Employing a visual style she has described as "Arab kitsch," the New York-based artist Tasneem Sarkez works across various media to create works which elegantly blend pop visuals and potent sociopolitical symbolism. Elements of autobiography combine with mainstream signifiers, often nodding to American culture, in an exploration of her diasporic experience as an Arab woman. The car - a universally recognised symbol of status, commerce and technology - recurs as a subject. The aesthetic language of the internet, with its ability to disseminate and recontextualise images, is also hugely influential on Sarkez's practice, as is an art-historical interest in romance and poetics. With her choice of subjects and framing, she draws parallels between the algorithmic curation of material on the internet, and the more traditional arrangement of painterly still lives, two modes of juxtaposition that imbue their composite parts with new significance by placing unexpected objects and symbols side-by-side. She has also expressed an interest in conjuring a sense of "Apricity," a word that refers to the experience of feeling the rays of the sun in winter: a revelation of something real and warm hidden beneath an otherwise cool surface. Text courtesy of Rose Easton.

Georgian-born, New York–based artist Nina Kintsurashvili’s practice is shaped by memory, fragmentation, and mediated experience within a center–periphery context. Interested in what it means to encounter culture indirectly through books, reproductions, and mediated images rather than direct access Kintsurashvili draws from personal archives spanning archaeology, art history and vernacular imagery, assembled through an ongoing engagement with Tbilisi’s Bukinist networks of second-hand book dealers. As the daughter of a fresco conservator and icon painter, Kintsurashvili’s work examines the formal potential of absence created through fragmented histories and indirect encounters with images, considering incompleteness not as loss, but as a generative force within painting. Within this context, abstraction operates as a gateway to hidden structures. Forms drawn from references gradually dissolve as their descriptive clarity breaks down and new formal relationships emerge. Her paintings are characterized by uncertain forms that resist fixed categorization while retaining traces of their origin, gestural brushwork, and layered surfaces. Built through cycles of accumulation and erasure, where multiple temporalities and references coexist, the surface becomes a central site of meaning. Through slow looking, revision and perceptual translation, her paintings explore the tension between what is visible and what remains unresolved.