Contemporary Artists You Should Be Following on Instagram

Feature image: Scott Kahn, The Basement (cropped), 2025, via David Zwirner

Social media has become one of the best places to discover working artists, often years before their work reaches a gallery wall or an art fair booth. It can be a powerful tool for artists and collectors alike. Here are our current favorite contemporary artists worth following and collecting.

Tony Toscani paints figures with disproportioned bodies, limbs and torsos inflated or stretched to cartoonish extremes, heads shrunk small or set adrift from the body entirely, set into otherwise ordinary scenes like a pool, a bedroom, a backyard. The settings stay mundane and legible, so the bodies read less like invention and more like distortion. Toscani has built a steady international exhibition record in a short span, with solo shows at Stems Gallery in Brussels and Massey Klein Gallery in New York, group placements from Dubai to Brooklyn, and work that has already moved through the secondary market at auction houses like Ravenel. 

Natalia González Martín paints in the format of icon paintings, working on small wood panels with a brush fine enough to render individual eyelashes and the sheen on a grape. Her nude figures are usually fragmented, a neck, an ear, a foot, and set against Christian and medieval visual traditions that she bends toward something quieter and stranger, exploring the line between devotion and desire. She's shown at Steve Turner in Los Angeles and Chicago, Guts Gallery in London, and Lawrie Shabibi in Dubai, and It's Nice That and other design press have written about her work for the sheer discipline of her technique.

Alicja Pakosz works across painting, sculpture, and large-format diorama, building surreal scenes that dig into collective memory, national identity, and the gap between how history gets remembered and how it actually happened. Her jury citations have singled out her imagination and her sense of humor in equal measure, a rarer combination in work this politically pointed. She's a laureate of the Magdalena Abakanowicz Artistic Award at the University of the Arts in Poznań, chosen out of over two hundred submissions, and has had a solo exhibition at the Arsenał Gallery in Białystok.

Jonathan Gardner builds his paintings through a collage-based process that flattens space into stylized, cinematic tableaus, drawing directly on Henri Matisse, René Magritte, and Pablo Picasso. Architectural devices like columns and doorways divide his scenes into isolated vignettes, so figures dining, bathing, or reading appear suspended in a stillness that never resolves into a clear narrative. Gardner shows with Casey Kaplan in New York, Almine Rech in London and Paris, and Jason Haam in Seoul, and his paintings sit in the permanent collections of LACMA and the Daegu Art Museum. He won the Prix Jean-François Prat in 2017.

Martin Jarrie paints hybrids and mutations, elephants with scaled skin, figures built from repeating spheres, bodies grafted onto animal forms, always in thick acrylic on surfaces he never starts blank, choosing paper, canvas, or reclaimed wooden crates already marked by earlier work. He's cited surrealism, the Italian primitives, and art brut as his main influences, and it shows in how comfortably his imagery sits between the whimsical and the unsettling. He won the Grand Prize at the International Illustration Biennial in Bratislava and has received special mentions at the Bologna Children's Book Fair, and his paintings hang in the Musée de l'Illustration in Moulins and the Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature in Paris.

Scott Kahn calls his own practice a visual diary, returning again and again to the moon, the sun, and the architecture of New England homes as a kind of personal vocabulary. His landscapes and interiors sit right at the edge of real and remembered, painted with enough specificity that they read as places you've actually been, even when you haven't.  Kahn's most recent one-person shows include Diary at Nicelle Beauchene Gallery's third-floor project space and Diary Continued at Harper's Books in East Hampton, both in 2019, alongside selected group presentations Sit Still in the Age of Distraction at Anna Zorina Gallery and The Circus Has Been Cancelled at Harper's, both in 2020.

Sara Anstis works primarily in soft pastel, building nocturnal, folkloric scenes where unruly, mostly female figures move through moments of revelry and tenderness, always with the sense they could be caught in the act. Her palette has a hazy, bruise-like quality she developed after years of working only in charcoal, and her subjects draw on personal mythology, humor, and desire in roughly equal measure. Her collaborative work includes Pee Cherries for FACE magazine's Winter 2020 issue with photography by Harley Weir and styling by Danny Reed, additional images for Pink Cloud made in collaboration with Lena Anstis, and Intimitet og nærhet at Kunstnerforbundet in Oslo in 2021.

Pablo Benzo paints plants, vases, and domestic objects as cubistic, softly rounded forms, their oversaturated colors set against dim, neutral backgrounds that give the compositions a sense of suspended calm. He describes his work as an attempt to portray sensations, feelings, and memories rather than the objects themselves, tracing that impulse directly to the Cubist and Surrealist painters who broke reality open to see what was underneath. He's most recently shown at Anticipated Memories at This Weekend Room Gallery in Seoul and Time Traveler and Other Fragile Detours, his first New York solo exhibition, at The Hole.

Supporting living artists carries a weight collecting from history simply can't, every follow, share, and purchase goes directly toward funding someone's next body of work, rather than adding another line to an estate's provenance. The artists on this list are still building their careers in real time, and a collector who takes an early interest gets to be part of that story rather than reading about it after the fact.

Disclaimer: Images of artworks by living artists are included for editorial and educational purposes only. All rights remain with the respective artists. All images are linked in their captions to the artists' official websites and Instagram accounts.

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