In 2026, the question, who are the women artists to watch next?, is arguably still relevant. On the one hand, women artists are already everywhere, while on the other, what does it take to be visible and at the same time honest to oneself as a female artist these days?
What’s virtually invisible is the specific work that holds their threads of meaning together: the curatorial framework, the careful refusal to over-explain work that is not neat by definition. What is now happening all around Europe, is parallel female artist practices – strong, clear-cut, authentic in meaning; these are as resistant to categorisation as they are part of the same wave.
The exploration below is not a list of “emerging stars,” but a snapshot of artists whose work already operates with a certain independent voice, without the need of institutional stamp on it.
Jadé Fadojutimi
Medium: Painting
Based in: London
Fadojutimi’s paintings are large-scale emotional landscapes. Highly symbolic, semi-abstract, these works are essentially visual diaries of inner transformation and daring freedom.
Fadojutimi has had a strong institutional support and gallery representations and her rise in the contemporary art world is rapid and growing. The astonishing part is that the work remains as honest and as raw as it was at the start.
Can intensity survive scaling? Jadé Fadojutimi proves it must, because therein lies the value of the work.
Jadé Fadojutimi – A Season’s Echo
Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley
Medium: Video, performance, game-based art
Based in: Berlin
Immersive participatory artwork is no surprise to anyone in contemporary art world, but what if participation is made…uncomfortable. Brathwaite-Shirley’s work is Interactive, game-based, performative and it as awkwardly exposing institutional blind spots.
Using video games, animation, and performance, she composes worlds that address themes of identity, power, survival, and community, while her primary focus is black trans experience.
What is authorship, agency, and what is even participation in contemporary art world? Are these themes defined or should we keep on questioning?
THE DELUSION – A new video game commission and multiplayer immersive experience from Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley that explores themes of polarisation, censorship and social connection.
Sara Sadik
Medium: Video, installation, interactive media
Based in: France (Marseille)
The medium of Sadik’s work is a point for debates: Is it video? Installation? Gaming? Social realism presented on screens? It is some sort of speculative fiction that draws from social media aesthetics, and cinematic storytelling.
Her narratives explore youth, desire, and social belonging within both digital and physical spaces. Ultimately, Sadik asks – where in these worlds and among these concepts do we belong, without any predefined moral framework.
What’s beautiful, is that museums are adopting and learning to host such works, that are not polished or defined and represent hybrid worlds.
Sara Sadik, Xenon Palace: Crystal Zastruga, Basement Roma, 2023. Commissioned by Basement Roma. Photo: Roberto Apa
Jenya Datsko
Medium: Painting
Based in: Spain
Datsko paints moments that feel slightly unfinished and thus transmit a precious feeling of being present in a moment. Interiors frame this presence and hold space for its traces. No narrative pressure, figures are let loose. No explanations, just state of being.
This restraint and lack of visual or narrative elaborativeness come across as almost defiant. Like a frame from a movie, silent and still. Are European audiences ready to sit with that silence?
Jenya Datsko
Maya Golyshkina
Medium: Photography, video, performance
Based in: London
Golyshkina’s work is about instability – fragile, vulnerable, and sometimes absurd.
Her recent exhibition this year at Galerie Nicola von Senger, in dialogue with Martin Parr, is a great example of these qualities. Portable sculptures, visibly improvised scenography, bodies half-hidden or strangely framed.
The exhibition refused to smooth things over.
Maya Golyshkina, The portraits
That refusal to frame, stabilize and polish things – was curatorial as much as artistic. The exhibition was curated by Varvara Zotova, whose practice sits somewhere between editorial thinking and spatial construction.
Zotova’s curatorial work is not evident at first glance. It is an underlying structure that allows the artist’s statement to remain expressed and yet not fully stabilized, as a shimmering thought on the edge of possibility. The work does not collapse in to chaos though, it directly connects to the soul of the viewer – as ever-changing and unstable as the art.
Zotova prefers to work closely with artists over time, particularly women navigating international contexts, migration – and find emotionally charged and real material in these liminal spaces.
In the Golyshkina exhibition, curatorial decisions allowed the work to remain uncomfortable and unresolved, without being framed as confession.
It is important to express, as there is never enough written about this work behind-the-scenes, that without such curators willing to hold that kind of tension, the most interesting practices would run the risk of being either flattened by institutional context or invisible to audiences altogether.
In 2026, visibility is not the challenge for young female artists; Sustaining raw complexity of feelings is.
