This month, Artsy launches Foundations, a curated showcase highlighting artists at the beginning of their careers. With over 250 artists from 85 galleries from around the world, there’s a wealth of names to watch, making this the perfect chance to discover fresh voices and buy fine art at an accessible price.
At Artsy, we’ve been combing the works in Foundations for our favorites. From an Indian portrait painter to an Icelandic textile artist, we selected seven that stood out.
Kwaku Osei Owusu Achim
B. 1991, Kwahu, Ghana. Lives and works in Accra, Ghana.
Works available at: Galerie REVEL
Silent Gathering , 2023
KWAKU OSEI OWUSU ACHIM
Galerie REVEL
Talking to the moon again, 2024
KWAKU OSEI OWUSU ACHIM
Galerie REVEL
Kwaku Osei Owusu Achim’s otherworldly compositions feature full moons and swirling bodies of water, exploring themes of spirituality. In Achim’s Foundations presentation with Galerie REVEL, the Accra-based artist examines how ritual can forge connections between community and everyday life through paintings inspired by West African literature.
Using drawing as a starting point, Achim applies bold brushwork and layers his canvases to create dreamlike oil paintings. The opaque skies of Silent Gathering (2023) provide an uncanny backdrop for vibrant silhouetted figures that huddle together, communicating through gesture and hand motions. Elongated arms sprouting from their heads suggest hybrid forms. With palms positioned like antennae, Achim’s subjects appear to perform a sacred ritual.
The artist also explores storytelling through language, incorporating the Ghanaian dialect, Akan, into his artwork titles. For instance, Odo koma (2023), which derives from “Odomankoma” (meaning “God” in Akan), depicts figures holding hands while praying in a pool of water. Through religious imagery, Achim references Ghanaian mythology, blurring the lines between the living and the spiritual.
Achim studied medical data at Yeshua Institute of Technology before pursuing a career in art. In 2024, he mounted a solo exhibition with Omenai Gallery in Chicago. His work has also been featured in group exhibitions at Mitochondria, Gallery 1957, and Chilli Art Projects, among others.
—Adeola Gay, Senior Curatorial Manager
Jen O’Farrell
B. 1990, Liverpool, England. Lives and works in London.
Works available at: NEVEN
Consciously Unconscious, 2024
Jen O'Farrell
NEVEN
Refractions II, 2024
Jen O'Farrell
NEVEN
Soil, resin, and charcoal made from bamboo all feature in the abstract wall works of London-based artist Jen O’Farrell. At Foundations 2025, her textural, resin-covered pieces are on view with tastemaking East London gallery NEVEN. In Consciously Unconscious (2024), flaky golden fragments of soil and paint pigments are preserved in a smooth yellow surface and surrounded by a beautiful, grid-like walnut frame. Meanwhile, the dark, sticky-seeming surface of Refractions II (2024) is encased by a burned-out, black frame.
These works are typical of the artist’s abstract style, which evokes the raw texture of both wild and urban landscapes. Unruly splotches flicker across these works, suggesting geological formations, or perhaps fossils. For her works in Foundations, O’Farrell was inspired by an artist residency she completed in the Atacama Desert in Chile, where she sourced the bioresin used in Consciously Unconscious. Her work, with its rough textures and edges, also invokes urban decay, serving as a reminder of industrialization’s ties to the extraction of resources. You can also feel the influence of land art, whose practitioners used natural processes and materials to create work about the environment.
O’Farrell has exhibited across London at museums including South London Gallery and the V&A Museum, and at galleries including Nicoletti Contemporary, Niru Ratnam, and NEVEN.
—Josie Thaddeus-Johns, Senior Editor
Kuldeep Singh
B. 1984, India. Lives and works in New York.
Works available at: Aicon Contemporary
Cuddling the Land in Raag Marwa, 2024
Kuldeep Singh
Aicon Contemporary
In Cuddling the Land in Raag Marwa (2024), a semi-abstract figure appears to float or recline in an ambiguous, chalky background. It’s one of two paintings by Indian artist Kuldeep Singh on view as part of Aicon Contemporary’s Foundations presentation. Loosely rendered with expressive, gestural brushstrokes, the figure’s contours blend into the surrounding patches of colors, creating a sense of intimacy and vulnerability.
The work is typical of Singh’s practice, which draws on “a sacred working knowledge of countless bygone generations,” as the artist shared on his website. Indeed, Singh spent a decade training intensively in Indian classical dance, specifically the style of Odissi. The discipline dates back more than two millennia and emphasizes fluidity, grace, and spirituality—qualities that permeate his paintings, which often focus on queer male figures. He also draws on historical Ragmala miniature paintings that depict Indian musical modes or “ragas.”
Singh received his MFA in painting and intermedia at the University of Iowa in 2015. Recent solo shows include “Men music, and Hills” at Seattle’s Sand Point Art Gallery and “Nakhra: Towards Sacred Sensuality” at Mumbai’s Chermould CoLab.
—Arun Kakar, Senior Art Market Editor
Rebekah Rubalcava
B. 1996, La Jolla, California. Lives and works in Atlanta.
Works available at: ALLGORITHIM
Kindred, 2024
Rebekah Rubalcava
ALLGORITHIM
Paired, 2024
Rebekah Rubalcava
Wolfgang Gallery
There’s an ominous tinge to Rebekah Rubalcava’s seductive paintings—a sense of glamour mixed with decay. Threats loom over her pastoral scenes of young, frolicking women in varying states of undress: Swarms of ants descend on picnics, and tornados tear through dark skies. A self-taught painter, Rubalcava explores sexuality, spirituality, and the subconscious mind through her practice, often subverting symbols from her evangelical Christian upbringing to unsettle notions of feminine purity.
Recently, Rubalcava’s work has become increasingly surreal, as exemplified by Kindred (2024). Included in ALLGORITHIM’s group presentation at Foundations, the painting features a pair of irises emerging from a shadowy landscape that’s seemingly engulfed in pink flames. The title suggests a deep spiritual bond, while the fiery imagery evokes both the beauty and the danger that accompanies such close relationships.
Rubalcava has exhibited in Los Angeles, London, and Shanghai, in group and solo shows with galleries including Soho Revue and Rusha & Co.
—Olivia Horn, Managing Editor
Sanoh Lee
B. 1996, Seoul. Lives and works in Seoul.
Works available at: drawingRoom
정지비행 Hovering, 2025
Sanoh Lee
drawingRoom
In Hovering (2025), dozens of ceramic wings burst outward from a central panel etched with the image of a single bird in flight. This is one of 10 works featured in Sanoh Lee’s presentation with drawingRoom for Foundations 2025. The bronze-toned wings radiate in all directions—some outstretched, others mid-fold—creating the impression of a frenzied flock frozen in motion, as if orbiting or protecting the gliding central figure.
Birds are often the focus of the Korean artist’s works. Wings, in particular, recur across her drawings and sculptures, acting as symbols of violent yet graceful transformation. Blood Feather (2025), a composition in colored pencil, watercolor, ink, pastel, and pigment on paper, features ripples with feathered arcs and gossamer curves. It evokes a flock of doves in movement, which the artist uses as a “a symbol of weightlessness and transformation.”
“I see a bird going through a process of pausing and regeneration in the cycle of life as a being symbolizing a kind of non-gravity, whose existence has become as light as a feather,” the artist wrote on Instagram.
Lee earned her MFA in ceramic craft from Seoul National University of Science and Technology and her BFA in Korean painting from Sejong University. Her recent solo exhibitions in Seoul include “Eclipse Plumage” at drawingRoom and “Island of Pale Languages” at Gallery Moomok.
—Maxwell Rabb, Staff Writer
Vanessa Valero
B. 1985, Bogotá. Lives and works in Bogotá.Works available at: Milk Moon
There is No Mountain Peak without the Bottom, 2025
Vanessa Valero
Milk Moon
Years spent living in Finland and Iceland inspired Colombian artist Vanessa Valero’s relationship to the environment. In particular, the Nordic region taught her to observe nature more closely, helping her to translate its moods into material form. For instance, Invisible Mountains (2025)—part of the artist’s Foundations 2025 presentation with Milk Moon—is made from layered, hand-tufted wool yarn arranged in horizontal bands that ripple across the surface. These waving bands shift in texture and color, forming a stylized mountain range in soft gradients of rose, ochre, moss, violet, and midnight blue.
Much of Valero’s work explores texture and depth, using the sculptural qualities of fiber to evoke natural phenomena. While Invisible Mountains depicts its titular peaks, Last Light (2024), also part of her presentation, takes a more abstract approach. The field of hand-tufted blue yarn transitions into a dramatic cascade of vivid orange hand-knotted tassels—perhaps evoking the fleeting moment when sunlight breaks against the horizon.
Valero earned a design degree from Los Andes University in 2010, then moved to the Nordic region to study textiles more deeply. An internship in Reykjavik introduced her to Icelandic fiber traditions, the subject of her master’s thesis at Aalto University in Finland.
—M.R.
Kelly Tapia-Chuning
B. 1997, California. Lives and works in Utah and Montana.
Works available at: Material
Visions of a Pink Sky, 2025
Kelly Tapia-Chuning
Material
Dancing Moon, 2025
Kelly Tapia-Chuning
Material
Serape blankets have a complicated history. These vibrant, finely woven textiles, often worn as cloaks or ponchos, originate in Indigenous communities of northern Mexico but reflect European influence. They also became a Mexican national symbol following the country’s revolution in the early 20th century. For Xicana artist Kelly Tapia-Chuning, serapes are a symbol of her mestizo identity, which she explores in her practice by dismantling these textiles.
In her works on view in Foundations with Material, the colorful weft threads are missing in parts, leaving behind diamond patterns strung together by only the undyed warp strands. These blank threads are pulled taut and fixed with copper nails, or sometimes braided together like hair, as in Visions of a Pink Sky (2025). By deconstructing the serapes, the artist explains in her statement, she intends to “signal a dismantling of the systems within colonial power structures.” The unraveled blanket appears vulnerable but also firm, turned into a bold abstract shape through the fibers’ tension.
Tapia-Chuning holds an MFA from the Cranbrook Academy of Art and received CAA’s 2023 Visual Arts Fellowship. She has exhibited with galleries across the U.S. including Gavlak in Los Angeles, Material in Salt Lake City, and Eric Firestone Gallery in New York.
—J.T-J
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