Seven upcoming female artists. Seven distinct practices. One moment in Contemporary art that feels genuinely charged with possibility. From solo exhibitions to international art fairs, the Contemporary female painters featured here are building the kind of momentum that serious collectors recognise early. This is Maddox Gallery’s guide to the female visual artists leading the conversation in 2026.
Art history has spent decades catching up with its female painters. Contemporary female painters are reaching collectors, galleries and museums around the world as their careers develop. After generations in which recognition so often came late, we now have the chance to see important careers taking off in real time.
There is no single narrative connecting the seven Contemporary female painters selected by our curators as ones to watch in 2026. Their paintings range from the deeply personal to the surreal, revisiting childhood memories, transforming familiar landscapes and questioning the images and ideas we inherit from popular culture. With exhibitions, residencies and international art fairs ahead, there is plenty more to come from each of them in 2026.
The Female Art Market in 2026: Record Sales, Rising Demand and a Collector Opportunity Hidden in Plain Sight
The auction market for female visual artists looks markedly different today than it did 20 years ago. Prices have risen, demand has grown and more works are finding buyers. In the first quarter of 2026 alone, auction sales for female artists reached $105.5 million, up 59% year on year.
If we look back over the past two decades, the scale of the change has been undeniable. Between 2005 and 2025, average auction prices for 20th-century women artists more than doubled, rising from $438,000 to $1.083 million. At the same time, the number of works offered at auction rose by 53%, with the proportion finding buyers also increasing from 71% to 87%.
Perhaps the most surprising figures, however, are not found at auction. Despite this strong growth, women artists still account for just 36% of permanent museum collections and 34% of exhibitions worldwide. Commercial demand may have increased dramatically, but institutional representation remains strikingly unequal. For collectors looking beyond established names, that gap leaves considerable scope to discover upcoming female artists before recognition becomes more widespread.
EXPLORE ARTWORKS BY CONTEMPORARY FEMALE ARTISTS
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COLLECTOR INSIGHT: THE GENDER GAP IN THE ART MARKET Women artists account for only 36% of permanent museum collections and 34% of exhibitions worldwide, even as auction sales for 20th-century women artists have grown around 25-fold in value over the past two decades. The contrast is striking: the market for work by women has expanded dramatically, while their representation within museums and exhibitions remains far lower. The figures show just how much ground there is still to make up. |
Seven Contemporary Female Painters to Watch in 2026
Chosen by Maddox Gallery for the individuality and quality of their work, these seven painters are among the most exciting modern female artists on our roster. Below, we take a closer look at their practices and why 2026 is an important moment in each of their careers.
1. Bibi Lei: Growing Up Without Growing Old
Bibi Lei, Hopes & Bloomings (2026)
Bibi Lei has never viewed growing up as a reason to leave childhood behind. The Portuguese-Chinese artist, raised between Macau and Portugal and now based in Tokyo, describes herself as a “childlike soul that never grows old”. Working in acrylics, she creates richly coloured paintings populated by wide-eyed girls, fantastical gardens and oversized flowers that explore childhood, motherhood and the imaginative space between the two.
Since becoming a mother, Lei has found new meaning in her own childhood memories, revisiting those experiences as she watches her daughter grow. A self-taught artist, she paints as readily with her fingers as she does with brushes, an intuitive approach that can be traced back to painting with her grandmother as a child in Lisbon. Rounded, repeated marks accumulate into petals, faces, hair and clouds, giving her paintings their recognisable visual language.
This October, Lei makes her UK solo debut at Maddox Street with ‘Where Light Blooms’, which will introduce 18 new paintings. They include Hopes & Bloomings (2026), in which an older girl and younger child appear amid a profusion of flowers, echoing the mother-daughter relationship that is increasingly important to her practice. Loli-Loti Grow Up, meanwhile, considers growing older as an accumulation rather than a loss.
Lei’s year will close with another important presentation, as Maddox takes two further new works to Art Miami in December. Five years after her first solo exhibition in Tokyo, she has become a key name among Maddox Gallery’s up-and-coming female artists, with a significant final quarter of 2026 ahead.
REGISTER YOUR INTEREST IN BIBI LEI’S UPCOMING EXHIBITION, ‘WHERE LIGHT BLOOMS’
2. Mina Alikhani: Into the Unknown
Something curious has been happening in Mina Alikhani’s paintings recently. The Los Angeles-based Iranian-American artist has long used contemporary Surrealism to examine the social and cultural structures that govern how we live. Recently, however, she has begun moving away from figures and explicit narratives towards imagined landscapes, where elongated trees, heightened colour and improbable shifts in scale give the natural world an uncanny quality.
That shift in perspective is clear to see in Follow, November and Blue Dream, three oil paintings created in 2026. In Follow, a path winds between rows of blue and green trees towards a distant horizon, while the warmer ochres and browns of November transform similar forms into an entirely different environment. Neither corresponds to somewhere we could readily find on a map, leaving these landscapes – and their meaning – unresolved.
This September, Alikhani will explore this new direction further during a nearly 12-week Artist in Residence programme at Maddox Gallery’s Shepherd Market space, creating without a predetermined outcome. Six existing paintings will establish the starting point, with new works added to the residency catalogue as they are completed. Her London residency offers a rare opportunity to follow one of Maddox’s emerging female artists at close quarters as her practice develops, with even Alikhani unable to say what will be hanging on the walls come November.
REGISTER YOUR INTEREST IN MINA ALIKHANI’S RESIDENCY AT MADDOX GALLERY SHEPHERD MARKET
3. Mulgil Kim: The Surreal Side of Nature
Artist, Mulgil Kim, siting in front of her works
In Mulgil Kim’s paintings, grass rarely behaves as grass should. It becomes a curtain pulled aside to reveal a giant cat, the walls and roofs of tiny houses or an ocean into which figures disappear. Part of a new wave of young female painters emerging from East Asia, the South Korean artist gently bends the rules of the natural world, creating surreal landscapes that are playful enough to surprise, yet possess an extraordinary sense of calm. Closely associated with biophilic art, Kim uses grass, trees, water and sky as an emotional language, evoking the restorative experience of being outdoors.
Many of Kim’s works begin with places she has actually seen. Painting in acrylic and gouache, she transforms memories of landscapes through changes in scale, light and atmosphere. The origins of that approach can be traced back to her ‘Art Road’ project, when, after feeling constrained by the studio, she set off alone on a 673-day journey across five continents and 46 countries, producing more than 400 artworks along the way. “I want to blur the line between memory and imagination,” she explains.
Her 2026 exhibition ‘Green Melody, Blue Poem’ marked both her Maddox Gallery debut and her first UK exhibition, introducing a new palette in which vivid greens were joined by muted blues recalling moonlight, water and dusk. Collectors responded emphatically, with the exhibition achieving a 100% sell-through rate. In December comes another first, when Kim makes her Art Miami debut with four new paintings presented by Maddox.
WHY COLLECT MULGIL KIM'S WORKS?
4. Manuela Gallo: A Woman’s World
Manuela Gallo knows how to make an Italian summer look like a memory. Her oil paintings place women at leisure beside pools, beaches and brilliant expanses of blue, using saturated colour and carefully arranged compositions to recall vintage photography.
Born in Cosenza and now based in Tuscany, Gallo inherited her love of painting from her grandfather, a landscape painter, before training in classical techniques and studying in the studios of Gianni Strino and Eloy Morales. Women gradually became the focus of her practice, appearing alone or together in moments that suggest friendship, introspection or escape. In Sisters (2026), four women in matching red swimsuits, white bathing caps and oversized sunglasses stand knee-deep in the sea. Grouped together but looking in different directions, they could have stepped out of an old holiday photograph, yet the story connecting them is left tantalisingly open.
A recent addition to the Maddox Gallery roster, Gallo was introduced to collectors through the group exhibition ‘The Shape of Heat’ earlier this year, with new works set to be presented at Art Miami in December.
5. Jessica Brilli: Wish You Were Here
Jessica Brilli, Ascension Day (2025)
Jessica Brilli grew up inside the American Dream. On Long Island in the 1980s and 90s, childhood meant manicured lawns, suburban houses and afternoons spent pool-hopping between friends’ homes. Decades later, those memories feed into her acrylic paintings, which are steeped in nostalgia without being defined by it.
Brilli works from an archive of 35mm Kodachrome slides and found photographs dating from the 1940s to the 1990s. Swimming pools, suburban streets and familiar objects recur, often with people absent or pushed to the margins. Nearly two decades spent as a graphic designer inform her command of colour and composition, but she is equally interested in the mythology behind these images: the promise of the American Dream and how differently we might view it today. Her paintings leave room for both nostalgia and scepticism. She likes, she says, to “walk a line where you could go either way with it”.
In Rush Hour (2025), cars scattered across grey tarmac become an unlikely study of American life. Ascension Day turns to the swimming pools of Brilli’s childhood, its violet and pink palette lending a dreamlike quality to a lone swimmer who appears to levitate above the water. Her upward movement, coupled with the work’s title, introduces the possibility of transcendence to the scene.
Following presentations with Maddox in London and Miami, the gallery is now in conversation with Brilli about a new body of work for 2027. For now, collectors can explore a selection of her recent paintings available through Maddox Gallery.
EXPLORE AVAILABLE WORKS BY JESSICA BRILLI
6. INAE: Painting Time
INAE, The Afterheat of Memory (2026)
A painting by INAE can take on a different life as the day progresses. Memory is central to the South Korean artist’s work, expressed through reeds, fireworks, flowers and distant landscapes that recall fragments of the past. Working in acrylic on canvas, she builds thousands of tiny marks on translucent layers of pigment, with lustrous gold catching the light so that details intensify, recede or disappear.
In The Afterheat of Memory (2026), a field of flowers emerges through thousands of dots beneath a golden sky, its tondo format giving the scene the quality of a world glimpsed through a window. The relationship between memory and changing light was also central to ‘Field of Memory’, INAE’s first UK solo exhibition at Maddox Gallery, which ran from December 2025 to January 2026. The exhibition introduced a more lustrous use of gold, subdued under softer illumination and increasingly brilliant in direct light, making the conditions in which the paintings are viewed part of the experience.
Collectors have responded strongly, with INAE consistently achieving a 100% sell-through rate at Maddox Gallery. Following her UK solo debut, Maddox will present a series of new works at Art Miami in December – her first presentation of new work since ‘Field of Memory’.
7. Charlotte Rose: Selling Us a Story
Charlotte Rose, Lady Macbeth in Blue (2026)
British artist Charlotte Rose understands the seductive power of a great advertisement. In her provocative paintings, she recreates the glossy graphics of 20th-century cigarette advertising, then disrupts familiar packets, logos and slogans with skulls, literary quotations and her own text. The imagery still entices, but the artist uses it to tell a very different story.
Rose studied creative writing before turning to painting, and literature guides her practice, alongside visual influences including Pop art, Andy Warhol and the advertising of the 1960s. Her interest in cigarette packaging is personal, too. She remembers her grandfather rolling cigarettes in his study, a childhood association that sits uneasily beside what she now knows about the product itself. That tension between nostalgia and knowledge runs through her paintings, which ask why certain brands and images retain such power long after we have learnt to distrust what they are selling.
In the acrylic-on-wood painting Lady Macbeth in Blue (2026), the words “unsex me here” cut across a Marlboro packet, bringing Shakespeare’s most famous meditation on femininity and power into the language of advertising. Here, Rose sets one construction of gender against another: Lady Macbeth’s rejection of conventional femininity and the highly coded ideas of masculinity and femininity once used to sell cigarettes. A skull interrupts the polished design with a blunt reminder of the consequences concealed behind the branding.
Through Maddox Gallery, Rose’s paintings have reached collectors around the world, bringing her exploration of advertising, nostalgia and popular culture to an international audience.
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What These Seven Contemporary Female Painters Have in Common, and Why It Matters
Personal experience unites the work of all seven painters, often providing the starting point for something much broader. Motherhood has led Bibi Lei back to the imaginative freedom of her own childhood. Jessica Brilli’s memories of suburban Long Island become a means of probing the American Dream, while Mulgil Kim takes the natural world and upends its rules, turning grass, trees and water into scenes where the impossible becomes entirely plausible.
Beyond that, there is little reason their work should be grouped together. Manuela Gallo’s cinematic women inhabit a very different world from Mina Alikhani’s surreal landscapes, just as INAE’s painstaking layers of pigment and gold bear little resemblance to Charlotte Rose’s subversion of cigarette advertising. As opportunities for female painters increase, perhaps the most meaningful change is that the conversation around their work can become less about gender and more about the ideas each artist brings to her work.
The market is beginning to reflect that change, with the growth of the female art market no longer only a story of record prices for established names. Upcoming female artists are building international careers and finding collectors earlier, meaning their work can be discovered as those careers develop, rather than decades later through retrospective reassessment.
Mina Alikhani, Sui Generis (2025)
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COLLECTOR INSIGHT: WHAT IS DRIVING THE RISE OF FEMALE ARTISTS IN THE ART MARKET IN 2026? Several forces are contributing to the expansion of the female art market, from rising auction demand to greater recognition from museums and galleries.
The overall picture is one of growing interest, with greater visibility for established and upcoming female artists accompanied by increasing demand from collectors. |
The Collector Opportunity: Why Now Is the Moment for Contemporary Female Painters
In 2026, rising demand and greater institutional attention are bringing more female painters to wider audiences. The past two decades have shown how dramatically perceptions of modern female artists can change as commercial interest grows and their work gains greater prominence in museums and galleries.
Today’s Contemporary female painters are building international careers against this rapidly changing backdrop. Collecting their work offers the chance to follow those careers at close quarters, discover new bodies of work and acquire paintings before an artist becomes more widely known.
Maddox Gallery’s art advisory team can help translate an interest in female visual artists into a considered collection. Drawing on their knowledge of individual practices and the wider market, the team can identify works that align with a collector’s tastes and ambitions, whether they are making their first acquisition or adding to an established portfolio.
Start Building Your Collection of Contemporary Female Art With Maddox
