Young NFT Artists to Watch in 2022

NFT artists are no longer newcomers in the art world. However, despite their increasing recognition in traditional art spaces, it can still be hard to know where to start when finding artists in this field. We have selected five young creators that we have had our eye on recently, with a wide range in styles and backgrounds. Keep reading to discover the NFT artists that you should have on your radar!

1. Andre O’Shea

Digital artist Andre O’Shea claims that he “makes art for people who wanna escape reality & build the future.” And looking at his artworks, you can see what he’s getting at. O’Shea’s digital NFT works blend the artist’s technical skill and creative eye with futuristic, dreamy, and often other-wordly elements. His work Choices Vs Decisions is a prime example of his distinctive style, recalling video-game graphics in a hyperrealistic yet dream-like setting. 

2. Klara Vollstaedt

Canada-based Klara Vollstaedt is another NFT artist whose work blends the realistic with the other-wordly. Her work explores themes of identity, connection, loss, and relationships in the digital age. Vollstaedt talks about being part of the first generation to grow up alongside the internet and having watched its relationship with humanity evolve and intensify throughout her life. Her digital works are an example of her generation’s ability to address these themes both critically and with humor. The Big Catch renders an art installation mimicking that of a traditional gallery, but with a digital, unearthly touch.

3. JAKE

Using a totally different art style, NFT artist Jake Osmun (known as JAKE in the NFT world) produces energetic, painterly works of digital art. His work ART_HEIST.JPG recalls Basquiat’s expressive abstract style while turning it around into something distinctively different. The white computer cursor at its center hints at the digital construction of the work, added to by the glitchy composition of the image itself. The work mixes the old and new, the familiar with the undetermined, mirroring the nature of the digital age itself. 

4. Black Dave

Dave Curry (AKA Black Dave) is a musician, producer and multidisciplinary artist exploring the NFT field through music and art. He first dabbled in this market in 2020 during the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, creating NFTs of his unreleased cover art. These works are his Manga Tears series, featuring stylized and edited images extracted from manga comics. Curry likens this artistic process to that of producing rap music, which frequently uses samples of other creators’ work. 

5. Shay the Surrealist

Shaylin Wallace (Shay the Surrealist) is a 22-year-old NFT artist that specializes in creating surrealist digital images. Wallace digitally manipulates stock photos in an aim to transform the everyday into the extraordinary. Common subjects in her work, as in her NFT Under The Weather: Rain, are elements of nature combined with humans or animals. By blending surrealist compositions with photographic image quality, her works blur the boundary between the real and the imaginary. 

A generational shift in arts and culture…

The way we learn, communicate and entertain ourselves today is inherently shaped by the digital age, and the rapidly changing nature of technology has caused an acceleration of culture that can be difficult to keep up with. These five young NFT artists are using digital art to express ideas and concepts that are specific to a generation raised with the internet. What do you think of their works?