5 Artists on Our Radar in July 2025

“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. 1987, Rio de Janeiro. Lives and works in Rio de Janeiro.

Miguel Afa came up painting graffiti in Rio de Janeiro’s colorful favelas, where none of his work stayed untouched for long. While he has since traded the street for the canvas, a sense of ephemerality lingers in his paintings today. Using a palette of muted, earthy tones, Afa captures quiet, contemplative moments in time. A shared meal, a pair of figures in a garden, and an unmade bed are among the scenes featured in “Um céu para caber,” a solo show of paintings on view at A Gentil Carioca in São Paulo through August 23rd.

Built from murky brushstrokes, each of these paintings feels like the remnant of a memory. The soft focus of the figures and furnishings gives them a dreamlike quality, and subjects appear lost in thought, their faces expressionless. In Silêncios estrondosos (2025), a couple is seated at opposite ends of a table, the emotional ambiguity of the image underscored by the dense, muted palette. Such subtlety leaves the viewer feeling unmoored, like the scene might slip away.

While getting his start in graffiti, Afa studied at the School of Fine Arts at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. Currently, the artist is presenting his work in another solo exhibition, “O vento continua, todavia,” at Paço Imperial in Rio de Janeiro. His work is part of the Jorge M. Pérez Collection.

—Maxwell Rabb

B. 1983, Aarau, Switzerland. Lives and works in Zurich and Düsseldorf.

In the latest works of Swiss artist Cédric Eisenring, velvet evokes the elegance of theater and a fusty, wanton luxury. His square, monochromatic wall pieces are made of large, irregular swatches of the fabric, stitched together and then stamped using a woodcut printmaking technique. Up close, the raised contours of these embossed images—illustrations of people, rendered in a 19th-century style of line drawing—become visible.

Such works stood out in DREI’s presentation at Basel Social Club, the alternative art fair that ran concurrently to Art Basel last month. One of them, Tailor (2025), is a navy and gray patchwork depicting a man sewing, its seams visible and raw. Due to the velvet’s irregular fibers, the image only reveals its meaning from certain angles, suggesting the ways that fiction and truth can be sewn together into a composite narrative.

In May, Eisenring had his third solo exhibition at DREI in Cologne, “A Velvet Glove Cast in Iron.” While the artist has worked in many different media, from installation to photography, he is most interested in printing. He has exhibited in solo and group shows across Germany and Switzerland and received his BA and MA from Zurich University of the Arts. He also co-founded the publishing house Bleach Books.

—Josie Thaddeus-Johns

B. 1979, Tirana, Albania. Lives and works in Tirana.

For the majority of his artistic career, Genti Korini’s practice has centered on geometric abstractions that draw inspiration from the urban architecture of his home country, Albania. But the Tirana-based artist recently made waves with a solo presentation of striking portraits at Basel Social Club. These unsettling paintings represent a new direction in both tonality and subject for Korini, whose oeuvre spans painting, sculpture, photography, and video.

This new body of figurative work is expressive and dramatized. Rendered using gestural brushwork, Korini’s subjects share sharp features and haunting gazes. Their distinctive styling—ranging from a classic suit in Walking (2025) to a distinct ’70s shag haircut in Faux Fur, Gentle Skin (2024)—and the sparse context provided by their minimal backgrounds make them difficult to place in relation to one another. These figures are mysterious; inspired by the proliferation of social media, Korini has chosen to focus not so much on the identity of the individual as on the act of posing.

Korini studied at the University of Arts and Design in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, before completing his MFA at the University of Arts, Tirana. His solo exhibitions include presentations at Jecza Gallery, mygallery, Harabel Contemporary, and Beers London. Additionally, his work has been featured in institutional shows at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb, Croatia; the Contemporary Art Museum Warsaw; and the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Bucharest, Romania.

—Adeola Gay

B. 1996, Port Stanley, Canada. Lives and works in Toronto.

Freedom is the guiding principle of Celia Lees’s vibrant, gestural paintings: She gravitates to abstraction, she’s said, because it has “no rules.” Her unbounded approach results in canvases bursting with soft washes of color, covered in drips and splotches like Rorschach tests. Guided by intuition and feeling, Lees works at a large scale so that her whole body becomes an implement. The colors she selects for her physically impressive pieces signpost the emotions that she pours onto the canvas. Black and red works like 45 lives (2023) carry a sense of dark interiority, while brighter, airier works like I thought it rained last night (2025) feel unburdened.

These paintings are clearly resonating with audiences: Earlier this year, Lees gained representation with Canadian gallery Bau-Xi, and she has seen a recent uptick in followers on Artsy. A self-taught artist, Lees studied fashion design at Toronto Metropolitan University and worked for Acne Studios before turning to painting full-time during the pandemic. Since then, she has had solo exhibitions at Sugarlift Gallery in New York and Cry Baby Gallery in Toronto.

—Olivia Horn

B. 1983, Temuco, Chile. Lives and works in Paris.

In Ursula K. Le Guin’s short story “Sur,” a fictional diarist recounts a secret, all-women expedition to the South Pole that took place years before the famous inaugural journeys of Amundsen and Scott, but was kept deliberately out of the history books. The story offers a stark critique of a historical record shaped by patriarchal narratives.

Chilean artist Christiane Pooley’s landscapes emerge from that same speculative impulse. For “Imaginary Country,” a new solo exhibition at Perrotin in New York, she worked with oil on engraved copper plates and canvas to create shimmering, unplaceable landscapes. Rather than depict real sites, she paints scenes that collapse imagination and memory, and probes how landscapes are remembered and who gets to define them. The violently cascading waterfalls and tremulous violet horizon of To Fold a Map (2024), for example, reference the work of Frederic Edwin Church—the Hudson River School painter who produced famous, idealized paintings of South American landscapes in the 19th century.