5 Artists on Our Radar in December 2025

B. 1997, Cornwall, England. Lives and works in Cornwall.

British painter Imogen Allen creates lush, gauzy paintings of flora and fauna that push us to consider our own perception. She often focuses on the hues and patterns of butterfly wings, zooming in on their delicate gradients of color and bold spots and stripes. Her subjects appear to be dissolving into fields of color; there are echoes of Gerhard Richter’s famed blur effect. Allen’s sensitivity to nature and its textures traces back to her upbringing near the wild moorlands of southwest Cornwall.

Allen has had a busy year. This month, she is presenting new paintings at NADA Miami with Megan Mulrooney, following “Imago,” a recent two-person exhibition at Soho Revue in London. Her work is currently included in “TERRA,” the annual exhibition across heritage sites in Burgundy, France, and several standout works were also recently featured in a group show at Blue Door Gallery in New York.

Allen studied at Camberwell College of Arts in London and has participated in residencies in Brazil, Australia, and the U.K. She was awarded the Young Penwith Artist of the Year in 2024 and has exhibited widely, including solo presentations at Penwith Gallery in Cornwall and Unit in London.

—Casey Lesser, Editor in Chief

B. 1994, Rio de Janeiro. Lives and works in Rio de Janeiro.

Working across portraiture, archival research, and narrative painting, Brazilian artist Elian Almeida reframes figures historically marginalized within Brazilian visual culture by presenting them as protagonists. His works often draw from historical photographs, which he reimagines through vibrant palettes, celestial motifs, and references to pop culture and mythology.

In a current dual show with fellow Brazilian artist Alberto Pitta, “Carnival, Struggle and Other Brazilian Stories,” on view at Nara Roesler New York, Almeida expands his exploration of Afro Brazilian identity by looking to myth, folklore, and everyday ritual as sites where history and imagination meet. In Land of the Holy Cross (A Latin Scale after Albert Eckhout) (2025), for instance, a woman carrying a vessel encounters an enormous peacock—long a symbol of beauty, power, and spiritual presence—set within a lush, almost dreamlike landscape. Eckhout, referenced in the work’s title, was a 17th-century Dutch painter known for ethnographic portraits of Indigenous Brazilians. Here, Almeida reclaims representation of his country and its people from a colonizing gaze.

Almeida received his BA degree in fine arts from the University of Rio de Janeiro Institute of the Arts and has exhibited extensively in Brazil, including in group shows at the Museu de Arte Moderna (MAM Rio) and Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo. His work is held in institutional collections, including the ICA Miami and El Espacio 23 (Jorge M. Pérez Collection).

—Arun Kakar, Senior Art Market Editor

B. 1985, Red Bluff, California. Lives and works nomadically.

Wire, crocheted into flexing lattices; bulbous clay forms, stacked and knotted; leather, looped and joined with a jeweler’s precision. These disparate materials all play a role in the practice of artist ektor garcia, whose sculptures are particularly inspired by the traditional crocheting techniques practiced by his grandmother in Mexico. In his current show at the San José Museum of Art in California—his first institutional solo—garcia suspended his sculptures from the ceiling and propped them against walls. Though scattered across the room, they together comprise a unified vision of his material experimentation.

Meanwhile, in a recent group show at Rebecca Camacho Presents in San Francisco, garcia showed several works that take previous sculptures as a starting point. For example, the hanging copper sculpture pieles (formerly wire mesh) (2025) unravels and reconstructs an older work with a new, black border section. It’s typical of his transformative and fluid method that rejects the traditional, hands-off approach to finished artworks.

To make his natural-looking sculptures, ektor garcia works nomadically, often outside a studio setting, in locations such as beaches and parks. He received his BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and his MFA from Columbia University in New York. As well as the San José Museum of Art, he has a current solo show at Galerie Nordenhake in Stockholm, and previously exhibited in the 2024 Whitney Biennial.

—Josie Thaddeus-Johns, Senior Editor

B. 1989, São Paulo. Lives and works in New York.

There’s a softness to Eny Lee Parker’s ceramic objects, with their rounded edges and glazed surfaces that catch natural light. The New York–based designer works primarily with clay, shaping sconces that evoke calla lilies, floor lamps that rise like stems, and vases balanced on bulbous bases. A selection of these organic designs is featured in “A Soft Place to Land,” Parker’s current solo exhibition at Hannah Traore in New York. The back room of the gallery is transformed into a welcoming sanctuary, with plush red carpet that enhances the elegant whimsy of the works.

Born in São Paulo, Parker moved to Los Angeles as a teenager and later attended the Savannah College of Art & Design in Georgia, where she obtained her BFA, MA, and MFA. Parker established her eponymous Brooklyn-based design studio in 2017. She has showcased her work with VERSO and Objective Gallery in New York, and collaborated with brands including Lulu and Georgia.

—Maxwell Rabb, Staff Writer

B. 2000, Beijing. Lives and works in New York.

Flesh and light are the key ingredients in Jesse Zuo’s delicious figurative paintings. Like peers such as Rachel Lancaster and Alexis Ralaivao, the New York–based artist fixates on the soft contours of the body, which she renders in exquisite, zoomed-in detail. Dainty hoops glint on delicate earlobes, glossy nails catch the light, dappled sun dances across exposed skin. Zuo’s paintings—a selection of which are on view in a duo show at New York’s Plato Gallery through January 3rd—combine the sensuality of boudoir portraiture with the technical rigor of photorealism. They also carry an aura of mystery: In many, an unidentified subject with long, braided hair recurs. Perhaps it is the artist herself, though her face is rarely shown. She is at once close and distant; exposed and anonymous.