FIVE York artists are uniting to mount an an independent exhibition in April at a pop-up gallery space in Apollo Street, off Heslington Road, from next Friday.

Taking part will be printmaker Jean Duncan, painters Paul Bramley, Jenny Eden and Stephen Aspley and creator of images and concepts Simon Micklethwaite.

"We have no collective agenda, though we probably share leanings to the abstract and we're sympathetic to each other's needs to find a good space in which to exhibit our work," says Simon.

"Apollo Gallery will be a temporary site, located within the Orillo Film Studios at No 3, Apollo Street, and we'll be placing signs around town to indicate our location via an arrow and walking distance."

Jean Duncan and her husband have moved to York only recently. She is Scottish by birth and trained at Edinburgh College of Art, but she is known as an Irish artist, having lived in Ulster for a lengthy period, when she took an advanced diploma in printmaking at Belfast College of Art.

Jean is a member of the Royal Ulster Academy and founder member of Seacourt Print Workshop in Bangor, County. Down. Her work in painting and printmaking reflects her belief that "less is more" and is influenced in particular by a visit to Japan, where she won a prize at the 2005 Tokyo Mini-print International.

Paul Bramley is shortlisted for two painting prizes in London, the most notable being the Royal Academy's annual Open Call for emerging artists. This self–taught painter, who started painting prolifically when living in Barcelona, likes to "engage the viewer in a modern, abstract dialogue and to pepper his paintings with juxtapositions".

"Having returned to the arable farm in East Yorkshire where I grew up, I work to capture the chaos, dichotomy and brutal beauty of our 21st century existence," he says. "What interests me most is the physicality of engaging with the canvas. My work references post-war abstract expressionism and reflects the art of the street – the unsanctioned and hastily created tags and murals of urban spaces – and, more broadly speaking, the digital world we live in."

Jenny Eden's work involves large or small canvases with a geometric appearance and a sense of movement.

"I work with flat colour against sanded textures to explore the aesthetic relationships and tensions that arise from combining two or more techniques within a painting," she says. "These latest paintings deal with interlocking shapes, forms that imply an existence outside the canvas and the visual result of using solid colour to conceal work underneath the surface."

Stephen Aspley specialises in excitingly subtle, colourful, textural landscape and abstract compositions in plaster and pigment. "I think of this new work as constructed painting, translating the exterior natural environment into interior design," he says.

After six years working as a York venue promoter and musician, Simon Micklethwaite says his new pictures pick up from the thematic direction of his past text and image-based works and the more conceptual notions of his last solo show in 2006 at Victor J's Art Bar in Finkle Street, York.

"I'm attempting a playfully satiric collaboration with the viewer by engaging with the comical visual postings on social networking sites and the all-encompassing accessibility of internet images, and relating to this appropriation with textual commentary," he adds.

The Apollo Five's Exhibition of Paintings, Drawing And Prints will run from April 4 until April 26. A preview and further exhibits will be at Bison Coffee House, Heslington Road, York, on April 4 from 7pm to 9pm, the launch night then continuing at Apollo Gallery until late that night.