10 Young Contemporary Artists You Must Know

A self-trained illustrator, Yoskay Yamamoto fuses elements of urban culture from his current home, California, with traditional Japanese themes. The mix has a nostalgic twist, and is all about balancing past (i.e. personal heritage) and the present.

Colombian born artist Alejandra Hernández has a very interesting, intimate and creative way of painting, which makes her works very particular.

Conor Harrington is a extremely talented Irish painter and street artist who has garnered worldwide recognition for his dramatic and mesmerizing artworks which wonderfully fuse together various street art motifs and rather ambitious realist painting.

Heidi Hahn brings a thoughtful and refreshing perspective to the medium of painting. Often engaging with the female body, the artist's layered, parafin infused images utilize a consistent cast of characters. The artist’s sumptuous application of paint and seductive layered surfaces draw the viewer into a psychologically intense narrative, in conversation with this tradition, which unfolds across the paintings presented.

Masakatsu Sashie's paintings present a post-apocalyptic world brought on by rampant consumer culture and the rapidity of postmodern life.

Dan Attoe’s paintings depict natural wonders—waterfalls, beaches, mountains, rocky cliffs, over-sized forests—populated by tiny figures spouting even tinier diaristic missives, painted in silver and culled from the artist’s stream of consciousness. The miniature humans disrupt the grandeur of nature with their small stature and utterances.

Mario Martinez (aka MARS-1) paints from a penetrating perspective of great depth. Viewers are drawn into his imaginative compositions, overflowing with colorful geometric and organic shapes, layered to form unique patterns and textures. The artist signature style of vast, abstracted, quasi-extraterrestrial looking landscapes feature imagery of surreal distortions, contained within spherically convex transparent bubbles.

Human desire is something that has always interested Susuma Matsuura. Intimidating but at the same time pure and beautiful, the complexities of human nature drives his interest and inspires him to delve into the minds of people he encounters. Buildings, streets, goods in shops, flowers, trees, pavements and parks also feature in his quest to make sense of the process behind invention.

Tauba Auerbach is a visual artist working across many disciplines including painting, artists' books, photography, and sculpture. Her work "operat[es] in the gap between conceptual art, abstraction and graphic art". She lives and works in New York.

Audrey Kawasaki is a Los Angeles-based painter, known for her distinctive, erotically charged portrayals of young, adolescent women. Art Nouveau and Manga comics combine to form an unlikely marriage in Kawasaki's work. She balances the delicate and the bold, realizing mysterious figures that are at once both innocent and erotic.