6 Artists to Follow in 2023
We selected 6 artists to follow in 2023, but to discover them, let’s dive back to the past year. The contemporary art market is officially back in motion, and 2022 saw particularly notable increases in interest in street artists, abstract painters, fine art photographers, and expressive portraiture. Producing quality and thought-provoking work, the artists on this list are making waves in the contemporary art world.
1. Felipe Pantone
Felipe Pantone is an Argentinian artist, born in Buenos Aires. When he was young, he moved to Spain to discover graffiti and, later, experiment with it. He obtained an Art diploma in Valencia, where he still has his studio.
An eternal wanderer, his mural paintings are visible in Tokyo, London, Osaka, Paris and many other cities.
Felipe Pantone draws inspiration from several artists like José María Yturralde, Frédéric Platéus, Herb Lubalin, Sozyone Gonzalez, Steven Powers, not to mention Demsky.
His work combines typography and abstraction with extremely modern aesthetics. Strictly avant garde, his unique style re-invents graffiti art with futuristic and kinetic art. He uses a palette of colors with geometric pattern of optical art, by defying movement and perspective. A true chameleon, he explores text, neon and metallic colors.
Felipe Pantone puts together a new visual language, on the borders of the digital era, technology and society.
His work has been exhibited around Europe, America, Australia and Asia.
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2. Maude Ovize
Born in 1980, Maude Ovize is a French artist, living and working in Lyon.
Graduated from the fine arts of Saint Etienne, she moved to Lyon in 2005 and works since the question of the motif in painting. She is part of a collective of artists working in a workshop on the slopes of the Red Cross, the Mecca of the Lyon creation.
In her journey around the question of the motif, Maude Ovize is currently working on a series devoted to water which she explores all aspects: sensation, matter, light, color.
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3. Kaws
Brian Donnelly, aka Kaws, is an American artist and designer born in 1974 in Jersey City, New Jersey, USA. As a street artist, painter, illustrator, sculptor, publisher, his work touches on everything that surrounds the world of Pop Art.
After receiving his Bachelor of Fine Art in Illustration in 1996 from the School of Visual Arts in New York, Kaws briefly worked for Disney as a freelance animator. Today he lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
Kaws began his career in the 1990s with street interventions. He superimposed his own work onto billboards, bus stops, and phone booth advertisements. As he became more well-known, his ads were taken down and collected by people. He created or reused well-known characters from comics and cartoons in his offbeat imagery. Subjects like the Michelin Man, the Simpsons, Mickey Mouse, Snoopy, Sponge Bob, are all common figures rooted in the collective imagination that allows the artist to adopt a universal language. Kaws’s goal is to make art accessible to all. He signs all his creations with a very particular trademark: figures with crossed-out eyes, making his style easily recognizable.
After becoming famous, Kaws appropriated different techniques and extended his artistic production to the world of sculpture and painting on canvas. The passage from 2D to 3D works is motivated by his search for greater mastery of space and reality. His sculptures can reach monumental dimensions. Some of his giant characters have been exposed in front of museums, and they never fail to draw the attention of passers-by.
Kaws’s work is influenced by Pop Art, but also by artists such as Gerhard Richter, Claes Oldenburg, or Chuck Close.
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4. Thandiwe Muriu
Passionate about photography since the age of 14, Thandiwe Muriu grew up in Kenya in a family marked by art, surrounded by a sister who is a stylist and a second one, a virtuoso pianist. She refined her photographic practice during her teenage years, influenced by Vogue magazine and the aesthetic canons in the front page of this women’s publication. She took one of her sisters as a model and tried to portrait her with complete freedom.
It is the time of the rise of social networks, her photographs meet a great success and lead her to sign her first commission as a young talent.
After graduation, passionate about the 8th art, she dedicates herself definitively to fashion photography and at the age of 23, signs her first contract for an international campaign.
Like her fellow citizens, it is important for her to highlight the natural beauty of women with whom she identifies herself. Her compositions are in keeping with the beauty criteria of a black femininity. Essential models for the African readership at home and from the diaspora too often absent from the front pages of magazines.
Also, she sublimates through her art, black skin and afro hairstyles that deserve to be more than ever valued. Moreover, the photographer reconnects with the glorious past of African empires by using fabric, declined in frank and vivid colors enveloping her subjects.
Determined, passionate, she wishes to spearhead a new generation of committed women entrepreneurs in Kenya through her art, destined to write an inspiring story for many of them. Next challenge? To photograph a cover of Vogue.
She considers the series entitled “Camo” (2015) as a particularly personal achievement marking a decisive stage in her artistic process.
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5. Okuda
Okuda (Oscar San Miguel) is a Spanish artist born in 1980 in Santander. He lives and works in Madrid. His work deals with the meaning of life and its contradictions. The artist tries to make us reflect upon the conflits between modernity and humanity’s roots, upon war and violence.
Okuda is a major international artist, selected in the top 100 of the Urban Contemporary Art Guide 2014. He has worked with major brands and travels the world painting on trains, buildings, walls and showing his work in major art galleries.
6. Javier Rey
Javier Rey is a Colombian artist & photographer. His work is in many collective exhibitions, one solo exhibition and several international art fairs such as ArtLima (Peru), Scope Art Fair (Miami) and La Feria Del Millón (Colombia). Rey’s work has also appeared in books such as “Unlocked”, by the Greek collective Atopos, and was chosen as one of the 145 most relevant visual artists and photographers on the web in 2015. His photographs in which he explores the physical structure and the possibilities of sculpture through photography have been featured in several publications in Colombia, USA, Mexico, Germany, Spain, Denmark and other countries.
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