10 Artists you need to Know 👀 #2
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1 | Mark Maggiori
Mark Maggiori is a French painter who captures the romance and grandeur of the American West with modern cowboys and dramatic landscapes.
Trained at Paris’s Académie Julian, he traded a career in music and film for painting after visiting a Western museum in 2014, creating scenes with vast skies, golden clouds and lone riders that evoke nostalgia for the frontier era.
2 | Hiroshi Nagai
Hiroshi Nagai is a Japanese illustrator who defined the visual aesthetic of City Pop music with his dreamy paintings of sun-drenched California.
Self-taught and inspired by David Hockney and American pop art, he created imagined landscapes of pools, palm trees and ultramarine skies from Tokyo, using magazines and travel brochures rather than visiting the places he painted.
His iconic album covers from the 1980s captured Japan’s economic boom era, and his nostalgic style has found new life with vaporwave culture and online audiences.
3 | Mulgil Kim
Mulgil Kim is a South Korean artist celebrated for her serene, dreamlike landscapes that beautifully merge nature with emotion. Her paintings often showcase flowing forests, delicate grass, and soothing green hues, evoking a sense of calm and reflection.
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4 | Léo Gausson
Léo Gausson was a French painter who embraced Neo-Impressionism and Synthetism during a brief but innovative artistic career from 1886 to 1900.
An early adopter of pointillist techniques, he studied color theory and simplified his compositions with bold colors, while also gaining recognition as one of Paris’s finest poster artists of the era.
5 | Elizabeth Keith
Elizabeth Keith was a Scottish artist who documented Asian life and culture through woodblock prints in the shin hanga movement.
She traveled across Japan, Korea, China and the Philippines, creating intimate scenes of street life, traditional ceremonies and people in regional dress that captured a vanishing world.
Museums and collectors value her rare prints for their cultural authenticity and limited editions.
6 | Gerrit Dou
Gerrit Dou was a Dutch Golden Age painter who founded the Leiden school of fijnschilders with his exceptionally small, highly polished genre scenes.
Trained by Rembrandt as a teenager, he mastered trompe l’oeil niche paintings and candlelit interiors with dramatic chiaroscuro, creating meticulously detailed works that commanded extraordinary prices during his lifetime.
Though his works hang in major museums like the Louvre, Rijksmuseum and National Gallery, and he was once among the most famous Dutch painters, Dou remains surprisingly unknown to the general public today.
7 | Heng Swee Lim
Illustrator Lim Heng Swee repurposes cats into minimalist creative landscapes 🐱
8 | Helen McNicoll
Helen McNicoll was a Canadian Impressionist painter celebrated for her luminous treatment of sunlight and shadow in everyday scenes.
Deaf from childhood, she studied in London and Cornwall, painting women, children and coastal landscapes with a masterful eye for atmospheric light that earned her international acclaim during her brief but prolific career.
9 | Simon Bailly
Simon Bailly is a French illustrator who creates witty editorial images blending retro-futuristic scenes with clean-line comic aesthetics.
Inspired by ligne claire masters like Hergé and contemporary artists like Daniel Clowes, he works for The New York Times, The New Yorker and Hermès, crafting narrative illustrations that tell complete stories through crisp, colorful compositions and understated humor.
10 | Vilhelm Hammershøi
Vilhelm Hammershøi was a Danish painter who created hushed, melancholic interiors distinguished by their sparse furnishings and muted gray palettes.
Working primarily in his Copenhagen apartment at Strandgade 30, he painted over sixty canvases of its empty rooms flooded with pale northern light, often featuring his wife Ida with her back turned in silent contemplation.
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Those cats, though! ❤️❤️❤️