The Value of Archival Portraits for Future Generations

In this group of artists, intimacy, memory and abstraction intersect in different methods, but all share a level of sensitivity to the fleeting: the ignored image, the half-remembered location, the unsteady border in between what we see and what we feel. Together, they form a quiet however insistent meditation on how implying accumulates in normal life.

Taken together, rendered in her unique painterly style, these retellings of easily-forgotten minutes show how a regular life, when analyzed from a specific viewpoint, starts to radiate a palpable sense of significance.Rosemary Burn Bowl of cherries, 2025 Mona Sultan's photocollages describe the fragmentary nature of memory and meaning, calling photographic truth into question by breaking down, recontextualising and duplicating images. Stabilizing systematic precision with a noticeably human, necessarily imperfect visual perceptiveness, his paintings are easy going abstractions for the digital age.Luke Rudolf Fizzog 4, 2025 Jo Berry's airbrushed paintings provide physical types to images that we generally see via a screen andquickly forget, such as stock photos and ReCAPTCHAs. To me, her distinctive language hazy, distorted, subtly upsetting shows the alienation and dissociation inherent in a world filled with images that seems to appear and disappear ever-more rapidly. A shadow, a handstand, a large curtain draped over a houseplant: by photographing such things, he provides a 2nd life in which they become long-term. Emile Kees Handstand, 2023 Jo Hummel's minimalist abstractions have a specific ahistorical quality; they link multiple histories of material experimentation and creation from all over the world within a special visual language. They locate the viewer within landscapes that feel limitless with a low mist hanging over the horizon. Unknown, these images are deeply peaceful, welcoming you to revel in the basic enjoyments of a perpetually twilit, pastoral world.Llus-Carles Peric Cap a La Calma, 2014 The scenes that Bianca MacCall paints a train window showing the carriage's interior over the passing landscape; a barely-visible cars and truck concealed by an ochre-yellow curtain appear deliberately mystical. They make me think about the simultaneous absurdity and beauty of the world in front of me, thinking about familiar scenes through an unknown lens. Bianca MacCall Perpetual Movement, 2023 Henry Ward's painting practice is ever-shifting. If you stand in front of one of his paintings for long enough, you may see it alter in real time. The unsettled, unforeseeable nature of his work is what makes me keep going back to it.Henry Ward Bethany III, 2023.