When it comes to discovering new art, Frieze Week is great, but it’s also a lot. Let this edition of The Radar be your breather – cutting through the chaos to spotlight three rising stars at the fair: Mika Horibuchi, Rasoul Ashtary, and Anton Munar.

Showing at 56 Henry, Chicago-based Mika Horibuchi plays with repetition – recreating images in different sizes and styles to toy with how a work’s subject, object, and supposed ‘value’ all twist around each other. Over at diez gallery, Berlin-based Ashtary goes big with a sculptural installation and sweeping paintings packed with skeletal trees, bulbous forms, and near-machinic forms. At Wschód’s booth, Majorca-and Copenhagen-based Munar dives into dreamy narratives powered by love, blending paintings and sculptures where inside and outside spaces blur together.

We asked each artist to give us their past, present and future.

Mika Horibuchi

THEN

My proudest moment was learning that the Art Institute of Chicago had acquired one of my paintings for its permanent collection – a painting based on a drawing I made of my favorite piece in the museum, one that I frequented as a student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. When I started out as an artist, my earliest and most impactful influence was Gerard Richter. I’m ok with mimicry now, but I wasn’t at first.

NOW

I’m currently working on a new body of work based on a fictional institution’s art entrance exams. I accidentally re-learned how to draw this year, which I’m really excited about. At the moment, my studio is dense with plants. I keep a clean working area and I will often have a basketball game playing in the background.

NEXT

I’m planning my upcoming solo exhibition with Patron Gallery in Chicago in 2026. I want to make a killer large painting. My art world prediction is that there will be some iteration of “back to basics.”

Rasoul Ashtary

THEN

My proudest moments have been meeting the right people. My biggest influences when I first started out were romantic painters and crazy writers. My most pivotal works were the photos I took in the late 2000s and early 2010s. I feel that I change every day, and so does my practice.

NOW

My current studio setup is two tables, a laptop, a scanner, dozens of tools and paints, some objects I tend to make sculptures from, and a few wall spaces where I’m constantly replacing the paintings. My current obsessions are life and exorcism.

NEXT

My future plans include visiting a forest and escaping the fireworks. I predict that the art world will continue to fluctuate between contraction and expansion.

Anton Munar

THEN

The past exists now. I hold on to some of it: the relationships that have carried me and still do. To me, the past means not being nostalgic, and to wholeheartedly love Francisco de Zurbarán.

NOW

The present exists now. The present is really all there is, and still, I dislike the word ‘now’. The present has to do with presence. So I latch onto that which awakens me and brings me to a state of presence. This is what nature does, what art can do at times, and what my loved ones give me.

NEXT

The future exists now. What I am doing in this moment is all I have. The only future truth is that my life will end. That is the backdrop of my makings, the backdrop of my life. This truth brings me vitality and joy.