LOUISE BONNET

The figures that populate Louise Bonnet's paintings and works on paper walk a line between beauty and ugliness, between absurdist, knockabout comedy and extreme psychological and physiological tension. Inhabiting sparse, eerie landscapes and boxed in by the edges of the canvas or the page, they act out dramas of profound discomfort that plumb the depths of the artist's subconscious. Drawing on a range of sources, from Old Master painting to Surrealism and underground comix, Bonnet toys with signifiers—of gender and sexuality in particular—in a playfully confrontational style. Her subjects are at once monumental in scale and diminished in capacity, their limbs grotesquely bloated and their eyeless faces partially obscured by dense caps of hair.

RACHEL FEINSTEIN

In richly detailed sculptures and multipart installations, Rachel Feinstein investigates and challenges the concept of luxury as expressed in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe, in the context of contemporary parallels. By synthesizing visual and societal opposites such as romance and pornography, elegance and kitsch, and the marvelous and the banal, she explores issues of taste and desire.

HELEN FRANKENTHALER

Helen Frankenthaler (1928–2011), whose career spanned six decades, has long been recognized as one of the great American artists of the twentieth century. A member of the second generation of postwar American abstract painters, she is widely credited with playing a pivotal role in the transition from Abstract Expressionism to Color Field painting. Through her invention of the soak-stain technique, she expanded the possibilities of abstraction, while at times referencing figuration and landscape in highly personal ways. She produced a body of work whose impact on contemporary art has been profound and continues to grow.

ELLEN GALLAGHER


Through processes of accretion, erasure, and extraction, Ellen Gallagher has invented a densely saturated visual language in which overlapping patterns, motifs, and materials pulse with life. By fusing narrative modes including poetry, film, music, and collage, she recalibrates the tensions between reality and fantasy—unsettling designations of race and nation, art and artifact, and allowing the familiar and the arcane to converge.

KATHARINA GROSSE

Widely known for her in situ paintings, in which explosive color is sprayed directly onto architecture, interiors, and landscapes, Katharina Grosse embraces the events and incidents that arise as she works, opening up surfaces and spaces to the countless perceptual possibilities of the medium. Approaching painting as an experience in immersive subjectivity, she uses a spray gun, distancing the artistic act from the hand, and stylizing gesture as a propulsive mark.

JENNIFER GUIDI

Light and color pervade every aspect of Jennifer Guidi's work. The Los Angeles artist's radiant, mandala-like paintings are marked by tonal and chromatic shifts that operate in concert with richly textured surfaces. The effect echoes natural phenomena and undergirds a powerful archetypal symbolism. Guidi mixes sand into her paints—she uses both oils and acrylics—to produce immersive abstract compositions that borrow from the pared-down structures of Minimalism while evoking ancient theories of energy and perception.

NEIL JENNEY

A maverick of twentieth-century American art, Neil Jenney pursues realism as a style and philosophy. He strives to return to the classical ideal of truth and to integrate form and content, while eschewing what he has described as the decorative, expressive qualities of modern abstraction.

EWA JUSZKIEWICZ

Ewa Juszkiewicz's oil portraits of women turn genre conventions inside out. Beginning by producing a likeness of a historical European painting—her sources date from the Renaissance through the nineteenth century—she expertly imitates the original's technique and style but replaces the subject's face with a surreal or grotesque distortion. In some compositions, the Polish artist swathes her sitter's head in folds of fabric or lush floral arrangements; in others, she redirects an elaborately plaited hairstyle to shield the woman's face from view. The results of this process narrate a history of effacement and erasure that runs throughout the Western canon of female portraiture.

VERA LUTTER

Inspired by the city's presence, light, and architecture, Vera Lutter began experimenting with photography. In order to capture an immediate and direct imprint of her experience, Lutter decided to turn the room in which she lived into a large pinhole camera—thereby transforming the space that contained her personal experience into the apparatus that would capture an image of it. Through a simple pinhole instead of an optically carved lens, the outside world flooded the interior of the room and projected an inverted image onto the opposite wall. Exposing directly onto wall–size sheets of photographic paper, the artist achieved large–scale black and white images. Maintaining her concept of directness and least possible alteration, Lutter decided to retain the negative image and refrain from multiplication or reproduction.

SALLY MANN

Sally Mann is known for her photographs of intimate and familiar subjects rendered both sublime and disquieting. Her projects explore the complexities of familial relationships, social realities, and the passage of time, capturing tensions between nature, history, and memory.

NANCY RUBINS

Through sculptures assembled from discarded materials and graphite drawings that assume the appearance of liquid metal, Nancy Rubins transforms quotidian objects into artworks that exceed the sums of their parts. She explores the precariousness and limits of natural forces through large-format pieces with formidable psychological and physical presence. Working with salvaged commercial and industrial materials since the late 1970s, Rubins frequently combines features of assemblage and monumental sculpture to create dynamic works that are at once familiar and otherworldly.

JENNY SAVILLE

In her depictions of the human form, Jenny Saville transcends the boundaries of both classical figuration and modern abstraction. Oil paint, applied in heavy layers, becomes as visceral as flesh itself, each painted mark maintaining a supple, mobile life of its own. As Saville pushes, smears, and scrapes the pigment over her large-scale canvases, the distinctions between living, breathing bodies and their painted representations begin to collapse.

SARAH SZE

Sarah Sze gleans objects and images from worlds both physical and digital, assembling them into complex multimedia works that shift scale between microscopic observation and macroscopic perspective on the infinite. A peerless bricoleur, Sze moves with a light touch across proliferating media. Her dynamic, generative body of work spans sculpture, painting, drawing, printmaking, video, and installation while always addressing the precarious nature of materiality and grappling with matters of entropy and temporality.

TATIANA TROUVE

In her large-scale drawings, cast and carved sculptures, and site-specific installations, Tatiana Trouvé assesses the relationship between memory and material, pitting the ceaseless flow of time against the remarkable endurance of common objects. By pushing the very definitions of "copy," "echo," and "image," she invents, even inhabits, environments that straddle studio, street, landscape, and dream.

ADRIANA VAREJAO

In her richly diverse oeuvre, Adriana Varejão uses the Baroque tactics of simulation, juxtaposition, and parody to reflect on the mythic pluralism of Brazilian identity and the complex social, cultural, and aesthetic interactions that produced it. Varejão draws upon a potent visual legacy animated by the histories of colonialism and transnational exchange to create a confluence of hybridized forms—paintings that are both architectural and sculptural; theatrical, painted sculptures; mesmerizing multichannel videos—that expose the multivalent nature of memory and representation.

MARY WEATHERFORD

Mary Weatherford makes large paintings comprising grounds of spontaneously sponged paint on heavy linen canvases, often surmounted by one or more carefully shaped and placed colored neon tubes. The canvas—prepared with white gesso mixed with marble dust and worked on with Flashe paint, a highly pigmented but readily diluted emulsion—supports startlingly diverse applications of color. The surface of the paint ranges from matte and velvety to transparent and translucent. The canvas is at times densely filled, reading as a painterly continuum; at others, it shifts in color from edge to edge; and at yet others it contains clusters of marks set in relatively bare surroundings.

RACHEL WHITEREAD

In Rachel Whiteread's sculptures and drawings, everyday settings, objects, and surfaces are transformed into ghostly replicas that are eerily familiar. Through casting, she frees her subject matter—from beds, tables, and boxes to water towers and entire houses—from practical use, suggesting a new permanence, imbued with memory.

During her childhood in London, Whiteread's parents' interests in art and architecture made an enormous impact on her understanding of form and material. Her father's fascination with urban architecture "enabled [her] to look up," and her mother's artistic practice allowed her to see the intersection of home and studio, life and art. Whiteread fondly remembers helping her father lay a concrete floor in their basement to convert it into a studio. The processes of looking, emptying, and filling run throughout her work, revealing how the surfaces of daily life can disappear and reappear, bearing the traces of their previous lives.