Tag: contemporary women artists

Nadja Eleonora Milsten’s work sits in the space between doubt and trust. Her watercolor figures feel present but unfinished, shaped as much by emotion as by restraint. Some of her strongest paintings are the ones she almost abandoned—set aside for months until time changed how she saw them. Moving from oils to watercolor during a turning point in her life, she stopped painting for expectation and began painting from instinct. Her practice isn’t about certainty. It’s about letting doubt exist, stepping away when needed, and trusting that what doesn’t make sense…

Nena Lang creates paintings that feel less like images and more like emotional presence. Built through layers scraped, pressed, and reworked with knives and rigid rulers, her works give form to what cannot be spoken moments when holding everything inside becomes impossible and painting becomes the only way forward.

Rooted in the body and shaped by constant movement between cultures, Helena Barbagelata’s work resists categorisation. Her images don’t offer answers, they confront the viewer with presence, vulnerability, and the cost of never landing.

Olga Hiiva paints the faces that were never allowed to remain. Working on tablecloths, nightgowns, and worn domestic fabrics, she restores presence to lives erased by violence and silence. Her portraits are not memorials of suffering, they are acts of return, carrying grief, love, and survival across generations, and insisting that what was meant to vanish is still here.

Martine Jansen doesn’t fill space, she creates it. Through layered pastel paintings and restrained sculpture, her work proves that silence, patience, and refusal to overexplain can carry more weight than noise ever could.

For Stephanie Swilley, art and care are inseparable. Her practice weaves beauty, ecological awareness, and mutual aid into a single gesture proving that tenderness can be radical, and art can help reshape how we live together.

The start of a new year carries possibility. Artist of the Month invites women artists to step forward, share their work, and begin the year by trusting their creative voice.