What is the future of painting? Let’s have a look. In this article, we highlight twenty of the most influential painters born after 1990, Millennial and Gen Z artists, presenting a curated snapshot of painting today. As with all our top lists, this list is grounded in data rather than personal preference. Using the Artfacts algorithm, which evaluates artists through verifiable career metrics and institutional presence, we present a reasoned anthology of leading contemporary artists for whom painting is the primary medium—intentionally excluding those whose engagement with painting is secondary to broader multidisciplinary practices. For clarity, the artists are listed alphabetically. This structure reflects our intention to emphasize the significance of the selection itself rather than impose any competitive order.
1. Tunji Adeniyi-Jones
Tunji Adeniyi-Jones (b. 1992, London, the United Kingdom) is a British-Nigerian painter whose work explores themes of cultural hybridity, mythology, and identity. Drawing inspiration from Yoruba heritage and the broader history of West Africa, the artist describes his practice as one of “cultural addition, combination and collaboration,” reflecting his engagement with African and Western visual traditions. Adeniyi-Jones often begins his process with studies in ink or watercolor before translating these into vividly colored oil paintings. His recurring figures—stylized bodies rendered in rhythmic, interlocking forms—occupy shallow, patterned spaces influenced by Cubism, Matisse’s paper cutouts, and West African design motifs. Through repetition, symmetry, and ceremonial imagery, his multi-panel compositions evoke ritual and transformation. The artist frequently incorporates references to African art and symbolism, including the Black Crowned Crane, ritual masks, and royal objects, positioning the body as a central narrative device within diasporic identity.
Adeniyi-Jones received his BFA from The Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford (2014), and an MFA in Painting and Printmaking from Yale School of Art (2017). He lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Recent solo exhibitions include White Cube, Hong Kong (2023); FLAG Art Foundation, New York (2023); Morán Morán, Mexico City (2023); White Cube, Paris (2022); White Cube, London (2021); and Morán Morán, Los Angeles (2021). Earlier exhibitions include The Cabin, Los Angeles (2018); and Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, New York (2017). His work has been included in numerous group exhibitions, among them PUBLIC PRIVATE, Pond Society, Shanghai (2023); Sounds of Blackness, Metropolitan Museum of Manila (2023); When We See Us: A Century of Black Figuration in Painting, Zeitz MOCAA, Cape Town (2022); Out of the Fire, Dakar Biennale, Senegal (2022); and Young, Gifted and Black: The Lumpkin-Boccuzzi Family Collection, Concordia College, New York (2019–2020). Adeniyi-Jones lives and works in Brooklyn, New York, the United States.1
2. Alexander Basil
Alexander Basil (b. 1997, Arkhangelsk, Russia) is a painter whose work centers on a recurring archetypal figure—an abstracted self-portrait featuring a bald, rosy-skinned protagonist rendered with smooth contours and precise detail. This figure appears in intimate domestic environments as well as in humorous and surreal transformations into objects, animals, and anthropomorphic forms. Through these varied iterations, his compositions employ flat layers of oil paint, strong contrasts, and crisp delineation. Motifs such as wine bottles, keys, and everyday furnishings function as narrative devices, suggesting themes of personal interaction and vulnerability. Repetition and variation within the figure reinforce a consistent visual language while opening multiple readings of selfhood.
Basil studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and the Akademie der bildenden Künste Vienna, working under Tomma Abts, Elizabeth Peyton, Daniel Richter, and Kirsi Mikkola. Now based in Berlin, he presented his first solo exhibition with Galerie Judin in 2023, accompanied by a monograph published by Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther und Franz König. In 2024, the X Museum in Beijing organized his first institutional exhibition. His work is included in the permanent collections of the X Museum, Beijing; Kunstpalast Düsseldorf; and the Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main. Basil lives and works between Berlin, Germany, and Vienna, Austria.2
3. Jadé Fadojutimi
Jadé Fadojutimi (b. 1993, London, the United Kingdom) creates large-scale paintings in which color, line, and layered mark-making convey shifting emotional states. Her compositions, built with oil paint and oil pastel, move between suggestions of natural forms and pure abstraction, incorporating visual references to clothing and material culture. Influences cited in her practice include Japanese anime, fashion, and soundtracks, as well as writing, which serves both as a tool and a parallel outlet within her process.
Fadojutimi received a BA from the Slade School of Art, London, in 2015 and an MA from the Royal College of Art, London, in 2017, where she was awarded the Hine Painting Prize. Solo exhibitions include The Numbing Vibrancy of Characters in Play, Peer, London (2019), and Yet, Another Pathetic Fallacy, Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami (2021). In 2022, she presents a solo exhibition at the Hepworth Wakefield, England. Her work has been featured in group exhibitions such as Jahresgaben 2020, Bonner Kunstverein, Bonn; The Stomach and the Port, Liverpool Biennial (2021); Mixing It Up: Painting Today, Hayward Gallery, London (2021); and The Milk of Dreams, 59th Venice Biennale (2022). Fadojutimi continues to live and work in London, the United Kingdom.3
4. Louise Giovanelli
Louise Giovanelli (b. 1993, London, the United Kingdom) works in interconnected painting series that revisit motifs drawn from staged photographs, film stills, classical sculpture, and architectural detail. Subtle variations in composition and tone recur across her canvases. Her use of controlled light, surface, and pattern addresses the history of painting while focusing on its formal properties and slowing the act of looking. Giovanelli pushes the radiance and luminosity of painting to celebrate the pure alchemy of the medium, while engaging with distinctively time-bound imagery—from shiny curtains to ecstatic faces.
Selected solo exhibitions include The Hepworth Wakefield, Yorkshire; White Cube, Hong Kong; He Art Museum, Foshan; GRIMM, New York; Moon Grove, Manchester; Grundy Art Gallery, Blackpool; White Cube, London; and GRIMM, Amsterdam. Recent group exhibitions include presentations at the Green Family Art Foundation, Dallas; The Perimeter, London; Hastings Contemporary; Kunstmuseum Den Haag; The Courtauld Gallery, London; Centraal Museum, Utrecht; Hill Art Foundation, New York; The FLAG Art Foundation, New York; Kasmin, New York; Marlborough, London; and the Hayward Gallery, London. Her work is held in numerous public and private collections, including the AkzoNobel Art Foundation; Centraal Museum; Hill Art Foundation; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; Manchester Art Gallery; MOCA; The National Museum, Norway; the UK Government Art Collection; the Whitworth Art Gallery; and Yuz Museum Shanghai, among others. Giovanelli lives and works in Manchester, the United Kingdom.4
5. Sasha Gordon
Sasha Gordon (b. 1998, New York, the United States) creates luminous, quasi-hyperrealistic paintings that frequently feature her own likeness, using the body as a vehicle to express interior states and psychological tension. Working primarily in oil, she constructs scenes in which figures occupy surreal, often disorienting environments. Her compositions include mirrored reflections, multiplied figures, and framing devices such as windows or fences, allowing her to explore shifting perspectives and self-image. Gordon’s meticulously rendered bodies—sometimes intertwined in complex groupings—are depicted at large scale and in vivid, saturated palettes achieved through multiple glazes emulating the luminosity of the Flemish Primitives. Through repeated characters and motifs, she examines identity, embodiment, and the layered nature of the self.
Recent solo exhibitions include Haze, David Zwirner, New York (2025); Surrogate Self, Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami (2023–2024); The Flesh Disappears, But Continues To Ache, Stephen Friedman Gallery, London (2023); Hands of Others, Jeffrey Deitch, New York (2022); and Enters Thief, Matthew Brown, Los Angeles (2021). Her work has also been included in Overflow, Afterglow: New Work in Chromatic Figuration, Jewish Museum, New York (2024); Heroic Bodies, Rudolph Tegners Museum og Statuepark, Dronningmølle (2022); and Love Languages, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (2023–2025). Her work is held in the collections of the Art Bridges Foundation, Bentonville; Baltimore Museum of Art; Brooklyn Museum, New York; Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University; Dallas Museum of Art; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; Jewish Museum, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Serralves, Porto; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Sasha Gordon lives and works in New York, the United States.5
6. Chase Hall
Chase Hall (b. 1993, St. Paul, Minnesota, the United States) engages through painting with themes of power and collective memory, as he frequently draws from autobiographical sources. Hall has developed a distinct material approach that combines planning with improvisation, using brewed coffee as pigment to stain cotton supports. This method references global histories of trade and exploitation while grounding his images in the physical realities of the materials he employs. Hall’s work foregrounds representations of Black life outside conventional or stereotyped contexts. Through symbolic forms and gestural mark-making, he considers how natural cycles and cultural inheritances continue to shape both contemporary experience and historical understanding.
His work has been included in exhibitions such as Get in the Game: Sports, Art, Culture, SFMOMA, San Francisco (2024–2025); Day for Night: New American Realism, Palazzo Barberini, Rome (2024); Together in Time: Selections from the Hammer Contemporary Collection, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2023); Black California Dreamin’, California African American Museum, Los Angeles (2023); NGV Triennial, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne (2023); Black American Portraits, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2021); Young, Gifted and Black: The Lumpkin-Boccuzzi Family Collection of Contemporary Art, University of Illinois Chicago (2021); and This Is America | Art USA Today, Kunsthal KAdE, Amersfoort (2020). His work is included in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Dallas Museum of Art; Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris; Baltimore Museum of Art; Brooklyn Museum; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Montreal Museum of Fine Arts; SFMOMA, San Francisco; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Hall lives and works in New York, the United States.6
7. Kudzanai-Violet Hwami
Kudzanai-Violet Hwami (b. 1993, Gutu, Zimbabwe) creates paintings that merge personal photographs with online and archival material, bringing together different temporalities and perspectives. Her work explores how identity is formed within a digital culture of endless images. Influenced by her upbringing in Zimbabwe and South Africa, as well as her interests in spirituality, metaphysics, and contemporary Black and queer experience, Hwami employs a collage-based process that translates the layered logic of social media into painting.
She represented Zimbabwe at the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019, becoming the youngest artist to participate in the national pavilion. She returned to Venice in 2022 as part of The Milk of Dreams, curated by Cecilia Alemani. Hwami’s work has been included in group exhibitions at major international institutions, including: Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection, Paris (2025); Philadelphia Museum of Art (2024); Gropius Bau, Berlin (2023); Dulwich Picture Gallery, London (2022); Zeitz MOCAA, Cape Town (2022) and subsequent venues (2024–2026); Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2021–2022); Hayward Gallery, London (2021); The Perimeter, London (2021); Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris (2021); and Sonsbeek 20–24, Arnhem (2021). Her work is held in numerous public collections, including Fondation Blachère, Apt; Government Art Collection, London; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Jorge Pérez Art Museum, Miami; Kadist Foundation, Paris; Norval Foundation, Cape Town; Pinault Collection, Paris; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Tate, London; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford; and Zeitz MOCAA, Cape Town. Hwami lives and works in London, the United Kingdom.7
8. Rachel Jones
Rachel Jones (b. 1991, Whitechapel, London, the United Kingdom) is a British visual artist whose work investigates the relationship between abstract form, color, and the construction of identity. Working primarily with oil stick and oil paint on unstretched canvas, she creates layered, vivid compositions that go beyond the limits of spoken language. Her practice engages with questions of representation and Black experience, informed by her own background and artistic lineage.
Jones studied at the Glasgow School of Art, earning a BA in Fine Art in 2013, followed by an MA from the Royal Academy Schools in 2019. She has held residencies at Masterworks Museum of Bermuda Art (2016) and the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas (2019). Her work has been exhibited at institutions including Thaddaeus Ropac, the Sunday Painter, and the Royal Scottish Academy. Jones was featured in the major survey Mixing It Up: Painting Today at the Hayward Gallery, London (2021), where she was among the youngest participating artists. Her first solo exhibition in London, SMIIILLLLEEEE, opened at Thaddaeus Ropac in late 2021, followed by say cheeeeese at Chisenhale Gallery (2022). Jones’s work is represented in the collections of Tate, Arts Council England, the Hepworth Wakefield, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami. In 2024, she designed the Britannia trophy statuettes for the Brit Awards. Rachel Jones lives and works in the United Kingdom.8
9. Dominique Knowles
Dominique Knowles (b. 1996, Nassau, The Bahamas) is a painter and poet whose work centers on interspecies relationships, particularly the bond between humans and horses. Drawing on equestrianism as both subject and personal passion, Knowles explores companionship, mourning, and longing—often prompted by the loss of a beloved animal. His paintings incorporate references to Renaissance and Baroque religious art as well as modernist influences such as Mark Rothko. Knowles’s compositions frequently depict human and equine forms dissolving into earthy palettes of browns and oranges, creating an atmosphere that evokes themes of care, empathy, and shared existence. His work reflects a sustained engagement with ideas of nature, grief, and the dignity of life and death across species.
Knowles received his BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2020. He lives and works in Paris. Notable solo exhibitions include at Greene Naftali in New York, the United States; Hannah Hoffman Gallery in Los Angeles, the United States; and Kiang Malingue in Hong Kong, China. Notable group exhibitions include at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, Poland; the 12th International Biennial in Santa Fe, the United States; the Klima Biennale Wien, Vienna, Austria; the 15th Gwangju Biennale, Korea; and more. Knowles lives and works in Paris, France.9
10. Brandon Lipchik
Brandon Lipchik (b. 1993, Erie, the United States) produces digitally constructed images that are transferred to canvas and completed by hand. Combining multiple viewpoints within a single composition, he builds layered visual structures that evoke shifting surveillance or cinematic perspectives. His work frequently employs top-down or over-the-shoulder vantage points to underscore a sense of observation and detachment. Vivid lighting, saturated color, and fragmented forms draw on motifs associated with American pop culture while referencing the language of early digital animation. Through organic and technological elements, Lipchik constructs fantastical and hybrid scenes that reflect contemporary conditions shaped by simulation and networked imagery.
Lipchik studied Painting at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence and later expanded his interest in digital methods at Brown University. His institutional exhibitions include Moonbeams of Allegory at Kunstpalais Erlangen (2022) and presentations at EMMA Museum of Modern Art, Helsinki (2022); Museum der Bildenden Künste Leipzig (2019–2020); Museum More, Gorssel (2024); and Museum X, Beijing (2024). Lipchik has also taken part in international gallery exhibitions across Europe and the United States. He has been an artist-in-residence at Palazzo Monti in Brescia (2019), The Garage in Amsterdam (2020), So Far Residency in Montpellier (2018), and Mohilef Studios in California (2025). Lipchik lives and works in Paris, France.10
11. Murat Önen
Murat Önen (b. 1993, Istanbul, Turkey) studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf from 2018 to 2022 (Prof. Yesim Akdeniz), the Academy of Fine Arts Dresden from 2012 to 2017, and began his training at Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University in Istanbul. Önen’s paintings fuse personal experience with imaginative and art historical references. Working through processes of layering and overpainting, he disrupts academic conventions while examining shifting identities, queer masculinity, and the tension between real and constructed imagery.
Institutional solo exhibitions include Doing the work at Neuer Aachener Kunstverein, Aachen (2023). He has also presented solo shows at venues including Galerie Max Mayer, Düsseldorf (2024), and Ballon Rouge, Brussels (2022). A solo exhibition is forthcoming at Edouard Montassut, Paris (2025). His work has been featured in numerous museum exhibitions, including Too Much Future, Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf (2024); The Way We Are, Weserburg Museum für Moderne Kunst, Bremen (2024); Nature and State, Kunsthalle Baden-Baden (2022); and Hallöchen at Robert Grunenberg, Berlin (duo, 2022). Additional presentations include exhibitions at Kunstmuseum Celle, Suermondt-Ludwig-Museum Aachen, G2 Kunsthalle Leipzig, and Sammlung Philara, Düsseldorf. His work is held in public and private collections, including Kunstpalast Düsseldorf, Bundeskunstsammlung (Bonn), G2 Kunsthalle Leipzig, Sammlung Philara Düsseldorf, and the Miettinen Collection, Berlin. Önen lives and works in Düsseldorf, Germany.11
12. George Rouy
George Rouy (b. 1994, Sittingbourne, Kent, the United Kingdom) works with the human figure to explore desire, identity, and transformation. His paintings shift between figuration and abstraction, presenting bodies that seem to move between poise and instability. Through layered forms, fluid contours, and spatial ambiguity, Rouy questions fixed notions of the body and depicts it as something continuously reshaped through relationships to self, others, and the surrounding world.
Rouy graduated from Camberwell College of Arts, London, in 2016. He has since exhibited internationally at institutions including Musée du Louvre / Centre Pompidou-Metz, Paris (2025); Kampa Museum, Prague (2025); Hauser & Wirth, Los Angeles (2025) and London (2024); Hauser & Wirth Somerset (2024); Museo Picasso Málaga (2023); and Gladstone Gallery, New York (2022). Earlier presentations include exhibitions at Nicola Vassell Gallery, New York; Almine Rech, Paris; Peres Projects, Berlin; and Hannah Barry Gallery, London. Rouy’s work is held in public collections such as the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Phoenix Art Museum; Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris; ALBERTINA and Albertina Modern, Vienna; M+ Museum, Hong Kong; and the X Museum and Sifang Art Museum in China. Rouy lives and works in Faversham, Kent, the United Kingdom.12
13. Christine Safa
Christine Safa (b. 1994, Le Chesnay, France) creates paintings drawn from memory, exploring that memory as a place—one where figures, mountains, silhouettes, and horizons dissolve into one another. Working with a warm palette that recalls her Mediterranean heritage, landscapes become portraits, and portraits take on the structure of landscapes, each serving as an inward reflection rather than a direct depiction of an external site. Safa considers her works “tributes, fragments of memories, that which remains.” She treats painting as a process of giving shape to what persists in recollection: outlines emerge and recede, forms turn into fields of color, and light becomes the carrier of shifting emotional states. By stripping the image down to essential elements, she invites a focused encounter with feeling, offering quiet yet resonant meditations on belonging, time, and the endurance of lived experience.
Safa graduated from the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts in Paris. She has presented solo exhibitions at the ICA Milano (2022), FRAC Auvergne, Clermont-Ferrand (2023), and Galerie Praz Delavallade, Paris (2021). Her work has also been shown in institutional settings including Musée des Beaux-Arts de Caen (2025); Centre Pompidou-Metz (2025); MASC, Les Sables-d’Olonne (2024); MOCO Montpellier (2023); Fondation Carmignac, Porquerolles (2023); Musée des Beaux-Arts de Dole (2023); Musée Estrine, Saint-Rémy-de-Provence (2023); Fondation Pernod Ricard, Paris (2022); MUCEM, Marseille (2022); and Fondation Boghossian, Brussels (2021). In 2024, she received the 13th Jean-François Prat Prize for contemporary painting. Safa lives and works in Palaiseau, near Paris, France.13
14. Ana Segovia
Ana Segovia’s (b. 1991, Mexico City, Mexico) painting practice examines and subverts heteronormative representations embedded in popular visual culture. Drawing from iconic references such as the Golden Age of Mexican cinema, Western film, and sports iconography, Segovia alters familiar scenes and figures to destabilize idealized models of masculinity. Segovia’s protagonists often appear with obscured features and in settings punctuated by strident color and subtle humor. By intervening in image structures—through shifts in palette, form, and composition—the artist makes visible the artifice, montage, and performative constructs that shape gender and national identity. Through this approach, Segovia proposes new possibilities for looking at images that once appeared fixed or unquestioned.
Segovia received a BFA in Painting and Drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) and has been the subject of solo exhibitions at major institutions including the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey (MARCO), Mexico (2024); Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, Mexico City (2020); and Museo Taurino y Cantina, Mexico City (2019). Other recent solo presentations include La Faena (Mexico City, 2020), Can’t Sleep with the Man who Dims My Shine, MONTI 8, Latina, Italy (2021), and exhibitions at Galería Karen Huber and Fuego, Mexico City (2017–2023). The artist has participated in significant group exhibitions, such as the 60th Venice Biennale (2024); Cowboy, Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, Colorado (2023); Who Tells a Tale Adds a Tail, Denver Art Museum, Colorado (2022); Excepciones normales: Arte contemporáneo en México, Museo Jumex, Mexico City (2020); and Otrxs Mundxs, Museo Tamayo, Mexico City (2020). Residencies include Casa Wabi, Puerto Escondido, Oaxaca (2020) and Co-Lab Projects, Austin, Texas (2019). In 2019, Segovia received the Jóvenes Creadores grant from the Fondo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes (FONCA), Mexico. Segovia continues to live and work in Mexico City, Mexico.14
15. Tschabalala Self
Tschabalala Self (b. 1990 in Harlem, New York, the United States) is a distinctive artist who integrates painting, printmaking, and sculpture to explore themes related to the black body. Her work primarily features depictions of women, crafted through a dynamic blend of sewn, printed, and painted materials that cross various art and craft traditions. The formal and conceptual elements of her art are dedicated to a deeper exploration of identity, selfhood, and human flourishing.
Self has held numerous solo exhibitions and performances at prestigious venues worldwide. Recent highlights include the Espoo Museum of Modern Art in Finland (2024); Kunstmuseum in St. Gallen (2023); Le Consortium in Dijon (2022); the Performa 2021 Biennial in New York City (2021); the Baltimore Museum of Art in Baltimore (2021); the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston (2020); the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles; Art Omi in Ghent (2019); the Frye Art Museum in Seattle (2019); and the Yuz Museum in Shanghai (2018). Tschabalala Self lives and works in the Hudson Valley in New York, the United States. Self lives and works in the Hudson Valley, New York, the United States.15
16. Vaughn Spann
Vaughn Spann’s (b. 1992, Florida, the United States) practice engages both abstraction and figuration as a way to investigate space, time, and memory. Spann draws subjects from personal experiences and his own physical presence in and outside the studio. While rooted in formal considerations of color, line, and shape, his work acknowledges that subjectivity remains central to image-making. Through ongoing experimentation with unconventional materials and distinct stylistic approaches, Spann connects formal investigation with the people, places, and histories that inform his perspective.
Spann received his MFA in Painting and Printmaking from Yale School of Art in 2018 and his BFA in Studio Art from Rutgers University–Newark in 2014. Recent solo exhibitions have been presented at the Tampa Museum of Art, Florida (2024); Samek Art Museum, Bucknell University, Lewisburg (2021); and the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City (2020). Selected group exhibitions include presentations at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, La Jolla (2025); the Brooklyn Museum, New York (2024); the Rubell Museum, Miami (2024); the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami(2022); the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, Arizona (2022); and the Pérez Art Museum Miami (2020). Spann’s work is held in numerous public collections, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Pérez Art Museum Miami; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; and the Rubell Museum, Miami, among others. Spann lives and works in Newark, New Jersey, the United States.16
17. Xiyao Wang
Xiyao Wang (b. 1992, Chongqing, China) creates large-scale, immersive paintings in which gestural lines suggest shifting impressions of landscapes, bodies, movements, and thought. Her work develops a hybrid form of abstraction that draws from Taoism, post-structuralist theory, ancient Chinese pictorial traditions, bodywork, dance, martial arts, and Western art history. Mythological references and the lyrical, hermetic approach associated with Cy Twombly are combined with visual influences from global mass culture, electronic music, and digitally networked experience. Her paintings engage with inner visions and bodily perception while reflecting her East–West biography.
Wang received a BA from Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in 2014, followed by a BA and MFA from Hochschule für Bildende Künste Hamburg in 2018 and 2020. Recent institutional presentations include TANK, Shanghai (2024); Bangkok Art Biennale (2024); Shepparton Art Museum, Victoria (2023); Yuan Art Museum, Beijing (2023); Song Art Museum, Beijing (2023); and Pingshan Art Museum, Shenzhen (2023). Earlier exhibitions include the ARNDT Artbarn, Cape Schanck (2022); Aurora Museum, Shanghai (2022); Jiu Shi Art Museum, Shanghai (2022); Baumwollspinnerei, Leipzig (2020); Cité internationale des arts, Paris (2018); and the Chongqing Contemporary Art Center (2015). Awards and recognitions include nominations for the Schües Art Award and Hiscox Art Award in 2017, and a Karl H. Ditze Foundation grant and DAAD PROMOS scholarship in 2018. Wang lives and works in Berlin, Germany.17
18. Anna Weyant
Anna Weyant (b. 1995, Calgary, Alberta, Canada) is known for precisely executed paintings and drawings in which young female figures encounter what she has described as “low-stakes trauma” — moments of tension, absurdity, and vulnerability embedded in everyday life. Working with a muted palette of deep greens, dusty pinks, and dramatic blacks, she draws influence from seventeenth-century Dutch painters such as Frans Hals and Judith Leyster, and the enigmatic compositions of Balthus. These tragicomic scenes highlight how popular culture and social convention construct narratives around femininity, yet her protagonists are rendered with empathy, humor, and psychological nuance. Her still lifes similarly imbue ordinary objects with an uncanny sense of emotion and foreboding. Weyant’s early works included a dark, cinematic series centered on a dollhouse modeled after one from her childhood, while later paintings draw on the aesthetics of American suburban melodrama found in made-for-television films.
Weyant’s work has quickly gained international visibility. Recent solo presentations include exhibitions at Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid, Gagosian in London, Paris, and New York, as well as shows at Blum & Poe in Tokyo and Los Angeles and at Winter Street Gallery in Edgartown, Massachusetts. Her work has also been featured in key group exhibitions, including “Copyists” at Centre Pompidou-Metz, the exhibition “Breasts” at Palazzo Franchetti in Venice, “Femmes” at the Musée de Mougins in France, and institutional presentations at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Plains Art Museum in North Dakota, and the FLAG Art Foundation in New York. Weyant lives and works in New York, the United States.18
19. Chloe Wise
Chloe Wise (b. 1990, Montreal, Canada) examines how identities are constructed through systems of consumption, representation, and media culture. Combining humor and self-aware parody, she considers the influence of branding, fashion, and publicity in shaping the self within a digitally driven visual landscape. Portraiture is central to Wise’s work. She frequently paints friends from her immediate community, addressing how personal relationships and shared generational experiences intersect with the tradition of portrait painting. These works reflect the porous boundaries between professional and private life and foreground the artist’s perspective as a New York–based practitioner who chooses her subjects from her own social world.
Wise earned a BFA with distinction from Concordia University in Montreal in 2013. Her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at institutions including the Heart Herning Museum of Contemporary Art in Herning, Denmark. She has participated in significant group exhibitions at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the United States; The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, the United States; Kunstverein Bielefeld, Germany; and Passerelle Centre d’Art Contemporain in Brest, France, among others. She lives and works in New York.19
20. Issy Wood
Issy Wood (b. 1993, Durham, North Carolina, the United States) navigates a tension between revelation and restraint. Working in what she has described as a “smudgy pointillism,” Wood depicts subjects selected for their seductive, highly mediated allure—objects and images that are already filtered through advertising, photography, and the internet. Her works function as “pictures of pictures,” maintaining a deliberate distance from their sources while acknowledging the desire embedded within them. Cars, guns, and other coveted yet inherently troubling motifs recur throughout her practice, exposing a latent unease beneath their polished surfaces. Wood’s self-portraits similarly complicate visibility: faces are cropped, obstructed, or partially hidden, negotiating a fear of complete exposure alongside a persistent need for recognition and understanding.
Wood studied at Goldsmiths, University of London, and the Royal Academy of Arts, London. Her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at institutions including TANK Shanghai, China; Aspen Art Museum, the United States; Lafayette Anticipations, Paris, France; and Ilmin Museum of Art, Seoul, Korea. Her paintings are held in major public collections, among them The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the United States; National Portrait Gallery, London, the United Kingdom; Dallas Museum of Art, the United States; Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, France; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, the United States; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, the United States; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, the United States; and Tate, London, the United Kingdom. Wood lives and works in London, the United Kingdom.20
Cover image: Installation view of “George Rouy: The Bleed, Part II” (2025) at Hauser & Wirth in Los Angeles, the United States. Courtesy the artist, Hannah Barry Gallery and Hauser & Wirth © George Rouy / Photo: Keith Lubow
Notes:
- White Cube, Tunji Adeniyi-Jones consulted on December 5, 2025. ↩︎
- Galerie Judin, Alexander Basil consulted on December 5, 2025. ↩︎
- Gagosian, Jadé Fadojutimi consulted on December 5, 2025. ↩︎
- GRIMM, Louise Giovanelli consulted on December 25, 2025. ↩︎
- David Zwirner, Sasha Gordon consulted on December 25, 2025. ↩︎
- David Kordansky Gallery, Chase Hall consulted on December 5, 2025. ↩︎
- Victoria Miro, Kudzanai-Violet Hwami consulted on December 5, 2025. ↩︎
- Thaddaeus Ropac, Rachel Jones consulted on December 5, 2025. ↩︎
- The Green Gallery, Dominique Knowles consulted on December 5, 2025. ↩︎
- Robert Grunenberg, Brandon Lipchik consulted on December 5, 2025. ↩︎
- Galerie Max Mayer, Murat Önen consulted on December 5, 2025. ↩︎
- Hauser & Wirth, George Ruoy consulted on December 5, 2025. ↩︎
- Galerie Lelong, Christine Safa consulted on December 5, 2025. ↩︎
- Kurimanzutto, Ana Segovia consulted on December 5, 2025. ↩︎
- Tschabalala Self, Information consulted on May 16, 2024. ↩︎
- Almine Rech, Vaughn Spann consulted on December 5, 2025. ↩︎
- Perrotin, Xiyao Wang consulted on December 5, 2025. ↩︎
- Gagosian, Anne Weyant consulted on December 5, 2025. ↩︎
- Almine Rech, Chloe Wise consulted on December 5, 2025. ↩︎
- Michael Werner, Issy Wood consulted on December 5, 2025. ↩︎
Last Updated on December 8, 2025
- Published on
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.
