Arlette

The work of the Mexican multidisciplinary artist Arlette often combines seemingly contradictory themes or materials to electrifying, sensual effect. Her use of metal, a medium associated with both longevity and art-historical nobility, is playfully undercut by her ongoing interest in expressing more fluid ideas related to luxury, sexuality, pop culture, and her own personal history. Amusement and arousal emanate from surprising places, just as both things sometimes take us by surprise in life—her practice is not merely about sex, but genuinely sexy, and any references to masculinity in her exploration of gender politics tend to be celebratory and libidinous. Arlette also frequently invokes ideas surrounding faith and the family. Metal has spiritual associations in Mexican culture: the shaping of it requires graft and devotion, resulting in objects of great beauty whose high shine and imposing weight can turn abstract ideas into something physical and permanent. By giving tangibility to what might otherwise merely have been felt—like faith, or lust—Arlette takes the ephemeral and gives it a luxurious, three-dimensional luster, leaving behind pieces that are built to outlast us all.

Cara Benedetto

A practitioner whose preferred mediums range from painting to the romance novel, the American multimedia artist Cara Benedetto dedicates her work as a whole to the exploration of feminine archetypes and images. Often appropriating photographs of famous women from award shows and red carpets, she examines the effects of the patriarchy on femme self-presentation, as well as questioning what having power means for successful, wealthy, widely-adored stars who are also subject to perpetual scrutiny and surveillance, and whose inner lives are more complex than they are permitted to admit. The labyrinthine interaction of factors like race, class and cash in the elevation—and the subsequent destruction—of women is woven into Benedetto’s mixed-media images, as is a white-hot undercurrent of female rage. Her fiction, which is both erotic and experimental, reclaims the much-maligned ‘women’s’ genre of romance and injects it with new meaning, in an amalgamate of theoretical seriousness and explicit sexiness that echoes the feminist tenor of her visual work.

Eva Gold

The work of the British visual artist Eva Gold, which spans various media from sculpture to drawing to moving image, is united by her undeniable eye for the cinematic, with her knowingly fetishistic use of materials like bone, steel, carved soap, leather, and vulcanized rubber suggesting an oblique or hidden narrative behind every installation. She applies a keenly directorial approach to her own imagined scenes, focusing on abstracted details to provoke the viewer into wondering what is happening beyond the frame, and sometimes using this deliberate elision of the wider picture to suggest illicitness, uncanniness, or the possibility of an unknown threat. Gold also incorporates found items that arrive with their own inbuilt histories, and plays with sensory elements like scent. Several pieces suggest bodies-as-parts: either dismantled, or present only in the ghostly shapes of hanging clothes. Power, violence, and the volatile nexus between both of these major forces per existence under the constraints of capitalism recur as potent themes, as do references to America—a place whose culture, in addition to being a locus for cinema, often presents us with amplified examples of this particular dynamic tension.

Shamiran Istifan

The Zurich-based artist Shamiran Istifan has a fast-changing practice that moves fluidly between media as she acquires fresh inspiration. A self-declared autodidact, she draws voraciously on Middle Eastern culture, social and geopolitical history, pop aesthetics and philosophy in order to embed statements about class, gender and the body—and quite often about the way these three things interact with each other—in a practice that is materially luxurious, deliberately feminine, and tinged with kitsch. She has expressed an interest in employing “strategic masquerades,” and her appealing use of soft, saccharine colours and materials like satin, latex, and silver helps to mask the knife-sharp observations she is making just beneath the seductive surface of each piece, like a dagger hidden beneath silk. The charge afforded to familiar objects or symbols by their positioning in media and culture—from the high-end luster of the Louis Vuitton logo to the noughties trashiness of the classic mudflap girl—is also frequently explored, and subverted, in her work.

Amanda Moström

The Swedish artist Amanda Moström deals primarily with the erotic, albeit in an unconventional sense. Subtly humorous and rich in psychosexual undertones, her photographic work frequently appropriates familiar imagery and transforms it into something more provocative and intimate, complicating it with restaging or re-contextualisation. Her interest in expansive forms of sensuality extends to her bronzes, which upend the medium’s associations with solemnity and multiplicity by existing as one-off pieces that are deliberately imperfect, showing signs of human touch. Moström is inspired by the writing of the theorist Audre Lorde, who was quick to separate eroticism from the strictly pornographic or explicit, reclassifying it as “the personification of love in all its aspects.” Throughout her practice, she explores the conceptual and physical potential of softness, upending a cultural hierarchy that often prizes hardness and solidity instead, both materially and emotionally. The resulting works coax the viewer, made complicit by the act of looking, into confronting their own boundaries and preconceptions.

Tasneem Sarkez

Employing an aesthetic she describes as “Arab kitsch,” the New York based artist Tasneem Sarkez works across various media to create pieces that are united by an elegant marriage of pop culture visuals and potent symbolism. Elements of autobiography combine with broader mainstream signifiers, often nodding to American media and culture, in an ongoing exploration of her own experience of living in the diaspora as an Arab woman. The culture of the internet, with its ability to disseminate and recontextualise images on a global scale, is influential on her practice, as is a more art-historical interest in both romance and poetics. She has described her work as being intended to evoke a feeling of “Apricity,” an old-fashioned word that refers to the experience of feeling the rays of the sun in winter: a revelation of something real and warm hidden beneath the cool, slick surface of commercial imagery.