A new year has arrived once again, and with it we extend our best wishes for 2026 to our readers and fellow art enthusiasts. As is now tradition, we begin the year by highlighting a group of artists to watch—practices that stood out to us over the past year and that we are particularly keen to follow as their work and careers continue to unfold. This year’s editor’s choice brings together eight artists who have each, in their own way, demonstrated sustained momentum at a point where many practices tend to slow, plateau, or consolidate — narrowing the distance between themselves and the world’s leading artists of their generation.
1. Sara Anstis
We open our list with Sara Anstis (born 1991, Stockholm, Sweden), who caught my eye for the first time in 2023. Anstis is a Stockholm-born and Salt Spring Island–raised artist whose practice encompasses painting and site-specific installation. Raised on a small island off the Canadian west coast, she developed an early sensitivity to environment and light, which continues to inform her working process. Using soft pastels and oil paint, she constructs immersive pictorial worlds that draw on the visual language of folklore and dream. Her works bring together surreal landscapes, deftly lit figures, anthropomorphic flora, and recurring symbolic objects, creating scenes that operate simultaneously on material, narrative, and psychological levels while engaging with subjectivity, mythology, and ecology.
Sara Anstis’s paintings frequently center on her recognizable yet indeterminate figures that move, rest, hunt, or play within landscapes where human and natural forms are closely entwined. Her treatment of the nude engages with historical precedent while reworking it through smooth gradients of color, ambiguous gender, and biomorphic features that recall aquatic or amphibian forms found in mythological traditions. Close cropping introduces a sense of compression, allowing small, repeated motifs and symbolic details to emerge across bodies of work.
Sara Anstis received a BFA in Studio Art and Sociology from Concordia University in Montreal in 2013 and an MFA in Fine Art from Valand Academy in Gothenburg in 2016, and completed the Drawing Year Postgraduate Programme at the Royal Drawing School in London in 2018. She has held solo exhibitions at Kasmin in New York, Various Small Fires in Los Angeles and Seoul, Bradley Ertaskiran in Montreal, and Fabian Lang in Zurich, and has participated in group exhibitions at venues including Victoria Miro in Venice, Gallery Raphael Durazzo in Paris, Kunstnerforbundet in Oslo, Lyles & King in New York, Galerie Derouillon in Paris, and Palazzo Monti in Brescia. She has received grants from the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation, the Jerwood Arts Bursary, and the Anna-Lisa Thomson Foundation. Anstis lives and works in London, United Kingdom.1
2. Nour Bishouty
Up next, we have Nour Bishouty (born 1986, Amman, Jordan), a multidisciplinary artist working across video, writing, sculpture, printed matter, digital images, and works on paper. Bishouty explores gaps in archival memory and the Western production of knowledge and fantasy to examine how culture is often shaped by dispossession and displacement—evident, for example, in her fragile house sculptures or a bed that can be folded into a shipping crate.
Her work asks questions of permission and articulation, as well as the instability and failure of language, proposing artistic strategies that unsettle institutional systems of classification, order, and value production. For instance, Bishouty frequently creates through reconfiguration, omission, and speculative association, using cut-outs, collage, prints, assemblages, and textiles. By doing so, archival materials are not seen as fixed repositories of truth but are exposed and used as sites of fragmentation and contradiction.
Nour Bishouty received a BFA in Visual Art and Design from the University of Jordan and an MFA in Studio Arts from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Bishouty’s work has been exhibited internationally including at Museo Universitario del Chopo (2026), Mexico City; Liverpool Biennial (2025); Cooper Cole, Toronto (2025); Art Jameel, Jeddah (2024), La biennale de Québec (2024); Gallery 44 Centre for Contemporary Photography, Toronto (2022); GTA21 Triennial, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Toronto (2021); Darat Al Funun, Amman (2017); Casa Arabe, Madrid (2016); Access Gallery, Vancouver (2015); the Mosaic Rooms, London (2015); and the Beirut Art Centre, Beirut (2014). Bishouty lives and works in Toronto, Canada, and is represented by Cooper Cole, Toronto.2
3. Luz Carabaño
Another recent personal coup de cœur is the work of Luz Carabaño (born 1995, Maracay, Venezuela), a Venezuelan artist whose practice centers on small-scale oil-on-linen paintings stretched on often irregularly shaped canvases based on freehand contour drawings and constructed by the artist from cut wood and gessoed linen, alongside drawings on paper, handmade books, ceramic objects, and photographs. Raised in Venezuela in an environment shaped by art, with a father who painted and homes filled with artworks, she developed an early and sustained relationship with artistic practices before relocating to the United States.
Her paintings originate from direct visual references observed in everyday life—think of shadows, movements, or worn surfaces—yet their sources are gradually released during the painting process, allowing images to form intuitively rather than descriptively. Image and support integrate into a unified object, characterized by pale yet luminous hues, soft transitions, and subtle shifts in surface. By doing so, her practice emphasizes close looking, tactility, and finely worked surfaces achieved through sanding and layering, producing a smooth finish where marks hover at the edge of clarity. The power of Carabaño’s work seems to be rooted in the intimacy of painting, material sensitivity, and the enigmatic, sequential rhythm of her compositions.
Luz Carabaño received a BFA in Studio Art from New York University in 2017 and an MFA in Painting and Drawing from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2022. Luz Carabaño’s recent solo exhibitions include iluminaciones at Nina Johnson, Miami (2024); antesis at Super Super Markt, Berlin (2024); delineaciones at Hannah Hoffman, Los Angeles (2024); encuentros at Hannah Hoffman, Los Angeles (2023); sombras at Lulu, Mexico City (2023); rastros at Larder, Los Angeles (2022); Unfoldings at april april, New York (2022); and Ni Aquí, Ni Allá at Dimensions Variable, Miami (2019). Luz Carabaño was the recipient of the Helen Frankenthaler Award in Painting at the University of California, Los Angeles, in 2021. Carabaño lives and works in Los Angeles, USA.3
4. Johanna Dumet
A rising artist of the past few years who has made it clear that she is here to stay is Johanna Dumet (born 1991, Guéret, France). She is best known for her colorful paintings, working intuitively with oil, gouache, collage, and more experimental extensions of her painterly practice, including a monumental house-of-cards sculpture, wall-spanning in situ installations, and even a deck of cards. Dumet appears to search for the meaning and beauty of life not in grand philosophical narratives, but in the most mundane and everyday events, such as a family dinner or playing cards with friends while chatting about this and that.
Her paintings frequently depict table scenes during or immediately after meals, where the presence of people is implied through remnants such as used plates, spilled wine, leftover food, and scattered objects, bringing a contemporary and light-footed perspective to the tradition of still life painting. Tables are set and cleared, flowers are framed and multiplied, and everyday objects are arranged in ways that convey both exuberance and familiarity. However, Dumet refused to become a one-trick pony despite the widespread popularity of this format and continued her quest as an artist, which is not only a sign of courage but further proof that she is a true artist at heart—whatever that might be. As a result, subjects such as peering through keyholes, figures drawn from card games, and other folkloristic and historical symbols have entered her practice.
Johanna Dumet studied Applied Arts in La Souterraine and Fashion Design in Marseille before relocating to Berlin, where she developed a practice that integrates painterly experimentation with close attention to material, surface, and rhythm. Her recent solo exhibitions include Jeux de Société at KÖNIG SEOUL and La Vie Secrète des Fleurs at Kewenig, Berlin (2024), as well as Intérieur Rose at Mehdi Chouakri and Festmahl s’il Vous Plaît! at Kewenig Pied-à-terre (2023), and her work has been shown in institutional exhibitions, including La Casa Encendida, Madrid (2024), and Haus am Lützowplatz, Berlin (2025). Dumet lives and works in Berlin, Germany.4
5. Bendt Eyckermans
Arguably one of my favorite artists over the past ten years is Bendt Eyckermans (born 1994, Antwerp, Belgium), who has continued his upward career trajectory into 2026, convincingly becoming one of the leading Belgian painters of his generation. His work draws on everyday scenes from his own life while maintaining a strong sense of narrative ambiguity. His paintings depict friends and acquaintances, often people who pass through his studio, positioned in carefully directed stances that function less as portraits than as gestures or poses. These figures appear within familiar yet subtly estranged situations, where ordinary actions suggest moments unfolding beyond the frame, rendered in a line that seems to echo the work of Belgian painters such as Constant Permeke (1886–1952) and Jean Brusselmans (1884–1953).
Eyckermans’ practice is shaped by a longstanding engagement with sculpture and history, influenced by a family tradition of artists that includes his father and several generations before him. Raised among sculptural works and continuing to work in his grandfather’s former studio, he developed an early fascination with monumentality and the narrative qualities of bas-reliefs, which continue to inform the structure and material presence of his paintings. His compositions often feature tactile, almost bas-relief surfaces, dramatic lighting, and figures caught mid-motion, with exaggerated gestures that heighten their physicality. Classical references such as busts, statues, gateways, and sculptural fragments appear alongside contemporary elements, creating deliberate anachronisms that introduce surreal or absurd undertones while maintaining a contemporary register.
Bendt Eyckermans studied painting at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp, graduating in 2016. His work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions at venues including M HKA Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp, S.M.A.K. Ghent, Kunstfestival Watou, Andrew Kreps Gallery in New York, Carlos/Ishikawa in London, Gallery Sofie Van de Velde in Antwerp, and Mendes Wood DM in Brussels, and is held in collections such as M HKA Antwerp, the Vlaamse Gemeenschap, and TANK Shanghai. Eyckermans lives and works in Antwerp, Belgium.5
6. Jonas Höschl
Jonas Höschl (born 1995, Regensburg, Germany) is a German conceptual artist and photographer whose practice spans printmaking, sound, video, and installation. His work addresses identity-forming mechanisms of political systems, using regional political scandals and European conflicts as points of departure to examine processes of alienation from unifying ideals.
Through graphic prints and video works, he appropriates visual languages drawn from differently oriented, and at times historical, ideologies in order to expose strategies of propagandistic manipulation. By recontextualizing existing imagery and documents, his work emphasizes the referential nature of contemporary political and media images.
Jonas Höschl has received multiple awards for his artistic practice, including the Bavarian Art Promotion Award for Fine Arts, the Culture Award of the District of Upper Palatinate for printmaking, and the Paula Modersohn-Becker Art Prize. His work has been exhibited at institutions such as Bochum Art Museum, Ulm Art Museum, and the EIGEN + ART Lab in Berlin, and he is part of the artist collective Tannhäuser Kreis. He has published several artist books, including Fade Away Medley with Das Wetter and Politics of Media Images with Hatje Cantz, and has also worked with Verlag für moderne Kunst. Höschl lives and works in Germany.6
7. Manoela Medeiros
Manoela Medeiros (born 1991, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) is a Brazilian artist whose practice engages painting through an expanded, interdisciplinary framework that also includes sculpture, performance, and installation. Her work questions the conventional boundaries of artistic media by producing paintings and in situ interventions that explore relationships between space, time, and the corporeality of both the artwork and the viewer. Rather than treating painting as an autonomous object, she approaches it as a spatial and experiential process, allowing works to emerge in direct response to their architectural surroundings. Her practice frequently involves direct interventions within exhibition spaces, shaped by the material, structural, and luminous conditions specific to each site, attributing an organic quality to architecture and treating space itself as a living body.
Manoela Medeiros engages with a process often described as archaeological, using the notion of ruins as a way to address the passage of time and the accumulation of material histories. She scrapes and exposes surfaces such as gallery walls, revealing layers of paint, color, and matter that have been applied, concealed, and forgotten over time. These revealed strata are presented as coexisting temporal traces, each carrying the memory of the moment in which it was formed. Through this process, her work operates within a liminal zone between construction and destruction, emphasizing how these forces interact and reinforce one another rather than existing in opposition. By foregrounding material erosion, layering, and exposure, her practice seeks to recalibrate the viewer’s experience of time and space within the exhibition context.
Manoela Medeiros studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris and at the Escola de Artes Visuais do Parque Lage in Rio de Janeiro. She has presented solo exhibitions at venues including Nara Roesler in São Paulo, Kubik Gallery in Porto, Galerie Chloé Salgado in Paris, Galeria Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel in São Paulo, and Double V Gallery in Marseille, and has participated in group exhibitions at institutions and galleries such as Fondation Villa Datris, Fundação Iberê Camargo, Praz-Delavallade, Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, and Gentil Carioca, among others. Medeiros lives and works in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.7
8. Paula Siebra
We conclude our list with Paula Siebra (born 1998, Fortaleza, Brazil). Working from notebooks, drawings, and recollected images, she builds her paintings through a gradual accumulation of domestic, material, and vernacular motifs. Her canvases often begin with toned grounds in terracotta, ochre, or muted gray hues, onto which she applies thin layers of paint that soften contours, reduce contrast, and temper color, allowing light to hover between object and surrounding field. Recurring elements such as rivers, hills, clay jars, lace, sun-bleached façades, gloves, suitcases, and table settings appear across her work, forming scenes that move fluidly between lived experience, recollection, and dream, where atmosphere holds equal weight with form.
Paula Siebra’s visual language, developed in Ceará, in northeastern Brazil, was shaped by close familiarity with local artifacts, elements of nature, silicogravura sand art, and the planar geometry of modest architecture. As a result, her approach is guided by patient looking and lived proximity. Many of her interiors and landscapes are unpeopled, creating a suspended stillness that also extends to scenes of water, tables, and rooms. When figures do appear, they are often observed from a slight distance, introducing a restrained voyeurism that heightens the sense of private time paused in reflection or subdued celebration. This method has been described as a “cartography of returns,” in which repetition, habit, and temporal layering establish presence without resolution.
Paula Siebra holds an MA in Arts from the Universidade Federal do Ceará, Brazil. She has had solo exhibitions at Mendes Wood DM in Paris, New York, Brussels, and São Paulo, and has participated in group exhibitions at venues including Nara Roesler in New York, the Museu de Arte do Rio de Janeiro, the Coimbra Biennial, Grimm Gallery in London, and the Centro Cultural Casa do Barão de Camocim in Fortaleza. Her work is held in institutional collections including S.M.A.K. in Ghent, the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, and the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, among others. Siebra lives and works in Fortaleza, Brazil.8
Cover: Installation view of “Nour Bishouty: Rock Paper Scissors” (2025) at COOPER COLE in Toronto, CA © Nour Bishouty
Notes:
- Perrotin, Sara Anstis consulted on January 8, 2026. Kasmin Gallery, Sara Anstis consulted on January 8, 2026. ↩︎
- COOPER COLE, Nour Bishouty consulted on January 8, 2026. ↩︎
- Hoffman Donahue, Luz Carabaño consulted on January 8, 2026. Nina Johnson, Luz Carabaño: iluminaciones consulted on January 8, 2026. Casemore Gallery, Luz Carabaño consulted January 8, 2026. ↩︎
- KÖNIG Galerie, Johanna Dumet consulted on January 8, 2026. ↩︎
- Gallery Sofie Van de Velde, Bendt Eyckermans consulted on January 9, 2026. Mendes Wood DM, Bendt Eyckermans consulted on January 9, 2026. ↩︎
- Jonas Höschl, Works consulted on January 9, 2026. Galerie Kandlhofer, Jonas Höschl: Sensitive Content consulted on January 9, 2026. ↩︎
- Nara Roesler, Manoela Medeiros consulted on January 9, 2026. Doubel V Gallery, Manoele Medeiros consulted on January 9, 2026. ↩︎
- Mendes Wood DM, Paula Siebra consulted on January 9, 2026. ↩︎
Last Updated on January 9, 2026
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About the author:
Julien Delagrange (b. 1994, BE) is an art historian, contemporary artist, and the director of CAI and CAI Gallery. Previously, Delagrange has worked for the Centre for Fine Arts (BOZAR) in Brussels, the Jan Vercruysse Foundation, and the Ghent University Library. His artistic practice and written art criticism are strongly intertwined, examining contemporary art in search of new perspectives in the art world.
