Together, apart, 2025
Diane Chappalley
Megan Mulrooney
“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.
Sylvia Fernández
B. 1978, Lima. Lives and works in Lima.
Belong to Nature I, 2025
Sylvia Fernandez
David B. Smith Gallery
Midnight flower, 2025
Sylvia Fernandez
David B. Smith Gallery
Peruvian artist Sylvia Fernández paints the natural world with a keen attention to its majesty. She focuses on intricate details, zooming in on water droplets and wilting plants. These compositions take on a surreal, almost otherworldly quality. A selection of these canvases is on view in “The Illusion of Paradise,” her solo show at Denver’s David B. Smith Gallery, through April 18th.
Many of Fernández’s luscious paintings feature a feminine shadow. Belong to Nature I (2025), for example, portrays an emerald-green plant shimmering in the rain and darkened by a woman’s silhouette. Here, the artist creates a self-portrait that underscores her watchful relationship with her natural subjects. Meanwhile, other works focus exclusively on striking ecological beauty. Fernández captures a wilting Midnight flower (2025), contorted under the glowing moonlight. And from a greater distance, in Paradise Memory I (2025), she depicts a lavish grove through a thick brush.
Before relocating from Peru to San Diego in 2022, Fernández studied fine art at the Escuela Superior de Arte Corriente Alterna. Her most recent solo shows have been staged by San Diego’s Oolong Gallery in 2024, Asheville, Tennessee's Tyger Tyger Gallery in 2023, Lima’s Galería del Paseo in 2021, and Mexico City’s Salón Acme in 2020.
Linus Borgo
B. 1995, Stamford, Connecticut. Lives and works in New York City.
Mirror Box, 2025
Linus Borgo
Yossi Milo Gallery
Backslide, 2024
Linus Borgo
Yossi Milo Gallery
Linus Borgo’s paintings are informed by a near-death experience. At 18, Borgo suffered a devastating electrical shock from a generator that discharged 11,000 volts. Though he survived the incident, it necessitated the amputation of his left hand. This event, coupled with his lived experience as a transgender man, fundamentally informs a practice that deals with the pleasures and discomforts of embodied experience. Some of these works are on view in his solo show at New York’s Yossi Milo Gallery, “Into the Blue Again,” through April 25th.
Cavity Sam (2025), for instance, is a self-portrait based on the popular “Operation” board game. It features a shirtless Borgo with dissected sections, labeled with titles such as “funny bone” or “knot in stomach.” The portrait also shows the artist’s “phantom limb,” a disembodied arm beneath his left arm. Not all of Borgo’s works are as direct. Many of his paintings depict quieter scenes, characterized by intentional staging and precise lighting. In The Impossibility of Unlearning (2026), a figure stands over a seated figure who holds his head in his hands, as if receiving difficult news.
Borgo earned a bachelor’s from Rhode Island School of Design in 2018 and a master’s from Columbia University in New York in 2022. Steve Turner, in Los Angeles, mounted his debut solo show, “I’ll Grow Back Like a Starfish,” in 2022.
Christian Franzen
B. 1994, Long Beach, California. Lives and works in Los Angeles.
Things That Aren't Here Anymore, 2025
Christian Franzen
Uffner & Liu
Golden vistas of Southern California gleam from the canvases of Los Angeles artist Christian Franzen. The 32-year-old painter sources his scenes from a massive archive of his own photographs, which form studies of how light reflects off the Pacific Ocean. A series of these paintings appears in his debut New York solo show at Uffner & Liu, titled “SHIFTY” and on view through May 9th.
Franzen’s paintings are a love letter to the Californian horizon, much like those of his fellow Angelino, Sayre Gomez. The artist layers, glazes, and airbrushes acrylic on linen to capture the gradients of the sunlight against the skyline. Things That Aren’t Here Anymore (2025), for instance, features subtle oranges as the sun clashes with a cloudy dusk sky. In other artworks, Franzen depicts uncanny encounters with animals. In Black Cat (2024), a phantom cat with piercing white eyes barely registers against a nighttime backdrop. These paintings, though vastly different in subject matter, are connected by the artist’s attention to gesture and light as he manipulates paint to create strange and mesmerizing shadows.
Franzen earned his BFA from California State University, Long Beach, in 2018. He has presented solo shows with London’s Glasshouse and Los Angeles–based galleries in lieu and OWO.
Diane Chappalley
B. 1991, Switzerland. Lives and works in London.
La danse, 2025
Diane Chappalley
Megan Mulrooney
Anxious Flowers III, 2025
Diane Chappalley
Megan Mulrooney
Diane Chappalley channels the Swiss mysticism from her region, rooted in esotericism and spirituality connected to the natural world, as she creates fantastical paintings and charged sculptures. Her works consistently depict feminine figures, often painted in neutral colors, in moments of spiritual encounter. Dense floral forms often cover their bodies and serve as a backdrop as they dance or meditate.
La Danse (2025), for example, features three women prancing across a field of blooms that sprout from a deep red backdrop. Below them, a blurred, spectral shape suggests a link to a spiritual realm. Chappalley similarly channels her mystical sensibility into sculptures, including her “Anxious Flowers” series. Anxious Flowers III (2025), a glazed stoneware of a dying flower with a bright red bulb, resembles a sacred totem more than a dying organic form. Later this year, new works will be the subject of a digital solo show with Taymour Grahne Projects.
Chappalley graduated with a master’s in fine art from the University College London in 2017. She most recently presented “What Holds Us” at Megan Mulrooney in Los Angeles in 2025. Other solo shows have been staged by Taymour Grahne Projects and Lychee One Gallery (both in London), and Oxfordshire, England’s Informality Gallery.
Omyo Cho
B. 1984, Seoul. Lives and works in Seoul.
Nudi Hallucination, 2022
Omyo Cho
Wooson Gallery
Omyo Cho’s sculptures are largely inspired by science fiction, which Cho herself writes. She has penned novels, including Memory Searcher and In An Unwritten Song, motivated by conversations with biologists and neuroscientists. The artist transforms elements of these post-humanist narratives into sleek objects that evoke engineered lifeforms.
Such works unite metal tendrils (made of brass, steel, silver, and nickel, for example) with bulges of glass. Nudi Hallucination (2024), for instance, takes its name from one of the artist’s novels and features an alien form with stainless steel legs, topped with a brain-like bulb. Motifs Sent by the Future: Ripples from Afar (2025), with its swollen center and spindly metal stems sprouting from the core, resembles a cast of an otherworldly organ.
Rather than thinking about these forms as strictly alien, Cho believes science fiction is a way to talk about the future in an optimistic way. “My work is an exploration of the new possibilities that might emerge from a shattered reality,” she told USIA Review Magazine. Foundry Seoul is currently showing a series of Cho’s sculptures as part of Artsy’s online showcase, Women-Led Galleries Now.
After completing a bachelor’s degree at the University of London, Cho returned to Seoul. In Korea, she presented solo exhibitions at N/A, TEMI, Soorim Cube, and BUAM Art in 2019, 2021, 2023, and 2024, respectively. Many of Cho’s works have appeared at art fairs in recent years: Wooson Gallery brought a selection to Art Basel Hong Kong, and Foundry Seoul presented works at NADA Miami, both in 2025.
