Nine years ago, Artlyst compiled a list of 10 Artists under 30. Where are they today? A list of this nature is entirely subjective, as there are over 10,000 graduates from Art schools in the UK alone each year. Here is our international list, and let’s call it only part one of the artists that have caught our eye in the last twelve months.
10. Kelvin Okafor
Kelvin Okafor, Born 1989, is a British artist of Nigerian descent who was educated at Middlesex University, graduating in Fine Art in 2009. He lives in Tottenham, London. He draws photorealist portraits of ordinary people and celebrities using pencil and charcoal. Early pieces included portraits of Amy Winehouse, Mother Teresa and Nelson Mandela.
9. NIKA NEELOVA
Nika Neelova Born in 1987, Moscow, Russia Lives and works in London, UK. She makes sculptural installations out of reclaimed architectural features and burnt timber. Disassociated from their original use and re-composed in her new arrangements, these old beams, casts and worn ropes exude their own original energy as well as their heritage. They have become something other than what they were, while retaining a feeling of oneiric repetition – claiming a life of their own and a new purpose, but still clawing onto a past one.
8. Samuel Zealey
Samuel Zealey was Born in London in 1986. Zealey started to make unusual connections between the physical world and the visual world, and through a sculptural perspective, these articulated interesting formal and conceptual questions (‘Degenerate Science’ and ‘Plagiarising Nature’). He appropriates popular household and industrial appliances in order to find strange and unknown functions in their performances, motivated by a desire to catalyse domestic equivalents of spectacular events that you might see only once in your life, if ever, like a dying star. Zealey attempts to make an uncommon experience common in a controlled situation by constructing amazing PES (‘Potential Energy Sculptures’) that form perfect microcosms of our universe. He operates as an artist/scientist/engineer, translating the ordinary into the impossible, recreating scientific and celestial phenomena.
7. Zhu Tian
Zhu Tian, Born 1987. This Chinese-born, London-based Royal College graduate won the 2015 Catlin Art Prize, which rewards emerging talents who have been out of art school for a year. A multi-disciplinary artist who subverts the everyday and undermines the expected. She questions prevailing notions of power relations and asserts the identity of the individual, adroitly turning corporate or misogynist strategies back upon themselves in order to critique them. Moving effortlessly from object intervention to digital to performance to set piece installation, Zhu presents complex and engaging work that is challenging, layered and courageous.
6. Beatrice Haines
Beatrice Haines, Born in 1986, is an artist living and working in London and the South West. This Royal College graduate works in many different media, including drawing, photography, printmaking and sculpture. Her current work focuses on relationships between the scientific and emotional, the grotesque and beautiful, the micro and macro and life and death. Personal objects thought to be mundane or viewed with disgust are raised to the status of relics.
5. Dominic Hawgood
Dominic Hawgood Hawgood Born 1988 tackles the nature of perceived reality, the work processes to what degree real experiences were happening to the artist as a documenter of what ‘seemed to be’ the quite theatrical performances of deliverance and exorcism. The reality presented is multi-layered, created with a kind of confusion that blurs the divide between the real and the theatrical. Hawgood re-creates this effect for the viewer, removing narrative functions and introducing a noirish feel and the slick language of advertising.
4. Felicity Hammond
Felicity Hammond: Born 1988, MA Photography, Royal College of Art 2014. Her Restore to Factory Settings refers to this paradoxical reading of blue, where the urban landscape has been dismembered, whilst at the same time has gone through a process of careful reconstruction. It explores the interplay between the past and the present to imagine future potentialities, exploring dystopian visions through engaging in the complexity of restoration, longing, and homesickness. Nominated for the Catlin Art Prize 2014.
3. Ibrahim Mahama
Ibrahim Mahama was Born. 1987, TAMALE, GHANA: Ibrahim created one of the most outstanding works at this year’s Venice Biennale. Everyone was talking about his alleyway curtains, which transformed the back streets of the Arsenale into an earthy African village.
2. Rachel Rose
Rachel Rose was born in 1986 and currently lives and works in New York. Recent exhibitions include Visitors, Governor’s Island, New York (2015); Cloud Cover, CCS Bard College, Hessel Museum, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York (2015); The Importance of Being a (Moving) Image, National Gallery, Prague (2015) She currently has a show at the Serpentine in London and won the Frieze Artist award making her an artist to watch.
1. Oscar Murillo
Oscar Murillo, Born 1986, large-scale paintings imply action, performance, and chaos, but are in fact methodically composed of rough-hewn, stitched canvases that often incorporate fragments of text as well as studio debris such as dirt and dust. His paintings, video works, and performances are tied to a notion of community stemming from the artist’s cross-cultural ties to London, where he currently lives and works, and Colombia.