The Artsy Vanguard 2023–2024
Now in its sixth year, The Artsy Vanguard is our annual list of the most promising artists working today. The 2023–2024 edition is focused on 10 exceptional talents who span generations and geographies, mediums and messages. Their creations range from sensuous abstractions, to tender depictions of the natural world, to bold, narrative figuration. These artists deftly contend with the pressing concerns of our time, while dauntlessly pursuing the path of the contemporary artist. Through their work, we experience the potential for art to plumb the depths of human emotions, to offer catharsis amid trauma, and to summon beauty when it’s needed the most.
The artists of The Artsy Vanguard 2023–2024 have begun to garner the attention of the global art community—from participation in prestigious exhibitions, to representation with esteemed international galleries, to notable auction records. And like the Vanguard artists of years past, their momentum is only building. Yet one doesn’t need to skim a CV to understand why these artists are special.
In the following editorial profiles, we share the artists’ stories and delve deep into their practices, while in an accompanying collection on Artsy, we showcase their recent work. And from today through November 19th, their artworks will be broadcast to millions as they are featured on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York, at the intersection of West 48th Street and Broadway.
We’re honored to introduce the artists of The Artsy Vanguard 2023–2024.
Sarah Cunningham
B. 1993, Nottingham, England. Lives and works in London.
Portrait of Sarah Cunningham in her studio. © Sarah Cunningham. Photo by George Darrell. Courtesy of Lisson Gallery.
It’s difficult to describe precisely what Sarah Cunningham’s paintings depict. She works in oil, sometimes on large linen or cotton canvases, and other times on small pieces of board. The images that emerge from the thick, gestural strokes and washes of paint—in blue, green, red, yellow, white, or black—give a sense of landscape. There’s the peak of a mountain, a canopy of leaves, a shadowy figure framed by a door. But often, the paint threatens to overwhelm the subject, calling to mind the heavily impastoed urban scenes of Frank Auerbach, or J.M.W. Turner’s stormy seas that dissolve into abstraction.
This is all by design. “I am interested in creating this sense of place only to tear it down—and then build it up again,” Cunningham said in an interview. “I’m dealing with representation and I’m trying to rethink what we mean it to be.”
Read the full profile of Sarah Cunningham by Gabrielle Schwarz.
Harminder Judge
B. 1982, Rotherham, England. Lives and works in London.
Portrait of Harminder Judge by Sorina Reiber. Courtesy of Harminder Judge.
At his East London warehouse studio, Harminder Judge is standing framed by two large wall-based plaster works. As if portals, the rectangular, abstract pieces seem to invite the viewer into another world thronging with specters. Shapes and forms loom from the dusky surface, and blooming color is layered into polished surfaces that the artist described as “gleaming, glowing, stone-like objects that hold internal power and project a painterly presence.” His current works give off a Rorschach sensibility. En masse, they trace a path through the unconscious mind as it flits around and seeks meaning through recognition.
Read the full profile of Harminder Judge by Susanna Davies-Crook.
Basil Kincaid
B. 1986, St. Louis, Missouri. Lives and works in St. Louis and Klagon, Ghana.
Portrait of Basil Kincaid with Dancing the Wind Walk, 2023. Photo by Jason Sean Weiss/BFA.com. Courtesy of the artist and Mindy Solomon Gallery.
Drawing is a medium that dates back to Basil Kincaid’s childhood, when he would scribble in church to avoid dozing off. It remains at the core of the 37-year-old artist’s practice, which today also includes photographed collages, installation, performance, and textile works. Indeed, textile works are the pieces the St. Louis native is best known for: large, colorful, carefully fabricated quilts.
Still, drawing remains his “home base” to this day, acting as a generative entry point into other media, as well as a meditative habit that allows for a more intuitive, emotional impulse to guide his work. Kincaid’s small in-home studio is a universe of his drawings, with illustrations scattered on every surface, tacked to the wall, and spread across his drafting table. The pictures themselves often feature layered repetition, emphasizing similar outlines and silhouettes of faces and figures.
Read the full profile of Basil Kincaid by Jacqui Germain.
Yoora Lee
B. 1990, South Korea. Lives and works in Los Angeles.
Portrait of Yoora Lee by Jungwoo Lee. Courtesy of Nicodim Gallery.
There is a fuzzy quality to Yoora Lee’s surfaces that evokes analog television and contrasts with the smooth, 21st-century technology she depicts. The artist also references global art and media from centuries past, which gives her canvases an uncanny relationship to time and place. Korean television dramas, 19th-century French masterpieces, and the artist’s own photographs are all among the inspirations for her compositions, which are finding admirers around the world. In 2023 alone, Lee has exhibited in Chicago, Los Angeles, Seoul, and Tel Aviv. Her paintings ultimately evoke longing and loneliness, emotions that transcend the disparate eras, cultures, and technologies that she quotes.
Read the full profile of Yoora Lee by Alina Cohen.
Li Hei Di
B. 1997, Shenyang, China. Lives and works in London.
Portrait of Li Hei Di in their studio. Photo by Kaishui. First assistant: Cristiano Mantovani. Courtesy of Michael Kohn Gallery.
In “Oscillating Womb,” Li Hei Di’s new solo show at Michael Kohn Gallery in Los Angeles, limbs, torsos, and fauna intermingle, fizzing and crackling in swirls of deep color and luminescent light. In a style that is neither figurative nor abstract, the Chinese, London-based artist captures the ephemerality of desire, encounter, and connection through painting.
“A lot of my work has to do with physical interaction or just the emotional entanglements in life, and how the human relationship is hidden almost into layers, like a landscape of abstract lights,” Li told Artsy from their studio in Roman Road, East London. Known for its market that has operated for more than 150 years, the area is a melting pot of the international cultures and citizens that make up present-day East London. In many ways, the neighborhood reflects Li’s practice, inspired and influenced by both the artist’s homeland and their international upbringing.
Read the full profile of Li Hei Di by Arun Kakar.
Cinthia Sifa Mulanga
B. 1997, Lubumbashi, Democratic Republic of the Congo. Lives and works in Johannesburg.
Portrait of Cinthia Sifa Mulanga in the studio. Photo by Andile Buka. Courtesy of Cinthia Sifa Mulanga and Latitudes Online.
Cinthia Sifa Mulanga doesn’t need a film to persuade her of Barbie’s cultural significance: The doll has been a presence, both literally and spiritually, in her work for years. It was Barbie—a potent symbol of the burden that Western beauty standards place on women, especially Black women—that influenced much of Mulanga’s early thinking about the precarity of modern womanhood, and has informed the distinct visual lexicon that appears in her work today. Using paint, charcoal, and collage, Mulanga builds up richly colored, densely referential images that place Black women in luxe, Dreamhouse-like interiors, surrounded by objects of consumerist desire and emblems of capitalist anxiety—each character seeking comfort, with varied results.
Read the full profile of Cinthia Sifa Mulanga by Olivia Horn.
Shota Nakamura
B. 1987, Yamanashi, Japan. Lives and works in Berlin.
Portrait of Shota Nakamura in his studio. Photo by Daniel Farò. Courtesy of Shota Nakamura.
Shota Nakamura, Untitled (the garden), 2022. Courtesy of the artist.
Shota Nakamura thinks a lot about gardens, and people in them. “I couldn’t really tell why, but nature is always coming up in my paintings,” he said, during a recent tour of his Berlin studio. The bright space was dotted with canvases featuring these gardens—some flaming pink and orange, others a murky mix of blues and browns.
Now represented by C L E A R I N G, Nakamura has had recent shows at Berlin’s Peres Projects featuring series of paintings depicting the outdoors, sometimes within a dreamlike, mystical haze, and populated by anonymized figures sleeping, meditating, or reading. In particular, “each passing day,” his second show with the gallery, which took place in 2022, showed portal-like paintings that open up calm, patchwork landscapes, populated by figures at rest.
Read the full profile of Shota Nakamura by Josie Thaddeus-Johns.
Soumya Netrabile
B. 1966, Bangalore, India. Lives and works in Chicago.
Portrait of Soumya Netrabile in her studio. Photo by Robert Chase Heishman/Bob. Courtesy of Anat Ebgi.
Soumya Netrabile sometimes closes her eyes to pick a tube of paint. She applies it using “anything and everything”: her hand, rags, a stick she found on the way into her studio. Her lush, whimsical oil paintings, typically depicting swirling nature scenes, aren’t meant to be representational; instead, they are phenomenological recreations of things she’s experienced. “I’m very aware that whatever I’m taking in is going to come out here, without even having to force it out,” Netrabile said of her intuition-led process. “Because it’s inside of me.”
Read the full profile of Soumya Netrabile by Kerry Cardoza.
Paula Siebra
B. 1998, Fortaleza, Brazil. Lives and works in Fortaleza.
Portrait of Paula Siebra by Guilherme Freire, 2023. Courtesy of the artist and Mendes Wood DM São Paulo, Brussels, Paris, New York.
In carefully layered oil and tempera paintings, Paula Siebra builds a visual vocabulary drawing on the clay-tinged color palettes, sandy topographies, and palpable sense of seclusion found in her native coastal state of Ceará, Brazil. Often, the scenes are familiar, but Siebra brings to them a certainty in the expressive potential of her medium. “I believe that painting renews itself constantly,” she said. “I may be making yet another nocturnal landscape, but it is mine, and in this sense, it is unique and singular.”
Read the full profile of Paula Siebra by Ela Bittencourt.
Tesfaye Urgessa
B. 1983, Addis Ababa. Lives and works in Nürtingen, Germany.
Portrait of Tesfaye Urgessa by Kameron Cooper. Courtesy of Tesfaye Urgessa and Saatchi Yates.
The bodies in Tesfaye Urgessa’s paintings are both potent and vulnerable. Their powerfully rendered muscles are highly visible, as though the viewer can see straight through the skin to the insides of his subjects. In some works, limbs are disembodied and figures seem to merge into one another, creating a sense of communal fusion, which can become claustrophobic on his energetic canvases. “I want my figures to have almost an emotional vulnerability,” he said in an interview at his London gallery, Saatchi Yates. “I want to keep them confident but at the same time fragile. They have been through something but made it. You might see a scar, but it’s not a mark of defeat.”
Header, from left to right: Li Hei Di, “Unmotherly Sea of Winter,” 2022. Courtesy of the artist and Michael Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles; Paula Siebra, “Hora dourada,” 2022. Courtesy of the artist and Mendes Wood DM São Paulo, Brussels, Paris, New York; Yoora Lee, “The Night We Met,” 2022. Photo by Yoora Lee. Courtesy of the artist and Nicodim Gallery; Sarah Cunningham, “I Will Look Into the Earth,” 2023. © Sarah Cunningham. Courtesy of Lisson Gallery; Harminder Judge, “Untitled (orchid, chest),” 2023. Courtesy of the artist.
