A strawberry scaled up into abstraction. Brancusi’s The Kiss rendered in blue-and-white stripes. For the German artist Raphaela Simon, process is key. “It is of utmost importance that her oil surfaces are layered, which gives them solidity, and that the edges of her many stripes rarely seem ruled, which gives them life,” wrote Roberta Smith, the co-chief art critic at The New York Times, in 2018. Simon often uses minimalist forms and aggressive colors in her work, adding and removing paint to create contrasts. Her art does not transport, it confronts. Simon was mentored by Peter Doig and continues to be inspired by him, as well as by artists such as Francis Bacon, Frank Stella, and Agnes Martin. —Jeanne Malle