The 20 best up-and-coming artists

Friday, 10 October 2008

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Johan Anderson

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Johan Andersson

The 22-year-old Swedish artist recently graduated from Central St Martin's and is enjoying a healthy buzz, thanks to his place on the 2007 shortlist for the BP Portrait Award as the youngest ever artist to receive the accolade. He went on to win this year's Jerwood Contemporary Painters Prize. His otherwise traditional oil paintings of friends are given contemporary edginess by corrosive washes of white spirit and coloured oils. "Interest in him has been huge", according to Emma Poole, director of Kounter Kulture, where Andersson's Untitled, a large-scale portrait washed with pale blue and pink oils, will be on sale for just over £5,000.

Beier and Lund

Work by the Danish duo Nina Beier and Marie Lund is a personal favourite of Zoo Art Fair's director Soraya Rodriguez. Currently exhibiting their photographic work and installations at the Laura Bartlett gallery, the pair also delight in staged events. In 2007 they positioned members of Tate staff at strategic points around the building and asked them to start applauding at set times. The public soon joined in on a spontaneous standing ovation. And for The Division, the artists announced that 50 beautiful people had been invited to the Tate event, leaving visitors to eye each other up and work out who the fabulous guests might be. At the fair, they will be showing a joint project and a solo piece by Beier, in which Zoo's 30 interns will whistle "The Internationale" while they work.

Karla Black

The Scottish artist graduated from Glasgow School of Art in 1999 and is on the cusp of major success with several solo shows planned for 2009. Her large-scale, fragile sculptures mix domestic materials such as make-up, cleaning products and medicines with paint, paper, chalk and plaster dust. Last year she won Best Artist at Zoo Art Fair and this year has a solo show there. Black will also be presented at Glasgow's vibrant Mary Mary gallery, making its Frieze debut this year.

Osman Bozkurt

Could Turkish art be the next big thing? If it is, then Bozkurt is the man to watch, according to Alistair Hicks, art advisor for Deutsche Bank, which has the largest corporate art collection in the world. Bozkurt's political photography captures the tensions and paradoxes of modern life in Istanbul including Marks of Democracy, a series of close-ups of the ink-stained thumbs of voters at the country's last election. He is represented at Frieze by Istanbul's not-for-profit PiST, who will be running their own tea-room, complete with Turkish tea-men at the fair. Bozkurt's new series, Untitled, includes a portrait of a faceless corporate drone.

Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard

One of Lizzie Neilson's tips, curator and head of the Zabludowicz collection, is double-act Forsyth and Pollard met while studying together at Goldsmiths in the 1990s. Their (mainly video) work re-enacts moments of cultural importance, including a meticulous live recreation of David Bowie's last performance as Ziggy Stardust at the ICA in 1998. Recent works include the video for Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds' "More News From Nowhere", filmed in London's oldest legal striptease club, with cameos from Peaches Geldof, Will Self and Beth Orton, and the film Run for Me, about the Great North Run, which premiered at Baltic. They're represented by Kate MacGarry at Frieze.

Cyprien Gaillard

"Definitely an artist to watch for the future" according to Zoo Art Fair's director, Soraya Rodriguez. A 28-year-old Parisian, Gaillard (who shows at the fair with the Laura Bartlett Gallery) works in a range of media, from film and photography to collage, etchings and sculpture. For his vandalistic video series, Real Remnants of Fictive Wars he filmed the aftermath of exploding fire extinguishers in various locations. At the 2008 Berlin Biennial he exhibited Le canard de Beaugrenelle, a two-metre high duck in concrete and bronze.

Ewan Gibbs

Gibbs originally based his travel drawings on photographs torn out of holiday brochures. Now he works from his own photographs of famous landmarks, and 13 of his finely wrought pencil drawings of New York – made up of row upon row of pencil slashes, so that the familiar scenes appear to dissolve the closer one gets to them – are on show at London's Timothy Taylor gallery, which has a stand at Frieze. His work can also be found in the Tate and Moma collections.

Piao Guangxie

The gospel according to Charles Saatchi preaches that Chinese art is hot – and who are we to argue? Born in 1970, Guangxie's circular paintings of young people sinking into, and wading through, water, tinted pink to reflect prosperity, reflect the conflicting values of the Tiananmen Square generation. Based in Beijing, the artist has already exhibited extensively in his home country, throughout Asia and in Milan. His paintings will be on sale (from £10,000) at Kounter Kulture.

Mark Harasimowicz

At last year's Zoo Art Fair, Nottingham's Moot gallery completely sold out of Harasimowicz's felt-tip-pen and pencil drawings of zebras, stags and elephants combined with geometric shapes on A4 lined paper. The 26-year old Manchester-based artist has already sold several pieces to Hauser & Wirth so his work (from £500 upwards) is sure to go like hot cakes this year.

Alexander Heim

The German artist had his first solo show in the UK in August, at Edinburgh's doggerfisher, having previously exhibited as part of Bloomsbury New Contemporaries and the ICA's Nought to Sixty series. Another of Neilson's tips for the top, his works – on show at Frieze – explore the friction between the natural world and man-made activity, elevating the mundane and the brutalised to the sublime with photographs, video, and found objects.

Hush

Street artist Hush worked as a toy designer in Hong Kong after studying graphic design in Newcastle. Now back in the UK, his urban art is characterised by wide-eyed girls and pop art kitsch. He's at Kounter Kulture, where prints are on sale for a couple of hundred pounds.

Ju$t another rich kid

AKA Ken Courtney, a hip New Yorker whose work pivots on the excesses of celebrity and consumerism. His Indulgences series includes a pair of Nike trainers dipped in 24-carat gold (on sale at Kounter Kulture for £2,700) and a gold-plated coffee spoon. Perfect satire on materialism or ideal Christmas gift for the rich kid who has it all? You decide.

Yuri Leiderman

Among the works that Hicks is most interested to see at Frieze are this Ukrainian artist's greasy, grubby, stained old newspapers decorated with collages of brightly coloured flowers. Part of the same school of Moscow conceptualism which spawned Ilya Kabakov, Leiderman had his first solo exhibition in the UK last year at Birmingham's Ikon gallery, where his black and white photomontages of historically resonant images were presented alongside groups of folk musicians representing notions of cultural identity and stereotypes.

Tanja Roscic

The 28-year old Croatian-Bulgarian artist is represented by Freymond-Guth & Co, a not-for-profit gallery in Zurich which will have a stand at Zoo Art Fair this year. Her works on paper (around £950) are highly commercial, recalling Tracey Emin's early drawings in their blending of naive and disturbing images of womanhood.

Stuart Semple

At only 28 years of age, Semple is carving out a reputation as a modern-day Andy Warhol, and his pop art has been bought by Johnny Depp, Boy George and Debbie Harry among others. He famously created RIP YBA from debris collected by Uri Geller after the Momart warehouse fire, and in 2005 he smuggled one of his paintings, complete with slogan, "British Painting Still Rocks", into the Saatchi Gallery. His latest collection, on show at Kounter Kulture, is based on song lyrics and celebrity portraits.

Julie Verhoeven

Verhoeven's whimsical, psychedelic and just a little bit creepy drawings of girls in pencil and crayon acrylic on paper are eminently collectable and easy to love. The artist began her career as a fashion illustrator for John Galliano and has worked with many designers since. Her colourful prints adorned cutaway swimsuits and silky evening gowns in Versace's Spring/Summer '09 collection in Milan. Her new drawings will be on sale at Riflemaker's stand at Zoo Art Fair, starting at £3,000.

Matt Stokes

Stokes is already established in the art world after winning the Beck's Futures Prize in 2006 for his mesmerising video work of a Northern soul night in Dundee. Next year the artist (represented at Zoo by Gateshead's Workplace Gallery) has shows lined up at Baltic and Zabludowicz's 176 gallery. Stokes' work combines film, performance, music and installation; his latest concentrates on the links between his home, Newcastle upon Tyne and Camden, home to 176.

Jack Strange

Having graduated from the Slade only last year, Strange is making a name as a quirky artistic wunderkind whose work has already been snapped up by Anita Zabludowicz and Moma. The 24-year-old's witty work in sculpture, video, photography and on paper exudes charm. Strange is showing with Shoreditch's innovation hothouse, Limoncello, at Zoo.

Mathilde Ter Heijne

The super-cool Berlin gallery Arndt & Partner counts Keith Tyson and Thomas Hirschhorn among its artists but this year the buzz is loudest around the Dutch video artist ter Heijne. Her best known works see ter Heijne, represented by a life-size dummy, hurling herself off a bridge and posing as a suicide bomber. Tipped by both Neilson and Hicks.

Nicole Wermers

A triumphant solo exhibition at Herald Street Gallery last month makes the German-born, London-dwelling Wermers a hot ticket at this year's Frieze, according to Lizzie Neilson, curator and head of the Zabludowicz collection. Wermers first became celebrated for her mock-Modernist furniture/sculptures at the Tate Triennial in 2006. The large walk-through sculpture Spa, composed of three interlinking stainless-steel hoops, is among more recent work.