Contemporary Artists We Are Moved By
30 favorites curated by the Welcome team
To put it mildly, the 2026 art world is perplexing. With the Whitney Biennial receiving a mixed reception, record-breaking auction prices at Christie’s, and a landscape rife with emerging independent galleries, it can be hard to know where to find compelling art.
On the bright side, internet platforms have made discovering artists without institutional backing easier than ever. Discovery has been democratized.
But it has also been made more difficult. Incredible art may be at your fingertips, but so is the rest of the internet. Artists submit their work into the digital abyss, and have little visibility into the process by which the algorithm rewards them with either golden virality, or coal-lump anonymity.
While the algorithm might make the plight of today’s artists more difficult, creativity itself is alive and well. There are contemporary artists making work that uniquely captures our era, work that turns away from it entirely, work that is as uncertain, overstimulating, surreal, and beautiful as life on the internet.
That is why we curated this list of contemporary artists whose work has moved us recently. We hope you enjoy reading this as much as we enjoyed putting it together.
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Lorenzo Amos
Lorenzo Amos is a New York based painter working primarily with oil paints, commonly on linen or canvas. Amos has said that his paintings exemplify a material realist style, in which paint is used to represent not only figures, but also the material of paint itself. A series of strong shows since 2024, in particular a buzzy outing at Basel Miami in December, have established him as a rising star among art world collectors and critics.
Virus of Minora
Virus of Minora is an artist who draws and paints on paper and also digitally on MS paint. His works are moody and atmospheric, many featuring taboo and erotic depictions of women. Negative space and red are recurring characteristics of his sketch-like work.
Naomi Hawksley
Naomi Hawksley is a New York based artist whose primary medium is graphite drawing. Hawksley’s works are dreamlike in their shimmering lightness, patiently revealing the latent expressiveness of grey tones. The dreamy quality of her work is further amplified through her sculptural practices, in which she presents drawings on objects such as mirrors, cradles, and a doll’s bed frame. Her work was recently featured at NADA Miami in late 2025.
Alina Desler
Alina Desler is an artist and skateboarder based in Vienna who primarily creates colorful oil paintings on wood. Focusing on genderless creatures and abstract shapes, Desler’s work explores themes of identity and self-expression. Her pieces feature extensive layering and erasure, while recurring stars, hearts, and suns evoke adolescent intuition.
Dagou
Dagou is a Chinese artist who works primarily with colored pencils. His drawings are soft and hazy, evoking a quiet warmth. Pairs of figures appear frequently as silhouettes within natural settings, returning to motifs of connection, intimacy, and hope.
Morgan Buck
Morgan Buck is a Portland based painter, working with acrylic on canvas and airbrushing techniques. His work revolves around scrolling viral culture in the digital world, replications of AI imagery, and image distortion through circulation.
Lugas Elias
Lugas Elias is a German artist who favors quick-drying mediums such as acrylic, markers, varnish, spray paint, pencil, and charcoal on canvas. His works feature multi-layered, colorful, and abstract collages, often marked by recurring motifs of horses and crosses. The pieces exhibit a childlike intuition, focusing on fleeting scenes that feel like flashes of memory drawn from experiences in nature.
Jamieson Pearl
Jamieson Pearl is an LA based painter primarily working with oil on linen, and occasionally on paper. Her works of meticulous pixelated portraiture thematically revolve around femininity, online consumptionism, symbolism, and dream logic. Pearl has remarked that the distorted nature of her paintings can simultaneously make them feel very real and very digestible, befitting of our scroll-first attention economy.
Mitchel Peters
Mitchel Peters is a tattoo and digital artist deeply immersed in online culture, with much of his work influenced by Wojak-core memes, metaphysics, tarot cards, Western animated shows, anime, and nihilism. Peters’ pieces are created primarily in Microsoft Paint and often carry strong sexual undertones, with recurring depictions of bondage and rope play throughout.
Chris Lloyd
Chris Lloyd is a multimedia artist based in Brooklyn, NY, working with an array of materials and methods, often anchored by acrylic and watercolor paints. His works juxtapose digital and spiritual imagery, thereby investigating the algorithmic reality that underlies our lives.
Angel Lovecraft Braswell
Angel Lovecraft Braswell is a painter based in Brooklyn mainly working with acrylic paint and airbrush techniques on canvas. Braswell’s works deal with growing up in a digital world.Video games and anime feature prominently. Nostalgia, comfort, fragility, desire, and hope are evoked in these depictions of digital fantasies.
Irina Patrusheva
Irina Patrusheva is Russian based painter, working primarily with oil and acrylic paints on canvas, linen, and wood. Patrusheva’s works combine classical techniques with contemporary glitzy subject matters, centering on the feminine, with many works depicting eyes, makeup, silver jewelry, hair with tiaras, and flowers.
Parker Conrad
Parker Conrad is a New York based painter, predominately painting with oil and acrylic paint, as well as charcoal, on canvas. Conrad’s work is characterized by overlapping striped patterns and muted colors, often depicting abstract geometric forms or investigating liminal spaces with overhead lighting.
Rachel Simon
Rachel Anna Simon is a painter based in New York and San Francisco, formerly married to director Harmony Korine. She is heavily inspired by 2002’s Spiderman films with Tobey Maquire and Kristen Dunst, specifically their iconic upside down kiss, with her body of work consisting largely of various vignettes of Spiderman receiving head, painted with oil paint on canvas. Simon states that this emphasis is not reflective of a fetish or a Marvel obsession, but rather her belief that fine art should be humorous. The idea for the series came while she was getting her lashes done, before she had even owned any art supplies.