Five abstract artists to have on your radar in 2023

Lesley Vance (b. 1977)

In 2019, writing in The New York Times, Will Heinrich described the paintings of Lesley Vance as resembling dense bundles of ‘brightly coloured loops and whorls, something like what M.C. Escher might have come up with if he’d ever taken ayahuasca’.

Vance’s highly textured visual language is rooted in her origins as a still-life painter. However, her newer abstract pictures are painted in spontaneous bursts of creativity, when she allows form and colour to develop unplanned.

Based in Los Angeles, the Milwaukee native has had six solo shows at David Kordansky Gallery in LA between 2005 and 2020, four at Xavier Hufkens in Brussels (2012-2021), two at Herald St in London (2018 and 2022), and one each at Meyer Riegger in Berlin (2016) and Bortolami in New York (2019).

Her work is also in several major public collections, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Dallas Museum of Art, and the Whitney, MoMA and the Met in New York.

Yet Vance’s biggest break to date happened just a few months ago, in April 2023, when her first solo show at a public institution opened at the Columbus Museum of Art in Ohio. The exhibition started with a selection of the museum’s own works, by Georgia O’Keeffe, Charles Demuth and Gertrude Abercrombie, from which Vance said she drew inspiration when creating some of the 27 paintings for the exhibition.

Her auction record remains untested since that important show closed. It was set in London in 2018 at £97,500, with an untitled 2012 painting. Another, larger work, Untitled, from 2015, is being sold in Christie’s Post-War & Contemporary Art Day Sale on 14 October, during Frieze Week in London.

Tomo Campbell (b. 1988)

The English artist Tomo Campbell uses his iPhone to collage elements from Rococo and Neoclassical pictures of hunts, balls and parades, then works them up into large, abstract oil paintings with thick, rhythmic brushwork and rich palettes. ‘I try and paint in a way that makes the paint vibrate,’ he told i-D magazine in 2016, ‘to make it look light and delicate and on the cusp of shifting.’

Campbell graduated in 2010 from London’s Central Saint Martins. Two years later, he was selected to be the first artist-in-residence at the English National Ballet.

Since then, Campbell has held solo shows at Gallery Voltaire in Melbourne (2017), County Gallery in Florida (2021), and Double Q Gallery in Hong Kong (2022). Campbell has also had three solo shows at Cob Gallery in London, the latest of which runs until 14 October 2023. According to The Times, celebrities including the model and presenter Alexa Chung and the musician Harry Styles are collectors of Campbell’s work.

A relative newcomer to the auction market, Campbell made his debut in 2021 at Christie’s. His painting Well You Could Do (2021) fetched more than three times its low estimate, selling for £18,750.

Full Circle (2022), which is offered in First Open: Post-War and Contemporary Art Online until 17 October, was acquired directly from Cob Gallery by the present owner. Its sale marks the first time Christie’s has offered Campbell’s work since establishing his record.

Lucy Bull (b. 1990)

In March 2021, David Kordansky Gallery in LA announced it had signed a contract to represent the young abstract painter Lucy Bull. At the same time, it opened a solo exhibition of her latest work. In an accompanying video, her paintings — which consist of tactile networks of daubs, swirls and scratches of colour — were described as ‘visceral works that appeal directly to the senses’.

The exhibition kicked off a boom in interest for Bull’s work. Within weeks, the American actress and filmmaker Lena Dunham had singled out 18:39 (2021) as a favourite at Frieze London, saying it reminded her of ‘Monet if he was twisted through a lens of feminine madness’.

At the start of the following year, Bull made headlines with her own curatorial project, From the Desk of Lucy Bull, which saw her install a chandelier by the artist Alexandra Metcalf inside her own Toyota Prius, then drive it around Frieze Los Angeles.

Three months later, in May 2022, she made her auction debut. Selling in New York, the oil-on-linen painting Special Guest (2019) achieved $907,200 against a low estimate of just $60,000. That price was smashed the following month, when a bidder in Hong Kong paid HK$11,382,000 ($1,449,990) for 8:50 (2020), a painting nearly three metres wide. It was the first time Bull’s work had been auctioned in Asia.

Bull’s recent success has seen her hailed as a key figure among a new breed of ‘ultra-contemporary’ artists whose work is in exceptionally high demand. With multiple sales since June 2022 that have broken their top estimates, and 2023 solo shows at The Warehouse in Dallas and the Long Museum in Shanghai, as well as a display at the forthcoming NGV Triennial in Melbourne, her reputation looks set to continue soaring.

Austyn Weiner (b. 1989)

Austyn Weiner is an American painter who creates large, lyrical canvases — sometimes asymmetrical and angular in shape — with a diverse range of marks made in oil stick, house paint and charcoal. In her own words, these abstract images investigate ‘what it means to be a woman at war, both internally and externally, in the 21st century’.

Currently based in Los Angeles, Weiner graduated from New York’s Parsons School of Design in 2013. Since then, her work has gained a cult following, especially after solo shows at Carl Kostyál in London (2020) and König Galerie in Berlin (2021) and Seoul (2022). Over the past few years, examples of her work have also been acquired by the Aurora Art Museum in Shanghai, He Art Museum in Guangdong and the Green Family Art Foundation in Dallas.

Alongside her work as a painter, Weiner debuted a fashion line in collaboration with the French brand Each x Other at Paris Fashion Week in 2019. Covering the collection, Vogue declared that Weiner was ‘having something of a moment’.

‘Shape and contour in fashion are the study and manipulation of the figure, which mimics my practice in a lot of ways,’ Weiner told the magazine.

More recently, in 2022, she announced something of a watershed moment: a representation deal at Massimo de Carlo. The gallery then unveiled solo presentations of her work in Paris and at Art Basel Miami, and has an upcoming solo show planned in London.

Her auction prices have jumped accordingly. Back in 2020, Nothing I Can Do To Make You Stay But Spitting In Your Face May Help fetched $90,000 at Christie’s in New York, nine times its low estimate. By 2022, that record had risen to £226,800, with Working Through Not Knowing A Damn Thing About Any Thing, a 2020 diptych. I Fell Open (2021), the canvas being offered in Christie’s Post-War and Contemporary Art Day Sale on 14 October, is nearly 4.5 metres wide, making it the largest of Weiner’s work ever to appear at auction.

Sarah Morris (b. 1967)

Sarah Morris first started to attract attention in the 1990s with her abstract paintings and non-narrative films, which, she says, investigate ‘urban, social and bureaucratic typologies’. A 2017 profile in Interview magazine described her canvases as ‘controlled detonations, more scientific than spontaneous declarations’, as well as ‘kaleidoscopic grids [that] function like cultural spiderwebs’.

The work being offered at Christie’s, War of Roses (Sound Graph), from 2018, combines aspects of both her painting and her film work. Using audio recordings of author and fellow filmmaker Alexander Kluge speaking in one of Morris’s previous film projects, Finite and Infinite Games (2017), she mapped his speech patterns onto a canvas. The resulting work is both an accurate record of what was said and a highly distorted representation of language.

Born in Kent in southern England, Morris studied at Brown University in Rhode Island, then Cambridge. She has been exhibiting since 1990, staging her first solo show just two years later, at Kunsthalle in New York, the city where she currently lives and works. In 2001 she won a Joan Mitchell Foundation painting award.

Morris has had several high-profile solo shows in recent years: at Jesus College in Cambridge (2019), UCCA Beijing (2018), M Museum Leuven in Belgium (2015) and Fondation Beyeler in Basel (2008). She has also exhibited with White Cube, her representative gallery since the 1990s, more than 10 times across London, Los Angeles, Hong Kong and São Paulo.

Her work can be found in the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and MoMA in New York, the Centre Pompidou in Paris and Tate Modern in London.

Morris’s paintings appear regularly at auction, sometimes selling for six figures. That could become the norm in light of her recent prominence in institutional shows. A major solo survey opened in 2023 at the Deichtorhallen in Hamburg, featuring more than 180 works, while another solo exhibition is running until 7 January 2024 at Espace Louis Vuitton München.

Explore Christie’s 20th and 21st Century Art auctions in London and Paris, throughout October 2023

Main image, clockwise from top left: Lucy Bull (b. 1990), Untitled, 2017. Oil on canvas. 40 x 30⅛ in (101.6 x 76.5 cm). Estimate: £50,000-70,000. Austyn Weiner (b. 1989), I Fell Open, 2021. Oil and oil stick on canvas, in three parts. Each: 71⅝ x 58⅛ in (183 x 147.5 cm); overall: 71⅝ x 174¼ in (183 x 442.5 cm). Estimate: £60,000-80,000. Sarah Morris (b. 1967), War of Roses (Sound Graph), 2018. Household gloss on canvas. 60 x 60 in (152.5 x 152.5 cm). Estimate: £20,000-30,000. Lesley Vance (b. 1977), Untitled, 2015. Oil on linen. 24¼ x 17 in (61.6 x 43.2 cm). Estimate: £30,000-50,000. Tomo Campbell (b. 1988), Full Circle, 2022. Oil on canvas. 55⅛ x 59 in (140 x 150 cm). Estimate: £8,000-12,000