Much concerned with stillness and anticipation – what is, isn’t, and might soon be seen – Louise Giovanelli’s work turns on charged atmospheres and suggestive details, in which light, having been transmuted into paint, attains a dense, glinting physicality. Drawing her imagery from sources as diverse as Renaissance art, vintage film stills, and contemporary popular entertainers, her intensely worked canvases often focus on the staging of rituals and performances (religious, theatrical, social), while their jewelled palette and shallow pictorial space compels us to linger on their surfaces, slowing down the act of looking to something close to a meditative encounter, and underlining painting’s status as a system of representation, in which meaning is created in the meeting of medium and support. Giovanelli studied at the Städelschule, Frankfurt, DE (2018–2020) under the tutelage of Amy Sillman, having received her BA from the Manchester School of Art, UK, in 2015.

Recent exhibitions: As If, Almost at White Cube Bermondsey, London, UK on view until September 11 (2022); Auto-da-fé at GRIMM, New York, NY, US (2021); A Priori at GRIMM, Amsterdam, NL (2021); in medias res at Workplace, London, UK (2020); Aerial Silk at GRIMM New York, NY, US (2020); and Louise Giovanelli at Manchester Art Gallery, UK (2019). In 2021, her work was included in the group exhibition Mixing it Up: Painting Today at the Hayward Gallery, London (UK). 
Selected collections: Akzo Nobel Art Foundation (NL); the EKARD Collection; Fundación Medianoche0 (ES); The Government Art Collection (UK); The Grundy Gallery Collection (UK); Hill Art Foundation (US); Hort Family Collection (US); Manchester Art Gallery Collection (UK); Manchester School of Art Collection (UK); Sarow Gallery Collection (DE); The University of Salford Collection (UK); Warrington Museum and Art Gallery (UK) among many private collections.

Teemingly organic, Francesca Mollett’s recent paintings take as their point of departure a luminescent moss colloquially known as Goblin’s Gold (Phosphorous Grip, all works 2022), and the iridescent wings of moths (Alliance and Scattered Rest), nocturnal insects that navigate by lunar light, and who often mistake naked flames and electric bulbs for the glow of the moon. By honing in on this flora and fauna – these radiant beings that occupy nature’s dark, damp spaces – Mollett creates abstracted compositions in which tangible form fractures, and her paint takes on an agitated mobility, suggesting living, ever-growing matter, saturated with light.  

Mollett received her MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art, London (UK) in 2020, having previously studied at the Royal Drawing School and Wimbledon College of Art, London (UK). In 2020 she was awared the Aidan Threlfall Award.

Selected exhibitions: The Moth in the Moss, Taymour Grahne Projects, London, UK (2022); Spiral Walking, Baert Gallery, Los Angeles, CA, US (2022), and her work has featured in numerous group shows including, Down in Albion, L.U.P.O. Lorenzelli Projects, Milan, IT (2022); Le coeur encore, The approach, London, UK (2021) and London Grads Now at Saatchi Gallery, London, UK (2020).

Ryan Mosley’s paintings plunge us into the narrative deep end, immersing us in worlds where time is out of joint, and a rag-bag cast of characters pursue quixotic ends. In his Athenians (2022), two women swim in the waters off a Grecian quayside, observed by a pair of lanky, impassive men, who stand on the decks of oar-less, unmoored boats, which might at any moment drift off, pitching their passengers into the lapping waves. We might wonder what obscure protocol is being followed, here, and whether the apparent hierarchy between the figures is about to be upended. Bonne Anniversarie (2022) is perhaps even more of a puzzle. A small crowd of zoo visitors (one with a Gustave Courbet-like beard, another with an image of a birthday cake on his jacket’s back) stand inside a cheetah’s cage, while a keeper whispers in the beast’s ear. What is he whispering? The silent, static image cannot tell us, and therein lies not a limitation, but a universe of possibilities. 

Mosley completed his MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art, London (UK) in 2007. His work has featured in numerous group shows, notably the major survey Radical Figures: Painting in the New Millennium at the Whitechapel Gallery, London, UK (2020) and One Day, Something Happens: Paintings of People, Hayward Gallery Touring, UK (2015-2016, curated by Jennifer Higgie).

Recent solo exhibitions: Upon Peaceable Land at Galerie EIGEN + ART, Leipzig, DE (2022); Three Corner Field at Josh Lilley, London, UK (2021), and Verses in Time at Larsen Warner, Stockholm, SE (2020).

Selected collections: Milwaukee Art Museum, WI (US); Arts Council Collection, England (UK); Falckenberg Collection, Hamburg (DE); Saatchi Collection, London (UK); Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI (US).

Perhaps best understood as a set of way markers on a journey of personal development, the work of Christian Quin Newell braids his studies of mysticism, psychology and art’s long history into an arresting, otherworldly gestalt. In an echo of early 20th-century Pittura Metafisica (Metaphysical Painting), the artist – who is of mixed Jamaican and Italian heritage – presents us with imagined worlds in which enigmatic objects proliferate, Earthly principles of time and space do not quite obtain, and hybrid figures from what might be a mythic past, or an imagined future, struggle towards wisdom, or else lose themselves in a terminally fractured reality. 

Christian Quin Newell graguated from Camberwell College of Art in London (UK). In 2021, the artist was part of the residency programs at The Fores Project, London (UK) and WT Foundation, Kyiv (UA).

Recent exhibitions: Siena at Various Small Fires, Los Angeles, CA, US (2022) and Earth Altar at Public Gallery, London, UK (2021). His work featured in the group shows Likkle Things at the New York Studio School (2021, curated by Curtis Talwst Santiago) and 100 Drawings from Now at The Drawing Center, New York, NY, US (2020).

Mary Ramsden’s paintings track a ceaseless, ever-supple reckoning with her medium: its materiality and histories, its complex deals with figuration and abstraction, the points where it yields, the points where it resists. Drawing on ways of seeing that are both long-established and acutely contemporary (not least those inaugurated by new technology), there is an archaeological quality to the way she lays down, and excavates, strata of marks and pigments, buried deposits of space and time. With their audacious play of textures, surface and scale, these are paintings that insist on their own physicality, the impossibility of their reduction to mere image. Rather, like us, they belong to the world of objects, a realm of densities and depths. Here in The Kingfisher’s Wing, the artist’s focus turns to the domestic interior, with a triptych that echoes the work of Henri Matisse and Édouard Vuillard, while imbuing the everyday world of the home with an ambiguous psychological charge that is all her own.

Ramsden graduated at the Royal Academy Schools, London, UK in 2013. In 2016, the Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, CO (US), presented a key solo show of her work, and her paintings have been included in numerous group exhibitions, notably 60 Years at Tate Britain, London, UK (2019); The Drawing Biennial 2019 at The Drawing Room, London (UK); Art Now: Vanilla and Concrete at Tate Britain, London, UK (2016); and Panda Sex at State of Concept, Athens, GR (2014, curated by Tom Morton).
Recent solo exhibitions: For newness of the night at Wentrup, Berlin, DE (2022); The bag of stars at Pilar Corrias, London, UK (2022); Blunt Instrument, Wentrup Gallery, Berlin, DE (2021) and ZORRO, Pilar Corrias, London, UK (2019).

For Phoebe Unwin, painting is a way of articulating things – impressions and moods, experiences and thoughts – for which we do not have words. While her intimate, acutely sensitive canvases characteristically focus on the familiar stuff of daily life – a sun-hazed beach, a lounging figure, an energetic dog – her paint is never wholly subordinated to the business of representation, but rather insists on its own quiddity. Each of her works presents a particular formal challenge, and perhaps this is why she often shifts painterly register, sometimes within a single image. Nevertheless, what abides is a sense of her tuning into a fleeting signal on the edge of perception, or understanding, and amplifying it until it feels deeply present, and as undeniable as any of the named things that make up our world.  

Unwin studied at the University of Newcastle, UK (1998-2002) and the Slade School of Fine Art, London, UK (2003-5), and was shortlisted for Whitechapel Gallery’s Max Mara Art Prize for Women in 2015.
Recent exhibitions: Osmosis at Amanda Wilkinson Gallery, London, UK (2020); Iris, Towner Art Gallery, Eastbourne, UK (2019) and Field, Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia, IT (2018). Her institutional group shows include Walk Through British Art, Tate Britain, London, UK (2016); One Day, Something Happens: Paintings of People, Hayward Gallery Touring, UK (2015-16); British British Polish Polish: Art from Europe’s Edges in the Long ‘90s and Today, CSW Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw, PL (2013, curated by Tom Morton and Marek Goździewski); and British Art Show 7: In the Days of the Comet at the Hayward Gallery, London and touring, UK (2010-2011).

Selected collections: Arts Council Collection (UK); UK Government Art Collection (UK); British Council Collection (UK); Tate Gallery, London (UK); Saatchi Collection, London (UK); Southampton City Art Gallery (UK); Fenberger House, Nagano Prefecture (JP); Kolon Group Collection, Seoul (KR); Collezione Maramotti (IT); Collezione Di Mario Testino (IT); Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam (NE); Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, Connecticut (US); Jiménez-Colón Collection, Ponce (PR) and HSBC, London (UK).