The Artists Trending This April
Based on Artsy’s internal data.
“Trending Now” is a monthly series focused on the artists with a significant growth in followers on Artsy from one month to the next. The 10 artists featured in the chart above are making waves across auctions, gallery exhibitions, fairs, social media, Artsy engagement, popular culture, or major publications. All numbers are based on Artsy user engagement from March through April 2023. Below, we spotlight three of this month’s trending artists.
Dana James
B. 1986, New York. Lives and works in New York.
Dana James’s moody abstract paintings land her at the top of Artsy’s trending artists list this month. Her practice makes full use of color and size to create captivating abstractions that evoke the changing hues in the sky. James’s paintings often incorporate multiple panels that are combined to make a singular work, often taken from previous, larger paintings, cut down to be attached to new work.
James’s mostly pastel palette means that a splash of red or black becomes pronounced on the canvas, drawing the eye. For her, these contrasts are a way for her to play with juxtaposition: not only of color, but of mood and tone, as a way to interrupt the “prettiness” of the palette.
The rising artist is experiencing renewed interest in her work following an in-depth profile of her studio practice in Cool Hunting—though she initially made a splash in the art world with her 2021 debut solo show “Something I Meant to Say” with Hollis Taggart, which represents the artist.
Kyle Dunn
B. 1990, Livonia, Michigan. Lives and works in New York.
Kyle Dunn’s seductive, cinematic figurative paintings of queer masculinity are making waves at P.P.O.W, where his latest, nearly sold-out exhibition “Night Pictures” is on view through May 13th. Queer angst is a theme throughout Dunn’s practice, evident both in the longing gazes of his subjects, and the dynamic color palette of his paintings that evoke nighttime encounters on the street or in the bedroom. His paintings feature characters that are composites of the artist, his partner, and men from art history and culture at large.
If cinema is driven by feeling, then Dunn’s cinematic impulse is driven by eroticism, which elicits drama across his narrative paintings. Featuring a slew of nude or semi-nude men, each painting drips with melancholy as lovers are portrayed separated, or in various states of longing for an absent someone. In this way, Dunn’s work references the eroticism of early queer cinema, where lonely men experience sexual bliss by retreating to their subconscious, as seen in films like Kenneth Anger’s Fireworks (1947) or Jean Genet’s Un chant d’amour (1950).
Cecily Brown
B. 1954, London. Lives and works in New York.
Cecily Brown is fresh off the opening of her stellar mid-career survey exhibition of her abstract figurative paintings, “Death and the Maid,” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The exhibition, which opened on April 4th and closes on December 3rd, combines over 25 years of Brown’s experimentations with abstraction across painting, drawing, and printmaking. Stylistically, her work takes after 20th-century masters like Willem de Kooning, Francis Bacon, and Joan Mitchell.
Combining both figuration and abstraction, Brown examines tensions in her work: between gender binaries, color spectrums, and in sex, viewing her paintings as evidence of an argument or dialogue the artist has between herself and the work. Visually, she makes references to memento mori, mirroring, and vanitas as recurring motifs throughout her work. At times, figures can be seen in Brown’s paintings in various states of anguish or bliss, but often, the nature of their state is left ambiguous to the viewer.
Brown’s paintings set an auction record in 2018 when Suddenly Last Summer (1999) sold for $6.7 million at Sotheby’s, more than three times its median estimate of $2.1 million. For the past 15 years, Brown’s large-scale paintings have sold for six figures at auction, and with several pieces available in the forthcoming May auctions, there may well be more instances of this trend to come.
