Queer Art Now is Artsy’s Pride Month 2025 celebration spotlighting 30 LGBTQ+ artists meeting the moment and shaping the future of contemporary art. Nominated by leading figures across the art world—including curator and author Legacy Russell, photographer Catherine Opie, and art advisor Racquel Chevremont—these artists reflect the diversity and dynamism of queer creative expression today.
The featured cohort includes painters, photographers, performers, and sculptors showcasing the breadth of queer experience through their radical, boundary-pushing work. In tandem with this list, Artsy also invited curator and author Gemma Rolls-Bentley to reflect on some of the major themes she observes in queer art today.
Here are 30 LGBTQ+ artists defining queer art now. You can browse available works by the artists in the collection “Queer Art Now.”
Hortensia Mi Kafchin
B. 1986, Galati, Romania. Lives and works in Berlin.
Nominated by Rob and Eric Thomas-Suwall
Vibrant strokes of paint sweep through Hortensia Mi Kafchin’s surreal scenes, which bring together the fantastical and the everyday. The Romanian artist’s paintings are full of hybrid forms, reflecting on contemporary experiences of transness, technological advancement, and environmental collapse. Some paintings viscerally depict transitioning, as in Battle Bots and Deep Anaesthesia (2023), which features a rainbow-hued body lying on a surgical table surrounded by giant steely implements. Others present a more symbolic transformation, like the angelic wings sprouting from the subject’s back in Years of Bad Hair Day (2022–23). The surrounding terrain is often chaotic, full of human-made structures, with hot pink landscapes implying global warming.
Her techniques are richly informed by the Old Masters, as she fuses traditional processes with the politics and social constructs of our present and speculative future. She is represented by Galerie Judin and P·P·O·W, and her work has been featured in institutional group shows at the Centre Pompidou and the Palais de Tokyo. – Emily Steer