Art
Artsy Editorial
“Artists on Our Radar” is a monthly series focused on five artists who have our attention. Utilizing our art expertise and Artsy data, we’ve determined which artists made an impact this past month through new gallery representation, exhibitions, auctions, art fairs, or fresh works on Artsy.
B. 1991, Seoul. Lives and works in New York.
Figures emerge and dissolve within churning storms of crimson red, forest green, and electric blue in Julia Jo’s paintings. The Korean artist’s visual language feels simultaneously intimate and uncontainable, with whispers of flesh rendered in unruly, colorful brushstrokes. In Down on One Knee (2025)—featured in Jo’s solo presentation with Charles Moffett at New York art fair Independent earlier this month—fragments of torsos, faces, and limbs hover in a volatile state, their contours partially visible among flashes of lavender, umber, and acid yellow.
Jo’s frenetic brushwork is how she translates emotional intensity into her paintings. “I am always thinking about social relationships and the difficulty of putting certain emotions into words,” she told Galerie. These paintings evoke emotions ranging from contemplative sadness, as seen in Down on One Knee, to all-consuming love in Catching Fire (2025), where two faces kiss within a tangle of ochre and green foliage.
Based in Brooklyn, Jo received her MFA from Parsons School of Design in 2019. Her recent solo shows include “Torrent” at Charles Moffett in 2024, “Swoon” at Jessica Silverman in 2023, and “Point of No Return” at James Fuentes in 2023. Her work is held in the collections of ICA Miami and the Morgan Stanley Collection in New York.
—Maxwell Rabb
B. 1976, Torrance, California. Lives and works in Los Angeles.
Postcards are a common sight at art fairs: Exhibitors often reproduce works from their booths as 4-by-6-inch mementos. By far the most covetable postcards at New York Art Week, though, weren’t bits of paper ephemera, but instead ceramic wall works by the Taiwanese American artist Raina Lee. At both NADA and Future Fair, Lee presented pocket-sized, glazed stoneware paintings inspired by her travels. L.A. gallery Stroll Garden’s selection at NADA captured scenes from a trip to Paris, like Lee’s partner snapping a photo of a Monet painting. Meanwhile, her presentation with LaiSun Keane at Future Fair documented her time in Spain.
The memories that Lee turns into ceramic keepsakes reflect her deep fascination with relics of cultural history. These include the Islamic pottery she saw at the Alhambra in Granada, Spain, and sculptures from the Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelona. This interest is reflected across Lee’s broader ceramic practice in works that reimagine Korean moon jars, Japanese raku pottery, and other traditional forms with gloopy, textural glazes and unexpected color palettes.
A former journalist, Lee holds an MA in media and film studies from the New School. While living in New York, she picked up ceramics at a studio near her home. Now based in Los Angeles, Lee has had solo exhibitions at local galleries Stroll Garden and Niche Gallery.
—Olivia Horn
B. 1995, Henan, China. Lives and works in London.
Yaya Yajie Liang’s oil paintings come alive with fluid, gestural brushstrokes that ripple across her canvases. Her work is deeply concerned with bodily sensations and the interconnectedness of life forms, and draws on philosophical sources. Among these are Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, in which the protagonist is transformed into an insect, and the theory of agential realism, which proposes that nothing exists independently; rather, things come into being via their relationships and interactions.
This month, Liang presented a new series of works with Cob at NADA New York, including watercolors on Indian cotton paper alongside large- and small-scale oil paintings. In one such work, Falling Falling (2025), swirling biomorphic forms are rendered in earth tones and soft lilacs, taking inspiration from objects, like seaweed and shells, found on the artist’s coastal walks. Hovering between abstraction and figuration, Liang’s compositions suggest the instability of the natural world—a resonant theme in a time of environmental crisis. She completed the fair booth at NADA with a site-specific mural that underscored her paintings’ ecological visual motifs.
Liang earned a BA in fine art from China Central Academy of Fine Arts and an MA in painting from the Royal College of Art, where she is currently pursuing a PhD. She has mounted solo exhibitions at Galerie Kandlhofer in Vienna, Lyles & King in New York, and Cob in London. Liang’s work has also been exhibited in group shows at London galleries including Thaddaeus Ropac, Gillian Jason Gallery, and others.
—Adeola Gay
B. 1994, Delhi. Lives and works in Noida, India.
The everyday encounters and ambiguities of life in Delhi are at the heart of Ritika Sharma’s painting practice. The artist both observes and questions her home city as she experiences it.
Sharma’s small, oil-on-panel paintings—featured in “Confluences,” a show exploring the intersections of painting and photography mounted by Delhi gallery VHC | Vida Heydari Contemporary earlier this year—suggest scenes lifted from CCTV footage. In a monochromatic palette, she paints enigmatic encounters between loosely rendered, faceless figures, leaving the viewer to wonder whether they are witnessing moments of intimacy or conflict. The title of the works in this series, “Close to Identify,” references delayed identification of suspects in criminal matters. Thus, Sharma nods to the uncertainty of each scene and the false sense of security fostered by the surveillance state—adding a political layer to her quotidian scenes.
Sharma earned a BFA and an MFA in painting at the College of Art, Delhi. She has participated in group shows across India at galleries including Bikaner House and Nippon Art Gallery. In the past year, the artist has received the Space118 Fine Art Grant and the Inlaks Fine Art Award.
—Arun Kakar
B. 1990, the Netherlands. Lives and works in Amsterdam.
Early in her career, multidisciplinary artist Marilyn Sonneveld created figurative paintings exploring the body as a site of both intimacy and politicization. In newer works—such as the paintings on view through May 31st in her solo show at EDJI Gallery in Brussels—Sonneveld considers intimacy through an evocative but more abstracted language, centering personal memory and distance.
At first glance, Royal Hug (2025) is an atmospheric abstract canvas rendered in vibrant jewel tones. Keep looking, and two figures materialize in soft focus. Though the work invites closer inspection, the embracing figures remain hazy, refusing to solidify—like an elusive word on the tip of the tongue.
In contrast, Sonneveld’s hanging, blown-glass sculptures, like Soap III (2022), have clear bounds. Their dripping, twisting forms evoke movement and fluidity, like ephemeral soap bubbles floating above a sink. Together, the paintings and sculptures build tension—between absence and presence, and motion and stillness.
Sonneveld graduated from the Willem de Kooning Academie in Rotterdam. She has exhibited in solo exhibitions at the Kunsthal Rotterdam, No Man’s Art Gallery in Amsterdam, Badr El Jundi Gallery in Madrid, and elsewhere.
—Isabelle Sakelaris
