This month, Artsy launches Foundations, a curated showcase highlighting artists at first of their careers. With over 250 artists from 85 galleries from world wide, there’s a wealth of names to look at, making this the right likelihood to find recent voices and purchase wonderful artwork at an accessible worth.
At Artsy, we’ve been combing the works in Foundations for our favorites. From an Indian portrait painter to an Icelandic textile artist, we chosen seven that stood out.
B. 1991, Kwahu, Ghana. Lives and works in Accra, Ghana.
Works accessible at: Galerie REVEL
Kwaku Osei Owusu Achim’s otherworldly compositions characteristic full moons and swirling our bodies of water, exploring themes of spirituality. In Achim’s Foundations presentation with Galerie REVEL, the Accra-based artist examines how ritual can forge connections between group and on a regular basis life by way of work impressed by West African literature.
Utilizing drawing as a place to begin, Achim applies daring brushwork and layers his canvases to create dreamlike oil work. The opaque skies of Silent Gathering (2023) present an uncanny backdrop for vibrant silhouetted figures that huddle collectively, speaking by way of gesture and hand motions. Elongated arms sprouting from their heads recommend hybrid kinds. With palms positioned like antennae, Achim’s topics seem to carry out a sacred ritual.
The artist additionally explores storytelling by way of language, incorporating the Ghanaian dialect, Akan, into his paintings titles. For example, Odo koma (2023), which derives from “Odomankoma” (which means “God” in Akan), depicts figures holding palms whereas praying in a pool of water. By spiritual imagery, Achim references Ghanaian mythology, blurring the strains between the dwelling and the non secular.
Achim studied medical knowledge at Yeshua Institute of Expertise earlier than pursuing a profession in artwork. In 2024, he mounted a solo exhibition with Omenai Gallery in Chicago. His work has additionally been featured in group exhibitions at Mitochondria, Gallery 1957, and Chilli Artwork Initiatives, amongst others.
—Adeola Homosexual, Senior Curatorial Supervisor
B. 1990, Liverpool, England. Lives and works in London.
Works accessible at: NEVEN
Soil, resin, and charcoal produced from bamboo all characteristic within the summary wall works of London-based artist Jen O’Farrell. At Foundations 2025, her textural, resin-covered items are on view with tastemaking East London gallery NEVEN. In Consciously Unconscious (2024), flaky golden fragments of soil and paint pigments are preserved in a clean yellow floor and surrounded by an attractive, grid-like walnut body. In the meantime, the darkish, sticky-seeming floor of Refractions II (2024) is encased by a burned-out, black body.
These works are typical of the artist’s summary fashion, which evokes the uncooked texture of each wild and concrete landscapes. Unruly splotches flicker throughout these works, suggesting geological formations, or maybe fossils. For her works in Foundations, O’Farrell was impressed by an artist residency she accomplished within the Atacama Desert in Chile, the place she sourced the bioresin utilized in Consciously Unconscious. Her work, with its tough textures and edges, additionally invokes city decay, serving as a reminder of industrialization’s ties to the extraction of sources. It’s also possible to really feel the affect of land artwork, whose practitioners used pure processes and supplies to create work in regards to the setting.
O’Farrell has exhibited throughout London at museums together with South London Gallery and the V&A Museum, and at galleries together with Nicoletti Modern, Niru Ratnam, and NEVEN.
—Josie Thaddeus-Johns, Senior Editor
B. 1984, India. Lives and works in New York.
Works accessible at: Aicon Modern
In Cuddling the Land in Raag Marwa (2024), a semi-abstract determine seems to drift or recline in an ambiguous, chalky background. It’s one in every of two work by Indian artist Kuldeep Singh on view as a part of Aicon Modern’s Foundations presentation. Loosely rendered with expressive, gestural brushstrokes, the determine’s contours mix into the encircling patches of colours, creating a way of intimacy and vulnerability.
The work is typical of Singh’s follow, which pulls on “a sacred working data of numerous bygone generations,” because the artist shared on his web site. Certainly, Singh spent a decade coaching intensively in Indian classical dance, particularly the fashion of Odissi. The self-discipline dates again greater than two millennia and emphasizes fluidity, grace, and spirituality—qualities that permeate his work, which frequently concentrate on queer male figures. He additionally attracts on historic Ragmala miniature work that depict Indian musical modes or “ragas.”
Singh obtained his MFA in portray and intermedia on the College of Iowa in 2015. Current solo reveals embody “Males music, and Hills” at Seattle’s Sand Level Artwork Gallery and “Nakhra: In the direction of Sacred Sensuality” at Mumbai’s Chermould CoLab.
—Arun Kakar, Senior Artwork Market Editor
B. 1996, La Jolla, California. Lives and works in Atlanta.
Works accessible at: ALLGORITHIM
There’s an ominous tinge to Rebekah Rubalcava’s seductive work—a way of glamour combined with decay. Threats loom over her pastoral scenes of younger, frolicking girls in various states of undress: Swarms of ants descend on picnics, and tornados tear by way of darkish skies. A self-taught painter, Rubalcava explores sexuality, spirituality, and the unconscious thoughts by way of her follow, typically subverting symbols from her evangelical Christian upbringing to unsettle notions of female purity.
Just lately, Rubalcava’s work has grow to be more and more surreal, as exemplified by Kindred (2024). Included in ALLGORITHIM’s group presentation at Foundations, the portray contains a pair of irises rising from a shadowy panorama that’s seemingly engulfed in pink flames. The title suggests a deep non secular bond, whereas the fiery imagery evokes each the sweetness and the hazard that accompanies such shut relationships.
Rubalcava has exhibited in Los Angeles, London, and Shanghai, in group and solo reveals with galleries together with Soho Revue and Rusha & Co.
—Olivia Horn, Managing Editor
B. 1996, Seoul. Lives and works in Seoul.
Works accessible at: drawingRoom
In Hovering (2025), dozens of ceramic wings burst outward from a central panel etched with the picture of a single hen in flight. That is one in every of 10 works featured in Sanoh Lee’s presentation with drawingRoom for Foundations 2025. The bronze-toned wings radiate in all instructions—some outstretched, others mid-fold—creating the impression of a frenzied flock frozen in movement, as if orbiting or defending the gliding central determine.
Birds are sometimes the main focus of the Korean artist’s works. Wings, specifically, recur throughout her drawings and sculptures, appearing as symbols of violent but sleek transformation. Blood Feather (2025), a composition in coloured pencil, watercolor, ink, pastel, and pigment on paper, options ripples with feathered arcs and gossamer curves. It evokes a flock of doves in motion, which the artist makes use of as a “an emblem of weightlessness and transformation.”
“I see a hen going by way of a strategy of pausing and regeneration within the cycle of life as a being symbolizing a sort of non-gravity, whose existence has grow to be as mild as a feather,” the artist wrote on Instagram.
Lee earned her MFA in ceramic craft from Seoul Nationwide College of Science and Expertise and her BFA in Korean portray from Sejong College. Her latest solo exhibitions in Seoul embody “Eclipse Plumage” at drawingRoom and “Island of Pale Languages” at Gallery Moomok.
—Maxwell Rabb, Workers Author
B. 1985, Bogotá. Lives and works in Bogotá.Works accessible at: Milk Moon
Years spent dwelling in Finland and Iceland impressed Colombian artist Vanessa Valero’s relationship to the setting. Particularly, the Nordic area taught her to watch nature extra carefully, serving to her to translate its moods into materials kind. For example, Invisible Mountains (2025)—a part of the artist’s Foundations 2025 presentation with Milk Moon—is produced from layered, hand-tufted wool yarn organized in horizontal bands that ripple throughout the floor. These waving bands shift in texture and colour, forming a stylized mountain vary in delicate gradients of rose, ochre, moss, violet, and midnight blue.
A lot of Valero’s work explores texture and depth, utilizing the sculptural qualities of fiber to evoke pure phenomena. Whereas Invisible Mountains depicts its titular peaks, Final Gentle (2024), additionally a part of her presentation, takes a extra summary method. The sector of hand-tufted blue yarn transitions right into a dramatic cascade of vivid orange hand-knotted tassels—maybe evoking the fleeting second when daylight breaks towards the horizon.
Valero earned a design diploma from Los Andes College in 2010, then moved to the Nordic area to review textiles extra deeply. An internship in Reykjavik launched her to Icelandic fiber traditions, the topic of her grasp’s thesis at Aalto College in Finland.
—M.R.
B. 1997, California. Lives and works in Utah and Montana.
Works accessible at: Materials
Serape blankets have a sophisticated historical past. These vibrant, finely woven textiles, typically worn as cloaks or ponchos, originate in Indigenous communities of northern Mexico however replicate European affect. In addition they turned a Mexican nationwide image following the nation’s revolution within the early twentieth century. For Xicana artist Kelly Tapia-Chuning, serapes are an emblem of her mestizo id, which she explores in her follow by dismantling these textiles.
In her works on view in Foundations with Materials, the colourful weft threads are lacking in components, forsaking diamond patterns strung collectively by solely the undyed warp strands. These clean threads are pulled taut and stuck with copper nails, or generally braided collectively like hair, as in Visions of a Pink Sky (2025). By deconstructing the serapes, the artist explains in her assertion, she intends to “sign a dismantling of the programs inside colonial energy constructions.” The unraveled blanket seems weak but in addition agency, changed into a daring summary form by way of the fibers’ rigidity.
Tapia-Chuning holds an MFA from the Cranbrook Academy of Artwork and obtained CAA’s 2023 Visible Arts Fellowship. She has exhibited with galleries throughout the U.S. together with Gavlak in Los Angeles, Materials in Salt Lake Metropolis, and Eric Firestone Gallery in New York.
—J.T-J
Artsy Editorial
Picture credit, clockwise from high left: Sanoh Lee, 양력 Raise, 2025. Courtesy of drawingRoom. Kuldeep Singh, Late within the Sundown Park, 2022. Courtesy of Aicon Modern. Vanessa Valero, Crossing Mountain Ranges, 2024. Courtesy of Milk Moon. KWAKU OSEI OWUSU ACHIM,
Between the strains of contact, 2024. Courtesy of Galerie REVEL.
