting style that combines additive and subtractive techniques, employing both brush and spatula. The impetus of each work often begins with a photograph, which Plessen categorically believes imprisons its subject in time and space.
His aim in revisiting these images is to resuscitate the subjects, and therefore make what he calls “completely unsentimental” paintings—“Perhaps an image that leaves the viewer—and also the art object and its creator—much freer,” as he says. Plessen is also known for his signature blocky forms and the blending of figures and background, as well as the use of vivid colors.

Petrit Halilaj (1986, Kostërc, former Yugoslavia) creates complex, immersive installations that claim space for freedom, desire, intimacy, and identity while expressing his wish to alter the course of personal and collective histories.
In his artworks, the artist reflects on his experience as a refugee and explores the intersection of reality and fantasy through the rich world of children’s drawings. Halilaj draws inspiration for the work in found inscriptions, carvings, and scribbles collected from desks at his former primary school and other schools in Eastern Europe—a record of young people’s fantasies, fears, and private messages conveyed in many languages.

Pierre Knop’s (b. 1982, Nancy, France) landscape works, trees, mountains, sky and sea loom large, powerfully upstaging the small human and animal figures quietly hiking, resting or performing mundane tasks among them.
Viewers are invited to enter Knop's kaleidoscopic, timeless worlds through multiple access points, led in by a trail of distant vacationers, gentle ocean currents, or quaint, winding paths. His paintings convey a childlike fantasia, depicting idyllic mountainous landscapes with rich, swirling colors and a deliberate flattening of perspective.
Approaching the canvas as both a sketchbook and a painting, the artist combines multiple mediums to render enchanted scenes that are inspired by his natural surroundings and personal memories. This loose and playful creative process, complicated by decidedly Expressionist and Post-Impressionist influences, opens interpretation of each painting to multiple storylines and moods.

Eliza Douglas (1984, New York, USA), the Balenciaga muse and multimedia artist, produces a meta-painting conscious of its status and history, where the use of images taken from advertising or the art world, fashion objects and other consumer goods, reminds us that painting is also consumable.
Her visual art often plays with notions of identity, absurdity, and contradiction. She explores the boundaries between the abstract and the figurative, frequently incorporating surreal and humorous elements.

This wall-based work is one of a number of sculptures Louise Bourgeois (1911, Paris, France) made of spiders. Bourgeois related the idea of this creature with her own mother, who was a needlewoman and manager of the family’s tapestry restoration business.
The spider weaves a world from its own body, repairs its web and protects its young. Despite these caring associations, Bourgeois had an ambiguous view of maternity. The mother figure in her world view has the capacity to be ferocious and powerful as well as tender and nurturing. Although it holds a marble egg protectively in its body, the large scale and muscular legs of this sculpture create a threatening presence.

Jeff Elrod’s practice is rooted in the tradition of American twentieth-century abstraction. He is known for his paintings that employ a unique combination of digital and analog techniques.
Early in his career Elrod developed a method of making what he refers to as “frictionless drawings”: gestural compositions that he creates in the virtual workspace with the use of a computer mouse and basic software. These renderings are then transferred onto canvas employing a combination of digital printing and manual application. Through this multifaceted process the original drawings are adapted and transformed.
Elrod was among the first artists robustly to explore the pairing of digital and conventional painting techniques in order to expand the language of the medium; his working method has evolved in tandem with changes in technology. Throughout his work, Elrod aims to depict a kind of “screen space” in order to examine the dichotomy between traditional painterly space and the virtual space of the computer.

Miriam Cahn makes intimate, haunting paintings and drawings of semi-ambiguous figures, animals, and landscapes imbued with quiet emotion. Influenced by the black-and-white images she was exposed to through early television and reproductions in art history textbooks, Cahn used only black, white, and shades of gray in her early work.
She began using color in 1994, turned on to the formal and psychological power of mass media imagery and its gradual saturation. With exquisite sensitivity, Cahn uses color to highlight choice parts of her figures—principally the genitals, breasts, lips, or eyes—suggesting fragility and fecundity and endowing her figures with a sense of inner life.

Pol Taburet’s work is a heady and iconoclastic mix of references that range from the artist’s own Caribbean background, the region’s synchretic voodoo traditions and belief systems, wider contemporary culture, as well as classical painting.
From Francis Bacon to Baroque and religious art, these influences are all visible but his work is not subjugated to them. His twisted figures, which often appear as hybrids between human and animal, stand out against starkly abstract backgrounds. Taburet says his subjects speak of life and death, and the passage from one to the other.
In their own way, his paintings hold a spiritual quality that is hard to define, and which might not be immediately apparent. An instinctive artist, Taburet’s themes, forms, compositions and even meaning often reveal themselves to him as he paints. “I want the work to be legible through a child’s eyes, for them to see something joyful and fun inside of it, and for adults to have a much more intense understanding of what’s being presented”, – Pol Taburet.