At 33, Banks Violette is the white guy from Ithaca, New York, with a lot of tattoos, a G.E.D. diploma, a couple of years of community college, and an M.F.A. from Columbia University—and is one of the most sought-after young artists. His influences range from Caspar David Friedrich to the suicides inspired by Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther, to Norway's black-metal subculture. Violette's creative impulse is rooted in dissatisfaction and adolescent angst: "If you're bored with things, you want to make an alternate world for yourself." His large-scale sculptural installations blend the aesthetics of Minimalism and rock 'n' roll into lurking, violent narratives exploring the boundaries between fiction and reality-narratives imbued with album-art iconography and themes of "new gothic mythology." "His early success has afforded Violette an enormous amount of creative freedom," says his dealer Jose Freire. "As his ambition escalates, the work is becoming more epic in scale. There's nothing but rabid enthusiasm for everything he does; for every piece he makes, there are 20 people waiting." Still, the world of Banks Violette is definitely not a place where Little Red Riding Hood should go on her own.

Banks Violette is one of the most sought after young artists.... Mathew Cerletty is known for crisp portraits.

Milwaukee-born, 26-year-old Mathew Cerietty is known for crisp portraits—wry and a little weird, peopled with privileged characters just pervy enough to make them interesting. His most recent works, an exquisite Bic-ballpoint rendering of Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater and a delightfully minimal Diet Coke painting, mark a new direction—a shift in influences from fashion photography, David Bowie, and Kids in the Hall to Gober, Currin, Johns, and Guston. He is a rising star at New York's über-cool Rivington Arms gallery, owned by Melissa Bent and Mirabelle Marden. What compels Cerietty to paint? "I have eight-foot-tall cutouts of Melissa and Mirabelle_They tell me what to do. When I'm not making work, they get very irritable, they ignore me, but when I paint, they whisper sweet nothings."