One of the biggest myths about buying art is that you have to be a millionaire to do it. At Foundations 2025, Artsy’s curated showcase of emerging artists from around the world, you’ll find work that’s not only original and inspiring, but actually within reach. These aren’t posters or prints—they’re one-of-a-kind pieces by rising talents who are starting to make their mark.
Here, our editorial team has picked the artworks at affordable price points—from just $650 to $2,200—that we can’t stop thinking about. For us, they produced an immediate spark: something personal and resonant.
If you’re looking to start your collection—or add a new piece that just gets you—this is the place to begin.
Under $1,000
Mara Faúndez
Resaca, 2025
Presented by Isabel Croxatto Galería
Price: $650
Resaca, 2025
Mara Faúndez
Isabel Croxatto Galería
As someone who goes through roughly a carton of eggs a week and has a slight weakness for whimsy, I was immediately taken with Resaca by Chilean artist Mara Faúndez, on view as part of Isabel Croxatto Galería’s Foundations presentation. The pair of fried eggs appear to be sharing an exchange: One yolk looks cheekily mischievous, with a raised brow and sly smirk, while the other looks worried, almost like it’s just realized it’s sitting in a frying pan.
Faúndez’s brushstrokes are luscious and textured, giving the eggs a surreal, almost dreamlike quality. The pan’s soft curves and the wooden grain of the tabletop it sits on add warmth and intimacy, creating the impression of a secret conversation between breakfast items. This isn’t just food—it’s storytelling on a skillet, and I’d hang this on my kitchen wall in a heartbeat.
—Arun Kakar, Senior Art Market Editor
Nandini Bagla Chirimar
Remnants of Sound, 2019
Presented by Aicon Contemporary
Price: $800
Remnants of Sound, 2019
Nandini Bagla Chirimar
Aicon Contemporary
At first glance, Remnants of Sound looks like a black-and-white photograph. Then, as you look closer, you begin noticing the shading, the blurred edges, the subtle imperfections of an etching. To me, this work embodies the feeling of shuffling through old memories—grasping at silhouettes, sounds, and feelings—and realizing reality has begun to blend with fiction. Nandini Bagla Chirimar’s slow, detailed practice deliberately evokes the process of forgetting: that drawn out sensation of grief and relief as new details come into focus. The top layer is pen on paper—delicate, ephemeral—which is mounted onto stone, something eternal. I love it because it’s a monument to memory: imperfect, simultaneously heavy and light.
—Sydney Gelman, Copywriter
Louisa Berger
First Train Home, 2025
Presented by Chilli Art Projects
Price: £700
First Train Home, 2025
Louisa Berger
Chilli Art Projects
At first glance, I had no idea what was depicted in this painting by Swiss artist Louisa Berger. The work consists of a dusky background on a small woven canvas, with two white dots and a pale zigzag form at the bottom. But reading the title, First Train Home, made it clear that those white halos reference headlamps.
For me, the first train of the day has only ever come at the end of a long night. As the sun rises, feet drag as hours of dancing, walking, and socializing all sink in. The train lights are both a warning and graceful herald, the signal of an impending return to reality. When I was younger (and, like Berger, lived in London, where many trains don’t run overnight), these “first train” nights used to happen all the time. Now, as they become ever-rarer occurrences in my life, I relish this tiny, mysterious little monument to staying out way too late.
—Josie Thaddeus-Johns, Senior Editor
Under $2,500
Huang Zhe 黄喆
One’s desire1, 2025
Presented by AAIE Center for Contemporary Art
Price: €1,100
One’s desire1, 2025
Huang Zhe 黄喆
AAIE Center for Contemporary Art
I tend to lean towards art that turns psychological turmoil into something physical. Recently, I read Clarice Lispector’s The Passion According to G.H., in which an existential crisis unfolds through a visceral encounter with a cockroach. That moment—when abstract dread becomes something tactile and unavoidable—feels like the tension in Huang Zhe’s One’s desire1.
In this painting, a figure, depicted in a hazy, verdant palette, wrestles with a mystical plume of smoke that’s taken on a physical form. Perhaps the smoke represents an inner demon, a pervading anxiety, or a vanishing memory. Perhaps it’s simply representative of fighting off one’s inner desires (as the name suggests). I’d love for this little one-foot-by-one painting to live above my desk, a reminder that these fleeting thoughts—or worries—are in my own hands.
—Maxwell Rabb, Staff Writer
Park Sebin
It was not the light that was hiding, 2024
Presented by Gallery Playlist
Price: $1,200
It was not the light that was hiding, 2024
Park Sebin
Gallery Playlist
I’ve always been drawn to the titles of artworks: They tell a story much like a song or album title. It was not the light that was hiding is no different, suggesting that the subject does not want to be seen by the viewer, adding a layer of intrigue. The scene hints at a hidden narrative, revealing only a glimpse of a hand behind a curtain, the rest of the figure almost completely obscured by shadows. Park Sebin’s paintings tend to focus on tiny details—the wings of a butterfly in Wonder of You 1 (2024) or the stillness of an empty room in Imagine 2 (2023). Awash with soft green hues of mineral pigment and gouache, Park’s mysterious window scene gives me the feeling of opening a book in the middle of a chapter. I would likely hang this in my living room near a window. There’s something quite meta about a painting of a home within a home.
—Adeola Gay, Senior Curatorial Manager
Phuong Nguyen
Planche LXIV, 2024
Presented by Tian Contemporain
Price: $2,200
Planche LXIV, 2024
Phuong Nguyen
TIAN Contemporain
There’s a high-low dichotomy at play in Phuong Nguyen’s Planche LXIV that I love. The central element of the work is a luxe oil-on-panel still life—the sort of thing you might expect to see in an opulent gold frame. Instead, the artist bound it to a rugged bit of carved wood with plastic twine and dollar-store trinkets. Nguyen, who was born in Canada to Vietnamese refugees, is interested in subverting the fetishization of East Asian cultural products within Western art history, and this DIY treatment is in line with that aim. So too are the details of the still life itself: It features sapphire brocade and burning lotus candles in ceramic bowls, but the decadence starts to disintegrate when you notice the cracks in the china and the way the candle wicks sadly sag.
One other thing I love, practically speaking: the artist-made frame. They never tell you this, but getting your artwork framed can sometimes cost as much as the art itself. Nguyen’s frame both undergirds the work—and spares you the trouble.
—Olivia Horn, Managing Editor
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