Fall is the art world’s most important season. Major museums and galleries across the globe open shows and commissions by artists whose visions (and markets) they believe in. It’s a great time to spot exciting new directions in both creative practices and the commercial side of things.
This fall, art history and contemporary practice collide as the season’s breakout artists quote some of the world’s most famous canvases. In new shows opening this fall, there are artists giving a queer spin to Picasso, inserting Black figures into compositions by Winslow Homer and John Singer Sargent, and reenvisioning Old Masters scenes in Compton.
Art history has always progressed via a series of artists reacting to and against their predecessors. Here, they’re challenging the canon’s omissions of different types of bodies and love stories—and its strict approach to medium. One artist unites basket weaving and ceramics. Others rethink the boundaries between the body and its adornments.
Altogether, this season’s breakout artists allow us to see ourselves anew, and to reframe the stories we’ve told about art and belonging. Here are nine to watch out for.
Louis Fratino
B. 1993, Annapolis, Maryland. Lives and works in New York.
Few artists in their early thirties get a two-person show with a modernist master; this past summer, painter Louis Fratino shared exhibition billing with Henri Matisse. The presentation, “Fratino and Matisse: To See This Light Again,” at the Baltimore Museum of Art, generated momentum for Fratino’s first show with David Zwirner, which opens at the gallery’s London outpost on September 18th. Zwirner announced representation of Fratino last year, and this will be his first solo show since.
Fratino has earned acclaim for his soulful paintings of male figures and queer spaces. The artist synthesizes art historical styles (Picasso, Matisse, the unsung British painter Christopher Wood) as he creates lush, intimate scenes of men in domestic, communal, and outdoor settings—and in bed.
Reggie Burrows Hodges
B. 1965, Compton, California. Lives and works in the Bay Area.
Reggie Burrows Hodges has lived an itinerant life, making homes for himself in New York, Malta, Angola, Canada, Vermont, the Bay Area, and Maine. Now, the Compton-born painter gets a grand homecoming with three presentations across Los Angeles. On October 20th, the J. Paul Getty Museum opens “A Theater of Passions,” the California African American Museum debuts “A Theater of Miracles,” and Art + Practice (painter Mark Bradford’s nonprofit space) inaugurates “A Theater of Dreams.” The museum shows are also Hodges’s local institutional debut.
For the roving artist, Blackness is a literal foundation, the ground to which he returns: He starts each piece by coating canvas or linen with a layer of black paint, then working over the surface with acrylic and pastel. His figures remain dark and solid, outlined or otherwise contained by the artist’s fields of color. Hodges’s scenes span landscapes, portraits, and interiors, while art historical references from Jacob Lawrence to Caravaggio lend his work erudition and breadth.
At the Getty, Hodges will respond directly to the museum’s collection of Old Master paintings by Artemisia Gentileschi and her father Orazio, which will hang alongside the artist’s contemporary interpretations.
Anina Major
B. 1981, Nassau, the Bahamas. Lives and works in Los Angeles.
Earlier this year, Anina Major won a coveted, unrestricted $50,000 grant from United States Artists for her work in craft. Her sculptures unite elements of two vernacular forms: ceramics and basket weaving. The artist treats clay like rattan and other fibers as she hand-weaves their strips into sturdy vessels. Her process draws on her own experience of migration; she and her work reject hard boundaries (art vs. craft, one medium vs. another, this country vs. that) in favor of fluidity and creation.
Given her archipelago origins, it’s no surprise that Major’s sculptures often bring in aquatic elements—she’s previously incorporated sea sponge, glass, and salt into her work. For her inaugural U.S. solo show, “The Sacred Mangrove,” opening October 1st at the Pérez Art Museum Miami, the artist will create an installation featuring a crushed conch shell path that leads through her work and brings viewers into a reimagining of the Caribbean landscape she once called home.
Roméo Mivekannin
B. 1986, Bouaké, Ivory Coast. Lives and works between Toulouse, France, and Cotonou, Benin.
Painter Roméo Mivekannin descends from Benin royalty and confronts the esteemed and sorrowful history of this lineage throughout his work. His great-great-grandfather, King Behanzin, was on the throne in West Africa at the end of the 19th century when the French invaded and looted his Kingdom of Dahomey (not to be confused with the Kingdom of Benin, which the British invaded and looted around the same time). The country’s treasures have only gradually been restored.
Mivekannin found his own subject matter after a visit to a 2019 show on Black models in French painting at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. He began painting his ancestors on bedsheets dipped in voodoo potions and stitched together. Sometimes, he inserted them into art historical scenes, which has become a trademark of his work. Over the past decade, he’s mounted over a dozen solo shows throughout Europe, remaking compositions by Edward Hopper, Gustave Caillebotte, and Francisco de Zurbarán while inserting Black figures in place of their white subjects.
On September 9th, Mivekannin opens “Porteurs de feu (Bearers of Fire),” his U.S. debut solo at Southern Guild. The artist is reworking compositions with a special connection to the city: a seafaring scene by Winslow Homer, a society portrait by John Singer Sargent, and Charles C. Ebbets’s famous photograph of construction workers eating on a skyscraper’s steel beam. These works ask viewers to consider how legacies of slavery and subjugation sit in relation to histories of art, architecture, and the city at large.
Bea Scaccia
B. 1978, Veroli, Italy. Lives and works in New York.
Bea Scaccia’s paintings abound with curling tendrils, beaded strands, gold chains, red high heels, and other markers of feminine adornment. These subjects appear woven together into faceless, sculptural forms that evoke fairytale creatures, as if a tornado hit a costume closet.
On September 22nd, Gagosian will open “Groomed,” its debut show of Scaccia’s work, curated by famed Italian art curator Francesco Bonami. A new diptych, Heels over Head—or Pillow Talk (2026), parodies the odalisque from Édouard Manet’s Olympia (1863), while another reconsiders a frequent Rococo subject: girls reading in their boudoirs.
Firenze Lai
B. 1984, Hong Kong. Lives and works in London.
While most of the artists on this list metabolize specific art historical styles and even discrete compositions, Firenze Lai turns her gaze inward. The Hong Kong–based artist, who lives and works in London, creates oil paintings featuring haunting figures who sit on urban benches and melt into psychedelic landscapes. Esoteric themes evoking the unconscious guide her work.
On October 13th, during Frieze London 2026, Lai will open “North and True North,” her inaugural show with White Cube and her first in the U.K. since the gallery announced its representation in July 2025. The presentation follows solo outings across Hong Kong, China, and France.
Ella Walker
B. 1993, Manchester, United Kingdom. Lives and works in London.
British painter Ella Walker adores illustrated manuscripts as well as the exuberant cinema of Federico Fellini: Both influences are obvious in her paintings. These theatrical works depict women in a flattened manner reminiscent of frescoes from European medieval and Renaissance traditions. Her figures wear flowing gowns and pasties, harlequin patterns, and what appear to be yoga pants. They are, in other words, a unique mix of mythical and contemporary themes, a blend of femininity that’s both out of a storybook and making its own rules.
On September 3rd, the artist opened two site-specific commissions at the Courtauld. They take the form of monumental paintings on linen, coated with acrylic dispersion, pigment, chalk, and pencil. One features an artist’s studio with a few off-kilter elements: a dangling fish, women with differing proportions, and figures in various states of dress. Another depicts a group of women gathered around a ladder. Walker’s engagement with Renaissance art continues, and she looks toward the institution’s own holdings for inspiration: a Sandro Botticelli altarpiece, in particular.
The Courtauld presentation marks a major institutional debut for Walker, followed by Casey Kaplan’s third solo show with the artist, slated to open November 5th in New York.
Emma Prempeh
B. 1996, London. Lives and works in London.
Gold leaf adorns Emma Prempeh’s canvases, glimmering across scenes that honor her Ghanaian and Vincentian heritage along with her upbringing in London.
This mélange of identities finds its counterpart in hazy compositions that embrace the in-between. In One world for another (2026), a new work for Prempeh’s September Paris debut at Perrotin, layers of finely rendered trees, a brushy blue sky, and architectural elements appear drawn from different styles and sites. The brown and green ground, full of drips, appears fluid. Prempeh’s exhibition title, “The Domain of the Stranger,” comes from Lose Your Mother, writer Saidiya Hartman’s 2007 exploration of slavery and the African diaspora, and Prempeh contends with a related sense of place and placelessness.
Blackness and transformation are integral to Prempeh’s scenes, and she’s been celebrated in the U.K., the country she calls home, and abroad. The artist has had solo shows at Tiwani Contemporary in London and Lagos. In 2025, both the Hepworth Wakefield and the Tate acquired her work.
Krzysztof Grzybacz
B. 1993, Poland. Lives and works in Krakow, Poland.
Painter Krzysztof Grzybacz made his London solo debut at Pace on September 3rd with “Haruspex.” The exhibition title references ancient Roman diviners who looked at animal guts to predict the future. The secrets of the body are similarly at issue in Grzybacz’s finely rendered compositions.
In Torso (2026), for example, a recumbent figure wears a white top with a zipper that could double as a rib cage, and the zipped and sutured material beneath simultaneously evokes skin, cloth, and paper. Floral patterns throughout the new works evoke the artist’s past series, and his palette derives from studies of plants and human perception. The Pace debut follows solo exhibitions at Mendes Wood DM in Brussels and Dawid Radziszewski Gallery in Warsaw.
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