New York-based artist Kathleen Ryan gathers inspiration for her oversized sculptures from natural sources: orchards, vineyards, and mineral mines below the earth’s crust. Ryan portrays the mouldy substances through precious and semi-precious gemstones like amethyst, quartz, and marble. The materials’ durability and longevity directly contrast the decay they represent. Speaking about her work, ‘They’re not just opulent, there’s an inherent sense of decline built into them,” she says, “which is also something that’s happening in the world: The economy is inflating, but so is wealth inequality, all at the expense of the environment.”

Figuration meets abstraction in the work of Nick Hornby, often in a fresh and illusory way. Twofold, as explained by the artist himself, was inspired by bringing together the work of Michelangelo and Kandinsky – two figures whose artworks, though polar apart, ‘are arguably pinnacles of their fields’.

Commissioned by Harlow Art Trust (Hornby’s first permanent public art commission), the sculpture was unveiled in 2019 as the 100th piece in Harlow’s art collection. In doing so, it joins the illustrious ranks of Barbara Hepworth and Auguste Rodin, offering new perspectives on their works and deconstructing conventions and categories within art.

Olafur Eliasson wants his art to break down boundaries between nature and culture. His latest show at Fondation Beyeler, Life, does just that. As a glittering green pool of water fills the inside and outdoor space, the work intertwines the museum with the natural landscape – an immersive eco-art installation that reflects the importance of environmental themes in Eliasson’s work.

‘In recent years, I have increasingly grown interested in efforts to consider life not from a human-centric perspective but from a broad, biocentric perspective,’ commented Eliasson, ‘to become aware of perspectives that go beyond what we humans can properly imagine.’ As Earth Day approaches later this week, we can credit his art with bringing these green visions to life.

Paris-born Jules de Balincourt is inextricably linked with California. He moved there in the Eighties with his family and has mined its storied landscape ever since. Executed in 2020, Solitary Cowboy invites us on a nocturnal journey to the wild west. His paintings — ‘a dreamy confluence between fantasy and reality' — are a riot of saturated colour.

But trouble often lurks beneath his candy-coloured surfaces. Look closely and you’ll see barbed references to social, political and cultural issues, from structures of power to racism and homelessness. Feeling uneasy? Good. ‘That’s the reality of our world. It’s a fragile, unsettling place,’ he’s said.

With an instinct for light to rival Renoir, and use of colour to echo Matisse, Marc Chagall is a true modern master. A Russian-French artist of Belasurian Jewish origin – with time spent in both Germany and the US – his oeuvre reflects all the finest qualities and influences of twentieth-century art.

No surprise that Chagall too was inspired by the sparkling vistas of the south of France, bringing to life the magic of Saint-Paul-de-Vence where he settled in his later life. The painting, containing elements of his Primitive style, captures that dreamy vibrance for which Chagall is celebrated.

The New York-based artist made global headlines in 2018 with Half Mast, a mural commissioned by the Whitney Museum that addresses America’s reckoning with mass shootings. Since then, his career has been on a meteoric rise.

His works, typically patchworked from humble materials such as newspaper and charcoal, grapple with themes of race, inequality, and aspiration in American society. Electric colour and repetition are signature elements.

He also looks at the culture of sport in his explorations of the collective. In Three Point Bend, three figures in identical costumes fold nimbly into backbends. ‘I have a conceptual interest in patterns: how they persist, how they are disrupted, what is fixed and what is shifting,’ the artist has said.

From art fairs to auction rooms, the Nairobi-born, London-based painter Michael Armitage has garnered a lot of attention lately. Now he’s the star of a new Royal Academy exhibition, which brings together 15 of his large-scale paintings from the past six years.

Among the highlights is The Chicken Thief, one of eight paintings inspired by his own experience at an opposition party rally in Nairobi in 2017. Painted on lubugo bark cloth in Armitage’s distinctive florid palette, it depicts the titular thief fleeing arrest — or perhaps he’s trying to escape from the demonic monkey clawing his back.

Harland Miller is celebrated for his investigations into the relationship between text, form and colour. He rose to prominence in the late 1990s with his Penguin series — the book’s fictitious titles were described as ‘wittily deadpan’ by the acclaimed novelist Michael Bracewell — and has continued on an upward trajectory since.

In 2017 he created a new series of paintings inspired by his archive of psychology and science books from the 1960s and ‘70s. The Future, You Might Not Like It Now But You Will features a three-dimensional graphic against a faded background. Like the design, the title can be read in myriad ways. What does it mean to you?

Think of the Portuguese artist Joana Vasconcelos and that tampon chandelier springs to mind. But she has created other dazzling works too, among them Lilicoptère, a gilded helicopter embellished with thousands of rhinestones and pink ostrich feathers. Exhibited at the Palace of Versailles in 2012, it recalls the opulent — dare we say outlandish — aesthetic of the Ancien Régime.

Unsurprisingly, the artist’s flamboyant, large-scale sculptures made out of everyday objects such as telephones and saucepans have scored her global recognition and solo exhibitions across Europe. When guidelines allow, she’ll unveil her new Wedding Cake installation at Waddesdon Manor. Watch this space.