Arthur Jafa (born 1960, Tupelo, Mississippi) is an American artist and filmmaker whose work explores Black identity, history, and cultural experience.
Working across film, video, photography, and installation, he is known for powerful montage techniques that combine found footage, music, and archival material.
His practice draws from Black music traditions, cinema, and political history.
Jafa represented the United States at the Venice Biennale in 2019 and won the Golden Lion.
He lives and works in Los Angeles.
Laura Owens (born 1970, Euclid, Ohio) is an American contemporary artist known for redefining painting through experimentation and innovation.
Her work combines abstraction, figuration, text, and digital techniques, often referencing art history and popular culture.
Owens challenges traditional ideas of painting by merging handcrafted and technological processes.
She has exhibited widely in major international institutions and galleries.
She lives and works in Los Angeles.
Charles Ray (born 1953, Chicago) is an American sculptor known for his hyper-realistic and conceptually rigorous works.
Using materials such as fiberglass, aluminum, and stainless steel, he explores the human body, perception, and scale.
Ray’s sculptures challenge distinctions between reality and representation.
He has exhibited extensively in major international museums and institutions.
He lives and works in Los Angeles.
Jenny Saville (born 1970, Cambridge) is a British painter known for her large-scale figurative works depicting the human body.
Her paintings challenge traditional ideals of beauty, addressing themes of flesh, identity, and physicality.
Saville’s work is characterized by expressive brushwork and an intense engagement with art history.
She has exhibited internationally in major museums and galleries.
She lives and works in the United Kingdom.
Tino Sehgal (born 1976, London) is a British-German artist known for creating “constructed situations” that exist without objects or documentation.
His work takes the form of live encounters involving performers, speech, movement, and interaction with the public.
Sehgal challenges conventional ideas of art, authorship, and the art market by refusing physical artworks.
He has exhibited internationally, including at the Venice Biennale and major museums worldwide.
He lives and works in Berlin.
Born in Seoul and moving to the United Kingdom at a very young age, Sang Woo Kim’s discourse addresses his fractured identity and confronts the alienating cultural factors that affected him early on. Raised in London by traditional Korean parents, he always felt «other» to the people around him, mainly of Western descent. This transpires in his works, in which he looks at the topic of identity, primarily that of first-generation immigrants who struggle with cultural duality. He brings awareness to this conflict and expresses it poetically and with a sense of irony and humor. He aims to surprise the viewer and cause a disruption that allows them to truly «see.»
Working with media that range from painting to installation, Kim builds up and breaks down boundaries to create a visual «skin» composed of nostalgia and recollections. His work suggests that the gaze comes from within and is tied to one’s identity: until one can cultivate it, one will always view oneself and the world self consciously. Identity takes on new connotations in the modern social media world, where one’s persona is a multi-layered construct and can be created out of thin air. The question inherent in Kim’s work is what constitutes identity and how much of it is «real»?
Although all his work is autobiographical, Kim has only recently started painting self-portraits. As a fashion model, he is used to being gazed upon and seen through the lens of someone else’s vision, so self-portraiture is a way of reclaiming his identity, being, and existence. He thus addresses the notions of perception, seeing and being seen, the subject and the voyeur. Through his multidisciplinary practice, Kim prompts greater awareness about how we engage and interpret the world around us.
Christopher Wool (born 1955, Chicago) is an American contemporary artist best known for his text-based and abstract paintings.
His work explores language, repetition, erasure, and the tension between control and chance.
Using techniques such as stenciling, silkscreen, and enamel, Wool challenges traditional ideas of painting.
He has exhibited extensively in major international museums and galleries.
He lives and works in New York.
Joseph Yaeger was born in 1986 in Helena, Montana, and lives and works in London. He received his BFA from Rhode Island School of Design (2008) and completed his MFA at the Royal College of Art, London (2019).
Selected solo exhibitions include:
Selected group shows include: