The Artists to Watch: Saatchi Art’s Rising Stars for 2019

One of the best ways to invest in art is to discover emerging artists with strong potential.  But for beginning collectors it can be difficult to determine just who is going to become the next sensation in the world of art.

This is where Saatchi Art comes in.  Saatchi is the only online art gallery I know of where professional art curators curate artworks into relevant collections and helps buyers find worthwhile works to invest in.  This is both a matter of the aesthetics that work with your decor and finding artists whose work has the potential to appreciate.

Saatchi Art’s Rising Stars 2019

Saatchi Art has long been dedicated to discovering and representing emerging artists from around the world.  These are the artists that will be shaping the future of contemporary art for years to come.

Saatchi Art’s Rising Stars 2019 focuses on these young talents.  In this annual list, Saatchi Art curators Monty Preston, Aurora Garrison and chief curator Rebecca Wilson introduce selected recent graduates from the finest art schools in the US and UK.

The final list of 31 Rising Stars was selected after reviewing the portfolios of hundreds of MFA and BFA graduates.  The highly curated list of artists to watch provides art collectors the chance to be among the first to discover exceptionally talented new artists.

Since the first publication of the MFA graduate feature which was formerly titled Invest in Art, many of the artist selected by Chief Curator Rebecca Wilson have gone on to achieve significant acclaim and the value of the artworks created by many of them have more than doubled.

This year’s top curator’s pick is artist Lizzy Lunday. 

Lizzy Lunday creates digital collages of images found in the media to use a references for her paintings… deliberately distorting the lines between artificiality and reality.  The Brooklyn-based artist received her BFA from the University of Miami and her MFA from the Pratt Institute in NYC.  She has exhibited in London, Washington DC, New York City and Miami.  She has been awarded a place at the 77Art Residency in Vermont the Summer of 2019.

Per her artist’s statement, Lunday’s work “observes reality television shows as contemporary mythologies. Using found imagery as references for my paintings, I deliberately contort bodies and environments to blur the lines between foreground and background, reality and artificiality.”  We find that the blend works very well!

Wilson has also curated a collection of 85 of the finest artworks from the overall rising stars list.  Artists whose work we feel stand out in this collection include:

Jaehyung Um from London.  Jaehyung’s paintings blend photo-realistic images of people into backgrounds that are often abstract.  The collision of the abstract with the realistic nature of his people brings the human element strongly into the forefront of his work.

Molly Brokelhurst also from London creates paintings where again the people in the work have a photo-realistic appearance within surreal backgrounds.  The juxtaposition brings a strong sense of validity to the people in her paintings.

Molly’s artists statement describes her work well: My practice emerges from the fascination of the found photograph. I paint from old photographs that I find in flea markets and antique shops around England. I am drawn to the ambiguity of the people in the photographs, each one begs a fiction.”

See her work below.

UK artist Paul McParland’s charcoal and silicone sketches have an unforgettable surreal but haunting quality that provokes the mind.  Per his artist statement, his latest work explores the decay of memory and the passing of time.  Those viewing his work will feel compelled to write the stories that go with the sketches in their own minds.  See his work below.

Sean Winn of London has created a series of paintings that while surreal, are so finely detailed that they could pass as photographs with highly creative lighting.  He explores the human mind, and the extraterrestrial existence that is beyond our imagination and understanding.  See his paintings below.

However, you’ll want to look at the curated collection of work from Saatchi’s Rising Stars and decide for yourself.  Do it now.  In just the time that we have been working on this article, the works of several of the artists have sold!  Also look over the 31 artists Saatchi has named their Rising Stars for 2019 for they are the future of art.

We hope you enjoy their art.  And as the holidays approach, consider giving the gift of art.  Long after the kitchen appliance has worn out or the chocolates have been eaten, art will remain in the home as a reminder of your thoughtfulness while appreciating in value.

See more artworks after the break!