Artist highlight

Top 5 Artists | Nicolas Bourriaud

Image Credit: Bianca Argimón, Truth Social, 2025, oil on canvas, 140 x 160 cm. Image taken from the artist’s Instagram.

A spotlight on the top 5 next gen artists from those that know. This week's Top 5 comes from Curator and Writer Nicolás Bourriaud. 

Image Credit: @bourriaudnicolas

Nicolás Bourriaud

A spotlight on the top 5 next gen artists from those that know. This week's Top 5 comes from Curator and Writer Nicolás Bourriaud. 

Nicolás is a leading figure in contemporary art, known for his innovative curatorial projects and institutional leadership. He co-founded and co-directed Palais de Tokyo in Paris (1999–2006) and served as founding advisor for the Victor Pinchuk Foundation in Kyiv (2003–2007). He was Gulbenkian Curator for Contemporary Art at Tate Britain (2007–2010) and Director of the École Nationale des Beaux-Arts de Paris (2011–2015).

Between 2015 and 2021, he founded and directed MO.CO (Montpellier Contemporain), uniting La Panacée, the ESBA art school, and the Hôtel des Collections into a dynamic platform for contemporary exhibitions and collections.

He was the Artistic Director of the 15th Gwangju Biennale in 2024, and his latest exhibition, 1+1. The Relational Years, opened at MaXXI in Rome. Nicolás has also curated numerous international exhibitions, from Traffic (Capc Bordeaux, 1996) to Planet B. Climate Change and the New Sublime (Venice, 2022), and contributed to several biennials including Lyon, Moscow, Athens, Taipei, Kaunas, and Istanbul.

In addition to his curatorial work, Nicolás is a writer. He published Relational Aesthetics in 1998, translated into more than 20 languages, and his most recent book is Inclusions. Aesthetics of the Anthropocene (2020).

@bourriaudnicolas

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Mohammad Al-Faraj

Mohammad Alfaraj is an Al Hasa–based multidisciplinary artist working in film, installation, sculpture, writing, and photography. Drawing on the oasis landscape and its materials, he reflects on the intertwined relationship between people and their environment, blending local stories with a poetic sensibility. His work has been shown across the Gulf, including solo exhibitions in Dubai and Jeddah. Alfaraj studied mechanical engineering and received first prize at the 2015 Saudi Film Festival for his documentary Lost.

“This young Saudi artist creates poetic installations—sometimes based on fictional sources—to explore contemporary social and environmental issues. By documenting his hometown of Al Hasa, collecting objects, or drawing with charcoal on walls, Al-Faraj emerges as a storyteller, a great chronicler of modern Arabia.”

@mohammadalfaraj

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Mohammad Al-Faraj, The whispers of today are heard in the garden of tomorrow, 2024, mixed media. Image taken from ATHR Gallery website.

Hajar Satari

Hajar Satari is a Paris-based Iranian artist whose work moves between sculpture, photography, and installation. Her practice reflects on how humans perceive and adapt to changing natural environments, blending research with poetic visual forms. She has exhibited internationally, including at the Lyon Biennale.

“This young Iranian artist upends conventions by blending ethnographic immersion with performance art. Spending months at high altitudes in thin air, she studies deep time—geological and botanical—through meticulous drawings that function as both an intimate diary and a laboratory. Upon returning from the mountains, she creates strange, luminous sculptures.”

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Hajar Satari, Le Dôme, 2022, polystyrene, acrylic resin. Image taken from La Biennale de Lyon website.

Bianca Argimón

Bianca Argimón (b. 1988, Brussels) is a Franco-Spanish artist based in Paris whose work spans drawing, sculpture, painting, and installation. She creates visually engaging pieces that mix playful imagery with subtle critique of contemporary society, touching on themes like power, consumer culture, and technology. Argimón studied at Central Saint Martins, ENSAD and the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and her work has been shown in major exhibitions and artists’ residencies in Europe and beyond. 

“A Franco-Spanish artist and avid traveler, Argimón depicts power, consumer society, and technological dystopia. In her sprawling allegorical drawings, the teeming details invite viewers to ‘read’ the image, much like the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch. Her sculptures, however, strike with their visual impact and dark humor. Her recent series of paper lamps—subtly referencing China’s 2022 ‘blank page revolution’—showcases her knack for capturing political currents through form.”

@biancaargimon

https://tinyurl.com/5ba26yd7

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Bianca Argimón, Truth Social, 2025, oil on canvas, 140 x 160 cm. Image taken from the artist’s Instagram.

Wang Yuyang

Wang Yuyang (b. 1979) is a Beijing-based artist who studied at the Central Academy of Drama and the Central Academy of Fine Arts, where he has taught in the School of Experimental Art since 2008. His practice spans a wide range of media, often turning to obsolete technologies, unconventional materials, and intentionally disruptive aesthetics. Through humor and staged fictions, Wang examines how the body perceives and interprets the world, while also probing the intersections of media, constructed realities, and historical memory.

“Through extensive research, Wang Yuyang crafts visually striking films that uncover profound connections. Her work thrives on juxtapositions and analogies, weaving formal and philosophical links between seemingly disparate elements. Her latest video installation on oil provokes more reflection than dozens of documentaries combined.”

@wyystudio_wangyuyang 

https://tinyurl.com/255kj3dw

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Wang Yuyang, Look on the Bright Side, 2022 (still), 20:00 minutes single-channel FHD video. Image taken from Kadist website.

Vladislav Markov

Vladislav Markov is a New York–based multidisciplinary artist whose installations, sculptures, and paintings explore the tension between digital and physical realities. Using scanning and 3D technologies, he transforms everyday objects into altered states of perception. Markov holds degrees from Parsons and Cornell, has exhibited internationally—including the Gwangju Biennale—and is featured in several major institutional collections.

“Vladislav Markov has antennas tuned to the near future. In 2022, he produced a series of paintings depicting a worn and tattered world, affected by an inexplicable spatial and temporal disintegration, as if the coherence of the universe itself had collapsed — paintings from a post-truth world that reveal the ‘accidents of things.’ In his recent New York exhibition, he incorporates bugs, remote controls, the dark web, buzz, and filters that distort or color reality, bringing them together in a spectacular installation.”

@no.waves

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Bianca Argimón, Truth Social, 2025, oil on canvas, 140 x 160 cm. Image taken from the artist’s Instagram.

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