Image via Complex Original
It’s a big deal to declare someone “the next” Picasso or Warhol or Banksy, a claim probably best left to overzealous parents talking about their child’s scribbles as they tape them to the fridge. Artists work hard to make a name for themselves, not just to be called someone else’s name. However, acknowledging parallels between younger and established artists can still be a useful tool to navigate the vast ocean that is the art world.
We’ve put together the following list of younger or emerging artists who may share aesthetic, technical, or conceptual concerns with art celebrities, masters, and OGs, but may also update, interrogate, or diverge entirely from other aspects of their predecessors' work. If there’s no compelling case for influence, ancestry, or even for further comparison between any pair, at least there’s awesome art on both sides of the equation. Here are 15 artists you might know, and 15 more that you might want to get to know.
If you like Sol Lewitt, check out Jeppe Hein.
Berlin-based Jeppe Hein’s sculptures and installations take the simple forms of Minimalism and Conceptual Art pioneered by artists like Sol Lewitt, but with modern technological updates that create unexpected and entertaining viewer interactions. This Lewitt-esque cube is no static structure. Changing Neon Sculpture (2006) lights up in various patterns until a visitor enters the room, when it quickly freezes its movement until the viewer leaves and continues to shuffle through its catalog of displays. Other works may vibrate, buzz, move, or squirt water when approached, while others use carefully placed mirrors (like Robert Smithson) in ways that distort the viewer’s perspective.
If you like Jean-Michel Basquiat, check out Oscar Murillo.
We aren't the first to compare London-based artist Oscar Murillo with Jean-Michel Basquiat. Both explore issues of class, race, and cultural heritage in colorful, calligraphic paintings. Basquiat’s work was rooted in his own graffiti practice, but Murillo devises his street art aesthetic in a meticulous studio practice, often incorporating text and materials that reference his Colombian roots.
If you like Ed Ruscha, check out Wayne White.
Ed Ruscha has a large body of text paintings dating from the 1960s that feature words and phrases like “Pay Nothing Until April” or “A Particular Kind of Heaven” set over color fields and landscapes. Eventually he even created his own font (“Boy Scout Utility Modern”) for these paintings. Word paintings are also the realm Wayne White, an artist from Tennessee and former set designer for childhood favorites like Pee-Wee’s Playhouse. White paints his lettering into existing paintings purchased at thrift stores. Silly and sometimes edgy phrases like “I’m With Stupid” or “Sugar Tit” weave around trees and across beaches, becoming characters in the scenes they inhabit.
If you like Dan Colen, check out Lucien Smith.
Dan Colen is known for his paintings, sculptures, and installations depicting the detritus of mass media and urban life, such as gum, garbage, graffiti, or bird guano. With an eye to abstraction and archivism, rising New York art star Lucien Smith takes on similar subject matter in a variety of mediums. He may photograph gum patterns or trash cans on city streets, apply paint to canvas using a fire extinguisher, or construct a garden of broomsticks across a gallery floor.
If you like John Baldessari, check out Ken Lum.
John Baldessari’s conceptual art has an irreverent take on the art world, often using found or manipulated images and glib text together in strange and amusing juxtapositions. Ken Lum, an artist often associated with the Vancouver School of photoconceptualism of the '80s and '90s, also pairs portraits with somewhat facetious captions.
If you like Ryan McGinley, check out Sandy Kim.
Ryan McGinley, the quintessential photographer of the young, beautiful and naked, has personally championed Sandy Kim as a talent in contemporary documentary photography. Both artists have a predilection for explicit subject matter, but treat it in a way that naturalizes sexuality rather than sexualizing nudity. Kim’s work focuses largely on herself and her friends in San Francisco and New York, capturing their life and times in all of its glory, goofy, or gritty moments.
If you like Tracey Emin, check out Jill Magid.
Tracey Emin, member of the late '80s Young British Artist movement, has a large body of neon works, which depict thoughts and phrases in her handwriting alluding to personal thoughts and feelings like, “I keep believing in you” or “Never again!” American artist Jill Magid also makes chirographic neon as part of larger investigative projects and performances that focus on large institutions and governmental structures. Her chosen phrases are decidedly less wistful or emotional than Emin’s, with text like I Can Burn Your Face (2008).
If you like Francis Bacon, check out Victoria Reynolds.
True to his name, Francis Bacon often rendered slabs of raw meat and splayed carcasses in his dark and sometimes grotesque paintings. While Bacon’s bacon remains painterly and visceral, LA-based painter Victoria Reynolds treats her meats in an elegant, stylized manner. Her rich and ornate compositions might also be compared to the glistening still lifes of Dutch masters like Pieter Claesz or the sumptuous ornamentation of the Rococo.
If you like Ryan Trecartin, check out Jon Rafman.
Plumbing the depths of the Internet and digital subcultures for both subject matter and raw material, Ryan Trecartin and the Quebecois artist Jon Rafman both make films that investigate identity and displacement in our digital age. Where Trecartin’s works are notorious for being frenetic, saturated, and highly theatrical, Rafman’s approach is slower, more restrained, and sometimes melancholy. He also writes essays, creates sculptures, and works in various digital media.
If you like Joan Miro, check out Jenna Ransom.
Joan Miró used the technique of automatic drawing to create little worlds, landscapes, and creatures with simple lines and shapes. Similarly, in the oil paintings and graphite drawings of Boston-native Jenna Ransom, faces, figures, and sometimes kittens seem to appear spontaneously from abstract fields of shapes and colors. She illustrates from her dreams and memories, combining symbols and imagery into pictures that can be spooky, playful, and earnest all at once.
If you like Gerhard Richter, check out Israel Lund.
Though he is well-known for his photorealistic paintings, Gerhard Richter’s process involved obscuring and degrading images through manual reproduction. Some of Richter’s nonrepresentational work also makes “imperfect” use of silkscreens and squeegees to make smears, blurs, and bleeds. Israel Lund, a painter who lives in Brooklyn, likewise pushes pictures through scans, photocopiers, silkscreens, and eventually onto canvas. The original image becomes a field of completely abstract, irregular deposits of pigment.
If you like Man Ray, check out Sara Cwynar.
“Rayograph” was Man Ray’s term for his photograms—or “camera-less” photographs produced by laying objects onto photo paper—a process that highlighted how objects become images. Canadian designer and photographer Sarah Cwynar pushes that exploration further, making images of images through collage and re-photography. Like Ray’s rayographs, Cwynar focuses on groupings and collections of objects. Rayographs, however, only existed in black and white; Cwynar’s works incorporate every color of the rainbow.
If you like Christian Marclay, check out ::kogonada.
Today, supercuts are a ubiquitous format on YouTube, mining and montaging everything from newscasts to reality TV, but they were not so common in 1995 when Christian Marclay created Telephones, his video collage of hundreds of telephone rings and conversations from Hollywood movies. More recently, Marclay made the 24-hour epic The Clock (2010), a painstaking montage of clips showing clocks, watches, and timepieces edited to synchronize with real time. The mysterious Korean video artist known as ::kogonada also pays careful attention to the history of cinema in his video “essays” that focus on the work and cinematography of famous filmmakers. ::kogonada catalogs tropes like Stanley Kubrick’s use of single-point perspective, Wes Anderson’s shots in bird’s-eye-view, or Quentin Tarantino’s predilection for filming from below.
If you like Keith Haring, check out Shantell Martin.
Keith Haring’s iconic characters first gained notice when he scribbled them on subway cars in the 1980s. Likewise, British expat Shantell Martin recently grabbed the art world’s attention by doodling over her entire Brooklyn bedroom—furniture and all. She draws bold, linear forms and figures in compulsive, stream-of-consciousness process, covering any number of surfaces including clothes, vases, museums, offices, schools, people…and sometimes paper or canvas, too.
If you like Clyfford Still, check out Hugo McCloud.
Paint was the definitive medium for Abstract Expressionists like Clyfford Still in making his iconic works of “torn” patches of color and heavy impasto. In the work of Brooklyn artist Hugo McCloud, who began as an industrial designer, paint hardly makes an appearance among many materials and techniques, including metals and blowtorches. However, McCloud’s finished pieces, like Still’s monumental paintings, are rich in color, texture, and innovation.