Painting: Lina Iris Viktor
2019 is going to be a breakthrough year for Lina Iris Viktor, following on from the success of her solo show at the New Orleans Museum of Art (until 6 January). If you aren’t already familiar with her intricate portrait paintings and palette of blue, black, twenty-four carat gold and white, you will be soon: she has a major exhibition at Autograph in East London coming up in September. She’s also the artist Kendrick Lamar reportedly pinched artwork from for his Black Panther video (he denied the claims filed earlier this year). Chris Ofili is an inspiration. (Charlotte Jansen)
Illustration/animation: Julian Glander
It’s nigh-on impossible to get enough of the weird, pastely, gloopy worlds of New York-based illustrator and animator Julian Glander. His gif work is at once meticulously crafted, cute and hilarious; whether working with big clients like Nike, MTV, MIT Technology Review and Adult Swim or on surreal personal projects. His 2019 looks set to be very exciting indeed: he’s launching Art Sqool, a bonkers computer game that sees its player (“froshmin”) navigate its way through an art school simulation to, ultimately, “achieve creative fulfilment”. (Emily Gosling)
Photography/sculpture: Mari Katayama
Japanese artist Mari Katayama stages exceptional photographs that often encompass her embroidered textile sculptures, directly referencing her own body. As a child growing up with developmental issues that ultimately resulted in both her legs being amputated, she struggled to make friends and turned to art as a way of making sense of her own life experience and rebelling against societal norms. Her beautiful, staged works investigate issues of beauty, femininity, sensuality and vulnerability. Her first show in London opens at White Rainbow on 24 January. (Holly Black)
Painting: Ambera Wellmann
There is a strange tenderness to Ambera Wellmann’s tactile, fleshy canvases. Bodies merge and morph together, part sensual love-making, part alien transformation into mutant creatures. Next year will see her mount a solo show KTZ Berlin, while she will be ruling the roost at Frieze New York in February with a solo booth at Galerie Antoine Ertaskiran, Montreal, and a showing at Chris Sharp’s Lulu in Mexico City. She is also to feature in group shows at MoMA Warsaw, Palais de Tokyo and ACCA Melbourne throughout the summer. Prepare yourself for more playful upturning of assumptions around what is normal and abnormal, tapping into the uncanny valley with seriously unsettling results. (Louise Benson)
Sculpture: Yu Jinyoung
Seoul-based artist Yu Jinyoung creates sculptures that give voice to the dual identity many of us manifest in our daily lives. Using moulded PVC she creates characters that are at once solid and transparent, alluding to the anxieties so many of us face as we attempt to fit in and be visible. The beautifully articulated—and decidedly melancholy—faces of her figures, as well as their impeccable outfits and animal sidekicks, allude to the confines and expectations of upstanding family values, as well as those that we place on ourselves. (Holly Black)
Sound/music/performance: AJA
Part noise artist; part living, writhing, screaming sculpture, AJA’s performances are brutally confrontational and dreamily transcendent in equal measure. The Nottingham-based artist, whose self-titled debut was released on Opal Tapes in 2018, weaves beguiling visuals, stunningly strange costumes (co-created with Berlin-based designer Lu La Loop) and unabashed, improvised barrages of sound to create something beautiful and cathartic—both for her and us, her audience. Alongside her performance work AJA also runs sound workshops to help promote more women in electronic music, and often works with young people and within the LGBTQ community. (Emily Gosling)
Ceramics/mixed media: Renee So
Renee So’s work has a playful, almost cartoonish tone, which is somewhat surprising when you consider that her research interests range from classical sculpture to primitive pan-cultural pottery and fertility idols. It is a gap that she is able to comfortably straddle, between old and new, fact and fiction, and high and low culture. A series of her “knitted paintings” were a highlight at the London Open group show at Whitechapel Gallery this summer, while in 2019 she is set to take over the main galleries of the Henry Moore Institute with a combination of her curious ceramic sculptures and machine-knitted textiles. (Louise Benson)
Photography: Avia Wyse
Avia Wyse’s grandma still asks her what her day job is, but many others will recognize her work from the most recent cover of Numero magazine in Berlin. Wyse can usually be found in her darkroom, if she isn’t prowling the streets for strangers to snap at her makeshift studios. Last year she was also named in the Vogue 100 (Karley Sciortino, aka Slutever, called her work “erotic”). You’ll have to get to her Instagram quick, though: it’s regularly shut down for a stray nipple or swinging ball sack. (Charlotte Jansen)
Painting: Caroline Walker
Caroline Walker creates a female-dominated world based on the outsider looking in. Her enormous paintings are irresistible to look at, with an intoxicating palette and deft brush strokes that offer just enough detail to embue an uncanny familiarity. With an undeniably prolific output, the artist had several major shows this year, including Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge, Anat Ebgi in Los Angeles, Grimm in New York (which presented a solo stand of her work at Frieze London), as well as a new monograph and a collaboration with Enitharmon Editions. (Holly Black)
Photography: Maisie Cousins
It wouldn’t be an Elephant artist picks without giving a nod to photographer Maisie Cousins. The artist’s show Dipping Sauce was a stunning opener for our Elephant West space, presenting her large-scale, food-focused works across print, light boxes and animations. Her work delights in slipping, viscously, between delight and disgust—sometimes all in one image—and is a superbly saturated riposte to anything we’ve been conditioned to see as beautiful or disturbing. We can’t wait to see what the next year will bring for her. (Emily Gosling)
Painting: Joan Snyder
As many women artists discover on their career path, it’s a U-shaped journey; the art world loves the young and the old, but in the middle, you get overlooked. Snyder is seventy-eight now, and her time has come again: rightly so. Her influential “flock” and “stroke” paintings—sensual techniques and materials she carefully developed to better convey the female experience—and her outspoken feminism since the 1960s have paved the way for many young American artists, and still bring fresh ideas today. A significant solo show of her work, Rosebuds & Rivers, open at Blain|Southern London on 28 March. Like many American painters of her generation—Marilyn Minter, Judith Bernstein, Betty Tompkins—Snyder is long overdue proper recognition. (Charlotte Jansen)
Graphic design/motion graphics: Jonathan Castro
Peruvian-born, Netherlands-based graphic designer and art director Jonathan Castro’s work is a glorious explosion of acid-bright colours; deliciously gloopy, experimental typography; jagged metallics and trip gradients. He’s the name on the lips of pretty much everyone in the graphic design world as one of the most exciting new talents around; thanks to his already much-aped work for clients including Boiler Room, Rotterdam’s Pantropical Club, Bristol’s Simple Things Festival, 032c magazine and more, and his totally original merging of aesthetic influences from experimental music and traditional Peruvian culture. (Emily Gosling)
Photography: William Ukoh
What makes an artist exciting, when so many are doing the same thing? William Ukoh’s work doesn’t demand a particularly discerning eye: that they’re exceptional is obvious. His understanding of form, colour and heritage often nods to his Nigerian roots and early encounters with reproductions of Western masterpieces in West Africa. He lives in Toronto now and is turning thirty soon: the fashion world have already embraced him, but there’s exciting things to come for Ukoh in the art world too. (Charlotte Jansen)
Sculpture/mixed media: Monika Grabuschnigg
The colour pink conjures many things: millennials (of course), romance (the sickly sweet variety) and girls (blue for boys, duh). For Berlin-based Monika Grabuschnigg, the symbolic weight of the colour is key to her baroque, fleshy sculptures made from clay and resin. Questioning our cultural affiliations and the meaning of ornaments, trinkets and souvenirs, she replicates their language through a strange, distorted lens. It is an approach that won her the Berlin Art Prize this year, a major accolade, while she also presented her first solo show in 2018 with Carbon 12 Dubai. Her name will continue to grow internationally in 2019, taking her love totems and perfectly pink ceramics global. (Louise Benson)
Printmaking: Alice Irwin
London-based printmaker Alice Irwin is as interested in process as she is the final product. Her obsession with making encompasses a practice that includes enormous screenprints, dense etchings and engraved sculptures. The recent RCA graduate exhibited at Yorkshire Sculpture Park this autumn, where she brought her distinct motifs together in an investigation of “a life lived with play”. She is currently exhibiting at Flowers Gallery as part of Small is Beautiful, until 5 January. (Holly Black)
Digital/video: Wong Ping
It’s difficult to know whether to laugh or cry with the strange animated films of Hong Kong-born Wong Ping, in which couples copulate in surreal domestic surroundings and absurdist humour reigns supreme. It makes for an experience not dissimilar to early teenage memories of getting loaded on too much candy and hours of cartoons: silly, but oh so sweet. It’s been a breakthrough year for the artist, showing his work in major group shows at the Guggenheim and the New Museum in New York simultaneously. At Frieze London this October, his solo booth with Edouard Malingue was awarded the inaugural Camden Arts Centre Emerging Arts Prize; expect a major show at the gallery next year, straddling the personal and the political. (Louise Benson)
