Justin Mortimer graduated from the Slade School of Art in 1992 and lives and works in London. He has won several prestigious awards including the EAST Award (2004), NatWest Art Prize (1996) and the BP National Portrait Award (1991).

Justin Mortimer (b.1970) is a British artist whose paintings consistently invite us to question the relationship between subject matter and content, beauty and horror, and between figuration and abstraction. While the imagery is almost exclusively pitiless, the texturing of the paint, the play between light and shade and the passages that lead from photo-realist definition to near-abstract formlessness are so sensitively handled as to make the work at least partially redemptive as well as to indicate a key philosophical dimension: the oblique relationship between evidence and interpretation.

The unity of Mortimer’s images keeps on breaking. Limbs are dislocated, space is disrupted. Elisions of imagery suggest a fragmented and fragmentary reality. This is not just a reflection of the ways in which one’s perception of the contemporary world is a kind of ever-evolving collage of imagery culled from an ongoing overload of print and digital information and layered over and upon our retinal vision, but also a suggestion of the ways in which the very fabric of society is increasingly fractured. The world is constantly shifting, and Mortimer’s paintings hint at the tectonic cracks and shifts appearing in the old world order. Put simply, the paintings depict a world in which nothing is stable or certain.

Mortimer’s paintings are not reportage or documentation, they are far too allusive and de-specified for that. Instead they represent a powerful and poetic visualisation of contemporary life, in all its grim and magical reality.

In fact these troubling images are composites variously sourced from the Internet, from medical journals, holiday photos and black and white images of war, collaged on Photoshop before being worked into a painting. Each canvas is built up through layers of paint that are then scraped away and built up again until a fully achieved environment forms. In this, scenes of abasement take place beside a supermarket’s plastic curtains, a washing line, some bobbing balloons, swathes of tarpaulin. The disjunctions take them beyond cold-eyed examinations of the atrocities of war and into a timeless, post-moral territory comparable to that marked out by Cormac McCarthy and JG Ballard. Real and imagined events become confused and the trajectory of humanity from barbarism to civilization is left in doubt.

Mortimer’s new paintings reflect upon a world in a state of disorder. Mortimer is an avid observer of the social and political upheaval that is the staple of the international news agenda and here are echoes of recent events in Ukraine, Venezuela, Syria and Afghanistan. Yet Mortimer wrings from this tortured narrative of violence and oppression images of both hope and despair and well as a strange and troubling beauty.

Working across a wide range of media, Lothar Hempel stages elaborate theatrical possibilities, placing the viewer as an autonomous character engaging in his constructed dramas according to their free will. Stemming from an interest in value and identification systems, Hempel’s paintings exist as potential casts for his interactive dilemmas. In this series of paintings, Hempel designs a parade of figures: identical in stance, each character is defined by their aesthetic properties; painting itself becoming an extension of persona, ideology and storytelling. In Golden Triangle, Hempel’s figure is a tragicomic muse: his face painted as a grotesque Venetian mask, and is sinister in uniform, adorned with a rainbow coloured tutu. Hempel frames his perverse presence with designer elegance; harlequin tiles and dead black-green buds suggest both a dandyism and courtly intrigue. Underlying themes of contemporary politic are neutralised for the viewer, creating not a portrait, but an instance of ethical quandary.

“Consideration of moral, ideological and ethical issues, are my central motifs, and are delivered by questioning the concept of the self.” Lothar Hempel explains. “The self here is fluid and dynamic, a social metaphor. It doesn't have a beginning or an end.” Taking fractured identity as a bi-product of modernity, Hempel constructs his portraits with a sense of fleeting transience. Painted on paper, they are figures of fancy; two dimensional characterisations, their similar format making them interchangeable props. In Kreuzberg Night, his figure operates as a formalist construction, a blank projection of contours and colour-fields, their attributes and symbolism readily appropriated for viewer self-identification and imagination.

Dada was an art movement formed during the First World War in Zurich in negative reaction to the horrors and folly of the war. The art, poetry and performance produced by dada artists is often satirical and nonsensical in nature

Born in 1888 in Berlin, Hans Richter was a German painter, graphic artist, avant-gardist, film-experimenter and producer. He strongly believed that any artist should be politically involved, fighting the best way they could on the side of revolution and against the war. He joined the Dada movement during 1916, and one of his biggest contributions to the anti-war politics as an artist in that time was being the co-founder of the Association of Revolutionary Artists (“Artistes Radicaux”) at Zürich, in 1919. He created one of the first abstract films ever, the Rhythmus 21, and although it wasn’t the first one as he claimed, it is considered a very important piece of art history. Later in his career, he directed Dreams That Money Can Buy (1947) and 8 x 8: A Chess Sonata in 8 Movements (1957) films, and made the film Dadascope as well as the first-hand account of the Dada movement titled Dada: Art and Anti-Art.

Lubaina Himid, Negative Positives: The Guardian Archive, 2007-2015 “… a wall of pages from the Guardian, with which Himid has intervened in one way or another, painting out pictures or text, and adding images here and there. In 2007, as the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade in the British empire approached, she decided to look in detail at the paper. It had plenty of images of black people in it, she noted – unlike the first time she studied it, in 1983, when she found only one photograph of a black person in a year’s worth of editions. …… But, she says, the Guardian “has this extraordinary habit of placing negative texts, about something else entirely, next to images of black people”. Wait, I say, isn’t that to be expected? Papers convey news, after all, much of which is bad. “But the juxtapositions are always to do with either violence, prisons, or theft,” she says …… She is probably right, in that editors do think about balance and pace of stories, about choice of pictures, about avoiding stereotypes and tropes, but they don’t look in the same way Himid does – with an artist’s eye for the whole effect of a page, at how unconnected stories and images, including adverts, bleed into one another.

Through a complex research-oriented practice, Allora & Calzadilla critically address the intersections and complicities between the cultural, the historical and the geopolitical. The interdisciplinary nature of their interventions is echoed by an expanded use of the artistic medium that includes performance, sculpture, sound, video and photography. Their dynamic engagement with the art historical results in an acute attention to both the conceptual and the material, the metaphoric as well as the literal. 

Allora & Calzadilla's body of work has long explored the dynamic between music and power. Some of the pieces that trace this "age-old sonic militarism against the contours of its relationship to contemporary culture and political ideology" are Clamor (2006), Sediments, Sentiments (Figures of Speech) (2007), Wake Up (2007) and Stop, Repair, Prepare: Variations on Ode to Joy for a Prepared Piano (2008). The first three feature "massive sculptural installation, live performance, collaboration, and, of course, extensive sound tracks."  Stop, Repair, Prepare is a complex hybrid of sculpture, performance and experimental musical practice. It consists of an early 20th century Bechstein piano that has been put up on wheels and ‘prepared’ by cutting a round hole in the center of the body and reversing the pedals, which allows a series of performers to play variations on the Ode to Joy (as transcribed for piano by Franz Liszt) from inside of the instrument. During the performance, the pianist, girdled by the absurd skirt of the instrument, periodically trudges with it through the performance space, dragging its weight as he or she plays.

Sterling Ruby’s work engages with issues related to autobiography, art history, and the violence and pressures within society. Employing diverse aesthetic strategies and mediums—including sculpture, drawing, collage, ceramics, painting, and video—he examines the tensions between fluidity and stasis, Expressionism and Minimalism, the abject and the pristine.

Born on Bitburg Air Base, Germany, to an American father and a Dutch mother, Ruby moved at a young age to the United States, where he grew up on a farm in southeastern Pennsylvania. There he encountered Amish quilt-making and Pennsylvania redware pottery, both of which directly inspired his initial forays into garment-making, soft sculpture, and ceramics. Ruby graduated from the Pennsylvania College of Art and Design, Lancaster, in 1996. He received a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2002, followed by an MFA from the ArtCenter College of Design, Pasadena, California, in 2005.

Living and working in Los Angeles, Ruby draws endless inspiration from the city’s physical and conceptual landscape. A subseries of the SP paintings (2007–14), the VIVIDS (2014), are electric color fields inspired by the shifting, multihued skies that he encounters on his way to the studio, while the SUBMARINE (2015) and TABLES (2015 –19) series were created from hulking industrial parts sourced nearby. Ruby’s work often deals with the ways in which acts of defacement, like urban demarcation and graffiti, can produce a painterly sublime. Both in his YARD paintings (2015–16) and in his WIDW paintings (2016–), he taps into the speed and motion of collage, incorporating bleached fabric and cardboard scraps and combining abstract color fields with fragments of studio refuse. Continually pushing the boundaries between artistic mediums, Ruby launched a ready-to-wear clothing line in 2019.