Alex Macedo’s oil paintings are characterized by the virtuosity of the old masters and exude a dark glamour. As if on a stage, the artist—who lives in Vienna—presents the delicate, the precious, the ritualized: a butterfly landing on a martini glass, fine brocade fabric with a crease filling the canvas, a Fendi shopping bag placed in front of a footballer’s portrait.

An electrifying liveliness goes hand in hand with a certain morbidity—lust and desire meet transience. And yet humor also finds its way into the pictures that are charged with meaning, for example when rubber frogs are draped around a fine crystal glass. The scenarios seem to be within reach in their wealth of detail, but seem to have fallen out of time with their dark backgrounds, the past and the present intertwining.

Painting in particular is historically closely linked to the creation of meaning and prestige. By interweaving techniques and motifs from Christian iconography and Dutch and Flemish art history with the contemporary visual culture of lifestyle and social media, Macedo updates the classic genre of still life and poses questions about identity and value in the here and now.

Noemi Weber’s works are paintings, bodies and fetish objects at the same time. Her opulent painterly texture is complex, combining abstract, gestural mark-making with a register of figurative representation. In Weber’s works, painting can be experienced not only as an image, but also as a textile that she dyes and soaks. While the background and thus the material conditions disappear behind the depiction in the classic panel painting, Weber makes the inseparable alliance between image and carrier the subject itself.

The Düsseldorf-based artist works alone as well as in interdisciplinary collaborations. In doing that, she exposes the connection between gestural painting and ornament and dance and positions herself against the ideological separation of folklore and fine art, individual and collective practice. Weber’s works are critical materialized thought figures that speculate on possible reorientations of the hegemonic Western concept of art by understanding painting as a cultural technique as well and proposing alternative continuities and narratives. The artist thus makes painting visible in its transformative potential and negotiates current possibilities of painting, but also of empowerment.

London-based artist Megan Rooney is best known for her large-format paintings—lyrical abstractions, that seem monumental yet intimate. It is her immediate surroundings, urban and natural landscapes, that the artist processes in her abstract works. Rooney creates her paintings from several carefully crafted layers, which she partially removes and paints over again. At times, the painterly traces appear like a gentle breath, other times, they’re wild and firm. The intense coloration of acrylics, oil and pastels is a special feature of Rooney’s work.

The artist time and again works directly on the wall on specific locations and reacts to the architecture of the space she finds without any preparatory sketches. Here, painting becomes an immersive experience, with every gesture testifying to a movement. The body is the pivotal point of Rooney’s work. It is therefore not surprising that her works sometimes have something dance-like and choreographic about them, as the artist also works with performance. The artist consciously places herself in the history of mural painting, which is considered the oldest form of mark-making and storytelling.

In her cross-media practice, Melike Kara deals with questions about home and exile, tradition and community, identity and migration. Since 2014, the Cologne-based artist explores the everyday visual culture and heterogenous history of the Kurdish diaspora. She uses her own photographic archive from various private sources that span generations, including portraits, family and landscape photography. For her installations, the artist manipulates these images with bleach, amongst other things, to visualize voids, invisibility, fragmentation and transformation of collective memory.

In large-scale installations, the artist often combines the photographic material with abstract paintings that deal with the ornamentation of Kurdish tapestries and while doing so, taking up knotting techniques, motifs and patterns from traditional weavers. Here, the knot becomes an abstract register, a symbol for cultural techniques as well as a personal means of expression. In this way, the artist succeeds in making invisible voices heard and celebrating the diversity of culture and history of the Kurdish diaspora.