7 Up-And-Coming Artists To Invest In
Natasha Kissell
Natasha Kissell’s paintings effuse aspiration and radiate wonderment. Often including modernist architecture, she places highly designed structures into imaginative landscapes. Her paintings depict fantastical landscapes that can only be borne out of the imagination. Kissell’s works also explore the distance between the desire for perfection and a Utopian existence and the reality of decay and mortality. Visions of architectural splendour strive for eternal presence in the landscapes they occupy but are surrounded by signifiers of their transience in this world, such as crumbling walls, vandalised architecture or clapped-out old cars overgrown with weeds. The paintings examine the human longing to leave a mark on this world, yet this desire for transcendence can never be fulfilled as bricks and mortar are subject to the elements and will ultimately fall away.
Follow Natasha Kissell
Clare Woods
British painter Clare Woods uses thick paint as a tool to sculpt an image, which harks back to her original training as a sculptor. She first gained recognition in the 1990s for her large-scale oil-on-aluminium paintings. Her bright, visceral paintings are often paired with titles that suggest darker undertones. For instance, her series ‘New Problems’ (2020) depicts snapshots of the interior of a home, focusing on details such as a glittering chandelier or a darkened window. Woods was commissioned by the Contemporary Art Society to create a ceramic mural for the London 2012 Olympic Park and has exhibited her work around the world.
Follow Clare Woods
Liza Giles
Liza Giles is about to open her first solo show in Mayfair at Flowers Gallery. Giles’ large-scale abstract paintings combine a hard line with intuitive mark-making, incorporating expressive gestures amidst a more formal structure. Her painting style developed from making smaller collages using found scraps and painted cut-outs, and her monumental canvases begin with the elemental forms from these collages. At times architectural, her paintings suggest the immensity and solidity of the urban skyline against harmonious earth tones and feathered edges.
Follow Liza Giles
Jennifer Louise Martin
Jennifer Louise Martin works in a variety of media including painting, collage and photography to create scenes of domesticity that hint at an undertow of melancholy. These multiple ways of working allow her to explore the tension between the immediacy of painting and more procedural forms like knitting and sewing, which often make their way into her work. This clash of the mass produced, the hand-made, the commercial image and the privacy of one’s inner visual world is central to her work. I love how it’s cinematic in composition and how she uses colour to determine a mood and pattern.
Follow Jennifer Louise Martin
Sophie Charalambous
Sophie Charalambous is a London-based, award-winning artist who works on paper using pencils, watercolour and mono-printing. She regularly visits Cyprus and in her work the island's flora, fauna, folk art, ancient history and festivals are re-imagined into personal landscapes which fuse the old world with the present. Sophie won the Jerwood Printmaking Today Prize in 2020, the Sunday Times Watercolour Prize in 2018 and the David Gluck Memorial Drawing Prize in 2017. Her large watercolour ‘The Church in the Mountains’ was included in the Prince & Patron exhibition at Buckingham Palace back in 2018. Charalambous has also exhibited internationally and, in 2010, was commissioned by Van Cleef & Arpels to draw in their workshops in Paris.
Follow Sophie Charalambous
Max Wade
Max Wade will open a show this spring in south-east London at Sid Motion Gallery, which has one of the most exciting contemporary art programmes in the capital right now. Working primarily on canvas, Wade transforms sketchbook drawings of mundane scenes into large paintings of bright, clashing colours. I love how he creates layered, imaginative environments by distorting and rotating parts of his drawings. Often taking on a large scale, his process invokes the physical style of abstract expressionists like Willem de Kooning. As well as paintings, he has also produced woodcuts and works on paper.
Follow Max Wade
Sophie Bouvier Auslander
Sophie Bouvier Auslander uses waxed maps as her canvas to create watercolour paintings. One needs to closely inspect them to understand what is hidden beneath the surface, under painted road maps or shredded world map collages. Her small and large-scale waxed maps are covered with paint and then scratched and scribbled into with abstract shapes or grids, and then sometimes recovered with paint drippings. Exposing hints of the underlying countries, oceans, cities and borders, one tries to decipher and rediscover familiar environments, names and signs. Within a larger framework, her sculptures and works on paper, though somehow organic, reflect a rather abstract aesthetic, yet ask of the viewer environmental and socio-political questions.
Follow Sophie Bouvier Auslander
Visit AnnaKirrage.com
DISCLAIMER: We endeavour to always credit the correct original source of every image we use. If you think a credit may be incorrect, please contact us at info@sheerluxe.com.