Gagliardi is trained in graphic design, and her art has grown out of a mastery of digital illustration. She designed publications and advertisements for exhibitions and luxury brands before fully focusing on her independent artwork, which took a turn toward what she describes as “robotic” figurative works in 2013. “Even in my recent work, the subjects aren’t male or female, more avatars,” she says. These avatars surface from dark backgrounds, their smooth, luminous faces and bodies often covered by long, lanky fingers tipped with glowy fingernails. “I like breaking into people’s intimacy, exposing them,” Gagliardi explains. “In my recent exhibition at Tomorrow, ‘La Belle Heure,’ walking into the show felt like entering a couple’s private space, but as much as you were the voyeur, they also were looking at you and posing for you.” The paintings are ghostly and surreal, executed in deep greens and browns that filter into pale blues and electric lilacs, at times resembling the tonal palette of a photographic negative. Other works fiercely celebrate female body parts, finished with nipple and genital piercings.

“All my favorite artworks have figures in them,” says Figgis. “Since I began drawing as a child that was my main interest.” Her lush paintings frequently center on fictional aristocrats in lofty interiors, portrayed in idiosyncratic swirls of paint that melt together. While some works seem dark and dystopian, others are tinged with notes of humor and levity; others still feel sweet, or elegant. (Her characters came alive brilliantly in an animated film earlier this year in a fitting collaboration with the Metropolitan Opera.) “I am trying to represent the figure in a way that maybe I can’t with words or writing,” she notes. “Paint is so convenient and I have so many things that I want to say that drawing with paint does it well enough sometimes.” The artist counts history, architecture, astronomy, and nature among her inspirations, as well as paint itself. “Paint is so beautiful. It is such a lovely experience for me. The challenge of it and the ideas that I want to explore feel much easier to do when I am alone in my studio. I feel free.” 

Beavers’s high-relief paintings are dimensional portrayals of people and food items, like a man’s chiseled six-pack abs, a composite of pouty pink lips, or a smattering of crimson-colored T-bone steaks. “My images come from the internet, predominantly social media, so when the images I’m looking at are memes, makeup tutorials, body painting, the figure becomes a part of the narrative,” Beavers says. During art school she looked to underground female comic book artists, like Julie Doucet, for inspiration, but following her MFA coursework at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, she turned to abstraction. “At some point I started titling my very abstract pieces after the things in the world they were based on, and as I did that, elements of representation began to creep back in, figures included,” she explains. In recent works she is exploring the wealth of nail art on the internet, creating paintings of intricately manicured fingers and toes.

“Strange mothers, icons, ghosts, dear friends, and altered reflections of myself have greeted me on the canvas since I started painting,” says Dancy. “The characters in the paintings are fictional. I debate even calling them characters actually because their flatness is about an ubiquity of the body itself in our landscape and psychic consciousness.” Her beguiling female nudes, traversing canvases, murals, and neons, have charmed the art world over the past year, as highlights at MoMA PS1’s “Greater New York” exhibition, and the buzz of major international art fairs like Frieze Londonand Art Basel in Hong Kong. “I came to painting from writing poems, and it always was a feeling that these women appeared in the paintings kind of mid-sentence that compelled me to push them further,” she explains. Dancy intended to pursue writing in college, but the esteemed artists she had as professors, Amy Sillman and Elizabeth Murray, led her to chart a path into art. Her female figures draw on advertising and branding, as much as history and mythological tropes. “I like the idea that paintings can be haunted by the past, that they have the means to resurrect, to conjure, and to alter a sense of time or reality. Mom, Beyoncé, and Isis (the goddess) are all themes that I’m working through these days.”