Year in review: New artists of 2025 and a great last half of the year January 07 2026, 0 Comments
By Kimberly Nicoletti
Last year, the galleries began representing four new artists: Paulina Johnson, Autumn Hunnicutt, Karen Bexfield and Yury Darashkevish.
They discovered the first two — which made their gallery debuts through Raitman — on Instagram. Bexfield caught the Raitman’s attention at other galleries over the years, and Darashkevish came through their close relationship with DE Fine Art, a company based out of Georgia renowned for managing artists’ careers.
Three of the artists are women who live in Colorado (Hunnicutt and Johnson) and New Mexico (Bexfield).
“We wanted to give opportunities to younger women that deserve it — they’ve all been creating something pretty cutting edge. All three of them are pushing their techniques and their mediums in different, exciting directions,” says co-owner Brian Raitman.
Paulina Johnson
Johnson, who lives in the mountains of Steamboat Springs, was raised in Mexico City. She is inspired by nature and aims to capture its complexity and beauty by placing paper on edge. Johnson's three-dimensional wall art stems from three different paper makers, creating beautiful paper both in the US and in Europe. She layers thick piece of paper each on edge, forming well-defined wildlife and landscapes.
Paulina Johnson roots her art in minimalism, using circles and lines to allow her love for paper to shine through. She views paper as magical: natural, versatile and unassuming. She enters into a relationship with the medium, exploring — and listening to — how it shapes a piece when invited to show up beyond the typical flat surface in which it usually presents itself, into a three-dimensional interaction with light and shadow.
“Her work literally moves as you walk past it,” Raitman says.
The Raitmans travel to Miami's Art Week annually to visit the largest week of American art sales of the year, viewing thousands of artists, and, although they have seen artists work with paper or canvas flipped on its edge to provide dimension, the work is always abstract. They have never encountered anything like the three-dimensional landscapes, florals and animals Paulina Johnson generates as they stand on edge, framed beautifully beneath glass.
Autumn Hunnicutt
Greatly inspired by her Southwestern roots in New Mexico, Autumn Hunnicutt’s oil paintings tell stories revolving around existence and experience. For instance, her oil on wood panel piece, “Quite the Lifetime,” came about after she saw yuccas in all their glory while starting her solo journey hiking the Pacific Crest Trail in Southern California. Unbeknownst to her, Hunnicutt timed it perfectly to witness the splendid blooms. When she returned from her expedition, she researched the plant and learned that they die after the bloom.
Quite the Lifetime by Autumn Hunnicutt
“It’s a testament to how it grows quietly, then it’s majestic and dies; she wanted to preserve that majestic moment in its life,” Raitman says.
Inspired by transcendental painters, Hunnicutt creates portals in her work by layering paints that are slightly darker than the previous layer underneath.
“It creates this Old World feel to part of the background, but then there’s this bright, stunning contemporary color over that. The way that she mixes them together — I haven’t seen that before. Her paintings are very crisp, and her line work is very strong. And, she paints narrative very well, her paintings do a wonderful job of telling a story. There is a lot of soul in her work, something easy to see both from afar and upon closer inspection of her paintings,” Raitman says.
Karen Bexfield
Merging art and science, Karen Bexfield has spent years perfecting her multi-staged technique of heating glass particles several times in the kiln to adjust color density and create her signature holes, which organically develop in response to the heat.
Bexfield's glass pieces blend control and letting go, resulting in serendipitous pieces that mirror patterns found in nature. She often sandblasts the exterior of her glass forms, influencing how light plays with the pieces. She also overlays glass powder, repeatedly firing it to subtly change how the colors look and to add depth to the already established shadows emanating from the small holes.
Sangria Luna by Karen Bexfield
“She pushes glass to its limits,” Raitman says. “It’s very organic looking but scientifically complex. ‘How did you do that?’ is always the question I ask. It’s structured, yet simultaneously natural in its appearance, and an immense amount of time and research went into it.”
Like many of the artists at Raitman Art Galleries, nature inspires Bexfield, from birds’ nests to Fibonacci’s Golden Angle. Bexfield's art has been shown at major art fairs and is featured in museum collections. Her recently completed studio is enabling her to continue developing works that are distinctly her own.
Yury Darashkevish
DE Fine Art introduced Mario Jung into the galleries a decade ago, and last year, they introduced Belarus-native Yury Darashkevish. The artist now splits his time between Florida and Portugal, pushing the boundaries of traditional art techniques to intrigue visual perception.
While his multiple series include figurative and abstract works, the galleries have focused on his landscapes.
“They’re beautiful in that they’re really impressionist paintings, but they have such a contemporary bend to them that’s kind of surprising,” Raitman says.
From a distance, their top-coat of resin creates a shine and the painting looks very much impressionist, but examine the paintings more closely, and you’ll see the artist’s abstract mark-making, from smears and scrapes to drips and angular marks.
Wandering Light by Yuri Darashkevich
“I find that to be very creative and very exciting,” Raitman says. “When you get close to the work, it almost looks entirely abstract, but then you step back 6 inches, it’s obvious it’s a forest or usually a single tree. It almost tricks your mind into thinking: ‘How did he create branches and leaves out of something so unorganized?’ But ultimately, it’s very organized because the intent is to create a tree and its setting. The mark-making is seemingly intentionally chaotic but very controlled. It lends itself to the creation of very dynamic paintings.”
A look back on 2025 sales
Although 2025 started out a little slow, sales flourished beginning last summer, despite traffic in Breckenridge and Vail dipping about 10-15%. The galleries hit a high number, the highest ever, which seemingly came out of nowhere but reflects the Raitman’s and their sales consultants’ longevity in the art world and their emphasis on building close relationships.
“We’re very blessed, and we look forward to doing it all again,” Raitman says. “Thanks to our clients for making it all possible — that our family, our sales consultants and our 50 or so artists get to do what we love and bring beauty to the world. The people that we sell art to are really good to us, and we make sure we’re really good to them. We’ve become friends with so many of our clients all over the world and that just comes from being in business so long and making sure we build relationships with people who come into the galleries. 2026 promises more of the same!”