CONTEMPORARY ISTANBUL

Spanish artist Manolo Valdés has developed an individual style that reviews History without detracting from the original subject. Quoting figures from well-known works of art by old masters such as Velázquez, Rembrandt, Rubens, and Fra Angelico, as well as twentieth-century masters such as Matisse, Picasso, and Lichtenstein, Valdés revitalises these familiar images by taking them out of their original context. Through his treatment of the material as well as his feeling for composition and effect, he manages to make each motif his own.

Korean artist Cho Sung-Hee successfully combines a traditional Korean sensibility with her unique vision and personal narrative. Her works explore the complex relationship between colour and texture through a labour intensive, time-consuming process. In constructing the surface of her works, she uses a collage method in which many circles are hand-cut or gently torn from traditional hanji paper, then layered with oil pigments and placed one atop another.

Swiss artist Andy Denzler has created a signature style encompassing bands of pigment that alternate between static, thick marks and blurred, flowing sweeps. The human figure remains at the core of his explorations, courting the viewer's memories, and leaving him with a vague gnawing that he has missed something lying just beneath the surface. Perception and distortion are prominent and powerful traits of Denzler's practice.

Iranian artist Reza Derakshani builds up the luminous, textured surfaces of his paintings with a base of roof tar, after which he applies layers of colour and other materials such as gold, silver, enamel, and sand. Blending abstract and figurative elements from both Western and Eastern cultures, he creates an idiosyncratic œuvre at the confluence of civilisations.

Spanish painter Lita Cabellut has developed a contemporary variation of the classic fresco technique and a recognisable personal palette style that awaken the viewer's senses. This portrait, endowed with great psychological potency captures the raw essence or the soul of its subject and exudes energy, beauty and passion.

Mesmerising and energetic, Anthony James's work gestures towards the theatricality of minimalism and formalism with a focus on materiality, alchemy, and a deep respect for light and space. The artist manages to translate the notion of infinity into art through his awe-inspiring sculptures.

Always exploring different techniques, both cutting edge and ancient, British artist Julian Opie plays with ways of seeing through reinterpreting the vocabulary of everyday life. Minimal and linear, his reductive style evokes both a visual and spatial experience of the world around us.

Nick Gentry and Seo Young-Deok artworks explore the relationship between humans and their over industrialised environment. Korean artist Seo Young-Deok illustrates this connection with his representations of the human body using welded chains taken from industrial machinery and bicycles. British painter Nick Gentry evokes today's consumerism by creating portraits using outdated computer floppy discs.

The textural, crystalline paper wall sculpture by Korean artist Chun Kwang-Young is from the Aggregation series for which the artist is best known. This sculptural composition is created from a myriad of small shapes wrapped in hand dyed old book pages, printed in the traditional manner on Korea's celebrated mulberry-pulp paper, called hanji. Chun likens the wrapped shapes to cells or units of information, and sees analogies to both chemistry and the human condition in the ways that the shapes interact physically: sometimes meshing, sometimes clashing.