Explore the 2026 Future Greats
This year’s edition of the annual feature meets a moment when artists are working more laterally – more infrastructurally, socially and across media and disciplines
As we shrug off the past and turn to face the future, here’s some advice. ‘Practise self-control, especially after taking drinks.’ Sorry, sorry! Right guy; wrong quotation. That one was just for ArtReview. Let’s go again. Every (lunar) new year, ArtReview’s feng shui master is always shouting at it: ‘Many wish to avoid the inauspicious and welcome the auspicious whenever the new year arrives.’ But while that comes off (delivered down a long-distance phone line) as a bark, it’s really more like advice. Avoid the bad (even if that’s all around you) and focus on the good. (The ‘many’ refers to ArtReview’s multitude of readers. btw. You. When the master is talking to other magazines, normally when they have a handkerchief close to hand, he always refers to ‘a few’. Not that ArtReview wants to brag or make itself seem important or anything. It leaves that to curators.) And ArtReview always follows its master’s advice. Even when he is wrong. That’s how you generate plausible deniability, after all. Which is relevant here – given that ArtReview makes other people select its artists for tomorrow – but not really the point. Although it should point out here that it is extremely grateful to those who have done the selecting this year, for the time, care and research they put into their selections and texts.
But enough about them; like all products of our capitalist, here-today-gone-tomorrow consumer culture, you just want to get your hands on what’s ‘new’. That’s what the contemporary bit in contemporary art is all about. Isn’t it? Still, after 19 years of this Future Greats stuff (artists who are or are going to be setting out new directions or preoccupations that we should be paying attention to, as selected by other artists or critics), this year it seemed necessary to step back a bit and think about the cycles of art production and visibility, to ask the questions that are more pressing than ‘who’s the greatest’: what even is greatness in art? What is future art? Is there even a future? And when will ArtReview get its Nobel Prize? Come on María Corina Machado, you know what you really need to do. Just kidding. It’s not like just anyone can get their hands on one of those gongs. But as artists work more and more laterally – more infrastructurally, socially and across media and disciplines – we asked some of our Future Greats nominators to think about what art can, or should, be in the year to come. Again, for the sake of plausible deniability should some of this crystal-ball-gazing turn out to be err… wrong. (Although ArtReview’s marketing people are constantly telling it not to sow the seeds of doubt in your minds. But they’re not the master, and he’s already given – for a relatively modest donation – ArtReview a Heavenly Pardon Pendant.)
ArtReview also used someone else’s words – those of novelist, art critic and sometime contributor John Berger – on the cover of this issue. Not because it might need to deny anything this time, but more because it seemed to get close to the reasons why we might still want to look at contemporary art, even when the world seems unpredictable and inexplicable. Berger’s words come from the novel Once in Europa (1987), which is the middle part of a trilogy of novels (though that perhaps is too simplistic a description) set in small Alpine communities, where the people are tied to the land and their labour, and where tradition is about to be swatted aside by future-facing notions of ‘progress’. The words come as part of Berger’s defence of storytelling (the basis of all art) in the face of the destruction and erosion of what were once thought of as certainties and necessities. The wider context for those words is this: ‘If every event which occurred could be given a name, there would be no need for stories. As things are here, life outstrips our vocabulary. A word is missing and so the story has to be told.’ Which might also stand as a rationale for why we need art in general and new art in particular. So that we might begin to understand the things around us, or at least learn how to describe them. The doing something about them, of course, is a matter that normally falls beyond the reach of art. But don’t listen to ArtReview. You’ll find better reasons for why you should be excited about the art to come in the section that is about to unfold. In the meantime, always follow the master’s advice: ‘Stay vigilant while travelling and during water activities’.
Explore the 2026 Future Greats
