5 Artists on Our Radar in April 2025

“Artists on Our Radar” is a monthly series focused on five artists who have our attention. Utilizing our art expertise and Artsy data, we’ve determined which artists made an impact this past month through new gallery representation, exhibitions, auctions, art fairs, or fresh works on Artsy.

B. 1985, Stockholm. Lives and works in Lund, Sweden.

Swedish artist Clara Gesang-Gottowt’s semi-abstract landscape paintings bridge the intimate with the expansive. Layered densely with foggy greens, muted pinks, and smoldering oranges, new works recently shown by the artist at Galleri Nicolai Wallner offer glimpses into a serene and otherworldly domain.

Titled “Waters,” the show at the Copenhagen gallery featured a series of these large landscapes in portrait orientation, suggesting doorways that the viewer could step through. Suffusive and spacious, Gesang-Gottowt’s scenes seem to harbor memory and emotion, articulated through vivid, affective colors and soft contours that suggest the blurriness of recollection.

Gesang-Gottowt earned her MFA at Stockholm’s Royal Institute of Art in 2013. Her work is in the permanent collections of Swedish institutions such as Moderna Museet, the Malmö Konstmuseum, and others. She has exhibited extensively in solo and group presentations at galleries including Galleri Magnus Karlsson, OTP Copenhagen, Galleri Cora Hillebrand, and the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Stockholm.

—Arun Kakar

B. 1982, St. Louis, Missouri. Lives and works in Columbia, Missouri.

Featuring dollhouses, unicorns, and paddling pools, Zoe Hawk’s narrative paintings explore the experience of girlhood on the cusp of womanhood. In the artist’s current solo exhibition, “She Said,” at Montreal’s Galerie Robertson Arès, her playful, oil-on-panel paintings of girls in pinafore dresses and ballet flats evoke John Tenniel’s famous Alice in Wonderland illustrations. Like Lewis Carroll’s protagonist, Hawk’s characters embody whimsy and adventure while also experiencing disruption and transformation. One such figure is the subject of The Sky Darkens (2025), an apprehensive-looking young woman navigating an unfamiliar world.

Beneath their colorful surfaces, Hawk’s paintings touch on themes of autonomy and social acceptance. Within her innocent-seeming depictions of girls swimming, scouting, and playing schoolyard games like hide-and-seek and “light as a feather, stiff as a board,” she alludes to the complex and evolving nature of friendships between girls and women.

Hawk holds a BFA from Missouri State University and an MFA from the University of Iowa. Her work has been featured in exhibitions at Sagar Reeves Gallery, Visions West Contemporary, Harman Projects, and Rhodes.

—Adeola Gay

B. 1996, Guangzhou, China. Lives and works in London.

Many of Chinese artist Junyi Lu’s hazy canvases are ripped and stitched back together, a method that ruptures her otherwise soft, sensuous images. Often featuring ghostly figures enveloped in psychedelic fields of color, these mixed-media paintings are layered with materials including gauze, thread, and paper drawings. A selection of these canvases, along with sculptures made from construction materials and found objects, is on view through April 26th in “(cosset)”—the artist’s first U.K. solo exhibition, at The Sunday Painter in London.

One standout painting, A Murderer’s Dream VII (2025), features a spectral, headless body against an aqueous backdrop, opposite an abstract, tree-like form and a stark grid that lends a sense of order to the disruption. This work captures the ephemeral nature of dreams and memory, where impressions are swallowed as if by fog, fading and distorting within our subconsciouses.

Lu received her BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2018 and her MFA from the Slade School of Fine Art in 2023. She previously presented a solo exhibition, “Watch Out, Kiddo,” with Shanghai-based gallery LINSEED in 2024.

—Maxwell Rabb

B. 1981, Saint-François, Guadeloupe. Lives in Saint-François.

Growing up in Guadeloupe, Kelly Sinnapah Mary identified as Afro-Caribbean before discovering that her lineage traces back to South Indian indentured laborers brought to the Caribbean. This revelation is foundational to her paintings, in which identities are often masked and revealed. In these surreal, storybook scenes, figures wrestle with environmental threat—a nod to the complex legacy of colonialism in the region.

At the center of many works is Sanbras, a character inspired by 1899 Scottish children’s book The Story of Little Black Sambo. Sinnapah Mary reimagines that story’s protagonist, a cunning young boy, as a tattooed animal-schoolgirl hybrid. The artist’s depictions of Sanbras seem pulled from disconcerting fairytales, as in her 2023 series “She taught me to listen to the wind.” In one work, a bestial hand reaches into the leaf-filled frame. Its furry claws grasp at a young girl’s face as she rests serenely on a pillow, her skin covered with stencil-like vines and Peter Pan motifs. Altogether, the striking scene suggests an impending loss of innocence.

Sinnapah Mary’s work has been shown internationally, including at the Pérez Art Museum Miami, Kunstinstituut Melly in Rotterdam, Netherlands, and the 34th São Paulo Bienal. She was the subject of a recent solo exhibition, “The Book of Violette,” at James Cohan Gallery in New York.

—Josie Thaddeus-Johns

B. 1994, Abington, Pennsylvania. Lives and works in New York.

There is something strangely human about Rachel Youn’s kinetic sculptures and their rhythmic, ritualized movements; watching them is a bit like watching awkward teenagers at a school dance. These “dancers” are formed from fake flora and salvaged motors that propel repetitive patterns of spinning and swinging. Youn’s materials are made poignant by their associations with artifice and intimacy: The motors are sourced from discarded electronic massagers, cheap substitutes for human touch.

The moving flowers and leaves gyrate and often bump into one another, bringing a clumsy sort of eroticism to Youn’s work. This overtone is humorously acknowledged by the title of their 2022 sculpture Sexy but not joyous. In the work—on view through April 12th in a duo show with Sophie Birch at London’s Alice Amati—a pair of artificial orchids are attached to a wall-mounted rig. One of them seems to nuzzle the wall, while the other pokes in and out of a metal aperture, a suggestive gesture made mundane through stilted repetition. Writing about a different work on Instagram, Youn succinctly described a theme that runs through their practice: “Desire is so embarrassing.”