5 Emerging Artists to Watch in 2026: New Material Languages Collectors Should Know

Finding genuinely interesting emerging artists to watch in 2026 is harder than scrolling through a list of names. Visibility can rise very quickly, but visibility is not the same thing as an artistic language that can sustain years of work.

For collectors, curators and galleries looking for something new in contemporary art, one question is especially useful: what is this artist doing with material, process or image-making that feels difficult to replace?

The five artists in this selection are very different. One turns embroidery into architecture. Another moves between wax, plant dyes, sculpture and film. Another builds paintings by layering and excavating their surfaces. One uses climate fiction and planetary imagery to rethink landscape. And one has developed a transparent painting medium that became the basis of a distinct language called Moltenism.

This is not an investment ranking and it is not a prediction of future prices. It is an editorial selection of emerging and breakout contemporary artists whose work currently offers a strong combination of material specificity, recognisable authorship and recent momentum.

Editorial disclosure: MOLODA ART GALLERY publishes this journal and works directly with Olena Moloda, who appears in this selection. Her inclusion should not be read as an independent market endorsement. We include her because this article is specifically about distinctive material languages, and Moltenism is central to our own programme.

What makes an emerging artist worth watching?

There is no formula. A young artist can receive a major institutional commission and still be at the beginning of a long career; another can work independently for years before wider recognition catches up. “Emerging” is therefore not simply an age category.

For this list, we looked for five things:

• A specific visual or material language. The work should not feel interchangeable with dozens of other artists.
• A process that matters. Material and technique should contribute to the meaning of the work rather than functioning only as decoration.
• A body of work, not one viral image. There should be enough continuity to see how the artist thinks.
• Recent momentum. Exhibitions, gallery attention, institutional projects or credible editorial interest can show that other parts of the art ecosystem are paying attention.
• Room to develop. The most interesting artists are not trapped by the very thing that first made them recognisable.

If you are approaching emerging art as a collector, our related guide 10 Signs an Emerging Artist May Be Building a Strong Career explains how to evaluate consistency, documentation, exhibitions, pricing and provenance without pretending that future market value can be predicted.

1. Klára Hosnedlová — when embroidery becomes architecture

Klára Hosnedlová is a Czech artist born in 1990 whose practice has moved far beyond the traditional boundaries of textile art. Her installations combine embroidery, sculpture, architecture, photography and highly controlled scenography to create environments that feel simultaneously archaeological and futuristic.

What makes Hosnedlová particularly interesting is the change of scale. Embroidery is usually read at intimate distance, associated with labour, touch and domestic craft. Hosnedlová allows it to occupy architectural space. The textile element is no longer a detail attached to an installation; it can become one of the structures through which the entire environment is experienced.

Her 2026 exhibition Echo at White Cube Bermondsey expanded this approach into immersive environments concerned with time, machine-made futures, idealised nature and hand-worked pasts. In New York, her site-specific installation Shelter at the New Museum opened in March 2026 as her first museum project in the United States.

Why collectors and galleries are watching

Hosnedlová is already beyond the point of being an unknown discovery. Her institutional trajectory is accelerating. That is exactly why she is useful to watch: she shows how a highly specific craft-based language can expand into the scale of major contemporary installation without losing its recognisable authorship.

For collectors, the question is not simply whether embroidery is “back”. It is whether an artist has transformed a medium so thoroughly that the process becomes inseparable from the work’s identity. Hosnedlová has done that.

What to watch next

The interesting issue is how her language translates across scales. Monumental installations can create institutional visibility, while smaller works need to preserve enough of that conceptual and material density to stand independently. The tension between intimate textile labour and architectural ambition is likely to remain one of the most compelling parts of the practice.

2. Diambe — beeswax, pigment, ecology and a living material system

Diambe, born in 1993, works across sculpture, painting and film. The practice brings together materials that are unusually alive in the literal and symbolic sense: textiles, food, egg tempera, vegetable dyes, bronze and beeswax appear alongside narratives of body, territory, ritual, ecology and cultural memory.

At Kunsthalle Basel, the 2026 exhibition Bees beings beans was presented as Diambe’s largest institutional solo exhibition to date. New sculpture, painting and film were brought together around the world of bees, with the work moving between fragility, loss, transformation and rebirth.

The attraction here is not simply an unusual list of materials. Many contemporary artists use organic matter. What distinguishes Diambe is the way material behaviour and historical meaning are woven together. Beeswax is tactile and mutable; plant dyes carry colour but also histories of extraction and environment; food can suggest nourishment, ritual, decay and economy.

Why collectors and galleries are watching

Diambe represents an important direction in emerging contemporary art: the collapse of the old distinction between painting, sculpture, installation and ecological process. The work asks to be read physically rather than as a flat image.

That matters in a period when so much art is first encountered through a phone. A practice that becomes substantially richer in person has a different kind of scarcity: not digital scarcity, but experiential scarcity. You need to stand in front of it to understand what the materials are doing.

What to watch next

The next question is how far this material vocabulary can expand without turning into a signature recipe. The strongest artists who work with unusual materials keep changing the relationship between medium and idea. Diambe’s movement across film, sculpture and painting gives the practice room to avoid becoming predictable.

3. Connie Harrison — painting as layering, scraping and excavation

Connie Harrison is a British painter born in 1993 and based in London. Her landscapes are made through a process that is almost the reverse of conventional image-building. Oil paint and translucent wax paste are layered onto wooden panels, then scraped and cut back so earlier marks reappear through the surface.

The result is visually lush, but the important part is structural: the painting contains its own history. Marks are buried and rediscovered. Areas become dense, while others are opened up. The surface behaves less like a single moment and more like sediment.

Harrison’s official biography describes the process as an excavation of the composition, while Nino Mier Gallery’s 2025 STRATA presentation included large oil-and-wax panels such as Grass to Grace, Brittle Lapping and Rose Parting.

In June 2026, House & Garden included Harrison in a feature on emerging artists worth collecting, with art adviser Lizzie Dixey describing her as “one to watch” and highlighting the artist’s photographic source material, wax paste and oil layering.

Why collectors and galleries are watching

Harrison’s work sits in an interesting position between landscape painting and physical object. From a distance, the image can read as vegetation, woodland or atmosphere. Up close, the subject gives way to scratches, wax, depth and exposed strata.

That double reading is useful for collectors because it creates what we call second-look value: the work does not reveal everything at once. The image and the surface keep interrupting each other.

What to watch next

The key will be whether Harrison can keep expanding the vocabulary of excavation rather than simply repeating a successful texture. Her strongest works suggest that the process is capable of carrying different kinds of landscape, scale and visual density.

4. Paula Turmina — climate fiction, planetary landscapes and a punk sense of space

Paula Turmina, born in Brazil in 1991 and based in London, works across painting, printmaking, analogue film and writing. Her imagery often moves through red and mineral landscapes populated by hybrid bodies, plants, insects and figures that seem to inhabit a world after familiar ecological rules have shifted.

Her work draws on soil ecologies, climate fiction, colonial histories and speculative futures. Rather than illustrating climate change directly, she creates environments in which adaptation has already become part of everyday existence.

In 2026, Instituto de Visión in New York presented Space Is Punk, Turmina’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. The works were created specifically for the show and developed a visual language informed partly by 20th-century avant-garde movements.

Turmina’s official site also lists the 2026 New York exhibition and further institutional and gallery projects, making this a particularly active period in the development of the practice.

Why collectors and galleries are watching

There is no shortage of contemporary art addressing ecology. What makes Turmina more distinctive is that she avoids the visual language of environmental reportage. Her paintings are speculative worlds. They use science fiction, colour and bodily transformation to make ecological questions strange again.

That is important because a subject as large as climate can easily become generic. Turmina’s red terrains and hybrid figures create a recognisable universe rather than simply attaching an ecological statement to conventional painting.

What to watch next

The practice has room to become more spatial and more cinematic. Because Turmina already works with film and writing, the painted worlds can potentially expand beyond the canvas without abandoning the imagery that makes them recognisable.

5. Olena Moloda — Moltenism and the invention of a new painting medium

Olena Moloda is a Ukrainian artist based in Gran Canaria, Spain, and the creator of Moltenism. Her work begins with a problem that is surprisingly rare in contemporary painting: instead of adapting an inherited medium to a new style, she developed a transparent painting medium specifically for the behaviour she wanted on canvas.

The material can form translucent layers, glossy passages, raised lines, pools of colour and areas of physical relief. Gravity, viscosity, pressure, timing and movement influence the result. Moloda controls palette, direction, composition and balance, but the medium retains enough physical autonomy that two works cannot be reproduced exactly.

This combination of control and unpredictability is the basis of Moltenism. The surface can visually recall molten or coloured glass, but the important point is not the resemblance. It is the fact that transparency, gloss and relief are built into the material language of the work rather than added as a decorative effect afterward.

We explain the process in more detail in Why Every Original Moltenism Painting Is Unique.

Why collectors and galleries should look closely

Moloda’s market position is very different from Hosnedlová’s or Diambe’s. Her practice is still presented primarily through an independent artist-led context in Las Palmas rather than a major international gallery system. That difference is precisely why the work belongs in a conversation about discovery.

For a collector or gallery searching for a genuinely distinct process, Moltenism has one useful quality: it is recognisable without depending on a single repeated composition. The identity comes from how the material behaves — transparency, flow, raised lines, layering and reflection — which gives the artist room to change palette, scale and structure without losing authorship.

What to watch next

The next stage for Moltenism is less about making the paintings more complicated and more about placing the material language in wider curatorial contexts. Large-scale works, site-specific groups, dialogue with architecture and exhibitions focused on material innovation could all reveal aspects of the medium that are harder to understand from individual online images.

Collectors, curators and galleries can explore current Moltenism works, view available original artworks, or contact MOLODA ART GALLERY for studio information and availability.

What these five emerging artists have in common

At first glance, very little. Hosnedlová’s monumental embroidery environments are far from Harrison’s wax-built landscapes. Diambe’s organic systems do not look like Turmina’s speculative red worlds, and Moltenism does not resemble any of them.

But there is a deeper connection: material is no longer a neutral carrier of an image.

In all five practices, the way the work is made becomes part of what the work means.

• Hosnedlová turns labour-intensive textile processes into spatial architecture.
• Diambe lets organic and historically charged materials participate in ecological narratives.
• Harrison builds time into the painting by covering and excavating earlier layers.
• Turmina uses the materiality of landscape and pigment to construct speculative ecological worlds.
• Moloda develops the painting medium itself as part of the artistic language.

This may be one reason material-first practices feel especially relevant now. Digital images have made almost every visual style instantly reproducible. A physical process that cannot be fully compressed into a thumbnail gives the original object renewed importance.

That does not mean “handmade” automatically equals good art. It means material specificity can become one of the strongest forms of authorship when it is connected to a coherent idea.

What collectors should look for before buying an emerging artist

Lists like this can be useful for discovery, but they should never replace looking carefully at the work itself.

If you are considering acquiring work by an emerging contemporary artist, ask a few practical questions:

• Can you recognise the artist’s thinking across several works? A coherent practice matters more than one spectacular image.
• Does the process create something necessary? Unusual materials are interesting only when the work actually needs them.
• Is there professional documentation? Titles, dates, dimensions, materials, invoices and provenance should be clear.
• Are prices understandable and consistent? Healthy careers are usually built more carefully than speculative spikes suggest.
• Is independent attention beginning to form? Serious exhibitions, curators, galleries, publications and repeat collectors can all provide useful context.
• Would you still want the work if its price never increased? This is one of the most important questions in collecting.

For a deeper framework, read How to Tell If Contemporary Art Is Actually Good: 7 Things to Look For and Why Is Contemporary Art So Expensive?.

What makes a new artist interesting to a gallery?

Galleries have a different problem from collectors. They are not choosing one object. They are considering whether an artistic practice can sustain exhibitions, conversations and development over time.

A strong emerging artist does not need to arrive with a perfectly finished “brand”. In fact, too much repetition can be a warning sign. What matters is a recognisable core that can evolve.

Some of the most useful signals are:

• a language specific enough to be remembered after a studio visit;
• a process that can generate new bodies of work rather than endless variants of one successful piece;
• clear professional documentation and reliable communication;
• an exhibition history that shows growing context rather than random visibility;
• the ability to discuss the work without burying it under jargon;
• practical awareness of scale, transport, installation and conservation;
• and, above all, evidence that the artist is still asking questions rather than merely supplying a recognisable product.

This is where material innovation becomes especially interesting. A distinctive process gives a gallery something concrete to build a curatorial conversation around — but only if the artist can keep pushing it forward.

Where collectors and galleries find new art before consensus forms

The most obvious names are usually the easiest to find. Discovery happens earlier in less central places: young gallery programmes, smaller art fairs, artist-run spaces, open studios, regional scenes, residency exhibitions, museum group shows and independent publications.

It is also worth looking outside the major art capitals. An artist working in São Paulo, Las Palmas, Prague or another geographically peripheral scene may develop a language under very different conditions from someone whose entire career unfolds inside London or New York networks.

The internet has made these scenes visible, but it has also created a new problem: too much visual information. The collector’s advantage now is not access. It is attention — the ability to look past the first image and ask whether a practice has depth.

Five artists, five different reasons to pay attention

There is no single “next trend” in contemporary art. The more interesting picture is fragmented.

Klára Hosnedlová shows how craft can become architecture. Diambe treats organic matter as part of a living narrative system. Connie Harrison makes the history of a painting visible through excavation. Paula Turmina turns climate anxiety into speculative worlds rather than illustration. Olena Moloda builds a language around the behaviour of a self-developed transparent painting medium.

None of that guarantees market success. It does something more useful: it gives collectors and galleries a reason to keep looking.

If your interest is specifically in new art movements and material innovation, continue with our article 5 New Art Movements to Watch in 2026.

If you are a collector, curator or gallery researching new material approaches in painting, you can also explore Moltenism by Olena Moloda or contact MOLODA ART GALLERY for current works, studio documentation and further information.

Selected sources and further reading

• White Cube — Klára Hosnedlová, Echo, 2026
• White Cube — Klára Hosnedlová at the New Museum, 2026
• Museen Basel / Kunsthalle Basel — Diambe, Bees beings beans
• Connie Harrison — artist biography
• Nino Mier Gallery — STRATA, 2025
• House & Garden — emerging artists worth collecting, 2026
• Instituto de Visión — Paula Turmina, Space Is Punk, 2026
• Paula Turmina — official artist website
• MOLODA ART GALLERY — Why Every Original Moltenism Painting Is Unique