Lot 5 Collective’s fourth exhibition, Face Value, will be staged at the Royal Opera Arcade Gallery, London, running from 8 – 17 November 2018.

The six artists that make up the collective, Lizet Dingemans, SJ Fuerst, Lucas Garcia, Luca Indraccolo, Helen Masacz and Harriet Spratt, seek to ‘reconcile contradictions by applying traditional techniques to modern themes, combining classical beauty with contemporary culture, and uniting expression with representation’ – using the old to create the new.

Face Value focuses on contemporary portraiture, and also will feature a number of international guest artists. These include Felicia Forte, whose painting Time Traveler, (Matthew Napping) was awarded Second Prize at the 2018 BP Portrait Awards, as well as Anastasia Pollard, Arvid Antonsen, Daniel Sequeira, Cornelia Hernes, Emanuela de Musis, Emma Hopkins, Hans van der Leeuw, Ione Hunter Gordon, Jamie Routley, Lewis Hazelwood-Horner, Milo Hartnoll, Nicolas Uribe, Phillip Harris, Simon Davis, Scott Eaton, Sainer Etam, Stella Ishack, Shana Levenson, Sharn Whitehead, Sofia Welch, Stephen Bauman and Travis Seymour. The works in Face Value showcase a variety of styles and subject matter but are linked by the artists’ commitment to representational painting, portraiture and contemporary art’s capacity to articulate the complexities of the human condition.

SJ Fuerst’s work is a mix of the styles of Pop art and classical painting, which she brings together to create playful tableaus that reinterpret elements of contemporary culture, each a slightly twisted version of the familiar. Fuerst is inspired by costume, toys, and fashion photography, and often incorporates the surreal atmosphere and compositional strategies of the latter to invoke a sense of fantasy.

With his latest works, Luca Indraccolo takes inspiration from the fires that devastated the Vesuvius National Park in Italy in the summer of 2017. This disaster is used as a starting point to make a comment on the global destruction of natural environment for financial gain of a few unscrupulous people. The impressive columns of smoke that rose kilometers into the air are a strong visual device that links all the paintings in this series. Helen Masacz’s latest paintings draw on her passion for music; she has been interpreting album titles by well-known musicians. For her, Face Value represents the paradox between the familiar and unfamiliar that underlies contemporary culture. Her painting Technical Ecstasy (2018) is a portrait that reflects the current climate of paranoia and violence in the world and expresses how technology has created the means to destroy us.