This summer’s hottest artists at refreshing prices

The comic characters featured in Turtletowerpower are hallmarks of Kenny Scharf’s distinctive visual language. Achieving fame as part of the 1980s East Village art scene alongside Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat, Scharf is known for his vivid colour palettes and cartoonish imagery. His work breaks down boundaries that separate fine art from pop culture by prominently featuring characters from TV shows such as the Simpsons and the Jetsons. ‘That’s where I’m from — the TV generation,’ he has said.

Having exhibited at the legendary Fun Gallery through the 1980s and taking part in the Whitney Biennial in 1985, Kenny Scharf has recently seen demand for his work soar, setting multiple artist records in the past few years.

Having studied at Parsons School of Design, Barbara Kruger rose rapidly through the ranks at Mademoiselle magazine in the 1960s and eventually made her way around the New York gallery circuit in the 70s with her early painting and weaving work. After taking a hiatus from art to teach, she took up photography in the late 1970s, resulting in her signature large-scale monochrome images overlaid with colour blocks and text.

Kruger’s recent exhibitions — including a large-scale site-specific installation at New York's Museum of Modern Art, and two solo shows at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Art Institute of Chicago — were just her latest moments of high-level recognition in the art world. Throughout her career, her hallmark use of pronouns like ‘you’ and ‘we’, such as in Untitled (The War for Me to Become You), have enraptured viewers, as she addresses and implicates them within the work.

Derrick Adams, who recently had an acclaimed solo exhibition at the Flag Art Foundation in New York, has established himself as one of the most prominent artists exploring Black life and culture in America. His works often incorporate performance, video, textile and paper collage. His multimedia interests in music and television can be seen in Sing It Like You Mean It.

Adams is no stranger to the global art market, but with celebrated exhibitions at institutions such as the Milwaukee Art Museum, demand for his work has only continued to rise.

Louis Fratino’s paintings draw in equal parts from memory and the everyday. Engaging family, friends and lovers as his subjects, Fratino places the human body and how it is perceived is at the centre of his artistic practice. Taking cues in his figurative portraits from painters like Marsden Hartley, Pablo Picasso and David Hockney, he offers intimate portrayals of queer desire and familiar comfort.

Fratino, whose painting Euchre more than tripled its low estimate in this May’s 21st Century Evening Sale, is quickly becoming one of the hottest artists on the market, making the present After Martin Ramirez a unique opportunity to acquire one of his works.

At first glance, Loie Hollowell’s paintings resemble works by Agnes Pelton, Georgia O’Keeffe, or the geometric abstractions of Hilma af Klint. But her depictions of bodily forms and spirituality are distinctly personal. Adapting symbols like the mandala, she has built a visual lexicon uniquely her own.

Hollowell is enjoying an uptick within the art market, with her first museum survey set to take place in early 2024 at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut.

Combining elements of painting, printmaking and bricolage, Tschabalala Self’s work lies between two-dimensional abstraction and sculpture. Princess, comprising pieces of cotton and tulle fabric quilted to form the image of a Black female figure, shows her interest in the iconography of representation.

Self explores the way in which individual elements contribute to the gendering and racializing of a body. She harnesses stereotypes and cultural symbology to unearth discrepancies between perceived and actual perspectives on the body.

Born in Newark in 1922, Grace Hartigan moved to New York City in 1945 and became part of what would be called the ‘second wave’ of Abstract Expressionism. She befriended and studied with Jackson Pollock and his wife Lee Krasner, as well as Willem and Elaine de Kooning, eventually gaining recognition for her abstract work in the 1950s.

Her paintings fluctuated between abstract and figural compositions throughout her life, but some of her finest work lives in the scission between these two poles — such as the present Untitled.

Like Hartigan, Lynne Drexler’s kaleidoscopic landscapes are best categorised in a space between artistic movements. Born in 1928 and studying under Hans Hofmann and Robert Motherwell, she incorporated elements of Post-Impressionism, landscape painting and abstraction in her vibrant compositions, though her work remains largely unique. This importance is not lost on her audience, either: her painting Herbert’s Garden brought a hammer price of $1,500,000 at Christie’s last year, shattering her previous record at auction. Beyond this, her top five auction prices have all been achieved since March 2022, suggesting that her market is just beginning to take off.

Characterised by repetitive, sometimes frantic arrays of brushstrokes, her paintings are a masterclass in using colour to convey feeling, cradling the viewer in the distinctly fragmentary forms of nature. Her works have a synesthetic quality — and indeed her inspirations come from music as well as art — as they present landscape and still life through colour as means of composing shape.

Deeply inspired by Josef Albers’ classic text Interaction of Color (1981), Halley’s work prioritises colour, shape and form. As a writer and artist, Halley played a foundational role in Neo-Conceptualism in the 1980s. He occupies a rare space, blurring disciplines, as he flits between post-structuralist critique and masterful representations of Neo-Expressionist aesthetic principles.

Based in Brooklyn, Mickalene Thomas often deploys abstract mixed media, such as gemstones, acrylics and enamel. Taking cues from a wide range of artists such from Henri Matisse to Romare Bearden, her work often explores the spectrum of Black female beauty, while also drawing on classical portraiture, still life, and the tradition of the female nude.

Though not new to the scene, Thomas’ art market success shows no sign of letting up. Recently, two of her works — Portrait of Qusuquzah #6 and NUS Exotiques #3 — were both sold as part of Christie’s Post-War and Contemporary Day Sale.

Shara Hughes 

Shara Hughes turned heads when her painting Spins from Swiss sold for a record $2,940,000 at Christie’s 21st Century Evening Sale earlier this year. Coaxed into her saturated colour palette, her subjects transform into what she refers to as ‘psychological or imagined landscapes’ — a term that owes as much to her sense of colour and form as her knowledge of art history.

These gestural compositions, as described in the New Yorker, ‘use every trick in the book to seduce, but still manage to come off as guileless visions of not-so-far-away worlds.’ In this sense, her work offers a curative escape, particularly in the post-pandemic environment.

Nina Chanel Abney 

Born in Illinois, Nina Chanel Abney is known for her large-scale works depicting culturally relevant and often sensitive themes. ‘I’m always picking hot topics,’ she said to Vanity Fair. ‘But I’m not going to give you one story, because I’m more than one thing. Whatever I feel like painting, I just paint it. For me, nothing is off limits.’

Through an array of angular shapes and colourful, symbol-heavy compositions, in her prints and works on paper she often explores race, gender and celebrity as they contributes to culture and society outside white, heteronormative perspectives. Recently setting an auction record of $990,000 in May 2021, her art has appeared everywhere from the cover of the New Yorker, to the album art of rapper Meek Mill.

Ernie Barnes 

First there were gasps, and then there were cheers when the hammer came down on Ernie Barnes’ The Sugar Shack this past May at Christie’s New York. A record for the artist, the work sold for an astonishing $15,275,000, it shattered its high estimate and ushering in a new era of demand for the artist.

Born in 1938, Barnes, a native of North Carolina, studied art at North Carolina College at Durham under a full athletic scholarship. After his graduation, he went on to have a six-year stint as a professional football player in the American Football League. Though he maintained a relative ambivalence to his career as an athlete, he recognized that his portrayal of bodies in motion owes to his first-hand experience with physical torment of the sport.

While recognized as the finest sports painter later in his life, in the early 2000s, Barnes recently has become more of a focus institutionally, gaining prominence within the wider mainstream art world and market.

Faith Ringgold

Faith Ringgold is widely recognized as one of the most important American artists alive today, with her recent show Faith Ringgold: American People at the New Museum demonstrating her vanguard status in establishing a place for Black women artists in the art world. As Holland Cotter wrote of the show for the New York Times: ‘Half a century ago, a presence like hers had to fight to exist in the mainstream art world. Look around now, and you see it, not everywhere yet, but more and more. Faith Ringgold, artist-agitator-seer, can be thanked for that.’

She bridges the multidisciplinary art of the Harlem Renaissance and the politically active work being made by Black artists today. Ringgold has left an indelible mark on American culture, and she continues to inspire generations of artists as she has since the Civil Rights Era.

Her works have a synesthetic quality — and indeed her inspirations come from music as well as art — as they present landscape and still life through colour as means of composing shape.

Stanley Whitney

Stanley Whitney’s first retrospective is expected to appear in 2023 at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum (formerly the Albright-Knox Art Gallery). Among its central themes will be Whitney’s exploration of colour, the complex entity he has dedicated his artistic life to understanding. His 2005 painting Great Balls of Fire sold in February 2022 at Christie’s London for £1,482,000, almost tripling its high estimate.

Taking cues from Minimalism and Colour Field painting, as well as music and other threads of culture, Whitney’s process-based paintings present and juxtapose various shades in vibrant grids. Each colour, according to Whitney, inspires a distinct feeling. Presented together, as in his works, distinct colours come in contact in complex ways.

Julian Opie 

Having been exhibited in London, Tokyo and New York, to name just a few, Julian Opie’s unique blend of Minimalism and Pop Art has captivated audiences since he emerged in the 1980s. Originally working out of the tradition of New British Sculpture, Opie has since executed his characteristic outline-based portraits in a variety of mediums from painting, to installation, and even album art.

‘The process of reading things as simulations but knowing at the same time that they are real is quite central to my work,’ he has said. He demonstrates this in practice by continuing to reinvent himself for changing times, presenting his audience with new tools for understanding their own perception of art and the world.

H.R. Giger 

H.R. Giger is best known for his iconic visual design work on Alien (1979), the Ridley Scott science fiction movie. Alien has been called the most gripping sci-fi movie ever made, and a great deal of that comes from its singular practical effects — rather than technological special effects, whose impact fades with time. Geiger’s team created the aliens using rubber suits and puppets, whose artistry holds up to this day.

Born in 1940 in Chur, Switzerland, Giger rose to fame for his ink and airbrush depictions of biomechanical creatures. His work has bridged the gap between science fiction and popular culture, as other artists have adapted it to furniture, stage decoration, album covers and tattoos.

Beyond this, his ability to depict grotesque forms with otherworldly, yet recognizably human beauty has been the key to his cultural resonance. The Tourist IX, made with his process of airbrushing, is a perfect example of this, marrying human and alien forms in a juxtaposition at once uncomfortable and entirely captivating.

Javier Calleja 

Javier Calleja’s wide-eyed characters embody the fusion of a saccharine facade, with a subversive personality. Born in Málaga, Spain, Calleja began working in the 1990s in opposition to what he calls ‘the intellectualism of contemporary art.’ Preferring instead to portray characters that do no need to be explained, his paintings are buoyed by a sarcasm owing to this simplicity of expression.

Much like contemporary art heavyweights such as Yoshitomo Nara or KAWS, the lightness of being his characters possess balances the cynical against the playful, the ironic against the overt. Redhead, printed in 2014, is no exception, demonstrating the artist’s continual refinement of his characteristic style.