Curator’s Choice
Curator’s Choice was a special section featured in the December Issue 79 of our magazine, dedicated to highlighting the artists and artworks that stood out throughout 2025 for their excellence, vision, and commitment to contemporary figurative painting. This selection brought together artists who actively collaborated with The Guide Artists during the year and whose work represents the highest standards of artistic quality and creative integrity.
Each artist featured in Curator’s Choice was carefully selected by our editorial team in collaboration with invited contributors, taking into account not only technical mastery and the strength of a personal visual language, but also the relevance and impact of their work within today’s global art landscape.
This section offered an informed and intimate perspective on artistic practices that are making a meaningful impact, with the aim of guiding readers, inspiring collectors, and opening new international opportunities for outstanding talents who deserve greater visibility.
Painting at Its Highest Level
In the December Issue 79, Curator’s Choice brought together an exceptional group of artists whose work stood out throughout 2025 for its technical excellence, conceptual depth, and commitment to contemporary figurative painting. This selection reflects not only the diversity of approaches within today’s figurative practice, but also a shared sense of rigor, artistic integrity, and the ability to create meaningful visual experiences.
The practices featured in this edition range from deeply introspective explorations to symbolic narratives and atmospheres suspended in time. Artists such as Eric Casey Baugh and Alejandro Rosemberg engage with the tradition of realism from distinct perspectives, expanding its boundaries through materiality, gesture, and emotional intensity. In other works, painting becomes a space for silence and contemplation, as seen in the work of Zayda Ascencio, Joaquín Maximiliano Martínez, and Marissa Oosterlee, where atmosphere and internal tension define the rhythm of the image.
The body and identity emerge as central themes across many of the selected practices. In the work of Carla Louise Paine, J. Louis, Anna Wypych, and Kateryna Reznikchenko, the figure is treated as an emotional and psychological territory—fragile, evolving, and charged with presence. These artists move beyond literal representation, using painting to access deeper forms of human truth.
Narrative and symbolic imagination also play a key role in this selection. Artists such as Jared Guerra Mirabal, Rómulo Royo, Albert Bonet, and Javier (Havier) construct richly layered visual worlds where the mythical, the autobiographical, and the dreamlike intersect. In these works, painting functions as an open language, inviting interpretation while maintaining a strong emotional core.
From a more classical yet distinctly contemporary perspective, Carlo Alberto Palumbo, Natalia Tomás Segovia, and Marcos Rey demonstrate how technical mastery and a deep understanding of tradition can be powerful tools for addressing the present. Their work is marked by formal precision and a psychological sensitivity that transforms figurative painting into a space for reflection on time, identity, and perception.
The selection also extends to practices that engage in dialogue with other visual languages. In the work of Genevieve May and Diego Lago, painting intersects with performance, photography, and narrative construction, expanding the boundaries of the medium while preserving its pictorial strength.
Curator’s Choice is not only a survey of some of the most compelling figurative works of the year, but also an invitation to consider how contemporary painting continues to evolve—asserting itself as a relevant, complex, and profoundly human language. This section was conceived to guide readers, inspire collectors, and open international visibility for artists whose work is shaping the present and future of painting.
The Art of Sculpture
This section unfolds as a curatorial journey that will develop over the coming months, introducing sculptors whose work stands out for its coherence, depth, and commitment to sculptural language. Each feature will offer a measured and thoughtful encounter with practices that understand sculpture as an ongoing dialogue between matter, space, and time.
The artists we will present engage consciously with the body, gesture, and volume,
exploring both traditional processes and more experimental approaches. Curator’s Choice proposes a progressive and attentive perspective, inviting readers to discover sculptors who build presence, meaning, and emotion through form, revealing new voices and reinforcing essential trajectories within today’s sculptural landscape.
Throughout this year, The Guide Artists has shaped a strong and coherent sculptural narrative through a carefully curated selection of artists who understand sculpture as a living, physical, and deeply emotional language. Rather than presenting a single aesthetic vision, this selection unfolds through diversity of approach, technique, and sensibility, unified by a shared commitment to form, presence, and meaning.
The journey opens with the sense of movement and graceful vitality found in Angela Mia’s work, where figures seem suspended in a fleeting, almost choreographic gesture. Alongside this delicacy, Sophie Gibson introduces a symbolic and narrative dimension, creating characters that emerge from an intimate and poetic universe rich in emotional resonance.
Structural strength and transformative tension define the sculptures of Marcin Otapowicz, whose work engages with myth and timelessness, offering a powerful and almost ritualistic reading of the human form. This intensity is counterbalanced by the psychological depth present in Domenico Sepe’s portraiture, where the face becomes a silent emotional territory marked by presence and introspection.
The narrative continues through the exploration of balance and restrained energy in Patrick Masson’s compositions, sculptures that appear to inhabit a suspended moment between motion and stillness. This sense of pause deepens in the work of Leonardo Morales, whose quiet figuration invites contemplation and inner reflection through stillness and subtle gesture.
Emotional depth is further reinforced by the sober sensuality and inner strength found in the figures of Ksenia Durnovò, where elegance and intensity coexist. From a more physical and spatial perspective, Eric Vanel introduces organic and vulnerable bodies that engage directly with space, expanding the sculptural dialogue toward themes of presence and existence.
Memory and fragility emerge as central themes in the poetic work of Natalia Gradova, offering a sensitive and human dimension to the selection. The journey concludes with the serene intensity and formal refinement of Biljana Petrovic’s portraits, where balance, silence, and lasting presence define her sculptural language.
Together, these ten voices form a unified story: sculpture understood not as an object, but as an experience. This edition of Curator’s Choice presents the most outstanding sculptural practices of The Guide Artists this year, affirming sculpture as a language of emotion, material, and shared human presence.
