5 Artists to Follow if You Like Georgia O’Keeffe
In this monthly series, Artsy’s Curatorial team features a group of five emerging and noteworthy artists who are working in a similar style or spirit as a well-known or established artist. This month, we focus on Georgia O’Keeffe, the pioneering American artist known for her virtuosic paintings of flowers and the New Mexican landscape.
Faith Wilding
B. 1943, Paraguay. Lives and works in Providence, Rhode Island.
A multidisciplinary artist working across painting, textile, writing, and performance, Faith Wilding makes use of whatever media best fits the subject matter at hand. Born in Paraguay, Wilding immigrated to the United States in 1961 and attended the California Institute of Art, graduating with an MFA in visual art in 1973. At the forefront of the feminist art movement in Los Angeles during the 1970s, Wilding was a key member of the Feminist Art Program and participant in the 1972 “Womanhouse” exhibition, alongside Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro.
A fierce eco-feminist activist, Wilding aims to encourage her viewers to reflect on their own relationship with nature. The sinuous forms in her watercolors make reference to both the female form and the greater natural world, and address notions of the aging body and the decline of nature over her lifetime, especially in her native Paraguay.
Exhibited extensively over the past 50 years, Wilding’s work has been shown at institutions such as MOCA Los Angeles, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid, the Centre for Contemporary Arts in Glasgow, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C. Wilding has also been the recipient of prestigious awards, such as the Women’s Caucus for Art Lifetime Achievement Award in 2014 and the Guggenheim Fellowship in 2009, and has received multiple grants from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Camilla Engström
B. 1989, Örebro, Sweden. Lives and works in Los Angeles.
Artist Camilla Engström creates vibrant, joyful paintings that address beauty ideals and climate change. After growing up between Sweden and China, Engström moved to New York to study fashion at the Fashion Institute of Technology. Ultimately, she changed course, left school, and began painting as a way to reflect on and process personal events.
Through her painting, Engström developed Husa, a pink, playful, full-bodied character. She is a manifestation of Engström’s alter ego, and a rejection of the tall, thin figures she had become accustomed to drawing in fashion school. Husa appears frequently throughout Engström’s work, in an imaginary world where she nurtures the land with her maternal energy.
“Returning Home,” Engström’s most recent solo exhibition with Los Angeles gallery Over the Influence, featured a series of paintings made during the pandemic. The artist found solace and consolation in nature during quarantine; some of the works from “Returning Home” depict colorful and seemingly serene landscapes. The natural imagery, such as erupting volcanoes, reflects the inner turmoil Engström felt during this period.
Browse available works by Camilla Engström.
Lido Iacopetti
B. 1936, San Nicolás, Argentina. Lives and works in La Plata, Argentina.
The forms in Lido Iacopetti’s paintings are simultaneously familiar and otherworldly. Iacopetti studied painting at the National University of La Plata’s Escuela Superior de Bellas Artes in 1958, at the height of post-Cubism and the avant-garde in Argentina. Drawing influence from a range of artists, from Wassily Kandinsky to Xul Solar and Ramón Gómez Cornet, Iacopetti developed a style that set him apart from his peers.
In 1969, Iacopetti published his manifesto, New Imagination, in which he declares to pursue art as means of transformation and liberation, rejecting egotism or spectacle in favor of a collective vision. Passionate about democratizing the art space, Iacopetti has made a commitment to showing his work in alternative venues—such as schools, hospitals, local restaurants, and shops—to make his work more accessible to the general public. In a similar spirit, in 2003, Iacopetti began publishing and selling calendars featuring reproductions of his paintings, and donating the proceeds to a local Argentinean nonprofit organization.
In 2019, “Imaginante Popular,” a retrospective of the now-83-year-old artist’s work, was exhibited at the Buenos Aires galleries Aldo de Sousa and Barro. Iacopetti’s work has been exhibited throughout Argentina and abroad, and he has received several notable awards, such as the Premio Único de Pintura from the Museum of Fine Arts, Buenos Aires, in 1965, and the First Prize Acquisition from the Fundación Florencio Perez.
Browse available works by Lido Iacopetti.
Matthew F Fisher
B. 1976, Boston. Lives and works in Brooklyn.
Matthew F Fisher paints idealized scenes of nature that appear suspended in time, such as a perfectly uniform wave at its peak just before breaking. The meditative process through which he works is reflected in the calmness of his paintings. Fisher slowly and intentionally layers acrylic and ink onto the canvas, rendering objects with such dimension and volume that they appear sculptural against flat, gradient backgrounds.
Inspired by childhood memories of spending time near the water and contemplating the vastness of the ocean, Fisher often paints seascapes featuring recurring motifs such as seagulls, crustaceans, and the rising and setting sun. These symbols are rearranged in each painting to create new compositions and narratives.
Fisher received his MFA in 2000 from Virginia Commonwealth University. “The Great Fire,” a solo exhibition of his work, is currently on view at Shrine Gallery in New York through October 25th. He has shown internationally at Ochi Projects in Los Angeles and Taymour Grahne Projects in London, and has been the recipient of prestigious artist residencies such as the Pollock Krasner Foundation in 2016 and Yaddo in 2007 and 2015.
Browse available works by Matthew F Fisher.
Anna Valdez
B. 1985, Sacramento. Lives and works in Oakland.
Anna Valdez is interested in the idea of a collective consciousness and the traditions and visual symbols of a community. She began pursuing a career in anthropology from a young age and first recognized her artistic abilities during an archaeological dig; she would draw in a sketchbook to catalog her research. Later, Valdez decided to pursue art full time and earned her MFA in painting from Boston University in 2013. She now works across a variety of media including painting, ceramics, printmaking, collage, and digital media.
Known for her maximalist paintings of elaborately staged still lifes, Valdez examines the relationship between objects and identity. For her most recent solo show, “Objects of Affection” at Hashimoto Contemporary, Valdez exhibited a series of paintings primarily made during quarantine. These paintings depict household objects and artifacts of everyday life, which collectively act as a kind of self-portrait of Valdez during quarantine. The works speak to the refuge that domestic spaces have provided to so many during this time.
Valdez’s work has been exhibited in museums and galleries throughout the United States at venues such as the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Arkansas, the North Carolina Museum of Art, the New Britain Museum of American Art in Connecticut, Hashimoto Contemporary in San Francisco and New York, Richard Heller Gallery in Santa Monica, Eleanor Harwood Gallery in San Francisco, and Nancy Margolis Gallery in New York. She is slated to open a solo exhibition this year at David B. Smith Gallery in Denver, Colorado.
