Suzi Fadel Nassif is a Lebanese artist born in 1973 who lives & works between Dubai & Beirut. She uses oil & acrylic. Suzi merges the old and the new to revive the idiosyncrasies of legends such as Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali or Frida Kahlo. Fascinated by tales, she captures various gazes that she infuses with a surrealist twist.

Louise Nevelson was an American sculptor known for her monumental, monochromatic, wooden wall pieces and outdoor sculptures. Born in the Poltava Governorate of the Russian Empire, she emigrated with her family to the United States in the early 20th century.

František Kupka, also known as Frank Kupka or François Kupka, was a Czech painter and graphic artist. He was a pioneer and co-founder of the early phases of the abstract art movement and Orphic Cubism. Kupka's abstract works arose from a base of realism, but later evolved into pure abstract art.

Emily Filler (b. 1982, Ottawa) is a visual artist based in Toronto, Ontario. Filler's paintings walk the line between the real and the imaginary. There is a sense of the familiar but also the feeling that you are falling into a dream - flowers act as a departure point to a world that dissolves into abstraction. She weaves together painting, printmaking and photography in her ‘painterly collages’, bringing together panels of color, meticulous patterning and floral elements. Dense mark-making contrasts with airy clouds of transparent color and screen-printed florals reveal themselves from behind cut and torn paper and canvas. As these processes and elements interlace, they create a hybrid between representation and abstraction, the natural and supernatural. Emily Filler is often influenced by her ritual walk to the studio, where she observes the landscape shift from bustling city life to contemplative residential neighborhoods. Exploring this contrast, the works playfully collate the images and textures from both worlds. Filler earned her Bachelor of Fine Art with Honours from Queen’s University, in Kingston, Ontario.

Jean-Michel Basquiat was an American artist of Haitian and Puerto Rican descent. Basquiat first achieved fame as part of SAMO, an informal graffiti duo who wrote enigmatic epigrams in the cultural hotbed.

Born: December 22, 1960, Brooklyn, New York, NY

Died: August 12, 1988, Great Jones Street, New York, NY

On view: Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Trento and Rovereto, UCCA Center for Contemporary Art

Periods: Neo-expressionism, Contemporary art, Primitivism

Buried: November 3, 1988, The Green-Wood Cemetery, New York, NY

Movies: Basquiat: Rage To Riches

Boafo’s portrait paintings are enticing in their lucidity, accentuating the figures in each work, who are regularly isolated on single color backgrounds, their gaze the focal point of each work. The brushstrokes are thick and gestural, the contours of the body’s almost soften into abstraction. The most well known of his series, the Black Diaspora portraits, serve as a means of celebration of his identity and Blackness.

Spielman graduated from the University of California at Davis in 1989 with a major in Art Studio and a minor in Anthropology. She was a student of Wayne Thiebaud, and has exhibited extensively both nationally and internationally. Most recently, in 2013, she was nominated for the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant Award. Also, in 2013, her large-scale painting, “Weightless” was purchased by the U.S. Department of State’s Art in Embassies Program (AIE) for their permanent collection in the U.S. Embassy in Monterrey, Mexico. In 2010, she was included in the New Museum’s Bowery Artists Tribute in New York City. In 2007, she was awarded the American Artist Abroad Program by the AIE U.S. Department of State, to serve as an Art-Ambassador in Uruguay, teaching and lecturing. Spielman has shown at: Aqua Art Miami, Miami, FL; Kustera Projects Red Hook, Brooklyn, NY; Michael Rosenthal Contemporary Art, San Francisco, CA; The Window Project, PDX Contemporary Gallery, Portland, OR; Art Fair 21, Cologne, Germany; White Box Gallery, New York, NY; Deitch Projects, New York, NY; Terrain Gallery, San Francisco, CA; Artists Space, New York, NY, and The Palm Springs Desert Museum, Palm Springs, CA. Her paintings have also appeared on the reality shows “The Queer Eye for the Straight Guy” and “The Bachelorette,” and in several motion pictures. Her work is in numerous private and public collections.

“..Barnet’s career as an artist and America’s foremost printmaker has evolved from 1930s social realism to 1940s cubism to 1950s geometric abstraction, and since 1961, figurative realism..”