Renk was born in 1987 and grew up as an only child — his brother and sister are much older than he is.

In Rennes, his hometown, he was immersed in the art world thanks to family tradition — his mother was an art teacher, his father an advertiser and visual artist, and his uncle a renowned comic book illustrator. Yet he still had to follow the path of formal schooling and submit to the methods of the French national education system.

It didn’t work out: his primary and secondary years were marked by countless disciplinary boards, moving from one school and boarding institution to another, until he was finally expelled from the entire academy.

Too many pranks, always minor ones — but enough to exhaust every step of the punitive ladder. And after that? 100REMOR: he kept doing graffiti. At 16, Renk was out of the school system and fully committed to his small rebellions. Later, he moved to Cork, Ireland, to train at a golf academy. There, he learned patience, consistency, and self-control, while developing his sense of human connection: he could mix easily with anyone — from street kids and partygoers to golf enthusiasts.

Back in France in 2007, he enrolled in a visual communication school in Paris. He fell in love with the city, learned the craft of graphic design, and won an international competition: his anti-discrimination bookmarks were unanimously acclaimed. However, he wasn’t allowed to travel to Madrid to collect his prize — a story involving his ID card, the organisers’ bad faith, and the opening hours of the town hall. Furious, Renk sat his exams in anger, shook a computer, and left the course without a diploma. He would obtain it the following year.

Once out of school, he had his skills and self-confidence to rely on. Renk wanted to paint — and he had the talent for it. His works immediately found success, winning over an ever-growing audience of both amateurs and professionals.

Painting has been his sole occupation since 2010.

Sam Bornstein (b. 1983, New York; works in New York. MFA Hunter College 2017, BFA Bard College 2005). Bornstein’s layered figurative paintings evoke an invented world that mirror contemporary life and personal narratives through the filter of the imagined. In alternately luminous and muted light, a variety of characters from New York City, folklore, media, and the collective imaginary coexist in scenes that are familiar yet resist closed readings. Often portraying multiple figures involved in ambiguous tasks, work, or leisure, his works play with perception of reality and dream states, creating a sense of familiarity that requires the viewer to apply their own experiences in order to complete the narrative. The paintings' tension of material and image often refer back to the act of painting, and recall Postwar and Modernist painters from Northern, Central, and Eastern Europe.

Frank Heath is an American artist who lives and works in New York. Heath’s works are poetic interventions into systems of communication, information and understanding, which expose moments of disjuncture and ultimately crack open perceived reality to reveal a more compromised construction.  These idiosyncratic, existential riffs, situated in the space between perception and reality in everyday life, are made approachable through his casual style and his frequent use of absurdity. In this way, Heath appeals to the viewer’s sense of humor while simultaneously effecting change to the way they see the world around them, leaving them with a sense of ambiguous tensions to grapple with.

In many of Heath’s works he incorporates the voices of unsuspecting individuals into the work in a compassionate but subversive way. By co-opting mundane social exchanges and infusing them with an unexpected narrative, Heath’s mediation exist simultaneously in both private and public spheres. In more recent work, the artist has held a sustained investigation into questions concerning the end of the world, and in particular the various ways that humans imagine and prepare for it. 

Mike HJ Chang is a Taiwanese American artist and educator in fine arts. He received his Bachelor of Arts from the University of California, Los Angeles, and his Master of Fine Arts from the California Institute of the Arts, both in the USA. Chang currently resides and works in Singapore.

Autobiographical information always serves as the basis for narrative exploration in Chang’s work. Recent projects such as Arrival Reception, and Welcome Door Mat, shows the way he idiosyncratically combines architecture, furniture, and text to focus on the notion of transient identity in a space where the public and the private intersect, such as a place between his bedroom door. Collectively, though, his work examines the interplay and relationship between ‘The Clean’, which is a quiet, orderly state, and ‘The Generic’, which is an empty state that is devoid of ego and memory.

Cynthia Daignault is an American artist, born in Baltimore, Maryland and currently based in New York and Los Angeles. Daignalut works mostly in series, and almost always in the format of small-scale painting, which come together to form a single larger work that visually reflects a lived experience. Whether it is clouds, land, the sunset, a still life or a found image, Daignault’s works record transitory moments creating a poetic interplay between creation of a work through the dissolution of a moment that is at once seen, experienced, remembered and imagined; a moment that can be universal, but which for each person can also be intensely personal. 

Daignault takes great pride in working with the traditional materials of oil on lead primed linen with a traditional palate in an age where the painting tradition is becoming increasingly obsolete and has said ‘I find it incredibly moving that I may be among the last generation of painters to even have the option of working in the same materials as Velazques, Courbet, Goya, Manet, Titian or Tiepolo.

Benedetto Pietromarchi was invited to be the inaugural artist in residence for The Owners Cabin. Pietromarchi boarded a vessel in July 2015 and remained in residence for approximately one month, during which time he produced a body of work related to his time, thoughts and investigations on board. 

Fundamental to Benedetto Pietromarchi’s practice is the investigation into the relationships between nature and artifice, biology and construction, and how these notions are experienced and perceived within the context of our varied cultures, histories and present realities. While the conclusion of Pietromarchi’s work takes the form of the physical artistic object – sculpture, film, collage, drawing – the study, research, journey and active experience of discovery that leads up to these works is central to the final understanding of and approach to the artwork. For Pietromarchi, art should exist in and of itself, but rather it is a mode through which to relay collected information - a vehicle for communication, reflection and revelation.