Celebrating the supremacy of painting, Carla Busuttil fills her canvases with energetically rendered figures, shaped primarily by the process of painting itself. Taking inspiration from photographs that she sees in newspapers and magazines, the subject of her paintings are often the larger-than-life people that seem to populate our celebrity obsessed conscious. These grotesque characters – grinning, bug-eyed ladies and urchin-like children with smeared faces – contain recognised features from these clipped images, yet also capture what Busuttil sees as the chaos and disorder of our time. Painted in 2008, Alles Ist Schwindel was included in the Saatchi Gallery’s exhibition Newspeak: British Art Now at the State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg, in 2009. Awarded the Jerwood Contemporary Painters Prize that year, Busuttil has since exhibited at institutions including the Royal Academy of Art, London and the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool. Her work will be featured in the upcoming book World of Art: Contemporary Painting, to be published by Thames and Hudson in September 2020.