The 25 Best Artists 25 and Under

We've often heard the expression (especially in relation so Abstract art), “A three-year-old could paint that.” Youth are so carefree and blasé, they could easily throw paint on a canvas in a way that ends up looking like it belongs next to a Pollock. But the fact is, youth is more worthwhile for the boundless creative energy of the output—ideas form and blossom with an enthusiasm that some older artists just can’t seem to muster. That’s why we want to keep an eye on the young artists out there coming up right now. Here are The 25 Best Artists Under 25.

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Age: 25

An affiliate of Katarina Janeckova, this Bratislava-based artist works in various media: photography, sculpture, painting, and drawing. A jack-of-all-trades with such prolific output must be kept an eye on, particularly when the work is so sinister and fascinating.

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Age: 24

Muller melds mythic imagery with contemporary verve. The Viennese artist has been known to baffle crowds at his shows with his weird combinations of subject that are highly referential, not only in terms of the symbols they use, but in dialogue with predecessors. Bright, spooky, and humorous, Müller's already comfortable with disrupting expectation and taking risks.

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Age: 25

This Canadian-born artist now resides in New York City. His work is in the post-expressionist mode, dealing with fetish, ritual and gender. He's been widely discussed throughout the art world for just how brash and bold it is.

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Age: 24

Working in the lineage of Kandinsky, Garbrecht's paintings straddle abstract expressionism and deliberate figures. The bold colors, striking lines, and combative shapes are all immediately recognizable. Colombian-born, Garbrecht now lives in Buenos Aires.

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Age: 25

It's hard to tell what this mysterious painter from Prague is up to, considering much of the information about her online is in Cyrillic or Czech. But the work speaks for itself—gloomy, engaging, and edging on the occult. She often paints distorted, globular landscapes and portraits of the unrecognizable. She's only showed back in Eastern Europe once or twice, so it will be fascinating to see what she has in store.

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Age: 25

Beer was born in New Orleans in 1988. By 2012, he was already showing solo exhibitions, including at the Kathleen Cullen Fine Art gallery in New York City. His playful, assertive paintings combine a few different disciplines. Beer creates landscapes that are both engrossing and mystifying, recontextualizing common visual signifiers to mystifying effect. "My work is an exploration of memory and cognition; I'm creating spaces and worlds where the past and present exist simultaneously," he says of his practice.

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Age: 25

Navasardian is a New York-based artist who creates portraits bearing an unmistakable fingerprint. They recall Picasso's early work, using subdued palettes to great emotional effect. She showed a solo exhibition earlier this year at the Galerie Michael Janssen Gallery in Singapore.

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Age: 24

Chimlenski creates some of the most vivid works of the artists on this list. He's storied for learning about his work and process through places like Craigslist and DeviantArt. "I didn't go out and look at paintings—I studied everything through the computer, so the glow you get through a computer screen I try to translate into my paintings," he told OUT Magazine earlier this year.

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Age: 13

Child prodigy Marla Olmstead became famous for her immense abstract canvases, helping to call to question the age-old debate of what is and is not art. By age 12, she was showing solo gallery exhibitions of her work. She is still painting.

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Age: 23

Komi lives and works in Helsinki, Finland. She creates deeply meaningful, enigmatic works of art that have an organic feel and shroud of mystery. Both there and not there, Komi's ghostly faces are haunting and bleak.

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Age: 19

Another of those child prodigy types, Karmarik came to international acclaim at an incredibly young age. She was discovered and covered in the news, particularly on Fox, for having a strong spiritual relationship. At just 11, she was lauded for her incredibly detailed style. She's also a celebrated poet.

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Age: 25

This British painter has a playful style and a cheeky attitude. He's coming up rather quickly, having pulled in a grip of awards and his first solo show at High House Gallery earlier this year.

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Age: 24

This Romanian painter has as much in common with Francis Bacon as he does with Charming Baker. Vaguely grotesque forms collide and meld into worlds that feel personal and mysterious and distorted.

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Age: 25

This Chinese artist is a self-described contemporary Daoist, a collage and ink artist who fuses the worlds of internal medical dictionaries with psychedelic colors and surreal set pieces. His work is both slightly off-kilter and fun.

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Age: 24

This is how the young Irish painter describes his work: "His work explores the materiality of paint to create haunting figures that live in a space in neither the past or the present. By doing this Kenny shows the uncontrollable hold time has over everything and how the past is an unreachable place."

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Age: 25

Janeckova is from Bratislava, Slovakia. Her referential acrylic paintings use a lot of repeating imagery to deal with violence, sexual identity, and nature: bears, boxing gloves, fruits, and faces recur in her work consistently.

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Age: 24

Not much is known about this young Swiss painter. He recently relocated to Dusseldorf, where he's slowly been pumping out work.

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Age: 25

Fisher comes to us from Los Angeles. He creates paintings that are ethereal and strange, as if shooting out of focus with a camera intentionally, often obscuring the subject of the work in some way. Stirring and dark, Fisher's work lacks compromise in the force of its emotional quality.

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Age: 25

This Colombian-born artist, now living in Amsterdam, as much as sculpts with paint, fusing issues of identity with various global traditions of art making. Her paintings are dark and textural and so dense they are difficult to discern.

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Age: 25

Like many of these young artists, Davidson traffics in abundance. His paintings are often overstuffed, both with imagery but also meaning. His heritage as one of London's rising art-world stars informs the tongue-in-cheek satirical content of much of his work.

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Age: 24

There might not be another artist on this list quite as energetic and odd as Price. With painting titles like The Wizard Critic Blowing His Own Trumpet and The Disaster Chef Squeezing Two Fish From A Bone this Scotland-born painter has as much humor as he does ideas.

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Age: 24

This Berlin-based painter fuses a variety of mediums to create bold and heavy works that are somehow both figurative and abstract.

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Age: 24

This Candaian artist works in a vibrant, surreal synthesis style. There's something disconcerting about her work, but also so familiar. It's a kind of fine art/digital art edge that recalls the old question "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" We imagine the answer is closer to one of her paintings.

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Age: 13

This 11-year old is a prodigy painter and the youngest member of the San Diego Museum of Art Guild. He's shown work coast-to-coast and attracted the eye of notable, prominent collectors. His style is fun, playful, youthful, and just a bit odd.

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Age: 6

This Australian abstract painter began painting before she was even one year old. In 2011, she sold out a New York gallery show at Agora in only a week. She works in abstract expressionism in acrylics, sometimes incorporating toys and other objects in her combines as well.

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