This year, for the first time, ArtReview considers artists working in and around one medium
ArtReview’s secondary school art teacher always insisted that art never changed. For him it was always about investigating the human condition. “What does it say about the human condition?” he would shriek when confronted with a lumpen, lopsided ceramic pot, before dashing it to the floor in a rage when the answer was a mumbled “errrrrr…” The art teacher was wrong of course. Everyone knows all art is not about the human condition alone. Indeed, most art today is just as likely to be about the nonhuman condition. That’s what’s called ‘progress’. Ha, ha, ha.
Of course it isn’t. There’s no such thing. But now’s not the time to get into that. What’s more relevant is that the art teacher was also wrong about art never changing. It does. Why else would ArtReview have put out its eagerly anticipated Future Greats issue every year for the past 18 years? OK, some of the early ones have the vibe of a set of insider trading tips. And at other times, market forces seem to play second fiddle to ideological truth-telling. The message perhaps is that how we value art also changes, and those old Future Greats issues are testament to the prevailing winds of each particular year. Even if ArtReview likes to think of itself as existing far beyond the capriciousness of ‘fashion’ – it still wears the same semi-drape, double-breasted-style, broad-shouldered, slim-hipped, wrinkle-resistant suit in which it was born in 1949. Even if its writers once tried to persuade it of the high fashionability, as the sun set on Empire, of a Madras shirt. Although, as ArtReview said already, now’s not the time for that.
Seriously though, thinking of those old school days, every once in a while ArtReview wishes it could stop time. Just suspend things for a moment, to be able to make a bit more sense of it all before time whooshes by. Sure, there’s almost eight decades’ worth of articles and reviews it can look back on, each one like an idea set in amber. But for each artist discussed in the bygone eras of ArtReview’s back pages there are the hundreds whose names aren’t mentioned, the artists who didn’t have a museum show or feature in such-and-such biennial.
In an effort to partially shift this, ArtReview’s annual Future Greats issue asks artists, curators and writers to nominate someone who they feel is doing work that deserves more attention: artists to look out for in the years to come. It might be an artist who’s been foundational to a town’s scene but is unknown on the other side of the world; or they might’ve just left art school; or had only a few smaller exhibitions. Artists who we should begin to observe more closely, and return to in time.
This year, for the first time, ArtReview wanted to focus its Future Greats a bit more closely, to consider artists working more in and around one medium, if that’s even possible. It felt appropriate to begin with stillness and displacement: what used to be called photography, or even lens-based media, and what we might now just call image-making, in whatever way this is mediated. We asked selectors to consider those who are shaping what it means to create an image now, whether Kathryn Garcia with her ritualistic geometric drawings (selected by Dean Sameshima), Tshepiso Mazibuko and her ghostly hometown portraits shot on expired analogue film stock (selected by Lindokuhle Sobekwa) or Yan Jiacheng’s digitally stitched together images creating panoramic, communal portraits (selected by Lai Fei). There is photography, painting, video, sculpture and more: it’s apparent there’s no one medium that can define how artists are producing imagery now, and what the artists gathered here show us is that even if art stops time, time doesn’t stop art.
Future Greats 2025
Léonard Pongo
selected by Roger Ballen
Aineki Traverso
selected by Karen Lamassonne
Alexey Shlyk
selected by David Claerbout
Rachelle Anayansi Mozman Solano
selected by Justine Kurland
Yan Jiacheng
selected by Lai Fei
Kathryn Garcia
selected by Dean Sameshima
Tiyan Baker
selected by Adeline Chia
Tshepiso Mazibuko
selected by Lindokuhle Sobekwa
Marina Woisky
selected by Oliver Basciano
Samuel Hindolo
selected by Martin Herbert
