Artists to Watch: The rising stars and rediscoveries that catch our eyes November 2024.

Li Hei Di, Unfolding a flood, 2022. Modern & Contemporary Art New York Evening Sale, Phillips, New York

Li Hei Di

Chinese-born, London-based artist Li Hei Di has quickly established themselves as a compelling voice in contemporary art, known for exploring identity, desire, and transformation. Painted in 2022, Unfolding a flood powerfully demonstrates Li’s ability to merge personal experience with broader cultural narratives. The painting’s vibrant energy and emotional depth exemplify Li’s skill in navigating the space between abstraction and figuration, creating work that is both intimate and universally resonant. Through their innovative use of color, form, and narrative, Li captures a journey of becoming and creating — carving out space in a world that often seeks to constrain or define. The ghost-like figures and shifting structures in Unfolding a flood reveal the fractal, nonlinear process of self-discovery, where everything remains possible and undefined.

Born in 1997, Li became the youngest artist on the roster of Pace Gallery just this September. Their first solo exhibition was held at Linseed Projects, Shanghai (2022), with subsequent solo exhibitions at Michael Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles (2023), and Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, London (2024). Li’s work is held in the collections of the Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; Long Museum, Shanghai; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and Yageo Foundation, Taipei, and others.

Antonio Obá, Cura, 2020. Modern & Contemporary Art New York Day Sale, Afternoon Session.

Antonio Obá’s works probe the ambiguity and history that define contemporary Brazilian cultural identity, often exploring the confluence between his figure’s bodies and their surrounding landscape. To see this, look no further than his glowing 2020 work Cura, which draws our eye to a lone male figure holding a lit candle in a rural grove. The work expresses the artist’s meditative state when painting, an act that follows multiple lines of inquiry while immersed in solitude and the metaphysical experience of the Brazilian sertão, or backcountry. As the artist has explained, “I elaborate upon memories, fears, solitude — questions that are relevant to every human being. For me, it is about that: attempting to converse through experiences that are mine but that also resonate with those from others.”

Born in 1983 in Ceilândia, Brazil, he currently lives and works in Brasília, where he engages in his multi-faceted practice through painting, sculpture, installation, and performance. Obá’s work has been celebrated in recent solo exhibitions at Mendes Wood DM, New York (2023); Pina Contemporânea, São Paulo, Brazil (2023); Oude Kerk, Amsterdam, Netherlands (2022); and X Museum, Beijing, China (2022). His works are also included in several important collections, including the Tate Modern, the Pinault Collection, and the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo.

As much as Joseph Yaeger’s works give us the space to imagine what’s beyond the canvas’ borders, what lingers in our memory is his ability to focus our vision on an unexpected detail within the frame. For the artist, this is intentional, as the function of memory is a key theme in his works. This is seen clearly in We are constantly on trial, with its watercolor paint seeming to swim across the gessoed linen surface, echoing the feeling of grasping for a fleeting memory. Cinematic and whimsical, the work expresses the sensation of the event it depicts but with a sense of distance akin to the hazy recollection of a dream.

A few moments of contemplation before this work makes it clear why the young artist has caught the attention of art lovers around the globe. His 2021 work Sphinx without a secret achieved a resounding success at Phillips last month, achieving more than 10 times its low estimate. Born in 1986, the American artist is now based in London, where he completed his MFA at the Royal College of Art in 2019, just one year before executing this work. Yager’s work has been presented in numerous acclaimed solo and group exhibitions, including at Hauser & Wirth, The Perimeter in London, and Antenna Space in Shanghai. He is represented globally by Modern Art, London, and Gladstone Gallery notably announced their US representation of the artist this past October.

Yuan Fang, Tickling II, sold for $69,850 at Phillips Auction house

Enter a room where a work by Yuan Fang is hung, and you’ll be instantly drawn to its slithering pulse. Her works present a visual enigma — we can sense linearity, but our eyes can’t trace where any one line begins or ends. They resonate with a psychological interiority and physicality that’s reminiscent of Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner but further evoke a feminine sense of resilience with soft lyricism that expresses the conflicts of selfhood. Fang was first drawn to image-making as a young adult while battling a depressive episode, and she took to drawing in sketchbooks to escape reality. This habit evolved into a painting practice that has caught eyes around the globe, and the monumental Tickling II is emblematic of why — its articulate sense of motion imparts a visceral reaction when standing before it.

Born in 1996 in Shenzhen, China, Fang eventually settled in New York, where she earned degrees at the School of Visual Arts under the mentorship of James Siena and Marilyn Minter. Her work is already held in prominent collections around the globe, including the ICA, Miami; FLAG Art Foundation, New York; and The Long Museum, Shanghai. Her work has been featured in solo exhibitions at Prince & Wooster, New York; Bill Brady Gallery, Los Angeles; ARM Gallery, New York; and more. In 2024, she was included in Forbes Asia’s 30-under-30 list.

Robert Zehnder

Drawing on his childhood experience in suburban New Jersey, Robert Zehnder’s paintings seem to imagine a world in which the earth looked at suburbia and decided to fight back. Tellingly, his landscapes remove all human presence, suggesting a natural state of adaptation and rehabilitation in the face of ecological and societal anxieties. His 2022 work Mineral Stop Light showcases the artist’s distinctive halo-like coloration of bulbous natural forms that seem to shift beneath a swirling, ominous sky. The work draws comparisons between the built environment and the natural one through its quilt-like composition, calling attention to the scene’s constructed nature and presenting the natural world in a manner almost as constructed as suburbia itself.

Currently based in Brooklyn, Zehnder earned a BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2015 and has worked as a studio assistant to the Swiss artist Nicolas Party. Since then, Zehnder’s works have been included in lauded exhibitions throughout the Midwest, New York, and Los Angeles. His works are in the permanent collections of the ICA Miami, The Mint Museum in North Carolina, the Aishti Foundation, and the Morgan Stanley Art Collection, among others.

Lawrence Calcagno

The full scope of Lawrence Calcagno’s (1913–1993) legacy is only beginning to come into full focus. He’s typically described as a San Francisco School Abstract Expressionist, but this does little to convey the pioneering nature of his practice. His works combine influences from his teachers, including Mark Rothko, Ad Reinhardt, and Clyfford Still, with a psychological approach to landscape. Whereas the expressive potential of the prevailing Abstract Expressionist movement was drawn from subconscious expressivity, Calcagno curiously applies a similar approach to the landscape’s astonishing breadth and power, drawing from the imprints left on his subconscious by the Pacific Coast’s horizon lines. This approach is seen in this 1983 work’s horizontal bands of purple, pink, and blue that confront us like a foggy memory of a quintessentially Californian vision.

Following his training at the California School of Fine Arts, Calcagno took to Europe, perhaps motivated by the region’s more tolerant view of homosexuality at the time. He studied in Paris at the Academie de la Grande Chaumière, befriending the painter Beauford Delaney, who became his lover and lifelong friend. The complexity of Calcagno’s approach and way of life may have proved too difficult for the prevailing culture to grasp during his lifetime. We can only imagine that the vestiges of this complexity could cause such a visionary American artist — who was featured in the Whitney Biennial no less than nine times — to be overlooked. Today, 31 years after his passing, his work deserves another look.

Sonia GechtoFF

Gechtoff, In the Red, 2016 American artist

The unique and personal approach to abstraction cultivated by Sonia Gechtoff over nearly six decades of practice is on full display in In the Red, executed just two years before the artist’s passing in 2018. The work immerses viewers in a swirl of flame-like abstractions that play out across a carefully controlled composition. These two visual forces — combined with Gechtoff’s distinctive use of the palette knife and graphite cross-hatching — explore the boundaries between the geometric and the gestural, as well as between painting and drawing. All told, it’s a captivating image that explores how expressive freedom can rest on top of a more rigid structure, akin to a complex trumpet solo heard over a repetitive harmonic progression in the kind of jazz music Gechtoff would have heard when she moved to San Francisco in the 1950s.

The daughter of a painter and a gallery owner, Sonia Gechtoff was born in Philadelphia in 1926 and enjoyed a successful career. Her work was included in a group show of young painters at New York’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 1954, where it was seen alongside such giants as Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, and Jackson Pollock. By 1957, she was the subject of two west-coast solo exhibitions at San Francisco’s de Young Museum and the Los Angeles’ Ferus Gallery. Her works are in the collections of Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; Denver Art Museum, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Maija Peeples-Bright

Maija Peeples-Bright, Goose Grand with Geraniums, circa 1970s.

Latvian-born artist Maija Peeples-Bright lovingly depicts various animal figures that she fondly calls “beasties.” In Goose Grand with Geraniums, we sense the joy Peeples-Bright feels for nature across each side of the four panels. Associated with both the Funk Art and Nut Art movements, her works reveal a jubilant reverence for figuration and embrace the phantasmagorical. This approach is immediately striking in this work, where a menagerie of birds and giraffes smiles back at us through the depths of the picture planes, surrounded by uplifting flora and peaceful blue skies.

At 82 years old, Maija Peeples-Bright is still on a hot streak. Recent solo exhibitions have been held at Parker Gallery in Los Angeles and Guerrero Gallery in San Francisco, in addition to inclusions in group exhibitions at Deitch Gallery in Los Angeles, Museum of Art and Design in New York. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, California; the Manetti Shrem Museum of Art at UC Davis, California; Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minnesota; and the Cincinnati Art Museum, Ohio.

George Rouy, Through the Window, 2018. 

George Rouy’s amorphous figures exist in a world where references to Old Master allegorical paintings meet the dreamlike visual aesthetic of contemporary digital life. In Through the Window, we spy two figures in an embrace, their gender identity obscured, and their pose suggestive of both ardent passion and the poses of 15th-century lamentation scenes. It’s a characteristic way of presenting imagery for Rouy, who draws as much influence from Jean Fouquet and Rogier van der Weyden as he does from soft-focus camera lenses, digital glitches, and Instagram filters. His works investigate today’s crises of isolation and identity while referencing the very imagery from the past that laid the foundations for Western aesthetics.

Living and working in Kent, England, Rouy received his BFA from Camberwell College of Arts in London in 2015. Since then, his works have been seen in lauded solo exhibitions, including Endless Song at Nicola Vassell Gallery, New York (2023); Body Suit at Hannah Barry Gallery, London (2023); George Rouy: Belly ache at Almine Reich, Paris (2022) and Maelstrom at Peres Projects, Berlin (2020). He is currently the youngest artist on Hauser & Wirth’s roster.