Amid the fairs, biennales, and museum and gallery debuts, we’ve seen art aplenty this year. While we’re already gearing up for 2025, we looked back over the year to find a few of the artists whose careers hit a new resonance, cutting above the noise. Here are five artists who had major moments in 2024.
Why the Art World Can’t Get Enough of Artist Agnes Scherer’s Forebodingly Pretty World
by Annikka Olsen, October 17, 2024
Agnes Scherer. Photo: Catherine Peter. Courtesy of Sans titre, Paris.
One of the stars of Art Basel Paris this October was the German-born, Salzburg-based artist Agnes Scherer, who debuted a Lit de sirène (2024), or “Mermaid bed,” a fragile large-scale paper canopy bed with a depiction of a mermaid, to scale. To make the work, Scherer used felt-tip markers and frenetically scribbled across the surface, leaving irregularities, subtle, recurring curves, and crosshatching. The work encapsulates the pretty, yet disquieting effect of Scherer’s practice.
`”The bed is an existential place. It’s an object, but it’s also a place in people’s lives where they suffer through sorrow and sickness, or maybe even childbirth and death. And that place can also be a carrier of imagery,” said the artist in an interview with writer Annikka Olsen, ahead of the fair. Beyond this, she was incredibly busy in 2024, preparing for three solo shows across three countries: “Savoir Vivre” at ChertLüdde, Berlin; “Woe and Awe” at Sadie Coles HQ, London; and “Strawfires” at Meyer Kainer, Vienna. We’re excited to see where 2025 brings.
Performance Artist Miles Greenberg on Pushing His Body to Its Limit
by Nadine Khalil, July 26, 2024
Miles Greenberg, Admiration Is the Furthest Thing from Understanding (2021) at the Bangkok Biennale, Bangkok, Thailand. Image courtesy of the artist.
Miles Greenberg, performance artist and protégé of Marina Abramovic, has had a remarkable year: The artist has been creating performances for over a decade at the Marina Abramović Institute, the Yokohama Triennial, the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, the Louvre in Paris, and the New Museum in New York, among other institutions. At this year’s Venice Biennale, however, his eight-hour performance Sebastian, curated by Klaus Biesenbach and Lisa Botti, went viral on social media. Writer Nadine Khalil spoke with Greenberg this past July when a continuous screening of his day-long walking performance Oysterknife (2020) was presented in “Twenty Four Twenty Four” in a two-artist show with Douglas Gordon at Albion Jeune. “Building a craft allowed me agency and visibility when I felt unseen,” shared Greenberg in this intimate profile.
The Endurance Test of Lucy Bull’s Visceral Abstractions
by Katie White, May 24, 2024
Lucy Bull, 2023. Photo: Kobe Wagstaff, courtesy of the artist and David Kordansky Gallery.
Los Angeles-based artist Lucy Bull capped off a high-profile year with her buzzy U.S. institutional debut “The Garden of Forking Paths” at the ICA Miami, which opened during Art Basel Miami Beach, and included a 30-foot-long vertical painting in the museum’s stairwell. The 34-year-old artist is known for her riotous color-drenched abstraction with whorls and eddies of paint that, in moments, hover at the threshold of recognizability before cresting and crashing down into abstract oblivion. Earlier this year, Bull spoke to Artnet soon after opening “Ash Tree,” her third exhibition with the gallery David Kordansky, and just before staging a 24-hour non-stop movie marathon at Lumiere Cinema in Beverly Hills—another of Bull’s passions. “It’s a dance between more compulsive, spontaneous mark-making and reflective sort of teasing out of various associations,” said Bull of her layered process. “Then I go back in with more automatic painting. Eventually, the older layers start to act as a relief. It becomes this interwoven experience of surprising landscapes or dreamscapes.”
George Rouy Has Landed His First Hauser and Wirth Show at Age 30. What’s Behind His Stratospheric Rise?
by Jo Lawson-Tancred, October 9, 2024
George Rouy in 2024. Photo: Kemka Ajoku, courtesy the artist, Hannah Barry Gallery and Hauser & Wirth, © George Rouy.
Rouy has become a stealth ultra-contemporary star in recent years, with an auction record of £162,540 ($195,619) set at Christie’s London in March 2023. Last year, mega-gallery Hauser and Wirth announced his representation, making him the youngest artist on the gallery’s roster (the representation is in collaboration with his longtime gallerist Hannah Barry). This fall, writer Jo Lawson-Tancred spoke with Rouy about his art world ascendance ahead of the artist’s debut solo show with the mega-gallery at their London location, called “The Bleed, Part I,” (on view through December 21).
Rouy’s psychologically charged paintings offer up entangled, faceless, figures, a tangle of disorienting limbs. The artist counts Cecily Brown, Willem de Kooning, and Gerhard Richter, among his influences. Particularly captivating for Lawson-Tancred were a subtle, nearly monochromatic grouping of paintings, so-called “phantom paintings,” where “the figure has almost dissolved into the void entirely, leaving behind only ‘minimal suggestions’ of a hand, a knee, a foot.” Rouy will be back in the spotlight early next year as Hauser and Wirth opens a “Part II” version of his exhibition in L.A. in February, coinciding with Frieze’s fair edition on the West Coast.
Samantha Joy Groff Captures the Mystique and Mythology of the Rural ‘Huntress’
by Katie White, February 29, 2024
Samantha Joy Groff, 2024. Courtesy of the artist. Photograph by Sofia Colvin.
Samantha Joy Groff paints young women cavorting in forests under the dark of night. The scenes are almost supernatural. Sometimes forest animals and fur pelts make appearances. Groff, who was raised in a Mennonite community in rural Pennsylvania, refers to these works as “Dark Pasture Encounters”—a riff on “Freedom Encounters,” a contemporary exorcism ritual practiced by a small niche of Christians. Groff spoke with Artnet earlier this year, ahead of “Huntress,” a solo exhibition at Half Gallery in Los Angeles, which opened coinciding with Frieze L.A.
At the center of these works is Groff’s entwined relationships with the people of Southeastern Pennsylvania, particularly the women in these communities. “These girls are people that I know or grew up with. In the past, I’ve used my family as models, and they’ll arrive in clothes they made themselves and have their hair covered,” she explained. “Endurance—the endurance of these girls—is part of the paintings. It will be 30 degrees outside and they’ll be in these little outfits and they’re letting me push them—pose them—in a way that takes a lot of trust,” the artist shared. This fall, the artist opened a new solo exhibition “Prophecy of the End” with Nicodim Gallery, in New York, and while the women in her paintings remain unchastened, the tone is more apocalyptic as Groff mines the religious texts particularly the Book of Revelation.