Becoming a breakout artist takes time. Over the years, ambitious exhibitions, prominent gallery representations, major awards, and significant art fair presentations all lay the groundwork for major attention. In 2026, such curatorial, critical, and professional achievements will finally pay off for the eleven breakout stars on our list. They include seasoned veterans who will receive major shows and public commissions, as well as figures who have steadily built momentum at the emerging stages of their careers. Keep an eye on these talents as they finally get the spotlight they deserve.
B. 1993, Rio de Janeiro. Lives and works in São Paulo.
Vida Amorável, 2025
Diambe
Simões de Assis
The nonbinary, Brazilian artist Diambe uses organic materials such as egg tempera and plant dyes to make fantastical landscape paintings. Their twisting, corporeal bronze sculptures originate in beeswax casts. The artist elegantly balances figuration and abstraction as they consider memory, interiority, and psychological tension.
In 2025, São Paulo–based gallery Simões de Assis mounted a strong solo presentation by Diambe at Frieze London. The booth was part of the fair’s curated section “Echoes in the Present,” which explored cultural exchange and the transatlantic slave trade, and earned many critical accolades. Artsy named it a “best booth.”
The artist kicks off 2026 with their largest solo presentation to date: “Bees being beans” at Kunsthalle Basel, curated by Mohamed Almusibli, director and chief curator. The show features a new film and sculptures, furthering Diambe’s explorations of cultural memory, colonial legacies, and the fragility of the natural world.
B. 1976, Saigon, Vietnam. Lives and works in Ho Chi Minh City.
Tuan Andrew Nguyen uses documentary strategies and speculative storytelling to create layered, poetic narratives that foreground voices excluded from official histories. The aftermath of the Vietnam War, which displaced the artist and his family in 1979, is often a touchstone for his film, sculpture, and research-driven installations.
In 2025, Nguyen earned a prestigious MacArthur fellowship. He opened the major presentation “We Were Lost in Our Country,” curated by Irene Sunwoo at the Art Institute of Chicago (on view through March 9th) and participated in the São Paulo and Singapore Biennials; it was a year of dense global visibility.
Magic and Mayhem, 2018
Tuan Andrew Nguyen
10 Chancery Lane Gallery
This spring, Nguyen will bring his meditative, politically charged work to a public context when he unveils a new commission for New York’s High Line Plinth. His 27-foot-tall, sandstone sculpture of the Buddha, titled The Light That Shines Through the Universe, is inspired by the colossal, 6th-century Bamiyan Buddhas that were destroyed by the Taliban in 2001. Nguyen’s work will be a monument to heritage and peace.
B. 1939, Punjab, India. D. 2024, London.
Untitled (Organic Forms), 1974
Balraj Khanna
Grosvenor Gallery
Lake, 1986
Balraj Khanna
Jhaveri Contemporary
Self-taught painter Balraj Khanna helped shape Britain’s rich community of Indian artists. He was born in India, moved to the United Kingdom in 1962, and became a member of the Indian Painters’ Collective. Khanna was also an acclaimed writer, gallery owner, and curator, positions he leveraged to support his peers.
Khanna’s own work, which spans abstraction and figuration, reflects a transnational modernism shaped by his own experiences with migration and postcolonial identity. The artist’s vibrant paintings feature celestial, organic patterns, and hints of puppet-like figures. Khanna experimented with mixed media later in his career, and sand and spray painting are also key to his oeuvre.
Shortly after the artist’s 2024 death, Jhaveri Contemporary featured his work at Independent 20th Century in 2025. In September 2026, Ikon Gallery in Birmingham, England, is staging a major retrospective of Khanna’s work, featuring early, rarely exhibited works from the 1960s and offering a long-overdue celebration of his contributions as an artist and advocate.
B. 1990, Uherské Hradiště, Czech Republic. Lives and works in Berlin.
Klára Hosnedlová creates large-scale, immersive sculptural installations that combine textiles, glass, metal, sandstone, and other materials to examine nationalism, labor, and the construction of collective identity. Her environments create simultaneously protective and oppressive spaces as they draw from Eastern European histories, folklore, craft, and militarized aesthetics.
In 2025, Hosnedlová’s career flourished. White Cube announced its representation of the artist, and she opened “embrace,” her largest institutional solo show to date at the Hamburger Bahnhof.
Hosnedlová enters 2026 with equal momentum. In February, she will open her inaugural solo exhibition with White Cube in its London location. Later this spring, Hosnedlová will debut a site-specific installation in the atrium stairway of New York’s soon-to-reopenNew Museum. This marks the artist’s first U.S. museum commission.
Kim Hankyul
B. 1990, Busan. Lives and works in Oslo.
Kim Hankyul creates striking kinetic sculptures and installations that explore vulnerability, the body, and the slippage of reality in the digital age. He works across disciplines, combining objects like sound equipment, models of skeletons, and lights to create environments that feel intimate yet disquieting and emotionally charged.
In February, Hankyul will open a solo exhibition “SOLO/OSLO: Kim Hankyul,” curated by Tominga O’Donnell at the Munch Museum. It’s Hankyul’s most complex exhibition to date: He’ll take over the museum’s expansive 10th floor, significantly scaling his work via an immersive installation that will hang from the ceiling and span over 16 feet.
B. 1985, San Miguel de Tucumán, Argentina. Lives and works in Lisbon.
Gabriel Chaile’s sculptures draw on Indigenous knowledge systems, pre-Columbian architecture, and communal rituals. These interests often manifest in large-scale clay and adobe forms that resemble vessels, bodies, or dwellings. Chaile’s work collapses distinctions between sculpture and shelter, foregrounding ideas of care, ancestry, and collective memory.
The Argentine artist has gained steady international acclaim in recent years. In 2022, his work was included in the Venice Biennale, followed by a public commission on the High Line that opened in 2023. Last year, Chaile opened his first New York solo show at Marianne Boesky Gallery, which included a series of large-scale adobe sculptures, photographs, and drawings inspired by the artist’s experiences during a No Kings Day protest in Montana.
In April, Chaile will open his first major solo show in London at Whitechapel Gallery. Chaile is extending his interest in community and Indigenous practices, shifting his lens to the cultural and historical legacy of London’s East End, where the gallery is located.
B. 1987, Merate, Italy. Lives and works in Milan.
Untitled, 2019
Benni Bosetto
Palazzo Monti
Italian artist Benni Bosetto draws inspiration from literature, cinema, mythology, and psychoanalysis to explore the myriad forces that shape identity and ideas about the body. She makes dense, finely drawn compositions, while a restrained grayscale palette often pervades her expansive, multifaceted practice: Sculpture, installation, and performance are also key to her work.
For her first major institutional solo show, at Pirelli HangarBicocca in Milan, Bosetto will reimagine the gallery space as a domestic interior that blurs the public and private. The exhibition is inspired by Daphne du Maurier’s 1938 psychological thriller Rebecca, in which a wealthy man’s second wife is haunted by her new home and the mysteries surrounding her deceased predecessor. Bosetto’s installation will immerse visitors in a dreamlike setting, inviting them to consider their own relationship to identity, care, and intimacy.
Pat Oleszko
B. 1947, Detroit. Lives and works in New York.
In 2026, Pat Oleszko gets a long-overdue institutional reckoning. The 78-year-old pioneer of feminist performance and sculpture blends humor, confrontation, and bodily exaggeration to challenge gender norms and institutional authority. Both the artist and her work are easily recognizable: Oleszko often wears playful outfits that feature cartoonish, inflatable breasts and exuberant hats. Indeed, costume and quirky, inflatable figures have become Oleszko’s signatures. Over the last 50 years, the artist has steadily earned critical regard and staged performances and presentations at major museums like MoMA, but she’s remained relatively under the radar.
In 2024, New York’s David Peter Francis gallery staged Oleszko’s first New York solo show in nearly 25 years. The next year, they announced their representation of the artist and mounted a solo presentation of her work at Art Basel Miami Beach. It memorably included 13-foot inflatable legs and feet inspired by the Wicked Witch of the East from “The Wizard of Oz.” In 2026, Oleszko will be included in the Whitney Biennial and in “Fool Disclosure” at SculptureCenter, her first New York solo exhibition in 35 years. These milestones will honor her influence and reintroduce her radical practice to contemporary audiences.
B. 1991, Santiago. Lives and works in Santiago.
Image weaver, Image technologies , 2024
Seba Calfuqueo
Galeria Marília Razuk
Seba Calfuqueo draws on her Mapuche cultural heritage and trans identity to confront extraction, colonial violence, and gendered power structures. She uses her body as a site of resistance and transformation throughout her performances, films, ceramics, and installations. Water, and the sacred bodies that carry it, is a recurring motif.
2024 was a big year for the artist. She mounted a solo presentation at the New Museum and participated in the Whitney Biennial and Venice Biennale. TRAY TRAY KO (2022), her video installation at the Whitney, depicted Calfuqueo carrying a long, blue cloth through a river and into a waterfall, underscoring the environment’s immense power.
In October 2026, Calfuqueo’s first European solo exhibition, “CAUTÍN,” will open at the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid. Her installation will feature pottery, large-format paintings, videos, and performance. All draw inspiration from the Cautín River in Chile, which has become emblematic of colonial extraction: The Mapuche fight to protect their land as the Chilean state diverts their water source for irrigation and hydroelectric developments. Throughout all this work, Calfuqueo centers Indigenous knowledge and promotes environmental justice and feminism through a First Nations perspective.
B. 1986, Los Angeles. Lives and works in Chicago.
Flowers, 2020
Tony Lewis
MASSIMODECARLO
Tony Lewis uses graphite powder to create large-scale, often monochromatic drawings that center on Black linguistic traditions and consider the relationship between visual art and language. His practice also includes collages, digital works, and installations that also exemplify the artist’s pared-down, typographic style: Lewis repeats, distorts, and absents symbols like letters in his larger compositions, which expose how social and political structures shape meaning. Olney Gleason announced their representation of the artist last year. In May, Lewis will open his first New York solo show with the gallery. The exhibition will include new bodies of work that continue the artist’s investigations of race, politics, and systems of power.
B. 1995, Chippenham, U.K. Lives and works in London.
London-based artist Nat Faulkner works at the intersection of photography and sculpture with an emphasis on experimentation. Rather than treating photography as a tool for representation, Faulkner focuses on its material conditions—light, chemistry, time, and chance. He transforms the darkroom itself into an active site of production and discovery.
Faulkner’s works include large-scale analogue prints, sculptural objects, and installations that foreground the physical residues of photographic processes, such as silver-rich surfaces and chemically altered materials. By reimagining traditional processes like “silvering” (in which metallic silver oxidizes to create a shiny haze), Faulkner pushes the boundaries of his medium.
Faulkner has enjoyed recent exhibitions in London, Milan, and New York. In 2024, he won the Camden Art Centre Emerging Artist Prize at Frieze London for his presentation with London-based gallery Brunette Coleman. The prize culminates in Faulkner’s first U.K. institutional solo exhibition at Camden Art Centre this January. Titled “Strong Water,” the show features new work that further explores the process and materials of photographic production.
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