10 Artists you need to Know 👀 #14
Discover 10 hidden gems of the art world, including Anna Weyant, Kawase Hasui, Francisco de Zurbarán & Helena Minginowicz. Your next favorite artist is here.
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1/10 | Anna Weyant (born 1995)
In May 2022, Gagosian Gallery signed a twenty seven year old Canadian painter. She was the youngest artist Larry Gagosian had ever taken on.
Anna Weyant was born in Calgary. She had been posting to Instagram, one small canvas at a time. That is how the gallery world found her.
She paints women. Round faced, big eyed, half comic, half haunted. She paints still lifes of cakes and cocktails that could belong on a Dutch table from 1650. The Wall Street Journal called her the millennial Botticelli.
Her prices went from a few thousand dollars to more than a million in three years. She was in a relationship with Larry Gagosian for several years, a detail the art world could not stop discussing.
In 2025, she had her first solo institutional show at the Museo Nacional Thyssen Bornemisza in Madrid, her canvases hung next to the Frans Hals and Judith Leyster works that had shaped her.
2/10 | Kawase Hasui (1883 to 1957)
The Kawase family sold rope and thread from a wholesale shop in the Shiba district of Tokyo. The son, Kawase Hasui, was expected to take over.
He wanted to paint. His parents refused. He was only freed the day his sister married a man who took over the shop in his place.
Kawase was 26 by then. He asked the respected nihonga painter Kiyokata Kaburagi for lessons. Kaburagi told him he was too old to start seriously. Kaburagi eventually accepted him anyway.
With the publisher Watanabe Shōzaburō, Hasui invented the shin hanga movement, the "new prints" that gave the Japanese woodblock a second life in the 20th century.
He designed almost a thousand of them in forty years. Temples in the snow, bridges at dusk, boats in the night. The human figure is almost always tiny, almost always alone, almost always walking away.
In 1956, one year before his death, the Japanese government named him a Living National Treasure.
His original blocks are still being pulled from today.
3/10 | Helena Minginowicz (born 1984)
