At the Artnet Gallery Network, we make it our goal to discover new artists each and every month, searching through the thousands of talented artists on our website and selecting a few we find particularly intriguing.
As the fall season kicks off, we’ve picked five promising artists whose works we’ll be watching closely and whose works are on view in Berlin, New York, Seattle, and beyond.
Don’t stop with our picks either. With the Artnet Gallery Network, it’s easy to discover new artists around the world from the comfort of home. Get busy exploring on your own, and keep an eye out for our monthly roundup of names to watch!
Iabadiou Piko at Galerie Michael Janssen, Berlin
Iabadiou Piko, 2021). Courtesy of Galerie Michael Janssen.
Indonesian artist Iabadiou Piko (b. 1984) creates energetic paintings and drawings that capture a spirit of raw emotional catharsis and freedom. Though he studied photography, Piko is self-taught as a painter who takes inspiration from Jean-Michael Basquiat, Jean Dubuffet, Pablo Picasso, and Cy Twombly. Creating what the artist calls his “visual diary,” Piko enlivens these disparate influences into works with immediacy, combining signs and symbols in the world around him with abstraction.
Enrique Martínez Celaya at Miles McEnery Gallery, New York
Enrique Martínez Celaya, (2022). Courtesy of Miles McEnery Gallery.
Enrique Martínez Celaya’s recent paintings and drawings are currently on view in “The Foreigner’s Song,” the Cuban artist’s first solo exhibition with New York’s Miles McEnery Gallery. A noted writer, artist, and former physicist, the artist, who is now based in Los Angeles, was raised between Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Spain. His drawings and paintings draw from his personal experiences living as a foreigner, combining a sense of disorientation and longing, with imagery that references literature and poetry, philosophy, and science. His dreamlike works offer moments of glittering reverie that allude to nature, mythology, and folklore.
Rixy at LaiSun Keane, Boston
Rixy, (2020). Courtesy of LaiSun Keane.
Self-taught Latinx painter Rixy creates interdisciplinary works that are rooted in her Honduran and Dominican ancestry. Working with acrylic and aerosol paint, inks, food dyes, fabrics, and other sustainable and recycled materials, Rixy blends together references to mythology and folklore and elements of style from street art to comic books. Based in Roxbury, Massachusetts, the artist is now showing recent works in the group exhibition “Communal Medicine: Tending Abundance” at Boston’s LaiSun Keane.
Humaira Abid at Greg Kucera Gallery, Seattle
Humaira Abid, (2021). Courtesy of Greg Kucera Gallery.
Humaira Abid’s second exhibition with Seattle’s Greg Kucera Gallery, “Fight Like A Girl,” explores the myriad conditions of global womanhood. In one series, Abid creates carved wooden sculptures that reference imagery seen on protest signs used in women’s marches around the world. Also on view are a series of evocative sculptures of rearview mirrors filled with paintings of the eyes of women wearing headscarves. These works are beautifully detailed and subtly hint at the politics, religion, taboos, and stereotypes that women endure. Meanwhile, a series called “This World Is Beautiful and Dangerous, Too” presents carved pine child’s swings, each suspended over carved objects such as lizards, cacti, and toy paper boats. The seat of each swing shows a young girl swinging happily in fantastical settings that combine dreamlike aspirations with the world’s lurking uncertainties.
Esther Pearl Watson at Andrew Edlin Gallery, New York
Esther Pearl Watson, Is the Creation of Earth a Joke? (2022). Courtesy of Andrew Edlin Gallery.
Esther Pearl Watson creates folkloric paintings of everyday scenes taken from her Texas childhood, from cow-dotted fields to roadside scenes, and her own fascination with UFOs. The artist grew up in small towns throughout the state, with an Italian immigrant father who spent his time trying to build a functional flying saucer. He imagined selling the plans to NASA in a financial windfall, spending the family’s meager funds on aluminum foil.
These flattened, colorful artworks recall the work of outsider artists such as Anna Mary Robertson Moses and Clara McDonald Williamson while underscoring the tensions between imagination, mental illness, poverty, and the American Dream. Watson’s exhibition “Guardian of Eden” is currently on view with New York’s Andrew Edlin Gallery.
