It’s become a cliché to say that there are many art worlds, rather than just one. Artists who are known quantities on the biennial circuit might be entirely unfamiliar to the blue-chip art market, and vice versa. That’s why we asked a broad range of art-world tastemakers—from outgoing Ford Foundation president Darren Walker to the divisive art-review Instagram account Diva Corp—to select one artist they are particularly excited to follow in 2025.
Here are their picks of the names that will be on everyone’s lips.
Laurie Rojas, critic
“A pioneer A.I. alchemist and one of the most provocative artists of the millennial generation, Jon Rafman redefines what it means to create art in a post-Internet, media-saturated world ruled by algorithms. Rafman's artwork—surreal, dark, uncanny and culturally charged visions from the collective unconscious—has led him to collaborate with Kanye West and James Blake on A.I.-assisted music videos, proving no one conjures magic from the machine like he does.”
Amal Khalaf, co-curator of Sharjah Biennial 16 and director of Cubitt
“I have long been interested in Dala Nasser’s material-based, multi-dimensional works that challenge traditional forms of sculpture, landscape painting, performance, and film. Embodying a human and nonhuman entanglement in the process of making, her work evokes the decay and decomposition of our ecological and political conditions as a result of extractive economies and violent colonial legacies. With a solo show at Kunsthalle Basel and commissions for Aichi Triennale amongst others, I am excited to see what new work Dala will bring into the world this year.”
Stefanie Hessler, director of the Swiss Institute
“I’m excited for Nolan Oswald Dennis, whose transdisciplinary work is receiving well-deserved attention. We are organizing their first solo show in the U.S. at the Swiss Institute this January, exploring Sylvia Wynter’s notion of the 'genres of the human' and her astute critique of symbolic, social, and technological orders, and expanding it to the planetary. Dennis works through a systems-specific, rather than a site-specific, approach, drawing from disciplines as varied as mathematics, astronomy, and philosophy. The resulting works are sculptures, diagrams, or a receipt-printing machine programmed to live print a dialogue between thinkers of the Black Radical Tradition. Dennis’s current solo at Zeitz MOCAA in South Africa, helmed by the visionary Koyo Kouoh, offers a glimpse of what they will do at SI, and we are co-publishing their monograph together.”
Tiana Webb Evans, cultural strategist and founder of YARD and Jamaica Art Society
“My artist to watch for 2025 is Jamaica Art Society In Focus Fellowship alum Jasmine Thomas-Girvan. Jasmine, who lives between Jamaica and Trinidad, is one of the region's best kept secrets. Her 30-plus-year practice has been defined by mysticism and the unearthing of ‘subsumed histories’ of the Indigenous Taino people and West Africans in the Caribbean. Trained as a metalsmith, Thomas-Girvan's work is as much defined by exquisite craftsmanship as it is by intellectual rigor, brilliant mythology, and foresight. She has a solo exhibition entitled ‘Fugitive Pathways’ curated by JAS In Focus Fellow Rianna Jade Parker at New Local Space in Kingston open now.”
José Esparza Chong Cuy, director and chief curator of Storefront for Art and Architecture
“I’d like to propose the Los Angeles-based multidisciplinary artist Guadalupe Rosales, founder of the beloved community-generated archive Veteranas and Rucas, which responds to the ‘under/misrepresentation and historical erasure of Latin@/x communities in Southern California.’ 2025 marks a decade of this resource, which has gained a cult following beyond art audiences, and this February, a symposium organized by Storefront with the Cooper Union School of Architecture will be held at the Great Hall in New York to celebrate her work. The event is presented as part of Tumbados, a long-term public artwork on view at Storefront's facade by Rosales with Lokey Calderon that pays tribute to lowrider culture and its significance within the built environment. A book published by Storefront will follow.”
Essence Harden, co-curator of Made in L.A., 2025, and curator of Frieze Los Angeles’s Focus 2025 section
“Adee Roberson will have an incredible February 2025 with three presentations: ‘Alice Coltrane, Monument Eternal’ at the Hammer Museum, a solo booth with Dominique Gallery at Frieze LA, and a solo exhibition in New York. Their work continues to expand on the matrix of Black indignity, Caribbean being, sound, and corporal/spiritual meditations. It is often abstract, brightly hued, and abundant in sensation.”
Matthew Higgs, artist and director of White Columns
“I’m looking forward to Na Kim’s upcoming solo exhibition ‘Memory Palace’ at Nicola Vassell, her first with the gallery. White Columns organized Na’s solo debut in November 2023. Na makes increasingly visceral ‘portraits’ of imagined female subjects that are meditations on identity and selfhood. About her approach Kim has said: ‘How we see is so complex, but portraiture adds another layer of intrigue for me. Because these women are not real, accuracy is not my goal. The question is more how to make these women believable—and belief is another slippery thing.’”
Goedele Bartholomeeusen, director of Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens
“Whether layering, stamping or smearing, the Senegal-born, Brussels-based Libasse Ka constantly seeks to explore the core qualities of painting. The Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens will host Ka's first institutional solo exhibition in 2025.”
Isolde Brielmaier, curator and chief strategy officer of Work of Art Holdings
“I will have my eye on a number of artists in 2025 and among them is the wonderful Nicholas Galanin. This talented multimedia artist is not only skilled in his technique and use of materials but in the way he both overtly and subtly contends with the complex and layered aspects of diverse Indigenous representation, culture, identity, and history. His December 2024 work on the beach in Miami, Seletega, was beautiful, provocative, and impactful—and perhaps gave us a hint of where he has been, where he sits now, and where he will take his practice going forward. He has our full attention.”
Emily LaBarge, writer
“I will never not be excited to see what Meriem Bennani does next. She's a true original, funny, deep, intelligent, unpredictable, always pushing her craft in new directions. Her work at Fondazione Prada this year was dazzling: the giant, percussive flip-flop installation and the feature-length animated film made with her longtime collaborator Orian Barki. Just beautiful.”
Darren Walker, outgoing president of the Ford Foundation
“Amy Sherald whose powerful, poignant and luminous paintings continue to elevate our humanity. I’m eagerly anticipating her long-awaited show at the Whitney in April.”
Tobi Maier, chief curator at Amant
“Together with the team at Amant, I am in the process of organizing the exhibition ‘On Education,’ scheduled to open in March and focused on unconventional artistic perspectives on the subject of education. We have invited Philip Wiegard for a new commission and U.S. premiere: Running up to the opening and together with a group of workshop participants from Brooklyn, the artist will produce an immersive environment with hand-painted wallpaper. The exhibition also features collaboratively produced polymer clay paintings that spring from Philip's popular Phimo tutorials on YouTube.”
Helen Molesworth, curator and writer
“Manuel Lopez makes exquisitely detailed line drawings, and brightly colored paintings of the Los Angeles Hollywood never sees. For Lopez, LA is a warren of backyards; chain link fences; cacti that grow along the edges of freeways; and the wild, untamed abundance of flora that grows everywhere untended. While Ed Ruscha mapped every gas station or parking lot on Sunset, Lopez heads east, taking on one terraced hillside or block of banged up worker’s houses from the 1920s at a time. If Ruscha’s photos offered us a deadpan, nearly always empty LA, Lopez sees the vestiges of human labor everywhere—the tangle of electrical wires overhead, defunct satellite dishes on top of squat rental apartments, people’s wash hanging from the line, palm trees with the divers in them left by the brave tree trimmers who climb to the top to trim their unruly fronds. LA is jolie laide, and Lopez has its number in one love letter after another.”
Stella Bottai, senior curator at large at the Aspen Art Museum
“I’m looking forward to Kira Freije’s first major solo exhibition in the U.K. at the Hepworth Wakefield in November 2025. I’ve followed her work since she was a student at the Royal Academy Schools in London and it’s exciting to see it grow into a distinctive sculptural vocabulary. Made with aluminum, stainless steel, fabric, and found objects, her ‘characters’ bind figuration with poetic ideas. I’m very curious to see how Freije will respond to the Chipperfield-designed, riverside spaces of this museum.”
Thomas (T.) Jean Lax, curator of Media and Performance at the Museum of Modern Art
“Jonathan Berger is an artist whose use of archives in making shows and reliance on long-term collaborations has deeply inspired my approach to curating exhibitions about the history of performance and the politics of everyday life. I am looking forward to organizing his upcoming three-week residency in MoMA's Kravis Studio this August during which he and a group of craftspeople will produce the first chapter in a new body of work.”
Diva Corp, anonymous art critic
“Thomas Macie is a breath of fresh air in the LA scene, and nonchalant to boot. Macie's assemblage and print works are anarchic, urgent, and unfixed, touching on something very now, something very Los Angeles. His recent output—including an anti-precious, clever two-person show at Public Notice in December—primes him for a strong solo in 2025.”
Michael Lobel, art historian
“When you’re a stodgy old fart like me, it’s all too easy (not to mention something of a cliché) to find yourself befuddled by what the kids these days are up to, which is why it was such a delight to take in Los Angeles-based artist Marcel Alcalá’s solo show at Marlborough Gallery in early 2024. The assembled paintings were full of a kind of young, exuberant IDGAF queer energy that reminded me of the San Francisco scene of the early 1990s, but with a fresh spin and new point of view. Alcalá’s pictures are fun and feisty and campy while also sincere and soulful. The extravagantly ruffled blue frock in Their Coronation, one of the more entrancing painted forms I’ve seen in a while, is something I haven’t been able to get out of my mind since I first encountered it.”
