This Must Be the Place: Artists for Whitechapel Gallery

Remi Ajani’s (b. 1984, London, United Kingdom) paintings draw on archival imagery and the human figure, transforming gestures and fragments of the body through layers of accumulated and erased marks.

Ajani studied Painting at the Slade School of Fine Art, London, and was the recipient of the Almacantar Studio Award (2022). Recent solo exhibitions include the sound of everything repeating, Jahn und Jahn, Lisbon (2026); Still Life, Jahn und Jahn, Munich (2025); Look Here, Travesía Cuatro, Mexico City (2024); and it’s not what you look at…it’s what you see, Sid Motion, London (2023). Recent group exhibitions include Maya Frodeman Gallery, Wyoming (2025); Sid Motion, London (2024); Almine Rech, London (2022); and Galerie Barbara Thumm, Berlin (2022).

Oliver Bak’s (b.1992, Copenhagen, Denmark) paintings return the viewer to a condition close to half-sleep, drawing on Symbolism, Surrealism, and the Nabis. Figures and plants emerge from mottled fields of colour and light, blurring into a visionary state of camouflage and transformation. As Bak puts it, “Painting is related to dreaming.”

Bak studied at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, graduating in 2020. Recent solo exhibitions include Swarmers, Indipendenza, Rome (2025–26); Ghost Driver, or The Crowned Anarchist, Sprüth Magers, Berlin (2024); Caves in the Sky, Cassius & Co, London (2023); and Sick with Bloom, ADZ, Lisbon (2022). Recent group exhibitions include FOCUS on The Collection, Krupa Art Foundation (2026); The Flowers of Evil, Sammlung Scharf-Gerstenberg, Berlin (2024–25); and Songs before Sunrise, Sprüth Magers, London (2025).

Nicholas Bierk’s (b. 1985, Ontario, Canada) paintings bring viewers into psychologically charged encounters sourced from personal photographs, creating compositions of psychic ambivalence where the boundary between personal and communal memory blurs. Bierk’s paintings explore death, grief, and transformation, but acknowledge that such things are always ‘seen through a glass darkly.’

Bierk studied painting at the Rhode Island School of Design. Recent solo exhibitions include Gladstone Gallery, Brussels (2025); ADZ Gallery, Lisbon (2024); Overduin & Co., Los Angeles (2024); Painters Painting Paintings (2023); Pangée, Montreal (2022); Patel Brown Gallery, Toronto (2022). Bierk has received grants from the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation (2025) and was a finalist for the Kingston prize (2017, 2019).

Tim Breuer’s (b.1990, Aachen, Germany) paintings depict figures in domestic and social spaces, suspended between presence and absence. Built through repeated layering and scraping back of paint, they retain traces of the initial drawing, creating surfaces in which forms seem to emerge, dissolve, and transform. His dreamlike interiors, often rendered in deep greens, browns, and blues, hold a quiet tension between mystery and tenderness.

Breuer studied under Peter Doig at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf (2011–17) before completing an MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art, London (2017–19). Recent exhibitions include Natural Mystics, The Warehouse, Dallas (2025); A Vanished Wholeness, Modern Art, Paris (2025); The Inner Island, Villa Carmignac, Hyères (2023); and Wild Dogs, Michael Werner Gallery, East Hampton (2021). Recent solo exhibitions include TRAMPS + Champ Lacombe, London (2026) and Champ Lacombe, Biarritz (2025).

Gareth Cadwallader (b. 1979, Swindon, United Kingdom) studied at the Royal College of Art and the Slade School of Fine Art, London. Working between figuration and abstraction, his paintings are dreamlike yet formally rigorous, depicting familiar scenes that resist specific time and place. Through layered surfaces and carefully calibrated colour, Cadwallader creates compositions that evoke memory, atmosphere, ambiguity.

Recent solo exhibitions include Goodnight Moon, Soup, London / GRIMM, New York (2026); Let Me See the Colts, Josh Lilley, London (2023); Half-Lowered Eyelids, Josh Lilley, London (2019); and II, Hannah Barry Gallery, London (2011). His work has been included in numerous group exhibitions, including The London Open, Whitechapel Gallery, London (2022); Mixing it Up: Painting Today, Hayward Gallery, London (2021).

Andrew Cranston (b.1969, Hawick, Scotland) is a painter-storyteller whose images emerge gradually through layering, lacquering, bleaching, collage, and repeated reworking, often on the linen-bound covers of old books. His paintings shift between past and present, drawing on the intimism of Vuillard and Bonnard alongside Matisse and Munch.

Recent solo exhibitions include Modern Art, London (2026) The Holburne Museum, Bath (2025); Pier Arts Centre, Stromness (2025); Modern Art, Paris (2024); Hepworth Wakefield (2023); and Ingleby, Edinburgh (2023). His work is held in collections including Tate, London; National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; ICA Miami; and Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Cranston is represented by Modern Art and Ingleby.

Simone Kennedy Doig’s (b. 1994, London, United Kingdom) richly coloured paintings draw on everyday life, memory and personal experience, exploring themes of migration, identity, family and female relationships through intimate narrative scenes.

A graduate of Slade School of Fine Art (2017), her first solo exhibition in London will be presented at The Approach in 2026, following Far from Home at The Pond Society in Shanghai (2025). Waist Deep at Baert Gallery, Los Angeles (2022) and The Visitor at Tanya Leighton, Berlin (2023). Her work has been included in group exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw; Museum MORE, Gorssel, Netherlands; and Michael Werner Gallery, East Hampton, New York, among others.

Nat Faulkner’s (b.1995, Chippenham, United Kingdom) practice examines the physical conditions of photography, drawing on its foundations in chemistry, optics, and industrial production. Faulkner allows light, temperature, and time to become active collaborators in processes that blur the boundaries between photography and material experimentation.

Recent exhibitions include Counterforms, A Plus A, Venice (2026); Passages, Kunsthalle Friart Fribourg (2026); Strong water, Camden Art Centre, London (2026); Steady State, ZERO…, Milan (2025); Compression, Matthew Brown, New York (2025); and Image as Trace, Brunette Coleman, London (2025). His work is held in the public collection of the Victoria & Albert Museum, London.

Lenz Geerk’s (b.1988, Basel, Switzerland) paintings depict psychologically charged portraits, landscapes, and still lifes that unfold in dreamlike worlds beyond any specific time or place. Drawing on European painting traditions while employing a restrained palette and subtle gesture, Geerk creates intimate compositions that explore solitude, memory, and the complexities of human emotion.

Recent solo exhibitions include Theatre of the Mind, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin (2026); November, MASSIMODECARLO, London (2025); Schwarzweiß, Roberts Projects, Los Angeles (2025); lautlos, Domushaus, Basel (2025); Moonpaintings, MASSIMODECARLO, Milan (2022); and Arrival, Roberts Projects, Los Angeles (2022).

Brett Goodroad’s (b.1979, Kearney, Nebraska, USA) paintings, made primarily en plein air in the high-desert landscape of Surprise Valley, California, move between abstraction and figuration, combining close observation with free invention. Goodroad has a particular affinity for the richness of texture and variety of surface, moving fluidly across mediums like oil, watercolour, pastel, and ink, and supports such as canvas, silk, flannel, and paper – often combining them for maximum effect.

Recent solo exhibitions include Brett Goodroad: Dandelion, VeneKlasen, London (Upcoming, 2026); Brett Goodroad: Bells, Crèvecoeur, Paris (2026); Paradise Valley, Michael Werner Gallery, Beverly Hills (2025); and Rainy, Greene Naftali, New York (2024). Recent group exhibitions include David Zwirner, New York (2025); Michael Werner Gallery, London (2025); Greene Naftali, New York (2024).

Sky Glabush (b.1970, Alert Bay, British Columbia, Canada) draws on sustained observation of nature and shifting light, his materially rich paintings explore the space between abstraction and representation. Often incorporating sand into oil paint, Glabush creates richly textured surfaces that transform landscape into meditations on memory, perception and presence.

Glabush has exhibited internationally, including Cordonhaus Städtische Galerie Museum, Germany (2020); Prosjektrom Normanns, Norway (2016); and Oakville Galleries, Canada (2016). His work is held in numerous public and private collections, including the Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, USA; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Canada; JP Morgan Chase, New York, USA; MacKenzie Art Gallery, Regina, Canada; McMichael Canadian Art Collection, Vaughan, Canada; and Museum London, Ontario, Canada.

Jake Grewal’s (b.1994, London, United Kingdom) paintings and drawings are dreamlike, unmoored from time and space. Figures, often based on the artist’s own image, recur within dramatic landscapes, where bodies and trees dissolve into one another. informed by a personal archive of found images and images he has taken himself, there is an underlying desire for ambiguity and abstraction within his figures.

Recent exhibitions include Under the Same Sky, Studio Voltaire, London (2025); Some Days I Feel More Alive, Pallant House Gallery, Chichester (2023); ; Now I Know You I Am Older, Thomas Dane Gallery, London, England (2022). Group exhibitions include: The Vandals, Gladstone Gallery, New York (2026); Barbana Bojadzi, Jake Grewal, Cole Lu, Bortolami Gallery, New York (2025); land marks, Pace Gallery, Los Angeles (2025).

Nathanaëlle Herbelin’s (b. 1989, Kfar Saba, Israel) paintings reflect an ongoing dialogue between memory, place and belonging. Her intimate figurative works invite slow looking, capturing everyday moments through softened forms, muted earth tones and delicate brushwork. Drawing on the poetic qualities of domestic scenes, her paintings evoke a quiet sense of contemplation and melancholy.

Selected solo institutional exhibitions include Feel the pulse at the He Art Museum, Shunde (2025); Être ici est une splendeur, Musée d’Orsay, Paris (2024); À la surface, le fond de l’oeil, French Institute of Tel Aviv (2022); Et peut-être que ces choses n’ont jamais eu lieu, Umm Al Fahem Palestinian Art Center (2021), Devenire Peinture, Yishu 8 prize, George V Art Centre, Beijing (2021).

Esme Hodsoll (b.1992, London, United Kingdom) works in oils over months and sometimes years, observing the same utilitarian objects and domestic ephemera until their surfaces have quietly accumulated light, atmosphere, and time. Her close study of light has been shaped by years of working and travelling in Scotland, Greece, and Spain.

Hodsoll studied at Penninghen, Paris, before attending the Royal Drawing School, London. Recent solo exhibitions include Sur les Deux Joues, Tendrement / On Both Cheeks, Tenderly, ADZ, Lisbon (2026). Recent group exhibitions include Nocturnes, Lyndsey Ingram, London; Whose Muse?, Palo Gallery, New York; New Nature, Paterson Zevi, London; and Air du Temps, Alma Zevi, Venice. She is a recipient of the Richard Ford Award and her work is included in Ways of Drawing: Artists’ Perspectives and Practices (Thames & Hudson, 2019).

Mia Kokkoni’s (b.1993, Athens, Greece) paintings draw on folklore and memory to create quietly enigmatic scenes that feel both familiar and otherworldly. Set within imagined landscapes informed by the rolling hills of Scotland and the flora of the eastern Mediterranean, her paintings are inhabited by recurring figures, animals, and motifs that evoke a timeless sense of place.

Kokkoni studied at the Glasgow School of Art, where she graduated in 2022 and continues to live and work. Recent solo exhibitions include INSTALMENTS, Ingleby, Edinburgh (2025); and Outlier Gallery, Glasgow (2025). Recent group exhibitions include Anat Ebgi, New York (2026); Ingleby, Edinburgh (2025); Union Pacific, London (2025); and Karma, Thomaston (2023).

Aaron Kudi (b.1993, Bauchi, Nigeria) is a London-based painter whose abstract practice draws on Nigerian traditions of Natural Synthesis and diasporic approaches to abstraction. Working with liquid metal, industrial enamel, and ink on cotton duck, Kudi pours and floods his surfaces before excavating images from the resulting material formations, creating paintings that explore endurance, abandonment, and the human condition through gesture and process.

Kudi holds an MFA from the Slade School of Fine Art, London (2026), where his degree show marked his first major presentation. Recent presentations and residencies include 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair, New York (2026); the British School at Rome (2025); and the Vannucci Foundation, Città della Pieve (2026).

Shigeo Otake (b. 1955, Kobe, Japan) has, since the late 1980s, focused on painting subjects drawn from fungi, insects, and hybrid organisms. Working with classical techniques including egg tempera and fresco painting, he uses precision and material depth to render complex imagery with subtle luminosity.

Recent solo exhibitions include White Cube, Hong Kong (2026); Consortium Museum, Dijon & Venice (2026); American Art Catalogues, New York (2025); Hive Center for Contemporary Art, Shanghai (2025) & Beijing (2023); and ADZ Gallery, Lisbon (2024).

Marc Prats-Quintana (b. 1995, Barcelona, Spain) is a contemporary artist based between London and his native Costa Brava. His practice centres on painting as a process of excavation, memory and material transformation.

A graduate from the Royal College of Art, his work quickly gained recognition for its richly textured surfaces and poetic exploration of personal history and place. Recent exhibitions include the solo presentation ‘A Moment’s Rest’ with the online archive Painters Painting Paintings (2026) and the group exhibition ‘The Vandals’ at Gladstone Gallery in New York City (2026).

Giangiacomo Rossetti’s (b.1989, Milan, Italy) paintings insert his own image, and those of people close to him, into compositions drawn from art history, including Renaissance masters and the Pre-Raphaelites. Through meticulous acts of reconfiguration, Rossetti claims and disrupts these inherited images, collapsing distinctions between historical reverence and contemporary irreverence.

Rossetti studied at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera, Milan, and graduated from Das Institut Kunst FHNW, Basel, in 2019. Recent solo exhibitions include Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa, Venice (2026); Mendes Wood DM, Paris (2026); Mendes Wood DM, Germantown (2025); Greene Naftali, New York (2024); Galleria Federico Vavassori, Milan (2024); and The Power Station, Dallas (2023). Group exhibitions include Castello di Rivoli (2022); David Zwirner, New York (2022); Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles (2022); Fondazione CRC, Cuneo (2021) and Aspen Art Museum (2020).

Shiwen’s (b.1995, Shanghai, China) paintings hold structure and its undoing in the same breath, bringing together botanical illustrations, architectural blueprints, and patterns accumulated in the studio. Shiwen transforms these skeletal frameworks intuitively, allowing soft, textural passages to meet angular planes and suggesting the possibility of collapse.

She received her MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art in 2021, a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2019, and a BA in Art and Technology from the Shanghai Institute of Visual Art in 2017. Recent solo exhibitions include The Must of the Moon, ADZ, Lisbon (2026); The river returns nothing of what it takes, Michael Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles (2024); and Lichtung, ADZ, Lisbon. Recent group exhibitions include Pace, Los Angeles; GRIMM, New York; Bernheim, Zurich; Issuing Gallery, Shenzhen; and Millennium Gallery, London.

Ellen Siebers’ (b.1986, Madison, Wisconsin) small-scale paintings hover on the edge of dreams, drawing on moments accumulated, often unconsciously, during her daily walks through the Hudson Valley, where she lives and works. She transforms fragments of landscape, fleeting encounters with figures, and remembered images into intimate scenes that shift between observation and invention, presence and absence.

Recent solo exhibitions include Ingleby, Edinburgh (2025); Bremond Capela, Paris (2025); and Parrasch Heijnen, Los Angeles (2023). Recent group exhibitions include Olney Gleason, New York; The Power Station, Dallas; Hannah Hoffman, Los Angeles; Dans les yeux d’Elsa, Paris; and The Approach, London. Siebers is a recipient of the 2023 Elizabeth Greenshields Grant.

Laurie Smith’s (b.1994, Huddersfield, United Kingdom) figurative paintings draw on historical painting and photographic sources to explore masculinity, sexuality, desire, and identity through a queer and autobiographical lens. Depicting queer nightlife, dance floors, street scenes, and domestic interiors, Smith’s paintings examine the ways bodies negotiate visibility, vulnerability, and power.

Recent solo exhibitions include Sinthome, Wschód, Warsaw (2026); Brick Boys, Gathering, Cologne (2025); Private Lives, Brunette Coleman, London (2025); A Flower for a Heart, Painters Painting Paintings (2024); and diez gallery, Amsterdam (2024). Recent group exhibitions include Ilenia, London (2026); Parloir, Tournai (2024); Union Pacific, London (2023); and V.O Curations, London (2022, 2020). Smith will have a presentation with Wschód at Frieze London 2026.

Rafał Topolewski’s  (b.1983, Grudziadz, Poland) paintings draw on dreams, memories, and photographic imagery to create uncanny spaces in which waking and sleeping, reality and imagination, begin to blur. Topolewski combines fragmented figures, landscapes, and objects with muted palettes and dry, stippled brushwork, allowing paintings to evolve through an intuitive process of discovery.

Originally trained in architecture, Topolewski studied Fine Art at Manchester Metropolitan University and the Royal Academy Schools, London. Recent solo exhibitions include Dusk, Alice Amati, London (2026); Smoulder, GRIMM, New York (2025); Slumber, GRIMM, Amsterdam (2024); and Interludes, Alice Amati, London (2023). His work is held in the collections of Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin; Longlati Collection, Shanghai; and Simian Foundation, Shanghai.

Arisa Yoshioka (b.2000, Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia) grew up between Mongolia and Japan. Her paintings present dreamlike tableaux in which personal memory, natural forms, and everyday experience are transformed into scenes of quiet possibility.

Recent solo exhibitions include When It Was Dark I Called and You Came, Gladstone Gallery, Brussels (2024); and her US debut, Аръя, at 15orient, New York (2023). Yoshioka has participated in many group exhibitions including The Vandals, Gladstone Gallery, New York (2026); Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime, Sadie Coles HQ, London (2026); The Woman Question 1550 2025, Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw (2025); and Self-Portraits, GRIMM, Amsterdam (2024). Yoshioka’s first monograph was published in March 2024 with American Art Catalogues. In 2026, Yoshioka curated Are You Working Hard or Hardly Working? at Galerie Falk Losniza, Basel.