Contemporary Artists Giving Old Traditions a New Life

Feature image: Jean Claracq, Qatarchitecten, 2018 (cropped), via Jousse Entreprise. Titles of works originally in another language have been translated to English.

These contemporary artists, ranging from a recent art school graduate to a veteran of 1970s Madrid, each give a centuries-old tradition new life in ways that reward a closer look on the feed.

Guillermo Pérez Villalta was born in Tarifa, in the province of Cádiz, in 1948, spent his childhood between La Línea de la Concepción and Málaga, and moved with his family to Madrid in 1958. He studied architecture before leaving the degree unfinished to paint, and as a largely self-taught artist, he became a central figure of the Nueva Figuración Madrileña in the early 1970s, alongside Carlos Alcolea, Carlos Franco, and Rafael Pérez Mínguez. In 1980, his work traveled to New York for New Images from Spain at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and in 1985 he received Spain's Premio Nacional de Artes Plásticas, followed by the Gold Medal of Merit in the Fine Arts in 2006 and the Community of Madrid's Culture Prize in 2007. The Museo Reina Sofía placed him at the center of its 2009 survey Los esquizos de Madrid, and in 2021 the Sala Alcalá 31 in Madrid staged El arte como laberinto, a retrospective of nearly 100 works that also included the jewelry, marquetry, and furniture he designed. His work is held by the Museo Reina Sofía, the Fundación Juan March, and the Guggenheim, among other collections.

Among the contemporary artists on this list, Pérez Villalta has the longest career, and his architectural training shapes nearly every canvas through his handling of empty space, light, geometry, and perspective. His early paintings of the 1970s, worked mostly in acrylic, are bright and saturated, with figures and stagings drawn from Baroque and Mannerist painting, which led critics to describe the work as neo-Mannerist, and over the following decades his palette moved toward earthier tones. He layers mythology, personal biography, and religious and Dionysian imagery inside labyrinthine architectural settings, and critics have traced references as wide as Italian metaphysical painting, Salvador Dalí, Marcel Duchamp, Walt Disney, psychedelia, and Pop art. His practice extends well past the easel into sculpture, jewelry, furniture and object design, stained glass, tilework, textiles, posters, illustration, and theater sets, all built on the same pursuit of balance and harmony.

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Jean Claracq was born in Bayonne, in southwest France, in 1991, and graduated from the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris in 2017. Three years later, he received his first solo museum exhibition, Open Space #7 at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris (September 2020 to January 2021), which debuted a polyptych of five tiny paintings based on the senses depicted in the medieval tapestry cycle The Lady and the Unicorn. In 2021, he designed the official poster for the Roland-Garros tennis tournament and was invited to show new work at the Musée Eugène-Delacroix during that year's FIAC, responding to Delacroix's journal and to portraits of young men in the museum's collection. In 2022, he was included in the 16th Lyon Biennale, Manifesto of Fragility, and he continues to live and work in Paris.

Claracq works mostly in oil on wood at miniature scale, with some panels measuring only a few centimeters across, and packs each surface with the fine detail and multiple narratives of medieval illumination, Renaissance painting, and Northern European old masters. He begins his compositions on the computer as digital collages assembled from dozens of sources, including images pulled from Instagram, Facebook, and dating apps, then translates them by hand into paint, giving the finished works a quiet, faintly video-game clarity. His subjects are usually young men caught between adolescence and adulthood, often figures from gay or marginal communities, shown alone inside apartments or against suburban towers and landscapes and absorbed in their screens. Few contemporary artists bring the genre scene into the age of social media as precisely, with the loneliness of online life set inside the formal order of a centuries-old tradition.

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Carlo Morrone is an Italian artist born in 1988 who keeps a deliberately quiet public profile, sharing his work almost entirely through Instagram, with no published CV or exhibition history to date. His work entered the secondary market in 2025, when signed unique pieces from his series Backdrops and Objects, produced in 2024 as pigment prints on textured paper and digital prints on brushed aluminum, sold at auction in Paris in a sale devoted to the neoclassical style. 

Morrone builds stage-like spaces that borrow their architecture, palette, and flattened perspective from Italian Renaissance painting and manuscript illumination, isolating a single element such as a canopied bed, a classical pavilion, or a row of Venetian façades and setting it against a broad, chalky sky or a dark interior. The figures of the original sources are almost always gone, leaving empty rooms and props that read like sets waiting for a scene to begin, and the title of his series, Backdrops and Objects, names exactly that approach. His palette stays close to the pigments of the period, with powdery blues, sage greens, terracotta, and saturated vermilion, and his sharp, frontal geometry carries a strong architectural sensibility through every image.

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Paree Rohera was born in Mumbai in 2003 and grew up in a Sindhi family, where long, abundant hair was treated as a mark of beauty, and where her mother worked as a jeweler and her father painted on Sundays. She kept sketchbooks of caricatures from high school onward, then moved to the United States to study painting at the Rhode Island School of Design, graduating with a BFA in 2025. During her studies, she received a Hopper Prize grant, took part in a workshop at Anderson Ranch Arts Center led by painter Linda Geary, and made a solo body of work titled The Frame Game, Let's Get Nosey over four months. She has since shown work in Mumbai, completed a residency at Wolf Hill in New York from October 2025 to March 2026, and now splits her year between India and New York City, making her one of the youngest contemporary artists to watch on this list.

Rohera paints in oil and acrylic, building her figures as side-profile caricatures, a shift from front-facing faces once she found the profile let her isolate and exaggerate a single feature, like the nose. Body hair, large noses, and long braided hair recur as deliberate subjects, all features she grew up seeing labeled as flaws, and she frames the work as a search for "the beauty in the ugly." Her surfaces are maximalist, with figures dressed in Indian ornament, jewelry, and textiles and set against dense wallpapers drawn from the architecture of Jaipur and Rajasthan and from her mother's jewelry designs. She describes the repeated patterns as having become "like my handwriting," and she often starts a studio day on a passage of repetitive marks to settle into the work, treating saturated color, kitsch, and religious imagery as signs of cultural authenticity.

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Katayoun Stewart is a Persian-American artist born in Tehran in 1966, who began drawing as a young child and, as a teenager during the Iran-Iraq War, painted large school murals of soldiers and tanks that first fixed her attention on the human form. She earned a BFA from Alzahra University in Tehran in 1997, winning the university's jury awards for surreal work in 1993 and for abstract painting in 1997, along with a Presidential Award for Artistic Excellence in Impressionism in 1994, and she showed in the painting biennials of the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art in 1994 and 1996. She then moved to Turkey, completing an MFA at Hacettepe University in Ankara in 2003, and later to the United States, where she finished a post-baccalaureate year at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts on a merit scholarship in 2014 and has since exhibited at the Grand Rapids Public Museum, the Southern Alleghenies Museum of Art, and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. She has taught art at the elementary, high school, and college levels, completed a commissioned series for Oakland University's Kresge Library in Michigan, and now paints full time in New York.

Stewart began as an abstract expressionist, drawing on Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, and Joan Miró, and turned to figuration during her years in Pennsylvania through contact with the painters Vincent Desiderio and Renee Foulks, later extending her study of the body into sculpture under John Horn. Her subjects now range across portraits, figures, seascapes, and landscapes, with a recurring focus on eyes and faces, and she describes each as a vessel for "presence, tension, and mystery." Some series draw on her personal history while others come from the ocean light of southern Florida, and she builds every canvas slowly in layers, letting instinct steer the direction of the painting. Her figuration carries forward the academic figure-painting tradition of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, founded in 1805 as the oldest art school in the United States, and among contemporary artists working in a realist mode, she gives that lineage new life through her patient handling of light and skin.

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Give them a follow, and keep an eye on where each of these contemporary artists goes next.

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