Flo Brooks is a painter of modern life. Their practice can be considered as a revising of traditional genre painting: at the very centre of each painting is a personal reflection on work, leisure and the in-between. Speaking of their approach, Brooks has said: “It feels fundamental to think critically about the ways we connect with each other, and what this might look like in our own lives. I make sense of things through lived experience, through intimate relationships and the communities I’m part of, whether that’s the rural community I grew up in, queer and trans communities, art networks or my blood family”.

Working with acrylic on shaped wooden panels, the compositions of their paintings literally burst at the seams sprawling across the gallery walls. For their recent touring exhibition, Angletwich, that opened at Brighton CCA, presented a suite of paintings set within a unique sculptural installation for the first time. Drawing from their own experience growing up in the rural Southwest, the works centre on a series of rural archetypes; from a livestock fair and the post office, to a lonely bus stop, generating a simultaneous sense of familiarity and isolation. Each work in the exhibition is part of a wider whole; depicting characters, scenes and places which together develop a critical narrative of place and queer experience in Britain.

Brooks recently presented their second solo exhibition at Project Native Informant, Be tru to your rec, a series of paintings depicting the changing landscape of a British recreation ground. 

Flo Brooks recently opened their first public artwork, Inner Bark Out, commissioned by Clapham Public Realm Programme and Studio Voltaire, as well as a solo exhibition at Spike Island, Harmonycrumb. In 2024, Brooks will present a solo presentation of new work as part of Art Basel: Statements. 

Artist, writer, musician and performer Juliana Huxtable (b. 1987, Bryan-College Station, Texas) excels in probing dormant and marginalized histories, narratives and technologies to challenge discourses around contemporary perceptions of identity, futurity and politics.

Through painting, photography, text and video, she has defined a singular aesthetics of language that often plays into a digital, Tumblr-ised visual identity, a kind of collaged rap and visual rapture. Huxtable’s practice offers a key critical voice on identity, as well as, specifically, her own identity as a black trans woman. Her work comments on different forms of reality through the lens of her personal structural experience. Inseparable from the political, the personal is our opportunity for disobedience, and Huxtable plays with this concept through her ever-evolving portrait of selfhood.

Her works and performances have been presented internationally in solo and group exhibitions, including Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève, Hayward Gallery, London, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Brooklyn Museum, New York, Institute for Contemporary Art, Boston, MOMA PS1, New York and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Her work can be found in the collections of Solomon R. Guggenheim, New York and The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York and Magasin III Museum for Contemporary Art, Stockholm.

In 2017, Huxtable published Mucus in My Pineal Gland, a celebrated volume of poems, performance scripts and essays.

Juliana Huxtable recently opened her second solo exhibition at Project Native Informant, AKIMBO SPITTLE. In 2023, Juliana Huxtable opened her first European institutional solo exhibition —USSYPHILIA at Fotografiska, Berlin. —USSYPHILIA includes and premieres a video installation, the new site-specific body of work and works from the AKIMBO-SPITTLE series.