Discover Scotland's 50 most exciting artists in 2026, from Turner Prize winners to rising stars shaping the nation's creative future.
London, United Kingdom Jul 29, 2026 ALN: Scotland has produced some of the world's most influential artists, but who is shaping the country's creative landscape today?
The Herald has ranked the 50 most exciting and important artists in Scotland plying their trade in 2026, from established international names to the brightest emerging talent.
Find the full list from 50 to 1 below.
Oana Stanciu's Buffalo. (Image: Oana Stanciu)
Romanian-born but now based in Edinburgh, Stanciu works primarily in photography and film and often presents images of herself in poses which are variously ridiculous, surreal, challenging or disturbing. She has won a slew of awards though perhaps the most notable is the one conferred on her by the President of Romania for her contribution to Romanian culture in the UK – the Order of Cultural Merit in the rank of Knight. She exhibited most recently in last month’s Hidden Door festival in Edinburgh with a photographic and audio-visual show titled Stai în banca ta/Behave, and her work can currently be seen in a large group show at the Villa Schöningen gallery in Potsdam, just outside Berlin.
Olivia Priya Foster in her HOST studio, Outer Spaces x EAF25. (Image: Olivia Priya Foster)
Raised on a sheep farm in rural Argyll, Priya Foster studied painting and printmaking at Glasgow School of Art, graduating two years ago. Winner of a gold medal for her degree show, she was chosen for the Royal Scottish Academy’s prestigious New Contemporaries exhibition in 2025 and in the same year showed Black Sheep, a sculptural piece drawing on her childhood environment, at the Edinburgh Art Festival (EAF). She returns for this year’s EAF as one of two awardees of the Platform opportunity for early career artists.
When You're Big by Bethany Reid. (Image: Bethany Reid)
Winner of a New Graduate award from the Society of Scottish Artists, Reid left Aberdeen’s Gray’s School of Art in 2024 and then featured in the Royal Scottish Academy’s New Contemporaries exhibition the following year. At the heart of her practice is an issue of growing political, ethical, social, economic and environmental importance: animals and how humankind treats them, relates to them and shares the planet with them. Check out her disarmingly titled mixed media work When You’re Big, an image of cute pigs frolicking in a field above which are sculptural pig carcasses.
Light Divine Sky II by Sekai Machache. (Image: Sekai Machache)
The practice of this Glasgow-based Scots-Zimbabwean spans photography, film, performance, drawing and design. She featured on the Saltire Society’s 40 Under 40 list in 2023, designed to showcase Scotland’s top young creatives, and in 2024 represented Zimbabwe at the Venice Biennale. A graduate of Dundee’s Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, she is currently exhibiting work at Edinburgh’s Inverleith House as part of Earth Matters, a group show celebrating the 300th anniversary of the birth of James Hutton, the so-called father of modern geology.
Eyes, from Portrait Of Dorothy Gale by Francis Dosoo. (Image: Francis Dosoo.)
Edinburgh born but now based in Vienna, Dosoo never went to art school but instead cut his teeth on Scotland’s club circuit, DJing and putting on club nights in which he often collaborated with visual artists. But, drawn to themes around memory and nostalgia – themes which themselves pull in other ideas relating to colonialism and diasporas – he has begun making bewitching work such as immersive installation Portrait Of Dorothy Gale, currently on view at Dundee Contemporary Arts, where Dosoo has his first solo show. It’s a multi-layered video work which takes as its starting point 1978 musical The Wiz, which starred Diana Ross in a Motown re-imagining of The Wizard Of Oz.
Springburn Sculpture Park by Mandy McIntosh. (Image: Mandy McIntosh)
An artist whose work involves becoming embedded in a community – she has worked intensively in Glasgow’s Springburn area for over five years, and also in Ferguslie Park in Paisley – the Glasgow native originally trained in knitwear design and worked for Kenzo in Paris before returning to Scotland. Her work is inter-disciplinary but has politics at its heart, often dealing with issues around the planning decisions affecting working class communities. Her work Springburn Sculpture Park (Communal Bronze) featured in the recent Glasgow International art biennial.
Charlie Prodger, Installation view, Blanks and Preforms at the Kunst Museum Winterthur in 2021. (Image: Charlie Prodger)
A writer, artist and film-maker, Bournemouth-born Prodger lives and works in Glasgow and took home the Turner Prize in 2018, the year of the all film/video/moving image shortlist. Prodger won for Bridgit, shot in Scotland on an iPhone and an exploration of her Queer identity. She represented Scotland at the following year’s Venice Biennale in 2019 and her most recent show was Cardinal Beams. Held in London in 2024 it consisted of new works and unveiled a new direction – drawings made during a residency at Harvard University in the United States. “Every few years, I shift to a new way of working,” she explained ahead of that show. “It hasn’t necessarily been a conscious process, rather it is reflective of my interest in the limits and parameters of particular materials, and in pushing, and feeling out those edges.”
A work by Sooun Kim exhibited at GI 2026. (Image: Eoin Carey)
Following undergraduate studies in Nottingham and in Seoul, the South Korean artist graduated from Glasgow School of Art’s two year Master of Fine Art programme in 2020 and still lives and works in the city. His practice is multi-disciplinary: Quiet Folds Dispersing You, a Creative Scotland-supported show at Patricia Fleming Gallery as part of last month’s Glasgow International biennial, was a film installation dipping into themes of migration and disconnection, while for his award-winning 2024 show, Mimae: The Edge Of Sleep, he presented a suite of fantastical, other-worldly paintings.
"Essentially a large scale sculptor, Edinburgh-based Fitzpatrick brings a healthy dose of humour and grotesquerie to works which deal in big subjects such as political power and nationalism". (Image: Ross Fraser McLean)
Essentially a large scale sculptor, Edinburgh-based Fitzpatrick brings a healthy dose of humour and grotesquerie to works which deal in big subjects such as political power and nationalism, and the ways in which they are controlled and deployed. He has exhibited internationally and featured in the New Contemporaries show at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts, and a solo exhibition at Edinburgh Printmakers has just opened. It showcases new work made using techniques shaped during residencies there and at the Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop and is titled Memorials To Sausage Politics.
Field Recording by Victoria Morton. (Image: Victoria Morton)
Though also employing sculpture and installation, the Glasgow-born and Glasgow School of Art-trained artist works mostly on large, colourful canvases which hover between abstraction and representation. She’s also a musician – she has played in several bands, including Luke Sutherland’s Rev Magnetic – and her work can currently be seen at The Modern Institute in Glasgow.
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A work in progress for The Idea of North - Sam Ainsley, 2023. (Image: Alan Dimmick)
A noted writer on art and an educator – she was the founder and former head of Glasgow School of Art’s Master of Fine Art programme in 1989 – Ainsley is also known for her vivid, abstract paintings and wall-mounted panels. In 2024, her first institutional show for 40 years drew 70,000 people to Glasgow’s Gallery of Modern Art, and a two-person exhibition with Alex Dempster has just opened at Glasgow’s Garnethill Gallery. Ainsley is showing a new body of work there, The Bed Drawings, made during her recuperation following an accident.
Joyce W. Cairns PPRSA, Pussers Rum. (Image: Joyce W. Cairns)
The first woman to be elected President of the prestigious Royal Scottish Academy, the Edinburgh born artist also taught for many years at Gray’s School of Art in Aberdeen, so her contribution as an educator is not to be under-estimated. As for her very personal and autobiographical works, they are largely figurative (and largely large!) and often deal with elements of mythology or with aspects of her family background. War, soldiering and conflict loom large, but so too does the village of Footdee in Aberdeenshire, where she lived for many years. On August 1, as part of its 200th anniversary celebrations, the Royal Scottish Academy in Edinburgh will mount A Personal Odyssey, a large retrospective of her long career which will include works from her critically acclaimed (and typically monumental) War Tourist series.
Installation view of new work by Sue Tompkins, at The Modern Institute, Glasgow. (Image: Sue Tompkins)
Former lead singer with Glasgow indie band Life Without Buildings, Tompkins is the twin sister of Hayley Tompkins and like her trained at Glasgow School of Art. Her practice often involves sound and she has an interest in language which means she often uses typewritten text in her work. King’s Leap gallery in New York is currently hosting Wanna, her first US solo show in a decade and her first major career survey. Meanwhile the music continues: late last year she collaborated with rabble-rousing Nottingham duo Sleaford Mods on their single No Touch.
Of Ane Blak-Moir by Josie KO, from the pass shadow, whisper shade group show at Collective, 2024. (Image: Sally Jubb Photography)
Using papier mache, glitter and found objects and employing (in her words) “a kitsch DIY aesthetic full of colour and humour with dark gothic undertones” Josie KO create sculptures and casts of Black female figures as a way of examining the Black British experience. Based in Glasgow, the British-Nigerian artist graduated from Glasgow School of Art in 2021 and featured in the prestigious New Contemporaries show at the Royal Scottish Academy in Edinburgh two years later, where her massive sculptural piece Lady In Blue dominated the main room. In 2024 she exhibited in the Glasgow International biennial and last September she was invited to Tate St Ives to create a large scale participatory artwork.
Performance-based artist David Sherry. (Image: David Sherry)
Born in Northern Ireland, based in Glasgow and a lecturer at Edinburgh College of Art, Sherry’s performance-based practice has been described as “comedy-adjacent” and absurdist, among other things. Alongside physical performances – one work was titled Carrying A Bucket Of Water About For A Week, and consisted of just that – he works with video, sculpture and drawing . Earlier this year he presented a grin-inducing solo show titled Sublime Review Of Wrongness in Edinburgh’s Fruitmarket gallery’s large Warehouse space.
A work by Rae-Yen Song, showing at the Tramway. (Image: Keith Hunter)
In common with other Scottish artists of migrant background, Rae-Yen Song mixes personal and family stories with influences from her wider cultural story, often to fantastical effect and using a blend of sculpture, installation, video, performance, sound and even collaborations with family members. Currently showing at Glasgow’s huge Tramway space where it featured as part of the Glasgow International art biennial is a show titled •~TUA~• 大眼 •~MAK~•, a series of large sculptural installations. Born in Edinburgh, educated at Glasgow School of Art and still resident in the city, Song brings the wow factor to everything she does.
Monya Flannigan mounted a large solo show to mark the 40th anniversary of Edinburgh's Collective Gallery in 2024. (Image: Monya Flannigan)
Born in Kirkcaldy, Flannigan studied at Edinburgh College of Art before heading to Yale University for a masters in Fine Art, Flannigan’s preferred form is the portrait and her grand subject is women. Drawing on influences from history, mythology and popular culture – and serving it all up with a twist of humour – her earlier work was often presented as exquisite miniatures. She has since moved into larger scale painted works and, increasingly, collage. Edinburgh’s Collective Gallery mounted a large solo show to mark its 40th anniversary in 2024, and in 2018 was part of a large group show at National Galleries Scotland’s Modern One.
An L-shaped, waist height wall is vertically striped from dark pink (at the top) to light pink then white (at the bottom). (Image: Tessa Lynch)
Having studied at both Edinburgh College of Art and Glasgow School of Art, Lynch now teaches at the first of those august institutions but lives and works in Glasgow. She works in sculpture primarily, co-opting everything from signs to huge building site hoardings, but also in print and performance. Her practice often involves working with community groups to make work which turns on cities, domestic spaces and the built environment as experienced by women. She featured alongside Nathan Coley and others in the group show NOW at Modern One in Edinburgh 2017 and in 2022 exhibited installation works at Edinburgh Printmakers in a show titled Houses Fit For People. Last year she had a solo show of new and old work at Glasgow’s Patricia Fleming Gallery. For Lynch the gallery space is “a city brownfield site, ripe for new development.”
A work by Anya Gallaccio. (Image: Anya Gallaccio)
Gallaccio is known for her large-scale installations that often incorporate organic materials, exploring themes of decay and transformation. Her work invites viewers to engage with the passage of time and the ephemeral nature of life. She has exhibited widely, including at the Tate and the Venice Biennale, and her installations often provoke thought about the relationship between nature and art.
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