10 Artists you need to Know 👀 #7
Discover 10 hidden gems of the art world, including Shōen Uemura, Guido Reni, Rudolf Koller & Victor Vasarely. Your next favorite artist is here.
1 | Frances Featherstone (b. 1961)
British painter who captures people curled up in bed, viewed from above. After years as a BBC designer, she started painting figures lost in books, stroking cats, engulfed in patterned duvets. Her aerial perspective makes geometric tiles dance against messy bedding. Won the top oil painting prize at the 2025 Royal Academy Summer Exhibition.
2 | Shōen Uemura (1875–1949)
Japan's first woman to receive the Order of Culture painted beautiful women when critics dismissed the genre as shallow. Raised by her widowed mother, at fifteen she sold a painting to the Duke of Connaught visiting Japan. Instead of courtesans, she painted mothers and housewives, elevating ordinary women to high art. Became Imperial Household Artist in 1944.
3 | Guido Reni (1575–1642)
Bologna's baroque superstar ran a studio with 200 pupils and charged fortunes for portraits. Critics swung wildly on him for centuries, from "divine Guido" to Ruskin calling him sentimental and vulgar.
He blended Raphael's classicism with Caravaggio's drama, influencing Murillo and Ribera across Europe. His Aurora fresco still stops visitors at the Casino Rospigliosi in Rome.
4 | Gabriele Brombin (b. 1986)
Milan illustrator who mixes analog and digital to create worlds somewhere between ancient and futuristic. In 2012 he self published a science fiction graphic novel he spent two years designing.
Works for Nike and The North Face while pursuing personal projects inspired by Tarkovsky's films. His thing: making romanticism collide with metaphysical weirdness.
