10 Figurative Artists to Watch This Month

Ten painters. Ten very different versions of the figure. Here's who's worth following this month.

Alvin Ong

Ong was born in 1988 in Singapore and holds a BA from the Ruskin School of Art, Oxford, and an MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art, London. His paintings pull from both Western and Eastern art history, placing figures in fragmented scenes touching on queer intimacy, memory, and desire. His work has been shown at the Singapore Art Museum and the National Portrait Gallery in London, and sits in the collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum and the X Museum in Beijing.

Jess Valice

Valice was studying neuroscience in Santa Barbara when she switched paths to painting, three years into the degree. Born in 1996 in the San Fernando Valley, she paints huge, heavy-lidded eyes and oversized, mismatched ears, features exaggerated enough to read as self-caricature. She's shown with Carl Kostyál in London and Milan, and with Almine Rech in New York and Paris. Photo courtesy of the artist and Carl Kostyál.

Kate Meissner

Meissner earned her MFA in painting from Yale in 2021 and now works out of Los Angeles. Her oil paintings borrow from BDSM aesthetics, bodies posed and contorted under compressed, cinematic light. She's represented by Lyles & King in New York, and her work is held in the collections of the Denver Art Museum and the Xiao Museum of Contemporary Art in China.

Hayley Chiu

Born in 2001 and raised in Markham, Ontario, to parents who immigrated from Hong Kong, Chiu graduated from OCAD University in 2023 with the program medal. Her paintings layer realism with fable-like imagery drawn from her family's Hong Kong heritage, working through inherited memory and the search for home. She's shown with Moosey in Norwich and held two solo exhibitions in Toronto.

Sébastien Nôtre

Nôtre trained as a fashion designer at Central Saint Martins in London before a move to Milan redirected him toward painting instead. The French artist now works from his home studio there, and had his exhibition "Fugues" at Moosey in Norwich this past year.

Giulia Caliò

Born in Syracuse in 1988, Caliò studied Illustration and Comics at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna, where she still runs her own studio. Her paintings return often to mermaids, mythical creatures, and symbolic female figures, drawing on Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, and the Pre-Raphaelites.

Sasha Gordon

Gordon graduated from RISD in 2020 and, at 26, became the youngest artist on David Zwirner's roster when the gallery announced her co-representation in 2024. She paints her own likeness almost exclusively, rendered in electric color through layers of translucent oil, working through her experience as a biracial, queer woman. Her work sits in the Whitney, the Brooklyn Museum, and LACMA.

Juan de la Rica

De la Rica was born in Bilbao in 1979 and graduated from the University of the Basque Country in 2007. He paints in flat, saturated colors and clean lines, closer to Pop Art and comics than to traditional portraiture, applying that style to subjects that range from still life to mythology.

Elizabeth Glaessner

Glaessner earned her MFA from the New York Academy of Art in 2013 and has shown four solo exhibitions with P·P·O·W since 2014. She pours pigment and layers oil paint to build amorphous, half-formed bodies, figures that look mid-transformation, closer to Symbolist painters like Munch and Redon than to any single mythology.

Nicasio Fernandez

Born in 1993 in Yonkers, New York, Fernandez grew up on cartoons, an influence still visible in his thick, exaggerated figures in warm magentas and glowing oranges. He cites Philip Guston, Peter Saul, and Kerry James Marshall among his influences, and leans on dark humor to carry paintings about labor, anxiety, and not belonging.

Who else should we be watching?

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