10 Artists you need to Know 👀 #10
Discover 10 hidden gems of the art world, including Gerrit Berckheyde, Jeffrey Larson, Rudolf Koller & Bridget Riley. Your next favorite artist is here.
1 | Guillermo Arias (contemporary)
A Mexican illustrator who builds his career one print at a time.
Hand drawn movie posters. Indie band artwork. Fashion graphics. The kind of images you would expect on a vinyl sleeve, a tour t shirt or a horror film one sheet from the 1970s.
He runs a small brand called Besos Robados that puts his illustrations on physical objects. He also sells through Redbubble, where the same image lands on a mug, a poster or a phone case in one click.
His audience lives on Instagram under the handle @hangtheguille. 2,500 posts and counting. Not a star account, just steady output that has built him a niche reputation among illustration nerds.
No museum, no gallery, no big publisher. Just a phone, a stylus, and a back catalogue that the right people keep recirculating.
2 | Bridget Riley (born 1931)
In 1961 she painted black and white squares. No story, no symbolism, no tricks. Just paint on canvas.
But your eyes refused to stay still. The wall seemed to move. People stood in front of her work and felt seasick.
Four years later MoMA put her in The Responsive Eye exhibition. Overnight she was the most copied painter in New York. A fashion brand printed one of her paintings on a dress before she had even landed at JFK. She sued. She lost.
Riley spent the next sixty years asking the same question with paint: how does the eye lie to itself?
She is 95 today and still working. Her London studio produces canvases the size of a wall.
Sixty five years on the same problem. Few painters have stayed inside a single question that long.
3 | Georges Lemmen (1865–1916)
A Belgian who joined the most radical art group in Europe at twenty three. Les XX, Brussels, 1888.
Twenty painters who refused the official Salon and invited their own friends instead. Seurat, Van Gogh, Cézanne, Gauguin, all shown in Belgium before anyone in France gave them a fair viewing.
Lemmen painted in pointillism for ten years. His wife reading. His baby in a bath. His mother in profile. Thousands of tiny dots applied to a child’s bath time.
Then around 1898 he dropped the dots. Said they were too cold. Went back to soft brushwork and his five children growing up.
He also designed type, posters, book covers, fabric patterns. Total Art Nouveau range. Nothing was beneath him.
He died at 51 in Brussels, half forgotten.
4 | Michel Devanakis (born 1962)
