Mersuka Dopazo is an artistic phenomenon. Through her vision and originality, she has achieved a special position in the contemporary art world: her work instantly recognisable, and much sought-after. 

 

During Art Basel|Miami 2022, her solo presentation at Art Miami was a complete sell-out. Artnet News acclaimed her as one the ‘7 Breakout Artists’ of the fair: a ‘star in the making’. 

 

Mersuka Dopazo’s pictures – large in scale yet rich in detail - embody a rare creative energy. They abound in colour, in intrigue, in human engagement, in life. The life-size figure paintings and out-size still-lifes combine elements of painting, of drawing, of collage, of applique. 

Though born, and trained, in Spain, the artist now lives - with her family - in Bali. The printed fabrics and patterned papers that she incorporates into her work are gathered by her from across the Asian continent – from Indonesia, India and China. The rough-hewn frames that enclose her pictures are often made from re-purposed Balinese door-frames. All media find their place in the blithe exuberance of her art, making the fragmentary monumental. 

Emma Haworth is a painter of the urban scene. Her art is built upon meticulous observation of the ebb and flow of modern metropolitan life - in the streets, the parks, the squares of London, New York, Paris or some other great urban centre: it is a constantly shifting drama, of moving people and changing light, played out in a great arena that is both architectural and natural.

 

Emma Haworth's disciplines her vision of this teeming stage through long study as well as through sketching and photography. The scene before her is one of extraordinary complexity, a complexity that she readily embraces. She is somehow able to distil both the telling, individual detail - the plastic bag caught in the branches of a winter tree, the Hyde Park sunbather's slim-line briefcase - and a vital sense of the whole panorama - the quality of light falling through London plane trees or bouncing off New York skyscrapers, the sense of movement in a crowd, the sense of pleasure on a Bank Holiday.

 

 

Morten Lassen is a Danish abstract painter, living and working in Copenhagen. 

 

He creates richly-worked images, in which the variegated textures and complex colours of the freely painted surface, seem braced against a half-concealed sense of structure in the composition. Beneath the organic richness of all his paintings there lies a sense of something formal, even geometric. It is a compelling vision.

 

He works in sequence on multiple canvases (or sheets of card) concurrently, each suite of paintings being created over a period of weeks, or even months. His process allows each new layer of paint to dry thoroughly before the application of the next, ensuring an element of clarity and control amidst the dynamic and expressive. There are areas of over-painting, of scratching back, of drawing-over-painting, of spray-paint highlighting. Each layer of paint suggests and challenges the last.

Sylvain Lefebvre characterises himself as ‘an imaginary wanderer in search of new lands.’

 

His pictures draw us into this realm of wonder, at once personal and universal: a world of primordial forests, where tea parties take place beneath the towering trees; of ocean deeps where women sport with vast and silent whales; of Latin barrios where tigers stroll beneath the coloured balconies.  

 

The heightened, almost fantastical, quality of Lefebvre’s vision is enhanced by the bravura technical inventiveness of his practice. He combines painting and collage to brilliant effect: deploying vintage cigar labels and other printed ephemera as telling visual notes in an imaginary South American street scene. Or laying marbled papers over an entire canvas and allowing a whale, or other sea creature, to emerge as the negative space in the otherwise painted composition.

Barbara Macfarlane is a painter of the land and the landscape. Her large-scale works, most typically done in oil and ink on huge folios of handmade paper, capture the essence of terrains both familiar and unexpected: from the rugged olive-clad hills of Les Baronnies, in South Eastern France, to grid-like matrix of Manhattan; from the wilds of the Hebridean shore to the busy archipelago of Hong Kong.

 

Having graduated from Exeter School of Art at the beginning of the 1980s, Macfarlane established her reputation with emotive paintings of the Sussex Coast, where she lives, and the austere French countryside that she knows and loves. She developed a painterly language of abbreviated forms and gestural marks that brilliantly conjures the drama of these wide-open spaces, with its contrasting elements of land, sky and water. 

 

Phil Shaw is an acclaimed British artist who creates hyperreal images of bookshelves. While visually stunning Shaw’s work is always rooted in a conceptual context. Each image plays with an idea: an idea that challenges our expectations and interrogates the changing place of the printed world in our digital age.

 

Book-titles (all genuine) ranged on a shelf might spell out a fairy story when read in sequence, or reveal the names of the stations on a line of the London Underground, or conceal the words of a Shakespeare soliloquy. Or some subtle slippage may have occurred, the familiar book titles altered to reveal new meanings or suggest new possibilities.

 

Shaw’s work is clever, beautiful, sometimes unsettling, and often very funny. These are pictures to explore and re-explore. Each encounter yields fresh discoveries.

 

During the Covid pandemic of 2020, his print – Shelf Isolation – became both a viral and real-world sensation.