13 Highlights from Modern & Contemporary Discoveries

Mother and child is an intimate oil and pastel on paper work that showcases Le Pho'ss masterful ability to create a domestic tableau of extraordinary refinement. A Vietnamese mother, elegantly clad in traditional ao dai, gazes tenderly at her young child — a scene that exemplifies the artist's profound exploration of maternal devotion. The work's sophisticated harmony of East-West aesthetics emerges through Le Pho's virtuosic technique: fluid strokes inherited from his training at the École des Beaux-Arts in Hanoi melds with a distinctly Parisian sensibility, while his trademark palette of celadon greens and golden ochres suffuses the composition with ethereal warmth.

Born the son of a scholar-calligrapher at the National Palace Museum in Beijing, Chuang Che first studied calligraphy before becoming a leading member of the modernist Fifth Moon Society in Taiwan. A Rockefeller grant pivoted him in the direction of America – first Iowa, then the bright lights of New York City. There, Chuang was exposed to contemporary Western painting, and began synthesising Chinese landscape painting traditions with Abstract Expressionist gesturality. Works such as Untitled (1982) achieve an extraordinary dialectical tension between Eastern and Western sensibilities, with dramatic sweeps of azure, magenta and golden ochre surging across the void.

One of the most significant figureheads of post-Impressionism alongside Pierre Bonnard and Edouard Vuillard, Georges d'Espagnat was, rather unusually, self-taught. Visiting the Louvre each morning, pencil in hand, he drew the works of Rembrandt, Delacroix and other favourite artists. D’Espagnat would later be involved in the founding of the famed Salon d'Automne and serve as its vice president. Les deux baigneuses is a lyrical meditation on human connection and natural beauty, with loose, expressive brushwork capturing the intimacy between two bathers, their forms harmonising with the landscape in a symphony of warm hues and dappled light.  

A household name in post-war Paris, the French modernist painter Bernard Buffet’s characteristically stark palette and emphatic black outlines create a compelling tension between delicacy and severity in Pot de fleurs (1953). Framing each petal and stem with almost brutal precision, Buffet strips away the prettiness typically associated with floral still lifes, and replaces it with a raw, architectural quality that perfectly captures the mood of a city still shaking off wartime trauma.
 

Le bouquet rose (1977) is a masterful orchestration of colour and form by the French painter André Brasilier. In a space seemingly both intimate and infinite, Brasilier sets the stage for a dream-like meditation on natural beauty: the elegant silhouette of a woman gliding past a bouquet of vibrant fuschia pink blooms, its petals floating in a dimension somewhere beyond abstraction and representation. Brasilier’s lyrical style employs fluid brushstrokes and bold hues that speak to both emotion and memory. Combined with Brasilier’s approach to perspective and light, Le bouquet rose is a poetic exploration of presence and ephemerality.

“I’m really trying actively to surprise myself every time I make a new painting,” said Brooklyn-based American painter Shara Hughes succinctly describing her working process. Enchantingly surreal tableaux like Legal Guardian (2004) reinvigorate the viewer’s perception of reality, whilst the intense, clashing Fauvist- and German Expressionist-inspired palette suffuses these dream-like spaces with gestural tactility. Born in Atlanta, Hughes received her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2004, before going on to study at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.

It is hard to overstate the cultural phenomenon of Kasing Lung’s Labubus, with queues around the block on Pop Mart’s stock drop days. Hong Kong–born and Belgium-based, Lung modelled Labubu and his other characters after elves, fairies and monsters from Nordic folklore in his storybook series The Monsters. In the guise of the three wise monkeys, a visual metaphor for the proverb "see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil", the lovable Three Wise Labubu Series: Don't Hear, Don't See, Don't Speak with their serrated teeth and impish smiles are the acme of contemporary pop culture.

With an avant-garde career blending the tongue-in-cheek with geometric precision, François-Xavier Lalanne was a French sculptor and installation artist whose Surrealist leanings spawned a fantastical series of zoomorphic sculptures. Enamelled in electric blue, Rhinoceros Bleu (1981) attests to Lalanne's masterful ability to distill fearsome, monumental presence into clean, modernist lines and intimate scale. A symbol of power and strength, Lalanne’s iconic rhinoceros motif can be traced back to his debut joint exhibition with his wife Claude in Paris where he unveiled his first major sculpture, Rhinocrétaire I (1964), whose metal belly housed a drop-down desk, bar and safe.

"Reality and feelings can find expression in paint in a way that is not possible in words," mused the Japanese contemporary painter Ayako Rokkaku. Meditatively manipulating impasto daubs of neon-bright pigments with her fingertips, Rokkaku conjures up kaleidoscopic visions of childhood joy and whimsy, drawing on inspiration as diverse as Japanese kawaii culture as well as Impressionist masters such as Claude Monet. This playful, performative aspect of her method is embodied in the intuitive traces of “improvisational and primitive impulse” on canvas and cardboard that make up rapturous scenes of apples and buttercup yellow sunshine in Untitled (2008).

The unmistakable bold black outlines and tongue-in-cheek humour of Caterina Dancing in Black Trousers 3 (2009) is characteristic of the British Pop artist Julian Opie. A graduate of Goldsmiths' College in London, where he studied under the conceptual artist Michael Craig-Martin (and for whom he briefly worked as an assistant), Opie was catapulted to the forefront of the 1980s British art scene with a series of painted metal sculptures. Opie’s distinctive graphic style, which skilfully strips away aesthetic noise to capture the essence of his subjects, has translated across giant billboard posters, album covers and LED screens with equal aplomb.

Adroitly bridging (and frequently rupturing) classical Chinese and Western aesthetic codes, Zeng Fanzhi's unerring ability to speak to dual artistic traditions while confronting modern societal shifts makes him a powerful voice in global art discourse. Zeng’s monumental The Last Supper (2002) reinterprets Leonardo da Vinci's Renaissance masterpiece through the lens of contemporary Chinese society. Christ and his disciples are replaced with masked Young Pioneers wearing neatly tied red scarves and seated at a table covered in hunks of blood-red watermelon. This Land so Rich in Beauty (2011) channels traditional Chinese landscape painting through Zeng’s expressionistic visual language, his characteristic impasto technique and frenetic brushwork creating a chaotic terrain of abstracted mountains and turbulent skies.

German-born and Netherlands-based interdisciplinary artist Willehad Eilers, better known as Wayne Horse, has garnered critical acclaim for his embrace of “blind drawing” - a technique which embraces “fantastically ugly” distortions as a result of the artist drawing whilst looking away from his work. Arguing that “painting does not depict a certain moment but an overall atmosphere,” Eilers creates monumental works such as Oh My Goodness Me (2022) that teem with energetic life in every line and stroke, orchestrating a circus of the impossible and the inexplicable.
 

The paintings of William Brickel, a rising star of the contemporary British art scene, are a surreal patchwork of childhood memories and the deep subconscious: a Punch & Judy puppet show, the outsized hands of his mother, tensions and vibrations real and imagined. In an ironic reversal of Canova’s Three Graces, three young men shove each other aside, arms and limbs flung in all directions as they leap with balletic grace across a grassy knoll and towards a coin on the ground in All This for a Coin (2022). Originally a graduate of Camberwell College of the Arts in London with a BA in photography, Brickel pivoted towards painting after completing his MA at the Royal Drawing School.