For generations, artists and photographers have challenged the way we see the world. Through techniques such as cropping, extreme close-ups, motion blur, experimental lighting and digital manipulation, familiar subjects are transformed into compositions of colour, texture and shape. Throughout the 20th century, figures including Man Ray, László Moholy-Nagy, Wolfgang Tillmans and Barbara Kasten pushed photography beyond its documentary function, embracing abstraction as a creative language. In this selection, we highlight five artists longlisted for the Aesthetica Art Prize 2026 who continue that spirit of experimentation. Each explores the possibilities of material, process and form to produce striking works.
Alexej Sachov is a conceptual artist who captures images whilst scuba diving. He creates work that explores emergence, transformation and survival at the boundary between the built and natural world. His projects use distinct physical processes as their method: the (un)controlled structuring of plastic; long-exposure “dancing” subjects in the sea; and macro studies of living corals. Sachov does not use composites, nor digital painting. Instead, the ocean provides both subject and condition. The Jewel of Nature observes cycles of life underwater, where decay becomes ground for renewal.
Paweł Sadaj is a visual artist, conceptual photographer, filmmaker and lecturer at the Academy of Fine Arts. He explores the relationship between history and human impact on the environment. In Hidden Colours, a bird’s-eye perspective transforms nature into abstract forms, influenced by the Colour Field paintings of Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman. From a bird’s eye view, he reinterprets landscapes as expressive colour fields, where nature becomes abstract composition. The images reveal shifting perceptions of colour, especially green, as both calming presence and perceptual illusion.
Born and raised in the heart of the Ashdown Forest, UK, Tom D Morgan moved to London as a young adult, where he began working in the music industry and before establishing himself as a commercial photographer. Shades of Momiji, conceived in Kyoto’s Imperial Palace gardens during autumn 2024, abstracts Japanese maple trees through light, colour and in-camera techniques. The series reflects the concepts of “komorebi” and “mono no aware” as meditations on impermanence and transformation. Morgan’s work has been featured in publications such as Huck Magazine and The Guardian.
Cristina Burns is an Italian-American artist working across photography and installation. Her practice explores the seductive language of consumer culture, transforming everyday materials into charged visual systems that question desire, excess and control. In Scars, she shifts toward material history, using photographic fragments to examine memory, division, and the enduring traces of political and psychological borders. Burns’ Scars — From the Berlin Wall treats surviving fragments as a wounded body, where graffiti, cracks and peeling paint become scar-like records of resistance and memory.
Digital technologies often appear invisible or seamless, only drawing attention to themselves when they fail. To make the Digigrams series, Tommy Goguely deliberately damaged digital cameras by scratching, drilling and altering the photosensitive surface. The images taken with these cameras record their own degradation rather than the external world. Colours smear and glitch across the frame, or dissolve into speckles and “noise.” By drawing attention to the physical properties of digital image making, the work challenges the notion of its immateriality by situating it within the history of technology.
These artists will feature in States of Becoming, the Aesthetica Art Prize 2026 Exhibition at York Art Gallery from 17 July – 15 November. Find out more: yorkartgallery.org.uk
Words: Emma Jacob
Image Credits:
1. Image Courtesy of Tommy Goguely.
2. Image Courtesy of Alexej Sachov.
3. Image Courtesy of Alexej Sachov.
4. Image Courtesy of Paweł Sadaj.
5. Image Courtesy of Tom D Morgan.
6. Image Courtesy of Tom D Morgan.
7. Image Courtesy of Cristina Burns
8. Image Courtesy of Tommy Goguely.
9. Image Courtesy of Tommy Goguely.
