Jadé Fadojutimi’s (b. 1993 / lives and works in London) new painting To hover, to flutter, what will be, will be is a true testament to her unique painting practice in which her endlessly colorful, haphazard brush strokes replace language to become a visual reflection of their own fragility. Seemingly light and playful, the work conveys Fadojutimi’s subjective reactions to everyday experiences and the awareness of her own identity.

Ximena Garrido-Lecca (b. 1980 in Lima, Peru, lives and works in Lima and Mexico City) engages with the turbulent history of her native Peru through sculpture and film, examining how neocolonial standards are continuously enforced by globalization. Her project Destilaciones (Distillations) began as an investigation into the Peruvian town of Lobitos, in which the petrol industry asserted immense power. The two-channel video Aceite de Piedra depicts the realities of the socio-economic life of Lobitos. Similarly, her sculptures, composed of stainless steel and ceramic, present a powerful juxtaposition of the ever-present oil purifier machines and local artisanal practices.

Stefanie Heinze’s (b. 1987 / lives and works in Berlin) new work As You Treat Me (Specious Prosperities) features her archetypal surreal figurations in which obscured forms become recognizable as unexpected subjects, drawing us into her intimate visual worlds. From disembodied body parts, to everyday objects, to animal-like figures, Heinze’s subjects melt into colorful, fantastical forms to create vivid compositions which, in combination with their lyrical titles, are both deeply personal as well as cleverly subversive in their questioning of the status quo.

Jacqueline Humphries (b. 1960 in New Orleans, lives and works in New York) contrasts traditional brushstrokes with stencil-mediated applications in her textural paintings. The artist makes use of ASCII, an image encoding system which dates back to the 1960s, to translate forms into stenciled grids through which she applies paint to the canvas, thus reflecting the increasing influence of technology in contemporary abstract painting. For one such form – the emoji as seen in the painting presented – Humphries uses a handheld portable inkjet printer to create the image, which she then enlarges on a computer and cuts into a stencil, a process that produces a heavily degraded, almost unrecognizable emoji.

Sanya Kantarovsky’s (b. 1982 Moscow, lives and works in New York) new work is a tribute to Maki Asakawa, a Japanese jazz and blues singer from the 1970s. The work is named after her song Ura Mado (translating to Rear Window), which is a reading of a poem about lost love by Shūji Terayama. The image in the background shows a figure conflicted in an act of self-sabotage. The scene presents a stark juxtaposition; a dark and disturbing background behind the foregrounded magnetic figure of Maki Asakawa. As typical for his practice, Kantarovsky toes the line between seductive and unsettling – humorous but frightening.

Rodney McMillian (b. 1969 in Columbia, South Carolina, lives and works in Los Angeles) explores the complicated relationship between history and contemporary culture, not only as it is expressed in American politics, but also as it manifests in its modernist art traditions such as landscape painting. His paintings on knitted blankets, sometimes with clear representation of a landscape, reflect on the systems of exchange that domestic objects can exist in, and their relation to the histories they evoke, whether personal, national or art historical.