Idris Khan creates sculpture, painting and photography that investigates memory, ritual and the layering of experience. He shot to fame in 2004 after he scanned every page of the Qur’an, then digitally layered the images.

Repetition is key to Khan’s meditative process. To make this striking work Khan stamped dense layers of text onto a glass pane using woodblocks coated with oil-based ink.

Superimposed on one other, the words become illegible. Their semantic meaning is lost. But in the process new truths are revealed: text becomes image. Open to interpretation, engages your close and questioning attention.

‘I paint myself,’ Kahlo once said, ‘because I am so often alone, because I am the person I know best.’ Of her 143 surviving paintings, 55 are self-portraits. Many of these speak of her physical and emotional suffering, the fragility of the human body, life and death.

Painted in 1940, this small but arresting painting shows Kahlo’s pain: her skin bleeds from the thorn necklace, her expression is solemn, the hummingbird is black and lifeless.

By employing symbolism and iconography from indigenous Mexican culture, Kahlo pioneered a new language of loss and pain and reframed self-portraiture for good.

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye has devoted her career to painting fictional black characters, explaining that they are ‘composites constructed from found images, life drawings and my imagination.’ They are painted in a muted palette of blacks, browns and greys, with the occasional flash of brightness, and seem to exist outside of a specific time and place.

But each has a story to tell. ‘Yiadom-Boakye’s figures push themselves into the imagination, as literary characters do,’ Zadie Smith wrote in 2017.

In Willow Strip, two women in emerald green dresses dance, their right arms interlaced. They gaze at each other admiringly: why are they celebrating? Yiadom-Boakye leaves us to decide.