Artsy has named the Brazilian artist Diambe to its Vanguard 2027 roster, the online platform's annual selection of ten emerging artists it considers the most promising working today. The profile, published on 8 November, arrives in the ninth year of the series and comes in a busy week for the artist, who opens two exhibitions within days of each other: a two-person presentation with Tunji Adeniyi-Jones at Simões de Assis in Curitiba on 10 November, followed by a solo show at kaufmann repetto in Milan on 11 November.

Born in Rio de Janeiro in 1993 and now based in São Paulo, Diambe treats the natural world as both subject and raw material. Sculptures begin as delicate forms modelled in beeswax before being cast in bronze, while paintings are made in egg tempera on linen and coloured with mineral pigments ground from stone. The choice of wax is deliberate: its melting point is linked to the extreme heat-index readings recorded in Brazil, so the climate crisis is embedded in the making of the work rather than only depicted by it.

The resulting objects take strange, hybrid shapes, often suggesting fruit, insects or creatures caught mid-transformation. One piece, the artist has said, imagines a centipede-like animal assembled from vegetables. Behind the playfulness sits a serious set of concerns: collective memory, the legacies of colonial history, the experience of the Black Brazilian diaspora and the fragility of ecosystems under strain.

Diambe's profile has risen quickly in the past two years. Their largest solo exhibition to date, titled Bees beings beans, opened at Kunsthalle Basel in early 2026, following a solo booth with Simões de Assis at Frieze London in 2025. Artsy filmed the artist in Milan in September during a residency at the Fonderia Artistica Battaglia foundry, where new sculptures were being made. Diambe is represented by Simões de Assis in São Paulo and kaufmann repetto in Milan and New York. One member of the Vanguard 2027 cohort will also have a work acquired for the Brooklyn Museum's permanent collection, with the winner of that new prize announced on 13 November.