In the summer of 1961, the artist Elizabeth Rivers published an article in which she attempted to pinpoint “modern” Irish painters whose work would endure.

Dismissing fashionable trend-echoing wannabes, she wrote about Patrick Collins and Jack B Yeats, Nano Reid, Norah McGuinness, Camille Souter, Louis le Brocquy and “one of the younger painters”, Patrick Pye. Her mention of Patrick Scott, then aged 40, was attended by reservations about his future based on current work. What Rivers wanted was “more tactile use of material and less fastidious restraint” from Scott. In the six decades that followed he demonstrated some of the former and less of the latter, but his reputation endured. His death in February, aged 93, seemed to mark the end for that generation of artists who became the Irish artworld establishment.

Time and opportunity are the factors that shape any artist’s reputation, but for all its love of novelty the art world moves slowly. It takes decades to build a solid reputation in a world where fortysomethings can still be regarded as “emerging”.

The current generation of solidly established names comprises mostly of artists born in the 1950s: Alice Maher, Dorothy Cross, Brian Maguire, Janet Mullarney, Eilis O’Connell, Cecily Brennan, Mick O’Dea, Nigel Rolfe, Donald Teskey and Charles Tyrrell.

Discussions about the next generation tend to focus on recent graduates showing promise, but there’s another group ready to slip into place. These are artists born in the 1960s. They are destined to loom large in the next chapter of the Irish art-history book. It’s a generation that includes two artists who died too young: the filmmaker Paddy Jolley (1966-2012) and the painter William McKeown (1962- 2011). Both have work in public collections and active estates, which seem unlikely to allow their names to disappear.

Our selection includes five painters and a photographer, two film-makers and two sculptors. That half are painters says something about the enduring strength of work being made in traditional media. However established this lot may become, artists born in the 1970s (such as Jennifer Trouton and Eoin McHugh) and 1980s (such as Richard Mosse and Vera Klute) are already snapping at their heels. But let’s focus on the 1960s cohort.

Decade of birth is not a useful measure of maturity for an artist, and it serves here only to make a cohesive group out of a coterie of very different practitioners. Artistic merit is a matter of debate and, inevitably, of taste. Enduring significance can be pinpointed only in hindsight. Still, it’s worth taking stock every now and then. So here are the 10 names I tip to dominate the art-history chapter entitled Early to Mid-21st Century Art.

Diana Copperwhite (born 1969)

She paints cool, dream-like compositions that blend figuration and abstraction to produce images that crackle with psychological tumult. Her focus is on human figures in a recognisable but disconnected world filled with brush strokes, pallet-knife marks, layers and drips. Her visual sources include personal memory, science, mass media and modernist design. Candy-coloured rainbow stripes and circles often obliterate the faces of her female figures.

Gerard Byrne (born 1969)

A master of what is now called lens or time-based media, Byrne works in film and photography, often producing large-scale, multi-screen video installations. New Sexual Lifestyles (2003) is a 54-minute film in which actors re-enact a panel discussion about sex published in Playboy magazine in 1973. Films of this length demand a big commitment, but they return a series of slow-burning, unexpected insights into human nature.

Colin Davidson (born 1968)

Davidson is best known for his portrait “heads” series which began with a painting of the singer Duke Special in 2010. Each image is more than a metre wide and blends elements of expressionism and photorealism to produce striking, unforgettable likenesses. The series now includes the singer Glen Hansard, the playwright Brian Friel and the poet Michael Longley (part of the National Gallery of Ireland portrait collection). We are just about to find out where he went next.

Clare Langan (born 1967)

Langan makes films underwater, in the desert and on snow-capped mountains in the dark. Her trademark aesthetic comes from the hand-painted filters she places over her camera lens to produce uniquely blurred and darkened images on the fly. Immersive, wordless soundscapes accompany these condensed epic journeys, which transform the real world into a mysterious but familiar place. Langan’s films are slow moving, visually stunning and short (most under 10 minutes) meditations on the fragility of human beings in a difficult, beautiful world.

Corban Walker (born 1967)

He works in “Corban-scale”, a self-coined term for the ratio between his own height of four feet and the western-male ideal of six. His sculptures in steel and glass frequently force the audience to embrace the change in perspective that comes with negotiating a world in which they don’t quite fit. As part of a wider dialogue about man’s relationship to the built environment, his work has flawless structural integrity and transforms the physical space in which it is shown.

Oliver Comerford (born 1967)

The landscape painters Mairéad O’hEocha and Nick Miller also deserve consideration, but Comerford wins out for his cinematic outdoor scenes. He paints the world as seen through car windows, using photographs as source material. Much of his skill lies in his ability to recreate a sense of movement by dragging his brush sideways in a gesture that gives a slight horizontal blur to the tops of trees, buildings and mountains as they stand stark against exquisitely beautiful skies. His sparsely populated places have a crime-scene quality that keeps viewers looking.

Paul Seawright (born 1965)

He takes photographs in places most people avoid. Best known for shots of sectarian murder sites in Northern Ireland and abandoned urban landscapes on the edges of European cities, he has also worked in Afghanistan, Africa and urban middle America on a series about the homes of sex offenders. Merging documentary photography with an artistic sensibility, his images are driven by the social, political and historical significance of their location. His themes are fear, borders, violence and death, but the real horror is always just beyond the edge of the frame.

Rachel Joynt (born 1966)

The best public artist of her generation, Joynt has produced some of the country’s most striking outdoor sculpture. From the bronze footprints embedded into O’Connell Bridge in Dublin (People’s Island, 1988) to her two-metre cast-bronze sea urchin at Sandycove, Co Dublin (Mothership, 1999), her secret lies in an intuitive approach to scale and location. She also makes impressive smaller works, but her reputation is likely to pivot on the enduring quality of her public sculptures.

Mark O’Kelly (born 1968)

His paintings originate with printed, photographic material, frequently taken from newspapers and magazines. Grid lines and magnified newsprint patterns distinguish his compositions. He is heavily art-history aware, as are all of these artists, but his work is driven by concerns about how we experience visual information and what effect it might have on our perception. His installation at this year’s EVA International show in Limerick, which began last week and runs until July 6, will be worth a look.

James Hanley (born 1965)

Elected to the Royal Hibernian Academy in his mid-thirties, and now on the National Gallery of Ireland’s board of governors, Hanley seems to come from an older generation, being already part of the establishment. As a realist painter of predictably accomplished official portraits, he has secured a place in Irish art history, but being so young (in art terms) and possessed of remarkable technical skills, he may yet do something to surprise us.