Artistic Mediums of 2025: Where Touch and Technique Meet

In today’s art world, the impact of human touch is more powerful than ever. Following a wave of intangible triumphs in the early 2020s, including the debut of NFT art acquisitions, trends have more recently shifted toward the tactile.

Both collectors and curators are sharpening their eye for the material and physical aspects of both emerging and established talents. As a result, the skills of craftsmanship are competing with the screen-based digital art realm as many turn toward the handmade. Touch and technique are inextricably intertwined in textile and the mixed media works, encaustic painting and ceramic forms gaining in popularity. Join in as we explore these manually motivated artistic mediums popular in 2025.

The NFT Moment: From Beeple to Breakdown

Global interest in the digital art world was on the rise already in 2020, but the onset of the global pandemic further fuelled market interest in online innovations, from online exhibitions to AI-image generation. This rapid growth achieved new attention in 2021, when digital artist Michael Joseph Winkelmann, better known as Beeple, sold his non-fungible token (NFT) work, Everydays: The First 5000 Days, at a Christie’s auction for nearly $70 million. Featuring a compilation of images Winkelmann created from 2007 onwards, the work drew attention across the art world as heralding the arrival of NFT artwork among the major blue chip collecting categories. Sales of NFT artworks skyrocketed, and even well-established figures like Damien Hearst embraced its potential.

Soon, though, the NFT art market crashed. DappRadar reports that since 2021 the market for these digitally born creations has plummeted by 93%. Moreover, the value of those NFT artworks still on the market has also significantly dropped in value. While many elements played into this plunge, including the inherently speculative nature of these creations, one core contribution was the overall sense of digital fatigue that began to plague both collectors and the broader public. The impermanence of these digital works meant they lacked the physical presence of conventional artworks. They could not be picked up or held, nor could the technical capacity of each brushstroke or inlaid element be observed. The result, then, was a swing back toward works that still bore the hallmarks of human touch.

The Triumph of Texture and Material: Textiles, Encaustic, and Ceramics

More recently, both contemporary artists and collectors have invested anew in attention to surface and texture. Works that invoke the power of the artist’s touch, whether that be from the warp and weft of a loomed work or the surface incisions made on a print block or ceramic vessel. The reality of these works – that they were made by human hands – is amplified by the capacity to see into the artist’s working process one mark at a time. This ability to study offers a slower pace than the hectic digitally fuelled world around, serving as a salve for the distance and isolation that the online world can often cultivate.

With this turn, several disciplines have come into revived focus in the market for exactly these tactile and textural talents. These include:

Textile Art

Though the textile arts were, for a long time, marginalized from larger conversations on fine art, these woven wonders have enjoyed a rise in prominence as an increasing array of artists have embraced the field and its potential. For some, this medium allows them to reconnect with age-old traditions of making in a conversation across time. Sheila Hicks, for instance, translated her study of indigenous weaving traditions from around the globe into fantastic fibre art installations. Hicks’ creations, which range from “macro-broderies”, a play on traditional embroidery, to works with multimedia additions including everything from shells to shoelaces, present a novel take on abstraction and blur the boundaries between textile traditions and sculpture in creative ways. This novelty has resulted in massive success for Hicks, with her works being exhibited across prestigious venues, from the Venice Biennale to the Parisian Centre Pompidou, in recent years.

For others, the investigation of textile art allows them a new vehicle for contemporary protest or statement. Such is the case for African artist Otobong Nkaga, who used her time growing up in Nigeria as inspiration for a body of work that incorporates textiles as a commentary on contemporary cultural concerns. Of particular focus in many of Nkaga’s creations is the issue of neocolonialism in the form of extractivism, or the invasive pillaging of global resources like essential minerals. She wove these themes into her 2024 exhibition, “Cadence”, at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, where she merged her work in textiles with both sound and performance components to transform the museum’s iconic atrium.

Ceramics

The realm of ceramics is also a rich one in which artists and collectors can explore the nuance of an artwork’s surface. Contemporary artists working in ceramics have continued to experiment with surface to create charged works that both channel tradition and speak to the current age. Simone Leigh, for example, has championed the field of ceramics with her sculptural creations that resonate with traditional African methods but that share feminist themes, particularly those that connect to the experience of women of colour. In works like Las Meninas II, for example, Leigh combines terracotta sculpture with a skirt made of raffia, a material often invoked in African artistic traditions, to comment on the ideas of artistic legacy and female representation. 

A similar strength can be found in the work of Edmund de Waal, who uses his talents as both an artist and writer to create impactful porcelain installations that recall the richness of archival collections. Blending ideas as diverse as traditional Japanese modes of making and Bauhaus modernism into his work, de Waal recalls history while also encouraging conversations across time and within larger museum collections in which his works are exhibited. In works like For Agnes Martin, for instance, de Waal crafted a collection of one hundred and fifty-two porcelain forms neatly arranged in a streamlined bookshelf-like container as if creating a micro-archive of vessels for reflection. 

Encaustic

A historic technique of painting that involves applying pigment to heated wax, encaustic results in works with durable, luminous colour that draws viewers to the surface of each work. This pull is enhanced by the inherently dynamic surface conjured as the wax hardens into small peaks and valleys left by the painting process. Contemporary artist, Linda Benglis, has capitalized on this technique to create evocative works that play with the viewer’s sensation of the surface while simultaneously making the presence of her hand felt throughout. 

The Tactile Demand in 2025’s Exhibitions and Auction Markets

Just as artists are pushing the boundaries of these hand-hewn media in exciting ways, so too are global art fairs and exhibitions revealing a growing interest in material authenticity and ways these techniques can bring talented new voices into the art world. In addition to Nkanga’s previously mentioned MoMA exhibition, other notable showcases include:

Major Art Fairs

Frieze New York, one of the world’s preeminent art fairs, placed a new importance on textile, ceramic, and even encaustic works with an emphasis on makers whose works celebrate “material memory”. Participant galleries like Hauser & Wirth showcased works by Rashid Johnson and Lorna Simpson, both of whom explore the ties between material and representation in their work. Meanwhile, Pace Gallery put some of Linda Benglis’ sculptural works on display. Though these were mostly bronze, not encaustic, they nevertheless relayed a similar emphasis on the expressive role of materiality in her work.

Exhibitions

Museums, galleries, and art centers around the world are also filling their 2025 calendar with showcases that similarly celebrate these art forms. Richard Saltoun Gallery in New York, for example, debuted a group show entitled, “Wall Hangings”, which celebrated the potential of textile and fibre art via the lens of works by figures like Magdalena Abakanowicz and Erin Manning. London’s Fashion and Textile Museum also launched a dynamic exhibition, entitled, “Textiles: The Art of Mankind”, which examines the ways in which textile and fibre art unifies cultures and conveys powerful stories.

With regard to ceramics, in addition to the anticipated British Ceramics Biennial and Polish Ceramics Triennial, both of which open in late 2025, Le Delta in Belgium is spending the summer showcasing an exhibition entitled, “Alive & Unfolding”, which features over twenty international ceramic artists and their innovative approach to the medium. Emphasizing the role of the material and its biographical connections to the artists themselves, it promises to be a prime space to soak in the rising stars of ceramic art.

Part of the momentum driving these exhilarating exhibitions is the realization among many gallerists and curators that collectors like the unique characteristics that these media can yield. Each work tells a story of the artist, not just in the making of the work but also in the themes invoked that reveal some of their experience or biography.

Feeling Our Way into the Future

The general shift in the art world from digital dazzle to tactile talent could be indicative of a larger sense of fatigue over digital saturation, or it could simply be the need for us to connect individually with the artists whose works we collect. This need for touch means tapping into these innovative contemporary artists who use these tactile media to build both meaning and message into their creations. So, for 2025, tap into this tactile trend.