Honor Titus is one of the art world’s most buzzed-about painters. After fronting the Brooklyn punk-rock band Cerebral Ballzy and working as a studio assistant for Raymond Pettibon, he turned to painting, developing a unique style inspired by Les Nabis, a group of 19th century French painters who eschewed linear perspective in favour of flat planes of colour and decorative patterns.

In January 2020 he had a breakthrough show at Henry Taylor’s downtown LA studio and a year later his first solo show at Timothy Taylor gallery in New York. It sold out a week before opening, with critics hailing him as a rising star. Suffused with a sense of romance and nostalgia, Titus’s paintings depict leisure activities and fragmented street scenes conjured from his lived experiences and memories.

Trophy Position (2021) shows a woman measuring her serve up against an old-timey net. Is it match point? As with many of Titus’s paintings, we’re left to interpret the narrative. It is one of many sporting pictures Titus has painted over the last few years. ‘Athletics are often filled with such ritual, whether it be sartorial or domain, that I find it quite rich for inspiration,’ he once said.

Marc Quinn is renowned for his frank, visceral sculptures that explore what it means to be human today. Since finding fame in the 1990s with Self, a self-portrait cast from his own frozen blood, he’s made art from plastic bin bags and slides of human DNA — and even cast a sculpture of Kate Moss in 18 carat gold.

His ambitious new work 100 Heads comprises 100 portrait busts of refugees, cast in concrete from an initial 3D scan of the sitter. Each plinth is inscribed with the sitter’s name, birthplace, current residence and short message which challenges the perception of refugees as unidentifiable masses.

The sale proceeds from each sculpture will support the creation of Our Blood, Quinn’s not-for-profit project comprising two identical cubes of frozen human blood (one will be made from refugee donations, the other from non-refugee donations) which will launch at the New York Public Library in 2023. The project aims to raise awareness around the international refugee crisis, while also raising funds for refugee charities, including the International Rescue Committee.

Born in Norway in 1863, Edvard Munch is best known for sombre works — from paintings and watercolours to drawings and lithographs — that explore matters of human mortality, anxiety and emotional suffering. But he also produced paintings of nature, recreation and long summer days by the sea, suffused with luminous light and vibrant colours. After suffering a nervous breakdown in 1908, Munch returned to Norway to lead a quiet life, finding inspiration in the landscape, farm labourers and animals around him. Created for the University of Oslo’s new ceremonial hall (Aula), The Sun (1909) depicts a glowing sunrise over the rocky archipelago off Kragerø. Not only does it reflect Munch’s newly optimistic outlook but also his interest in nature and Vitalism, a school of thought that promoted health and hygiene and emphasized the sun as an energy-giving source.

Yayoi Kusama has become synonymous with dots, infinity nets and pumpkins. Since coming to prominence in New York in the 1960s, she has expanded her creative practice to include installation, painting, sculpture, fashion design and writing. The obliteration room, which opens at Tate Modern on 23 July, reflects her enduring obsession with repetition, obliteration and interactivity. Originally conceived as a project for children by the Queensland Art Gallery in 2002, it consists of a white space, fully furnished with white furniture. Visitors are invited to cover every available surface with colourful dot stickers, transforming the room from a blank canvas into an explosion of colour.

Few images of the Queen are as mesmerising as this one. An outtake from Chris Levine’s official hologram portrait shoot of Her Majesty, commissioned by the Jersey Heritage Trust in 2004, it shows the Queen serene, her eye closed. ‘The camera that shot the sequence of stereo images took a while to reset itself after each pass,’ said Levine. ‘Meanwhile the Queen was brightly lit, and I suggested to Ma’am she might rest between shots.’ It was during these moments of rest that Levine captured Lightness of Being (2004). The sense of tranquillity that pervades the portrait stems from the artist’s interest in meditation. ‘I was very conscious of her breathing in order to capture a sense of calm in the work.’

This painterly photograph of roses comes from Nick Knight’s critically acclaimed series ‘Roses from my Garden’. Inspired by the work of 16th and 17th century still life painters like Jan Brueghel the Elder and Jan Van Huysum, Knight shot cut roses from his garden on his iPhone, using only natural daylight to illuminate them. He then enlarged the images and filtered them through software that uses AI to fill in the spaces between the pixels. ‘Roses from my Garden references the rich history of classical painting whilst also looking towards the exciting world of new technologies,’ he has said. Lush, delicately coloured and resolutely modern, Knight’s roses are among the most alluring in art history.

Gallery 1957 has established a reputation as one of the world’s leading galleries dedicated to artists of West Africa and the diaspora. Launched by Marwan Zakhem in Accra in 2016, it has since expanded overseas, opening its first London outpost in 2020. On display at the gallery’s booth at 1-54 New York is this painting by Lord Ohene, a Ghanaian portrait, figurative and still life painter currently based in Amsterdam. Part of the artist’s ‘Afro Memoirs’ series, Possess Gaze (2021) features Ohene’s signature palette of bold, brilliant hues and delicate beadwork, which hints at the character, style, performance and dreams of the sitter. ‘I incorporate elements from life which are inspired by people from my past and my hardships along the way,’ he has said. Catch her eye and you’ll find it hard to look away.

Refik Anadol’s Casa Batlló: Living Architecture is a constantly changing, live NFT inspired by the 1906 Gaudí building after which it’s named. The result of a collaboration between Casa Batlló and the Turkish-Armenian artist Refik Anadol, it is made using environmental data gathered in real-time, making the building the first UNESCO World Heritage Site to take the form of a live NFT. ‘Refik’s work resides between art and technology, expands the possibilities of architecture, and brings a new outlook beyond space and time,’ said Gary Gautier, Casa Batlló’s manager. This monumental artwork will be offered for sale on 10 May (estimate: $1 million - 2 million) in New York, with ten percent of the sale proceeds benefiting the Associació Aprenem Autisme and Fundació Adana institutions. It will be on display outside Rockefeller Plaza until 13 May. Catch it if you can!

Tomorrow would have been Keith Haring’s 64th birthday. Known the world over for his visual language of bold figures and bright backdrops, Haring’s work started popping up on New York sidewalks in the 1980s and has been an irrepressible artistic force ever since, spawning a worldwide legacy. Having created his own iconography, Haring toyed with his collection of characters: angels, mermaids, dolphins and UFOs re-emerge time and time again.

Like his compatriot Jean-Michel Basquiat, Haring’s paintings brought the raw energy and playful colours of the street to the white walls of the gallery world. The two are inextricably linked in public imagination - when Basquiat died in 1988 at 27, Haring penned his obituary for Vogue, and paid homage to his fellow artist with the work A Pile of Crowns for Jean-Michel Basquiat. Friendship is not all they shared, as market prices for both oeuvres skyrocketed in the late eighties in an ironic defiance of the social commentary contained within their works.

Despite their childlike colour palate and shapes, Haring’s bold figures take a wry cartoonish eye to the darker social themes of the time, addressing drug abuse, exploitation, war, safe sexual practice and the AIDS epidemic. These themes spawned multiple public art campaigns (including his famous Crack is Wack mural) eventually setting up the Keith Haring Foundation to provide funding and imagery to AIDS organisations and children’s programs. Speaking on his mission statement of art for all, he said: “I don't think art is propaganda; it should be something that liberates the soul, provokes the imagination and encourages people to go further. It celebrates humanity instead of manipulating it.”