The future is female: Four more women shaping the landscape of contemporary art

'The Future is Female' has long moved beyond slogan status to become a rallying cry for visibility, equity, and representation especially in the art market. Across a broad spectrum of styles and mediums, the four female-identifying artists below are asserting new visions that challenge, disrupt, and expand our collective imagination. Continuing our Future is Female article series, we are pleased to spotlight the work of Emily Pope, Karolina Dworska, Zélie Nguyen, and Paula Turmina.

Emily Pope

Emily Pope is a Canadian artist whose work explores muliebrity through a deeply symbolic and intimate lens. Employing self-portraiture alongside still life elements such as pearls, glass, gloves, and organic materials, she constructs visual arenas that evoke introspection and emotional nuance. Drawing on her background in design and art direction, her canvases are cinematic in composition, sparse yet charged, blurring the boundaries between vulnerability and strength.

Emily Pope, An Intimacy Contained (2024). Image: © Artist website

Karolina Dworska

Karolina Dworska is a UK-based artist whose textile works, spanning hand-tufted rugs, machine-knitted tapestries, and sculptural fibres, offer a visceral exploration of dreams, myth, and the subconscious. Her richly textured pieces function as portals into strange, intimate worlds, blending craft with surreal imagery and a touch of body horror. Dworska’s use of materials evokes both softness and unease, conjuring personal symbols and uncanny figures that speak to memory, desire, and emotional dissonance. By pushing the boundaries of textile as a medium, she reclaims it as a site of deep psychological storytelling.

Karolina Dworska, Outside of Time (2024). Image: © Artist website

Zélie Nguyen

French artist Zélie Nguyen’s paintings unfold like visions from a private mythology which is dreamlike, symbolic, and rich in ornamental detail. Drawing from Persian miniatures, medieval iconography, and the likes of Giotto and Uccello, her work conjures imaginary architectures, strange creatures, and inner landscapes that feel both ancient and otherworldly. With a precise, delicate hand and a taste for refined composition, Nguyen constructs what she describes as a “palace of memory”, a fluid mental space where introspection and the fantastical converge. Her painting practice evolves in cycles, gradually allowing the real and the uncertain to seep into her surreal vocabulary, resulting in a body of work that is at once intimate, timeless, and in constant transformation.

Zélie Nguyen, Le refuge, huile sur toile (2024). Image: © Artist website

Paula Turmina

Brazilian-born, UK-based Paula Turmina blends folklore, ecology, and cosmology in her magical realist paintings. Her lush, symbolic landscapes conjure spiritual narratives, engaging with cycles of growth, decay, and regeneration which are all animated by an animist sensibility. Turmina’s art encourages a conversational relationship with nature, inviting viewers into dream-laden worlds where myth and memory intertwine and where the non-human is animated with sacred presence.

Paula Turmina, All the things she said (2023). Image: © Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery

Together, Emily Pope, Karolina Dworska, Zélie Nguyen, and Paula Turmina demonstrate how contemporary art is being reshaped by practices rooted in introspection, symbolism, and cultural hybridity. Their work doesn’t merely participate in current conversations—it expands them, offering new mythologies, aesthetics, and ways of seeing. As these artists continue to push boundaries across painting and textile, figuration and abstraction, what emerges is not only a richer art landscape, but a compelling vision of the future female-led, and fearlessly original.