The Artists Trending This March
Based on Artsy’s internal data.
“Trending Now” is a monthly series focused on 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 February through March 2023. Below, we spotlight three of this month’s trending artists.
Raghav Babbar
B. 1997, Rohtak, India. Lives and works in London.
Raghav Babbar, The Coal Seller, 2020. Courtesy of Sotheby’s.
Raghav Babbar’s emotive-laden figurative oil paintings function as expressive character studies of everyday individuals. Often in a neutral color palette, with subjects shown from odd, unexpected angles, these works use both fictional and real characters.
At only 25 years of age, the London-based artist is already seeing career-defining sales on the secondary market. For example, his 2020 painting The Coal Seller set an impressive auction record at Sotheby’s “The Now” evening auction at the beginning of March, when it sold for £609,600 ($733,528)—an impressive increase of 2,338% above its median estimate of £25,000 ($30,562). Astonishingly, this sale isn’t even an outlier: It falls just above the average of his work on the secondary market since his debut last August at Sotheby’s modern and contemporary art auction in Singapore. At that sale, Babbar’s Memory is a Permanent Luxury (2020) sold for S$441,000 (US$316,560), which was a 1,236% increase above its median estimate of S$33,000 (US$24,778).
On Artsy, the artist’s page has reflected the growing demand in Babbar’s secondary market with an increase of 2,283% in traffic across February and March. Born in Rohtak, India, Babbar received his BFA at the College of the Arts in Singapore and an MFA at the Royal College of Art in London. Babbar’s secondary-market explosion is rare for an emerging artist and feels comparable to the historic debut of Anna Weyant’s work at the New York auctions last spring ahead of her debut solo show with Gagosian in autumn 2022.
Fanny Sanín
B. 1938, Bogotá. Lives and works in New York.
On the heels of an increased awareness of women’s work in both historical and contemporary Abstract Expressionism, Fanny Sanín’s geometric abstract paintings have been seeing a rise in interest. Sanín’s increased visibility on Artsy is likely connected to Whitechapel Gallery’s current, critically acclaimed exhibition “Action, Gesture, Paint: Women Artists and Global Abstraction 1940-70,” on view through May 7th, where Sanín’s work has received significant attention.
Case in point: In a recent New York Times review on “Action, Gesture, Paint,” Sanín’s work was featured heavily. Her geometric, flat, abstract paintings and drawings evoke the work of Anni Albers and Carmen Herrera, while citing the architectural legacies of abstraction across Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s.
Born in Bogotá, Colombia, Sanín has been based in New York since the early 1970s. There, she combined her early Abstract Expressionist style from her time in Colombia with the hard abstraction being developed in the United States at the time. Sanín has listed David Manzur Londoño and Armando Villegas as key influences.
Jean-Baptiste Bernadet
B. 1978, Paris. Lives and works in Brussels.
Jean-Baptiste Bernadet is on trend, in more ways than one. Firstly, his work has seen a 1,029% increase over the past two months on Artsy. Secondly, he’s just launched a hot collaboration with French fashion brand, Études. For its spring/summer 2023 collection, Bernadet’s sensorial, abstract paintings were printed onto button-up shirts, wide-leg shorts, and boxy, workwear jackets.
His brightly colored paintings evoke landscapes without representing them, leaving audiences to interpret his brushstrokes on their own, and get a deeper feeling for nature through color and texture. Audiences in Paris will have two forthcoming opportunities to encounter Bernadet’s awe-inspiring abstractions in April and May. The first is a group exhibition, “Inauguration,” at Lo Brutto Stahl that also features rising U.S.-based sculpture artists Ivana Bašić and Quay Quinn Wolf. A solo show, “Pollen,” with Almine Rech, which represents the artist, will follow.
Bernadet’s paintings have only recently hit the secondary market over the past year and are already making a sizable splash, selling for, on average, twice their high estimates of $7,000–$15,000.
