Monday, January 19, 2026

5 Artists on Our Radar This January https://ift.tt/5ShG8yR

“Artists on Our Radar” is a monthly series focused on five artists who have our attention. Utilizing our art expertise and Artsy data, we’ve determined which artists made an impact this past month through new gallery representation, exhibitions, auctions, art fairs, or fresh works on Artsy.


Elladj Lincy Deloumeaux

B. 1995, Les Abymes, Guadeloupe. Lives and works in Paris.

Sous la brise de Basse-Terre, 2025
Elladj Lincy Deloumeaux
Loft Art Gallery

La femme et le portrait, 2025
Elladj Lincy Deloumeaux
Loft Art Gallery

Elladj Lincy Deloumeaux paints solitary figures in quiet, sun-soaked moments of reflection, using everyday scenes to explore perception and identity. He was born in Guadeloupe and raised in France from the age of eight. This experience of displacement has fueled Deloumeaux’s ongoing engagement with his heritage—which he once described to Shadowplay Magazine as “an inexhaustible source” of inspiration.

A selection of his latest works is featured in Loft Art Gallery’s current group show in Casablanca, Morocco, “Painting in the Exercise of Art.” The painting Sous la brise de Basse-Terre (2025) features a Black woman in a white robe moving her curtains aside to let sunlight in, illuminating the interior’s yellow and orange hues. The contemplative moment reflects the artist’s ongoing interest in how everyday life reveals itself in brief, luminous intervals. His figures often examine something or someone just out of sight, as seen in Souvenir suspendu (2025), where a similarly dressed woman sits on a windowsill and looks towards another figure adjusting the curtains on the other side of the room. From these small acts of observing, rich storytelling unravels.

Deloumeaux graduated with a National Higher Diploma from the National Supérieur d’Art Plastique in 2023 and a diplôme professionnel from Paris’s École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts. He will present a solo show at Morocco’s Musée de la Parure de Marrakech in 2026. He has also had solo exhibitions at Abidjan’s Galerie Cécile Fakhoury in 2024 and Perrotin Dubai in 2023.

—Maxwell Rabb


Xiaochi Dong

B. 1993, Shanghai. Lives and works in London and Shanghai.

Green Cube, 2025
Xiaochi Dong
Albion Jeune

In Xiaochi Dong’s paintings, nature is a fascinating enigma, even when it’s tamed. Trained in classical Chinese painting, Dong creates intimate works that feel cultivated rather than wild, drawing on the precise nature of Asian horticulture practices. Born in 1993, the London-and-Shanghai–based artist builds soft, humid-looking surfaces from materials such as soil, moss, ink, and gesso, evoking gardens, terrariums, and carefully maintained miniature ecosystems.

Dong often uses traditional brush techniques from Chinese painting—textured strokes and small dotted marks that echo rock, foliage, and organic growth—but applies them to close-up scenes instead of panoramic landscapes.

His current two-person exhibition, “The Garden and The Gaze” with Wen Feiyi at Albion Jeune in London (on view through January 31st) uses precise dimensions drawn from sites like Kew Gardens’s Waterlily House and Derek Jarman’s Prospect Cottage to anchor these atmospheric works in real places.

He received BA and MA degrees in Chinese painting from Shanghai Academy of Fine Arts before receiving an MA from the Royal College of Art in London in 2023. Since then, his work has been gaining further attention internationally, with exhibitions in 2024 at Tank Shanghai and Sherbet Green in London.

—Josie Thaddeus-Johns


Bobbye Fermie

B. 1990, Amsterdam. Lives and works in London.

Growth, 2025
Bobbye Fermie
Wilder Gallery

Common Ground, 2025
Bobbye Fermie
Wilder Gallery

In Bobbye Fermie’s dreamlike watercolors and intricate collages, a range of figures and objects inhabit ambiguous interior spaces. Her latest series of paintings, created during a period of profound loss, are currently featured in “Every Time A Bird Sings,” her solo exhibition on view at London’s Wilder Gallery. In the works, the home becomes an internal landscape of grief and healing.

In A Moment of Clarity (2025), for instance, an interior scene of what could be a kitchen is rendered in a muted, near-monochrome palette. The pigment’s translucency, softness, and airiness convey fragility and vulnerability. In such works, the boundaries between the physical structure of a room and the psychological state of the inhabitant converge; what we see is shaped by both presence and memory.

Fermie graduated with a BA degree in fine arts from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp in 2014 and a postgraduate diploma from the Royal Drawing School in 2015. “Every Time A Bird Sings” is her fourth solo show with Wilder Gallery. She has also exhibited in group presentations at galleries including Oliver Gallery and 155A Gallery.

—Arun Kakar


Julia Kowalska

B. 1998, Radom, Poland. Lives and works in Warsaw.

Awareness, 2025
Julia Kowalska
G Gallery

Julia Kowalska paints figures that feel half-remembered, as if they’ve drifted in from a dream. Built from soft washes of oil paint, her protagonists occupy muted, nondescript spaces where bodies touch, rest, entwine, and stare. These intimate scenes often center women’s experiences and their dynamics with one another. Kowalska’s works surface moments of emotional and bodily uncertainty; her imagery can feel seductive one moment and haunting the next.

Kowalska’s paintings are currently included in “Unseen Relations” at G Gallery in Seoul, a group show focused on intimacy, desire, and emotional tension. It follows a series of Kowalska’s recent exhibitions across Europe, including a two-artist show with Natalia Gonzalez-Martin last February at Coulisse Gallery in Sweden, where her work explored female desire and vulnerability.

She received her MFA in painting from the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw in 2022. Her work has been shown internationally in Poland, the U.S., and South Korea.

—Casey Lesser


Rachel MacFarlane

B. 1986, Scarborough, Canada. Lives and works in New York.

Bridge, 2026
Rachel MacFarlane
Hollis Taggart

Tongues of Fire, 2025
Rachel MacFarlane
Hollis Taggart

Rachel MacFarlane paints fantastical visions of plants and landscapes that feel lifted from speculative fiction. Before she begins painting, MacFarlane builds small paper constructions that distill the emotional forms of plants and places, using memory as a guide. The finished works glow with slick brushstrokes and electric hues of magenta, amber, orange, teal, and violet, drawing viewers into environments that feel at once lush and uncanny.

This January, MacFarlane presents a new solo show, “Afterlight,” at Hollis Taggart’s downtown New York space. In this new body of work, climate change seeps into that sense of uncanniness: plants and skies appear sunstruck and overheated; the land appears to be under pressure. Many of the plants are drawn from recent experiences, including several inspired by real species she encountered during a research trip to Spain.

MacFarlane earned an MFA from Rutgers University in 2016 and a BFA from OCAD University in 2008. She has also had solo exhibitions at Nicholas Metivier Gallery, Norberg Hall Gallery, the MacLaren Art Centre, and Mason Gross Gallery at Rutgers University.

—C.L.



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