Investing in art? Ten young artists to watch in 2017

It hasn’t been a great year for young artists. Their market was already limping as 2016 began, and things didn’t get much better as the year ground onward. And while it could be argued that the dazzling boom and bust of a few 26-year-old white male skateboarders-cum-abstract-painters isn’t representative of thousands of other emerging artists, the spectacular market failure of that one, tiny group had a much broader cooling effect on the market.

And yet, that same uncertainty has begun to benefit artists and the art world more generally. Without the pressure on a $14,000 artwork to serve as an immediate investment vehicle, the art world has returned, at least partially, to the process of making and selling interesting, thought-provoking artworks.

The following artists are both beneficiaries and catalysts of this phenomenon — they’ve shown in respected, forward-looking galleries and have been critically and commercially well received, but have maintained artistic practices that have avoided market hype and hysteria. 

Jordan Casteel

Casteel, one of the Studio Museum in Harlem’s 2015-16 artists in residence, is known for her large-scale figurative paintings of black men. The paintings are tightly composed and evoke, with startling immediacy, the complexity of their subjects. Casteel’s work has struck a chord with audiences, and her career is beginning to take off. 

Bunny Rogers

Rogers’ work has the earnest melancholia of adolescence. That in itself is immediately seductive, until you remember that Rogers hasn’t been an adolescent for close to a decade. Taken in context, then, her installations are nostalgic not only for the general feeling of adolescence, but also for its specific materials and emotional textures. 

Maggie Lee

Lee’s multimedia art is often autobiographical, drawing inspiration and material from both the traumas and mundanities of her young life. She’s made a full-length film, Mommy, about the fallout of her mother’s unexpected death, which was screened at the Whitney Museum. Most recently her show Fufu’s Dreamhouse at the New York gallery Real Fine Arts was made up of a slightly unnerving series of “Jenny doll” dioramas that depicted the fragile, often stumbling process in which contemporary girls are expected to become women. 

Ryan Mrozowski

It’s easy to mistake Mrozowski’s art as purely decorative — his lush, leafy oils and clean acrylic oil-stick drawings have the clean, plush sheen of unchallenging art. Look more closely, though, and you’ll find that he’s playing with pattern, repetition, form, and colour: His “pair” paintings, for instance, are in fact diptychs of one image in which each side has a different shape painted over.

Alisa Baremboym

Baremboym’s sculptures are resistant to interpretation. They integrate industrial materials, finely rendered casts of objects (fallopian tubes, ammunition), and often take the form of industrial assemblage. It’s a testament to Baremboym’s art, then, that since she graduated from Bard’s MFA program in 2009, her work, which interrogates form, utility, and production, has steadily gained traction in the art world. 

Gina Beavers

It’s hard to turn paintings into sculptures, but Beavers’s relief-style paintings come close. The objects she paints—food, eyes, female torsos—are so heavily layered that they become three-dimensional, literally bursting from their frames. Beavers has had multiple solo shows since graduating from the school of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2000.

Candice Lin

It isn’t easy to be simultaneously aesthetically pleasing and overtly political, but Lin manages to be both. In her recent show, You Are A Spacious Fluid Sac, in Los Angeles’s Ghebaly Gallery, Lin’s most prominent work was a giant fibreglass and papier mâché sculpture of an insect’s head, into whose mouth visitors could crawl and drink tea among pink fluffy rugs. It was a cross between a punchline and a trenchant commentary on the trappings of social and cultural directives. 

Charles Harlan

Harlan installs massive corrugated pipes, colossal fences, and steel garage doors in fine art galleries in a practice that’s as much about institutional critique as it is about fetishising ready-made objects.

Julien Ceccaldi

Ceccaldi, who was born in Canada, draws heavily on Japanese Manga style to create his art, which combines comics, paintings, and social critique. Ceccaldi is far from an unknown — his art was on the cover of Artforum magazine — and his work is slowly developing a market. 

Holly Coulis

These lists always fetishise youth, but there’s something to be said for acknowledging artists who’ve had a slow, steady, and largely under-the-radar career for decades. Holly Coulis is the perfect example: She’s been showing her art since the late 1990s, but her practice was never swept up into the aforementioned market manias that inevitably destroyed artists’ careers. Instead, her paintings have been enjoyed by a consistently understated crowd of knowing patrons. 

Source: Bloomberg