Merlin James considers the history and legacy of painting from an unconventional viewpoint. As commented by Artforum’s Sherman Sam, his work “has sought to rigorously problematise the experience of painting while simultaneously deepening its formal language”. Generally small in scale, his works depict diverse subject matter including vernacular architecture, riverside views, post-industrial landscapes, empty interiors, mysterious figures and scenes of sexual intimacy. His works refine and renew many of painting’s most time-honoured concerns – genre and narrative, pictorial space and expressive gesture, the emotive resonance of colour and texture.

Isabel Nolan has an expansive practice that incorporates sculptures, paintings, textiles, photographs, writing and works on paper. Her subject matter is similarly comprehensive, taking in cosmological phenomena, religious reliquaries, Greco-Roman sculptures and literary/historical figures, examining the behaviour of humans and animals alike. These diverse artistic investigations are driven by intensive research, but the end result is always deeply personal and subjective. Driven by “the calamity, the weirdness, horror, brevity and wonder of existing alongside billions of other preoccupied humans”, her works give generous form to fundamental questions about the ways the chaos of the world is made beautiful or given meaning through human activity.

Marcel Vidal makes paintings and sculptures. Quietly disarming and unsettling us with an ominous beauty, Vidal’s paintings are marked by their controlled brushwork, layering oil on linen with delicacy and precision. They are refined and restrained, incarnating brightly lit fragments of photographs or digital images: unidentified figures caught by flashbulbs hold their arms in defensive barriers; glossy foliage catches the light before retreating into darkness; distinguished hands are frozen mid-clap. Vidal’s minimal compositions are severely cropped to reveal only a sliver of their subject, using ambiguity to frustrate interpretation, all while inviting our curiosity. 
 

Zhou Li creates paintings, sculptures, installations and public art using mixed media, including oil paint, washes of ink, charcoal and cotton cloth. Her lyrical abstract paintings capture her acute sensory observations of the world: lightness and shadow, solidity and dissolution, the sense of being. Building upon the history of European painting and the central tenets of traditional Chinese art, Zhou Li harnesses both traditions to develop a distinct painterly language. Her paintings looks towards nature as a starting point, particularly the mountainous terrains of Southern China, but are imbued with a sense of much more: every brush stroke on the canvas is driven by her persistent query and pursuit of being.