The art world is always eating itself, tearing down what came before and repackaging it for the next generation. It moves in cycles—grand gestures give way to intimate ones, excess collapses into restraint, spectacle turns back into sincerity. Right now, contemporary art is splintering, fracturing into smaller movements and personal obsessions, a thousand different micro-trends running in parallel. There is no singular direction, no dominant aesthetic, no one voice leading the charge. That’s what makes this moment so interesting.
Painting is Alive, But It’s Weirder Than Ever
For years, the market has been driving trends in painting, rewarding bright colors, recognizable motifs, and flat, Instagram-ready surfaces. But that’s changing. There’s a shift toward something messier, more tactile, more difficult to place. Artists are pulling from art history, not in a nostalgic way, but to mutate and distort it, twisting classical compositions into strange, feverish dreamscapes.
Joiri Minaya is a Dominican-American multidisciplinary artist whose work delves into themes of identity, colonialism, and stereotypes. Utilizing digital media, photography, performance, and textiles, Minaya challenges preconceived notions, wrapping her subjects in immersive patterns that subvert exoticized representations of the Caribbean. Her work exists somewhere between fiction and reality, hyper-stylized but deeply personal.
Dutch artist Afra Eisma takes another approach, creating ceramic and textile installations that feel like relics from a world that never existed. Her pieces—cartoonish, vibrant, and playful—turn childhood imagination into something sculptural. The textures invite interaction, making viewers want to reach out and touch, but beneath the humor, there’s an exploration of vulnerability and human connection.
Meanwhile, Anna Sampson and Chloe Brailsford are reshaping how queer identity and erotica are portrayed in contemporary art. Sampson’s photography captures intimacy in its rawest form, stripping away the performative layers of desire. Brailsford’s work, on the other hand, plays with humor, pulling queer identity into a space that feels celebratory, strange, and completely outside the traditional art-historical canon.
And then there’s Grogan, who moves between the worlds of craft and fine art. Originally trained in fashion, he has shifted into intricate woodcarving, creating elaborate, tactile pieces that exist somewhere between sculpture and painting. The art market has already taken notice—his pieces are selling at increasingly high prices, signaling that collectors are looking for something more than just paint on canvas.
The Digital Has Merged With the Physical
There was a moment when NFTs and digital art seemed poised to take over everything, when it felt like the physical object was becoming obsolete. That moment has passed. What’s left is something more interesting—a hybrid space where artists are using digital tools to create physical work, and vice versa.
Jes Fan is fusing biotechnology with sculpture, embedding synthetic hormones into glass and silicone, making work that feels like it exists in the future. Kiyan Williams is turning digital distortion into physical form, creating sculptures that look like they’ve glitched out of reality. Artists aren’t abandoning technology; they’re absorbing it, making work that reflects the strange way we experience the world now—half in real life, half in the digital ether.
The Market is Fragmenting
For years, the art market has been driven by a handful of mega-galleries and auction house darlings, but that model is starting to crack. Mid-tier galleries are becoming more powerful, artists are moving between spaces, and collectors are looking outside the traditional blue-chip system. There’s more interest in discovering new names, in buying work that isn’t just a status symbol but actually means something.
At the same time, the rise of private museums and personal collections is shifting power away from institutions. Art isn’t just being shown in white cubes anymore—it’s appearing in industrial warehouses, desert landscapes, and intimate home collections. The smartest collectors are looking beyond what’s already been validated, searching for work that feels like it belongs to this moment.
What Comes Next
The future of contemporary art isn’t one thing. It’s a collision of old and new, digital and physical, beauty and grotesquery. It’s artists making work that refuses to be easy, that challenges the way we look at images, that pulls from history but doesn’t repeat it. It’s about finding meaning in chaos, about embracing imperfection, about making art that feels like it actually belongs to the strange, fractured world we live in.
The next decade will be defined by artists who aren’t just making work to be consumed but making work that demands to be seen, to be felt, to be remembered. The question isn’t what’s trending—it’s who is paying attention.
🔗 Visit: www.goodmothergallery.com
📍 Follow: @goodmothergallery for real-time updates on exhibitions, available works, and private sales.