These 5 Artists Are Heating Up the Art World
Tracking Momentum with ArtFacts' Heat Index
There are numerous ways to stay on top of the art world and discover new artists. One such approach is ArtFacts’ analytical tool, the Heat Index—a data-driven system designed to track career momentum and highlight the artists making the biggest waves. Earlier this week, ArtFacts updated its Heat Index with five new artists who are more than worth discussing.
The Heat Index uses advanced machine learning and ranking analysis to identify the fastest-rising names based on their exhibition history, institutional recognition, and overall market impact. In other words, they present the hottest artists at this very moment. For this article, we’ve focused on the top-ranked artists new to the heat index. So, who’s setting the art world on fire? Let’s dive in.
Małgorzata Mirga-Tas
Małgorzata Mirga-Tas, born in 1978 in Zakopane, Poland, lives and works in Czarna Góra, Poland, is a Romani artist, educator, and activist whose work tackles anti-Roma stereotypes while constructing an affirmative iconography of Roma identity. Her practice intertwines art and activism as she seeks to redefine the representation of Roma communities. As she states: “It is hard to separate activism from art. These two activities merge, permeating and affecting each other… I can’t shout. I thought that what I can do is talk about my community, show how we see ourselves. And the tool I use is art.” Mirga-Tas is best known for her vibrant textile collages, which depict everyday life, relationships, and shared experiences within the Roma community. She collects fabrics and materials from family and friends—curtains, jewelry, shirts, and sheets—imbuing her patchwork with personal and historical resonance.
These compositions function as ‘microcarriers’ of history, where intimate and tangible fragments unite revising the dominant, often reductive, perspectives on Roma identity. A central aspect of her work is its grounding in minority feminism—a perspective that both amplifies the strength of women and remains consciously attuned to the artist’s cultural heritage. Her images celebrate Roma women as active agents of culture, solidarity, and continuity, challenging the historically imposed marginalization of the community. In 2022, Mirga-Tas became the first Roma artist to represent any nation at the Venice Biennale, serving as Poland’s official representative at the 59th edition of the art world’s prestigious event.1
Nolan Oswald Dennis
Nolan Oswald Dennis, born in 1988 in Lusaka, Zambia, is a para-disciplinary artist based in Johannesburg, South Africa. His work explores what they describe as “a black consciousness of space” and the material and metaphysical conditions of decolonization. Dennis investigates the hidden structures that shape our social and political imagination through diagrams, drawings, and models, questioning the politics of space and time through a system-specific, rather than site-specific, approach. Their practice unveils the underlying conditions that organize our political sub-terrain, exposing the frameworks that govern physical and ideological landscapes.
Dennis’ work has gained international recognition for its conceptual rigor and structural inquiries. In 2025, they will present their first UK institutional solo exhibition at Gasworks, London, as well as their first US institutional solo exhibition at the Swiss Institute, New York. To mark this occasion, the Swiss Institute, together with Zeitz MOCAA in Cape Town and Koenig, will publish the first monograph dedicated to their practice, set for release in April 2025.2
Sin Wai Kin
Sin Wai Kin, born in 1991 in Toronto, Canada, is a London-based artist whose multidisciplinary practice spans performance, moving images, writing, and print. Using speculative fiction as a central strategy, Sin confronts binary constructs and assumptions about objective truth and reality as a true postmodern artist, creating fantastical tales that disrupt normative processes of desire, identification, and objectification. Sin is predominantly known for their extra- and post-human drag avatars who serve as a means to explore the fluidity of the body, reimagining relationships between selfhood and the collective gaze.
Sin studied at Camberwell College of Arts, University of the Arts London, and later at the Royal College of Art in London. Through their work, they construct alternative worlds that articulate lived experiences of gender, desire, and consciousness, offering a reconfiguration of how identity is formed and understood. Sin’s work has gained international recognition, earning them a nomination for the Turner Prize 2022 and the 2024 Film London Jarman Award, as well as the prestigious 24th Baloise Art Prize at Art Basel 2023.3
Fireleí Baez
Firelei Báez, born in 1981 in Santiago de los Caballeros, the Dominican Republic, is a New York-based artist whose practice reimagines diasporic histories through a lens of speculative possibility. Her vibrant paintings, large-scale sculptures, and immersive installations combine historical narratives with personal and collective mythologies, intertwining elements of folklore, science fiction, and resistance. Báez’s visually rich compositions incorporate diverse representational cues—including hair textures, textile patterns, plant life, and iconography associated with healing and power—offering new frameworks for understanding identity.
Born to a Dominican mother and a Haitian father, Báez’s work is rooted in Hispaniola’s cultural and historical complexities, the island shared by the Dominican Republic and Haiti. She examines its history shaped by colonialism and migration, often painting directly onto historical materials such as found maps, travelogues, and documents to disrupt and assert alternate perspectives. Her portraits, frequently featuring powerful female protagonists, explore liminal spaces—between human and landscape, self and history—engaging with themes of resilience, agency, and belonging. Past series have examined figures like the ciguapa, a mythological Dominican trickster-woman; the tignon, a legally mandated head covering for women of color in 18th-century New Orleans; and the iconography of the Black Panther Movement.4
Igshaam Adams
Igshaan Adams, born in 1982 in Cape Town, South Africa, where the artist continues to work and reside, is a multidisciplinary artist working in textile, sculpture, performance, and installation. Born and raised in Bonteheuwel, a suburb shaped by South Africa’s history of racial segregation, Adams draws upon his complex background—intersecting racial, sexual, and religious identities—to explore themes of identity, spirituality, and transformation. His work serves as a palimpsest, inscribed with traces of personal and collective histories, blending fact with myth.
As Adams explains, “I’m interested in the personal stories recorded on the surface. What is recorded is not necessarily always a factual account but can be what is imagined—a combination of myth-making and meaning-making.” At the heart of Adams’s practice is an intuitive engagement with materiality, where textiles, beads, wire, and linoleum become metaphors for memory, labor, and transformation. Drawing upon Islamic decorative traditions, the aesthetics of domestic spaces, and the personal imprints left on everyday surfaces, Adams uses materials not only for their physical properties but also for their ability to transfigure and evolve.5
Cover image: Installation view of “Igshaan Adams: Kicking Dust” (2022) at Kunsthalle Zürich, CH. Photo: Annik Wetter / Image courtesy Kunsthalle Zürich and Igshaan Adams.
Notes:
- Frith Street Gallery, Małgorzata Mirga-Tas consulted March 15, 2025. ↩︎
- Goodman Gallery, Nolan Oswald Dennis consulted March 15, 2025. ↩︎
- Blindspot Gallery, Sin Wai Kin consulted March 15, 2025. ↩︎
- Hauser & Wirth, Firelei Báez consulted March 15, 2025. ↩︎
- Thomas Dane Gallery, Igshaan Adams consulted March 15, 2025. ↩︎
Last Updated on March 15, 2025
About the author:
Sylvia Walker (b. 1986, US) is an art historian, essayist, art critic, and curator. After contributing to numerous publications, and curating exhibitions in the United States of America and beyond, she currently works as the assistant director of Contemporary Art Issue (CAI).
