15 Young Art Stars to Keep Your Eye On

Image via Complex Original

Location: New York

There are few people who can or ever have done what Ryan McNamara does. Call him Marina Abramovic for the Twitterverse. The current crowned prince of New York City’s performance art scene is redefining the art and melding it with video artistry, which makes his work perfect for our social media-driven world. McNamara is lauded all over the world for his pieces, including a recent performance at Art Basel Hong Kong, Score, which saw 20 dancers interpret 20 dance moves in 20 minutes. One of the Arizona native’s greatest achievements (at least thus far) came last November when he received the Malcolm McLaren Award, a top honor at Performa 13, New York City’s performance art biennial.

Location: Brooklyn and Kansas City, Mo.

Photographer/performance artist Jaimie Warren really nailed the way her art makes its viewers feel when she registered her Website’s URL: DontYouFeelBetter.com. It’s impossible to look at her work, which has been featured everywhere from The New York Times to The Huffington Post, and not smile. With her own body as her canvas, Warren has transformed herself into everything from one of Jaws’ victims (in the middle of a séance) to Tanning Mom. One of her most inspired series features a series of “Food’Lebrities,” hybrid photos of celebrities as food products (think Lasagna del Rey or Pretzel Rod Stewart).

Location: New York

Before he even earned his BFA at the Cooper Union in 2007, Lucien Smith’s name was becoming a familiar one amongst New York City’s art insiders. It certainly didn’t hurt when an art dealer, curator, and adviser to the stars (including Jay Z) took an interest in, and actually purchased, some of Smith’s work when he was still just a student. Smith has differentiated himself from his contemporaries by devising unique ways to cover a canvas, like the time he turned a fire extinguisher into a paintbrush for his 2011 series, “Rain Paintings.” By 2012, Smith had garnered the attention of Forbes editors, who named him one of their annual “30 Under 30.” Just when you think you’ve figured Smith out, he goes and does something like “Tigris,” his summer exhibition at Skarstedt Gallery featuring 11 camouflaged paintings.

Location: London

Every detail in Oscar Murillo’s large-scale paintings is there for a reason, right down to the studio dust. All of these elements come together in a unifying way, even if there’s a distinct feeling of chaos. Perhaps it has something to do with Murillo’s global identity; born in Colombia, Murillo earned his BFA at the University of Westminster, London in 2007 and an MFA in 2012 at the Royal College of Art, London, which is where he continues to live and work today. “Arepas y Tamales,” his first solo exhibition, was mounted in the city’s Cole Contemporary. In just the past year, he’s had three major shows in three different cities—“we don't work Sundays” at Marian Goodman in Paris, “A Mercantile Novel” at David Zwirner in New York, and “Distribution Center” at The Mistake Room in Los Angeles.

Location: Los Angeles

Alex Prager is having a major moment, and it’s not the kind of 15-minute success that Andy Warhol promised all of us. Whether she’s shooting still images or moving ones, there’s a cinematic quality to the 34-year-old’s work that is perfectly befitting of her proximity to Hollywood (Prager was born in Los Angeles, where she continues to live and work). Perhaps most impressive is that she’s totally self-taught and credits an exhibition of William Eggleston’s work at the Getty Museum nearly 15 years ago as her inspiration for picking up a camera. Since then, she has shot for the likes of The New York Times Magazine, Vogue, and W. Her work has been added to the permanent collections of some of the world’s most prestigious art establishments, including the Whitney and MoMA. Prager’s “Face in the Crowd” show—a large-scale photo exhibition in which hundreds of people sat to create a single image—has traveled the world, and even led to a gig with IFC to shoot the ads for Portlandia.

Location: Los Angeles

Sculptural artist Jen Stark’s decision to use paper as her primary medium may be an inspired act of creative genius. But the Miami native, who earned a BFA in Fiber from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2005, will be the first to tell that it was purely a financial consideration, at least in the beginning. While studying abroad in the South of France, Stark needed to find a way (and medium) to express herself that wouldn’t break the bank. Enter the holy trifecta of construction paper, glue, and an X-acto knife. Though Stark has since expanded her artistic repertoire to include drawing, animation, and woodworking, it’s still those mesmerizingly bright kaleidoscopic paper sculptures she is best known for. Stark has exhibited all around the world, from New York to Miami and London to Australia, and her work is on permanent display at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Microsoft Art Collection, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the Museum of Art Fort Lauderdale, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Miami.

Location: New York

One could easily make the argument that Canada-born artist Aurel Schmidt is creating her very own genre of art. Audacious and a little bit naughty, Schmidt sees creative potential in objects that others deem waste, be it straight-up garbage or a discarded cigarette. It’s those items on which she bases her intricate drawings but only to show you a different view on how beautiful these things can be. “People often see my work as negative,” Schmidt once told HUH magazine. “But I see it simply as life. Grey. Nothing is perfect, nothing is one thing. There is no waste, there is only life moving around itself, and hopefully laughing at itself a little.

Location: Brooklyn

Everything old is new again in the hands of Puerto Rican artist Angel Otero, who derives inspiration for his process-based paintings from key moments in history, both personal and otherwise. He’s reinventing the process, utilizing a unique oil paint scraping process to create deeply textured canvases that offer new ideas and points of interest with each viewing. Otero isn’t afraid to experiment with form; in “Gates of Horn and Ivory,” his 2013 solo show at New York’s Lehmann Maupin, he showcased a few of his first attempts at sculpture.

Location: New York

After earning his BFA from Pacific Northwest College of Art in his native Portland, Tabor Robak headed east to New York where his video game-inspired landscapes have been gracing the walls (and LED displays) of the New Museum, Swiss Institute of Contemporary Art, and MoMA PS1. Robak’s most enthusiastic champion may be Team Gallery, which hosted the artist in one of his earliest group shows and last November unveiled “Next-Gen Open Beta,” Robak’s first solo exhibition, in which he employed Unity, After Effects, Photoshop, and Cinema 4D to create a series of fascinating digital words and even an accompanying video game.

Location: New York

Born in Johannesburg, South Africa, Dean Levin has made quite a home for himself in New York City since earning his Bachelor of Architecture degree from Pratt in 2012. He’s put that architectural education to innovative use, mixing traditional painting elements (he likes to play with elements of light versus dark) with design concepts to create a whole new way of looking at art. Case in point: “1X1,” Levin’s debut solo show that took place at New York’s Robert Blumenthal Gallery earlier this year. Though it was comprised of a series of stacked paintings encased within an interactive sculpture, the piece was meant to be viewed as a single work. The individual elements could be pulled out for viewing separately (in the way one might view a carpet selection). The year has continued to be a busy one for Levin, whose second solo show, “Surface Support (It’s All Black and White),” took place at Hudson’s Retrospective Gallery last month.

Location: Tel Aviv, Israel

If you only heard the name “Know Hope,” you might be prepared to witness a slate of work that pays tribute to the dark side of life, but for the past decade, the artist has been creating street art, murals, and site-specific installations that are meant to uplift and bring messages of positivity. Describing his street art as “personal landmarks,” the Tel Aviv-based artist believes that the context in which one sees his work can impact its meaning. “Some people see it after they just got fired; some people see it after realizing that they just fell in love. People see it with their own baggage.” Know Hope has a gallery artist side to him as well, having taken part in dozens of group and solo shows from Tel Aviv to Norway to London to Vienna to New York to Los Angeles.

Location: New York

Huntington, West Virginia native Travess Smalley is yet another young artist whose professional career began before he had even completed his academic one. A year before earning his BFA from the Cooper Union in 2010, the digital artist’s work was being recognized and showcased in spaces like Brooklyn’s Light Industry, Chelsea’s Foxy Production, and the Reference Gallery in Richmond, Virginia. Smalley is a new generation of artist, one who combines both traditional methods with state-of-the-art technologies. As he told ARTINFO last year, “I’m a painter who doesn’t paint,” which was an impressive enough talent to land him on Forbes’ “30 Under 30” earlier this year.

Location: New York

With large-scale installations that combine painting, sculpture, apparel design, sound, and live performance, Donna Huanca’s work is truly interactive and always evolving, making it difficult to truly describe the work this Chicago native is creating without actually witnessing it for yourself. It’s a multisensory experience that is felt, not just seen. This summer, Huanca created Sade Room, a mind-bending collage of found materials (and live models), that was exhibited in the storefront of the Print Shop, MoMA PS1’s project space. This month, she’s unveiling at the ABC art fair in Berlin, where she has lived and worked in the past.

Location: Los Angeles

Even before he earned his BFA at Pratt in 2009, Jack Greer’s name was becoming familiar within the art world. In 2005, at the age of 18, Greer took part in two group shows in his native Los Angeles, at Frank Pictures and Gallery 1988. His artistic interests, which he has described as leaning toward “lighthearted punk rock imagery,” know no bounds. In addition to the more traditional pursuits of drawing, photography, and sculpture, Greer has also designed clothing for Opening Ceremony and Nike. This summer, he also showed at London's White Cube gallery.

Location: Los Angeles

Raffi Kalenderian is a Los Angeles artist through and through. He was born there in 1981, received his BFA from UCLA in 2004, and the public first got a look at his paintings—which are most often portraits of his friends and family, people he knows well enough to capture both their external and internal beings—in group shows at places like the South La Brea and Kantor/Feuer Galleries. Since then, Kalenderian’s work has gone on to be exhibited around the world, from the French West Indies (where he did a residency in 2007) to Zurich, Milan, and Berlin. This summer, he was exhibiting back at home, with his second solo show at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects.