Over the course of 11 themed rooms, “The Histories,” a major survey of Kerry James Marshall’s work at the Royal Academy of the Arts in London, demonstrates why the Chicago-based figurative painter is one of the most respected and well-known artists working today. “All of the paintings show Black subjects, and Kerry, in his own words, is unapologetic about centering Black figures and engaging with the history of art,” said the show’s curator, Mark Godfrey.

For over four decades, Marshall has placed Black bodies in everyday settings, using history painting to challenge how Western art has often excluded and dehumanized Black people. He has since become known for his large-scale works combining art historical and Black cultural references. “When I started out, my goal was to figure out how to make the most sophisticated paintings I could,” he told Artsy. “I want people to come back time and again, and each time to see something new they hadn’t noticed before.”

To celebrate the exhibition, which is on view through January 18, 2026, Artsy highlights some of Marshall’s most iconic works on display in the London show.

A Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self (1980)

At just eight inches tall, A Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self (1980) is considered a pivotal turning point in Marshall’s artistic career. The piece marks Marshall’s shift from mixed-media abstract collages to painting Black figures in everyday settings.

Taking cues from painters such as Albrecht Dürer and Rembrandt, Marshall used the practice of self-portraiture to signal his new direction. As he told art historian Benjamin H. D. Buchloh in the exhibition catalogue for “The Histories,” the piece exemplifies “my escape from the limitations and the projections that accompany stereotypical representations of Black people.”

Created on paper in egg tempera when he was only 25, the piece depicts the artist himself as a jet-black figure in a black coat against a black backdrop. Almost invisible, the man is brought to life by the whites of his eyes, his mischievous wide-toothed grin revealing one missing tooth and pink gums, and a white shirt underneath.

Decades after he created this work, the artist is still painting figures with pure black skin, though they are now rendered with more depth and dimension. “Black [in this way] is not reductive,” he told Artsy. “It’s a statement of complexity, because I make the blacks as rich as I possibly can.” For Marshall, using black in this way works to emphasize that his subjects are not real but “rhetorical figures” in realist spaces.

In 1984, the collector Steven Lebowitz bought the painting for $850, hanging it in a bar at his home. As a painting reflecting on historical racist stereotypes, many guests found it offensive out of context, prompting him to move the piece to a bathroom. It stayed there for over 25 years, until he and his wife gifted it to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2019.

De Style (1993)

De Style (1993) was the first of Marshall’s works to be acquired by a major museum, also purchased in 2019 by LACMA for around $12,000, according to the artist. This milestone aligned with Marshall’s intentions to insert Black figures into the Western canon of art history. At nearly 8 and a half by 10 feet, it was his largest work to date and set a precedent for many of the works he would later become known for.

Set in a Los Angeles barbershop (named Percy’s House of Style, according to the window sign), De Style depicts five Black men, four of them facing the viewer. Three wait, and one sits in a chair as the barber cuts his hair. Like many of his works today, the piece draws on several aspects of Western art history. The men’s placid stares echo Rembrandt’s De Staalmeesters (1662), where six men—five drapers and an attendant—look up from their work to acknowledge the viewer. The large mirror behind Marshall’s figures echoes Édouard Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1882), and the primary colors of the barbershop cabinet alongside the piece’s title nod to Piet Mondrian’s De Stijl movement, founded in 1917.

For many Black communities across the globe, a barbershop is a haven. In an interview with The New Yorker, Marshall noted that young Black men of his generation were enchanted by the blaxploitation movies of the ’70s, low- to mid-budget films featuring black protagonists in action-oriented roles. He recalled that this meant “guys were spending as much on their hair as girls did.” “My brother and I did each other’s hair,” he noted. Marshall brings the piece into contemporary events by depicting a calendar marking April 1991. This was the month after Rodney King, a Black man, was brutally beaten by the Los Angeles police.

Great America (1994)

In the early 1990s, Marshall created several works about the transatlantic slave trade, focusing on its enduring impact often through metaphor and depicting contemporary settings. In Plunge (1992), for instance, a woman in a bikini prepares to dive into a pool where a swimmer appears to be drowning. Voyager (1992) shows two partially obscured figures aboard a small vessel called Wanderer, which was named after a slave ship that illegally transported people from Africa to Georgia in 1858. Meanwhile, Great America (1994), which takes its name from a Californian theme park, illustrates a group of figures on a boat ride heading towards a haunted tunnel.

In 2011, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., acquired Great America, and two years on, it became the centerpiece for their solo exhibition “In the Tower: Kerry James Marshall.” The idea for the piece emerged from the 1993 film Sankofa, directed by the Ethiopian filmmaker Haile Gerima. Marshall worked on the movie as a production designer. The story follows an African American model on a photoshoot in Ghana who is transported to the 18th century and forced aboard a slave ship.

In this work, Marshall reimagines the Middle Passage of enslaved Africans traveling to the Americas in an amusement park setting, featuring a dinghy and haunted house ghouls. One man, submerged in the water, appears to have fallen out of the small boat—a scene often likened to John Singleton Copley’s Watson and the Shark (1778), depicting a true account of a 14-year-old, Brook Watson, being mauled by a shark after falling overboard.

Past Times (1997)

When Past Times was sent to auction in 2018, the piece sold for nearly 800 times more than the Chicago Metropolitan Pier and Exposition Authority (MPEA) had originally paid. The corporation bought the piece directly from Marshall in 1997 for $25,000 and consigned it to Sotheby’s with an estimate of $8 million–$12 million. The painting ultimately sold for $21 million, making it the highest auction price ever achieved for a work by a living Black artist at the time.

Often compared to French Impressionist Georges Seurat’s portrayals of working-class and petit-bourgeois leisure, Past Times offers a scene of Black respite in a Chicago park. In the foreground, his figures play croquet and listen to music on a red-checkered blanket. Around them, people go golfing, boating, and water skiing.

The record-breaking sale not only cemented Marshall’s place as one of the most important artists alive today but also fueled a renewed interest in Black figurative art among artists, collectors, and institutions alike.

Untitled (Underpainting) (2018)

In 2020, two years after Marshall made Untitled (Underpainting), The Washington Post hailed it as “a tour de force by a painter at the top of his game.” The painting, which presents two nearly identical scenes of Black visitors in a gallery space, sold for $7.3 million, three times its high estimate, at Sotheby’s the year prior.

The 10-foot-tall diptych is divided by two white stripes, evoking a gallery wall and creating the effect of two separate panels. On both sides, a busy museum is filled entirely with Black exhibition-goers, including cross-legged children. The scenes contradict the idea of museums and galleries being unwelcome spaces for marginalized groups, transforming them into places where Black visitors feel at home.

The artist first showcased Untitled (Underpainting) at David Zwirner’s London gallery in 2018, in an exhibition of new works titled “History of Painting.” Unlike the vibrant works Marshall was known for at this point, the piece presented a scene almost entirely in shades of taupe. This unique approach harkened back to traditional art academies where students created underpaintings in gray or earth tones. “I’ve always been interested in unfinished underpaintings, like Leonardo’s Saint Jerome in the Wilderness,” Marshall told Apollo Magazine the following year. “That’s how I learned how paintings were constructed, from those sorts of works.”

Haul (2025)

Near the end of “The Histories,” in a section titled “Africa Revisited,” Marshall returns to his exploration of the Middle Passage. On a single wall, three paintings present a new series of works exploring Africans’ role in the transatlantic slave trade. The exhibition wall text describes Outbound, Haul, and Cove (all 2025) as “challenging moments in the recorded history of Africa, not often represented by artists.”

Together, these images illustrate Africans taking Black captives to canoes to be sold, paddling to slave ships and returning to shore with their earnings. In Haul, a woman reclines on sacks holding payments for the slaves. Other items supposedly a part of their bounty are spread across the boat, visible to the viewer, including a Victorian teacup, a clock, and an empty gold frame.

In an essay, Nikita Sena Quarshie, one of the curators of “The Histories,” describes Marshall’s new paintings for the Royal Academy exhibition as “his most conventional approach” used over four decades of “dismantling history painting.” Why Marshall chose a more orthodox style here is unclear, though perhaps the complex subject matter demanded it.

Once a radical voice on the rotary dial, American artist and poet John Giorno’s Dial-A-Poem is now just a click away. First introduced in 1969, the project invited callers to dial a phone number and hear recorded readings of poems. Now, the phone line has gone global: Audiences can find the project on a newly launched website and localized phone numbers worldwide.

Giorno, who died at 82 in 2019, was a poet and artist who bridged the literary and visual art worlds. Working from downtown New York, he collaborated with artists like Andy Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg while building Giorno Poetry Systems, a foundation committed to expanding the reach of poetry.

Dial-A-Poem premiered at Architectural League of New York in January 1969 and was presented at the Museum of Modern Art’s (MoMA) 1970 exhibition “Information.” Visitors could call a number (originally 212-628-0400) and hear Giorno—or popular figures such as novelist Kathy Acker and musician Patti Smith—recite a poem. That initial version drew FBI attention for its inclusion of politically radical ideas. It received more than 1.1 million in four-and-a-half months. Now, the renewed version combines early recordings with contributions from international poets and performers, creating an archive accessible to a global audience.

“When John Giorno first conceived of Dial-A-Poem, he envisioned a new venue for poetry beyond books and magazines, and leveraged emerging answering-machine technology,” Bonnie Whitehouse, archivist for Giorno Poetry Systems, told Artsy. “The Dial-A-Poem website faithfully builds on Giorno’s original concept of encountering randomly selected recorded poems to maintain the spontaneity and serendipity of Dial-A-Poem. By harnessing web-based technology instead of phone lines, Dial-A-Poem can transcend geographical boundaries and increase access.”

In recent years, the project has been reactivated in different forms. In 2012, Giorno recorded new material and created stand-alone rotary telephone sculptures programmed with poems for a MoMA exhibition, “Ecstatic Alphabets/Heaps of Language.” However, these were not connected to live numbers. In 2021, Giorno Poetry Systems restored the project’s dial-in service, bringing back the phone-based element for the first time in decades. The number was turned off in 1971, but reactivated several times for various exhibitions.

The current iteration includes five existing live phone lines, including the original and an updated U.S.–based line, as well as numbers in Brazil, Mexico, and France. Giorno Poetry Systems expects numbers to go live in Switzerland, Hong Kong, Italy, and Thailand in 2026.

Artsy is partnering with the BBC and Stellify Media on an episode of its forthcoming series The Art Game, a televised competition where British participants will be challenged to buy and sell artworks. As part of the show, Artsy is staging an online auction curated around the theme of “Boundless Berlin.” The sale spotlights works by two of the city’s rising talents: Argentine-born artist Celeste Najt and artist duo 44flavours, comprising German artists Sebastian Bagge and Julio Rölle.

Registration for the auction opens on September 23rd, bidding begins September 27th, and the sale will close on September 29th at 12 p.m. EST (5 p.m. GMT).

Lee Vor Luv, 2023
44flavours
BBC "The Art Game"

The Art Game will explore the high-stakes world of art dealing through a six-part limited series. In each hour-long episode, contestants will face a new challenge that involves selling art. The series will premiere in 2026; the exact date has yet to be announced.

“Boundless Berlin” spotlights two up-and-coming Berlin-based artists, whose work channels the city’s cosmopolitan personality and its legacy of bold creativity.

In Begriff zu reisen (About to Travel), 2021
Celeste Najt
BBC "The Art Game"

Najt studied visual arts at the Universidad Nacional de las Artes in Buenos Aires, where she predominantly worked on digital collages before eventually turning to painting. Her map-inspired paintings, characterized by gestural marks and bright colors, combine geographic motifs and layered collage-like imagery. Her practice also includes abstract wooden sculptures, where she wraps and collages the exteriors with paper maps. Her most recent solo exhibitions have been presented by Quimera Galería in Buenos Aires and the Argentinian Embassy in Germany.

Bagge and Rölle started working together as 44flavours in 2003. At first, the duo began as graphic designers; however, their practice has evolved into one that includes painting, ceramics, sculpture, and murals. Across mediums, their work features layered geometric shapes and playful forms, combining bright colors and patterns to create chaotic abstractions. As part of their improvisational work, the pair often uses everyday or found materials as their canvas, such as cardboard, stone, wood, or even an object from a flea market. Some of their murals have appeared in Berlin; Dakar, Senegal; São Luis, Brazil; and Abrantes, Portugal, to name a few.

Explore BBC’s The Art Game x Artsy Auction now.

Marina Abramović will become the first living woman artist to be featured in a major solo exhibition at the Gallerie dell’Accademia in Venice. Titled “Marina Abramović: Transforming Energy,” the show will open on May 6, 2026, aligning with the 2026 Venice Biennale, and will run through October 19, 2026. The exhibition is also framed as a celebration of the artist’s 80th birthday: November 30, 2026.

Shai Baitel, artistic director of the Modern Art Museum (MAM) Shanghai, curated the exhibition, working in close collaboration with the artist. Baitel previously helped stage an exhibition by the same name at MAM, which opened in October 2024 and featured works inspired by Abramović’s walk across the Great Wall of China. Now, Abramović will present both new and old work across the Venetian museum’s temporary and permanent exhibition spaces.

“Placing Marina Abramović’s work within the permanent collection brings past and present into direct dialogue, and invites audiences to inhabit that space with their own bodies,” Baitel said in a press statement.

“Transforming Energy” will feature Abramović’s interactive “Transitory Objects,” including stone beds and crystal-embedded structures designed to facilitate what the artist describes as “energy transmission.” Paired with these works, the exhibition includes landmark performance pieces such as Imponderabilia (1977), in which Abramović and Ulay, her longtime partner, created a narrow entryway and stood naked in it, forcing viewers to squeeze past them. It will also include Rhythm 0 (1974), in which the artist stood still for six hours in a gallery, encouraging guests to interact with her using objects, such as a rose or scissors, on the table in front of her.

Another highlighted work is Pietà (with Ulay) (1983), a a photographic work inspired by the Christian icon of the Pietà, which will be paired with Titian’s Pietà (ca. 1575–76), the final yet unfinished work by the Renaissance master. It will coincide with the painting’s 450th anniversary. The exhibition will also feature Abramović’s series using precious stones, such as quartz and amethyst. These materials echo the Venetian mosaic tradition, tapping into the city’s history of Renaissance-era material experimentation.

“I was 14 when my mother first brought me to the Venice Biennale,” Abramović said in a statement. “We traveled by train from Belgrade, and as I stepped out of the station and saw Venice for the first time, I began to cry. It was so incredibly beautiful—unlike anything I had ever seen. Since then, returning to Venice has become a tradition, and after receiving the Golden Lion in 1997, the city has always held a special place in my life.”

During the 1997 Venice Biennale, Abramović became the first woman to be awarded a Golden Lion. More recently, Abramović made history when she became the first woman to present a solo exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts in September 2023, which she discusses in-depth on the Artsy Podcast.

AI Red ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, 2024
Dario Cusani
Wallector

Guaranteed to elicit passionate—and often contradictory—reactions, artificial intelligence (AI) is a hot-button issue for every industry, and the art world is no exception.

While the immediate response for some might be to dismiss the conversation altogether, AI is already being widely used and is likely here to stay. Within a creative field like the art industry, debates abound about the potential of the technology to shape and influence production and expression. Still, there are several ways that AI can streamline the art buying process.

Buyers, dealers, and advisors alike increasingly rely on the tool’s ability to gather a significant amount of information at a fast rate. But there are also limitations to using AI: It lacks the human element that can instill confidence in buyers and help develop taste. And with the vast amount of data AI can search, inaccuracies are common, not to mention the carbon emissions of AI tools, which are increasingly coming under scrutiny.

Whether you are for it, against it, or agnostic to the tool, here are some pros, cons, and caveats of using AI as an art buyer.

AI can rapidly access a vast expanse of data

Chromatographic Landscapes, Data Visualization, Mauve, 2025
Lisa Marie Patzer
InLiquid

AI is undeniably proficient in searching for information and does so with incredible speed. A request that might take several days to find an answer can be resolved in just seconds with AI. Art buyers are already using the technology to ask questions about topics including art historical information, auction results, upcoming exhibitions an artist might have, and noteworthy accolades like awards and press.

Too much data, however, can be overwhelming to sift through, and AI can occasionally provide misleading information. Karen Boyer, founder of the advisory firm Elements in Play, recalled a recent scenario: “A client bought a painting for $200,000 that had been exhibited in the Venice Biennale, arguably the most important exhibition in the world,” she explained. “He later asked AI about pricing, and it came back with a range of $7,000 to $88,000. On the surface, that looked like a huge discrepancy, but those results were for small works on paper or uncharacteristic minor paintings, nothing comparable in quality or importance to the Biennale piece.” AI can struggle to make such distinctions.

Moreover, the technology only collates publicly available data, such as auction results. While it might be able to search in deeper corners of the web to scrape more information than a human can, it can’t gather unpublished information. As a tool for collectors to research pricing, AI is more useful to determine a general range for works by an artist in question. If a buyer is looking for art under $10,000, for example, AI can help weed out artists whose markets are clearly not a fit.

Chromatographic Landscapes, Data Visualization, Oranges, 2025
Lisa Marie Patzer
InLiquid

Another caveat is that the information AI provides can be outdated and incorrect. “AI aggregates information from the broad internet, and as we know in this information age, there is also a lot of misinformation,” said Mindy Taylor Ross, owner of the consulting agency Art Strategies LLC. “When asked to write a biography for Robert Rauschenberg, my mentor, AI wrote that he had served in the Marines. He served in the Navy. This is a small example, but it is about a very famous artist.”

While fact-checking and editing require time and research, for some people, this process is less arduous than facing the blank page problem of knowing where to start.

For The Melrose Gallery, which utilizes AI for various tasks, such as timing a press release, the tool can be useful for improving existing practices rather than replacing them. “The main caution is not to depend on it too much,” said Tracey Strydom, who works at The Melrose Gallery. “AI works best when it supports human insight. A good practice is to give very specific and personal information, so the results do not feel generic, and then always review and shape the final outcome with care.”

AI in action

For collectors, AI can guide initial research on artists or artworks that they may want to collect.

I tried my own prompt using the basic, free version of OpenAI’s ChatGPT: “I’m interested in buying contemporary art. I really like Caravaggio,” I wrote. “Can you recommend similar artists working today?”

In the results, I could immediately see limitations with the tool. First and foremost, ChatGPT made assumptions about why I liked Caravaggio instead of asking me, which a good salesperson might do.

El sacrificio de Isaac (The Sacrifice of Isaac), 1603
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza

Some of the results ChatGPT offered were on track with what I do like about Caravaggio’s work: moody, figurative paintings with strong contrasts of light and dark (chiaroscuro), moments of physical and emotional intensity, and scenes related to debauchery, all without heavy impasto. Included in the contemporary artist suggestions it offered were Nicola Samori and Roberto Ferri, but artists I felt would be obvious, such as Jesse Mockrin, were missing. With other suggestions, the tool was more off the mark: Instead, it focused on terms associated with Caravaggio, like emotion and intensity, offering Sam Messer and Gottfried Helnwein.

With any tool, more specificity can yield better results, but very often, newcomers are at the early stages of honing their taste and don’t know where to start. It can be difficult to put into words what it is about an artist or artwork that catches our attention, in particular with technical terms like chiaroscuro.

With that in mind, it’s advisable to give as much precise information as possible with your inquiry, including your budget, any preferences like material or size of a work, and any particular factors that matter to you, like an artist’s background. When forming an inquiry, ask yourself what it is about a particular artist or artwork that you like. Is it the medium? The colors? Something about the way it makes you feel? Telling AI what you don’t like is also helpful to better tailor your results.

If you can’t put words to what you’re drawn to, AI can help with that as well. Using Caravaggio again, I asked ChatGPT to help me pin down what it is about his work that I liked, and the tool gave me a very approachable analysis of the artist’s work and the characteristics that I might be drawn to. Using these, it gave me a set of questions to better home in on the qualities of his work that I like.

AI might be able to suggest an artist, but it can’t give you access

Boy with an Apple, 2011-2013
Andrew Hemingway
Mira Godard Gallery

After further prompting ChatGPT with additional requirements like my budget, I had a list of artists that matched my desired style and price range. Surprisingly, the tool was also able to give me contacts at galleries to reach out to, as well as templates for my outreach that it felt would garner a positive response. One approach even suggested that I should tell the gallery that I would be “happy to discuss potential museum loans in the future,” a common tactic used by collectors to gain access to a coveted work of art.

Unfortunately, the contacts ChatGPT offered were not always accurate. Also, just because I have the name of a salesperson and an email template doesn’t mean I will be offered work to buy, or that the artists even have works available to purchase.

When buying art, it’s important to consider additional factors like the provenance and condition of an artwork, which AI can’t do for you. During a transaction, there will also be points where a human touch is necessary to finesse negotiations. Buyers may need to talk through their decisions to feel confident in a purchase. While a buyer can certainly have such conversations with AI, the emotional element of collecting is better served by a salesperson or advisor. There are also post-sale factors like coordinating shipping and installation that the tool might be able to streamline, but certainly can’t replace entirely.

“AI can help with data and putting together options, but most of the time, there’s a real-world element that AI can’t access,” said art advisor Deborah Gunn. “In the art world, relationships are very important, the physical condition of the work matters, and how a particular work will fit into the collector’s life and home isn’t something that AI can easily help with.”

Other advisors and galleries echoed this sentiment. “AI can gather information, but it can’t pick up the phone and convince a gallery to let you have the best work,” said Boyer. “And it certainly can’t build the kind of relationships that take years of conversations, art fairs, dinners, and trust. Knowing who to trust—and earning that trust—is something only people can do. Collecting is part research, part strategy, part diplomacy.”

Moreover, as Boyer noted, becoming an informed buyer is only part of the equation. “Collecting isn’t just about information,” she said. “It’s about interpretation, context, and vision. AI can streamline the background work, but the choices that matter most will always require the human touch—and a sense of taste, which no algorithm has managed to replicate.”

Frida Kahlo’s 1940 self-portrait El sueño (La cama) could become the most expensive artwork by a woman artist ever to be sold at auction when it goes on sale in November. The painting, which carries an estimate of $40 million–$60 million, will be auctioned at Sotheby’s New York as part of Exquisite Corpus, a major private collection sale of more than 80 Surrealist works.

Kahlo’s current auction record was set when Diego y yo (1949) sold for $34.9 million at Sotheby’s New York in 2021. The result is also the highest price for a Latin American artwork at auction. Meanwhile, the record for a work by a woman artist at auction was set when Georgia O’Keeffe’s Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1 (1932) sold for $44.4 million at Sotheby’s New York in 2014. Kahlo’s El sueño is positioned to challenge both benchmarks.

El sueño was painted at a time of intense personal upheaval and suffering for Kahlo. Her former lover, Leon Trotsky, was assassinated in 1939, and in 1940, she divorced from the artist Diego Rivera. This image portrays the artist lying in bed, intertwined with vines. Above her, a skeleton wired with dynamite hovers over the bed, holding a bouquet of dried flowers. The painting has been out of the public eye for almost 30 years and will travel to London, Abu Dhabi, Hong Kong, and Paris before the showing in New York ahead of the sale during the marquee November auction season.

“El sueño stands among Frida Kahlo’s greatest masterworks—a rare and striking example of her most surrealist impulses,” said Anna Di Stasi, senior vice president at Sotheby’s. “In this composition, Kahlo fuses dream imagery and symbolic precision with unmatched emotional intensity, creating a work that is at once deeply personal and universally resonant. It is an enduring testament to her genius, and its appearance on the market presents an unparalleled opportunity to acquire a cornerstone of Surrealism.”

Women Surrealists feature prominently in the Exquisite Corpus auction. Dorothea Tanning’s Interior with Sudden Joy (1951), estimated at $2 million–$3 million, is among the most significant examples of the artist’s psychologically charged interiors to appear at auction. Kay Sage’s The Point of Intersection (1951–52), meanwhile, estimated at $1 million to $1.5 million, offers a counterpoint with its desolate landscapes of scaffolding-like structures and suspended drapery.

Other highlights from leading Surrealist figures at the sale include René Magritte’s La Représentation (1962) and La Révélation du présent (1936), estimated at $4 million–$6 million and $2 million–$3 million, respectively. Also featured is Salvador Dalí’s Symbiose de la tête aux coquillages (1931), painted the same year as his most famous work, Persistence of Memory, which is expected to fetch $2 million–$3 million.

The announcement of the Exquisite Corpus auction follows last week’s $136 million white-glove sale at Sotheby’s London of works from Pauline Karpidas’s collection, which included Surrealist pieces by Magritte and Max Ernst.

Overlapping Waves and Rain (Blue, Purple & Turquoise) , 2025
Amy Lincoln
Taymour Grahne Projects

Taymour Grahne is no longer a purely nomadic art dealer. After nearly 15 years of operating between London and New York, the Finnish Lebanese dealer is putting down roots with a new project space in Alserkal Avenue, Dubai’s leading arts district.

Although he’s operated at gallery spaces throughout his career, Grahne is known for doing things unconventionally. Over the last 15 years, he has operated with a nomadic model, hosting pop-up shows around the world rather than maintaining a single brick-and-mortar location. He eschewed the well-trodden paths of his peers, such as participating in numerous art fairs, and has consistently championed an experimental program of more than 50 artists, including Amy Lincoln, Dominique Fung, Samira Abbassy, and Latifa Alajlan.

Now, the intrepid dealer, who is only in his thirties, is returning to his roots. “It’s interesting to kind of go back in time, because everything happened for a reason,” he told Artsy.

Indeed, Grahne’s connection to art can be traced back to the Middle East. Born in London and raised there, New York, and Beirut, Grahne’s interest in and introduction to art began in the Arab region early on. His Lebanese grandfather, Nuhad Es-Said, was a passionate collector of Islamic metalwork. “I remember we were in Washington, D.C., because his collection was on view at the Smithsonian Museum. It was my earliest memory of anything related to the arts,” Grahne said.

Grahne later studied international relations in Boston, and he recalls visiting his family in Beirut and roaming around the city’s vibrant art scene during this time. His encounters with gallerists and artists, such as the longtime Lebanese dealer Saleh Barakat and the veteran Lebanese painter Mouna Sehnaoui, left a lasting impact on him. This was the genesis of his influential blog, Art of the Mid East, which he launched at the age of 19. “I went back to Boston and I was like, ‘Wow! There’s so much happening in the region, and there’s barely anything being written about it.’” Featuring exhibition reviews and artist and collector interviews, the blog became Grahne’s entry point into the art world.

Running Bull, 2012
Nicky Nodjoumi
Taymour Grahne Projects

For four years, Grahne earned a reputation for his presentations of notable Middle Eastern names in the contemporary art world, including French Algerian artists Zineb Sedira and Katia Kameli, Emirati artist Mohammed Kazem, and Moroccan photographer Hassan Hajjaj. “Maybe I’m biased,” he confessed, “but some of the best artists in the world are from the Middle East, because they’re really dealing with such important topics: the history of the region, the legacies, both socioeconomic and political.”

For Grahne, his selection of artists to work with was always based on an innate feeling. “They have to really speak to me,” he explained. “It has to connect to me on a visual level first to bring me in. Then comes the concept, thought, research, and process. For me, it’s really a combination of singularity, authenticity, research, and depth of work.”

Amitiés d’Algérie, 2018
Katia Kameli
Taymour Grahne Projects

But by 2017, Grahne was ready for his next journey. He missed living in London and being closer to his family and friends in the U.K., Lebanon, and the UAE, so he moved to the British capital. There, he founded his eponymous art advisory and set up online and pop-up exhibitions in locations including Cromwell Place in South Kensington and a number of spaces in Fitzrovia. Notable shows featured American artists Maia Cruz Palileo and Gail Spaien, and South Korean artist GaHee Park, among others. “It was great moving around and being flexible,” he said. “I do believe the nomadic model will be the future.”

It was only last year that Grahne developed itchy feet once more and seriously began to consider relocating to Dubai. Backed by years of knowledge and experience, the timing felt right. “Dubai, for me, became in a weird way the place where I know more people than anywhere in the world. It’s nice because everybody’s here. It feels like a new center,” he said, adding that Dubai has become the epicenter of the region’s art market during the past few decades.

Flamingo at Villa Elma, 2014
Maia Cruz Palileo
Taymour Grahne Projects

The General and his Wife, 2014
Maia Cruz Palileo
Taymour Grahne Projects

In the bigger picture, the UAE has developed a unique and attractive ecosystem of museums, galleries, biennales, auction houses, and other artistic establishments. Aside from Grahne’s new home of Alserkal Avenue, lined with contemporary art galleries, modern eateries, and homegrown boutiques, Dubai is also home to the region’s most prominent and international fair, Art Dubai, which has been running for nearly two decades. Major auction houses, including Sotheby’s and Christie’s, have also set up bases in the city, promoting modern and contemporary art from the wider region, including Iran and Turkey.

Nearby, the emirate of Sharjah has its namesake biennale and the museum-like Barjeel Art Foundation displaying a wide and vibrant selection of artworks hailing from the Arab world. And not to mention, nearby Abu Dhabi is turning into the museum destination of the country, hosting the Louvre Abu Dhabi and the upcoming projects of the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi and the Zayed National Museum.

With Grahne’s new two-level space, Taymour Grahne Projects, he is doing things his way and adopting a new mindset. He is, for instance, refraining from using the traditional language of the art world. He explains that he doesn’t want to “represent” artists but “collaborate” with them, and he aims to establish an approachable “project space” over a stereotypical gallery. “For me, it’s a project space. There will be artist talks and tours. I’m going to make a big effort to bring people to the gallery. Let’s have coffee and walk around the show, and let’s see what else is on view,” he said.

“I want to be present in my space and my shows. I want to spend time with people here,” he added. One way he hopes to do this is by taking a measured approach to art fairs, perhaps participating in up to two events per year. “I don’t want to be on a plane going to 10 art fairs a year every three weeks,” he said. “I don’t want that lifestyle. I want to be here to build.” He also aims to bring new artist names to new audiences in Dubai, making his space an international one with a nod to the region.

For his debut exhibition in Dubai, which opened mid-September, Grahne is showcasing a solo exhibition, “Arranging Flowers,” of serene artworks of New England charm by the American artist Gail Spaien, who draws inspiration from her coastal base in Maine. “She’s been doing these incredible interior scenes and quiet still lifes with so many different reference materials, from American furniture designs to adverts of the ’50s,” he noted.

One thing evident about Grahne is how sharp and assertive he is. He boldly states, for instance, that the typical gallery model is “dying,” as notable galleries around the world are closing. One reason, he notes, is due to quick expansion plans and high costs. “I think the art market at the moment is in a weird place. I think if a gallery has a lot of high costs, a lot of locations, a lot of staff members, and they’re doing a lot of fairs, they’re in big trouble because there’s definitely been a slowdown in the art market in general,” he added.

Cottage Drift, 2025
Gail Spaien
Taymour Grahne Projects

He also adds that regional and small cities like Beirut and Dubai, by contrast, are insulated to an extent from some of these systemic issues. “The Middle East is kind of immune to the gallery model,” he said. “I think the gallery model can only work in cities like Dubai, Beirut, and Mexico City; in spaces where there are fewer galleries and less competition.”

It’s for that reason that working in Dubai may prove to be the young dealer’s most formative journey yet. “We’re in a day and age where the whole gallery model is in flux,” Grahne, who will continue operating his advisory in London, said. “I think many more galleries will close. I think we’re at the tip of the iceberg, and I think a new art world, a new model, is coming. It's a work in progress for all of us.”

Paris’s Centre Pompidou has closed its doors to begin the most sweeping renovation in its 48-year history. The overhaul will modernize the landmark museum’s infrastructure and visitor experience, while addressing long-deferred safety concerns. The museum closed off its permanent collection in March, but hosted temporary exhibitions throughout the summer. The final exhibition, a retrospective of the German artist Wolfgang Tillmans, closed on September 22nd.

Designed by architects Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers, the Pompidou opened in 1977 as a radical “cultural machine,” according to the museum, with a distinctive exterior defined by exposed pipes and other infrastructure. The renovation of the building by French Japanese architectural firm Moreau Kusunoki, in collaboration with Frida Escobedo Studio, is estimated to cost €460 million ($542 million). Technical work will be overseen by AIA Life Designers, with the French state contributing €280 million ($330 million) and private funding, including €50 million ($58 million) from Saudi Arabia, covering the remainder.

Renovation priorities include removing asbestos from the façade, upgrading fire safety, and improving accessibility for disabled visitors. Officials say the improvements to climate control could also reduce the museum’s energy consumption by as much as 40%, as reported by Agence France-Presse (AFP). “We’re keeping the exterior framework, but from the basement to the top floor, we’re changing everything,” the Pompidou’s president, Laurent Le Bon, told the AFP.

During the renovations, the museum’s collection and programming will be presented across France and abroad through the museum’s “Constellation” initiative. The program kicked off in the spring. Exhibitions are scheduled at partner venues including the Centre Pompidou-Metz, the West Bund Museum in Shanghai, and H’ART Museum in Amsterdam. A new facility, the Centre Pompidou Francilien—Fabrique de l’Art, will open in 2026 in Massy, a suburb of Paris, to support the museum’s conservation efforts.

The Pompidou’s main campus is expected to reopen in 2030, but an exact date has yet to be set. “We hope that visitors will feel a bit [of] the same shock as when the Centre opened in 1977,” Le Bon said.

Thaddaeus Ropac opened its new gallery in central Milan on September 20th, marking the mega-galley’s seventh location worldwide. The inaugural exhibition, “L’aurora viene,” features works by Georg Baselitz and Lucio Fontana. The venue is in the Palazzo Belgoioso, a neoclassical building near the upscale shopping street Via Monte Napoleone. The Milan gallery occupies two rooms totalling 280 square meters.

“Milan is at Europe’s crossroads, Italy the continent’s heartbeat, a country that profoundly shaped the evolution of art through the ages and where crucial modern art movements were conceived,” founder Thaddaeus Ropac said in a press statement. “We increasingly felt Italy was missing from our constellation of European galleries, since it has always been important to how we have grown internationally and to our artists’ development.

Elena Bonanno di Linguaglossa will lead the Milan branch. Her three decades of experience include senior positions at New York’s Lévy Gorvy Dayan, Italian museum Fondazione Pastificio Cerere, and the now-closed Blain|Southern gallery, among others. “I’ve always greatly admired the outstanding selection of artists the gallery represents and the visionary approach Thaddaeus takes to working with them, as well as the way in which the programme has evolved in such compelling ways with the new artists who have joined in recent years,” she said in a press statement.

Founded in Salzburg in 1983 by Austrian gallerist Thaddaeus Ropac, the gallery has grown to represent more than 60 artists and estates. Early programming in Salzburg included exhibitions with Joseph Beuys, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Keith Haring. Today, the Salzburg headquarters is based at Villa Kast, a 19th-century townhouse in the Mirabell Gardens, supplemented by an additional exhibition hall opened in 2010.

The new gallery places Ropac amid Milan’s vibrant art community, including museums like the Pinacoteca di Brera, Palazzo Reale, Museo del Novecento, and Palazzo Citterio. The Museo del Novecento hosted a major exhibition from April 5th to June 29th, marking the centenary of Robert Rauschenberg, whose estate is represented by the gallery. Milan is already home to a bustling network of galleries, including MASSIMODECARLO and Cardi Gallery. Beyond the inaugural exhibition, Thaddaeus Ropac Milan’s program has yet to be announced.

Milan is also attracting growing attention from collectors and galleries, thanks in part to Italy’s enticing tax regime: wealthy individuals who relocate to the country pay a flat annual levy of €200,000 ($207,800) on foreign income. Gallerist Ben Brown—preparing to open a new branch in the city—described Milan as a “fiscal paradise” in an interview with Artsy. Other newcomers include Cadogan Gallery and Lehmann Maupin, which recently launched a “seasonal” gallery. This increased interest, bolstered by the annual miart fair, has made Milan one of Artsy’s emerging art capitals to watch in 2025. Ropac noted, “With the momentum of Milan as a destination for the arts, it’s a natural home for us.”

As the 2025 Aichi Triennale opened, the clouds that towered over the Japanese prefecture threatened a thunderstorm, but one would be forgiven for mistaking them for plumes of ash. As curator Hoor Al Qasimi points out, there was a time when skies filled with smoke and soot would have been welcomed here as a testament to the area’s ceramics production, a sign of prosperity, industry, and hard work.

Al Qasimi, who is known for her tenure as president and director of the Sharjah Art Foundation, is the first non-Japanese curator to direct the event. Her exhibition focuses on our relationships with the environments that surround us in all their contradictions and complexities. However, this isn’t simply a show about climate change—many works dig deeper into the ways that human activity shapes our environment and how our environment shapes us in return.

Borrowing its title from the book by noted Syrian poet and painter Adonis, “A Time Between Ashes and Roses,” the sixth edition of the Aichi Triennale highlights how our varied brushes with nature leave behind traces, chronicling cycles of destruction and rebirth. But the exhibition is careful to resist a binary between disaster and prosperity, refusing to make any singular claim—despite the ever-intensifying horrors—about whether our current era is closer to the “ashes” or “roses” end of the spectrum. In doing so, the show reevaluates what it means to be “between,” encompassing sprawling timelines, imagined futures, and personal histories.

Dala Nasser’s monumental sculpture, Noah’s Tomb (2025), demonstrates this fluid quality of time. The emerging Lebanese artist combined the forms of three burial sites attributed to the biblical figure into a single sculptural structure using terracotta, ash, and cloth. With a towering mast draped in hand-dyed, jade-hued sails and a serpentine clay frame, the work simultaneously calls to mind ancient architecture and an ultramodern ark barreling toward uncertain futures.

Such epic, large-scale offerings dominate an exhibition that feels sparse compared to previous editions. Al Qasimi has gathered a roster of 62 artists representing 22 countries—down from the 82 exhibited in 2022. Perhaps as a result, this year’s artists have been given the space to find clarity in their varied interpretations of the theme. Presented across two major local museums and a clever selection of innovative offsite spaces, the Triennale prioritizes intricate and thorough considerations of its weighty concerns. Here are five standout artists from the Aichi Triennale 2025.

Kubo Hiroko

B. 1987, Hiroshima, Japan. Lives and works in Chiba, Japan.

Much of the work in the Triennale seeks alternatives to the dominant, human-centric perspectives on looming catastrophes, both climate-related and man-made, that define our era. Across her practice, Japanese artist Kubo Hiroko highlights forgotten mythologies and marginalized histories, particularly those of women. Repurposing industrial materials such as netting, mesh, and farming supplies, her sculptures resuscitate the heritage lost to war, societal collapse, and environmental disaster. For Aichi, she presents The Lion with Four Blue Hands (2025), a tapestry made from striking blue tarps that cascades down across three levels of the Aichi Arts Center (AAC).

A path winds through the image she pieces together in the work, past drowned towns, disease-stricken livestock, and ending in a mushroom cloud towering over a refugee camp. The floating head of a lioness watches over the scene. Her four disembodied paws make uncanny gestures: beckoning, questioning, casting spells. Whether this godlike figure has descended to guide or to judge is left vague, but the work reminds us of the non-human forms of knowledge that might offer respite to the crises we face.

Solomon Enos

B. 1976, O‘ahu, U.S. Lives and works in O‘ahu, U.S.

Another huge mural-like work sweeps across the wall outside AAC’s Learning Center. It comprises over 800 small drawings made in collaboration with more than a thousand nursery school children from the surrounding area. The swirling mass of color on a background of blue is a testament to the intersection of art and community organizing in the work of Hawaiian artist Solomon Enos. However, it is his “Pala (Ripe)” series of paintings that best captures the ideas of human mutation and adaptation that emerge throughout the Triennale.

These imposing paintings imagine humans as just a small part of a larger, leafy organism. Richly illustrated in earthy greens and ochres, serene faces peek out of folds in fungus; fleshy stems and branches pose like bodies. It is a vision of humanity rooted in an organic, symbiotic community that echoes across the exhibition. For example, in the work of Japanese collective Ohkojima Maki, adorable deer/human hybrids work the land alongside animals, while the paintings of Kato Izumi show barely recognizable people playfully canoodling with the wealth of marine life.

Basel Abbas & Ruanne Abou-Rahme

Abbas, b. 1983 in Nicosia, Cyprus. Lives and works in New York, U.S., and Ramallah, Palestine.

Abou-Rahme, b. 1983 in Boston. Lives and works in New York, U.S., and Ramallah, Palestine.

War casts a long shadow over the exhibition, understood variously as human conflict as well as attacks on our environment and the land. Amid these interpretations, much space is given to the atrocities that have come to define the times we are living through. Palestinian artists Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme present an ominous room full of video work that contrasts the inhumanity of occupation with the power of music and dance. In May amnesia never kiss us on the mouth: Only sounds that tremble through us (2020–22), eerie, color-inverted clips of violent raids are intercut with shots of feverish dance and simmering basement jam sessions. The film’s thunderous bass shakes itself free from the room and reverberates through the halls.

During the opening, this work was also the backdrop to a riotously playful performance at local Nagoya bar, Mago, where Abbas was joined on stage by Ramallah-based musicians Baraari and Julmud. The footage flooded the basement with light. Slogans in Arabic and English, projected across the performers’ faces, made statements like “The land brings us back to life.” It was typical of Abbas and Abou-Rahme’s project of reassembling audio and visual fragments into formations that create new possibilities for political discourse and radical resistance.

Yasmin Smith

B. 1984, Dharug Country, Australia. Lives and works in Dharug Country, Australia.

Of the many threads that unexpectedly knit different works in the exhibition together, one of the most common was coal. For example, late Japanese artist Yamamoto Sakubei’s bold paintings unflinchingly document social histories of life in the coalfields of his home, Kyushu, Japan. However, the ceramic work of Australian artist Yasmin Smith most gracefully captures the life of this resource across millennia.

Smith’s minimal, wall-mounted installation Forest (2022) arranges 11 ceramic-cast lumps of coal in a precise line. These 11 sculptures are each fired in glaze mixed from coal ash gathered at 11 different power plants around Australia. These plants source their own coal from quarries in the surrounding areas, meaning each sample is distinct—a unique geological record. The glaze that incorporates coal ash drawn from the oldest quarries shines bone white, while more recent samples (18 million years old) are suffused with the dark,earthy color of soil still rich with minerals. The gradient that emerges is a timeline told in color, tracing the development of coal, which is itself pivotal to the development of human history.

Adrián Villar Rojas

B. 1980 in Rosario, Argentina. Lives and works nomadically.

Each edition of the Aichi Triennale makes a point of exploring its themes in the context of the surrounding region, this time focusing on Seto City. Argentine artist Adrián Villar Rojas’s layered digital images are presented in a recently abandoned school, now vacant due to the area’s dwindling child population. Where we might imagine periodic tables and finger paintings once hung, the classroom walls are now covered floor-to-ceiling with messy collages of digital renderings. Pixelated fires tear across the space in one room, while in others, intimidating gangs of muscle-bound Neanderthals glare out at the child-size sinks and workbenches that still fill the space. Villar Rojas’s images even plaster the windows, blocking out the light of day.

The artist describes his work as a “membrane,” and we see it cling to the building in the same way that history clings to human experience. The effect is a type of time travel. Neolithic cave drawings are collaged against snapshots of modern political uprisings, while our sinister ancient ancestors collide with a sinister present where children are becoming more scarce. Villar Rojas’s site-specific provocation bleeds into the Triennale’s surroundings in Seto City like a gateway to a parallel universe. It is a work that immerses us in the cycles of destruction and rebirth at play throughout “A Time Between Ashes and Roses.”

Agnes Gund, one of the most prominent art patrons in the United States, died on September 18th at 87. Her daughter Catherine confirmed her death to the New York Times.

Gund’s approach to collecting and philanthropy reshaped the American art world, earning her a National Medal of Arts from President Bill Clinton in 1997. Her collection included works by Mark Rothko, Ellsworth Kelly, and Frank Stella, among numerous other artists, many of whom she befriended.

Gund’s influence was particularly strong at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), which she began supporting in 1967 as a member of its International Council. She subsequently became a trustee of the museum in 1976 and served as the board’s president from 1991 to 2002. During that time, she helped propel MoMA into the 21st century, notably through her fundraising efforts for its sweeping $858 million expansion in 2004.

She also played a pivotal role in revitalizing MoMA PS1, the Queens contemporary art center that became formally affiliated with MoMA in 1999. Gund remained on the museum’s board until her death, and the museum’s directorship, currently held by Connie Butler, bears her name in recognition of her impact.

Born in 1938 in Cleveland to George Gund II, a banker and real estate investor, Gund studied history at Connecticut College. She later returned to school, earning a master’s degree in art history from Harvard in 1980.

Throughout her life, Gund was an advocate for arts education and social justice. In 1977, budget cuts pulled funding from art education programs in public schools across New York. In response, she founded Studio in a School, a nonprofit organization supporting youth arts education that still operates today.

Gund made headlines in 2017, when she sold Roy Lichtenstein’s Masterpiece (1962) to finance the launch of the Art for Justice Fund, an initiative aimed at addressing the harms of mass incarceration in the United States. The painting was purchased by collector Steve Cohen for $165 million, and Gund directed roughly $100 million of the proceeds into the new fund. This was documented in the 2020 film Aggie, directed and produced by Gund’s daughter.

In 2023, Gund sold another Lichtenstein painting, Mirror #5 (1970), for $3.1 million. She donated the proceeds to organizations supporting reproductive rights in the wake of the overturning of Roe v. Wade.

Gund promised almost her entire collection to museums, according to the Times. During her life, she often made donations to the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Known for its connection to the space industry, its rich food scene, and its cultural offerings, Houston now has its own major art fair. On September 18th, Untitled Art, Houston opened its inaugural edition, hosting some 88 galleries at the downtown George R. Brown Convention Center.

For its director, Michael Slenske, the decision to launch the fair was a long time coming for those aware of the city’s underrated cultural clout.

“I get asked this question a lot: ‘Why Houston?’” Slenske told Artsy. “I’m asked, ‘Why not an art capital?’ You don’t know what you’re talking about if you don’t think this is an art capital.” He pointed to the city’s dense network of institutions, from the Menil Collection to the University of Houston’s School of Art and Public Art MFA program, as evidence of its cultural strength. The program, which is featured at Booth A53, is displaying student work throughout the fair.

This is Untitled Art’s first new venture since the firm was acquired last year by the luxury lifestyle portfolio South Florida Ventures. Founded in 2012 by Jeff Lawson, Untitled Art has staged an annual fair directly on the sands of Miami Beach during the city’s December art week. From the start, it sought to distinguish itself from the megafair model by presenting a more focused, curatorial approach.

Untitled Art, Houston aims to replicate that point of view. Framed as a “boutique invitational fair,” it is intended to test the waters of Texas’s art market, and its organizers are taking an intentional approach in line with its local market.

For instance, Slenske emphasized that the pace in the city is intentionally different. “We want to slow people down,” he explained, noting how the labyrinthine booth layout by Michael Hsu Office of Architecture encourages lingering. “People aren’t sick of going to art fairs—what they’re sick of is going to the same art fair in the same art town, done the same way.” Unlike Miami, with its “tidal wave” of visitors and hype, as Slenske puts it, Houston requires building momentum more deliberately. “Here,” Slenske added, “you have to make that tidal wave happen.”

Indeed, the fair’s VIP day got to a steady start at 1 p.m., as modest crowds trickled in during the opening hours. Galleries and advisors observed a common trend: Much like in Dallas, the majority of its VIP Day crowd arrived in the latter half of the afternoon. While some dealmaking occurred with focused collectors during the early hours, the majority of VIP guests descended on the fair in the evening.

Many noted that most dealmaking will carry through over the weekend, true to the Texan pace noted by Slenske. “Galleries are waiting to see how the week unfolds and to what extent collectors come—after work or over the weekend—and are anticipating more of a slow burn of the week rather than just a mad rush when the fair opens,” art advisor Adam Green told Artsy just before 5 p.m. during VIP day.

The fair is also notable for its bold curatorial orientation. Rather than prioritizing scale, it emphasizes focused presentations, often spotlighting solo booths or thematic groupings that reflect contemporary concerns. Also central is its Nest sector—a program dedicated to supporting emerging artists, young galleries, and nonprofit organizations through “progressive” booth costs. Conceived at the Miami fair in 2021 to assist with the financial hurdles associated with art fairs, Nest has become one of Untitled’s defining features and is replicated here.

Untitled’s curatorial mission is buoyed by its Special Projects section. As guests walk in, they will find the first installation, Houston-born Mel Chin’s Pool of Light (2024–25), which was recently featured at the 2024 Prospect triennial in New Orleans. Near the center of the fair, Cuban artist Reynier Leyva Novo presents 500 white cement vessels in Solid Void #1 (2022). Outside of the city, the fair helped organize a major performance by Lita Albuquerque and her daughter Jasmine at the Buffalo Bayou Park Cistern, a show it seems everyone in Houston is talking about.

Untitled Art wagered that the art community in Houston is primed for an art fair. By the evening of VIP day, that thesis was already beginning to bear fruit, with buzz generated among participating galleries and artists. There was much chatter across the fair’s vast aisles, and, indeed, there were plenty of standout presentations to talk about.

Here, Artsy picks five of the most talked-about artists from the fair’s VIP day that had tongues wagging and phones photographing across the concourses.

Mustafa Mohsin

Rajiv Menon Contemporary

Booth A9

Karbistan (graveyard), 2025
Mustafa Mohsin
Rajiv Menon Contemporary

Gallery wine, 2025
Mustafa Mohsin
Rajiv Menon Contemporary

Brooklyn-based artist Mustafa Mohsin chronicles his daily life with a sensitivity that turns his memory into a ubiquitous subject. His paintings tap into his personal experience, drawing on and often combining settings from Pakistan and New York. These scenes are rendered through bold, expressive hues and a surprising softness that caused more than a few visitors to stop by Los Angeles gallery Rajiv Menon Contemporary’s booth on VIP day.

In Karbistan (graveyard) (2025), for instance, Mohsin layers loose, expressionistic brushstrokes to create a familiar scene of a family visiting a gravestone. An academy-trained artist, he approaches painting with deep reverence for the canon while filtering his practice through the autobiographical lens of a recent immigrant. “There’s such a beautiful chronicling of immigrant life coming through his autobiographical perspective,” said the gallery’s founder, Rajiv Menon, who grew up in Houston.

Date night (lahore), 2025
Mustafa Mohsin
Rajiv Menon Contemporary

Collectors were quick to pounce. “I purchased his work Date Night (lahore) (2025), a beautiful, small work set in Lahore,” said collector Mitra Murthy. “It shows a couple sitting in a car, with so many layers to it, so much to unpack. It’s a commentary on a society [where] young couples have to have their date nights in their cars, nestled in together, because it’s very frowned upon.”

Born in Lahore, Pakistan, in 1994, Mohsin studied at the Florence Classical Art Academy in Italy before earning an MFA from the New York Academy of Art. His paintings are presented in a two-person booth with Indian American painter Joya Mukerjee Logue, with prices ranging from $1,200 to $30,000. His work continues to affirm the power of painting to carry personal histories into broader cultural conversations.

April Bey

TERN Gallery

Booth A17

I See All The Way Back To Where I'm Supposed To See, 2024
April Bey
TERN Gallery

April Bey built her practice from a story her father told her as a child. When she asked why people questioned her difference from others, he replied that they were from another planet—a place called “Atlantica.”

That origin story became the foundation of her art: a speculative utopia free of prejudice, where glitter is prevalent and agricultural workers are celebrated as royalty. This world is captured in her massive textile, I See All The Way Back To Where I’m Supposed To See (2024), at The Bahamas–based TERN Gallery’s booth.

The work, part of Bey’s Houston debut, generated immediate buzz. “They went big,” Sean Green, CEO of software firm Arternal, told Artsy. “Go big or go home, right? You’re in Texas. This is museum-quality work, and TERN, who had to make the decision to come here, said, ‘Okay, I’m going to Houston; they need the vibrance that April brings to her work.’”

Pineapple Portal Grower 4068, 2025
April Bey
TERN Gallery

ReParentification, 2025
April Bey
TERN Gallery

I See All The Way Back To Where I’m Supposed To See is a monumental Jacquard tapestry accented with sherpa, crushed velour, metallic thread, beads, adorned clothespins, and bamboo earrings. Priced at $120,000, the work envelops viewers in Atlantica’s lush, speculative cosmology, rendering a vision of liberation that is as tactile as it is expansive. “It’s a moment in the U.S. that feels dark, and her vision is about joy and finding joy and creating a world where there‘s beauty and rest and acceptance, and that’s a really powerful message right now,” TERN founder Amanda Coulson told Artsy. The booth also features smaller works, including the surreal portrait COLONIAL SWAG: Say I Mean Something (2023).

Based in Los Angeles, Bey earned her MFA in 2014 from California State University. A tenured professor at Glendale College, she has taught at ArtCenter College of Design and is represented by TERN and Vielmetter Los Angeles.

Earlie Hudnall, Jr.

PDNB Gallery

Booth B17

Mother with Sons, 1973
Earlie Hudnall, Jr.
PDNB Gallery

Lady in Black Hat with Feathers, 1990
Earlie Hudnall, Jr.
PDNB Gallery

Earlie Hudnall, Jr. is a staple of Houston’s art community. For more than five decades, his black-and-white photographs have chronicled the everyday lives of Black Houstonians with intimacy and dignity, preserving moments of joy and struggle embedded in the city’s cultural memory.

Texas’s PDNB Gallery dedicated a solo booth to Hundall, Jr.’s work, with prices ranging from $2,500 to $8,000. The photographs, often described as intimate portraits of Houston itself, stirred deep responses from the crowd, particularly from local attendees. “It makes me feel right about this fair that he’s here,” said Jessica Phifer, director of business development and art advisor at the Fine Art Group. “As a native, seeing some of his shots from back in the day of [former municipality] Freedmen’s Town and looking east stirred me in ways I hadn’t expected. This man is overdue for this kind of attention.”

Jump Rope, 1997
Earlie Hudnall, Jr.
PDNB Gallery

After returning from his tour of duty in Vietnam, Hudnall, Jr. studied art at Texas Southern University, where painter and muralist John Thomas Biggers encouraged him to draw from his own experiences. That advice shaped a lifelong practice: Hudnall’s black-and-white photographs—many set in the city’s historic neighborhoods like Freedmen’s Town—capture daily rituals. For instance, Street Champion, 4th Ward (1986) features a group of kids playing games on the street, particularly one kid wearing boxing gloves, with his arms raised in a champion stance.

The resonance has been immediate. “It’s been phenomenal,” said Burt Finger, co-founder of PDNB Gallery. “I’ve had people say, ‘Oh, that’s so-and-so, I grew up with them.’ Others recognize buildings. It’s brought a lot of nostalgia back to people.…You’re not just buying a photograph, you're buying a piece of photographic history. Art history.”

Mason Owens

Megan Mulrooney

Booth B10

paul's little blue room, 2024
Mason Owens
Megan Mulrooney

lets just cleanup tomorrow, 2025
Mason Owens
Megan Mulrooney

A spider web on a rain-trodden porch, figures skipping rocks on a dreary day, and a moody, empty bedroom: Mason Owens’s miniature paintings recall the intimacy of Vincent van Gogh’s famed Arles interiors.

The response has been immediate, and the gallery sold out its presentation—which also features works by TJ Rinoski—in the first few hours of the fair. “Megan Mulrooney once again brings her A game,” said art advisor Nicholas Campbell. “No surprise that most of the booth has already sold. [She’s] leading the charge as one of the most exciting galleries out there.”

Owens’s book-sized paintings were meticulously painted with egg tempera, resulting in a matted glow. Owens cultivates what Los Angeles gallerist Megan Mulrooney calls “Anemoia,” a dreamlike nostalgia for memories one never actually lived. “They give you nostalgia for a memory that isn’t yours,” she noted.

went snorkeling, if not back by 9:30, call the coast guard :), 2025
Mason Owens
Megan Mulrooney

the skipper and his first mate, 2025
Mason Owens
Megan Mulrooney

Owens’s panels, priced from $2,000 to $8,500, unfold with devotional slowness and a grounded attentiveness to the natural world. In paul’s little blue room (2024), a blue bedroom hums with stillness; in lets just cleanup tomorrow (2025), a night garden suggests spectral presences beneath its shadows. Meanwhile, the skipper and his first mate (2025) depicts two figures skipping rocks on a hazy body of water that bleeds into the horizon, giving the essence of a fleeting memory. Each work balances precision and fluidity, conveying the subtle passage of time—a breeze through a window, the faint silvering of dusk, the hush of evening descending.

This two-person presentation precedes Owens’s first-ever solo show, which will be held by the gallery in Los Angeles. Owens currently works as a landscaper and farmer in Baltimore and is certainly a name many will be watching following this appearance.

“My clients have really gravitated towards Mason Owens,” said Lea Weingarten, Houston-based art advisor. “It’s a meditative thing when you’re tending a garden, and he took that into painting, and you really feel it in the paintings; they feel intimate.”

Miko Veldkamp

Alice Amati

Booth B23

Moonlight, 2025
Miko Veldkamp
Alice Amati

Miko Veldkamp’s standout paintings, featuring colorful scenes of everyday life obstructed by patterns, weave personal memory with influences from his Surinamese and Javanese heritage, shaped by his upbringing in the Netherlands.

Ghostlike silhouettes and shadowy figures drift across his canvases as if projected from behind. These forms allude to Southeast Asian shadow theater while also invoking the unseen presence of ancestry and lineage. “It’s a reference to what comes before you—the idea of your lineage, your heritage, and something that perhaps you don’t see [that] is hidden behind [you], but yet it’s what informs who you are, your identity,” said London gallerist Alice Amati, who is showing his work alongside that of American painter Abigail Dudley.

Though tucked away in a booth at the back right corner of the convention center, Veldkamp’s colorful, culturally rich paintings caught the attention of eagle-eyed advisors and collectors throughout the VIP day.

Outdoor Dining, 2025
Miko Veldkamp
Alice Amati

“They mine his personal memory and experience, but then are overlaid with textures,” said Jessica Wessel, director of business development at art advisory Gurr Johns, who first encountered the artist at Amati’s London gallery. “It felt like looking at a batik scarf on top of a painting, so that felt like memory, history, and personal analysis [altogether].”

In Outdoor Dining (2025), for instance, Veldkamp sets a solitary figure with closed eyes in a vacant dining space, surrounded by empty chairs and tables. Light filters through a pattern evocative of breeze blocks, scattering circles across the surface, while translucent reddish silhouettes float in and out of focus. The result is a festive and melancholic atmosphere, where details shift between plants and ghostly presences, as if memory itself were slipping in and out of view.

Born in Suriname in 1982, Veldkamp grew up in the Netherlands and has lived in New York since 2014. A former resident at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam and a Hodder Fellow at Princeton, he earned his MFA from Hunter College in 2021.

Anish Kapoor will present a major solo exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in London, opening on June 16, 2026, and running through October 18, 2026. The show will bring together recent pieces with his early works, tracing the artist’s five-decade-long career.

Kapoor, one of the most influential sculptors of his generation, is known for artworks that play with space and perception, often creating illusory abstract and conceptual installations. He rose to prominence in the 1980s, becoming associated with a generation of British sculptors who embraced bold forms and new materials, such as Richard Deacon and Antony Gormley. After winning the Turner Prize in 1991, Kapoor garnered international acclaim with landmark works such as Cloud Gate (2004–06) in Chicago and Sky Mirror (2006) in England.

The Hayward exhibition will highlight what Kapoor has described as “the space of the object,” with works that shift viewers’ attention from material surfaces to the unseen or imagined beyond.

At the center of the show will be three monumental works inspired by phenomenological and mythological environments. These large-scale architectural works engage with the idea of the sublime, forcing the audience to reckon with their sense of self in the face of colossal scale. Titles and additional details about the work will be released closer to the exhibition.

Visitors can expect to encounter Kapoor’s “void” works, which explore endless space. Meanwhile, the exhibition will feature some of the artist’s newer sculptures made with Vantablack, the light-absorbing nanotechnology that renders surfaces nearly invisible. Kapoor purchased the rights for the world’s darkest material in 2016. The exhibition will also feature a selection of Kapoor’s visceral sculptures referencing the human body.

The presentation also includes Kapoor’s mirror sculptures, which draw viewers into disorienting and unstable reflections. These works continue his long-standing interest in the relationship between the object and the viewer, and the way perception itself can become the subject of an artwork.

Kapoor recently made headlines when his artwork, BUTCHERED, was installed on an oil rig in the North Sea by Greenpeace activists. The activists unraveled a massive white canvas before shooting blood-red paint onto it with a hose, intended to represent “our collective grief and pain at what has been lost, but also a cry for reparation,” according to the activist group.

When she was in high school, Nanette Carter walked into the Guggenheim on a field trip to see the 1971 Piet Mondrian retrospective unfurling along the museum’s spiraling gallery. The experience was revelatory. “It was a flash that someone could change so drastically and create a type of art that no one had ever seen before,” she said in an interview in her studio, an apartment in Washington Heights where the artist has worked since 1981.

Carter comes from the lineage of Black American abstractionists but has long carved out a distinct path, particularly with her experimental use of materials. Her studio bears witness to this restless practice: Rolls of Mylar, the industrial polyester film that has become her signature, lean against the wall; older reliefs in metal and wood are mounted in the studio’s long hallway; half-erased pencil sketches cover the main room, mapping out her complex abstract forms. Scattered among them are reminders of her long, evolving career, from ambitious abstractions done at the Triangle Workshop in 1991 to the small ceramic Cheeks, a sculpture she made as a teenager in the late 1960s and early ’70s at Montclair High School in New Jersey, just outside New York City. Now, at 71, Carter is experimenting with three dimensions in different contexts, introducing new steel sculptures.

“I wanted to come off the wall for years,” Carter told me, as she prepared to travel to her birthplace, Columbus, Ohio, to install a major solo exhibition at the Wexner Center for the Arts. “Afro Sentinels,” on view through January 11, 2026, brings together her signature wall-based abstractions while debuting her first freestanding “Afro Sentinels.” The exhibition caps a remarkably active stretch for the artist: Earlier this year, she was the subject of a retrospective at the Montclair Art Museum. This follows solo shows at New York’s Berry Campbell Gallery in 2022 and 2024. Justice, community, and the turbulence of contemporary life surface throughout her practice. Today, she’s confronting what she calls the “seismic changes” of the past decade.

Childhood and early influences

Born in Columbus, Carter recalls how “pleased” she felt when her parents moved to New Jersey, especially for its proximity to New York. “Just going into the city opened my eyes up,” she said. Her father, Matthew G. Carter, was a prominent civil rights leader who later became the town’s first Black mayor. Meanwhile, her mother encouraged her creativity from an early age, gifting her stationery in a spectrum of vibrant colors, for example. “I didn’t write a note,” Carter joked. “I was collaging with the paper and giving it to friends…These were geometric abstractions. They loved it.”

Carter’s family often spent the summers in Sag Harbor, New York. In the summer of 1977, while pursuing her MFA at Pratt, Carter took a job at the Guild Hall museum in East Hampton. There, she met the painter Al Loving at an opening: “This tall, handsome Black man, and we saw each other and just gravitated immediately,” she recalled. Loving, known for his amorphous, color-clashing wall works, would become a mentor, influencing how Carter approached her work and introducing her to artists like Jack Whitten and Ed Clark.

Through Loving, Carter met legendary dealer George N’Namdi in Detroit, who gave her a solo show in 1984. By her late twenties, she had shown with some of the most prominent Black abstract expressionists, including Whitten, Clark, and Howardena Pindell. She explained, “I like to say: ‘I come from the school of Loving.’”

Architecture and Mylar

Carter first encountered Mylar, which would define her material practice, unexpectedly at a Frank Lloyd Wright show at the Cooper Hewitt in 1983. “I didn’t know what that was,” she recalled. Curious, she immediately bought a sheet, cut it down, and began experimenting. “It was just a wonderful, smooth sensation drawing on it.”

That first sheet led to decades of engagement. Carter now sources Mylar in massive rolls—“53 inches by 100 yards,” she told me—and relishes its versatility. “It’s just magical stuff,” she said. The tough, stiff material made it possible to create her complex, colorful, collage-like abstractions with immediacy. They aren’t “collages,” according to her. “I am not collaging. I’m building architecture on the ladder,” she said.

Creating the “Afro Sentinels”

One of Carter’s most powerful bodies of work, “Afro Sentinels,” began in the political climate of the late 2000s, when she witnessed vocal criticism of President Barack Obama and feared for his life. “I thought, ‘sentinels.’ We need something to protect Black people from this kind of nonsense.”

Initially, the works were conceived as individual guardians, but over time, they expanded into army-like forms. On view at the Wexner, Afro Sentinels #3 (2024) presents 14 Mylar-based, 8-foot-tall abstractions resembling weapons hung across the wall. Her references included power figures from the Congo, studded with nails to ward off disease and safeguard communities, and the Terracotta Army guarding the tomb of Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of China. Originally, the “Afro Sentinels” were exclusively wall works, but today, these pieces are accompanied by a new series by the same name, featuring freestanding steel sculptures intended as guardians.

For fifty years, Carter has proven that abstraction can be politically urgent and deeply human. With her new three-dimensional “Afro Sentinels,” she transforms her iconic forms into enduring monuments of resilience. As social and political pressures that first inspired this work intensify, Carter emphasized, “I want that presence now—that physicality.”

Abstract expressionism and political engagement

Carter has always been inspired by the world around her. For instance, her “Illumination” series (1984–86) drew from her first trip to Rio de Janeiro, incorporating the bright colors evocative of the city’s Carnival festivities. More recently, pieces from her Mylar-based wall-work series, “Shifting Perspectives” and “Destabilizing,” some on view at the Wexner, respond to violence, political upheaval, and the invasive presence of media in everyday life. Shifting Perspectives #8 (2022) sets jagged bands of blue, black, and gray into precarious alignment, a composition that evokes the fractures of social unrest while insisting on balance.

If destabilizing forces often serve as her catalyst, Carter’s abstractions also search for equilibrium. The “Cantilevered” series, some of which are on view at the Wexner, explores the fragile balance between weight and suspension. She sees these abstract forms as ways to communicate political thought to a wide, diverse audience. “I can [communicate through] this abstract form and really give a universal language to people,” said Carter.

Timothy Taylor will now represent American artist Martha Tuttle in London. The gallery will present her first solo exhibition with the gallery in November, featuring works made with materials collected during a summer residency in Somerset, England.

Tuttle will continue to be represented by Peter Blum Gallery in New York, where she has previously shown her textile- and sculpture-based works. Her practice combines weaving and dying techniques with painting, a hybrid methodology she uses to explore materiality and impermanence. Born in rural New Mexico in 1989, Tuttle frequently draws on personal connections to environment and geography. “My work is always asking how we, as human beings, can encourage intimacy with the nonhuman world that surrounds us,” she said in a press statement.

The upcoming exhibition, yet to be titled, will highlight Tuttle’s engagement with natural materials, including plant dyes, stone pigments, wool, linen, and silk. A new work, I walk along the bottom of a canyon, finding mineral matter and fragments of bones (2025), incorporates geode fragments and bronze casts of cow bones. Like her other pieces, it demonstrates her interest in the tension between opacity and transparency, and the oppositional dialogue between geometric order and shifting natural light.

Over the past decade, Tuttle has expanded her approach by embedding natural elements, such as stones, charred wood, or cast aluminium, into layered textile-based surfaces. These processes often begin with labor-intensive preparation, such as grinding pigments or hand-spinning wool. The physicality of the work, and its reliance on natural sources, underscores her commitment to slow, deliberate methods.

Tuttle’s practice also extends to outdoor installations. Her 2020 project at Storm King Art Center, A stone that thinks of Enceladus (2020), featured piles of stones evocative of burial mounds with an entryway text written by Tuttle: a series of 23 questions reflecting on geological history and mythology.

Now living and working in Livingston, Montana, she graduated with an MFA from Yale School of Art in 2015. Previous solo exhibitions include “An ear, a hand, a mouth, an offering, an angel” at Chicago’s Rhona Hoffman Gallery in 2022 and “Wild irises grow in the mountains” at New York’s Tilton Gallery in 2021. Her work is held in collections such as The Museum of Modern Art in New York and the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C.

Correction: a previous version of this article stated that Tuttle lives in Brooklyn. She lives in Livingston, Montana.

Alexandre Diop

B. 1995, Senegal. Lives and works in Vienna.

A Vos marques ! Prêt ! Illegal – On Your Marks ! Get Set ! Illegal, 2025
Alexandre Diop
Stephen Friedman Gallery

A sense of constant motion is embedded within Alexandre Diop’s monumental mixed-media works, which are inspired by his background as a dancer and musician. The Vienna-based artist combines fragments from the world around him—discarded bits of metal, food packaging, nails, and door hinges—into what he calls “object-images,” often depicting frenetic, lithe bodies. Diop, who is newly represented by Stephen Friedman Gallery, will open a solo exhibition, “Run For Your Life !,” there on September 19th, marking his debut with the gallery and in London.

One of the works on view, A Vos marques ! Prêt ! Illegal – On Your Marks ! Get Set ! Illegal (2025), captures the exhibition’s sense of urgency. In the experimental portrait, Diop combines painting techniques with various found objects, layering textiles, netting, book covers, and expressive marks to bring his subjects to life. The piece, which mirrors the starting line of a race, draws inspiration from the story of Olympic medalist Jesse Owens, speaking to themes of freedom and resistance.

Qui vivra, Weira, 2024
Alexandre Diop
CFHILL

Valet, 2024
Alexandre Diop
CFHILL

Driver Of Minds, 2025
Alexandre Diop
Stephen Friedman Gallery

Negrita, 2025
Alexandre Diop
Stephen Friedman Gallery

Following his training at the Inter-University Center for Dance Berlin, Diop continued his studies at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. His solo exhibitions include presentations at Spinello Projects, the Rubell Museum in Miami, and the Josephinum in Vienna. His work can be found in a number of notable collections, including the Albertina Museum and the Rubell Museum.

—Adeola Gay, Senior Curatorial Manager

Ahrong Kim

B. 1985, South Korea. Lives and works in New Jersey.

Occupied, 2025
Ahrong Kim
LaiSun Keane

Weightless, 2025
Ahrong Kim
LaiSun Keane

Ahrong Kim’s surreal ceramic sculptures turn the body topsy-turvy. Across her work, feminine figures dressed in cutesy outfits pop out of vividly patterned, brightly colored surfaces and curvy, disembodied legs stick out of unexpected objects. Drawing together Korean and Western cultural references, these mishmashed figures explore transformation through a cheeky and unexpected lens.

Kim’s current solo show, “Last Rehearsal,” at LaiSun Keane in Boston (on view through September 28th), features works dating from 2021 to the present. They embody the transformative experiences of motherhood, striking a playful tone while reflecting on this stage of life. For example, in Occupied (2025), the top half of a woman’s head, forehead crinkled with worry, sits atop a harlequin-patterned stool. The tiny gilded hands stuck to her hairdo point in many different directions, evoking a multitude of conflicting mental demands. Kim’s signature motif, upside-down, disembodied legs, protrudes from the sculpture’s top in a whimsical flourish.

The Spring of Me, 2025
Ahrong Kim
LaiSun Keane

The Garden, 2025
Ahrong Kim
LaiSun Keane

Lovepool (Falling in Love), 2022
Ahrong Kim
LaiSun Keane

The Last Bow, 2025
Ahrong Kim
LaiSun Keane

Kim earned a BFA in ceramics from Konkuk University in Seoul and an MFA in ceramics from the Rhode Island School of Design. She has exhibited at the Hunterdon Art Museum in New Jersey, and her work is in the permanent collections of the RISD Museum, Fuller Craft Museum, and the American Museum of Ceramic Art.

—Josie Thaddeus-Johns, Senior Editor

Marlon Portales

B. 1991, Pinar del Río, Cuba. Lives and works in Miami.

The Last Man, 2024
Marlon Portales
Spinello Projects

The Sacred Tree II, 2025
Marlon Portales
Spinello Projects

Marlon Portales’s enticing paintings are like pages torn from a lost storybook—fantastical, vividly colored, and mysterious. Borrowing a sense of the natural sublime from the Romantic painters of the 19th century, then dialing up the saturation, the Cuban artist paints scenes evocative of myths or fairytales. His solo presentation with Miami’s Spinello Projects at The Armory Show earlier this month featured a cast of tragic-seeming heroes. In The Last Man (2024), a figure in golden, princely attire is pierced by arrows; in The Dance (2025), three men flee from a fearsome, whip-brandishing female centaur. Even when the narrative context is unclear, the paintings are inflected with high drama.

Portales favors swirling, gestural brushstrokes and foregrounds soft details, like dainty hands holding flowers and rippling, shimmery fabrics. His aesthetic is deliberately feminine—signaling a rejection of notions of masculine strength often embedded in heroic tales and of machismo in Cuban society more broadly. “Since leaving Cuba, my universe has expanded and freed itself from many burdens and prejudices,” the artist recently told Portray Magazine.

The Dance, 2025
Marlon Portales
Spinello Projects

The Wedding (Diptych), 2025
Marlon Portales
Spinello Projects

Lovers, 2025
Marlon Portales
Spinello Projects

Hand of the Sacred Deer, 2025
Marlon Portales
Spinello Projects

After studying art at the Academia Profesional de Artes Visuales Tiburcio Lorenzo in his hometown of Pinar del Río, Cuba, Portales earned a BFA in visual arts from the Instituto Superior de Arte in Havana. In 2018, he participated in the prestigious Fountainhead Residency in Miami, and he has subsequently had solo shows at Pan American Art Projects and Spinello Projects.

—Olivia Horn, Managing Editor

Josh Raz

B. 1993, United Kingdom. Lives and works in London.

Deep Ford (Mudlark at Deptford Creek), 2025
Josh Raz
Ronchini Gallery

Thought Formed in the Gaps, 2025
Josh Raz
Ronchini Gallery

Josh Raz’s large-scale paintings look as if they’ve been lifted from the edge of a dream, with pattern-rich surfaces depicting glistening skies and cities in cosmic, gestural swirls. Painted from imagination, these landscapes hover between the fantastical and the familiar. They could be anywhere, leaving room for the viewer’s own associations and memories.

Earlier this month, Raz showed new works in Ronchini Gallery’s presentation at The Armory Show—one of Artsy’s best booths at the fair. One of those paintings, Deep Ford (Mudlark at Deptford Creek)(2025), peers through a dark brick-lined tunnel under a bridge, which opens onto a twinkling cityscape. The scene is tinted the dark blue of dust; lights bounce off the water’s surface like glowing golden beads. Raz’s loose brushstrokes and rendering of shadows in color reference Impressionist forebearers like Claude Monet, giving the painting a timeless appeal.

Breakers, 2025
Josh Raz
Ronchini Gallery

Night, 2025
Josh Raz
Cob

Fates Fed, 2024
Josh Raz
Ronchini Gallery

Gloaming, 2023
Josh Raz
Ronchini Gallery

Raz graduated from Newcastle University with a bachelor’s degree in fine art in 2016, the same year he won the Hix Award for emerging artists in the U.K. In London, he’s had solo shows at Ronchini and Painters Painting Paintings, and, this year alone, has been featured in group shows at Cob in London, HdM Gallery in Beijing, and F2T Gallery in Milan.

—Maxwell Rabb, Staff Writer

Guim Tió Zarraluki

B. 1987, Barcelona. Lives and works in Barcelona.

El cami mes llarg, 2024
Guim Tió Zarraluki
Artside Gallery

In Spanish artist Guim Tió Zarraluki’s recent soft, introspective compositions, faceless or blurred figures find themselves in vast, often serene landscapes. A sense of solitude pervades these fields, deserts, and other expanses, reflecting the artist’s ongoing exploration of the human condition.

Figures are defined here less by their identity than by their affect: Their postures often suggest contemplation or fatigue. In El cami mes llarg (The longest path)(2024), an ambiguous figure has taken a fork in the road, but glances back—perhaps regretfully—at the path he left behind. The simple gesture carries surprising emotional weight. As in many of the artist’s recent works, the painting’s warm tones are gentle and subdued, contributing to an enveloping sense of peace.

El primer cop, 2024
Guim Tió Zarraluki
Artside Gallery

Almar, 2025
Guim Tió Zarraluki
Alzueta Gallery

Narcis, 2024
Guim Tió Zarraluki
Artside Gallery

Butes, 2023
Guim Tió Zarraluki
Ruttkowski;68

Earlier this month, Zarraluki, who boasts a substantial Instagram following and has experienced significant growth in inquiries on Artsy, caused a buzz at The Armory Show. There, his works were featured in the booth of Spanish gallery Alzueta. This presentation was preceded by a solo show in March with Ruttkowski;68 in Paris. Zarraluki, who received his BFA in fine arts at the University of Barcelona in 2010, has also shown with galleries including Madrid’s Coleccion SOLO and Montreal’s Patel Brown.

—Arun Kakar, Senior Art Market Editor

Marie Watt and Jennifer Packer are among six recipients of the 30th Heinz Awards, each receiving an unrestricted $250,000 cash prize for their contributions to the arts. The awards, totaling $1.5 million, recognize American individuals whose work addresses systemic change and sustainability. The award ceremony will take place in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in October.

The Heinz Awards were established in 1993 to honor the late U.S. senator John Heinz. Since its founding, the program has awarded 186 individuals, totaling more than $32 million worth of prize money. Each year, the award is granted to six people, two in each of the three categories: art, economy, and environment.

Packer, a New York–based painter, is honored for her figurative work that reimagines contemporary American representation in art. She is known for her intimate portraits rendered in gestural brushstrokes, where sitters—often Black figures based on her friends and family—emerge from and recede into lustrous backgrounds. Packer has presented solo exhibitions at the Serpentine Galleries in London, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.

Based in Portland, Oregon, Watt works across textiles, printmaking, and sculpture in works involving text embellishment and collaboration. A member of the Seneca Nation, she incorporates Indigenous feminist teachings and often invites community participation through sewing circles and material contributions. “Working with the community resonates with me as it connects art and life in a tangible way,” Watt said in a press statement. “She is also known for her collaborative monuments, some of which are in major public collections such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Seattle Art Museum.

“This year, we celebrate 30 years of honoring Americans who excel in the qualities that my husband, John Heinz, held in highest regard: intellectual curiosity, an informed optimism, a passion for excellence, and a willingness to take risks,” Teresa Heinz, chairman of the Heinz Family Foundation, said in a statement. “Their work doesn’t just shift systems; it stirs imagination, amplifies truth, and breathes possibility into the future we all deserve. Honoring them and witnessing their impact is a privilege.”

KAWS is stepping into a new role with UNIQLO as the fashion brand’s first artist in residence, the latest in its ongoing series of collaborations with artists. The appointment was announced on September 15th, during New York Fashion Week, at the Museum of Modern Art.

KAWS, whose real name is Brian Donnelly, is known for his “Companions”—cartoonish, hollow-eyed figures that blur the line between collectibles and contemporary art. As artist in residence, KAWS will support the UNIQLO’s aim to democratize art and design for a global audience through events staged at stores worldwide and collaborations with museum partners. He will also participate in creating new LifeWear collections, the first of which will be released in the fall/winter 2025 season.

KAWS’s relationship to the global retailer dates back to 2016. Last year, UNIQLO released the KAWS + Warhol UT collection, featuring clothing with artwork by KAWS and Andy Warhol. Previously, they collaborated on collections featuring characters from Sesame Street and Peanuts as well as KAWS’s own “Companions.”

“I appreciate them giving me this opportunity to be more involved in the company,” KAWS said during the announcement event. “One of the best things about working with UNIQLO is the reach.”

According to a press release from UNIQLO, the new position will encompass multiple responsibilities beyond product design. KAWS will be tasked with introducing new collaborators and developing creative concepts for the brand. Additionally, the artist will contribute to future editions of UT Grand Prix—the retailer’s annual t-shirt design competition—and join events alongside brand ambassadors.

“In our ever-evolving world, art is now more important than ever as an expression of our humanity. KAWS has been breaking the traditional boundaries of the art world, just as UNIQLO in its efforts to redefine the apparel industry through LifeWear,” UNIQLO’s president of global creative of fast retailing, John C. Jay, said in a press statement. “As our artist in residence, KAWS will help Uniqlo to expand the global appreciation and participation of art and creativity for all.”

Sotheby’s will open its global headquarters in New York’s Breuer Building in November with a $400 million auction of works from the Leonard A. Lauder Collection. The 24-lot evening sale will feature three never-before-auctioned Gustav Klimt masterpieces, led by Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer (1914–16), which is estimated in excess of $150 million.

The portrait is one of only two full-length portraits from this period believed to still be in private hands. The painting depicts Elisabeth Lederer, daughter of August and Serena Lederer, Klimt’s greatest patrons. If sold for its estimated price, it will far exceed the artist’s previous auction record set in 2023 for Dame mit Fächer (Lady with a Fan) (1917), which sold at Sotheby’s London for £85.3 million ($106.75 million). It would also mark the first work to sell for more than $100 million at auction since René Magritte’s L’empire des lumières (1954), which sold at Christie’s New York last November for $121.16 million and was the most expensive work sold at auction that year.

The other Klimt works featured in the upcoming Sotheby’s sale are Blumenwiese (1908), a mosaic-like wildflower meadow estimated in excess of $80 million, and Waldhag bei Unterach am Attersee (1916), believed to be Klimt’s final landscape, estimated in excess of $70 million.

“To have not just one but three rare superb museum-quality masterpieces by Klimt, none of which has previously been offered on the open market, coming up for sale together, represents a truly unique moment,” said Helena Newman, chairman of Impressionist & Modern art worldwide at Sotheby’s, in a statement. “The Portrait of Elizabeth Lederer epitomizes the aesthetic of Vienna’s Golden Age in which youth, beauty, color, and ornament are fused into a stunning Modernist portrait, whilst the two exquisite square format landscapes, Blumenwiese (1908) and ‘Waldhag bei Unterach am Attersee (1916) attest to Klimt’s liberation from the traditional conventions of painting.”

Leonard A. Lauder, a businessman known for his time as chairman emeritus of the Estée Lauder Companies, is widely recognized as one of the most influential American art collectors of his generation. He started his collection in 1966 with the purchase of a Kurt Schwitters collage, going on to acquire a leading collection of Cubist artworks, which he later gifted to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He also championed New York institutions, providing the Whitney Museum of American Art with a record $131 million endowment in 2008. Lauder passed away in July at the age of 92.

“A towering figure in the worlds of art, philanthropy and business, Leonard A. Lauder will long be remembered as an extraordinary art patron with a passion for collecting across artistic periods, mediums and genres, and for transforming the Whitney and Metropolitan Museums with his vision and generosity,” said Sotheby’s CEO Charles Stewart. “We are honored to be entrusted with his exceptional collection, which will captivate collectors worldwide.”

The auction will also feature six bronze statues by Henri Matisse, together expected to realize a price “in the region” of $30 million. This includes Figure décorative (1908), a sculpture of a naked woman reclining, inspired by both Islamic art and proto-Renaissance artists. According to Sotheby’s senior specialist Simon Stock, “This is the most important group of Matisse bronzes to come to auction in recent memory.” Other works include La Serpentine (1909), Nu couché I (Aurore) (1907), and the complete series of Henriette busts.

Other highlights include Edvard Munch’s Midsummer Night (ca. 1901–03), which is estimated at $20 million, and Agnes Martin’s The Garden (1964), a rare canvas that has been featured in several significant exhibitions, including Martin’s 1992 retrospective organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art.

For almost eight decades now, Lois Dodd has been following her own path in the art world. Immune to passing trends and the trappings of fame, the artist has been driven only by her desire to observe and reflect the world around her. Although she began painting in the 1940s and was a key figure in New York’s post-war art scene, it wasn’t until 2012 that she (at the age of 85) had her first major solo exhibition at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City. Today, however, her paintings are held in prestigious collections including those of MoMA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Smithsonian, and they invite fierce competition at auction. When Reflection of the Barn (1971) sold at Christie’s for $378,000 (nearly five times its estimate) in October 2024, it set the third successive record for the artist’s work in the space of a year.

And yet this remarkable painter, now 98 and still working almost every day, remains largely unknown outside the U.S. Hopefully, that will change this autumn, as the Kunstmuseum Den Haag, in The Hague, Netherlands, presents “Lois Dodd: Framing the Ephemeral,” which runs through January 4th. As the first European retrospective of her work, this revelatory survey brings together almost a hundred paintings from the 1950s to the present day. “In some ways, she could be seen as one of the most important artists of our time,” suggested David Breslin, curator of Modern and Contemporary art at The Met, in an illuminating documentary filmed to accompany the exhibition. This long-overdue showcase should help explain why.

Lois Dodd’s subject matter

Dodd has always insisted on the simplicity of her practice, maintaining that she just paints what she sees. And it’s true that her subject matter might seem unremarkable at first glance. Trees, flowers, windows, doorways, and laundry lines are common motifs, mostly drawn from the immediate surroundings of her homes in rural Maine and New Jersey, or her apartment in lower Manhattan. But beneath their quotidian surface, these exquisitely observed works are spatially sophisticated, lyrical, and utterly compelling. Hovering in the space between abstraction and figuration, they are the result of a lifelong dedication to the act of looking.

Whether it’s a shadow on a wall, the reflection in a mirror, rain on a windowpane, or ice melting on a river, her paintings capture brief, unrepeatable moments. Each one is carefully framed and executed with swift, economic brushstrokes and thin layers of paint, generally in a matter of hours. She often returns to the same scenes over the course of many years, at different times of day or season, recording small variations in light and atmosphere. For Dodd, a dedicated plein air painter who never works from photographs or preparatory sketches, the subject is not so much what she is painting, but how it exists in that moment.

The exhibition, which is organized thematically rather than chronologically, traces the various themes that recur throughout her work and is full of such ephemeral moments. In Light Reflected on Brick Wall, December (2014), for example, she captures the shadow cast on her apartment wall by a fleeting instant of winter sunshine. In Snow Patterns (1985), streaks of falling snow are etched across the facade of a gray barn, while in Burning House, Lavender (2007), a controlled blaze organized by the local fire department rages through an abandoned building, flames pouring from the windows while wisps of smoke skitter across the rooftop. Elsewhere, there is an entire room of nocturnes from the 1970s in deep shades of blue, silver, and black. These works capture the play of moonlight and shadow over the landscape, distilling its forms into stark contrasts of darkness and light.

Walking from room to room, encountering the same scenes and motifs again and again, offers a window into Dodd’s world. One cannot help but be impressed by the consistency of her vision over so many decades. As Louise Bjeldbak Henriksen, the show’s curator, explained to Artsy, “She notices what tends to pass most of us by, and by making us privy to her observations, she teaches us a new way of seeing. Her paintings reward us for approaching them with the same attentive looking with which she made them, while their stillness and clarity offer an antidote to the speed and noise of our present moment, making them feel all the more relevant today.”

Dodd’s artistic career

Dodd was born in 1927 in Montclair, New Jersey. The youngest of five daughters, she lost both parents by the age of 17, which perhaps helped foster the fiercely independent spirit that would shape much of her life and career. From 1945–48, she studied textiles at the Cooper Union in New York City, where she met the painters Alex Katz and Jean Cohen, both of whom would become lifelong friends. She also met the sculptor Bill King, to whom she would briefly be married.

In 1952, she made her mark as the only female founding member of the legendary Tanager Gallery, the first of several co-op galleries that sprang up on East 10th Street in lower Manhattan during the ’50s and ’60s. These artist-driven spaces offered an avant-garde alternative to the more conservative venues of Madison Avenue and 57th Street, and they were situated in the heart of the burgeoning post-war art scene, at the nexus of Abstract Expressionism, Pop art, and Minimalism. Willem de Kooning, Philip Guston, and Ludwig Sander were just a few of the gallery’s regular visitors. Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg both exhibited there, while Andy Warhol had his work rejected by the gallery on three separate occasions.

Dodd, however, would set herself apart from these new movements, acknowledging their importance while preferring to follow her own artistic instincts. As she points out in the documentary, “I never got into total abstraction. But I see abstraction, and [it] is very important to me. But I think all painting is abstract, period.” Henriksen expanded on this idea, explaining that “she absorbed the lessons of modernism, but filtered them through an observational lens distinctly her own. Her compositions distill forms to their essentials…She simplifies form, flattens space, and balances shapes, preserving in paint the feeling and atmosphere of her surroundings as much as their visual representation.”

The influence of abstraction

While her work bears comparisons with other American artists such as Edward Hopper, Arthur Dove, and Georgia O’Keeffe, and even European painters like Johannes Vermeer or Vilhelm Hammershøi, the figure she most often cites as an influence is Piet Mondrian. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Kunstmuseum, home to the world’s largest collection of the Dutch master’s work, is taking this unique opportunity to place the two artists in dialogue, displaying a selection of his paintings alongside Dodd’s. However, as Henriksen points out, the two painters have very different approaches. “Where Mondrian sought abstraction through construction, Dodd finds it in the underlying structures of the observed world.”

Thus, her paintings often develop out of abstract elements she finds close at hand. In the show, this is evidenced through Sun in Hallway (1976), where the view through a doorway becomes a series of geometric color bars, or the oval shape of a mirror in Springtime Studio Interior (1972). Even the stark, geometric alignment of walls and shadows outside her apartment window, as seen in View of Cemetery + Men’s Shelter (1967), turned into an inspiration. In her matter-of-fact way, Dodd explained in the documentary that “I just liked the shape of that rectangle out there, so I started painting it over the years…It would change radically according to the season, according to the hour, and so it became a great subject matter for me.”

“I think it’s all about geometry,” she remarked in a recent interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist (reproduced in the exhibition catalogue). “Even the trees outside, inside. Wherever you are, it’s all about geometry.” This is especially true of her window paintings. Since 1968, window frames of every shape and size have been one of her most enduring motifs, often painted to scale and employing skillful trompe l’oeil effects, and there is at least one in every room of the exhibition. These “Mondrian Constructions,” as she has called them, deftly explore the tension between the rigidly structured grid of the windowpanes and the layers of abstraction found within the glass. Works such as View Thru Elliott’s Shack Looking North (1971) invite the audience to decipher the complex interplay of reflections, refractions, shadows, and distortions in order to make sense of what they are seeing.

Overdue recognition

All of this invites an obvious question: Why did it take so long for Dodd to achieve recognition? For Henriksen, one explanation is that her tenacity and refusal to compromise her personal vision have been both a strength and a hindrance. “By eschewing fashionable movements—whether Abstract Expressionism, Pop, or Conceptual art—she positioned herself outside dominant post-war narratives, which partly explains her long underrecognition, especially internationally. In recent years, however, there has been a broader reappraisal of overlooked women artists and those who quietly persisted outside the spotlight. And her work resonates very strongly in this context.”

Even now, approaching her centenary, Dodd retains the independent streak that has marked her career. Immune to any attempts at interpreting or theorizing her work, she is content to have simply done her own thing and has no advice for young painters except that they try and do the same. “I can’t remember anybody giving me advice,” she wryly told Obrist, “and if they did, I wouldn’t have taken it anyway.”

Designer Jason Wu unveiled his spring 2026 collection, “COLLAGE,” on Sunday evening during New York Fashion Week, in collaboration with the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation. Both Wu’s designs—directly inspired by Rauschenberg’s art—and the choice to stage the presentation within a rarely seen installation, are part of worldwide celebrations honoring the late American artist’s 100th birthday.

Set in a raw, industrial warehouse at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, the runway wound through A Quake in Paradise (Labyrinth) (1994), Rauschenberg’s maze-like installation composed of 29 silkscreened aluminum and Lexan panels. Models passed between mirrored and translucent surfaces in deconstructed coats and jackets, gowns printed with Rauschenberg’s imagery, and fluid slip dresses that carried the collection’s collage theme. As sunlight filtered through lofty windows, it ricocheted off the panels, turning the space into a glowing, exhibition-like environment.

Each of Wu’s looks nodded to Rauschenberg’s experimental use of material, echoing his groundbreaking three-dimensional “Combines,” which blurred the boundaries between painting and sculpture. Given access to the Foundation’s archives, Wu drew inspiration from two series: “Hoarfrost” (1974–76) and “Airport Suite” (1974), both known for their layered imagery and use of fabric. He reinterpreted elements of 10 specific artworks—a checklist of which was distributed at the show—into garments made from satin, silk twill, and organza. He described these as “living compositions.”

“Within the centennial initiatives, this dialogue between art and fashion affirms that Rauschenberg’s spirit of experimentation and connection remains vital, inspiring new generations to engage with his work in unexpected and resonant ways,” Courtney J. Martin, executive director of the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, told Artsy. The Rauschenberg Foundation approached Wu about a collaboration in January 2025, knowing that the designer has named Rauschenberg as an influence.

Rauschenberg created the installation A Quake in Paradise (Labyrinth) at his Captiva Island studio in Florida in 1994. Designed to adapt to its surroundings and to be navigated by viewers, the work offered a creative yet fitting structure for a runway show. The installation was last shown to the public at MASS MoCA in 2018.

Wu has long intertwined his work with art: His spring 2012 collection was a collaboration with KAWS; his spring 2024 ready-to-wear show paid tribute to Isamu Noguchi and was staged in the artist’s Sunken Garden (1961–64) in Lower Manhattan; and during last year’s New York Fashion Week, he partnered with Chinese calligrapher Tong Yang-Tze.

Calling this latest collaboration “a dream come true,” Wu described the collection in a press statement as “my tribute to Mr. Rauschenberg’s work and my personal journey as an immigrant who collects what seem disparate references into my creations.”

“Seeing Jason Wu translate Rauschenberg’s radical fabric works into living, moving garments was both thrilling and a testament to Jason’s ability to channel the artist’s vision through contemporary design,” Martin told Artsy. “The collection doesn’t merely reference Rauschenberg—it carries forward his belief that materials, collaboration, and risk can transform how we see the world.”

Wu’s timely presentation comes just ahead of “Robert Rauschenberg: Fabric Works of the 1970s,” which will open on September 19th at the Menil Collection in Houston. It will be the first major exhibition to focus on the artist’s fabric works.

Also on Sunday, designer Ulla Johnson presented a collection inspired by Helen Frankenthaler—Rauschenberg’s contemporary and a leading figure in 20th-century American painting—at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. The two shows reflect fashion’s ongoing embrace of art in recent years. Other memorable collaborations this year include Dior’s collaboration with Artsy Vanguard alum Rithika Merchant and Rejina Pyo’s Edvard Munch-inspired collection.

However, for many, the art world is associated with stereotypes of aloofness and exclusivity. Finding your personal style, establishing a budget, and identifying where to buy works can be overwhelming for first-time buyers to consider. Add in some unhelpful myths about the art world perpetuated by the news and the media, and the process can become downright confusing.

Here, we speak to gallerists to help bust some of the biggest myths about buying art and share what collectors need to know instead.

Myth 1: You have to be rich to buy art

Ayo, 2023
Landon Pointer
Moosey

A lot of prospective collectors think art is for the ultra-wealthy, notes Kate Sam of KB Fine Art. Most coverage of art sales that grab headlines focuses on the priciest outliers at auction houses, which can lead to a misconception that “art is on the $1 million level,” she explained.

The reality is that most art is sold for much lower, accessible prices. According to Artsy’s Art Market Trends 2025 report, the vast majority of works purchased by collectors and sold by dealers are priced at $5,000 or less.

Although not all galleries are transparent about prices, “it’s not illegal to ask how much something costs,” said Patti Ruiz of Ruiz-Healy Art.

Understanding how art pricing works can help buyers make informed decisions. Ruiz recommends that new buyers ask galleries about prints or works on paper if they want to look at more accessible work by specific artists—or even ask to be put on the mailing list.

“That’s a good way to build a collection, start the conversation, get to know more about the artist and the gallery programming,” she said. “And see if their upcoming shows are going to be more on your price point.”

Learn what determines the price of an artwork here.

Myth 2: The art world is closed off to ordinary people

Andy Warhol, Billy Al Bengston & Dennis Hopper at the opening of Marcel Duchamp's retrospective, 1963
Julian Wasser
Hilton Contemporary

While personal relationships undeniably fuel aspects of the art world, the vast majority of galleries are keen to connect with new buyers and audiences.

Ruiz said many people are concerned that gallerists “are going to be mean or won’t speak to them”—a stereotype perpetuated by fictional portrayals of tight-lipped art dealers such as Charlotte in Sex and the City and Rhodora Haze in the satirical thriller Velvet Buzzsaw.

But the reality is different. “If you’re going there to be respectful, see the art, have meaningful conversations, and learn more, people are happy to have you, even if you’re not intending to buy that evening,” she said.

Since the pandemic, there has been a greater prevalence of online viewing rooms, which has also opened up galleries to a wider audience. This enables interested parties to connect with galleries around the world. “You can be online in Austria and look at a gallery in Texas,” Ruiz added. “We get requests from people all over the world.”

Read more about how to feel confident when visiting an art gallery here.

Myth 3: You need an advanced degree to understand art

The Art Critic, 2021
Toni Hamel
CK Contemporary

Many prospective buyers are worried that they don’t understand art enough to feel comfortable making a purchase.

“They feel unsafe being in this market when they are trying to start collecting, because they are afraid of making a mistake,” Sam said. But, as she points out, “art history is like a big ocean for people to think about…they can never know everything.”

To make this prospect less intimidating, it’s advisable for those interested to focus on a specific movement or artist they’re interested in and focus their research.

Lu Chen of AMPHI Gallery recommends that newcomers view solo shows of individual artists. “They often offer a comprehensive presentation of the artist’s creative approach and their styles, and you get to know the background,” she said.

Galleries are also there to help, should any questions and thoughts arise. “When you buy from a good gallery, you are buying into the security of experience and safe provenance,” said Christina Jansen of The Scottish Gallery.

Find out how to build your taste in art, according to experts, here.

Myth 4: Galleries only care about selling art

Private Viewing III, 2021
Chike Obeagu
kó

It is easy to imagine an art gallery as simply a shop that hangs art and takes a commission. While this can undoubtedly be the case for different buyer needs and seller interactions depending on the context, many galleries are more than happy to engage beyond a sale.

“A good gallery is a creative partner for artists, collectors, and the public,” said Jansen. “We shape careers, nurture talent, and work alongside our artists and curate experiences that connect people with art in a meaningful way.”

Galleries can also advise on artworks that might interest you or answer any questions about the practicalities involved in buying art. Many also take on a community role for like-minded people in the area.

“It’s a space where people can connect with each other,” said Chen, whose gallery is based in Old Pasadena, California. “When we celebrate exhibitions, students, artists, visitors, and curators get the chance to talk to each other.”

We cover essential questions for new art buyers to ask galleries here.

Myth 5: You need a mansion to live with art

Refractions, 2006-2023
Roxa Smith
C24 Gallery

Thanks to mainstream coverage of art, its status is viewed as a lofty and unattainable asset more at home in mansions and museums than in ordinary homes.

“There is a lack of understanding about what art is—why you would want to have art, to be immersed in art, or what it feels like to have artworks on your wall,” said Sam.

Collectors can be put off by the prospect of maintaining original artworks and identifying suitable mediums to complement the size and design of their home, but gallerists can help with such queries. Once buyers set aside their reservations to explore the vast range of artworks available with an open mind, the process can be immensely rewarding.

“I want people to be curious about the artists,” Sam said, adding that it brings her a lot of joy when buyers connect with her artists’ work. “They like the stories behind the paintings, and then they want something on their wall to remind them about this concept—I love it.”

Learn more about how to display artwork in your home here.

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According to Julia Sherman, cooking is a lot like painting: “ It’s a composition, it’s layering of materials… it works best when there’s contrasting flavors and textures and colors.”

The artist, author, and chef is bringing this philosophy to her latest venture as executive chef of the new restaurant at New York’s New Museum, opening this fall. On this episode of The Artsy Podcast, Sherman joins Artsy’s managing editor Olivia Horn for a conversation about how artists eat, why art institutions are leaning into dining, and what the art and food worlds can learn from each other.

Plus, Artsy editors Casey Lesser and Arun Kakar recap recent art fairs in Seoul and New York and discuss the artists who are on their radar this fall. Listen now, and read an edited excerpt of the conversation with Sherman below.

This episode was produced by Olivia Horn and edited by Grant Irving.