Artsy has named five artists to watch in its October roundup, a monthly series on artists who made an impact through new representation, exhibitions, auctions, fairs or fresh work. This month's five are James Owens, Thalita Hamaoui, Qian Zhong, Alejandro Javaloyas and Austin Hayman.

British painter James Owens, born in Middlesbrough in 1995 and based in London, makes Symbolist-like imagined scenes shaped by a childhood between countryside and a Yorkshire fishing village. He showed at Artsy's Foundations fair and Kiaf SEOUL in 2024; earlier this month Newchild Gallery announced his representation, and he will feature in a duo show with Yoo Geun-Taek. Brazilian artist Thalita Hamaoui, born in São Paulo in 1981, paints large, colourful landscapes built from memory and family storytelling, including scenery from her grandmother's stories of Romania. Her work was recently shown with Simões de Assis at Frieze London, and she has had a New York solo debut, Nascer da Terra, at Marianne Boesky.

Qian Zhong, born in Sichuan in 1995 and based in London, paints surreal, fragmented figures exploring women's identity and desire. Her solo show Almost Body is at Soho Revue in London through 31 October, showing cropped-in snapshots of feminine bodies in shiny lamé and sequined dresses. She earned her MA in painting at the Royal College of Art in 2025. Toulouse-based Alejandro Javaloyas, born in Palma de Mallorca in 1987, makes intimately scaled, hazy images balancing delicacy with unease, drawn from nightmares he logs in a dream journal. His summer solo show Un cuchillo que no corta was at Galeria Reus in Palma, and this year he won the 20th Prisma Art Prize with the coloured-pencil diptych Incredulità di San Tommaso.

The fifth pick is Los Angeles painter Austin Hayman, born in Santa Monica in 1989. The self-taught artist makes figurative oil paintings that teeter on Surrealism, turning domestic scenes unfamiliar with a single green apple or a glowing candle. He had a solo show, Looking for a Friend, at Make Room in Los Angeles this summer, alongside a solo at Allgorithm Gallery and a group show at Gambit Gallery in New York.