The Most Influential Artists of 2025

In 2025, art world influence proves harder than ever to define. Artists are breaking through in radically different ways: viral blockbuster solo exhibitions, sustained institutional recognition, fast-rising gallery momentum, viral robotic art fair presentations, and public advocacy that extends beyond the gallery walls.

This year was unusually volatile. As artists grappled with accelerating AI adoption, cuts to arts funding in the United States, and the aftershocks of climate catastrophe—particularly the devastating fires in Los Angeles—much of the year’s most resonant work addressed contemporary crises. In the face of these conflicts, artists who won a groundbreaking award or received a long-overdue solo exhibition are still cause for celebration. The names on this list, from Amy Sherald, who refused to compromise her values for the sake of an institutional show, to Beeple, who created the year’s biggest art fair spectacle, defined 2025 as they confronted contemporary anxieties and still managed to shock and move us.

Here are Artsy’s most influential artists of 2025.

Amy Sherald made headlines this year by walking away from a show. The Baltimore-based painter, who rose to prominence for her 2018 portrait of Michelle Obama, was the subject of a high-profile traveling exhibition, “American Sublime,” organized by SFMOMA and shown at the Whitney Museum of American Art this summer. Sherald canceled the tour’s third stop, at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., due to disagreements about her painting Trans Forming Liberty (2024). It was a rare and consequential act of institutional refusal.

The painting depicts a transgender woman posed as the Statue of Liberty. The National Portrait Gallery was considering replacing the work with a video of people reacting to the painting, a strategy to avoid provoking President Donald Trump. Instead of acquiescing, Sherald asserted artistic autonomy and sparked conversation about who gets to define American imagery. “When I understood a video would replace the painting, I decided to cancel,” she said in an interview with the New York Times. “The video would have opened up for debate the value of trans visibility and I was opposed to that being a part of the ‘American Sublime’ narrative.” “American Sublime,” in its unadulterated curation, remains on view at the Baltimore Museum of Art through April.

—Maxwell Rabb, Staff Writer

For 10 days this spring, Anne Imhof’s massive durational performance DOOM: HOUSE OF HOPE dominated art world conversation in New York. Staged at the Park Avenue Armory from March 3rd to 12th, the three-hour, open-format experience transformed the Wade Thompson Drill Hall into an immersive environment with no fixed seating and no privileged point of view.

Curated by Klaus Biesenbach, DOOM choreographed a cast that moved fluidly between high and low cultural registers. The performance folded dialogue from Romeo and Juliet into scenes of American high-school angst: Imhof staged tailgate parties atop black Cadillac Escalades and school dances drained of romance. It all unfolded beneath a looming doomsday countdown clock, which promised a catastrophe that never arrived. Instead, audiences got prolonged anticipation and unease.

The groundbreaking piece raised questions about power, alienation, and spectatorship.

Imhof’s last project of this scale was Faust (2017), an immersive performance critiquing power and late capitalism, which earned her the Golden Lion at the 2017 Venice Biennale. The making of DOOM will be the subject of a documentary produced by Art21, out next year.

This December, Imhof released an album and booklet titled “Wish You Were Gay,” an extension of her 2024 exhibition at Kunsthaus Bregenz of the same name. She also opened “Fun ist ein Stahlbad,” an exhibition at the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art in Portugal. The centerpiece is a newly commissioned 60-foot swimming pool sculpture.

—M.R.

At 88, Arpita Singh is one of India’s best-known artists. She’s celebrated for her stunning, surreal oil paintings, which bring a deeply personal approach to Bengali folklore, mythology, and urban life. Cars, planes, and figures float against her pastel backgrounds. The artist often incorporates text and ink into her work (she’s become a master of watercolor as well). Singh represents a second generation of Indian Modernism, and her paintings reinterpret contemporary life via scenes that feel simultaneously historical, timeless, and new.

Though it opened in 2024, “Imaginary Institution of India: Art 1975–1998” at the Barbican set the tone for 2025’s increasing international focus on Indian art. The London show featured Singh’s work alongside that of Nalini Malani, Madhvi Parekh, and other contemporaries. But it was in March that Singh’s paintings received London’s full attention: The Serpentine North opened “Remembering,” her first institutional solo show outside of India. It marked a major turning point for the artist, and for the international art world, which has been slow to appreciate the significance of 20th-century South Asian artists like Singh.

—Josie Thaddeus-Johns, Senior Editor

Ayoung Kim’s slick, futuristic visions have popped up across Asia for the last few years: In 2025, her influence reverberated across the globe. In February, the artist opened “Many Worlds Over” at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin. The show brought together two of the videos from her “Delivery Dancer” series, along with sculptures, wallpapers, and a playable video game based in the same universe. In November, the Performa biennial brought Kim’s live-action interpretation of the films to New York. Now, the full “Delivery Dancer” trilogy is on view in the city as MoMA PS1 hosts the artist’s U.S. solo institutional debut.

These films use cutting-edge techniques—from motion capture to AI—to present a captivating universe where two rival female motorcycle delivery drivers are locked in a sci-fi love story as they race against time. With an aesthetic that references mind-bending action movies like Inception, the films nod to the infinite availability of our always-on contemporary culture. Kim is responding to her perception of Seoul, where she lives. As the artist told me in an interview earlier this year: “This ‘survival game mode’ is embedded in all Korean people in all sectors of society…I wanted to call out this competition.”

—J.T.J.

At Art Basel Miami Beach, Beeple propelled himself onto this list with Regular Animals, an installation of robotic dogs topped with the hyper-realistic heads of tech billionaires. It quickly became one of the fair’s most talked-about spectacles.

The machines featured the faces of Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Andy Warhol, Pablo Picasso, and the artist himself. They roamed a transparent pen inside Zero10, the fair’s new digital art section. The dogs periodically entered “Poop Mode,” taking photographs of one another and printing them out from their backsides.

The work sparked conversation about how tech leaders and AI are increasingly shaping how we see the world, as artists like Picasso and Warhol changed people’s perceptions in the 20th century. “There is an analogy; we’re increasingly going to view the world through AI,” Beeple told The Art Newspaper. “We’re also seeing the world through the lens of artists and tech leaders like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, who shape what we see, probably more than anybody else.”Beeple is known for this type of art world provocation. The digital artist, born Mike Winkelmann, rose to prominence with his record-breaking $69 million NFT sale at Christie’s in 2021.

—M.R.

Danielle Mckinney’s saturated, cinematic paintings focus on the intimate lives of Black women. The artist depicts her subjects in dimly lit interiors as they lounge, read, smoke, think, and find contentment within themselves. These pieces commanded attention from Maastricht, the Netherlands, to Massachusetts this year.

Mckinney debuted eight new paintings with Marianne Boesky Gallery at TEFAF Maastricht in March. Then, her first U.S. institutional solo show, “Tell Me More,” opened at Massachusetts’s Rose Art Museum in August. She capped off her remarkable year with a solo exhibition at London’s Galerie Max Hetzler, which opened in September.

The 44-year-old artist was born in Montgomery, Alabama, and is now based in New Jersey. Mckinney started her work as a photographer at 15 and earned an MFA in photography from Parsons School of Design in 2013. She only took up painting in 2020, during the pandemic. In just five years, Mckinney has cemented her reputation as an era-defining painter.

—M.R.

Kelly Akashi’s year was marked by perseverance. In January, Los Angeles wildfires destroyed her Altadena home and much of the work for her first exhibition with Lisson Gallery in L.A. Yet the artist moved quickly to remake the show while advocating for fellow artists and art workers who had lost everything.

The Lisson exhibition opened during Frieze Los Angeles and quickly became a highlight of the week. Glass and bronze sculptures filled the gallery, their precision belying the circumstances of their making. A handful of salvaged works revealed the patina of flames and ash. The presentation amplified enduring themes in Akashi’s practice—time, impermanence, personal history—now sharpened by fresh grief.

Akashi’s influence carried throughout the year, with group exhibitions at institutions including the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, the Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Art in Malibu, California, and The Warehouse in Dallas; a residency at the Pilchuck Glass School in Stanwood, Washington; and news of a public commission for JFK Airport’s new Terminal One. Just this month, the Whitney Museum announced that Akashi will create a major terrace commission for the 2026 Whitney Biennial. The work is an homage to the L.A. wildfire victims. It will reimagine the artist’s chimney, the only part of her home that survived.

—Casey Lesser, Editor in Chief

During London’s packed fall calendar of museum and gallery shows, art world wags recommended one exhibition more than any other: Kerry James Marshall at the Royal Academy of Arts.

“The Histories,” the artist’s largest European show to date, definitively cemented Marshall’s status as a master of contemporary history painting for a global audience. The survey spanned four decades and documented a creative career spent rewriting and enriching the Eurocentric canon of Western art history by centering Black figures and experiences.

However, the show was not just a retrospective glance at Marshall’s oeuvre. A provocative series of eight new paintings explored the complex and often avoided topic of the active role of Africans in the transatlantic slave trade. At 70, Marshall continues to contribute to difficult global conversations about history, power, and representation.

—Arun Kakar, Senior Market Editor

British artist Nnena Kalu shattered a glass ceiling in December when she became the first neurodivergent awardee of the Turner Prize. Kalu is known for hypnotic, intuitive sculptures, drawings, and paintings that resist translation or explanation. Instead, they operate as direct expressions of self for the nonverbal artist.

Born in Glasgow in 1966, London-based Kalu repurposes found VHS tape, rope, discarded paper, and other materials to make the vivid sculptures for which she’s best known. Her cocoon-like forms emerge through repetitive wrapping and binding gestures that emphasize the importance of accumulation in her practice.

Long affiliated with ActionSpace, a London-based studio supporting artists with disabilities, Kalu spent decades working outside the mainstream. In 2024, she gained recognition at Manifesta 15 in Barcelona and in a group show, “Conversations,” at Liverpool, England’s Walker Art Gallery.

—M.R.

Otobong Nkanga works with materials like soil, stone, glass, and fiber—alongside sensory elements such as scent and sound—to explore how landscapes absorb human activity and memory related to extraction, migration, and agriculture. This year, the artist powerfully shaped conversations around environmental art.

Nkanga began 2025 with a major MoMA atrium presentation, “Cadence,” which featured sculptures, a monumental woven tapestry, and the sounds of deep breathing and visceral emotion. These interventions transformed the space into a lifelike ecosystem and a site of communal mourning for ecological upheaval.

The artist’s momentum continued in the spring, when Nkanga was celebrated as the 2025 Nasher Prize Laureate and opened her exhibition “Each Seed a Body” at Dallas’s Nasher Sculpture Center. The show centered on a 53-foot installation encrusted with plants and spices connected to North Texas; visitors were invited to kneel down and inhale its essence.

This October, a sprawling tapestry by Nkanga welcomed visitors to Lisson Gallery’s booth at Frieze London. And a week later, the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris opened “I dreamt of you in colours,” a major exhibition—on view through February 22, 2026—bringing together early drawings, installations, and recent tapestries that chart the evolution of Nkanga’s practice.

—C.L.

Tyler Mitchell first entered the cultural spotlight in 2018, at just 23, as the youngest and first Black photographer to shoot Vogue’s cover. What once looked like a breakout moment has hardened into sustained influence. This year, gallery shows, a major Met commission, and a monograph solidified Mitchell’s position as a generational talent. His photographs foreground the lives of Black people, focusing on tenderness, joy, and interiority.

In February, Mitchell presented “Ghost Images,” his first solo exhibition with Gagosian in New York. The gallery mounted another presentation of his work at their Burlington Arcade location in London this September. The Metropolitan Museum of Art tapped into Mitchell’s intimate engagements with Black dandyism and identity by commissioning him to shoot the catalogue for the “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style,” the Costume Institute’s show tied to the Met Gala. This placed his images of figures like Spike Lee and Ayo Edebiri in dialogue with a longer visual tradition.