Joel Rea was the Highly Commended Runner Up in the 2011 Metro Gallery Art Award in Victoria, and a finalist in both the 2011 Prometheus and Clayton Utz Art Award in Queensland. Joel was also a finalist in the 2010 Redland Gallery Biennial Contemporary Painting Award in Queensland, and for the second year running the 2012 Clayton Utz Art Award in which he was also awarded a high commendation from the judges. In 2012 Joel held his 5th solo exhibition in Brisbane, the major painting from the exhibition was curated into ‘Art on Art’ at the Gold Coast City Art Gallery. Joel was the winner of the 2011 Gold Coast Rotary Young Achiever in Vocational Excellence and holds a Bachelor of Fine Art Degree from the Queensland College of Art, graduating in 2003.

Karla Black is a Scottish sculptor whose work, Doesn’t Care In Words, was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2011. She was born in 1972 in Alexandria and went to the Glasgow School of Art, where she graduated from the sculpture department in 1999 and became a Master of Arts in 2004. She uses mostly traditional art-making materials like plaster, paint, paper and chalk in her work, along with a small amount of everyday substances such as cosmetics and toiletries. Her sculptures are either ‘almost’ or ‘only just’ objects and skirt amongst the mediums of painting, performance art and installation, often contrasting large scale with a fragility of form. Artists who have influenced her work include Helen Frankenthaler, Karen Kilimnick, Lynda Benglis, Robert Smithson and Richard Tuttle. Karla Black is represented by Stuart Shave/Modern Art in London.

Arturo Samaniego ‘describes his style as a blend of realism, minimalist cool and contemporary edge. Samaniego combines the beauty of the human form with the emotion-evoking quality of gesture. The figure is executed in the classical, old master style, while the environment is abstract and nebulous, representing the emotional and internal. ‘In his latest “Emergence” series, Samaniego explores the theme of beginning and awakening. The figures surface from the live-giving water source with renewed understanding, both soothed and refreshed. They appear energized, cleansed and in control. The treatment is almost hyper-real such is Samaniego’s assured dexterity with the brush – but, the paintings retail a cool, detached aura of voyeurism as if the viewer is actually present at some kind of metamorphosis.’

Lovely pop icon paintings by White Rabbit (alias of artist Hillary White).

Site-specific mural intervention/exhibition at Fondazione Pastificio Cerere, Roma by Spanish artist Santiago Morilla.

Annemarie Busschers (NL) was born in 1970, in southern, catholic ‘s-Hertogenbosch, Hieronymus Bosch’s hometown; she moved to the northern, protestant city of Groningen in the early 90s where she studied at the Minerva Fine Arts School; she never moved back down South. Her first body of work drinks directly from Bosch’s heritage; soon enough she found her own theme and language. In 2003 she makes Child I, work which signals the turning point in her oeuvre; in 2005 Chicken Pox is selected for the BP award of the London National Portrait Gallery, for which her work will be selected again in 2006 and 2008. Since then, her body of work consists of self-portraits and portraits she works on based on a photograph. Her work belongs to the Dutch tradition of reproducing the subject matter with utter detail, as if we could touch with the eye the textures of the surfaces, the fabrics and the skin, etc Busschers’s work digs deeper into the meaning of contemporary individualism by treating the surfaces as landscapes with a right of their own. They are not psychological portraits, in the manner of Lucian Freud, her work is scientific, almost microscopic; she researches the surfaces of the body, of the imperfect, uneven skins, bound to illness, decay and ultimately death. They are paintings of hybrid beings where the subject is not only painted but also built by different layers of materials such as acrylic paint, pencil, pastel, epoxy, wood, wax, paper and felt. Portraits are therefore not only painted but also constructed by adding these layers onto the canvas. These layers help document the constant change we are subjected to, as if we were observing with the curiosity of a teenager who in front of the mirror stares with resentment, anger and fear the mutations the body goes through. Indeed, the individuals portrayed seem to be looking at themselves into augmented mirror.

A rug made out of glass marbles (184cm x 244cm) by Steven Emmanuel.

Loving this series of animal shaped wood wine racks from Conte-Bleu, a design company based in Seoul, South Korea.

Rotating Kitchen is an art installation by Zeger Reyers at the ‘Eating the Universe’ exhibtion at the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf in Germany. It rotated for 3 months.