Why Hand-Crafted Portraits Are Vital Most

In this group of artists, intimacy, memory and abstraction intersect in various ways, but all share a sensitivity to the short lived: the neglected image, the half-remembered place, the unsteady border in between what we see and what we feel. Together, they form a peaceful but insistent meditation on how meaning builds up in normal life.

Taken together, rendered in her unique painterly design, these retellings of easily-forgotten minutes show how an ordinary life, when taken a look at from a specific perspective, starts to radiate a palpable sense of significance.Rosemary Burn Bowl of cherries, 2025 Mona Sultan's photocollages explain the fragmentary nature of memory and meaning, calling photographic reality into question by breaking down, recontextualising and repeating images. Stabilizing methodical precision with a definitely human, necessarily imperfect visual sensibility, his paintings are easy going abstractions for the digital age.Luke Rudolf Fizzog 4, 2025 Jo Berry's airbrushed paintings provide physical kinds to images that we typically see by means of a screen andrapidly forget, such as stock photos and ReCAPTCHAs. To me, her distinct language hazy, misshaped, discreetly disturbing reflects the alienation and dissociation intrinsic in a world filled with images that appears to appear and vanish ever-more quickly. A shadow, a handstand, a sheer curtain draped over a houseplant: by photographing such things, he provides a second life in which they end up being irreversible. Emile Kees Handstand, 2023 Jo Hummel's minimalist abstractions have a specific ahistorical quality; they link several histories of product experimentation and production from around the globe within a special visual language. They locate the audience within landscapes that feel limitless with a low mist hanging over the horizon. Though unknown, these images are deeply peaceful, inviting you to revel in the simple enjoyments of a constantly twilit, pastoral world.Llus-Carles Peric Cap a La Calma, 2014 The scenes that Bianca MacCall paints a train window showing the carriage's interior over the passing landscape; a barely-visible automobile concealed by an ochre-yellow curtain appear deliberately mystical. They make me think about the simultaneous absurdity and charm of the world in front of me, considering familiar scenes through an unknown lens. Bianca MacCall Perpetual Movement, 2023 Henry Ward's painting practice is ever-shifting. If you stand in front of one of his paintings for long enough, you may see it change in genuine time. The uncertain, unpredictable nature of his work is what makes me keep returning to it.Henry Ward Bethany III, 2023.