Nov 3, 2025 4:05PM

Emil Sands first saw Doryphoros, Polykleitos’s fifth-century BCE sculpture of the “ideal man,” during one of his childhood trips to the British Museum with his grandfather. “I remember standing in front of this body, this fucking perfect body—an unattainable body for anyone—and feeling really like I understood it,” Sands told me during a recent visit to his New York studio.

The statue’s contrapposto stance—one hip shifted over one weight-bearing leg—was deliberately imbalanced. “It was honest in a way that most things aren’t,” Sands said. What struck him most wasn’t the figure’s perfection but its asymmetry—its embodiment of the tension between stability and strain. For Sands, that conflict was familiar. The British artist was diagnosed with a form of cerebral palsy as a child, and his body was often measured and corrected in the course of treatment. It made him acutely aware of his own form from an early age.

Today, Sands obsessively paints bodies—imagined, inspired by friends, or his own. These figures inhabit isolated, sometimes eerie, landscapes, often near water. The resulting impressionistic tableaux present an intimate study of the human form, where partially bare bodies are subject to the same attention that Sands gives himself.

To say these paintings have generated buzz would be an understatement. When we met in August, Sands was clearing out his Williamsburg studio, preparing to fly to Venice for a residency with Victoria Miro, where he’ll stage a solo show following the residency. He will also participate in a three-person show in Victoria Miro’s London gallery later this month. This follows a previous residency in Mexico City with the gallery JO-HS and a solo exhibition at Kasmin (now Olney Gleason) earlier this year. This level of attention from influential art world players is especially notable, given that the 27-year-old only began painting seriously a few years ago.

In fact, until 2020, Sands thought of himself as primarily a writer. But he had made art throughout his childhood, even enrolling in a one-year program for painting at Central Saint Martins before attending Cambridge to study classics. He chose this field precisely because of how ancient art’s treatment of the body matched his own preoccupations. “The body is a central way to understand the world,” he said, explaining that idea as the foundation of his academic studies and, eventually, his artwork.

Sands says his first real foray into painting began during the COVID-19 lockdown, when he took refuge in his family’s garage in London. “I was so nervous to paint anything,” he remembered. “I just painted self-portraits, self-portraits, self-portraits.” He joked that he worried his mother would think he was incurably self-obsessed.

Soon after, in 2022, Sands won the Henry Fellowship to study art and writing at Yale. There, he turned his gaze outwards, learning from other people’s bodies and postures, not just his own. At this time, he colored his figures in radioactive greens, purples, and reds, as seen in his ethereal figurative painting Staying in Line (2023), which features five naked bodies processing around a maypole. This work was among those included in his debut solo show at the storied downtown gallery Tibor de Nagy in 2023.

That same year, he got his major break as a writer from an essay published in The Atlantic. The title gets to the point: “Society Tells Me to Celebrate My Disability. What If I Don’t Want To?” Sands described the thesis to me in even franker terms: “It would be lovely to celebrate difference and yes, it would be gorgeous if I love my body, but it would also be a lie,” he said.

The essay landed him a book deal, and now he divides his days between his two professions—starting to write as early as 6 a.m., then painting late into the night. His manuscript is due in January.

Before starting his paintings, Sands collects tons of reference photos. Sometimes, he will ask a friend to model for a photograph, or will find a random landscape that resonates with him. He often mashes unrelated images together to create hybrid compositions that set a particular mood. Sands describes the approach as “very higgledy-piggledy.”

At first, Sands’s figures existed almost exclusively in kaleidoscopic dreamscapes. However, by the time he presented his solo show with JO-HS in 2024, his focus had shifted. In this body of work, the setting was often coastal—though most paintings retained an eerie, dark quality. These motifs persisted in his solo show with Kasmin earlier this year, where subjects often faced away from the viewer and out towards an expanse of water, as in Tide pool crab land (2024) and *The last holiday *(2024).

In these paintings, Sands’s gaze lingers on the contours of bodies—the curve of a shoulder, the shadows cast across a back. One might assume that Sands’s vantage point is purely romantic. In some ways, his gaze is covetous, shaped by his childhood and his disability, which has made the sight of a “normal,” functioning body into a source of fascination and longing. As he explains, the work is less about desire itself than about his developing understanding of his own perspective. “I’ve had to retrain myself to understand that I see the world and look at the world in a really voyeuristic, desirous way,” he said, explaining that he “always wanted to be different and still want[s] to be different.”

In Sands’s recent work, his figures appear alongside stone sculptures, inspired by his long-held interest in Greco-Roman art. The last, then-untitled painting in his studio before he completed his move out features two women in swimsuits. The right side of the canvas is dominated by a close-up view of the posterior of Praxiteles’s fourth-century BCE sculpture Aphrodite of Knidos, which Sands told me was exceptionally provocative in the ancient world. Allegedly, at least one man attempted to consummate his love for the stone goddess. The inclusion of statues links directly back to his academic studies, reflecting on how Greco-Roman artists used the body as an emblem of beauty and human striving.

Though he rarely paints self-portraits these days, Sands’s work still reckons with who he is and what he wants. He recalls the best piece of advice he ever got—from fellow artist and his close friend Chloe Wise—after complaining to her about his self-doubt over not making the “sickest, most out-there, most cutting-edge avant-garde work,” as he called it. “I’m painting people looking at their bodies in a reasonably traditional color palette,” he lamented. Her blunt advice: “Emil, just make what you want.”

Sands retains an admirable frankness—the same quality that fueled his breakout essay and continues to shape his painting today. His paintings don’t show us the ideal; they teach us to look at others and ourselves with “an awareness of foibles and hopefully, a tenderness” towards the essential humanness of difference, he said. In the end, his work is an extension of himself—and it feels true: “There’s not another thing I could be making right now.”

The Artsy Vanguard 2026

The Artsy Vanguard is now in its eighth year of highlighting the most promising artists working today. As 2026 approaches, we’re celebrating 10 talents poised to become future leaders of contemporary art and culture.

Explore more of The Artsy Vanguard 2026 and browse works by the artists.

MR

Maxwell Rabb

Maxwell Rabb (Max) is a writer. Before joining Artsy in October 2023, he obtained an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BA from the University of Georgia. Outside of Artsy, his bylines include the Washington Post, i-D, and the Chicago Reader. He lives in New York City, by way of Atlanta, New Orleans, and Chicago.

Video by Pushpin Films / Giulia Fassina for Artsy.

Thumbnail: Portrait of Emil Sands by Giulia Fassina for Artsy, 2025; Emil Sands, from left to right: “The last holiday,” 2024, and “The invitation,” 2024. Courtesy of the artist and Olney Gleason.