Nina Chanel Abney

In her charged paintings, Nina Chanel Abney uses vivid contemporary references – celebrity, politics and current affairs – merging them into characters and bizarre scenes, heavy on symbolism blocked out in bright, cartoon colours. Her paintings often feature group representations of people with ambiguous race or gender, depicted in a scene like a populist narrative, the sort of depressing sex-scandal story that seems to eclipse actual important news, but used by Abney to point out a) the ludicrousness of such things and b) the greater concerns in the world.