Jordan Casteel, Derek Fordjour, Jenny Holzer, Hilary Pecis, Harland Miller, Adam Pendleton & Josh Smith

In 2017, Jordan Casteel painted Yvonne and James, showing a bundled-up couple holding hands against the cold. Yvonne and James II (2021) shows James in their apartment – now alone, with only a wedding portrait to hold after Yvonne passed away. Jordan paints windows into the lives of her subjects with enough detail that they don’t feel like strangers. She breathes life into the spaces their lives are lived – a family restaurant, the subway, a Buddhist temple. Jordan’s paintings ask what can we learn about a person when we slow down enough to see them?

Derek Fordjour’s paintings begin with a collage process that includes layers of different materials such as newspaper, cardboard, and glitter. He often creates immersive environments that engage multiple senses for the presentation of his work. Born to Ghanaian immigrant parents in Memphis, Derek’s creative aptitude was present from a young age, though his path to artistry took a circuitous route. After briefly attending Pratt Institute, he took a break from his art education before attending and graduating from Morehouse College, Harvard University and Hunter College. At Hunter, Derek worked closely with artist Nari Ward, who was his thesis advisor. Nari encouraged his growing interest in depicting Black American issues using unconventional materials. Derek’s artwork is layered with textures and intricate details. His subjects include the tension between invisibility and hypervisibility, the expectations and spectacle of Black athletes, and the under-told narratives of Black performers and magicians.

For more than forty years, Jenny Holzer has presented her astringent ideas, arguments and sorrows in public places and international exhibitions, including Times Square, the Venice Biennale, the Guggenheim Museums in New York and Bilbao, and the Louvre Abu Dhabi. Her medium, whether a T-shirt, plaque or electronic sign, is writing, and the public dimension is integral to her work. Starting in the 1970s with street posters in New York City and continuing through her recent light projections on landscape and architecture, her practice has rivalled ignorance and violence with humour, kindness and courage.

No one paints the simple pleasures of life quite like Hilary Pecis. The American artist is famous for exuberant still life paintings, landscapes, and interiors which have a Fauvist sensibility for colour and perspective. Over the years, Hilary has mastered the art of slow looking – a pot of coffee or a crossword puzzle has the same power and grandeur as a mountain. She pays close attention to light and pattern, finding new facets of beauty the more she looks at something. In terms of process, Hilary usually works from photographs in her studio. Sometimes, photos she has taken intentionally for a painting, and sometimes, outtakes from her camera roll she never expected to turn into art. Occasionally, she spots a photo taken by a friend and asks if she can paint it.

A title is seductive by design. Harland Miller’s work with text turns this truth into art. He began working with text as part of a series of paintings based on the book jackets associated with the literary genre commonly known in the USA as 'pulp fiction' and in the UK as 'tin pan alley' or 'penny dreadfuls.' The original paintings were in fact fairly painstaking reproductions of the dust covers he'd collected in the UK but it was after moving to Paris that these early appropriations developed into more personal formations or 'takes' on the idea of painting books or, put another way, books as a subject for paintings.

The words ‘Black Dada’ are frequently emblazoned across Adam Pendleton’s works. Named for the Amiri Baraka poem Black Dada Nihilismus, Pendleton borrowed the term to describe his artistic practice. European Dada was a rejection of mainstream aesthetics in the aftermath of World War I in favour of art that embraced irrationality and protest. Although Black Dada incorporates elements of this movement, such as collage, the world that Pendleton responds to requires new visual codes. Working across film, painting and performance, he presents an artistic world full of juxtaposition and daring abstractions.

Sensitivity is a virtue in artworks by Josh Smith. He is thoughtful about the ideas communicated by both their subject matter and his painterly techniques – “I want people to look at my work and understand exactly how it was made.” His brush strokes are bold, directional and always exposed. For Josh, that rawness is central to his life and practice. “I don’t want to become less sensitive,” he says, “I just put it in the art.”