The body is a physical and material being. However, it can also reflect a person’s spirit, sense of ‘self’ or embrace metaphors of our contemporary age. This exhibition seeks to bring together the work of contemporary painters who explore the body as material, and as the embodiment of the immaterial, engaging in themes ranging from the notion of ‘self’, identity, critical race, queer theory and the technological body. It also seeks to shed light on the varying ways in which different artistic styles of figuration can engage with the question: how do we picture the human subject today?In an age where questions of embodied experience are continually accentuated by our relationship with cross-cultural exchange, media, new technologies, and socio- political change, the body has come to signify the transcendental.