Amoako Boafo is a painter, born in Accra, Ghana, and based in Vienna, Austria, whose sinewy portraits are captivating in their transparency. Often isolated on flat monochromatic backgrounds, the artist’s figures accentuate flesh made with flesh, with Boako creating finger-painted channels that rise and fall across the skin. Another important characteristic of the artist’s work is the use of photo transfer to reproduce found patterns in his subjects’ clothing; a contrast that finds energy between the tactile treatment of the skin and the burnished pictographic fabrics. Like Boafo himself, the men and women in his portraits are always well-dressed, and the artist is inspired by traditional English fabrics, Liberty print gift wraps and reproductions of wallpaper from the Victoria and Albert Museum. Much of his work is inspired by his upbringing in Ghana, often challenging the belief that boys must be raised to be aggressive and masculine when they’re grown: “The primary idea of my practice is representation, documenting, celebrating and showing new ways to approach blackness.”

Nick Cave is an artist, educator, and messenger, working between the visual and performing arts through a wide range of mediums including sculpture, installation, video, sound, and performance. The artist is perhaps best known for his Soundsuits, which are sculptural forms based on the scale of his body that were created in response to the police beating of Rodney King in 1991. What began as an armor of sticks sourced from a local park, these wearable sculptures have grown and changed in a number of dynamic and emotional iterations, using found objects to create a second skin that conceals race, gender, and class, and forcing the viewer to look without judgment. His works serve as a visual embodiment of social justice that represents brutality and empowerment simultaneously. Through his roles as artist, educator, and social activist, Cave encourages a profound and compassionate analysis of violence and its effects as the path towards an ultimate metamorphosis.

For over 25 years, Beverly Fishman has studied the science, imagery and advertising of the pharmaceutical industry. Within Fishman’s works, color and surface are calibrated for maximum effect, transforming the iconography of the pharmaceutical industry into hard-edged relief painting. The artist uses hue and texture to destabilize the viewer, with bright contrasts and slight shifts that cause varying levels of optic confusion and palpable disorientation. Fishman paints the edges of her works in bright fluorescents that leave a hovering glow on the gallery wall, a symptomatic and circumstantial buzz that radiates from each specimen. The artist appropriates pill forms that are at once familiar and addictive, thereby drawing from empirical research as well as the complex macro and microcosms of human cost. Full of emotion, the works “channel loss and joy,” forcing us to consider our own attraction, revulsion, and dependence.

Loie Hollowell is recognized for her paintings that evoke bodily landscapes and sacred iconography, using geometric shapes to move the body into abstraction. Originating in autobiography, her work explores themes of sexuality, often through allusions to the human form with an emphasis on women’s bodies. The artist’s early work shifted from abstraction and metaphor to figurative painting before introducing reflection and mirroring, which transformed it into the radiating symmetrical silhouettes she has come to be known for. Hollowell uses drawing as a point of departure, pushing personal or metaphorical depictions of the body into a lexicon of sacred shapes: mandorla (the sacred almond shape representing union); ogees (ancient serpentine-shaped architectural details); and lingams (the Hindu god Shiva as represented by a phallus). With strong colors, varied textures, and geometrical symmetry, Hollowell’s practice is situated in lineage with the work of Georgia O’Keeffe, Gulam Rasool Santosh, and Judy Chicago.

Tony Matelli’s artistic practice contrasts the ancient and the topical, the classical and the common. Matelli describes his garden statues as modern-day memento mori - a still life that suggests transience and the decay that begins at the pinnacle of perfection. The degenerating human ideal in marble is set against the tantalizing richness of ripe fruit, a contradiction of culture versus nature as both decompose. The series was born one day when Matelli passed a scrapped car at a junkyard on the way to his studio; on a whim, he placed a strawberry he was carrying with him on the hood: “The two objects spoke to one another in a powerful way. It reminded me of those “Death and the Maiden” paintings from the Northern European Renaissance. It seemed somehow erotic and strange and spoke very clearly to me about youth and old age. I started developing the idea using statuary instead of other objects to more clearly implicate the viewer in the work.”

Josh Sperling employs the language of minimalist painting from the 1960s and 1970s, primarily working with shaped canvases. In their three-dimensionality, his works cloud the distinction between painting and sculpture, and he expertly crafts winding and layered organic shapes from rigid plywood before hand-stretching canvas over his elemental parts. Mining a wide range of sources, from design to art history, Sperling has crafted a unique visual vocabulary remarkable for its emphatic quality and boundless energy. For his bubble works, the artist employs an early trope and creates a link between them that becomes a building block: “Those were the results of taking that first shape - the bullseye - and having them morph into each other almost like two water droplets on the table when they start to connect. That shape has become an elemental brick and now I can keep on using it to realize these different overall shapes.”

An early adopter of 3d printing and digital modeling, Frank Stella’s recent work utilizes computer technologies to explore how subtle changes in scale, texture, color, and material can affect our perception and experience of an object. Where some have interpreted his expansion over the years as radical departures from his minimalist works and geometric canvases of the 1960s, the artist clarifies an ongoing exploration of symbols and ideas; Stella once shaped his canvases like stars and lattices and now, he is pushing that construction into the third dimension. Says Richard Klein, Director of Exhibitions at the Aldrich during a recent presentation of Stella’s stars over his career, “Even with something as stable and as knowable as the star, Stella is able to reinvent it every time he approaches it and make you look at it in a different way.”

Hank Willis Thomas is a conceptual artist focusing on themes relating to identity, commodity, media, and popular culture. His work often incorporates recognizable iconography from advertising and branding to explore the toxic generalizations that so many companies reinforce around race, gender, and ethnicity. Thomas created one of his most iconic photography series in 2006, titled B®anded, where he portrayed the marked bodies of Black men with the Nike swoosh logo, scarring their flesh and recalling the history of branding slaves in America, as well as the objectification of Black male bodies in contemporary culture. Thomas has explored this language of branding and advertising throughout much of his career. “I started thinking about logos as our generation’s hieroglyphs,” said Thomas in an interview with The Brooklyn Rail in 2015. “They can be embedded with so much meaning, and I really wanted to play off that.”

With influences ranging from Pop art and Minimalism to childhood relics, punk music, and 1970s cinema, Blair Thurman’s forms present a subconscious realm of abstract geometries that are unusual, personal, and accessible. The artist employs the transformation of recurring frameworks and forms pulled from slot-car racetracks, American vernacular, and found shapes from daily life to create a personal lexicon. Thurman refers to the immured style and significance of his work as its “signature-content” as he examines the memory and poetry that is innate to observation. According to artist Steven Parrino, Thurman is “a Pop-Sensitive… his method is gaze and memory rather than cold analysis. More like the free associations of a Beat poet on the road, happening upon Gonzo situations and structures, awash in neon… the dark self on the road to nowhere” (The Return of the Creature, the Künstlerhaus Palais Thurn und Taxis, Bregenz).

Following the recurring presence of figurativism in her work, painter Austyn Weiner has recently distilled her layered, turbulent forms further into abstraction. Using oil on canvas, the works remain attached to personal narrative but become more universal, opening themselves up for a multitude of readings where isolation, love, and chaos enter all of our lives. Weiner’s practice explores a duality of forces that are both persuasive and forlorn, exploring romance, rejection, loneliness, and performance. Built through a series of elongated processes and sudden gestures, Weiner teases notions of attraction and availability that cannot exist without the presence of fear. Her paintings are an exercise in the ongoing ritual of self-exploration, and communicate a particular vitality and conflict that is characteristic of youth; she is a painter and a personality whose lexicon is bound to grow and change while retaining its vulnerability.