BE OPEN Art, an online art gallery project by Elena Baturina’s BE OPEN think tank, has just announced the winner of their Artist of the Year title in 2024, and a number of other exciting news and innovations.

First of all, congratulations to the talented Imile Wepener who was voted the Artist of the Month back in April, and now by the majority of votes - the Artist of the Year 2024 and an awardee of €1000!

Imile Wepener is an artist and illustrator from Johannesburg, South Africa. While obtaining his BA Honours in Visual Communication from The Open Window Institute in Pretoria, Imile was an apprentice of South African master puppeteer Toby van Eck, and added puppetry to his skillset that also includes sculpture, animation and painting. He currently works as a freelance illustrator.

Founder Elena Baturina congratulated the winner: “Imile Wepener’ artwork has a touch of magic in it, and the visitors of BE OPEN Art appreciated that as much as we did. BE OPEN Art is proud to showcase the remarkable young talent we meet all over the world, and facilitate the artists in getting visibility and opportunity to have their say in the art and therefore affect lives of people who appreciate it. We applause all the featured artists and thank everyone who voted throughout the year.”

To be featured in the gallery, BE OPEN Art selects artists at an early stage of their career who emphasize social consciousness, philosophical meaning and the aesthetical solutions for the wrongs of the contemporary world, such as inequality, lack of diversity, environmental issues, and consumerism. In a way, the project sees its mission in looking for the new influencers in the art scene, and invites everyone to contribute to this process.

Aiming to showcase young talents, every month for the past five years, BE OPEN Art invited art enthusiasts to choose the best artist among those 20 exhibited in the online gallery. The artist whose works gains the majority of votes throughout the year becomes the Artist of the Year.

Another great piece if news is that starting from this year, money grants, though smaller, will be awarded to all the monthly winners as well. This has become possible due to the Community Support Fund, the non-profit initiative the gallery launched in January with the hope to build a mechanism of mutual financial support. The initiative attempts to reinvigorate the engagement and communication between the collectors and the BE OPEN Art featured artists by running an actual art trading platform with a community fund function.

Every month of 2024, the trading platform attached to the BE OPEN Art website offered 6-8 art pieces with the condition, that the author will receive 50% of its price, while the rest will be accumulated in the BE OPEN Art Community Fund. In December the amount accumulated in the Community Fund has been split into equal parts and will now be distributed among the monthly winners.

Thanks to the gallery’s patrons, the fund has reached the mark that will allow to award the artists €300 each! The lucky recipients will be Dora Prévost, Lisa Einkemmer, Brian Connolly, Imile Wepener, Aigerim Asanbekova, Esinulo Chiamaka Praise, S.M.Khayyam, Amy Lewis, Akindele John, Ahsan Memon, Julia Bartolini and Yibei Liu.

“We hope that these additional resources will support our emerging artists in their continued pursuit of a successful career in the arts,” said Elena Baturina. “We want to empower artists to keep dreaming, to keep creating, and to keep following their hearts, while involving the audiences in buying their art not purely for purposes of collecting and possession, but also playing a philanthropic part in their future creative paths.”

BE OPEN Art also reports that the regional competition will continue in 2025 to cover four new regions starting with South Asia in January-March. Elena Baturina explained that “the regional competitions highlights those emerging artists whose art best represents their regional, cultural and ethnic identities. This helps us support even more young people. From now on, not only each regional winner selected by the public will be awarded a money prize, but the foundation’s favourite as well. We love the outcome of the programme so much that BE OPEN will expand the regional competition to four new regions over 2025, to involve artists of South Asia, Oceania, South America and Western Africa.”

Next year, BE OPEN will also tailor a section of the gallery for sustainable and inclusive art and artists, supported by the “Art Limitless” online competition, lectures, master-classes and other sources of knowledge and guidance on sustainability in arts. “We do our best to build an artistic community rooted in BE OPEN Art. We have introduced a special ‘Artists for Artists’ section on the gallery website dedicated to facilitating communication and exchange of useful and applicable content by the more to less successful artists. There is some practical advice on managing social media, organizing a working place, maintaining healthy work-rest balance, etc.; there are conversations about artistic journeys, sources of inspiration, and backgrounds of selected artists; video clips of artists’ studios that describe the process of work, their tools, and a lot more useful and inspiring content…”

BE OPEN Art is an online art gallery created by BE OPEN foundation with an ambition to provide emerging artists with an opportunity to showcase their work to the world. In 2023, a regional competition was set up for those artists who best represent the artistic identity of their regions, which will continue into 2025.