Hello dear readers and subscribers.
A new year has arrived again, and with it we would like to extend our best wishes for 2026 to all fellow art enthusiasts.
As is tradition now, we begin the year with spotlighting a group of artists that has truly caught our eye in the past 12 months and that we very much look forward to see what they have in store for us in the new year and how their art and career will continue to unfold.
As a result, this year's Editor's Choice consists of a group of eight artists who have truly been pushing and continuing their career momentum at a moment where most artists see their career plateau or stagnate or consolidate, therefore convincingly narrowing the gap between themselves and the world's leading artists of their generation.
We open our list with Sarah Anstis, who caught my eye for the first time in 2023.
Anstis is a Stockholm-born and Salt Spring Island-raised artist whose practice encompasses painting and site-specific installation.
Using soft pastels and oil paint, she constructs immersive pictorial worlds that draw on the visual language of folklore and dream.
Her works bring together surreal landscapes, deftly lit figures, anthropomorphic flora and recurring symbolic objects.
Sarandt's paintings frequently centre on her recognisable, yet indeterminate figures that move rest, hunt or play within landscapes where human and natural forms are closely entwined.
Her treatment of the nude engages with historical precedent, while reworking it through smooth gradients of color, ambiguous gender and biomorphic features that recall aquatic or amphibian forms found in mythological traditions.
Up next we have Noor Bishouti working across video writing sculpture, printed matter, digital images and works on paper.
Bishouti explores gaps in archival memory and the Western production of knowledge and fantasy to examine how culture is often shaped by dispossession and displacement evident, for example, in her fragile house sculptures or a bed that can be folded into a shipping crate.
Bichouti frequently creates through reconfiguration, omission and speculative association using cutouts collage prints, assemblages and textiles.
By doing so, archival materials are not seen as fixed repositories of truth, but are exposed and used as sites of fragmentation and even contradiction.
Another recent personal coup de coeur is the work of Luz Carabagno, a Venezuelan artist whose practice centers on small-scale oil and linen painting stretched on often irregularly shaped canvases based on freehand contour drawings and constructed by the artist from cut wood and gessoed linen.
Her paintings originate from direct visual references observed in everyday life.
Think of shadows, movements, or worn surfaces.
Yet their sources are gradually released during the painting process, allowing images to form intuitively rather than descriptively.
Image and support integrate into a unified object characterized by pale yet luminous hues, soft transitions and subtle shifts in surface.
The power of Carabagno's work seems to be rooted in the intimacy of painting, material sensitivity and the enigmatic yet sequential rhythm of her compositions.
A rising artist of the past few years who has made it clear that she is here to stay is Joana Dumais.
She is best known for her colorful paintings, working intuitively with oil gouache, collage and more experimental extensions of her painterly practice, including a monumental House of Cards sculpture, in situ installations and even a deck of cards.
Her paintings frequently depict table scenes during or immediately after meals, where the presence of people is implied through remnants such as used plates, spilled wine, leftover food and scattered objects, bringing a contemporary and light-footed perspective to the tradition of still life painting.
However, Dumais refused to become a one-trick pony, despite the widespread popularity of this format, and continued her quest as an artist.
As a result, subjects such as peeping through keyholes, figures drawn from card games and other folkloristic and historical symbols have entered her practice.
Dumais appears to search for the meaning and beauty of life not in grand philosophical narratives, but in the most mundane and everyday events, such as a family dinner or playing cards with friends while chatting about this and that.
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Arguably one of my favorite artists over the past 10 years now is Bent Akermans, who has continued his upward career trajectory into 2026.
His work draws on everyday scenes from his own life, while maintaining a strong sense of narrative ambiguity.
His paintings depict friends and acquaintances, often people who pass through his studio, positioned in carefully directed stances that function less as portraits than as gestures or poses.
These figures appear with familiar yet suddenly estranged situations, where ordinary actions suggest moments unfolding beyond the frame.
Ekermann's practice is shaped by a long-standing engagement with sculpture and history, influenced by a family tradition of artists that includes his father and several generations before him.
Raised among the sculptural works and continuing to work in his grandfather's former studio, He developed an early fascination with monumentality and the narrative qualities of bas-reliefs, which continue to inform the structure and material presence of his paintings.
His compositions often feature tactile, almost bas-relief surfaces, dramatic lighting and figures caught in mid-motion with exaggerated gestures that heighten their physicality.
Jonas Höschel is a German conceptual artist and photographer whose practice spans printmaking sound, video and installation.
His work addresses identity-forming mechanisms of political systems, using regional political scandals and European conflicts as points of departure to examine processes of alienation from unifying ideals.
Through graphic prints and video works, he appropriates visual languages drawn from differently oriented and, at times, historical ideologies in order to expose strategies of propagandistic manipulation.
By recontextualizing existing imagery and documents, his work emphasizes the referential nature of contemporary political and media images.
Manuela Medeiros is a Brazilian artist whose practice engages painting through an expanded interdisciplinary framework that also includes sculpture, performance and installation.
Rather than treating painting as an autonomous subject, she approaches it as a spatial and experiential process, allowing works to emerge in direct response to their architectural surroundings.
Her practice frequently involves direct interventions within exhibition spaces shaped by the material, structural and luminous conditions specific to each site, attributing an organic quality to architecture and treating space itself as a living body.
Manuela Medeiros engages with a process often described as archaeological.
She scrapes and exposes surfaces such as gallery walls, revealing layers of paint, color and matter that have been applied, concealed and forgotten over time.
These revealed strata are presented as coexisting temporal traces, each carrying the memory of the moment in which it was formed.
We conclude our list with Paula Siebra.
Her canvases often begin with toned crowns in terracotta, ochre or muted grey hues, onto which she applies thin layers of paint that soften contours, reduce contrast and temper colour, allowing light to hover between object and surrounding fields, as many of her interiors and landscapes are unpeopled, creating a suspended stillness that also extends to scenes of water tables and rooms.
When figures do appear, they are often observed from a slight distance, introducing a certain and restrained voyeurism that heightens the sense of private time paused in subdued celebration of it.
Recurring elements such as rivers hills, clay jars lace, sun-bleached facades gloves, suitcases and table settings appear across her work, forming scenes that move fluidly between lived experience, recollection and dream.
So atmosphere holds equal weight with form.
Thank you so much for tuning in today.
Feel free to watch our video on goals to set in 2026 for artists to make this year count next.
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Bye.
