The Next Rising Art Stars, according to Tracey Emin, Frank Bowling, and Other Top Artists
One day it’s a vast painting exploding with vibrant shapes; the next it’s an uncanny sculpture crafted from scraps: Welcome to a regular week in the life of London gallery Flowers’s 25th “Artist of the Day” showcase, an exciting and unpredictable display of the future of contemporary art.
Since 1983, Flowers’s landmark program, “Artist of the Day”—an ephemeral series of one-day exhibitions where an established artist selects an emerging artist to present their work—has nurtured the talents of over 200 artists. Conceived by the late Angela Flowers and her son Matthew, the exhibition has launched prosperous careers for the likes of Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Juno Calypso, Billy Childish, and Anthony Daley, the latter of whom was the very first “Artist of the Day.” Selectors have included David Hepher, Maggi Hambling, and Roland Penrose, and this year include Tracey Emin and Sir Frank Bowling.
“In the early 1980s Angela and I were interested in exploring artists’ relationships with each other, particularly the kind of support artists were showing in championing each other’s work and career development,” said Matthew Flowers, managing director of Flowers. “The relationship between the selector and the artist adds an intimate power to the daily installations, resulting in a unique, very positive fusion of mentorship, friendship, and collaboration.”
In an industry where success relies as much on chance as it does talent, “Artist of the Day” provides valuable opportunities for emerging artists. Forty years on, the exhibition is firmly embedded in the gallery’s DNA. It’s an endeavor that Flowers says is as “dynamic and essential as ever.”
This year, the revolving two-week show schedule, running from June 24th to July 6th, features 10 relatively unknown U.K.-based artists, each presenting a one-day solo exhibition at the gallery’s Mayfair location, supported by their selector.
We spoke with this year’s selected artists about their practices ahead of the busy program.
Aethan Wills, selected by Victoria Cantons
B. 1974. Lives and works in London.
Portrait of Aethan Wills and Victoria Cantons with Wills’s works. Photo by Antonio Parente. Courtesy of Flowers.
Aethan Wills’s expressive oil paintings are primarily inspired by the artist’s upbringing in Japan and the U.K. Explosions of color trip and spin across the canvas, depicting fragmented visions of lakes, plum trees, and sunsets.
Wills explores and reconciles his mixed heritage through abstraction and figuration. The piece A Ballad to the Dawn (Dorothy Parker) (2024), for example, depicts vistas through fine grids that nod to traditional Japanese shō-ji sliding screens, providing the illusion of depth.
“In many ways I feel that all artists have elements of themselves and their lives interwoven within their practice, at some point you just stop trying to be somebody or something else,” said Wills. “Now I’m passing the age of half a century—a sobering thought—I realise I have burnt more gas than I have left in the tank. I think this is a perfect opportunity to reflect on and work with who I am. The art practice is the amalgam of this way of thinking.”
Angela Lizon, selected by Stewart Geddes
B. 1962. Lives and works in Bristol, England.
Portrait of Angela Lizon and Stewart Geddes with Lizon’s works, 2024. Photo by Antonio Parente. Courtesy of Flowers.
Using homegrown bouquets of flowers as an allegorical backdrop, painter Angela Lizon appropriates the visual language of 17th-century Dutch painting, adding kitsch objects, vegetables, and amusing porcelain figurines to her compositions.
She buys these cheap ornaments from charity shops and flea markets, reconsidering these unvalued objects. Playfully rendering them in the context of a still life transforms them into visions of worth, with their own history and narrative.
“My cultural heritage feeds directly into my work,” said Lizon. “It’s a blend of cockney humour from my mum and Polish folklore and exotica from my dad, influencing the work atmospherically, emotively, and aesthetically.”
Bella Bradford, selected by Olivia Bax
B. 1996. Lives and works in London.
Portrait of Bella Bradford and Olivia Bax. Photo by Antonio Parente. Courtesy of Flowers.
Slade MFA student Bella Bradford’s fabric sculptures feel both familiar and alien at the same time. Her humorous, varied steel armatures are upholstered with found, donated, or secondhand materials. “Societal habits towards materials, clothing, and trends fascinate me,” Bradford said, noting the prevalence of movements like normcore or cottagecore. “I’ve more recently become interested in fashion ‘cores,’ how they’re replaying history, and spreading through social media,” said Bradford.
Many of her sculptural forms are inspired by quotidian domestic objects, which she initially plans by collaging magazine cuttings and textile off-cuts. Standouts include a mobile covered in denim with phallic, leopard-print protrusions titled Guyrope (2023); and the cowboy-style sculpture Bronco (2024), featuring leather straps and a fur-fringed sheriff star. Bradford noted that her interest in fashion stems from its capacity for transformation: “I am curious about the moment that a form transforms, when I ‘dress’ a sculpture with certain materials and how that affects the way that the form is perceived.”
Bianca Raffaella, selected by Tracey Emin
B. 1992. Lives and works in Margate, England.
Portrait of Bianca Raffaella and Tracey Emin with Raffaella’s works. Photo by Elissa Cray. Courtesy of Flowers.
Exploring themes of memory, perception, and fragility, Bianca Raffaella employs gestural fragments and impasto marks to translate motion and visual disturbances onto the canvas. Her ongoing series of textural flower paintings evoke the artist’s experience of beauty in braille, which was how she first learned to read and write. “Each flower is fragile, temporary, a burst of life quickly fading, whilst also being an escape,” said Raffaella.
As a partially sighted artist, Raffaella relies on touch in her painting process. Never losing contact with the canvas, she blends delicate hues of blue, beige, and baby pink until they become an ethereal impression, cloudy details made with fingertips or scrapes of a pallet knife. It was this particular quality that caught the attention of her selector, Tracey Emin, when Raffaella applied for a place at Tracey Emin Artist Residency (TEAR).
“If my paintings are described as ‘otherworldly,’ it is a perspective from the sighted viewer,” the artist continued. “Hushed impressions and flashes of color represent the constant motion of my involuntary eye movements.”
Freya Tewelde, selected by Barbara Walker
B. 1977. Lives and works in London.
Portrait of Freya Tewelde and Barbara Walker with Tewelde’s works. Photo by Antonio Parente. Courtesy of Flowers.
Freya Tewelde’s recent work draws on fragmented memories from her childhood in Eritrea, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, and, more recently, as a young woman living in London. In her woozily pigmented paintings, Tewelde portrays figures inhabiting an otherworldly realm. “The elusive figures embedded in abstraction are in states that reflect complex emotional and psychological themes,” said Tewelde. “By exploring concepts such as healing, resilience, and transformation, I’m engaging with universal human experiences.”
There is a meditative and intangible quality to Tewelde’s work. In Exploring the complexity of musica universalis (2024), for example, it is unclear whether we are viewing some heavenly coalition of spirits or the pulsing of molecules beneath a microscope—what the artist describes as “landscapes of sensory ambiguity.”
John Bunker, selected by Sir Frank Bowling
B. 1968. Lives and works in London.
Portrait of John Bunker and Frank Bowling. Photo by Antonio Parente. Courtesy of Flowers.
John Bunker’s wall-based assemblages and mixed-media sculptures emerge from his playful, improvisatory practice of both painting and collage. For example, he bends pizza boxes into Dada-esque bouquets, and flips and repurposes photo frames into mounts for abstract shapes. “Collage gives me access to a visual dynamism born of rupture and collision,” Bunker said. “Over the years, I have become more at ease with uncertainty. Experimentation leads the way, and no material or medium is off limits.”
Collages such as Flail (2017) and sculptural series such as “Between Rainstorms” (2023) are made from flotsam and jetsam from the modern world, evoking a kind of organic modernism. “I try to make an abstract kind of art from the real world of things and debris of images and mediums that might have had another purpose entirely,” he said. “I wouldn’t call it deconstructionism, although that is part of the process; I’d prefer reconstructionism, as I’m crafting something new from the debris.”
John O’Donnell, selected by John Lessore
B. 1948. Lives and works in London.
Portrait of John O’Donnell and John Lessore with O’Donnell’s works. Photo by Antonio Parente. Courtesy of Flowers.
Using cool, moody tones, painter John O’Donnell depicts landscapes, floral still lifes, and portraits of his friends and family that he says “provide him with a sense of belonging.” His sometimes brusque brushwork, portraying his subjects in moments of contemplation, creates a sense of soft mystery and calm. Rooted in an Impressionist style influenced by natural light and shadow, his portraits feel intimate, showing the deep connection between painter and sitter.
O’Donnell is especially interested in locality, including views from his own home in Camberwell, London. “I return to these scenes because of the quality of light,” he said. “In the painting Peace in the Golden Hour (2002), which will be included in the ‘Artist of the Day’ exhibition, I capture the sun setting, shining down on the brick of the houses in my back garden.”
Lucienne O’Mara, selected by Liliane Tomasko
B. 1989. Lives and works in London.
Portrait of Lucienne O’Mara and Liliane Tomasko with O’Mara’s work. Photo by Antonio Parente. Courtesy of Flowers.
In 2017, Lucienne O’Mara experienced a brain injury that considerably affected her vision. “The process of learning how to ‘see’ again changed my perspective on how we receive visual information entirely, not least because until that point I’d never seen vision as something we learn,” she said.
Today, for the London-based artist, color is the protagonist of her work. In her expressive geometric paintings, square motifs repeat in pieces such as 8.9. (2023) and 5.12 (2024). Despite the regularity of her subject matter, O’Mara’s canvases have an element of chaos, reminiscent of the dynamic gestures and palette of her selector Liliane Tomasko’s textile sculptures.
O’Mara’s linear compositional method enables her to experiment with the margins of color, rhythm, and space in her work playing with visual cues and how often we take them for granted.
Paula Pohli, selected by Hughie O’Donoghue
B. 1955. Lives and works in County Mayo, Ireland.
Portrait of Paula Pohli and Hughie O’Donoghue with Pohli’s work. Photo by Antonio Parente. Courtesy of Flowers.
A move from Dublin to the County Mayo in the west of Ireland in 2011 inspired a new poetic precision in Paula Pohli’s lino prints. In her hand-burnished works, she observes the natural world around her, depicting signs of human presence, such as barns and sheds, into the organic patterns of the countryside.
Yellow stripes of a building in Secure Vault (2020–21) run into the natural markings of grass beneath it, for instance, and a red structure stands stark against the soft washed horizon in the graphic landscape Robeen (a road village in County Mayo) (2020). In these scenes, Pohli exercises a lively, free brushstroke, enjoying the “gentle elegance” that a tempered paint of pigment, egg yolk, and water affords.
Pohli’s spontaneous and intense application of color is evocative of German Expressionist painters such as Emil Nolde and August Macke. “There is urgency and expression in the Expressionists’ work that I’m drawn to,” said Pohli. “Freshness dominates the nuances of their greens, blues, and yellows.”
Nick Paton, selected by Jessie Makinson
B. 1984. Lives and works in London.
Portrait of Nick Paton and Jessie Makinson with Paton’s work. Photo by Antonio Parente. Courtesy of Flowers.
In his practice, Nick Paton brings together found objects, such as copper wire, flocking fibers, and rusty nails, with ceramic clay to build curious and chimeric sculptures. Some look like cages and tables, others like charms, but others are completely unrecognizable. The titles of these works—finger fair (2024), night soil (2024), kipper wish (2022), and so on—evoke an inventory of occult ingredients, imagining a turbulent world, yet to be discovered.
“It’s in the search for new materials to work with ceramics where I find most interest, by combining differing textures and exploring roles of hierarchy for absurd narratives,” Paton said.
Paton’s sculptures are constantly evolving. Throughout the studio process, his materials bend and melt in response to the spontaneous application of weight and heat. “My work explores place through the concept of what change means,” the artist continued. “They are growing through all stages of production to become something much wiser. I think it’s interesting conceptually when looking at my work to think, ‘Can you see past it?’”
