Editorial
Promising artists
Who are the artists to watch closely in 2025?
8 Jan 2025, 6:21 pm
Every beginning of the year brings reflections on the future. In the realm of visual arts, the curiosity revolves around promising artists, those to be closely watched. This year, to answer this question, we turned to curators Fernanda Brenner, Fernanda Pitta, Renato Menezes, Luciara Ribeiro, and Tarcisio Almeida for their assistance.
Each of them was invited to recommend up to two Brazilian artists who will stand out in 2025, along with a brief justification for their choice. The criteria were open, including, for example, career trajectory, relevance of their work, and participation in important exhibitions and residencies. More than the length of their career, they were encouraged to consider the artists’ current moment.
The result you see below is a selection featuring names from Bahia, Mato Grosso, Amazonas, Rio de Janeiro, Ceará, and Minas Gerais, who work in different mediums and explore equally diverse themes: from Baniwa creation stories to experiments with painting, text, and artificial intelligence.
Above: Mayara Ferrão, "I.A e Arte digital", from the series “Álbum de Desesquecimentos”, 2024
Arorá (Rio de Janeiro, RJ, 2000)
Works with the materiality of time. Her research develops around the idea of the informe — forms that are on the verge of losing matter. She is also interested in visions, mirages, dreams, and all forms of image projection that become rarefied. The duration of the work process, which can result in paintings, drawings, or objects, coincides with the slow time of observation that her works demand.
Arorá, "Suspense 14", 2022-23 (photo: Estudio Em Obra/courtesy Quadra)
Arorá, "Cachoeira da estrela IV", 2023 (photo: Estudio Em Obra/courtesy Quadra)
arth3mis (Fortaleza, CE, 2000)
Visual artist, cultural and audiovisual producer, and art educator, arth3mis is 24 years old and lives, works, and launches arrows from Fortaleza (CE). She is an undergraduate in visual arts at the Federal Institute of Education, Science, and Technology of Ceará (IFCE) and a collaborator at the Livro Livre Curió community library and the casAvoa – Community Museum. Her pursuit is to weave strategies that consider independent art spaces and their communities based on their differences and concerns, conspiring about how to “play” a museum.
arth3mis, "Acalanto", from the series "A face do afeto", 2021
arth3mis, "Trazer à existência as coisas que ainda não existem", 2023
Daniel Jorge (Recreio, MG, 1991)
Daniel Jorge’s (galeria Paulo Darzé) work reveals itself through a critical thought about the genealogy and use of materials, articulating in his sculptures and installations a unique relationship between fractal geometry, ancestral stonemasonry techniques, and vernacular knowledge. His works with stone, clay, and ore demonstrate a sophisticated understanding of geological time and historical layers inscribed in matter, while carrying a powerful denunciation of contemporary apartheid, revealing an artist who deserves special attention in 2025.
Daniel Jorge, "Escultura Ancestre", 2023
Daniel Jorge, "Fenda Sísmica: O Oráculo do Grito"
Frank Baniwa (Assunção do Içana, Amazonas, 1991)
Frank Baniwa is a storyteller who uses image as a means of expression. In paintings and drawings, he depicts the creation stories of the Baniwa, humans and more-than-humans that inhabit his cosmos. He is responsible for the illustrations of the book “Umbigo do Mundo” (Dantes Editora), by his sister, Francy Baniwa, and his works were exhibited in “Viva Viva Escola Viva”, at Casa França Brasil, in Rio de Janeiro, between 2023 and 2024.
Frank Baniwa, "Maami(inambú) fez podaáli para Omawari (sucurijú)", 2023
Frank Baniwa, "Nascimento do povo Medzeniako e a humanidade", 2023
George Teles (Feira de Santana, BA, 1997)
Lives in transit between the Reconcavo, the hinterlands, and the coast of Bahia. Through printing techniques, Teles (RV Cultura e Arte) reveals the invisible from encounters present in the experience of displacement. In the oxidations of the collected matrices, Teles establishes an alternate time, which does not match linearity and seeks the suspension of a routine of time-related ailment we live in.
George Teles, "Lambeduras, Colisões e Rotas de Desvio", 2024 (photo: Wallace Domingues)
George Teles, "Lambeduras, Colisões e Rotas de Desvio", 2024 (photo: Wallace Domingues)
Kaya Agari (Cuiabá, MT, 1986)
The production of Kaya Agari (Carmo Johnson Projects), an artist from the Kura-Bakairi people, has been consistently developing, exploring the creation of pictorial compositions from her people’s designs on canvas, paper, and mural painting. Her great sensitivity to planes and compositions allows her to tackle large panels such as those made in “Véxoa: nós sabemos”, at the Pinacoteca de São Paulo, between 2020 and 2021, and in the exhibition “Somos aquelas por quem estávamos esperando”, opened in 2024 at Sesc Catanduva. Also in 2024, she held her first solo exhibition, “Kaiumalo”, at Carmo Johnson Projects, after having participated in several group shows, including “Histórias Indígenas”, at Masp, in 2023.
Kaya Agari, "Kurâ Kywenu, Ywenu (Pintura dos Kurâ, minha pintura)", 2024 (photo: Samuel Esteves)
Kaya Agari, "Kalamigare (Pintura de menina moça)", 2020 (photo: Levi Fanan/Pinacoteca de São Paulo)
Lucélia Maciel (Morro do Chapéu, BA, 1979)
She is from Bahia, lives, and works in Goiânia (GO). She holds a bachelor’s degree in visual arts from the Federal University of Goiás (UFG). Her works deal with childhood memories. Maciel develops her artistic research and poetics using the lamp as a metaphor to think about ethnic, social, and gender inequalities.
Lucélia Maciel, "Torrão", 2023 (photo: Paulo Rezende)
Lucélia Maciel, "Tenor", 2019 (photo: Paulo Rezende)
Mariana Rocha (Niterói, RJ, 1988)
Researches the behavior of colors in fluid forms. Rocha’s work, predominantly resolved in painting, promotes an interaction between interior and exterior, viscera and epidermis, creating a universe that is sometimes microscopic, cellular, and at other times macroscopic, cartographic. The result of this research is a series of images that tend to remind us of the animal nature of humans and stimulate a humanized perception of non-human life forms.
Mariana Rocha, "O eterno gotejar", 2024 (photo: Renato Mangolin)
Mariana Rocha, "Boca, cílios, círculos", 2024 (photo: Renato Mangolin)
Mayara Ferrão (Salvador, BA, 1993)
Mayara Ferrão’s artistic practice destabilizes conventional documentation processes through the interaction between painting, text, and artificial intelligence. During her residency at Pivô Salvador, she demonstrated how her work operates within a productive tension by questioning biases of the ethnographic gaze. The way she weaves these issues, without falling into easy or conclusive solutions, demonstrates a keen understanding of the contradictions in contemporary memory and documentation systems, positioning her as a unique voice to be followed closely in 2025.
Mayara Ferrão, "I.A e Arte digital", from the series “Álbum de Desesquecimentos”, 2024
Mayara Ferrão, "Dan", 2019
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