John Baldessari was a pioneer of American Conceptualism, persistently challenging and redefining the expectations that influence our understanding of art. In National City (W,1,2,3,4,5,6,B) (1996), he turns his lens and his brush on the landscape of his own hometown, a modest community south of San Diego. The work comprises eight color photographs of routes he regularly traveled in National City. Across each image, Baldessari applied a hand-painted acrylic circle directly onto the photographic surface to conceal what he considered visual flaws. The circles progress from the palest white through a graduated tonal scale to the deepest black, imposing a systematic order onto the incidental and the everyday. These painted dots obscure as much as they reveal: rather than suppressing what lies beneath, they make us acutely aware of it. In doing so, Baldessari reminds us that all representation is ultimately a form of selection and exclusion.

Anne Imhof’s practice spans performance, sculpture, painting, and film, yet returns always to the same insistent subject: the body – how it moves through space, how it is observed, what it can and cannot occupy, and how fleeting experience might be translated into enduring form. Untitled (2026) is a large-scale painting depicting a hyper-realistic wave rendered in dramatic midnight blue, recalling the depths of the sea, its breaking crest dissolving into froth and tinged pink in places. The motif is in fact constructed: the image originates digitally before being realized, laboriously, in oil paint, layer upon layer applied across the canvas. Imhof then scratches directly into the painted surface, releasing gestural white lines that undulate, preserving the energy of a body in motion and the ephemeral movement of the dark water. While scratching has long been integral to her aluminum works, its application to canvas marks a new development. Frozen mid-break, the wave holds an uncanny stillness that nonetheless emanates an unmistakable sense of force.

George Condo is an icon of contemporary American painting. His unique pictorial language reimagines the imagery and practices of Western art history, most especially modernism and abstraction, with vitality and dynamism. Out the Window (2024) perfectly demonstrates Condo’s command of color and form. Starting from a gray rectangle in the upper left—a clever nod to the window in the title—the composition sweeps down to the lower right. Against a deep purple backdrop, thick black lines carve out fragments of entwined figures, their overlaid faces and tangled limbs merging into a distorted corporeal entity. The central composition shows influence from Picasso as well as cartoons, whilst the background, rendered in purple with loose grey brushwork, is deeply reminiscent of Abstract Expressionism. Otherworldly and grotesque, the psychological depth of Condo’s mysterious creatures is enhanced by an intense, all-over engagement with the canvas that brings a restless physical energy to the work.

Reinhard Mucha is a leading German sculptor and conceptual artist known for combining formal rigor and conceptual clarity with painterly and sculptural detail, often infused with subtle irony. Schuld, [2019] 2015 takes as its central element a model train set, cut apart and offset, its two halves mounted side by side on a wooden board, with horizontal aluminum struts spaced across the width of the work. Worn and stained, the board bears the marks of years of use: tape, handwritten notations, the traces of removed fixtures, and a streak of browned glue with an almost painterly quality. Laid over the surface, a sheet of glass is painted with fine, dense lines that evoke the geometry of a railway network—a theme that runs through Mucha’s œuvre—simultaneously defining and obscuring what lies beneath. The work’s composition and the reduction of the train set to formal essentials recall the economy of Minimalism, yet the stained wood, the texture and the pencil markings insist on remaining what they are—traces of a specific object whose prior existence resists such geometric absorption.

Cyprien Gaillard’s multifaceted practice examines the cyclical interactions between nature, human industry, conservation and decay, made visible and palpable through materials gleaned from meaningful sites across the globe. Gaillard’s new series of large-scale fabric-wrapped acoustic panels—salvaged from the gutted auditorium of Trieste’s Museo Revoltella—explores the patterns by which forms, environments and histories interweave across time. Life in the cracks (Part 2) (2025) bears the beautiful ghostly pattern of repeated touch: past visitors brushed against the velvet, inadvertently leaving marks that turn the surfaces into abstract canvases or modern cave paintings. Each panel features a single, hand-embroidered motif along one edge, where the material once concealed by frames transitions into exposed sections. Stitched onto this demarcation, a skeleton inspired by the Danse Macabre serves as a reminder of death’s inevitability and alludes to the echoes of past eras, spaces and sounds.

Icons of postwar German photography, Bernd and Hilla Becher meticulously documented industrial architecture across Europe and North America—utilizing large-format cameras and precise focal lengths to capture their signature black-and-white studies of framework houses, water towers, and other industrial forms. Their photography simultaneously distils each construction into a taxonomy of visually and functionally homogeneous structures, whilst emphasizing the particular and eccentric character of each. Framework Houses (1960–73) record the distinctive architecture of Germany’s industrial Siegen region, where Bernd grew up. Arranged in a grid of nine photographs, this “typology“ juxtaposes networks of gables and beams to highlight subtle symmetries, similarities, and differences. In doing so, the Bechers elevated industrial structures into a clear, unprecedented aesthetic realm.

Rosemarie Trockel’s work critically explores the conceptual dimensions of craft, challenging entrenched social norms surrounding the notion of the male artistic genius, gender roles and cultural philosophies. She first garnered acclaim in the 1980s for her “knitting paintings,” machine-produced wool works that evoke traditional feminine handicrafts. These pieces subverted conventional associations of women’s work by integrating them into the fine art context. Climate Box (2023) is part of this ongoing body of works, updated for a new millennium: instead of using a machine to produce them, Trockel wraps loose strands of yarn around the canvas to form geometric compositions. The pared-down composition and horizontal grain directly reference the male-dominated world of twentieth-century abstraction and Minimalism, offering a female-driven alternative aligning with forebears such as Agnes Martin. The title references conservation boxes, sealed containers built to maintain humidity and temperature levels for the preservation of delicate objects. Here, the analogy is made literal: the plexiglass frame encases the yarn beneath it, admitting the material to the same institutional logic that long excluded it.

Considered one of the pioneers of conceptual and installation art since the 1960s, Joseph Kosuth has undertaken sustained investigations into the philosophy of language and the primacy of meaning through objects, installations, texts, publications and projects in public spaces. ‘Self-Described Twice’ [Pink] (1966) exemplifies Kosuth’s use of neon. Rather than using the medium for commercial advertising, he uses it as a “readymade” form of public signage. In this early work, Kosuth was deeply influenced by the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, creating pieces that were tautologies – statements that are literally self-defined and true by their own nature. True to its title, the work plays on the literal meaning of words defining themselves. The text glowing in pink neon describes nothing other than its own physical existence and linguistic structure, whilst inciting humor through repetition.

Barbara Kruger’s razor-sharp, unmistakable work wields image and word as instruments of power, probing control, class, corruption and consumerism. For over four decades, her voice and aesthetic have transcended the insularity of the art world and influenced everyday visual culture. Untitled (A thing called you) (2024) is part of Kruger’s body of textual wall works that grapple with our current dystopian reality. In a large-scale digital print on vinyl, Kruger renders the phrase “A THING CALLED YOU” in her signature bold font, stacked across the composition in fading shades of gray that shift from stark white to deep shadow. Activating the space and playing with the seductive visual effects of three-dimensionality, the piece exemplifies Kruger’s ability to consistently question how we reveal ourselves to one another, reducing the self to language and interrogating what it means to be addressed, defined or reduced to “a thing” by another’s words.

Sylvie Fleury’s multimedia practice playfully yet provocatively interrogates the politics of consumerism, fetishism, and desire, radically challenging established artistic paradigms. This discourse is embodied in her series of mannequin sculptures, which feature the lower half of a fiberglass model coated in sleek car paint, legs crossed and draped in clothing—part shop-window display, part art object, collapsing the line between fashion and fine art. In Mercury /Virgo (2025), a pair of blue legs emerges from the wall over which a quilted, silver reflective coat hangs. Suspended mid-air, they disrupt normative bodily relations in a manner reminiscent of Robert Gober’s eerie, disembodied wax sculptures. Yet, unlike Gober’s unsettling works, Fleury’s legs remain seductively inviting, leaning into the sleek aesthetics of materialism.

The research-based practice of Gala Porras-Kim considers the relationship between cultural artifacts and the institutional conventions around registration, conservation and display. In her series A terminal escape from the place that binds us (2021–ongoing), Porras-Kim considers the afterlife of two-thousand-year-old human remains held by the Gwangju National Museum in South Korea. In a letter to the museum’s director, she calls into question at what point the agency over our own bodies ceases. Alongside the letter is a large-scale map made using paper marbling techniques, which create a landscape of vivid pigment swirls suggesting an alternative, self-determined final resting place. A refreshing approach to institutional critique, the work questions the colonial ideology behind the encyclopedic museum and proposes nuanced ways of representing the ancient past.

Hyun-Sook Song understands painting to be an act of concentrated meditation that visually records the artist’s state of mind. Her decades-long practice has been defined by a distinctive style: simple compositions of deliberate linework, which are reminiscent of East Asian calligraphy, rendered in egg tempera. 5 Brushstrokes (2024) depicts the artist’s white gestural sweep anchored by an orange stroke, against a gradual dark green background. The positioning is reminiscent of a white flag fluttering in the wind. The painting is emblematic of the artist’s economy of gesture, naming the number of brushstrokes needed to complete the work. In doing so, Song prompts viewers to identify and trace each measured line, to understand its enigmatic balance of abstraction and figuration by tracking her meticulous movements in its creation.

Salvo was an Italian Conceptualist in dialogue with the burgeoning Arte Povera movement before his practice dramatically shifted in 1973, when the artist turned decisively to figurative painting. His oil paintings embrace the aesthetics of traditional art histories, from Giotto and Botticelli to Italian Futurism and Surrealism, employing flat geometric forms and rich colors that draw attention to the painting’s artifice. Fascinated by capricci—mythological compositions that merge architecture, archaeological ruins, and landscapes—Salvo brought the past into conversation with the present. Foregrounding his study of classical antiquity, these simplified landscapes, columns, and Greek and Roman ruins distill remembered spaces into a quiet meditation on the passage of time. Apamea (2001) depicts a remnant of Tuscan columns rendered in rich, rusty orange—some standing tall, others lying fallen across a vibrant green pasture against a backdrop of stormy, cloud-filled skies. The painting is characteristic of Salvo’s celebrated use of luminous light effects, which imbue the scene with a serene, dreamlike tranquility.

Thomas Demand is best known for his photographs of unique paper models that reconstruct scenes charged with historical, political and cultural significance, as well as everyday moments. In 2025, he began working with a new technique, creating smaller-scale images printed on copper. The material has deep roots in art history: in the fifteenth century, goldsmiths’ engraving techniques were adapted to copper plates for reproducible prints, with etching following in the sixteenth century. It was also favored as a painting support by artists including Jan Brueghel the Elder and Nicolas Poussin; its smooth surface made it suited to fine detail. In the nineteenth century, copper served as the support for the daguerreotype, the early photographic process. In Books (2025), Demand has reproduced stacks of books, including their precarious lean, the slight overhang of pages, bookmarks still slipped between leaves. This accumulation, which suggests the overflow of a well-used library or archive, is made entirely of paper, folding the medium back into what it depicts.

Thea Djordjadze’s distinctive paintings exemplify an embodied practice that investigates the poetics and particularities of space, alongside the inherent characteristics of her chosen materials. Her ongoing series of plaster-filled wooden frames with pigment both embedded within and layered upon their porous surfaces occupies a hybrid territory between painting and relief, fusing painterly gestures with sculptural presence. The tactile surfaces vividly reveal the artist’s process: upon closer inspection, rich hues of red and brown accentuated by green and yellow emerge through a process of build-up and removal, evidenced by subtle plaster remnants and deliberate surface scratches. These textured layers invest Untitled (2025) with a compelling sense of immediacy and gestural energy—positioning painting as an active site of physical negotiation between artist, medium, and space.

Kara Walker has produced one of the most complex œuvres in contemporary American art, spanning painting, works on paper, installation, film, and her celebrated cut-paper silhouettes. Her unflinching examination of history challenges the viewer to confront the positioning of power, race and desire in America’s collective unconscious. Marching Into His Trap (2025) is a watercolor and ink on paper drawing, part of a series conceived as an explicit meditation on the present moment – though, as with all of her work, past and present are fused to suggest new narratives. Walker floods the paper with cascading washes of rose, burgundy and umber, cut through with loose, expressive ink lines that characterize her technique. Whether the title’s march is one of compulsion or defiance, or both simultaneously, the work refuses to resolve tension, holding its figures in a state of suspension between myth, memory and recent history.

Mire Lee works with industrial materials and volatile substances to conjure forms that are at once beautiful and unsettling, evoking the body, its tensions and psychological trauma. Though resolutely abstract, her sculptures and wall-based works include appendages, membranes and structures that cannot help but feel embodied and lifelike. Lee’s Heads (2025) continue this exploration through the classical motif of the bust. Skull-like in shape, with molded concrete surfaces reminiscent of bone, these forms twist improbably around components such as rotational bearings and computer wires. By combining raw industrial mechanics with bone-like concrete forms, Lee reimagines the classical bust to confront the delicate, unsettling boundary between bodily vulnerability and machine-driven existence.

For over three decades, Arthur Jafa has produced imagery that dissects the realities, constructions, and influence of Blackness in contemporary culture. Through strategies of appropriation, his works reveal poignant gaps and connections between different sources through the power of juxtaposition. In Mike and Big (2024), Jafa appropriates a candid image of Michael Jackson and The Notorious B.I.G. (whether document or fabrication, the photograph circulates as fact). Two figures whose extraordinary gifts were shadowed by exploitation and untimely death, are caught here in an unguarded moment. Jafa punctuates the image rhythmically, almost like musical notation, with black circles that interrupt without erasing. The work holds joy and tragedy in a single frame, drawing on a tradition of appropriation art in which the intervening gesture reframes the source material, implicating both image and viewer in questions of authenticity, iconicity and loss.

David Salle rose to international prominence in the 1980s as part of a generation of artists whose work critically explored the power of images. Salle’s paintings stage encounters between contrasting elements, disrupting the connections between a picture and any automatic interpretation assigned to it while reveling in the beauty and incongruity of contemporary visual culture. In Untitled (2023), a hand grasps a thick black painted line that runs vertically down the center of the work. Flanked on either side by turquoise lines, this central axis fragments the composition further, evoking the grid of window bars. Beneath this, the paper background depicts the structure of an amphitheater lined with national flags, reminiscent of a sporting arena. This photographic backdrop is overlaid with horizontal sweeps of pale yellow and blue, obstructing the viewer’s gaze and exemplifying Salle’s signature juxtaposition of figurative representation and abstract expressionism.

Oliver Bak has become known for his historically inspired, vibrant painterly topographies, which stem from a deep engagement with the materials, procedures and influences of painting. Bak’s textured surfaces evolve by applying thick coats of oil paint mixed with wax and reworking them in a prolonged process of addition and subtraction until his motifs flicker in degrees of opacity. His mottled brushwork and magnetic use of color thus evoke the dreamlike works of Symbolist, Surrealist and Nabi painters. Bak’s work, Swarmers (day) (2025), conjures two pale luminous insects within a vast atmospheric field of layered blues—their wings caught in some moment of suspension between landing and flight. Around and beneath them the surface teems with smaller presences, a restless ground that seems to breathe. Bak’s works often inhabit such liminal spaces: existing somewhere between stillness and restless motion, they unfurl from their backgrounds to evoke deep interiority and the drift of the unconscious mind.

Henni Alftan’s artistic practice imagines everyday scenes of modern life that, at first, appear intimately familiar yet become increasingly elusive upon extended engagement. Windy (2025) depicts an abandoned table setting framed by a garland of orange and blue bunting set against a background that is split into light and dark panels, evoking a window left open at night. The title is reflected in the distorted proportions of the tablecloth and bunting, which appear wind-swept to the left. Alftan’s economy of means and careful cropping create an alluring dichotomy of familiarity and mystery; by including and omitting just enough information, she thwarts the urge to narrativize the composition, sparking perpetual speculation without resolution.

David Ostrowski’s practice continuously engages the concept of total reduction in painting, a conscious rejection of painterly codes and traditions. His recent work directly explores the ontology of painting and its semantics. In Untitled (Letters) (2025), Ostrowski renders the letter G in a faint blue line of spray paint. At first, this elusive symbol seems to be contained within a terrain of white emptiness, but upon closer inspection, the various layers within the painting’s surface reveal a wealth of complexity and sophistication. By painting over collaged remnants from his studio, he creates an elaborately textured monochrome field. Like all Ostrowski’s works, Untitled (Letters) (2025) challenges any simple interpretations and exemplifies how the artist achieves the greatest effects using the most minimal means.

Robert Elfgen’s works thrive on a specific kind of narrative and symbolic density, on biography, everyday observations and an acute sensibility for the subliminal poetry of myths and rituals. Elfgen does not paint his paintings; he builds them. Working like a sculptor, he uses solid materials such as wood and brass, which he then stains, saws and shapes. Chin Blu (2026) demonstrates this direct, handcrafted yet resolutely sensual approach, which leads Elfgen to an image reminiscent of nineteenth-century romantic landscape painting. A hushed, luminous scene emerges directly from the wooden support itself, with the visible grain beneath the paint softening into veils of mist that drift through a sky washed in dusky blues, mauves and pale apricot, an effect that lends the work a tactile, painterly quality. The other essential elements of the motif are created by erratically flowing ink and metallic spray paint, which Elfgen tames to form a low line of trees, their dark silhouettes doubled in perfect stillness on the surface of the lake below.

Pamela Rosenkranz’s artistic practice visually explores the profound scientific and sociocultural systems that affect humanity. Her interdisciplinary approach incorporates elements from neurology, art history, biorobotics and literature, a conscious blend of nature and culture. In Rosenkranz’s Healer Scrolls (2021–ongoing), the artist focuses specifically on the simultaneously archaic and contemporary image of the serpent, using ancient kirigami cuts and folds to evoke a pattern that resembles the scales of a snake. Healer Scrolls (Nommy Vibes) (2026) continues the artist’s negotiation with this squamate form, its diamond-like scales now laid over an accumulation of stuffed animals and plush objects – the debris of so-called “cute culture” – visible only as a ghostly underlayer, half-dissolved beneath the iridescent surface. The blush pinks, dusty mauves and soft ceruleans that suffuse the work are not incidental; they are the affective palette of kawaii and of algorithmically optimized tenderness. Rosenkranz veils this iconography of childlike innocence beneath a reptilian skin, implicating sweet objects within longer histories of desire and consumerism.