Born in London to Norwegian parents, Magnus Gjoen grew up in Switzerland, Denmark, Italy as well as in the UK. As a contemporary artist Gjoen has exhibited worldwide and questions the notions of beauty by juxtaposing a range of styles and media, incorporating a street and pop aesthetic with a fine art approach. His pieces draw on history and allusion, using existing artworks or fragments from the past to create his own, contemporary aesthetic.

Describing himself as an ‘accidental’ artist, Gjoen studied fine art and fashion design which led to a successful career in fashion, working for brands such as Vivienne Westwood.

A move back into the art world came from decorating the walls of his London flat and realising he could do so with his own artworks. Thought-provoking and often-emotional, Gjoen’s art offers a modern spin on old masterpieces or manipulates powerful and strong objects into something fragile yet beautiful. By blending two genres from completely different worlds, his art is about rediscovery, taking things from the past and renewing them for the contemporary market. Breathing fresh air into dusty old paintings found in the far corners of a museum or lending a sense of beauty and grace to typically powerful, even dangerous objects, Magnus Gjoen’s work invites a second look. It’s this ability to engage with the viewer and get them questioning, challenging and thinking that makes him a promising and successful young artist in the contemporary art world.

“I’m an Indian origin, Dubai born Canadian (immigrant) artist.

My relationship with art and poetic thinking has been long and enduring. My brother was one of those kids who had the most natural flare for drawing and hoarded comic books. He is now an amazing cartoonist out there. My mother loved literature, black and white Bollywood movies, poetry, tragedy and romance and injected in us curiosity and minds for storytelling and drama. Until my father left when I was 14, I tagged along to his construction sites, traced his architectural drawings and flipped through colour swatches on our drives home from school.

I spent my summers in India with my humanitarian grandparents surrounded by Indian folkart, textiles, carpets, artifacts and ornaments and the rich and infinite pool of creativity that Indian culture oozes of.

As a Dubai kid in a Muslim home I was exposed to Islamic architecture, calligraphy, henna, folklore, Persian carpets and a fascination with the moon.

I loved to draw but I hated the rules.

My style is my own. I can pick it apart and attribute it to all the visual information I’ve been surrounded by through my life. Comic books, textiles, mythology, calligraphy, graffiti, and so on. But drawing for me is a free-flowing process and I don’t consciously inject any one influence into my work. I’m interested in how we think and invent. Symbolism and semiotics. Mythology and folklore. Romanticism, existentialism. And ultimately our innate human urge to create, depict and express.”

Born in Basra in 1974, for Wissam Shawkat it was the form of four letters from the Arabic alphabet written across a school blackboard that started him on a journey that has shaped him both in early years and adulthood. He recalls finding peace and patience writing and repeating calligraphic letters on the dusty tiles of a makeshift shelter during a heavy aerial bombardment during the Iraq-Iran war and, spurred on by supportive parents, he became his own tutor.

His teen summers were spent lettering for a local sign shop before he began studying for a degree in Civil Engineering at Basra University, graduating in 1996. The life as a Civil Engineer, though, was not Shawkat’s destiny and the point where his affinity for letterforms would wait no longer quickly came.

In recent years, Shawkat has become known for a new calligraphic style, Al Wissam, which references a number of traditional scripts including Sunbuli, Jali Diwani, Eastern Kufic, and Thuluth, bringing them together with modern design.

It has been said that Wissam Shawkat is a rule-breaker. A modest individual, this loaded label is not something he’ll freely apply himself, but, that aside, it is impossible to deny that challenge is an ever present theme. We see it even in the way he goes about making new work – employing traditional tools and materials to produce a contemporary aesthetic. There is purpose in the liberating juxtaposition of using handmade paper reed pens and traditional inks to create works that ask us to think again about what Arabic calligraphy is and can be – a central Calligraformic characteristic and something that sits comfortably with an artist like Shawkat, whose less prescriptive route to Arabic calligraphy has always left him somewhere on the periphery of tradition.

Abdullah Lutfi is a young dynamic emerging Emirati artist based in Dubai Abdulla has a passion for art, and whist he enjoys painting and drawing images from his daily life, he is particularly drawn to buildings and vehicles. His interest in buildings, particularly in Dubai stems from his desire to show visitors to the city, what Dubai is really like.

Abdulla has a unique perspective on the world; his vision is piercing and accurate, no detail escapes his eye. It is this quality that characterizes his amazing art,. His bold line drawings are spontaneous and amusing and infused with a mischievous sense of humor.

Abdulla is an amazing mimic and definitely not shy about expressing his very strong opinions about people; an encounter with him could have you laughing like you have never done before! There is also a very caring side to Abdullah and to see him gently helping a physically challenged friend is a very moving and humbling experience.

Bahraini born and raised, Areej Rajab was an artist at birth and remains one to this day. She recalls watching with wonder as her aunt, the classical water-colourist Sameeha Rajab, worked away at the canvas. At three, with her aunt as both inspiration and tutor, Rajab began to learn about colour, materials, techniques and application. She began a love affair with colour that, as an adult, shows no signs of waning. Rajab studied Business and General Management at the University of Bahrain, and had three children before she made the decision to pursue her lifelong passion.

That passion took her, family in tow, to the London College of Art where her true talent revealed itself fully, perhaps for the first time. Today, Rajab’s work touches the hearts of collectors and enthusiast from all four corners of the globe. She has exhibited extensively throughout the Middle East including at Bahrain’s Ministry of Culture and the Gulf Hotel, Oman, Qatar and Saudi Arabia as well as across the UK. She works as an art teacher, tutoring a wide range of pupils, from absolute beginners through to the professionally trained, from the young to the old

Areej Rajab is an artist who is, unusually and quite utterly, unbound by the forces of genre and style. From the Masters of the Italian Renaissance to Dadaism’s rue of all things rational, we interpret our collective artistic heritage through groups and labels.

In art, as in life, we understand one through its relationship to the other – we know dark because there is light, hot because we have experienced cold. So it is perhaps natural that an artist who innately avoids any compulsion to define herself by the binaries with which we map out our world can sit somewhat uncomfortably. How do we understand the undefined artist’s relationship to us, and therefore, what their work might mean to us?

Ask Areej Rajab how she categorises her work and she will tell you she doesn’t know. It can leave you a little perplexed but, happily, the feeling presents itself momentarily. Before this artist’s work everything you think you need to know about an artwork will melt away.

All of a sudden your drive to imply structure and genre and style will seem like an unnecessary distraction from the sight of these pure, beautiful works. Quite simply, quite uncompromisingly, it is emotion that drives Rajab’s hand. Stand before her work and that becomes blindingly obvious.

Although originally from India, Sandhya Sethu spent her childhood in Nigeria, America, India, and most recently, Dubai.

As an artist, Sandhya feels as though she has never truly belonged to one place. Therefore, this is directly reflected in the work that she creates. Her pieces are inspired by all the places that she has had the pleasure to live; essentially they are an amalgamation of everything that she has seen and felt, a hybrid of each nation’s cultures and societies.

As a world created exclusively by the artist, Sandhya describes her art as a happy universe with super-saturated colours, which draw inspiration from her Indian heritage, her Nigerian love for celebration, and everything else that falls in between.

Her work revolves around colourful still life paintings and a universe of fictional characters. Belonging to a slightly odd dimension, the light in each region of a piece varies so that the same object never looks the same in a different place.

Sandhya’s earliest memory of happiness is entwined in the simplicity of drawing flowers on a piece of paper, which to this day brings her tremendous amounts of joy. For the artist, this is what makes the most sense. The ability to be as bold and as loud as she wants, without saying anything at all, lies at the core of her ethos.

The first 40 years of Mike Arnold’s career were spent as a professional and diligent architect. Thanks to what now seems like serendipitous timing, Arnold progressed through a successful career without ever having to become computer literate and rely on programmes to create building sketches and renderings.

As such, his drawing skills were fine-tuned throughout his life, preparing him for his second career as a full-time artist – something he feels he began as a child, when he would spend every weekend studying art at The Philadelphia Museum of Art, in the city where he was born and raised.

Now, Arnold fuses his knowledge of built structures and his ability to almost see through the exterior to the inner forms with the artistic perspective he was born with. He enjoys exploring with different materials and his practice now extends across oil-on-canvas, oil-on-glass, mono prints, oil sticks and oil-on-paper.

He also tries to push his boundaries by moving away from precise renditions of subjects, to embracing a looser form that allows for creativity to flourish. There is no overriding theme to his work other than a life-long passion dedicated to light. His attempt to chase and capture light is what marries all his work and within that search, Arnold attempts to convey emotion to his viewers.

An urban landscape is far richer and more complex than a first glance would ever imply. Whilst formidable structures and striking architecture might at first capture the eye, the details and intricacies that make a city are what captures the imagination.

Butler’s work, upon first look, is an accomplished contemporary representation of some of the world’s most iconic urban landscapes. But on second look, and third, a rich, detailed and often humorous narrative will emerge.

Butler creates this narrative with an expert use of characterisation; the people that occupy his scenes, a stylised representation of society that has often been compared to L.S. Lowry, are complemented and modernised with Butler’s collages.

His inclusion of newspaper text, slogans, statements or a single word, adds a depth and intrigue that keeps the audience hooked.

This murmur from the artist, a quiet commentary accompanying the scene itself can be likened to the hum of the city, the gentle chatter of a metropolis. With this, Butler brings an essence of the City onto our walls and into our homes.