This month, London has been the focus of the art world as Frieze brought artists, collectors and punters flocking to Regent’s Park. But what’s new? Who are the young artists emerging into the capital’s art scene, who we’re backing to be big at Frieze in the future? We’ve rounded up some of the most exciting.
Olivia Sterling (28)
Olivia Sterling’s distinctive, colourful paintings adopt a seemingly cheerful, Tom and Jerry cartoonishness (there’s a definite flavour of Philip Guston too) to subtly critique racialised ways of seeing in 21st century Britain. Food and fluid is everywhere – melting chocolate, ice cream, sun cream – relating consumability to the voluptuous, faceless human bodies depicted. Ordinary scenes and subjects pictured close to caricature reflect on how race and ‘othering’ can infuse the most mundane, or happy daily events. She describes herself, ever so slightly alarmingly, as “very motivated by revenge”.
Shadi Al-Atallah (30)
Growing up between Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, Shadi Al-Atallah’s early experience of questioning their gender and sexuality was tricky to say the least (a situation they have described with some understatement as “not great”). Now based in London, the figurative painter works through this complexity, and the whirlwind of passion of all kinds that comes with it. In their dark, tense canvases, bodies, some deliberately genderless, vibrate with urgent, physical energy – of sex, violence, vigorous dance. The works are made quickly, to avoid over-thinking them; the result is a raw expression of emotion.
Sandra Poulson (29)
Working between London and Luanda, the capital city of her birthplace of Angola (formerly a Portuguese colony), Sandra Poulson makes ambitious sculptural installations (a room-sized one at last year’s Venice Architecture Biennale was made entirely from blue soap) to observe the relationship between history, oral tradition and global political structures through the lens of Angola’s cultural, political and socio-economic landscape. “History is like anything,” she says, “someone wrote it, which means it can be questioned.” Poulson often also works with detailed, hand-crafted fabric patterns - she studied fashion at Central Saint Martins and the RCA before moving into fine art.
Ebun Sodipo (31)
Ebun Sodipo makes work “for black trans people of the future”. Guided by black feminist study, she uses sound, performance, text, installation, video, and sculpture to tell stories (her passion – she started writing a novel aged nine) about Black trans women’s presence and selves in the past, present and future. “My work is motivated by a desire to give to others, particularly Black trans kids, what I didn’t have growing up,” she says. She tries to fill in the gaps, excavate lives in a more considered, empathetic way than historical record allows.
Okiki Akinfe (25)
An accomplished painter who graduated from the RCA last year, Okiki Akinfe makes work that undermines stereotypes by demonstrating their absurdity. Her beautifully painted, technically precise works, which combine drawn and painted elements with patches of raw canvas, depict ghostly Black figures in landscapes and spaces on their own terms – often resting, pausing, at leisure. They are quietly powerful – quiet being the operative word: she’s interested in the “idea of being quiet as a form of activism, an assertive way of not draining yourself,” a conscious, considered rejection of the exhausting experience of existing in the default state of ‘other’.
Nour Jaouda (27)
Libyan artist Nour Jaouda works between London and Cairo, while her work straddles both painting and sculpture. She makes gorgeous large-scale textile collages in muted, earthy tones, using fabrics found in markets near her Cairo home, redyed and deconstructed, to reflect on her “rootless existence”. Their format is informed by the shape of the Islamic prayer mat, which creates a specific, spiritual space regardless of where it’s laid down - a lovely concept that I'd never really understood. Her use of colour evokes particular geographical memories, and steel frames and structures are repurposed from bits of the city’s ever-changing architecture.
Kentaro Okumura (21)
Japanese-born Kentaro Okumura grew up partly in China, and graduated from Camberwell College of Art in June this year. He was the youngest artist included in On feeling, an exhibition of 11 emerging artists curated by Peter Davies at The Approach this summer. His intense and heavily-worked paintings hover somewhere between figurative and abstract and he never knows in advance how a piece will look or turn out. He draws on Western and non-Western art histories and contemporary painting, and his own upbringing and experience, feeding all this into an intuitive process that results in highly coloured, mysterious works that look like messages from another world.
Alex Margo Arden (30)
Her Instagram is a riot of fantastical, self-created outfits, and performance and remaking are the central pillars of Alex Margo Arden’s work. She’s interested in “questionable authority” – how reproduction, remaking and reperforming can transform a story, challenging the original source. For her Condition Report series from this year, she commissioned commercial artists to reproduce the various photographs she found online of the before and after of the Marilyn Monroe dress that Kim Kardashian wore to the Met Gala in 2022 – each time they reproduce it, human error means details change. With wit and a highly contemporary eye, she makes us ask what it is we’re really looking at.
Areena Ang (25)
Areena Ang, who was born in Malaysia, is painting through a very specific lens, negotiating in their paintings their experience as an Asian, Muslim, queer, non-binary person, alongside their engagement with Western contemporary culture and with an awareness of the inequalities that confront them. Slack mattresses, sad sofas, desperate, deflated inflatables and “anti-social architecture” like grim metal doors and collapsing sheds have more than a whiff of the post-apocalyptic but life still goes on, so somehow, it’s also full of hope.
Georg Wilson (26)
You wouldn’t normally think of paintings as seasonal, but Georg Wilson’s wonderfully weird, folklore-inspired canvases change with the leaves, her palette shifting in line with the turning of the year – which makes sense, since one of her central concerns is ecology. She explores this, and history, through the lens of personal experience as well as English folklore. Grappling with the historical painterly narrative of her native land, she tells strange stories of an imagined landscape populated with non-gendered (slightly humanoid, moderately hairy)‘creatures’, outside our imposed human hierarchy.
Divine Southgate-Smith (29)
The Togo-born artist Divine Southgate-Smith is interested in storytelling – and how a story changes depending on the medium through which it is told. And what a lot of mediums they use. Photographic collage, sculpture, moving image, performance, writing, spoken word, and minimalist 3D animation – their work can comprise absolutely anything, in other words, which makes it impossible to categorise, but it always has an elegant aesthetic. Literature, music and archive material – as well as imagination and collaboration – provide inspiration. Their new ceramic work Is It Never Filled? is currently on show as part of a major exhibition at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts.
Pia Ortuno (28)
Is it a painting? Is it a sculpture? Well, yes, is the answer, for Costa Rican artist Pia Ortuno, whose explosively coloured, multilayered, erm, wall-objects made of wood, marble dust, salt, pigment and oil paint, and caved with chisels and repetitive gestures, are inspired by the Costa Rican landscape and customs, from pre-Columbian spiritual rituals to post-colonial religious iconography. Moving from Costa Rica to Italy, and then to London, she has said that here she has found her artistic home: “Here, I found many peers like myself – young artists striving to establish their artistic practices and create their own worlds.”
