A few years ago, when Grace Weaver was asked about her being an artist, she admitted that she "almost became a biologist". "But art," continues the painter, who was born in Burlington, Vermont in 1989 and now lives in Brooklyn, New York, is "like research, only that subject, experience and audience are much broader." Weaver paints characteristically energetic figures on large formats that seem to jump back and forth between the canvas and their busy urban everyday life. These almost sociological paintings, which one curator once described as reflecting the all-encompassing, "ambivalent state of a late-capitalist world," now sit alongside paintings by Carlotta Bailly-Borg, Maryam Hoseini, Conny Maier.

The question of the tipping point – the moment when the supposedly inelegant turns into its opposite and possibly also how to get out of it – underlies Rose Wylie's pictures. At first glance, Wylie seems to quote a "naive" and "childlike" imagery, but in the background autobiographical, political, pop, literary, and theater references come together. "There is a point where clumsiness becomes elegance," says the artist, who was born in Kent, England, in 1934. "In painting, skill and elegance are at the opposite end of the spectrum from the primitive, which is often very real, very emotional and very brief." Rarely do both come together in Wylie's paintings, as does the portrait of feminist pioneer Simone de Beauvoir from the Year 2013 shows.

Kristina Schuldt's art also appears ambiguous. Art-historical references, political and feminist topics as well as the scattered attention in the highly networked present are artfully linked in the colorful pictures of the painter who lives in Leipzig and was born in Moscow in 1982. Schuldt sees the figure on the canvas as something abstract. After all, her figures could "also be thoughts, they don't have to be people," explains the painter. Maryam Hoseini also works with such a comprehensive concept of abstraction. The artist, who was born in Tehran, Iran in 1988 and now lives in New York, is particularly interested in spaces that are activated by the body and that open up between public and private, pictorial space and exhibition space or painting and drawing.

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