In a recent exhibition with the Stephen Wirtz Gallery, artist Ulrike Palmbach created a series of materially rich and ambiguous sculptures that employ a sense of dark humor and illusion. The artist often renders common objects by hand in materials such as felt, muslin, wood and stains. At a distance, each piece is seemingly normal, but, upon further inspection, one can see that each exhibited item is an imitation in material and thus function. Palmbach is a graduate of the San Francisco Art Institute, and she attended Hochschule der Kunste in Berlin and the Freie Kunstschule Stuttgart. Last year, the artist has exhibited “Reconsidered Materials or Although Suitcases May Seem As Though They’re Made of Stone, They Seldom Are” at the Exploratorium in San Francisco.

The late Ian Hamilton Finlay is a modernist artist whose work is fundamentally carried through poetry. This month on the one-year anniversary of the artist’s death Victoria Miro Gallery in London will present “The Sonnet is a Sewing-Machine for the Monostich,” which will be the largest exhibition of the artist’s neon works to date. For the length of Finlay’s career, almost 40 years, he created work rooted in philosophical text, literature and historical content. While based in text, the materials of Finlay’s work included stone and wood carvings, silk-screen prints, landscape design and neon lights. Among the artist’s many achievements are the Turner Prize, presented by the Tate in London (1985), and awards from the Royal Caledonian Horticultural Society (2002) and the Scottish Arts Council Creative Scotland (2003). Finlay also held honorary doctorates from Aberdeen University (1987), Heriot-Watt University (1993) and the University of Glasgow (2001).

The oil paintings of Chinese artist Guo Wei serve as a quiet meditation on the minor details of life. The paintings often portray the artist’s daughter and friends and are rendered in a limited or even monochromatic palette, which aids in the placid imagery of his subjects. The imagery is also manipulated and distorted in unpredictable ways that further increases the physiological implications found in the paintings. Wei is a graduate of the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts, and he is known internationally for being a leading member in the Sichuan School in Chengdu, China. The artist is represented by Goedhuis Contemporary in New York and has exhibited with the Courtyard Gallery in Beijing. Wei often exhibits work with his brother Guo Jin; both artists were featured in an article in Art in America in June 2003.

With an interest in the human relationship to water, photographer Kerry Skarbakka stages a variety of water-related scenes, including floods and droughts. Skarbakka describes human interaction with water through extreme situations that underscore the substance’s fundamental importance and power. These photos mimic actual documentation, though they are all fully constructed and staged in areas such as swamps, sewers, bathrooms and oceans. The artist received his MFA from Columbia College in Chicago and a degree in studio arts from the University of Washington School of Art. Skarbakka has completed artist residencies with The Contemporary Museum in Hawaii and the Light Work Artist in Residence Program in Syracuse, New York, and, in 2005, he received an award from the Creative Capital Foundation. This year, the artist will exhibit “Fluid” at Gallery 51 in Antwerp, Belgium; the same series of photos was exhibited with the Lawrimore Project in Seattle in 2006.

Swiss artist Christoph Buchel creates complex hyper-real environments that often demand a physical commitment from the viewer. Buchel’s 2005 installation “Hole” exhibited at the Kunsthalle Basel forced viewers through several small rooms, narrow passageways and disturbing images of a suicide on tape. Each room is found in elaborate detail as if the viewer stumbled onto a forgotten place. Buchel also creates conceptual works that have political undertones and are rooted in social and legal interest. Buchel, along with artist Gianni Motti, attempted to lease the site of Guantanamo Bay from the Cuban government, and in a separate piece offered an entire exhibition budget to any visitor who could find the hidden check in the gallery space. The artist studied at Cooper Union School of Art in New York (1990) and at the Kunstakademie Dusseldorf (1992-97). In 2001, Buchel was awarded a scholarship at PS1 New York, and, in 2005, he exhibited in the Venice Biennale. Last week, Buchel closed an exhibition titled “Simply Botiful” at Hauser & Wirth Gallery in London, and, this year, he will exhibit with Palais de Tokio in Paris and with MASS MoCA in Massachusetts. View video of Buchel’s exhibition “Hole” at the Kunsthalle Basel here.

Wangechi Mutu is a Kenyan-born artist who was trained as an anthropologist and a sculptor. She has risen to much critical acclaim with her figurative collages that challenge culture and gender. The artist uses fragments of images taken from magazines to illustrate and comment on the roles of women, cultural identity, African politics and international fashion. Mutu’s figures are simultaneously attractive and repulsive and attempt to seduce the viewer with surreal and sexual associations. Mutu received her MFA from the Yale University School of Art and her BFA from Cooper Union in New York. She has also attended the United World College of the Atlantic in Wales. Mutu has been featured in countless exhibitions, including a solo show this year in Beijing titled “interrupted” with the PKM Gallery. Other recent exhibitions include “Still Points of the Turning World” with Site Santa Fe and “An Alien Eye and Other Killah Anthems” with Sikkema Jenkins & Co. in New York. The artist has participated and received awards with Art Pace Residency in San Antonio and the Studio Museum Artist in Residence in Harlem.

Matthew Ritchie is an artist with an interest in the totality of our universe. Information, the structures of knowledge and belief and the human ability to comprehend the world around us are a perpetual theme in Ritchie’s paintings, sculptures, animations, Web sites, drawings and installations. The artist creates these elaborate worlds by scanning drawings into a computer to manipulate, fragment and reform different elements before projecting and redrawing the image onto a final surface. Ritchie has also created expansive Web sites such as “The Hard Way,” where users are prompted to answer a series of questions that lead into a variety of directions, each revealing unique fragments of information. Ritchie is a graduate of Camberwell School of Art in London and lives in New York. The artist has exhibited worldwide, including recent shows with Andrea Rosen Gallery in New York City, The Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia and Atle Gerhardsen in Berlin, Germany. Ritchie was featured on the PBS artist interview series Art:21 and was reviewed this year in Art in America.