Top image: Jamie Fitzpatrick: The King (2015)

Bringing together artists from diverse practices and locale, Bloomberg New Contemporaries has been showcasing nascent talent since 1949.

With past alumni including Ed Atkins, Jake & Dinos Chapman, Mona Hatoum, Damien Hirst, David Hockney and Chris Ofili, the annual event is an acclaimed platform that showcases emerging artists to a global audience. Chosen by guest selectors Anya Gallaccio, Alan Kane and Haroon Mirza, this year’s show boasts the work of 46 artists those work explores themes across subjects such as mass-production, socio-economics, gender equality and cultural identity.

Here, Bloomberg New Contemporaries’ director Kirsty Ogg and programme manager Séamus McCormack each select their three highlights from this year’s line-up.

James Berrington: Smeed Dean Islington Yellow Rustica, 2015 and Whitburn Orange Multi (2015)
“After many years working in social housing, James Berrington’s C-type photographic prints on aluminium speak volumes about the current housing crisis which is now beginning to reach out of London to affect the rest of the UK. James’ bricks are presented in a way that refers to our obsession with classification and comparison, but which also encourage us to think about the housing market, homes and the people that occupy them.”

“Bringing together artists from diverse practices and locale, Bloomberg New Contemporaries has been showcasing nascent talent since 1949.”

Karolina Magnusson-Murray & Leon Platt: The Names, The Application and The Work (2016)
“These three moving image works from 2016 are a brilliant exploration of the process of applying to the New Contemporaries open submission exhibition, and of working together. The Names, The Application and The Work subtly reveal the tensions of making work and bringing it to public attention. Karolina & Leon’s works are in turns painful to watch and hilariously funny as they grapple to fit within a process, while simultaneously ‘avoiding’ making the work.”

Sophie Mackfall: We Eat and Drink and Sit by Fires (2015)
“Three painted glass panels form the series We Eat and Drink and Sit by Fires, 2015 are seductive and lustrous. Their colourful abstract surfaces refer as much to the history of 20^th century abstract painting as they do to everyday domestic home furniture. The shaped panels set up their own relationship to each other and to the space that they occupy at ICA, London.”

Jamie Green: The empire on which the sun never sets (2015)
“Green’s work explores immediate and relevant concerns relating to ownership, distribution and exchange.  In his ongoing project The empire on which the sun never sets (2016) the curators of the exhibition are invited to select from an archive of digital photographs taken by David Shankbone which the photographer has made available as free open-source content. Borrowing and making use of others visual taste Green’s innovative work questions authorship and creative licence.”

Jamie Fitzpatrick: The King (2015)
“Fitzpatricks’ riotous kinetic sculptural constructions undermine and challenge the conceived permanence of commemorative historical figurative sculpture. Using non-traditional materials such as dripping and melting wax, Fitzpatrick’s comic, absurd and often crude figures are distinctively recognisable making him unique among his peers.”

Jemma Egan: Stella (2015)
“Egan’s sculptural works raise questions of taste, aesthetics and value and are often derived from specific sources from the fast-food industry. In her bronze cast Stella we are pointed towards the humanistic features of everyday objects in this case an enlarged McDonald’s coffee cup lid. Egan makes use of her immediate surroundings and rather than looking from the outside her work is embedded within the context it references.”

Bloomberg New Contemporaries runs at the ICA 12 Carlton House Terrace, SW1Y 5AH until 22nd January.