Artsy Editors
Over the course of 2025, Artsy writers highlighted some of the most exciting artists working today. This year, we brought you closer to rising painters poised for major success as well as monumental artists whose recognition is long overdue. Nostalgic landscapes, energetic figuration, and boundary-breaking works that redefine painting are just a few of the themes that our readers were captivated by. Talking to artists is one of the privileges of writing about art: Their stories help draw back the curtain on how they create, bringing the magic of art closer to more people every day.
Here, we round up some of the Artsy profiles of artists you loved the most this year.
Portrait of Isabella Ducrot in her studio. Photo by Claire de Virieu. Courtesy the artist and Petzel, New York.
“Ducrot’s life story proves the maxim that it’s never too late. The artist herself is a model of persistence. Over the past four decades, Ducrot has created a body of work that invites us to examine the world more closely: how it moves, recurs, and affects us.”
Read our interview with Isabella Ducrot to discover the painter’s daily rituals.
Portrait of Eva Helene Pade. Photo by Petra Kleis. Courtesy of Thaddaeus Ropac.
“Over the course of her ascendant career, she’s earned a reputation for well-placed art-historic references, evoking the Expressionism of German painter Otto Dix and the golden haze of Vienna Secessionist Gustav Klimt alike. ‘Some of it is conscious, and some of it is unconscious,’ Pade commented.”
Explore the artist’s inspirations in our interview with Eva Helene Pade.
Portrait of Olga de Amaral at Casa Amaral, Bogotá, Colombia, 2013. Photo © Diego Amaral. Courtesy of the Fondation Cartier.
“Handmade fiber, horsehair, plastic, and gold: The materials interlaced into Amaral’s textiles testify to her meticulous, lifelong attention to texture and form. For six decades, her sculptural, often colossal work has challenged categorizations of ‘craft’ and ‘art,’ an approach that has also brought newfound recognition for contemporaries in textile art Sheila Hicks and Magdalena Abakanowicz. At 92, Amaral is now receiving recognition for her intricate textiles, such as the ‘Brumas.’”
Learn more about Olga de Amaral’s career in our interview.
Portrait of Geoffroy Pithon by Thibault Royer for Artsy.
“He rarely begins with a blank page; sometimes the works begin with digital prints of rough sketches he produces on the computer, or hand-drawn pencil lines for guidance, and other times he searches the large-format works leftover from site-specific installations for “the most efficient parts,” which he then cuts out and reworks. He compares this process to sampling with music, ‘only instead of sampling from another artist, I am sampling from my own work,’ he said.”
Read our interview with Geoffroy Pithon to get a feel for the artist’s process.
Portrait of Mavis Pusey. Courtesy of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts Archives, Pennsylvania.
“Though prolific in her work and well-connected, Pusey, like many other women artists of her time, was largely overlooked within art history. ‘She was a woman artist, but she was also a Black woman artist working in abstraction; the art world has not been kind to Black women abstract artists.’”
Explore the legacy of this underrecognized Black woman artist in our interview with Mavis Pusey.
Portrait of Bianca Raffaella in TKE Studios, October 2024. Photo by Antonio Parente. Courtesy of Flowers.
“She is drawn to flowers in particular as a symbol of finite beauty in the world that is often undervalued. ‘Sight is also finite, and we often don’t appreciate different layers of vision. My work is a conversation between these two important subjects,’ she said.”
Dive into an unconventional practice through our interview with Bianca Raffaella.
Portrait of Emil Sands by Giulia Fassina for Artsy.
“Today, Sands obsessively paints bodies—imagined, inspired by friends, or his own. These figures inhabit isolated, sometimes eerie, landscapes, often near water. The resulting impressionistic tableaux present an intimate study of the human form, where partially bare bodies are subject to the same attention that Sands gives himself.”
Read more about these paintings of bodies and perception in our interview with Emil Sands.
Portrait of Christina Kimeze in her studio, 2024. Photo by Lily Bertrand-Webb. Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth.
“For ‘Between Wood and Wheel,’ Kimeze has homed in on Black roller-skating groups in the U.K. and U.S. These paintings evoke ideas of flight, freedom, and movement. Her figures, shown in fragments of faces and torsos, appear lost in serene or elated action, soaked in bright purple, yellow, and orange.”
Explore this vibrant solo show through our interview with Christina Kimeze.
Portrait of Daniel Day-Lewis and Ronan Day-Lewis on the set of Anemone. Photo by Maria Lax / Focus Features. © 2025 Focus Features, LLC. All Rights Reserved. Courtesy of Focus Features.
“Many of his paintings feature…lustrous, dreamlike landscapes. This inspiration traces back to his childhood, particularly the months he spent in Marfa, Texas—when his father filmed There Will Be Blood (2007)—where the desert ‘embedded itself’ in his consciousness.”
Discover how memory informs this painter’s art in our interview with Ronan Day-Lewis.
Artsy Editorial
