Saatchi Art Names Its 2026 Rising Stars

The world’s leading online art community unveils its annual, curator-selected cohort — 30 artists whose work is made to be lived with.

LOS ANGELES, CA, UNITED STATES, September 17, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ — Saatchi Art, the online art gallery connecting artists with collectors in more than 150 countries, today announced its 2026 class of Rising Stars — an annual, curator-selected cohort that for more than a decade has served as one of the art world’s most closely watched signals of who to collect next.
This year’s selection arrives alongside a broader shift in how Saatchi Art is telling its own story. The gallery is repositioning its brand around a core idea: the home as a self-portrait — a living collection never finished — with art as its deepest emotional register. Rising Stars 2026 is where that idea meets 30 emerging artists whose work warrants that kind of devotion.

How the Class Is Selected
Each year, Saatchi Art’s curatorial team reviews thousands of portfolios from recent art-school graduates and exceptional self-trained early-career artists across every medium: painting, sculpture, photography, textiles, and mixed media. Curators look for a consistent visual voice, technical command, and the kind of momentum that suggests an artist is on the verge of a breakthrough. For the artists selected, inclusion means visibility among Saatchi Art’s global collector network, curatorial endorsement that opens doors to exhibitions, and a feature in the year’s Rising Stars report — the same distinction that has previously introduced collectors to artists who went on to show at institutions like White Cube London, the Brooklyn Museum, and more.

This year’s 30 honorees span nearly 20 countries, including the United States, the United Kingdom, South Korea, Brazil, Ukraine, Iran, India, Azerbaijan, and Tunisia. Their practices range from hyper-personal, autobiographical photography to textile-and-glass sculpture, architecturally inspired painting, and collage-driven abstraction. This full, unruly range reflects what collectors are gravitating toward as they build homes filled with work that’s one-of-one, not mass-produced.

The 2026 Rising Stars
Ayesha Pearce (UK) · Marko Vučković (Serbia) · Sandra Keja Planken (Netherlands) · Mat Macready (Australia) · Faith Couch (USA) · Ejae Park (South Korea) · Hye Yeon Shin (South Korea) · Hyunsun Yoo (South Korea) · Nini Sum (Germany) · André Souza (Brazil) · Gisela A. Lazarte (Venezuela) · Liv Ye (China) · Jacelyn Zhen / Bbblob (Singapore) · Myriame Dachraoui (Tunisia) · Giovana Töws (Brazil) · Yeonsoo Choi (South Korea) · Ana Flávia de Oliveira Garcia (Brazil) · Cheng Yen Yu (Taiwan) · Zoë Wilkinson (UK) · Lydia Lott (UK) · Ngai Ning Yu (Hong Kong) · Roza Muradova (Azerbaijan) · Minju Gwak (South Korea) · Justin Brennan (USA) · Golriz Rezvani (Iran) · Tania Yakunova (Ukraine) · Karina Danylchuk (Ukraine) · Le Liu (China) · Sofia Laskari (Russia) · Aditi Badola (India)

A Closer Look at the Class
Several of this year’s Rising Stars arrive with institutional and editorial credentials that place them squarely on the radar of the design and culture worlds.

Faith Couch (USA) is a photographer and visual artist whose practice centers self-depiction as a method of reshaping visual histories that have often excluded or flattened Black life. Constructing cinematic photographs that exist between documentation and fabrication, her work considers how Black subjects inhabit, resist, and reimagine historical and contemporary image regimes. Couch received her BFA in Photography from the Maryland Institute College of Art and holds an MFA in Photography from Yale University. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at Aperture Foundation, Fotografiska, and Les Rencontres d’Arles. She has worked editorially with Vogue, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal, and was named to Forbes 30 Under 30.

Zoë Wilkinson (UK), a British-Caribbean artist born and raised in the UK, just completed her MA in Painting at London’s Royal College of Art as a recipient of the Sir Frank Bowling Scholarship. Using family photographs, autofiction, and tropical greenhouses, she makes her world tangible through charcoal and paint. Wilkinson uses Caribbean folklore to reinterpret the gothic beyond the western canon. These postcolonial approaches are made apparent through the use of non-traditional materials which recall legacies of indentured labour such as sugarcane fabric and charcoal, handmade from driftwood. In 2025 she won a Hesketh Hubbard Bursary for life drawing and was shortlisted for the inaugural Jaguar x RCA prize. She recently won the annual Artiq residency at the Pump House. Wilkinson holds an Honorary Fellowship at the University of Guyana, where she conducted a three-month residency in 2026, funded by Arts Council England.

Ejae Park (South Korea), a contemporary artist who reinterprets fragments of digital images through the language of painting, opened her solo exhibition “Blow-Up” this past July at Space Willing & Dealing in Seoul, staged with support from the Seoul Foundation — timing that puts her Rising Stars debut alongside a major moment in her home market.

Sandra Keja Planken (Netherlands), a self-taught Amsterdam-based multidisciplinary artist, works across textile, glass, and immersive installation, exploring how material and tactility can restore emotional connection within a space. Her work invites viewers to slow down, look closely, and reconnect with the rhythms of the natural world.

Marko Vučković (Serbia), a practicing sculptor based in Belgrade who works primarily in marble and wood, also teaches as an associate in modern sculpture at the Faculty of Applied Arts in Belgrade. Several of his pieces draw on traditional Serbian village architecture, and his work has shown in solo exhibitions at Art Gallery Kruševac and Gallery Štab, as well as at the 2024 World Art Expo in Seoul.

Original Art for Rooms That Are Lived In
Their work, spanning oil and acrylic painting, sculpture, textile art, photography, and mixed media, will appear in Saatchi Art’s 2026 Rising Stars report and be available for collectors to acquire directly through Saatchi Art.

About Saatchi Art
Saatchi Art is a community for people who want to be obsessed with their spaces. As the world’s leading online gallery and marketplace for original art, Saatchi Art connects artists with collectors across more than 150 countries.

Claire Boeshaar
Saatchi Art
claire.boeshaar@saatchiart.com

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