Why Hand-Crafted Portraits Are Vital Most

In this group of artists, intimacy, memory and abstraction intersect in various ways, but all share a level of sensitivity to the fleeting: the overlooked image, the half-remembered place, the unstable boundary between what we see and what we feel. Together, they form a peaceful but insistent meditation on how meaning collects in normal life.

Taken together, rendered in her unique painterly style, these retellings of easily-forgotten moments demonstrate how an ordinary life, when analyzed from a particular point of view, begins to radiate a palpable sense of significance.Rosemary Burn Bowl of cherries, 2025 Mona Sultan's photocollages describe the fragmentary nature of memory and meaning, calling photographic reality into question by breaking down, recontextualising and duplicating images. Balancing methodical precision with a distinctly 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 give physical forms to images that we normally see by means of a screen andrapidly forget, such as stock photos and ReCAPTCHAs. To me, her distinct language hazy, misshaped, subtly disturbing reflects the alienation and dissociation inherent in a world saturated with imagery that seems to appear and disappear ever-more rapidly. A shadow, a handstand, a large drape draped over a houseplant: by photographing such things, he gives them a 2nd life in which they end up being irreversible. Emile Kees Handstand, 2023 Jo Hummel's minimalist abstractions have a particular ahistorical quality; they link several histories of product experimentation and creation from all over the world within a special visual language. They position the viewer within landscapes that feel unlimited with a low mist hanging over the horizon. Though unfamiliar, these images are deeply serene, inviting you to delight in the easy enjoyments of a perpetually twilit, pastoral world.Llus-Carles Peric Cap a La Calma, 2014 The scenes that Bianca MacCall paints a train window reflecting the carriage's interior over the passing landscape; a barely-visible cars and truck hidden by an ochre-yellow drape seem intentionally mysterious. They make me believe about the simultaneous absurdity and charm of the world in front of me, considering familiar scenes through an unfamiliar 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 alter in real time. The unclear, unpredictable nature of his work is what makes me keep going back to it.Henry Ward Bethany III, 2023.