My path has been quite unexpected. I studied literature and built a career in event planning, later working independently with decorative objects. Surrounded by beauty and curated spaces, I felt a growing pull toward artistic expression. Last year, I finally decided to follow that calling fully, and it opened an entirely new chapter in my life.
Frasquito Raymond Gil-Urquijo, born in Jerez de la Frontera, is a grotesque, tragicomic, and unapologetically absurd alter ego of his creator—a surreal mix of Andalusian roots, cosmopolitan wanderlust, and obsessive curiosity. His art is naïve, conceptual, and intentionally imperfect: flat perspectives, rudimentary techniques, and unpredictable outcomes give each piece kitsch, personality, and grotesque charm. Inspired by eccentric people, peculiar anecdotes, and the absurdities of life—from Holy Week processions with freshmen balanced on doors, to goat-bleating classmates, to the chaos of global cities.
The beauty of experimental art lies in the fact that the value of an idea cannot be mathematically calculated. Digital resources operate according to the code of "either/or." However, playing with an artistic idea is not computable. Creativity and innovation follow a both/and principle. The photographic artist as constructor is a creator, not a draftsman, not a graphic artist, not a copyist. As a phantom of light, photography becomes the bearers for an artistic vision. Image skin, artificial skin, forms the blueprint for another possibility.
David Poyant is a contemporary embroidery artist whose work transforms the traditional craft of needlework into a powerful form of visual storytelling. Entirely hand-sewn, his pieces merge fine-art composition with the intimacy of textiles, creating richly textured worlds one stitch at a time. Beginning his artistic life later in adulthood, Poyant brings to his practice a deep sense of reinvention, memory, and lived experience. His decades as a cobbler and craftsman inform the patience, precision, and tactile sensitivity that define his work today.
My work pokes at that uneasy space between structure and entropy — what I like to call “controlled chaos,” because frankly, that’s what life looks like when you take the training wheels off. Every piece is its own little ecosystem, humming along with its own rules, moods, and mischief. I’m fascinated by how order crawls out of disorder, how meaning sneaks in through the cracks when forms, colors, and movements collide like they’ve had too much coffee.
My work is about taking reference from various sources including books, the net and photos to comprise and create my own imagery. By creating my paintings through reference or made up elements, there becomes a play between artificiality and realism.
The figures allude to the practice of spirituality, to love of nature and humanity. Dialogue with God expands thought and the senses. The strands of light in my paintings symbolize forces, for example, the sun with its warmth and growth power, and the moon with its effect on water, especially on the sea with its ebb and flow, and on births, since humans are largely composed of water.
Jocelyn Hobbie is a visual artist based in New York City known for her brilliantly painted canvases of attractive young women in introspective states. She creates a situation of inadvertent voyeurism with the viewer drawn into circumstances where personal judgment becomes subsumed by an overall mood.
Katinka Lampe paints portraits. Or at least, you can clearly recognise the representation of a person. Yet, this is not the main motive of the painting. The portrait merely serves as reason to make the painting. The portrait is the imagery concept. Her paintings greatly appeal to the beholders.
In her painterly practice, Naomi Okubo develops beautiful and seductive images that mask darker themes relating to her adolescence and that are connected to greater problems and inconsistencies in society.
Paco Pomet combines chilling social commentary with humorous juxtapositions of past, present, and future in his satirical paintings .
A leader of his generation, Peter Doig is a Scottish artist who was able to propose a new set of questions and alter the way we understand art. In a time when new techniques were dominating and when painters and painting, in general, were considered quaintly anachronistic, he forged a new painterly language: an ironic mix of Romanticism and post-impressionism to create haunting landscape vistas.
Toyin Ojin Odutola was born in Ile-Ife, Nigeria in 1985, and later moved with her family to Alabama. In 2007 she was selected to attend the Norfolk Summer Residency for Music and Art at Yale University and continued her studies at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. She then earned her master’s degree in Painting and Drawing at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco in 2012. She currently lives and works in New York.
Israeli oil painter Guy Yanai captures peaceful moments featuring architecture and plants. Often merging indoor and outdoor perspectives, Yanai presents placid scenes devoid of human figures. Instead, scraggly houseplants and open doors and windows act as visual focal points, suggesting the presence of human life that may have potted the plant or propped open the door.
Tina Corrales-Mader is an American artist born and raised in Los Angeles, California.
She began her love of visual arts at a very young age mesmerized by Mexican folk art all around her. Growing up, Tina quickly recognized that colors, shapes, forms, music, and creativity is such a basic necessity and she needed to embrace it in any form.
THE COLLECTORS ART PRIZE recognizes outstanding achievements in contemporary art by celebrating the work of extraordinary artists whose practices are among the most innovative and influential of our time.
My engagement with photography has rekindled my relationship with both nature and my inner world. My work revolves around nature, urban settings, macro subjects, abstract forms, and fine art photography. Rather than seeking out the extraordinary, I am drawn to the hidden, quiet, and often overlooked aspects of daily life. I seek to uncover beauty, wonder, and poetry within the ordinary, shaping what I call "my little mundane world."
Ash Arash Bigdeli (pronounced: âraš, IPA: [ʔɒːˈɾæʃ]) has been working as a jeweler, sculptor, and later as a prop and set builder in the film industry across various countries since the 1990s. With over three decades of experience in wood carving, jewelry-making, pottery, and sculpture, his artistic journey has resulted in the creation of many large and small 3D forms and sculptures, some of which are held in private collections or featured in public art projects worldwide. Since 1992, he has participated in four solo exhibitions and eleven group pottery and sculpture exhibitions, both nationally and internationally.
Sukey Camacho It’s a self taught Artist and, She is Born in Mexico and Currently living in United States of America. Studied Classical European Art for 4 years at a private school in Sofia Art Academy in Dallas Texas and now she’s winning a Multiple International Awards with the most prestigious Elite Certifications Titles and with the most highly degree Diploma from the Royal court of the “ Duke "of Chania, Greece. And she’s was selected for the important award and recognized Globally for ”Art Legend of Our Time”in the prestigious Art Contemporary Art Collectors Magazine.
Marcelle Mansour’s contribution to contemporary art extends beyond her technical achievements. Her oeuvre embodies a new model of artistic consciousness one that merges intellect with intuition, individual expression with universal message. In a cultural climate often dominated by irony and detachment, Mansour reasserts the sacred function of art: to restore wonder, to provoke reflection, to heal. Her work invites viewers to look beyond surfaces to perceive with what she calls “the third eye,” that inner faculty of vision capable of discerning the invisible truths beneath appearances.
