Bringing art into a protected national rainforest—the largest in the U.S. Forest Service system—requires not only intense, multilateral curatorial thinking but also empathy that extends beyond the human to nature itself. It demands stepping outside the dominant anthropocentric paradigm that has historically shaped much of Western art and instead collaborating with nature to create symbiotically rather than in opposition. It is a practice of reattunement to natural rhythms and cycles—a form of listening as much as shaping. “It’s a continuous learning, from nature and from the artist,” Georgie Vega, director and curator of ArteYUNQUE, told Observer. The founder of theartwalkpr, Vega, who has overseen the initiative since its launch, is a well-established figure in the Puerto Rican art community, with over 20 years of experience conceiving and promoting exhibitions across the island’s museums.

Now in its third edition, ArteYUNQUE brings art into deep dialogue with the half-kilometer Science and Conservation Trail at El Portal de El Yunque, the main visitor center of El Yunque National Forest in Puerto Rico.

The project originated with the U.S. Forest Service, a federal agency within the U.S. Department of Agriculture, as part of an agency-wide initiative to increase public access to nature. In 2017, Hurricane Maria brought Puerto Rico to its knees, claimed lives and left the island in a prolonged state of emergency, and El Yunque was nearly obliterated. The proposal emerged as part of a government-backed renovation campaign to restore the forest’s infrastructure and reopen it to visitors. “I came here a few months after, and it was like a bomb had been here. There was nothing left,” Laura Rivera Ayala, who recently returned to Puerto Rico after several years in New York and now works full-time with Vega on the project, explained.

What the Forest Service initially envisioned was a far more modest artistic presence—largely decorative and mostly confined to the El Portal visitor center. Once Vega was approached by the Friends of El Yunque Foundation to lead the project in partnership with the U.S. Forest Service, she immediately advocated for a more ambitious and meaningful integration. The result was an unprecedented program of site-specific commissions unfolding along the trail and embedded in the living fabric of the rainforest.

This did not come without resistance or challenge. Ecologists overseeing the site were initially skeptical and deeply concerned about the potential environmental impact of introducing artworks into such a fragile ecosystem. The early stages were marked by caution, confrontation and bureaucratic delay. “We had to earn their trust,” Vega recalled. Even after installation began, new challenges emerged. Working in the forest means working with nature—accepting its rhythms, reactions and unpredictability rather than attempting to control them. For this reason, ArteYUNQUE structures its calendar around hurricane season: the annual outdoor commissions are installed in October and remain on view until July.

The first edition launched in 2023, gathering eight artists’ works under the title “NATURA” with very minimal resources, primarily raised through grassroots fundraising efforts on the island. “It was extremely experimental,” Vega said. By the second edition, the project had secured more stable support, including a three-year grant from the Mellon Foundation and backing from Bloomberg Philanthropies. All works are now accompanied by QR codes offering additional information and contextual materials via Bloomberg Connects.

Since then, ArteYUNQUE has not only helped restore life and energy to the forest but also drawn Puerto Ricans back to reconnect with this sacred landscape. El Yunque is not only home to a unique ecosystem but also carries profound spiritual and historical significance: for the Indigenous Taíno, it was a sacred site—the dwelling place of their principal deity—and petroglyphs depicting Taíno figures and symbols can still be found today. This spiritual reverence was also grounded in ecological reality: El Yunque is the hydrological heart of northeastern Puerto Rico, supplying freshwater to hundreds of thousands of residents. Major rivers—including Espíritu Santo, Mameyes, Sabana, Pitahaya, Fajardo, Santiago, Río Blanco and Río Grande de Loíza—all originate in or are fed by the forest.

Held under the title “RÍO,” the third iteration of the annual exhibition, on view through July 18, centers on El Yunque’s historical role as a vital watershed, expanding outward to consider rivers and bodies of water as sources of life, channels of connection and vessels of memory. The eight commissioned works engage this theme in diverse materials, gestures and forms of encounter, responding to water as both an ecological system and a cultural archive.

Several works in “RÍO” directly evoke the ancestral Taíno and Afro-Caribbean traditions that revere the site and its waters as sacred sources of life, renewal and spiritual continuity. One of the most powerful interventions, located deep along the trail, is Daniel Lind-Ramos’s La Madre de Yúcahu (The Mother of Yúcahu). Inspired by Taíno mythology, the sculpture—constructed from irrigation pipes—assumes a totemic presence, evoking Atabey, the goddess of water and fertility. Her son Yúcahu, the god of yuca and agriculture, was said by the Taínos to inhabit the mountain. Integrating natural and industrial materials, the sculpture channels the continuous flow of water and the cycles of exchange that sustain ecosystems. The pipes flow directly into the ground, where the sculpture is anchored, forming a potent symbolic image of nourishment, balance and ancestral memory—each flowing in the interplay between nature and human history. Despite his demanding schedule, particularly following his widely acclaimed exhibition at MoMA PS1, Lind-Ramos embraced the commission, recognizing its deep resonance with his origins and community. The sculpture faces toward Loíza, his home village and a vital center of Afro-Caribbean culture on the island.

Holding a similarly evocative presence, Edra Soto’s sculptural installation De Río a Río (From River to River) presents three suspended bodies composed of ceramic masks and silk ribbons. The work links river spirits and their relentless flow to experiences of migration, transformation and resilience within Puerto Rican history, weaving a poetic connection between water and movement across time and space. Drawing from her own migratory experience—living and working in Chicago—the masks reflect the processes of physical, emotional and cultural transformation, adopting different personalities to adapt to new surroundings. At the same time, inspired by African and Caribbean traditions and symbologies, the sculpture assumes a new totemic role, serving as a protector and an expression of identity.

Standing at the start of the trail, Gisela Colón’s monolithic, iridescent green sculpture Ríos de Oro y Polvo (Dust Rivers) rises as an imposing reminder of centuries of extraction and destruction while simultaneously acting as a luminous protective presence. Embodying the forest’s geological and spiritual memory, the work links the transatlantic journey of Saharan dust to colonial gold extraction and the violence inflicted upon rivers and Indigenous bodies. By weaving dust, water, mineral and memory into a single symbolic and physical entity, the sculpture—the only work by the internationally recognized artist currently on view in her homeland—asserts itself as an act of repair and a powerful emblem of healing, ancestral wisdom and resilience.

All artists participating in ArteYUNQUE are Puerto Rican, either based on the island or part of its diaspora. In this way, the program serves as a vital platform for the local art scene, offering one of the few opportunities for commissioned public artworks of this scale in Puerto Rico. Each artist receives a production budget and stipend while retaining ownership of their work. “This helps to empower and support the amazing art scene that we have. There are very few art commission programs on the island,” Vega said, underscoring how rare it is for artists to operate in such a prominent, site-specific public context.

At the same time, ArteYUNQUE is playing a key role in drawing local communities back to the forest. “The site is often perceived as being only for tourists, yet this project opens them up to the local community, giving people the chance to connect with and have real access to contemporary art.” Visitor numbers reflect this growing impact, and each edition is accompanied by a rich program of music, poetry and performances that has consistently exceeded expectations in terms of attendance. During the most recent edition, the site welcomed approximately 600,000 visitors. “It’s a significant number—especially considering that no museum in Puerto Rico reaches those figures,” Rivera Ayala noted, observing that tourists rarely come to the island for museums alone and that such levels of engagement—particularly among local audiences—are remarkable.

Perhaps most importantly, ArteYUNQUE operates as a living creative laboratory for ecological awareness, particularly for younger generations. Each edition demonstrates how human intervention can exist sustainably and respectfully within nature. “Our rule is leave no trace,” Vega said. Artists are required to leave no permanent mark and are encouraged to use materials with the lowest possible ecological impact.

Artists undertake multiple site visits before proposing a work, carefully selecting locations and studying how their interventions will unfold. “Once the artists submit their proposals, we move into a mitigation process with ecologists, anthropologists and historians to ensure that what we’re doing has little to no impact on the landscape. The site itself presents challenges, of course, but at the same time it pushes everyone—artists included—out of their comfort zones in a productive and meaningful way.”

One of the first interventions encountered along the trail offers a compelling example of this site-responsive approach. With Barroglifos de El Yunque (Barroglifos of El Yunque), Puerto Rican architect and artist Jaime Suárez reimagines Indigenous petroglyphs, translating them into delicate spiral ceramic forms that gently settle onto moss-covered ancient rocks. Rather than carving into stone—an extractive and irreversible gesture associated with the original petroglyphs—Suárez’s works appear as subtle bas-reliefs resting on nature’s surface. The medium itself is deeply rooted in place: clay references the forest’s clay-rich soil, historically used by Indigenous Taíno communities for ceramics and ritual objects. Yet the choice of white ceramics renders the forms particularly vulnerable, heightening their exposure to humidity, erosion and biological processes. The sculptures openly embrace transformation, allowing the environment to inscribe time, weather and decay onto their surfaces.

In fact, creating art in and for nature also means accepting vulnerability, degradation and change over time—processes shaped by weather, plant growth and interactions with non-human elements. Most installations are therefore conceived as inherently ephemeral, synchronized with natural cycles and designed to evolve in tandem with the living environment that surrounds them.

This embrace of natural forces as active agents is also central to Dhara Rivera’s La Lluvia, la Casa y el Río Invisible (The Rain, the House and the Invisible River). Inside a modular, provisional domestic structure—a human-made primordial shelter of iron, ceramic and copper—the installation features hanging clay containers connected by pipes and taps. When it rains, the sculpture is activated, transforming into a self-contained human-made ecosystem animated by nature. In this way, the work metaphorically evokes the journey of water from the mountains of El Yunque to its quiet arrival in domestic spaces—an often “invisible river” flowing into our bodies—bridging the natural and the domestic while prompting reflection on the fragility of water resources and the vital interdependence of human and natural systems.

Another example is Frances Rivera González’s El Río se Hace Cuerpo (The River Becomes Body), which features eight suspended sculptures made from coconut palm and cabuya fibers, each honoring one of El Yunque’s eight rivers. Within months of installation, their forms have already begun to change, shaped by humidity and the passage of time, evoking the gigantic morphing of the surrounding vegetation as they follow the seasons. At the same time, the works attest to the resilience of Indigenous techniques in contrast to contemporary industrial production. Rivera González belongs to a new generation of Puerto Rican artists committed to revitalizing traditional Caribbean methods—particularly weaving and textile practices—while seamlessly transitioning between art, design and visual culture.

Yet, as Vega notes, when it comes to conservation challenges, humans often pose the greatest threat. “When we have these first meetings, I always tell the artists to be conscious that they have nature and human nature,” she joked, acknowledging that fallen branches are part of the process. At the same time, damage caused by curious visitors remains an ongoing educational challenge. While the U.S. Forest Service does not provide direct funding, it supports ArteYUNQUE through maintenance, surveillance, site protection and coverage of potential litigation-related costs.

Looking ahead, a central concern is how to preserve—or extend—the life of what the project has generated, despite the ephemeral nature of the works. A publication devoted to the first editions is currently in the plans, but from the outset, documentation has been central to Vega’s vision. ArteYUNQUE’s media channels are filled with material tracing every phase of the commissions, from artists working in their studios to the processes of conception, production and installation in the forest.

A significant moment will come next year, when works from the inaugural edition will be recreated or represented in an exhibition at El Barrio in New York. “We wanted to do something for the diaspora and bring a broader awareness of this project,” Vega said.

Longer-term ambitions include expanding the program to artists from across the Caribbean and potentially establishing a residency, though both would require additional resources. In the meantime, ArteYUNQUE will launch a new curated video art exhibition on January 17, continuing its exploration of the site through new media—an area the team hopes to further develop, alongside efforts to support artists working in painting and other formats. Titled “Todas las aguas Están Conectadas” and staged inside the Ranger House—the oldest such structure in the entire U.S. Forest system—the exhibition will feature works by both local and international artists, including Dhara Rivera, Carolina Caycedo, Helen Ceballos, Sofía Gallisa Muriente and Emilia Beatriz. Together, their contributions offer a ritual, sensory and poetic multimedia journey that highlights the role of rivers, lagoons and seas as collective organisms and vital forces that move through us and sustain us, while inviting viewers to pause, listen and reconnect with these aqueous bodies and landscapes.

Walking the trail alongside Vega and her team as they recalled the episodes, challenges, successes and setbacks they’ve shared with the artists, it’s abundantly clear that ArteYUNQUE is driven first and foremost by deep conviction, care and passion—for humans as much as for nature—grounded in a profound belief that human creativity can still fulfill a generative and regenerative function, rather than a destructive one, in relation to the natural world.

In this sense, ArteYUNQUE stands as a pioneering model for how art and ecological consciousness can converge—not as a symbolic gesture, but as a living, adaptive creative platform that embeds sustainability into its very structure and practice. It prompts both reflection and action toward recognizing, respecting and protecting the interdependence of ecosystems, communities and Puerto Rico’s vital natural resources. With ArteYUNQUE, contemporary art, Indigenous memory, ancestral knowledge and environmental care converge—using art as a tool to reimagine and “re-engineer” how human creativity can operate in symbiosis with nature rather than against it.

It’s not every day that a work by Antonello da Messina comes to auction—especially one whose value and authenticity are bolstered by an extensive exhibition history, scholarly literature and clean provenance. Sotheby’s has secured a rare, jewel-like panel (c. 1460-1465) by the Sicilian Renaissance master, estimated at $10-15 million, which will lead its upcoming Old Masters week at its landmark Breuer headquarters in February.

The double-sided panel unites two evocative compositions that exemplify Antonello’s innovative use of light—marked by soft modulation—and his groundbreaking naturalism in rendering human emotion and psychological presence. The front presents an emotionally charged and profoundly human Ecce Homo, portraying Christ as a youthful figure, bound, crowned with thorns and flinching in pain. The motif would go on to influence generations of painters, particularly within the Venetian school. Antonello himself revisited the subject repeatedly, with other examples now held in major museum collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Musei Civici di Palazzo Farnese and Collegio Alberoni in Piacenza and the Galleria Regionale della Sicilia at Palazzo Abatellis in Palermo.

The reverse offers a more lyrical image: Saint Jerome in the Desert, in which the saint is immersed in a luminous, atmospheric landscape that acts as an echo chamber, amplifying the work’s spiritual resonance and meditative calm. This approach was later adopted and refined by painters such as Giovanni Bellini, as seen in St. Francis in the Desert (ca. 1475-1480), now at the Frick Collection.

Likely used as a portable devotional object, the small-scale panel appears to have been carried by its owners during prayer, as suggested by the surface erosion around the saint—probably caused by repeated kissing and touching during acts of devotion. The Metropolitan Museum’s example is among its closest known comparables.

Only about 40 works by Antonello are known to survive, with most held in museum collections. This painting is widely believed to be one of the few still in private hands, and it will only be the second work of this caliber to appear at auction in a generation. The last was Portrait of a Man (known as Il Condottiere), now in the Musée du Louvre in Paris, acquired in 1865 from the collection of the Comte de Pourtalès-Gorgier at the insistence of Napoleon III. That acquisition marked one of the first major Renaissance works to enter the Louvre through the art market rather than via royal or ecclesiastical donation. Other, less significant examples that surfaced at auction have typically carried weaker attributions—often catalogued as “after” Antonello or attributed to followers or workshop members, rather than being confidently attributed to the master himself. Another devotional panel, The Madonna and Child with a Franciscan Monk in Adoration (recto) with Ecce Homo (verso), sold at Christie’s London in 2003 for $251,650, landing at the midpoint of its estimate. However, it lacked the exceptional exhibition history and documented provenance of the panel now offered by Sotheby’s, reinforcing the latter’s standing as a historical and commercial landmark.

The earliest recorded mention of the panel dates to the early 20th Century, when it was part of a Spanish private collection. It was acquired by Wildenstein & Co. in 1967 and subsequently sold via private sale at Sotheby’s to dealer Fabrizio Moretti, who in turn sold it to its current owner. The first scholarly reference came from Federico Zeri, one of the 20th Century’s most influential art historians. In recent decades, the panel has been featured in major exhibitions at the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid, the Museu de Belles Arts de València and the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s landmark Antonello da Messina retrospective in 2005-2006. It later traveled to Italy for a comprehensive survey of the artist’s oeuvre at the Scuderie del Quirinale in Rome in spring 2006 and was most recently shown at Palazzo Reale in 2019.

“This work by Antonello da Messina is both extremely rare and extremely important, and opportunities like this simply don’t come along very often,” Christopher Apostle, Sotheby’s International Head of the Old Masters, told Observer. “For this particular work, we have documentation dating back to the beginning of the 20th Century, though not earlier, and it has never previously been publicly available on the open market,” confirming that the panel comes from a private collection in the United States. Apostle also emphasized Antonello’s pivotal role in the evolution of painting as a bridge between Flemish innovations—particularly oil technique and minute surface realism—and the spatial clarity and humanist rigor of Italian painting. His brief but influential career, especially his time in Venice, left a lasting imprint on Venetian art, shaping artists from Giovanni Bellini onward. By synthesizing Northern realism with Italian spatial and humanist concerns, Antonello helped establish oil painting as a dominant medium in Italy and redefined the expressive potential of portraiture and sacred imagery, infusing them with heightened psychological immediacy and interior presence.

At a time when painters in southern Italy had not yet fully embraced naturalism or optical effects, Antonello achieved remarkable subtlety, Apostle noted. In this work, light enters from the left, shaping Christ’s body through delicate transitions, reflected shadows and gradual tonal shifts across the chest and shoulders. “These minute modulations reveal Antonello as a true master of light, capable of creating an effect that is both restrained and profoundly moving.”

Over his 38 years at Sotheby’s, Apostle has spent countless weeks and months with paintings, yet this work distinguished itself by revealing its beauty slowly. “This is one of those pictures that becomes more and more beautiful the longer you live with it,” he said, noting that while some works make an immediate impact, this one unfolds differently. “The longer I live with it, the more beautiful it becomes. And when you hold it in your hands—which is really how it’s meant to be experienced—it’s such an intimate encounter.” The fact that it was actively venerated, he added, infused the panel with spiritual and emotional energy accumulated over time, making it even more affecting.

Given the extreme rarity of Antonello da Messina on the market, Apostle acknowledged that there are no true comparables by the artist himself. The $10-15 million estimate was therefore calibrated against works by artists of comparable historical stature, including an Andrea Mantegna that sold for $28 million at Sotheby’s New York in January 2003.

Other highlights of upcoming Old Master sales

The painting will be offered as part of Sotheby’s live sale Master Paintings & Works of Art Part I on February 5. Other highlights include Allegory of Music, Jacopo Tintoretto’s only surviving illusionistic ceiling painting, notable for its trompe-l’œil execution and produced with his workshop around 1550. First recorded in the early 20th Century as part of the collection of Count Alessandro Contini Bonacossi in Florence, the work remained with the family for generations before being acquired in 2002 by the consignor, the estate of Stanley Moss, the American poet, publisher and cultural figure best known as the longtime head of Ulysses Press. It comes to auction with an estimate of $500,000-700,000.

Also from the Moss estate—and acquired alongside the Tintoretto from the Contini Bonacossi family—is an exquisite painting of a woman at her toilette by Giovanni Bellini and his workshop, estimated at $600,000-800,000. With extensive scholarly literature, the work has featured in major museum exhibitions over the past decade at Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome, the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza and the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna.

Another six-figure lot is Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux’s pair of marble sculptures, Jeune Fille à la Coquille and Pêcheur à la Coquille, dated 1827-1875 and estimated at $1,500,000-2,500,000. The works have been on long-term loan to the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto since May 2023.

Also making a rare auction appearance is Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s Head of a Bearded Man, offered with an estimate of $600,000-800,000. This freely executed study captures the liveliness and softness of the Rococo master’s hand, with feathery brushwork and delicate pastel tones. It belongs to a celebrated group of bust-length têtes de vieillards produced from the mid-1760s to early 1770s—not as a formal series but as painterly experiments—of which at least eight examples, mostly in museum collections, are known today. Its well-documented provenance and extensive literature not only support the attribution but also help justify the estimate.

Leading the Masters Week at Sotheby’s will be the prestigious Diane A. Nixon Collection—one of the finest drawing collections in the U.S. and the most significant single-owner drawings sale in over a decade. Beginning in the 1990s, Nixon, who is arguably one of the few women to build a collection of this caliber, quietly assembled a museum-quality group spanning four centuries, from Correggio to Redon. Although works from her collection have been exhibited at institutions including the National Gallery of Art and the Morgan Library & Museum, they were always shown anonymously, making this sale the first time her name will be publicly attached to the collection. Highlights range from Fra Bartolommeo’s rare early landscape and an exceptional group of 17th-century Italian drawings by Guercino, Preti, Salvator Rosa and Pietro da Cortona, alongside luminous works by Tiepolo and Watteau, and a rare sheet attributed to Carel Fabritius. Later works by Greuze, Constable, Delacroix, Degas and Redon round out the collection.

Also on offer this February is the remarkable collection of Lester Weindling—a small but precisely curated group of just twelve works, representing the best of the Dutch Golden Age. Its top lot, Pieter Claesz’s Still Life with Assorted Fruit, Including Wild Strawberries and Cherries in Two Porcelain Bowls, carries an estimate of $800,000-1,200,000. The full collection is expected to achieve $12-18 million.

But the undisputed highlight of the season, appearing in the Master Works on Paper from Five Centuries sale, is Rembrandt’s drawing Young Lion Resting—the only known depiction of an animal by the artist still in private hands, and a work of extraordinary evocative power, capturing the poise and restless vitality of a majestic creature. The jewel-piece was held for two decades in the acclaimed Leiden Collection, owned by American investor Thomas S. Kaplan and his wife, and widely considered one of the foremost private holdings of 17th-century Dutch and Flemish art—including 17 paintings by Rembrandt, the largest known private collection of his work. Kaplan is Chairman of The Electrum Group, a precious-metals focused asset management firm, and Founder of Panthera, the world’s leading charity dedicated to big cat conservation.

This was not Kaplan’s first acquisition of a Rembrandt, but it was one of his most personally meaningful, owing to the subject. Most of Rembrandt’s surviving drawings are landscapes or figure studies; only six lion drawings by his hand are known. The other five reside in major museums—the British Museum (two believed to depict the same lion), the Louvre in Paris, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam. Young Lion Resting has already traveled to major institutions, including the Louvre (in both Paris and Abu Dhabi), the J. Paul Getty Museum in L.A. and the Pushkin Museum in Moscow. Estimated at $15-20 million, proceeds from the sale will benefit Panthera, the nonprofit Kaplan founded in 2006.

The Old Masters market saw a marked resurgence in 2025, with sales rising 68.8 percent to $282.5 million, supported by a 7.8 percent increase in lots sold, according to ArtTactic’s year-end report. While a new wave of cross-category buyers is increasingly driving the segment, the Old Masters market remains highly selective, with top-line results fueled by extraordinary works rather than routine offerings. In that context, the rarity, condition, documentation and presentation of the material coming to market this season appear primed to sustain the category’s renewed ascent.

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The art world can be challenging to navigate for non-insiders, and even more so for a young couple entirely new to the world of collecting. Yet research suggests that humans are instinctively driven to collect objects, images and other aesthetic traces that come to reflect a life, its movements and its memories. Carl Gambino and Sarah Ivory’s collecting journey began organically, as they brought back artworks from their travels—souvenirs not only of places, but also of human encounters, as they often sought out local artists. That early, unformed approach to collecting eventually evolved into something more deliberate and ultimately became intertwined with their professional lives and their growing family.

Observer met Gambino, who’s in real estate, and Ivory, who’s in interior design, in their two-floor riverfront home in Brooklyn Heights. Both are in their early forties, and they moved into the property with their two kids just a year ago. Even so, everything about their home feels not only highly curated in terms of the dialogue between art and furniture but also carefully calibrated and seamlessly integrated into the lived rhythm of a family home.

“We already had an existing collection to place, but I tend to move very fast when it comes to design in general,” Ivory, who curated the interior, said. “I also know that the art we bring in is almost always very colorful, so I try to keep the surrounding palette fairly neutral. That way, the color can really come from the work itself.”

Vibrant palettes and lively compositions dominate many of the works on view, punctuating the clean, minimal interior with vivid notes. The architecture favors neutral tones and warm materials, allowing the art to take center stage. “Sarah always loved incredibly colorful art. I was on a very colorful-art kick for many years, too, though lately I’ve found myself drawn to darker work,” Gambino reflected.

Much of this chromatic energy emanates from contemplative landscapes, lush forests and harmonious floral compositions—sometimes figurative, sometimes abstract—that engage in a quiet dialogue with the park’s greenery outside, coming alive as they are bathed in natural light.

A lyrical work by Tianyue Zhong, characterized by harmonious layers of nature-inspired abstract brushstrokes, is elegantly encased within a custom-made library. The structure also accommodates smaller artworks and design objects. “I wanted to create something special for Carl’s favorite piece,” Ivory explains, noting how the setup also facilitates frequent rotation, since smaller works can simply rest within the structure without the need for drilling. Still, works have already rotated multiple times throughout the house, as they try to display all that they’ve collected over the years at one point or another.

Carl Gambino grew up in New Jersey in an Italian American family, while Sarah Ivory was raised in Miami by a Colombian mother and an American father—both environments offering limited exposure to wild, expansive nature beyond the tropical coastlines. That untamed natural world is something they’ve both longed for. “I think we both love Europe, and we love being there. And I think we’re drawn to that feeling of nature in the work,” Ivory notes.

If contemplation of nature recurs across the collection, another equally present thread is found in intimate moments and fragments of daily life, often centered around domestic settings—a tablecloth, a corner of a room, an unguarded gesture. One of the artists the Gambinos have collected extensively is Claudia Keep, whose painterly practice—often focused on small formats—reveals the quiet complexity of quotidian moments.

Their collecting process is largely shared, though acquisitions often arrive with a sense of urgency—particularly on Gambino’s side—as he constantly scans for new talent and takes steps to secure works before an artist’s trajectory takes off. That pressure sometimes clashes with the pace of everyday life, but it’s a dynamic embedded in the market—and one that, for Gambino, makes discovery not only exciting but also timely.

Since he began collecting, Gambino has demonstrated not only a keen eye but also the tenacity to pursue his intuition relentlessly, activating every possible channel to secure works he believes in. He recalls calling, texting, and emailing repeatedly to obtain a piece by Alejandro Piñero Bello from the artist’s first gallery, KDR, just as his career was beginning to take off.

This, despite having actually discovered him much earlier—during a trip to Cuba that coincided with the Havana Biennial. “We were collecting very instinctively. If we went to Colombia, Cuba or other places, we would simply observe, try to meet some local artists and purchase a variety of works,” Gambino recalls. “In 2014, we went to Cuba during the Havana Biennial and visited what used to be a country club that had been converted into a massive art school, where Alejandro and many other Cuban artists studied. We ended up buying several pieces directly from students there.”

Recalling that time, the couple admits they knew very little about the system—the broader machinery of the art world. Ivory’s father was an artist, but not a commercially successful one. He understood the art world, yet never truly attempted to participate in it as a market. “I grew up around artists, but not the glamorous side of art,” Ivory recalls, describing a childhood shaped by precarity—by the tension between her father’s creative conviction and the necessities of everyday survival. Gambino’s experience was even further removed. “I was born in the city but grew up in New Jersey, in an Italian American family with absolutely no art education. The art in our house was more like home décor—things that literally said, ‘Your house is a home,'” he shares. “But for as long as I can remember, I’ve been drawn to art. I still feel that it makes life better, that it adds something essential.”

Their entry point was through key relationships that helped them find their footing in the art world. Early on, Gambino met Kim Hastreiter, co-founder of Paper magazine, who describes herself as an “obsessive collector.” She opened her collection to him and played a pivotal role in shaping his journey as a collector. Through her, he was introduced to Marsea Goldberg, founder of New Image in Los Angeles, a small gallery with an outsized impact, known for nurturing artists early while guiding new collectors. For Gambino, as for many young collectors, these early relationships proved foundational. “They taught me to buy only what I love,” he says.

Drawing on the soft skills developed through his real estate career, Gambino quickly learned that relationship-building was just as essential in the art world—not only for access, but also for timing, insight and, ultimately, negotiation.

From New Image, Gambino acquired one of their earliest contemporary works: a painting by Jeffrey Cheung. Though Cheung’s market never spiked dramatically, his colorful, playful and absurdist compositions—with figures multiplying as if to suggest the many dimensions of the self—continue to fascinate the couple. Over time, they acquired multiple works by him, as they did with other artists they deeply believe in, including Claudia Keep and Alejandro Piñero Bello.

For the couple, collecting multiples is both a way to support an artist’s trajectory and to assemble a meaningful group of works that truly reflects a practice. “Over time, and from other collectors, we picked up this idea that when you really believe in an artist, you try to live with more than one work. Two or three, if possible,” Gambino said. “That’s something we’ve carried through the collection—we own multiples of almost everyone we love.”

In just ten years, the pair’s collection has grown to over 100 works. What began as spontaneous passion gradually turned into something closer to obsession—particularly for Gambino. New works arrive almost every month, although they have attempted to establish a monthly budget, and Ivory diligently tries to archive everything digitally, keeping pace with Gambino’s rhythm proves challenging, as his acquisitions remain guided primarily by instinct, eye and emotion before any ratio. “There were periods this year when things just kept arriving—sometimes not small things at all. Like that huge wooden crate,” Ivory said. “I loved it. It almost turned into an obsession,” Gambino added.

Yet, the connection with both the work and its creator remains an essential part of the couple’s collection, which is why the focus stays firmly on emerging artists rather than celebrity names. That path, Gambino explains, is far more exciting and meaningful: it allows for collecting with intention, often with tangible impact on an artist’s career and, frequently, the formation of genuine relationships.

“I like the idea of supporting what’s new,” Gambino explained, noting how some of his collector friends—those more financially driven—question why he doesn’t concentrate on acquiring single works by established names. “I’d rather buy many works that I genuinely love and support the artists making them,” he said. “Art isn’t how I make money. I make money in real estate. If I want a safe return, I can put three hundred thousand into a property and know it’ll perform. With art, it’s different. It’s about the pleasure of living with it—wanting the work around you, every day, as part of your life.”

The sole blue-chip work in the collection is a David Hockney iPad drawing. But Gambino loves to be actively involved, supporting artists early and witnessing their ascent to blue-chip status, as has already occurred with artists like Pinero Belo and Marco Pariani. Then there’s British artist Rex Southwick, whom Gambino connected with through Instagram, and that connection became an ongoing exchange: Gambino would send Southwick photos of the villas he sold, Southwick would reinterpret them in his signature kaleidoscopically vibrant palette, and Gambino would gift the paintings to the homes’ new owners. As a result, Southwick’s work has since entered the collections of major celebrities and prominent families on both coasts.

On multiple occasions, Gambino has taken an active role in supporting artists beyond collecting—helping to place works, encouraging friends to buy and offering financial support when artists reach institutional milestones, such as LaKela Brown’s recent exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit.

But when it comes to introducing others to the art world, Gambino acknowledged that barriers remain. Friends with limited budgets often feel excluded, prompting him to encourage small beginnings—school shows, emerging artists, direct purchases. Friends with significant means face different risks—primarily being taken advantage of. “In both cases, I try to bring them with me, introduce trusted people, help them understand how it works,” he said. “The art world is a business, whether you like it or not. I don’t treat it like a business—it’s a passion—but relationships matter. That’s true in every industry. I just happened to spend years building them here, and fortunately, it intersects naturally with my work.”

Much has changed—both positively and negatively—within the ultra-contemporary segment where Gambino focuses. There is more work circulating now and greater accessibility, but also more filtering and increased difficulty in identifying who will endure. What feels genuinely encouraging, Gambino notes, is the growing recognition by major galleries of the importance of emerging spaces, and the shift toward collaboration rather than competition. “You see partnerships now—like Pace working with KDR—and I think that’s actually wonderful. That didn’t really happen before.”

They agree the ecosystem feels more approachable today than when they first started. “Galleries are quicker to show work, more open to access and less guarded. Some of the old games still exist—the pressure, the implied expectations—but we see far less of it now, especially as more work becomes available digitally,” Gambino reflected.

Many purchases now occur remotely, sometimes without the opportunity to see the work in person. “For certain works, if you don’t buy online, you simply won’t get them unless you’re willing to fly around the world constantly,” he said. “Sometimes I’ve seen other works by the artist before, sometimes it’s intuition and sometimes it’s trust in the gallery. That’s why relationships still matter.” He recognizes that this may be a generational aspect. Growing up digitally means being comfortable experiencing the world through screens, making younger buyers more comfortable with this particular structural reality of contemporary collecting.

Still, art fairs remain a central part of Gambino’s passion—and something he really enjoys. Despite becoming more selective about travel due to time and work constraints, the excitement hasn’t faded. “If I could, I’d go to every fair on the planet. Basel, Armory Week—that’s my favorite time of year,” he said. “I love real estate, I love my job, I’m grateful for it, but if I could spend most of my time just looking at art, I would.”

Gambino and Ivory’s relationship to collecting differs, yet it’s clear they complement one another. For him, the passion borders on obsession—returning to fairs day after day, rewalking aisles endlessly. For Ivory, one pass is enough. “We’re very different that way. He will go back to a fair every single day. I’ll walk through once, see what I like, and that’s it. I hit saturation faster,” Ivory acknowledged. But the balance works. One researches; the other responds instinctively. The final decision is always made together, and most often comes down to a simple question: do we want to live with this?

If Gambino and Ivory’s collecting began as an instinctive extension of travel and curiosity, long before they understood the art world’s complex machinations, a decade later, their Brooklyn Heights home tells the story of a collection shaped by relationships, intuition and a desire to live closely with art rather than speculate on it.

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This year, there’s no shortage of warm-weather art world detours for collectors who, after Christmas, are thoroughly done with the cold. Up front, this isn’t about fairs in different geographies competing for attention. Instead, it’s about regional expansion and the accelerating localization of the fair circuit. The global fair and art week calendar now gives different destinations comparable billing, and so where collectors go when happenings overlap is driven not by trendiness or the market but by their collecting priorities and their interest in what else a destination might offer beyond art.

For galleries, the question is whether a fair can realistically deliver access to clients, relationship-building and, increasingly, structural support that extends beyond sales. For collectors, the calculus is strikingly similar, as they look for opportunities for research, acquisition and taste development, as well as opportunities to connect more meaningfully with a creative ecosystem.

After more than a decade of fair travel—and having witnessed art scenes at vastly different stages of development as the circuit globalized—I find myself drawn to places I haven’t been yet, or haven’t been enough, where discovery and learning are still possible. What feels less rewarding is returning year after year to the same fairs, especially in regions I already follow closely, where the global brands increasingly present a homogeneous blue-chip lineup with only a handful of surprises tucked into curated sections.

Right now, in terms of February fairs and art weeks, Doha, Mexico City and Los Angeles feel less like competing options than distinct propositions. Their different formats, different vibes and different art offerings will naturally appeal to different collectors. Here’s what to expect at each.

What you’ll find at Mexico City Art Week

Choose Mexico City Art Week if you’re looking to connect—or reconnect—with a fully developed art ecosystem of galleries, museums and, above all, artists. This is a scene whose foundations were laid in the 1990s, when artistic communities held more sway over the conversation than market structures. The first Expoarte fair, in fact, came out of an initiative by artists and collectors in Guadalajara—Mexico’s second city—which still boasts one of the country’s strongest artist communities.

Over the past decade, the Mexican art scene has experienced significant growth, driven largely by internal forces, including the steady rise of local galleries and, most crucially, the launch of ZONAMACO by Zélika García in 2004, which provided Mexico with a durable international platform. For better or worse, the scene’s globalization accelerated during and after the pandemic, as Mexico City became a favored destination for travelers well beyond the art world.

Now in its 12th iteration, ZONAMACO’s 2026 edition will assemble 228 galleries from 26 countries across its main and curated sections. One section not to miss—especially if discovery is your priority—is EJES, dedicated to emerging talent from Mexico and the wider region. Curated by Buenos Aires–based Aimé Iglesias Lukin, EJES brings together galleries, hybrid spaces, and independent projects responding to this year’s theme of “exchange.”

For those looking to expand a Latin American–focused collection, Mexico City Art Week also offers access to some of the most compelling gallery programs in the region, with acquisition opportunities at far more accessible price points. In Mexico, you see something, you love it and you buy it. In the process, you may form a genuine human connection with the gallery, which is something deeply ingrained in Latin cultural dynamics. ZONAMACO’s additional sections devoted to design, photography, books and works on paper further broaden the field, making it possible to support Mexican and Latin creatives at virtually every scale and budget. The 2026 edition also introduces new sections, such as ZONAMACO FORMA, which focuses on the intersection of art and collectible design.

“I’m interested in seeing how different types of collectors respond, from those with long-standing experience to those buying their first work,” founder and director Zélika García told Observer. “There’s genuine excitement around emerging voices, artists, projects, and galleries that are shaping new directions, and that energy runs throughout the fair.”

Beyond ZONAMACO, Mexico City Art Week is defined as much by its satellite fairs as by its main event. Feria Material and SALÓN ACME, in particular, offer access to younger artists and galleries at similarly accessible price points—often just before broader market recognition. Feria Material’s relatively low participation fees have made it especially attractive to younger, research-driven dealers from around the world, who are drawn to the fair for its curated selection, sustainability and focus on experimentation over scale.

“From the outset, the intention with Material was always to complement ZONAMACO with another high-quality fair, but one that offers a more intimate and focused experience,” founder Brett W. Schultz told Observer in an interview, noting how “the human scale that we offer has been fundamental to ensuring that every exhibitor and visitor feels like they’re part of a meaningful, relevant and coherent conversation.”

Even more fluid in format—and less financially risky—SALÓN ACME offers emerging galleries, project spaces, independent artists and creatives a platform to engage both local and international audiences. Hosted in a soulful, multi-level historic building dating back to 1905, SALÓN ACME melds art, music and community: each evening, DJ sets activate the space, extending daytime programming well into the night and reinforcing the fair’s reputation as one of the week’s most energetic hubs.

Between fairs—or instead of them—Mexico City offers an exceptionally dense gallery landscape. From established leaders like kurimanzutto and OMR, which have played a central role in internationalizing Mexican art since the late 1990s and now anchor major global fairs, to long-standing spaces such as Labor, RGR, Proyectos Monclova and Lodos, the city’s gallery ecosystem is remarkably vibrant. Alongside these established names is a growing number of next-generation players increasingly present on the international circuit—Karen Huber, PEANA, General Expenses, LLANOS—as well as emerging voices such as JO-HS, Salón Silicón, Third Born and Campeche. The best way to experience them? Each night of the week tends to concentrate openings and events in specific neighborhoods, from San Miguel Chapultepec to Roma Norte and Sur, and as far as Nápoles.

Mexico City’s museums likewise offer an unparalleled depth of programming, with much of it timed to coincide with Art Week. These range from historical institutions like the Palacio de Bellas Artes, the Museo de Arte Moderno and the essential Museo Nacional de Antropología—which provides a deep immersion in ancient times and ancestral cosmologies—to the contemporary programs at Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo. The latter is opening its 2026 exhibitions during the Art Week—shows include a cross-cultural and cross-linguistic dialogue between Laura Anderson Barbata and Sheroanawe Hakihiiwe on indigenous cosmologies and epistemological and linguistic systems, and “The Gesture and the Invisible,” a group show that emphasizes the power of action and explores how the vital drive toward movement can produce collective synergy. Showcasing the breadth of its collection, the ongoing show “Futuros Arcaicos” stages a cross-generational conversation between modern and contemporary artists who find inspiration in the archaic.

Advance booking is recommended if you want to visit Museo Casa Estudio Diego Rivera y Frida Kahlo during this especially busy week, or for access to Luis Barragán’s architectural landmarks, but you can also visit the temple-like Museo Anahuacalli, home to Diego Rivera’s pre-Hispanic collection, as well as the newly reopened La Cuadra San Cristóbal—Barragán’s masterpiece of architecture and landscape—revived as a cultural space after its acquisition by Fernando Romero. Another Barragán jewel, Casa Gilardi, will also host a temporary exhibition this year, timed to coincide with the week. Further highlights include Museo Soumaya’s cross-period collection, Museo Jumex—which will still be hosting Gabriel de la Mora—and UNAM, which is slightly out of the way but well worth the trip for a Saturday visit, particularly for their must-see Delcy Morelos show.

Overall, Mexico City will probably be the most compelling destination for those seeking an art-filled escape with better weather and high energy, where serious art, exceptional food and constant daytime and nighttime activity. If your schedule allows, start your trip in Guadalajara, where the pre-MACO weekend—with its studio visits, new gallery openings, Zapopan Museo’s ambitious programming (the museum is currently hosting the first Mexico solo institutional show of Tino Sehgal), Plataforma’s growing presence as the city’s key art platform and the legendary Cerámica Suro gathering—offers an intimate and grounded glimpse into the Mexican artistic community at its source.

What you’ll find at Art Basel Qatar

Choose Qatar if you’re seeking a more institutional framework and are curious to see firsthand how the Gulf is utilizing a new model of art-led development to become a rising global power, both culturally and financially. The inaugural edition of Art Basel in Doha (which opens on February 4) is part of a broad political agenda grounded in substantial national investment in the arts, and it’s no secret that the country is investing heavily to ensure the success of the fair. Even as Art Basel has almost certainly received significant backing to bring its brand to Doha, the scale and terms of that support remain undisclosed.

This fair is the first in Art Basel’s history to be curated by an artist, with Wael Shawky at the helm. What is set to take shape is a more fluid, booth-free presentation—closer to an exhibition than a commercial fair—unfolding across M7 in Doha’s design district. Each of the 87 participating galleries will present a single artist under the curatorial theme “Becoming,” conceived as an invitation to reflect on humanity’s ongoing transformation and the systems that shape how we live, believe and produce meaning.

Shawky’s vision for Art Basel Qatar extends out of the Doha Fire Station’s new chapter: the creation of platforms capable of supporting sustainable, long-term growth for the region’s art scene, while allowing it to articulate its own voice and develop its own model. Almost 50 percent of the galleries participating in the fair are from the region, and “that’s very intentional,” he told Observer in an exclusive conversation ahead of the fair. Approaching Art Basel as an artist meant testing a new curatorial logic centered on focused solo presentations as the most effective way to truly valorize an artist’s universe and singular practice. “It was important that every gallery present just one artist, so that each presentation becomes almost like a minimal solo show,” he said, noting how at most fairs, works are removed from their original narrative and placed in contexts that have little to do with the artist. “Each artist will have their own world, their own logic. Otherwise, everything collapses into a kind of bazaar. That’s precisely what we’re trying to avoid.”

The selections for the first edition, however, still lean heavily toward historical figures and blue-chip names. Gagosian, for example, will focus on Christo, Hauser & Wirth on Philip Guston, Gladstone on Alex Katz and David Zwirner on Marlene Dumas, setting an overall tone of the fair that’s not necessarily in perfect alignment with Shawky’s intentions. But “you can’t isolate yourself from the world. You have to maintain a balance and stay in conversation with the international scene. That dialogue is essential,” he explained, emphasizing that placing artists from the region alongside such established names is key to building lasting international visibility. “It’s part of what we’re really trying to do here: to create a new language and to bring forward voices from the region.”

Roughly half of the artists presented hail from the MENA region, in a mix of historical and contemporary figures. These include internationally recognized names such as Etel Adnan with Anthony Meier and Iranian painter Ali Banisadr, alongside artists long deserving of broader exposure, like Turkish artist Nil Yalter with 1 Mira Madrid / 2 Mira Archiv; Qatari artist Bouthayna Al Muftah presented by Al Markhiya Gallery; Saudi artist Manal AlDowayan with Sabrina Amrani; Lebanese artist Walid Sadek with Saleh Barakat Gallery; and Saudi artist Lina Gazzaz with Hafez Gallery. Berlin-based carlier | gebauer will present the American video artist of Palestinian descent, Nida Sinnokrot. Representing Saudi Arabia, ATHR Gallery is highlighting Ahmed Mater, while Dubai powerhouse The Third Line presents Qatari-American artist Sophia Al Maria. From Beirut, Marfa’ Projects will showcase Lebanese multimedia conceptual artist Caline Aoun. Shawky’s curation also brings several Egyptian artists into focus. Thaddaeus Ropac will present the institutionally acclaimed work of Raqib Shaw, while Leila Heller Gallery will foreground the modernist Egyptian painter Wassef Boutros-Ghali. Alexandria-based painter Farida El Gazzar will be shown by Kalfayan Galleries, and ArtTalks | Kanafani Gallery will present the enigmatic paintings of Ahmed Morsi.

On both the programming and creative sides, one of the most compelling institutions in Doha is the aforementioned Fire Station, which has played a central role in artist development and cultural production for more than four decades. Originally built in 1982 as Doha’s Civil Defense headquarters, the building was repurposed in 2015 under Qatar Museums as the Fire Station: Artist in Residence. Now led by Shawky, it continues to support emerging and mid-career artists through a structured international residency program while serving as a hybrid space for artistic production, exhibitions and education. In Shawky’s vision, the Fire Station operates less as a conventional institution than as a living, multidisciplinary laboratory—one designed to help formulate the new language and alternative models he has repeatedly advocated for. Strategically positioned between the Museum of Islamic Art and the National Museum of Qatar, it functions as a bridge between heritage, national narrative and contemporary practice, effectively compensating for the absence of a dense grassroots ecosystem of art schools, galleries and independent organizations providing that critical space for experimentation, research, professionalization and international dialogue—all of which are essential to the long-term development of a sustainable local art scene.

On the other hand, if your interests extend beyond art, Doha is also home to the 3-2-1 Qatar Olympic and Sports Museum, which, through its immersive architecture and multisensory storytelling, ranks among the most forward-thinking sports museums globally. You might also opt to extend your trip to neighboring cultural hubs after Doha. The U.A.E., for instance, has a rapidly expanding museum landscape on Saadiyat Island and Dubai’s commercial gallery scene, along with periodically activated site-specific curatorial platforms such as Manar Art and the Sharjah Biennial—both of which have garnered international attention. Next door, Saudi Arabia has pursued a similar culture-led development strategy under Vision 2030, although it often relies more heavily on international consultancies. Opening later this month, the Diriyah Biennale—now in its second edition—has quickly established itself as a significant international platform connecting the Kingdom with the global art world.

What you’ll find in Los Angeles

Frieze Los Angeles at Santa Monica Airport comes hot on the heels of the offerings in Mexico City and Doha. Last year, L.A.’s tragic wildfires led to a noticeably more local fair, both in focus and attendance, and it’s likely we’ll see a similarly regional tilt this year—especially after witnessing how many international players didn’t make it to Miami. Still, with its 95 international exhibitors spanning blue-chip mega-galleries and younger programs, Frieze Los Angeles will activate a well-established ecosystem of top local institutions and nearby art districts, from the Hammer Museum, MOCA and LACMA to galleries across downtown L.A. and the Hollywood Westside. Then there are the auxiliary fairs:  Felix Art Fair and relative newcomer Post-Fair among them. Despite recent gallery closures, the scene remains dense, active and closely tied to a lively artist community—making the fair, and the city around it, very much worth the trip, for collectors willing to get on yet another plane.

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If we look closely at the time we’re living in, several unsettling parallels emerge with the Rococo period, both artistically and socially. Long dismissed as frivolous, Rococo eventually revealed itself as an aesthetic forged in the crucible of instability—a language of resistance shaped by ongoing cultural and societal crisis. Its signature deflections, its elegance, charm, sensuality and apparent naïveté were never merely decorative but rather deliberate strategies. In an age marked by political fragility, economic imbalance and the slow unraveling of ancien régime certainties, Rococo soothed collective anxiety without pretending it didn’t exist.

That anxiety was often exorcised through depictions of comfort, richness, cuteness and the idealized—qualities that came to define the era’s visual culture just as insistently as the images liked and shared across digital platforms today. Fast forward to modern times, and intergenerational interest in Old Masters has propelled the category to some of its strongest results in recent years. In 2025, sales rose 68.7 percent to $282.5 million, and the number of lots sold increased by 7.9 percent, according to ArtTactic.

I drew these parallels after the Frick Collection introduced New York to the feathery, dreamlike brushstrokes of Flora Yukhnovich via a contemporary art commission for what was once known as the Boucher Room. After learning that Christie’s Paris, with the Chefs-d’oeuvre de la collection Veil-Picard sale, is bringing to auction a group of 30 masterpieces from the collection of Arthur Georges Veil-Picard—including some true Rococo highlights—I found myself wondering how the Rococo period is performing in the market.

A recent Artsy report confirmed that collectors in 2025 have gravitated toward idyllic contemporary bucolic landscapes, comforting and familiar table gatherings and still lifes—soothing tableaus that Rococo often combined with remarkable fluency. Rococo artists were also the first to create tailored imagery to meet a new demand for taste, depictions of intimacy and domestic-scale paintings—qualities many collectors still look for in artworks today. Their approach to the relationship between artistic production, audience and market was indeed so modern that we might question whether they should truly be considered Old Masters or rather painters standing at the threshold of modernity.

A collection for the art history books

It’s worth considering what the Veil-Picard collection actually represents, as it has long been known primarily through black-and-white reproductions of works that remain among the most mysterious and coveted from this golden age of French art. Formed over several decades by collectors working deliberately outside the realm of spectacle, the collection prioritized connoisseurship, condition, provenance and scholarly significance. Its core emphasis lies in works that reveal process, social life and visual intelligence—qualities closely aligned with Rococo’s original cultural function.

Arthur Georges Veil-Picard, a banker and brilliant entrepreneur at the helm of the renowned Pernod distillery, was behind it. He began building the collection in the early 20th Century, first as a free-spirited amateur—self-taught, instinctive and deeply passionate about works from the 18th Century—before evolving into a discerning collector who, over the years, assembled truly important museum-grade treasures in his private mansion in Paris’s Plaine Monceau district.

Highlights from the collection include prime paintings and drawings by Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Hubert Robert, Jean-Antoine Watteau, Gabriel de Saint-Aubin, Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun and Marie-Suzanne Roslin. The top lot in the sale is a work by Fragonard, Veil-Picard’s favorite artist and a master of the Rococo style, titled Happy Family and estimated at €1,500,000-2,000,000. It is a quintessential example of the artist’s hand, with soft, virtuosic brushstrokes capturing a spontaneous and playful moment of familial affection and exchange—suspended between flirtation and pleasure with a typically Rococo erotic charge, subtly insinuated behind sliding silks, sprawled limbs and glowing flesh. These scenes are often tinged with melancholy rather than moral gravity. Of the various versions of the work, the one offered here is considered by scholars to be the first and most representative of Fragonard’s palette. Two other versions are held in private collections, and a preparatory study is housed at the André Malraux Museum in Le Havre.

Also coming to auction with an extraordinary provenance is another signature Fragonard, The Little Coquette, also known as The Peeping Girl (estimate: €400,000-600,000). The painting was previously owned by Hippolyte Walferdin, a great admirer of 18th-century art, and later by Count de Pourtalès. One of Fragonard’s seductive large wash drawings, Woman with a Dove, also came from Walferdin’s collection before being acquired by the Rothschild family (estimate: €200,000-300,000).

Standing among the most notable rediscoveries in the collection—and within the artist’s entire corpus—is a large sheet in red chalk and black stone by Antoine Watteau, described in his catalogue raisonné as coming “from an inaccessible private collection.” Reminiscent of the celebrated Pierrot in the Louvre, this image of a proud, delicately traced actor impersonating a hero or soldier of purely Rococo theatrical grace—Watteau loved to explore meditations disguised as leisure—is re-emerging for the first time not only at auction but also to the public, with an estimate of €600,000-800,000. Another playfully allusive and seductive drawing by Gabriel de Saint-Aubin offers a vivid glimpse into Parisian life, charged with subtle erotic tension; the artist depicts a painter and his model in the intimacy of the studio at a time when female nudes were forbidden at the Academy (The Private Academy, estimate: €150,000-200,000).

A market divided between important works and second-tier decorative material

The current auction record for a Rococo artist was set by Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s Portrait of François-Henri, 5th duc d’Harcourt, which fetched £17,106,500 (about $27.9 million) at Bonhams in London in December 2013. More recently, a rediscovered Fragonard painting of a woman with a hat sold at Drouot on December 21, 2023, for $3.5 million after fees ($2,746,182 hammer), almost four times its modest estimate of $440,000-660,000. Earlier, in November 2023, a 72 x 91 cm. oil titled Un sacrifice antique, dit Le sacrifice au Minotaure sold at Artcurial in November 2024 for $6,216,804 after buyer’s premium. Since then, only smaller works—often with less reliable attribution—have appeared at auction, generally selling in the five-digit range or going unsold, mostly at smaller regional auction houses. Only one Fragonard oil is coming up during New York’s February Old Masters week: a perhaps less immediately pleasing—but no less expensive—Head of a Bearded Man, offered by Sotheby’s with an estimate of $600,000-800,000. By contrast, Christie’s will present a gem of a drawing from the collection of Irene Roosevelt Aitken in February that was previously shown in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 2017 exhibition devoted to Fragonard’s drawings, with a more modest estimate of $200,000-300,000.

Meanwhile, when they do appear on the market, works by Jean-Antoine Watteau and Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun continue to command significant prices. The auction record for a painting by Watteau remains the rediscovered La Surprise, which achieved £12,361,250 (about $24.3 million) at Christie’s London back in 2008. More recently, one of his oil-on-canvas works, Le Pèlerinage à l’île de Cythère, sold for about €1.38 million at Christie’s in 2023, though substantial paintings by Watteau remain extremely rare at auction. In 2025, just a single—and not especially significant—oil on paper/panel by Watteau, depicting a small landscape devoid of human figures, appeared at Sotheby’s Paris, hammering at its high estimate of $206,866 (likely under guarantee) and reaching $262,720 with fees. Meanwhile, works on paper by Watteau continue to trade steadily in the mid-five-figure range, with all examples sold at Sotheby’s in 2024 exceeding their estimates. A very similar, though slightly smaller, drawing of a pompously standing man sold at Sotheby’s New York in January 2024 for $457,200 including premium, against an estimate of $120,000-180,000. Looking ahead, a drawing of a man playing the guitar by Watteau will be offered by Sotheby’s New York this February with a $700,000-1,000,000 estimate. The valuation is justified not only by its inclusion in the artist’s 1957 Catalogue complet, but also by its exceptional exhibition history, notably at The Morgan Library & Museum and The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The work is among the highlights of the Diane Nixon Collection, one of the most important drawing collections assembled in recent decades.

Vigée Le Brun’s record was set at Sotheby’s Old Masters sale in New York in 2019, when a 1788 portrait sold for $7.18 million—making it the most expensive painting by a pre-modern woman artist ever sold at auction. Still, the slightly more classical painter has continued to exceed expectations in recent auctions, particularly when the attribution is strong. Her oil Allégorie de la Poésie (1774) sold last September at Artcurial Paris for $387,226, surpassing its $94,445-141,668 estimate. Other works have landed within estimate, though a female portrait fetched $91,636 at a regional auction house (J.P. Osenat Fontainebleau S.A.S.). A double portrait in pastel on paper is coming up at Christie’s New York in February with an estimate of $500,000-700,000. It will be followed by an aluminous, idyllic pastoral landscape by François Boucher, offered with an estimate of $200,000-300,000. Boucher’s record remains $2,405,000 for The Sleep of Venus, sold at Sotheby’s New York on January 30, 2014.

These and other sales at auction suggest that what’s lacking is not demand for Rococo art among contemporary audiences but rather the supply of prime-quality works. The Rococo painting market is thin but highly sensitive to quality: when a truly museum-grade painting by a top-name artist surfaces with strong attribution and a compelling narrative, it can still command multi-million-dollar prices. By contrast, the broader field—less important compositions, workshop or circle works, “after” pictures and decorative genre scenes—is far less reliable.

Today, the market for Rococo—perhaps even more so than for other Old Masters—remains divided between important, iconic works and decorative second-tier material. “There is a real disconnect between important works and decorative ones,” Étienne Bréton, one of Paris’s leading Old Masters advisers, told Le Monde. “A large painting by Fragonard remains highly sought after, while 18th-century genre scenes are not worth much.” The issue is that attribution for these works is rarely binary (authentic vs. fake); rather, it is graded—autograph, studio, workshop, circle, follower, after—and most of the works resurfacing today fall in the lower tiers.

As Rococo artists operated within one of the earliest fully articulated art markets in Europe, they were often in such high demand that they actively produced versions of their compositions and encouraged replication. Studios and assistants played a major role in this process. Collectors frequently sought “a Fragonard” or “a Watteau-type” image, not necessarily the autograph work. The result is a market saturated with legitimate historical copies—many dating from the 18th or early 19th Century—not later fakes, but traded today through lower-tier auction houses as decorative objects rather than as true masterpieces. In many ways, this dynamic is embedded in the movement itself. Rococo artists were already navigating an early market economy shaped not only by royal courts but also by an emerging class of financiers, merchants, administrators and professionals who purchased art for their private interiors.

It’s a pattern that inevitably recalls any market cycle ending in saturation—when the proliferation of too many types of work dilutes originality, excitement and value. And the pattern feels unmistakably familiar today. Yet we’ve seen how Rococo-inspired artists such as Flora Yukhnovich have achieved strong secondary-market traction. Her auction record stands just above £3 million, set in 2022, with six-figure and high-six-figure results now routine for sought-after works.

The prime material, coming to auction at Christie’s Paris on March 25, speaks to a nostalgic desire for, and belief in, the illusory promise of charm and beauty—pleasing images capable of lifting the spirit amid today’s global tumult. Much as collectors are also turning toward more spiritually charged artworks, both now and in the past, Rococo offers access to alternate realms of intuition, sensuality and reverie. It stands in quiet resistance to a rational, technologically driven Western model of progress that has struggled to deliver the happiness and well-being it once promised. It will also be worth watching how the more esoteric charm of symbolist painter Jean-Michel Moreau performs, with two paintings illustrating festivities in honor of the Dauphin’s birth by the royal couple—respectively at the Hôtel de Ville (€300,000-500,000) and at the Palais Royal (€70,000-100,000).

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Local engagement is a foundational element in building the cultural capabilities that site-specific, art-led development can generate—often creating longer-term opportunities than strategies narrowly focused on international tourism. Too often, however, these events risk weakening ties with the very territories and communities they claim to elevate. A recent article in the Straits Times even questioned whether it might be time to shut down the Singapore Biennale altogether, describing it as “disconnected from the community, and inaccessible to even determined artsgoers.”

At the heart of this debate lies a question that biennials share with all cultural institutions: Who is the audience? In response, many of the most successful recent editions have shifted focus toward the specific contexts—historical, cultural and social—in which they unfold, prioritizing the involvement of local artists alongside deeper community engagement. In these cases, public programming is often central, not secondary.

“I realized the best way to do that was to understand the city and to do something meaningful for its reality,” curator Pedro Alonzo told Observer after the opening of the Boston Triennial. Accessibility and relatability, he suggested, are essential for a biennial to function and resonate first within the communities whose spaces it occupies. “The goal isn’t to produce a Swiss exhibition; that doesn’t work here. The goal is to create something that matches the soul and the conditions of this place, and that’s the connection I’m trying to make,” echoed Nikhil Chopra, curator of the recently opened Kochi Biennale. Rather than constantly crossing the globe, Chopra spent extended time traveling across India, visiting studios in different regions and engaging closely with emerging practices, while keeping accessibility at the forefront for a biennial where roughly 80 percent of the audience is local.

While every biennial is different, superstar biennials curator Hoor Al Qasimi told Observer, their impact on the host city and its local communities is essential. “A biennial has to engage with the city. It can’t be isolated,” she said. “The exciting ones are the ones that venture into public spaces, engage with people and develop as collaborative processes.”

If 2025 saw an especially crowded biennial calendar—with some events struggling to meet this fundamental premise—the arrival of a new year marks the return of major institutional biennials, including the historical and most influential Venice Biennale, alongside region-defining editions such as the Carnegie International and the Whitney Biennial. Here are the biennials not to miss in 2026.

The Venice Biennale, “In Minor Keys”

• May 9 – November 22, 2026
• Arsenale and Giardini, Venice

The 61st Venice Biennale will be the first edition to be held in the wake of a curator’s death before its opening. Titled “In Minor Keys,” the 2026 edition—conceived by South African curator Koyo Kouoh, who died in May 2025—promises a presentation designed to foster more attentive and intimate encounters with art and with the humans behind these artistic expressions. Envisioned as a kind of laboratory for retraining the empathy society appears to have lost, particularly in these turbulent times, the exhibition seeks to create spaces for listening, contemplation, exchange and understanding.

By staging introspective and deliberately scaled moments, Kouoh’s Biennale aims to counter the overwhelming and disorienting oversaturation of information—and disinformation—that has already marked the opening days of 2026. Fully aware of the Biennale’s role as “the centre of gravity for art for over a century,” in her own words, the exhibition is “a polyphonous assembly of art… convening and communing in convivial collectivity, beaming across the void of alienation and the crackle of conflict.”

The exhibition will be completed in strict accordance with the plan Kouoh developed with her team, which includes curators Gabe Beckhurst Feijoo, Marie Helena Pereira and Rasha Salti, critic and editor-in-chief Siddhartha Mitter, and assistant Rory Tsapayi. A full list of participating artists is expected to be announced later in February. In the meantime, many national pavilions have already revealed their representatives—not without controversy, as seen in the political debate surrounding the Australian Pavilion, which was forced to reinstate the previously dropped Lebanese-Australian artist Khaled Sabsabi and curator Michael Dagostino, the recent cancellation of Gabrielle Goliath’s
Gaza at the South Africa Pavilion, and the turbulence around the U.S. Pavilion, which ultimately concluded with the last-minute nomination of Mexico-based sculptor Alma Allen.

The Biennale of Sydney, “Rememory”

• March 14 – June 14, 2026
• White Bay Power Station and other locations in Sydney

The unstoppable Hoor Al Qasimi is curating the upcoming 25th Biennale of Sydney, following her widely acclaimed curation of the most recent Aichi Triennial and overseeing, as president and director of the Sharjah Art Foundation, the 2025 Sharjah Biennial. Titled “Rememory,” the 2026 Biennale of Sydney will explore the intersection of memory and history, remembering and forgetting, as recollection becomes an act of reassembling fragments of the past—often erased or dismissed—whether personal, familial or collective.

At the center of the biennial is an exercise in unearthing and highlighting marginalized narratives, sharing untold stories and encouraging reflection on how memory shapes identity and belonging. The exhibition aims to enhance recognition and understanding of the histories and connections that define the contexts and foundations of community. At its core is a quote by American writer Toni Morrison, which speaks directly to the need to contemplate histories and memories that have been sidelined, positioning them as possible counter-narratives to dominant accounts.
Since its founding in 1973, the Biennale of Sydney has maintained a dual commitment: engaging Australia with the world while playing a meaningful role in the life of the nation. In this spirit, the 2026 edition will bring together international artists alongside practitioners based in Australia for a collective exercise in reflection—on their own roots and on Sydney itself, its surrounding communities and layered histories.

This process of listening and retelling collective histories will unfold through works that revisit and reinterpret past events, tracing patterns that repeat and endure across time. Themes of migration, exile and belonging will be central, giving voice to stories from Aboriginal communities as well as the diverse diasporas that continue to shape Australia today.

The Whitney Biennial

• Opening March 8, 2026
• Whitney Museum of American Art

The Whitney Biennial has long been considered not only a defining event for contemporary American art but also a temperature check for the country’s cultural climate. Co-directed by Marcela Guerrero and Drew Sawyer, the 82nd Whitney Biennial is expected to take a softer, less confrontational turn. But that shift is not a retreat from politics; it’s already more apparent in the artist selection than in the curatorial concept itself.

Described by the curators as “a vivid atmospheric survey of contemporary American art shaped by a moment of profound transition,” the exhibition centers on what they call “forms of relationality,” encompassing human relationships, geopolitical entanglements and increasingly hybrid or non-human perspectives. Rather than putting forward a singular thesis, the Biennial will foreground mood and texture, inviting visitors into environments marked by tension, tenderness, humor and unease—while suggesting more conciliatory possibilities for coexistence within the social, natural and technological infrastructures that shape contemporary life.
Still, the exhibition—shaped through more than 300 studio visits across the U.S. and abroad—already reflects a deliberately expanded notion of American art. The intergenerational and international list of 56 artists is deeply informed by migration, diaspora and the long reach of U.S. power.

The 59th Carnegie International

• May 2, 2026 – January 3, 2027
• Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh.

As the longest-running exhibition of international art in North America, the Carnegie International has long served as a key moment in defining the state of contemporary art in the U.S. Yet its 59th edition aims to engage with a much broader notion of American art, embracing the multicultural and inevitably cosmopolitan dimensions of its identity—reflecting the globally interlaced reach of the country’s power and influence.

While the full list of artists will be announced in February, the names released so far already point to an international roster, with many artists based outside the U.S., including Aria Farid, Abraham González Pacheco, Arturo Kameya and Claudia Martínez Garay, Sanchayan Ghosh, Eric Gyamfi and Cinthia Marcelle, among others.

Curated by Ryan Inouye, Danielle A. Jackson and Liz Park—the Kathe and Jim Patrinos Curators of the 2026 Carnegie International—the exhibition maintains a clear focus on local engagement despite its global scope. The curators plan to transform the museum’s programs and spaces in imaginative ways while collaborating with partner institutions across Pittsburgh’s North Side and Hill District.

The curators described the exhibition as a collective attempt to re-imagine the 20th-century museum. “While organizing this exhibition,” they stated, “we have been thinking about ways of being in practice with art—the transmission of social, political and cultural knowledges, the energy and movement, which all unfold within kindred orders. In meetings with artists, we have found inspiration in artistic languages that affirm existence as a political condition and that share the experience of the geographies we traverse as vast, complex and dynamic.”

The Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale

• January 30 – May 2, 2026
• Diriyah and Ryahd, Saudi Arabia

Established in 2021, the Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale has quickly emerged as a top-tier global platform for contemporary art in Saudi Arabia—even as the Kingdom is only now beginning to expand its broader cultural ecosystem. This growth has been driven by local powerhouses such as ATHR Gallery, alongside Sotheby’s, which recently staged its first full-scale auctions in the Kingdom after years of charity sales that helped lay the groundwork.

Led by artistic directors Nora Razian and Sabih Ahmed, the 2026 edition—titled In Interludes and Transitions (في الحِلّ والترحال)—will unfold across the JAX District in historic Diriyah, near Riyadh. The exhibition will feature work by more than 70 local and international artists, including over 20 new commissions created specifically for the Biennale, many developed in direct response to the site and its context. At its core is the idea of passage and transition, long central to the nomadic cultures of the region and newly resonant within a contemporary global society defined by constant movement and change.

Drawing its title from a colloquial phrase evoking cycles of encampment and journey among nomadic communities in the Arabian Peninsula, this edition emphasizes the potential for connection and continuity even within states of flux. It invites a rethinking of the world in motion as an organic procession—entangling human experience with planetary, multispecies, spiritual and technological currents.
The international roster includes established figures such as Pio Abad, Petrit Halilaj, Gala Porras-Kim and Théo Mercier, alongside rising and prominent voices from the region, including Ahaad Alamoudi, Afra Al Dhaheri and Mohammed Alhamdan.

The 16th Gwangju Biennale

• September – November, 2026
• Gwangju, South Korea

Considered Asia’s leading contemporary art biennial, the Gwangju Biennale returns in 2026 under the direction of Singaporean artist Ho Tzu Nyen, acclaimed for his incisive explorations of Asian modernity. While many details—including the final curatorial concept and title—will be released in the coming months, his proposal centers on “the transformative power of art” as an imaginative and much-needed force in a time of global uncertainty.

As Tzu Nyen noted in his statement, this edition will bring together the energies, propositions, practices and ideas that have inspired and propelled his own work over the past two decades. “It will be an opportunity to explore how the practice of artistic transformation resonates with Gwangju’s legacy of democratic change,” he said, referencing the Biennale’s historical ties to the 1980 uprising that helped catalyze the end of South Korea’s military dictatorship. “Rather than delivering a single message, this Biennale will seek to generate propositions for change that are shared and shaped by all of us.”

Tzu Nyen, who represented Singapore at the Venice Biennale in 2011, is known for a practice that moves fluidly across film, video installation, sound and research-driven projects, examining how history, myth and power are constructed, transmitted and destabilized.

The Bronx Museum’s 7th AIM Biennial

• January 23 – June 29, 2026
• Bronx Museum, New York

Now in its seventh edition, the AIM Biennial has become a key talent-watching moment for artists rising in the New York area. Curated by Patrick Rowe, Education and Public Engagement, alongside Nell Klugman, the exhibition spotlights the two most recent cohorts of the museum’s AIM Fellowship program, which for 45 years has supported emerging artists through a year-long seminar designed to help them develop and sustain their careers.

Titled Forms of Connection, the 2026 edition brings together 28 artists confronting rising social fracture and proposing renewed frameworks for relation, connection and collective responsibility. Among them, performance artist Asia Stewart (AIM 2024) examines the legacy of empire in a video work depicting herself shredding a U.S. flag; artist and educator Piero Penizzotto (AIM 2025) explores the intricacy of community bonds through life-sized papier-mâché figures modeled after his students and colleagues; Cyle Warner (AIM 2025) presents a large-scale woven breeze-block tapestry that extends Caribbean traditions of decorative concrete into an architecture of memory; and through sculpture, Katie Chin (AIM 2025) draws on histories of labor strikes and acts of sabotage, inviting reflection on collective agency within inherited economic structures.

Manifesta 16

• June 21 – October 4, 2026
• Duisburg, Essen, Gelsenkirchen and Bochum, Germany

Conceived in the aftermath of the Cold War, Manifesta has, since 1998, operated as a nomadic artistic platform that changes host city every two years, often unfolding as a site-specific experiment. Each edition engages directly with local histories and communities, urban conditions and geopolitical fault lines, while situating them within broader European and global conversations. As one of the most context-responsive and politically attuned biennials, Manifesta functions less as a fixed showcase than as a process-driven experiment and civic platform rooted in long-term research and engagement. The 16th edition will take place across four cities in Germany’s Ruhr Area, activating 12 abandoned postwar church buildings across Duisburg, Essen, Gelsenkirchen and Bochum. The choice of site feels both particularly charged and resonant at a moment when, amid rising geopolitical tensions, Germany’s and the church’s power—as well as Europe’s political cohesion and global standing—have been repeatedly tested, exposing deep fragilities just as the threat of renewed conflict once again looms on the continent’s horizon.
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The 18th Biennale de Lyon

• September 19 – December, 2026
• Lyonne, France

The Lyon Biennial is among Europe’s most influential contemporary art biennials—and the leading and longest-running one in France—renowned for its strong curatorial vision and large-scale exhibitions. Staged across the city of Lyon and its surrounding industrial sites, past editions have frequently engaged with the city’s layered history, addressing urgent questions of labor, urban transformation and collective memory, often reactivating former factories, warehouses and infrastructural spaces as key exhibition venues. Leading the 2026 edition is curator, scholar and writer Catherine Nichols, who currently serves as curator at Berlin’s Hamburger Bahnhof—Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart, and previously curated Manifesta 14 Prishtina in 2022.

We expected it to open last fall. Then came months of silence. Now, at last, the delayed reopening of the New Museum has an official date: March 21. The 60,000-square-foot expansion—designed by OMA (Shohei Shigematsu and Rem Koolhaas) in collaboration with executive architect Cooper Robertson—will integrate seamlessly with the existing SANAA-designed flagship on the Bowery at Prince Street. The project doubles the museum’s exhibition space and dramatically enhances accessibility and circulation through three new elevators, a sweeping Atrium Stair and a redesigned entrance plaza—first revealed by the museum’s artistic director, Massimiliano Gioni, in an earlier interview with Observer. The expansion also adds major new public spaces, including an enlarged seventh-floor Sky Room and a 74-seat Forum for talks and events. On the ground floor, visitors will enter through an expanded lobby with a larger bookstore and a full-service restaurant operated by the Oberon Group.

When we spoke to Gioni, he shared plans for the reopening exhibition, “New Humans: Memories of the Future,” which brings together more than 150 artists, writers, scientists, architects and filmmakers in an ambitious, cross-disciplinary, cross-generational, encyclopedic presentation—very much in Gioni’s signature style, but also strikingly timely in its exploration of what it means to be human amid accelerating technological change. “The show will question how artists have envisioned the future, often predicting or dealing with shifting technological transformations while investigating how those transformations have ultimately changed our perception and representation of the self. It looks into the shifting definitions of humans in the 20th and 21st Centuries,” he said.

The list of participating artists spans from 20th-century historical figures such as Francis Bacon, Salvador Dalí, Ibrahim El-Salahi, H.R. Giger, Hannah Höch, Tatsuo Ikeda, Gyula Kosice, El Lissitzky, and Eduardo Paolozzi to recent works by artists who have emerged in recent decades, including Anicka Yi, Lucy Beech, Meriem Bennani, Cyprien Gaillard, Pierre Huyghe, Tau Lewis, Daria Martin, Wangechi Mutu, Precious Okoyomon, Berenice Olmedo, Philippe Parreno, Hito Steyerl, Jamian Juliano-Villani and Andro Wekua.

Described by Gioni as a “diagonal history,” one of the exhibition’s starting points is Karel Čapek’s 1920 science-fiction play Rossum’s Universal Robots—the first work to introduce the concept of the robot. Today, as artificial intelligence, robotics and digital technologies dominate public discourse, the exhibition feels uncannily prescient. “I think we live in a world that is overstimulated with information and images that can deal with vast amounts of information and images. Then, we have a nostalgic idea that a museum is a space of peace and calm. This show is, instead, very dense. We want to see what happens when the experience of looking at art is concentrated, as when we absorb images in our cellphones in our everyday lives.”

According to Gioni, the New Museum will be the first New York institution to mount exhibitions that directly confront the most urgent issues of our time. Despite the several-month delay—and the fact that related themes have since appeared elsewhere (most notably Lu Yang’s premiere at Amant Foundation)—the New Museum’s reopening exhibition still promises to be the most comprehensive survey of these questions, bringing a transgenerational and cross-disciplinary perspective to artistic, architectural, cinematic and photographic works spanning the past century and the present. “We have always been at the forefront of artistic trends and cultural issues. This show continues with this idea of exhibition as a tool to understand the world outside the museum,” Gioni said, describing this transhistorical approach as essential in a moment when a dangerously spreading historical amnesia threatens our ability to understand the present and imagine the future.

The new building allows the museum to expand on its production-driven mission. The upper floors now include a dedicated studio for artists-in-residence and a purpose-built home for the museum’s cultural incubator, NEW INC. “As a noncollecting institution, we can put a lot of our energy into truly supporting artists by working with them, producing works and finding the resources to make it possible,” he said. As part of this effort, the museum will debut a new commission, VENUS VICTORIA, by British artist Sarah Lucas in the entrance plaza. Lucas is the first recipient of the Hostetler/Wrigley Sculpture Award, a newly established biannual juried prize supporting the production and presentation of new work by women artists on the museum’s public plaza. Additional long-term commissions include a work by Tschabalala Self for the museum’s façade and a monumental sculpture by Klára Hosnedlová for the new Atrium Stair.

To celebrate the expansion, the museum will offer free admission on opening weekend. Beginning afterward, the New Museum will raise ticket prices: adult admission will increase from $22 to $25, tickets for seniors and visitors with disabilities will rise from $19 to $22 and student tickets will go from $16 to $19. Admission will remain free for visitors aged 18 and under, as well as SNAP/EBT benefits recipients.

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Riding the continued momentum of 2022’s The Milk of Dreams and the movement’s 100th anniversary in 2024, Surrealism—and particularly its long-neglected female visionary lineage—continues to gain traction through auction records and major international exhibitions. But this renewed focus on Surrealism and surrealists is not merely a matter of canon recalibration or market-driven revival. What is unfolding appears to exceed the constraints of the “surrealist” label altogether, which is too narrow, perhaps, to contain the breadth of what’s emerging. Rather than a passing aesthetic trend, this is a broader cultural shift that engages not only with the irrational but also with the symbolic, the psychic and the visionary as frameworks for both artistic practice and historical reinterpretation.

Seen alongside the parallel revaluation of Indigenous practices—most visibly foregrounded by Adriano Pedrosa’s 2024 Biennale, Foreigners Everywhere—and the slower but increasingly visible resurgence of outsider art, there is a clear renewed interest in and rediscovery of spirituality and alternative forms of knowledge involving magic and mysticism. One recent exhibition in Milan, organized by Fondazione Nicola Trussardi and curated by Massimiliano Gioni, Daniel Birnbaum and Marta Papini, offered a particularly thought-provoking cross-historical curatorial framework for considering what is becoming a broader shift in how curators are interpreting and framing recent art history.

“Fata Morgana: Memories from the Invisible” brought together the work of more than 70 figures—from writers and philosophers to mediums, mystics and clairvoyants—in a show that unfolded within the spiritually charged setting of Palazzo Morando, once home to Countess Lydia Caprara Morando Attendolo Bolognini, a figure at the margins of European spiritual modernism whose life blended aristocratic privilege with esoteric pursuit.

The exhibition placed overlooked historical visionaries in dialogue with contemporary artists through practices shaped by mediumship, ecstatic states and imaginative automatism—not to affirm supernatural claims but to retrace how belief systems outside dominant rationalist narratives have historically expanded definitions of art and belief while quietly reshaping social, gender and political imaginaries. Here, the surreal, the mystical and the magical emerge not as escapism but as a silent revolution of the imagination—one that feels acutely resonant with the shared needs of our turbulent present, and with what many contemporary artists are already attempting today, when read through these lenses.

What emerges is a shared symbolic lexicon and narrative framework that seeks to reactivate art’s most ancestral, primordial ritual function—using it both as a portal and a metaphorical code to access non-material realms of consciousness: dimensions invisible to ordinary perception but reachable through altered states of mind. For these artists, past and present, art becomes a tool for recovering meaning before and beyond the ideological and extractive logics imposed by late capitalism, reopening access to a deeper spiritual essence long obscured by both instrumental rationalism and the incessant noise of mass media and social media spectacle.

Most importantly, this kind of transhistorical journey reveals how different periods of crisis have historically produced similar and recurring revivals of esoteric and metaphysical thinking—largely because existing explanatory systems cease to feel adequate. When political, economic and ecological frameworks lose credibility, the promise of linear progress—along with official canons and dominant narratives—begins to fracture.

In this context, the phenomenon can also be read as a response to technophobia: a rejection of the uneasy entanglements—already visible at the start of the twentieth century and newly intensified today—between emerging technologies, para-scientific belief systems, disinformation and paranoia that increasingly call into question shared notions of truth.

This openness toward this mediumistic dimension of art appears today to be driven by a broader cultural and psychological attempt to reengage with the spiritual and psychic aspects of existence—realms that resist the purely functionalist and materialist narratives that have shaped society since the Industrial Revolution and its technological aftermath. Even if these works appear as mirages or hallucinations shaped by artists, self-taught creators and visionaries—”beacons in the night of meaning,” as André Breton once described them—they nonetheless offer glimpses into alternative ways of seeing and signifying reality at a time when prevailing frameworks have already begun to falter. They are not proposing solutions so much as different modes of perception—symbolic and often symbiotic—through which the reality of the cosmos, and our existence within it, might be reinterpreted and reimagined.

Beyond the now widely known, record-setting figure of Leonora Carrington and looking instead to artists such as Remedios Varo and Leonor Fini, we see that their work was fueled not merely by fascination with the mystical, but by profound engagement with it. For these artists, the canvas functioned as a portal: an intermediate space between the physical and the mythical, the imaginative and the psychic.

As foregrounded in the exhibition, for even earlier visionary pioneers of the still-uncharted paths of symbolic abstraction (e.g., Hilma af Klint, Georgiana Houghton and Wilhelmine Assmann) art was first and foremost about developing a symbolic lexicon capable of translating, often through deeply individual and transcendent states, the interconnected reality of all things. Their works give form to “thought-forms” that are both abstract and rooted in universal structures recurring in nature, offering what feels like a secret entry point into the collective unconscious. Notably, many of these artists worked on an epic scale, producing expansive symbolic narratives that flowed directly from their imagination, not unlike prophets—or at the very least, mediums—of cosmic messages.

Operating under the guidance of spirits and other supernatural presences, Hilma af Klint was among the earliest artists to develop a radically original form of abstraction—even before Der Blaue Reiter. By her explicit wish, however, this work remained hidden for decades: she forbade its public unveiling until twenty years after her death, convinced that her contemporaries were not yet ready to receive its message. As Julia Voss notes in the catalogue, these works conceived as originating in the astral realm required time to be understood in the material world. In her series Primordial Chaos from 1906–1907—the first chapter of The Paintings for the Temple, presented in her groundbreaking first U.S. retrospective at the Guggenheim in 2018—she already explores cosmic origins and primary dualisms, from male and female to heaven and earth, through a symbolic system of color and form rooted in Theosophical thought as much as in pure mystical illumination.

Around the same period, Emma Kunz developed a similarly charged form of abstraction, drawing on ancestral decorative systems used across cultures to connect with the divine. Working as a healer, telepath and artist, Kunz entered trance states to produce complex geometric drawings intended to reveal hidden energies and restorative forces. As Swiss curator Harald Szeemann observed, these works seek to reestablish a universal connection: through repetition and symmetry, Kunz created enclosed visual systems capable of momentarily channeling entropy into order.

Between 1926 and 1934, Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn produced some two hundred hypnotic images marked by Art Deco refinement and infused with sacred geometry, spirals, pyramidal forms and references to the third eye. These were accompanied by evocative titles such as The Portal of Initiation (1930) and Yoga and Meditation in East and West (1933). A comparable generative force animates the work of Madge Gill—recently spotlighted by the Gallery of Everything at Frieze Masters—whose obsessively intricate spiral motifs teem with feminine figures and spirits. Like af Klint, Gill rarely exhibited her work during her lifetime, insisting it did not belong to her.

In this lineage, the work of Emma Jung (1882–1955) is equally significant. Long overshadowed by her husband, Carl Gustav Jung, she was nonetheless a vital intellectual force within analytical psychology, particularly through her writings on the archetypes of Anima and Animus. Her recently rediscovered drawings and diagrams—several rare examples were in the exhibition—translate dream imagery and psychic processes into symbolic visual models of both individual and collective unconscious structures, imbued with a distinctly feminine sensibility.

Auction house performance in 2025 demonstrated how the major houses are increasingly forced to operate at scale rather than within narrowly defined niche economies. Sotheby’s and Christie’s have both taken steps to expand their audiences by engaging with a broader range of categories across wider price points. Notably, the third-largest auction house by turnover was not Phillips but Heritage Auctions, which reported $2.16 billion in total sales in dozens of relatively accessible categories, from prints and multiples to sports memorabilia, comic books and other cultural artifacts that have shaped the zeitgeist for generations.

To kick off the new year, Christie’s announced the auction of The Jim Irsay Collection, offering approximately 400 objects tracing pivotal moments in 20th-century music, film, sports and popular culture presented across four auctions taking place in New York between March 3 and March 17. Irsay, the owner and CEO of the Indianapolis Colts, was a deeply passionate collector who assembled a museum-quality trove of sports, music and cultural memorabilia over several decades. “Jim Irsay was an incredible collector with an eye for rare treasures tied to the most important moments in our collective history,” Julien Pradels, president of Christie’s Americas, confirmed in a statement, adding that the sale will give “collectors and visitors a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to view, be inspired by and bid on these objects.”

Among the highlights is a 1966 Fender Mustang guitar played by Kurt Cobain during the recording of Nirvana’s albums Nevermind and In Utero and featured in the music video for the band’s generational anthem Smells Like Teen Spirit. The instrument carries an estimate of $2.5 million to $5 million, a figure well aligned with recent market benchmarks. In 2020, another Cobain guitar—the 1959 Martin D-18E used during Nirvana’s iconic MTV Unplugged performance in 1993—sold for $6 million at Julien’s Auctions, setting a record for the most expensive guitar ever sold at auction at the time. Instruments tied to Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, Prince and Bruce Springsteen have likewise achieved mid-six- to seven-figure prices when linked to defining moments in music history.

Several top lots are connected to the most influential years of the Beatles’ ascent. These include John Lennon’s 1963 Gretsch Chet Atkins 6120 guitar, used during the recording sessions for Paperback Writer and Rain (estimate: $600,000-800,000), and Ringo Starr’s first Ludwig drum kit, played during hundreds of live performances and studio recordings between May 1963 and February 1964 (estimate: $1-2 million). Also offered are Starr’s iconic Beatles-logo drumhead from the band’s historic debut on The Ed Sullivan Show in February 1964 (estimate: $1-2 million) and his 9-carat gold and sapphire pinky ring, worn throughout his career with the band (estimate: $60,000-100,000).

Other music-related lots span genres and generations, from guitars owned by Green Day’s Billie Joe Armstrong (estimates: $8,000-12,000 and $6,000-9,000) to the Gibson Hummingbird acoustic guitar Bob Dylan played during the 1993 inaugural concert for President-elect Bill Clinton (estimate: $60,000-100,000). Janis Joplin’s Gibson J-45 acoustic guitar—on which she first learned “Me and Bobby McGee” and performed it publicly in 1969—is also included (estimate: $60,000-100,000), alongside Elton John’s iconic prescription glasses (estimate: $8,000-12,000).

For those who prefer jazz, the auction includes Miles Davis’s Martin Committee trumpet, played during his 1984 Montreux Jazz Festival performance (estimate: $100,000-150,000). And for the more poetic, there is Elton John’s Steinway Model D grand piano, used on tour from the mid-1970s and once loaned by Freddie Mercury (estimate: $600,000-$1 million).

Notable film memorabilia will also go on the block, including a Godfather production script—specifically a second draft in original black studio wrappers belonging to character actor Randy Jurgensen, who played “Sonny’s Killer #1”—estimated at $4,000-6,000, as well as Al Pacino’s annotated script for Scarface (estimate: $30,000-50,000), featuring handwritten notes related to the development of his Cuban accent. One of the most symbolically charged lots is a golden ticket from the 1971 film Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, estimated at $60,000-120,000, below the most recent result for a comparable golden ticket, which sold for approximately $137,500 in December 2022 at Heritage Auctions.

Cinematic icons have proven particularly resilient at auction in recent years. One of Heritage’s standout results in 2025 was the sale of Charles Foster Kane’s “Rosebud” sled from Citizen Kane, which achieved $14.75 million, making it one of the most valuable pieces of movie memorabilia ever sold. But the appetite for objects embodying era-defining storytelling extends well beyond film. Christie’s will also offer the original typescript scroll of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, the definitive Beat Generation novel, with an estimated value of $2.5-4 million.

Sports memorabilia continues to gain parallel momentum. The sale brings to market two era-defining boxing artifacts: Muhammad Ali’s WBC Heavyweight Championship belt, awarded after his victory over George Foreman in the legendary “Rumble in the Jungle” in 1974 in Kinshasa, now the Democratic Republic of the Congo (estimate: $2.5-4 million), and Ali’s fight-worn boots from the 1975 “Thrilla in Manila” bout against Joe Frazier (estimate: $200,000-300,000). The auction also includes a hockey jersey worn during Game 7 of the 1987 Stanley Cup Finals, estimated at $300,000-500,000, underscoring the premium attached to peak-moment artifacts across sports.

According to recent projections, the global memorabilia market is expected to grow from approximately $26.9 billion in 2024 to around $42.1 billion by 2030, reflecting sustained annual growth as collector interest broadens and more high-quality material enters the market. Music memorabilia is currently the most consistently active segment, followed by film, with sports sitting slightly apart as the largest by volume and liquidity overall, although it more often transacts at lower price points.

Even within music memorabilia, where the market is currently dominated by rock, punk and pop icons from the 1960s through the 1990s—figures able to resonate simultaneously with boomers, Gen X and older millennials—it will be revealing to watch how the next generational shift unfolds, with listeners leaning more toward K-pop, Bad Bunny and other new icons that have helped dislocate the market from its U.S.- and U.K.-dominated base. K-pop trading cards and limited releases—particularly BTS—have already seen an active secondary market with prices on platforms like eBay and other specialized sites, though still priced in the hundreds rather than the hundreds of thousands.

These new pop cultures, along with other digitally native phenomena, have built massive, intensely participatory and transnational fandoms, which may fully reshape notions of what constitutes “iconic” objects. We can already see this in, for instance, the Pokémon and sneaker markets, as next-gen nostalgia drives new buying trends. And so the memorabilia market thrives at a time when the oversaturation of visual and audio culture has made the emergence of new, widely shared icons increasingly rare. More critically, the accelerating pace of social, technological and cultural change—often overwhelming in its speed—has deepened the impulse to cling to objects that once anchored a symbolic world, offering continuity, meaning and belief in an environment where even reality feels unstable. The convergence of emotional attachment, scarcity, liquidity and narrative resonance has drawn a growing cohort of crossover collectors who view memorabilia not merely as lifestyle-driven alternative assets but as enduring vessels of cultural memory capable of preserving and transmitting collective history across generations.

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Venezuela is home to the world’s largest reserves of oil and gold, hence today’s geopolitical focus on the country, but for decades, it was also one of the most vibrant international centers of artistic and cultural life. That is, until much of its intellectual, creative and collecting class was gradually forced into exile, first under the Chávez regime and later during the continued rule of President Nicolás Maduro. They are among the more than 7 million Venezuelans who have migrated in response to ongoing economic and political crises, with the vast majority leaving during Maduro’s tenure. Yet many others stayed and continued—resiliently—to open exhibitions, work in museums and galleries and, perhaps most importantly, make art.

For days now, I have been gathering stories and voices from Venezuela’s artistic and cultural community, both within the country and in the diaspora. As an Italian who has long moved through the international art world, I’ve been in close contact with many Venezuelans—dear friends—who share the pain of distance alongside the enduring hope of return. I wanted to center the human side of what’s unfolding through the lens of art, at a time when global attention is on oil and the larger games of political and economic power. The word that comes to mind is resilience, paired with a clear awareness of what Venezuela’s cultural scene once was and what it continues to be. Thank you to all who have shared so generously. I will shape this work into chapters that move across time, context and voice. This first chapter feels like the necessary beginning: a look back at what Caracas was—and at those who still hope for its return to the artistic and cultural splendor it once reached, built on a belief in culture-led development that continues to resonate globally.

Venezuela’s postwar golden period: art as public infrastructure

In the immediate postwar years, Caracas shone as an international art hub. At the start of the 20th Century, Venezuela was largely agrarian and politically unstable. But the discovery and export of vast oil reserves transformed both its economy and its state institutions. By the mid-20th Century, Venezuela had become one of the world’s leading oil producers, fueling rapid urbanization and, for long stretches, political stability and relative prosperity compared with many of its neighbors.

Although the country increasingly became a rentier economy—overly dependent on oil exports, with weak productive diversification and deepening corruption that would later pave the way for Chávez’s attempted military coup—it was during this period (1958-1990) that the state used oil revenues not only to fund industrialization, social programs and infrastructure but also to embed culture directly into the nation-building project.

Extractive revenues were invested in architecture, universities, museums, public art and cultural patronage—treating culture as public infrastructure for the future. In 1974, internationally acclaimed kinetic artist Carlos Cruz-Diez designed the chromatic floor environment at Simón Bolívar International Airport, transforming a transit space into a perceptual experience. As early as the 1970s—well ahead of comparable developments elsewhere—the stations of the Metro de Caracas featured integrated works by Jesús Rafael Soto, Carlos Cruz-Diez and Alejandro Otero, reinforcing the idea that abstraction could inhabit mass public space as a way to reimagine relationships between people, place and the future.

Museums, universities, theaters, orchestras and public art commissions were supported as civic infrastructure, reflecting a pioneering belief that cultural investment was key to national development and international influence—placing art and culture at the center of the political agenda, not unlike what we see today in parts of the Gulf. Venezuela anticipated this model early on and, crucially, never stopped believing in it—shaping an entire generation of artists and collectors with few equals in the region or beyond at the time.

This cultural flourishing did not emerge in a vacuum. As New York-based, Venezuelan-born dealer Henrique Faria emphasized in conversation, the country had long been dominated by a small group of landowning elites. Many were educated in Europe, particularly France, and belonged to a highly cultured class deeply connected to European intellectual life—especially in Paris, which, between the 1920s and 1940s, stood as the global center of art and the avant-gardes. This transatlantic connection predated the postwar exodus and laid the groundwork for the extraordinary flowering of Venezuelan culture in the 1960s and 1970s, when the country consolidated one of the most sophisticated art scenes in Latin America.

One of the masterpieces that best embodies the spirit of that era is the Ciudad Universitaria de Caracas, now recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage site. “When the Universidad Central was built, that moment really consolidated the integration of art into Caracas,” recalls Faria. Conceived by Carlos Raúl Villanueva as a true synthesis of the arts, the campus permanently integrated works by a select group of Venezuelan artists alongside internationally renowned masters, including Alexander Calder, Fernand Léger, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Wifredo Lam and Victor Vasarely. Calder’s Floating Clouds, engineered as an acoustic ceiling for the Aula Magna, remain one of the high points of his ability to merge organic abstraction with architecture, sound and space. Inaugurated in 1954, the UCV formed part of a larger wave of national university projects across Latin America, each intended to send a clear message to the world: We are modern, and, like the French, we have our own Cité universitaire.

Venezuelan artists Jesús Rafael Soto, Carlos Cruz-Diez and Alejandro Otero—as well as internationally celebrated figures such as Gego—actively participated in this project. Many were part of the so-called dissidents, a generation of artists who received state support to study in Europe. Inspired by early avant-garde movements but extending their vision into the public realm, their kinetic, optical and chromatic abstraction was understood as a democratic visual language—one that bypassed literacy, ideology and class to activate collective imagination and reshape how citizens perceived space, movement and one another.

Caracas emerged as one of the leading laboratories of Modernism in Latin America, anticipating—and in many ways exceeding—the ambitions later crystallized in Brasília. “When we were children, you could go to friends’ houses and see Picassos, Juan Gris, Francis Bacon,” Faria recalls of growing up in Caracas in the 1970s. “None in Latin America was at the level of sophistication—and most importantly, the breadth of collecting—that Venezuela had at the time.” He even remembers a collector couple who built the most extensive Morandi collection in Latin America, later attempting to donate it to a state no longer willing—or able—to accept it.

Standing as a testament to this golden era of international exchange is Villa Planchart, designed by Gio Ponti for Anala and Armando Planchart on a hill overlooking Caracas. Now regarded as a manifesto of Tropical Modernism, the house was conceived as a total work of art—from custom furniture to ceramics. Envisioned by Ponti as a “machine to be lived in,” it plays with light, geometry and open space while achieving a seamless integration with the landscape, in dialogue with contemporaneous works by Frank Lloyd Wright.

But the major milestone that solidified Venezuela’s position in the international art community came in 1974, when, under the visionary leadership of cultural figure and journalist Sofía Ímber, the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Caracas opened its doors. Built in a transformed auto parts shop, the museum quickly evolved into one of Latin America’s premier institutions, with a remarkable collection of more than 4,000 works by Venezuelan modernists alongside international figures including Picasso, Joan Miró, Bacon and Calder.

Venezuelan-born, New York-based art advisor Maria Brito recalls how formative the museum and its collection were to her early relationship with art. Her grandfather had been a major collector whose passion passed to her father, who was closely connected to the Venezuelan avant-garde. She remembers visiting Jesús Rafael Soto’s studio as a child and seeing her first Rauschenberg at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo. “I used to go to the museum, which was absolutely wonderful,” she says, acknowledging how her sensitivity to art likely began with those early aesthetic encounters.

Venezuelan artist Johan Galue, still based in Caracas, also remembers the country’s cultural scene as though opening an album that smells of fresh oil paint. “It’s not just about thinking back to what once existed, but about what shaped me, what made me feel that I, too, was part of something bigger: a community of creators who breathed art into every corner,” he shared with Observer.

I also spoke briefly with Sofía Ímber’s daughter, Adriana Meneses. Before her birth in 1959, she explained, her parents lived in Europe for nearly a decade, moving between Belgium and France. It was during that period that her mother met Picasso. “He was already well known by then, and we even have photographs of her with Picasso,” she notes, confirming how deeply embedded her parents were in the international art scene. Those connections later enabled Ímber to secure exceptional works for Caracas’s new museum, once the state allocated acquisition funds. Ímber was a true connector—intuitive, tireless and effective. “She had something really special: her personality was incredible, and she had an extraordinary way with people,” Meneses recalls. “She was very deliberate in how she connected with them, and I think she had a kind of magic touch. She attended every fair and every gallery. She worked relentlessly to secure the very best prices for Venezuela.” Over the years, many other significant works entered public collections through private families and collectors.

Around the same time, a pioneering program supporting Venezuelan artists abroad was strengthened under President Carlos Andrés Pérez and led by Leopoldo López’s father through Fundación Gran Mariscal de Ayacucho, enabling them to pursue studies overseas and attain high levels of education, while being immersed in international art and culture.

As Meneses recalls, many internationally recognized artists were regular visitors to Venezuela. She remembers Rauschenberg visiting their home, and how extraordinary it was to listen to him talk. She would never forgot how, while he was installing the show at the museum, around eleven am he would always have a Scotch on the rocks. “For us, it all felt completely normal. We didn’t think much of it because it was just our everyday life. Writers, musicians, artists—fine artists—were always around. People would come to the house, eat with us and stay with us.” That story alone deserves a separate piece.

When things started to change

Back to reality: since 1999, following Chávez’s gradual shift toward authoritarian rule, many of these cultural institutions have fallen into prolonged neglect. Venezuelan museums became almost entirely reliant on state funding, stripped of the autonomy to manage their finances or seek private support. As inflation soared past 10 million percent, government contributions became effectively worthless, leaving staff with symbolic salaries and institutions operating in unsafe and inhumane conditions. As New York-based Venezuelan lawyer Denise Rodríguez Dao reported in her Substack, The Incurable Humanist, she witnessed the collapse firsthand before being forced to leave the country after her father’s assassination.

“During my internship at the Contemporary Art Museum of Caracas (2017-2018), I witnessed this collapse firsthand: non-functional fire extinguishers, no air conditioning, minimal security and artworks deteriorating from humidity and fungus,” she writes. “Despite this, longtime employees showed up every day out of pure devotion to art, earning salaries that couldn’t cover a single day’s meals.”

In 2001, Chávez publicly dismissed Sofía Ímber during a live radio broadcast, accusing her of elitism and purging her and the museum’s entire board, replacing them with political loyalists. In 2017, under Maduro, the museum was renamed after Armando Reverón. “Posters warned, ‘Aquí no se habla mal de Chávez.’” Employees lacked money for transportation. One colleague took his own life, unable to pay basic bills. Many relied on CLAP food boxes, Rodríguez Dao wrote. These experiences shaped her understanding of art, law and politics, and later informed her master’s thesis at Christie’s Education, which was dedicated to the legacy of Sofía Ímber and Patricia Phelps de Cisneros and their role in shaping the fate of Venezuelan art through their vision and collecting practice.

While the Cisneros collection is perhaps the most widely known for its contribution to repositioning Latin American modernism within global art history, it is far from the only story. Many other Venezuelan collectors, patrons, artists and cultural professionals now living abroad have long hoped for the day they might return home.

Around the same time, a pioneering program supporting Venezuelan artists abroad was expanded under President Carlos Andrés Pérez and led by Leopoldo López’s father through Fundación Gran Mariscal de Ayacucho. The program enabled many Venezuelans to pursue studies overseas and receive a world-class education. Throughout the 1970s and into the early 1980s, Venezuelans traveled widely and remained deeply immersed in international art and culture.

A similar memory of Venezuela at the moment of collapse was shared by Venezuelan-born, now Miami-based artist Bernadette Despujols, recalling her last visit to the country in 2018 for a solo show at Cerquone Projects. “At that point, Caracas was extremely dangerous, and there was a severe food shortage. It was awful. Things improved slightly later, but at the time, it was very harsh,” she says, remembering how she brought toilet paper and shampoo from her hotel to give to her cousins. At the opening, there was only one bottle of whiskey to share, and the entire budget went toward hiring two security guards. The curator did not attend—her home had been robbed the day before.

Despujols’s work focuses on portraits and faces of Venezuelan people, reflecting identity from multiple vantage points: those who have left, those who remain and those suspended between memory and longing. Her recent work draws on images sent by photojournalist Federico Ríos, who documented Venezuelans crossing the Darién Gap. She describes these migrants as silent heroes, whose journeys expose the scale of Venezuela’s crisis while also embodying its resilience. “I’m in my studio, looking at these photographs, and they’re just devastating,” she says. “At the same time, I try to balance that with the happiness and joy in my own life. I’m a mother, I’m happy and I don’t want everything to revolve solely around pain… I think that impulse—to bring joy even into the hardest moments—is also very Venezuelan.”

According to local curator Humberto Valdivieso, contemporary Venezuelan art has been shaped by what he describes as an estremecimiento—a profound shudder marking both its aesthetic and social dimensions. “The country’s unending crisis, echoed in much of the world, has deprived artists of stable referents: landscapes, bodies, times and identities have become fleeting gestures,” he reflects. “Venezuela exists both within and beyond its geopolitical territory; ours is a wandering nationality.” This condition, he argues, has rendered Venezuelan artists nomadic, with heterogeneous practices that cannot be separated from the country’s fractured reality.

Adriana Meneses, who had just returned to Caracas in September, described the city’s cultural institutions in a slightly improved state, a view confirmed by several other sources. Following articles in The New York Times and El País denouncing the post-pandemic degradation of key museums, the government had begun taking steps toward restoration. Teatro Teresa Carreño, a cultural landmark in Caracas, was among the first to be restored, followed by renovations of public sculptures and key museums within the city’s public parks. Efforts extended to the Galería de Arte Nacional, the Museo Alejandro Otero, and the Carlos Cruz-Diez Foundation, which resumed activity. Sala Mendoza, a private foundation that, as Faria notes, has consistently staged exhibitions over the years—particularly now—also remains active.

Another person on the ground in Caracas also confirmed that things had started to shift. Even if museum programming may no longer match the level of the past—and no international exhibitions have been staged there in years, largely due to insurance constraints and the risks involved in mounting major shows under current conditions—the fact that the state has begun to pay attention is seen by many as a meaningful first step.

Meneses echoed this sentiment, sharing her surprise at the abundance of cultural activity she encountered during her most recent visit. She recalled attending several exhibition openings last September, along with concerts and other events. “I was really impressed by how many openings and cultural events were happening. It felt incredible. People said the commercial side was very difficult—that selling work was hard and everything felt frozen in time—but the openings themselves were packed. They were incredibly crowded. People were eager to go out, to see each other, to see what was happening.” Venezuelan and Paris-based artist Elias Crespin had just opened a major show that week, which drew thousands of attendees, according to Meneses.

“There’s a deep understanding of art that stays with you,” echoes Faria, explaining why Venezuelans connect so easily with art and why international galleries and art fairs have engaged with the country for decades, bringing artists from around the world. “That history still matters,” he emphasizes.

“There was even an internal joke that all Venezuelans are photographers, or that all Venezuelans are artists,” says Juliana Sorondo, a young Venezuelan expat who now runs her gallery, Sorondo Projects, from Barcelona. “We’ve always been deeply connected to the idea that making art is necessary, that it’s part of the culture. When I was growing up, it was very common to ask kids what they wanted to be and hear answers like, ‘I want to be a fireman,’ but also, very naturally, ‘I want to be an artist.’ It was part of our identity.”

Sorondo sees it as essential to remember that Venezuelan artists are present, active and speaking through practices that span continents—not only in Venezuela but also across the diaspora formed by those who left in search of a better future. “I just hope to contribute, and I take this responsibility very seriously,” she notes, describing Sorondo Projects’ intentionally nuanced political and educational approach to showing the diversity and complexity of Venezuelan and Latino culture today—not only in her gallery space, but also through participation in international fairs. “The continuity of our lives—of Venezuelan life—was disrupted, but for those of us who were lucky enough to find work abroad, many of us tried to stay true to who we are,” she says. “We kept talking about identity. We kept trying to stay connected to Venezuela in some way.”

An art scene that never wavered

Even during the darkest moments, artists persevered. As the co-founder of Caracas-based gallery Abra—one of the few in Venezuela that still maintains an international presence—shared, the team had just closed for the holidays, giving them a rare pause to reflect and plan next steps. Otherwise, the gallery has remained active, hosting regular exhibitions and participating in international fairs, despite the compounding challenges of the global art economy and the uniquely difficult conditions of operating in Venezuela over the past several years.

Founded in 2016, Abra emerged at a time when the local market had all but vanished—radically reduced from what it had been just a few decades and political turns earlier. From the outset, the challenge was clear: to give their artists visibility beyond Venezuela. That meant seeking alliances with other galleries and creating long-term pathways for exchange. “We have tried to create a space where the public—but especially the artists and our team—feel safe, seen and valued,” one of the co-founders shared with Observer. “I guess, somehow, we are used to facing difficulties, and I try to see that as a strength. Our aim is to make the work of an amazing group of artists visible; to create opportunities for them and to be able to offer our team a secure and kind workspace.”

They acknowledge that the near-total absence of public and private funding for culture—as well as the broader collapse of the welfare system—has made every cultural actor vulnerable and the work undeniably harder. But these same conditions have also shaped a kind of durable resilience: a constant problem-solving state that fosters adaptability and, in many cases, innovation. Still, constant survival mode has its limits. It leaves little room for longer-term strategic thinking, or for building a more collaborative, interconnected gallery ecosystem—like the one that once existed in Caracas during the height of the city’s international art fair, FIA, which for years attracted major dealers from around the world and recorded record-breaking sales on Venezuelan soil.

As Abra co-founder pointed out — a point that was recurring throughout our conversations — is that many Venezuelan artists have continued to find ways to work through successive crises—some from within the country, others from new homes abroad. Several galleries today maintain consistent programs, present strong exhibitions and participate in fairs. There are also independent spaces for dialogue, where artists and researchers share ideas, and where performances, poetry readings and other formats unfold with creative urgency. “There was some kind of normality, until the recent days,” she shares. “What’s going to happen now, we do not know. I am fairly certain that we will adapt, find solutions to the obstacles and keep up with our work; at least, that is what recent history has shown me about us. We are very resilient; we want to have beautiful lives, and we are going to keep putting in the effort to make that happen.”

This resilience—and irrepressible sense of hope—recurred across conversations, as did a deep love for and belief in Venezuelan culture and identity. “The years from 2000 to 2025 were difficult, but they also revealed a quiet resistance, as artists continued to create out of conviction even as spaces disappeared,” artist Johan Galue confirmed. Guided by figures like Cruz-Diez and Soto, and inspired by artists such as Jacobo Borges, Emilia Azcárate and Deborah Castillo, Galue and others who remained in Venezuela found ways to continually reinvent their gaze. “I remember the fragile yet vital spaces that survived through collective effort—Oficina #1, El Anexo and, in Maracaibo, the Julio Árraga School—born from living rooms turned into studios and improvised art fairs driven by passion. Being part of this community has shown me that creativity always finds a way, sustained by generosity, resilience and a shared refusal to let art disappear.”

Despite ongoing challenges, the persistence of Venezuelan artists and cultural professionals remains a testament to the country’s creative strength. The founder of Tarsinian Gallery—active since the 1970s in championing Venezuelan artists both inside the country and abroad—remarked on this enduring commitment, which continues to shape the scene today. The gallery has actively supported recent exhibitions by artists like Johan Galue and sees continuity in their efforts. “Artists and art professionals continue to work both inside and outside the country to keep Venezuelan art alive, and their commitment is a ray of hope for a better future. In this context, it is exciting to see how the Venezuelan art scene continues to evolve and find ways to express itself. From painting and sculpture to music and dance, Venezuelan art is a celebration of the country’s identity and creativity.”

Most of the dealers we spoke with—both inside and outside Venezuela—shared a common priority: the preservation and promotion of Venezuelan culture above any broader commercial interest. Faria, in particular, has remained deeply engaged in building connections between artists and institutions, supporting exhibitions, acquisitions and museum partnerships that bring both Venezuelan masters and rising talents back to the center of the international stage. “We’re supporting the shows directly because one of the biggest problems in Latin America is the lack of platforms. There just aren’t enough local structures, so we have to find ways to connect artists to institutions elsewhere,” he says, emphasizing that what Venezuela lacks today is not talent or energy, but infrastructure—something that, in past decades, often existed more robustly there than in neighboring countries.

“We’re all working separately, in different pockets of the world, trying to stay in touch and remain connected,” echoes artist Bernadette Despujols, referring to the intangible yet enduring community of Venezuelans across the globe. “We’re there for each other, even if we don’t always have spaces where we can be fully represented or heard.”

For galleries run by Venezuelan expatriates—such as Henrique Faria in New York, RGR in Mexico City, Tarsinian Gallery and Sorondo Projects in Barcelona—the mission is rooted in what Faria describes as “cultural resistance” and persistence. “It’s a form of resistance through culture. We don’t position ourselves as overtly political, even though art is inevitably political,” he says.

In the current moment, many of the Venezuelan artists, cultural workers and collectors we interviewed expressed a cautious sense of relief—and hope. “As a Venezuelan, I wish for peace and truly free and fair elections after two decades of dictatorship. I hope for justice,” said ceramic artist Samuel Sarmiento, originally from Venezuela and now living and working in Aruba, who recently had a breakthrough solo exhibition at Andrew Edlin Gallery in New York.

Even from this first, multi-layered chapter of the story, it is clear how many different perspectives must be considered when understanding Venezuela’s artistic and cultural trajectory today. The situation remains fluid, complex and contradictory—with many shades of truth, hope, pragmatism, resistance and resilience. If the potential capture or transition of Maduro carries broader international implications and places Venezuelans once again at a point of uncertainty, it also marks a possible turning point—a threshold between what was and what still might be. Despite everything, Venezuela still holds the possibility of something new.

In a year defined by market calibration—especially on the ultra-contemporary front—very few young artists have truly emerged. One of the rare exceptions is 28-year-old Pakistani and New York-based artist Aiza Ahmed, who in 2025 achieved rapid, sustained recognition across two key regions: the art world’s center in New York and the rapidly expanding cultural ecosystem of the Gulf. Her enthusiastically received debut solo at Sargent’s Daughters closed only weeks ago, yet she is already preparing for the inaugural edition of Art Basel’s Qatar in February, where she will be one of the youngest artists featured in the fair’s curated exhibition format led by artist Wael Shawky. Although she was awarded last year a year-long residency at Silver Art Projects, Ahmed is now splitting her time between her downtown Manhattan studio and the MENA region’s most prestigious residency at the Fire Station in Doha, also directed by Shawky. She spoke with Observer from that studio, where she is working on the major installation she is preparing for her next milestone moment in Doha.

This continual movement between countries and cultures is not new to Ahmed, whose life has been shaped by constant geographical crossings. Her grandparents were originally from Calcutta but left India for Pakistan after the 1947 Partition, beginning a migratory trajectory that has threaded through the family ever since. Born in 1997 in Lahore, she spent a brief period in Karachi before relocating to London with her family at a young age. Ahmed spent her adolescence in Dubai before moving to the U.S. for her undergraduate studies at Cornell, followed by an MFA in painting at RISD. Now a decade into living in the States, she acknowledges that her life—and by extension, her art—has been defined by inhabiting the in-between, switching between cultural contexts governed by different social codes. That instability has sharpened her acute spirit of observation of the humanity around her, from which all her work originates.

Upon entering her solo at Sargent’s Daughters, what stands out is not only the maturity of her visual lexicon but also the clarity of her world-building instinct. Ahmed moves fluidly and inventively across mediums, shaping entire narrative spaces from the moment she traces a face or draws the psychological contour of a figure, then expands that gesture outward into the room as a potentially ever-evolving story.

“I’ve been drawing and working with my hands for as long as I can remember,” Ahmed tells Observer. Her parents say she was always making things or engaged in some kind of craft. But it was around year seven or eight—early in high school—that her interest began to take real shape. “I had a favorite art teacher who I credit so much—she supported me from the beginning and would leave little notes in my journals, encouraging me. They were just drawings I used to do, but she really saw something in them,” she recalls. “I also recently found these caricatures I made when I was about ten, these political cartoons, and looking at them now, I can see the threads. The seeds were already there—this instinct for humor, for drawing the line.”

Ahmed’s style, in fact, isn’t straightforwardly figurative. Her figures remain suspended in an unfinished state—between dimensions, between figuration and something surreal or even abstract—rooted more in the emotional and psychological space of her characters than in the synthesized volume of their bodies. At the same time, her sharp, confident line work grounds the compositions in a tradition that evokes comics, political satire and caricature. As seen in the work of French satirical artist Honoré Daumier or the German George Grosz, Ahmed’s caricatural style exaggerates posture, expression and behavior with a few quick, incisive strokes, distilling personality or social type into its most telling gestures. She readily acknowledges her connection to this lineage. “I’m really drawn to the face. I feel like I’m a keen observer of people, especially having lived between so many worlds and having to assimilate—from Pakistan to London to Dubai to the U.S.” she reflects. Across all those moves, she adapted in an ongoing process of code-switching—first observing, then imitating, learning to fit in without losing sight of who she was or where she came from.

Drawing gives Ahmed a space for unfiltered, intuitive expression—a way of seeing that precedes the expectations of society or culture. “When I draw, it’s quick and raw,” she explains. “It’s the first mark that comes out. I don’t erase. It’s whatever is coming through me in a stream-of-consciousness way.”

Notably, most of the characters Ahmed brings to the stage are men—often exaggerated in their grotesque appearances and postures, whimsically distorted in their grinning or perverse expressions, or revealed in moments of fragile vulnerability beneath a masculine performance of power.

The artist admits she only recently realized that, over time, she has consistently drawn or painted male figures. “I didn’t notice it at first, but recently I was like, okay, in my studio it’s just all these men of different types and me,” she reflects. Earlier in her graduate studies at RISD, she had been thinking a lot about uncles, she adds. “My whole practice is me trying to trace where I come from, the ancestry I didn’t know, the histories and displacement of my own country that I wasn’t taught until really late in my upbringing.” In more recent series, however, something has shifted—or perhaps she has simply become more aware of the deeper reasons behind her recurring male subjects.

Growing up, and even after she left Pakistan, she returned every summer to visit grandparents, aunts and cousins. During those visits, she became attuned to what she calls the grammar of men. “In public spaces, all you see are men. Women are usually inside, or covered,” she recalls, noting how her visual field was filled with authority, corruption and performance. Even after moving to New York, she found the dynamic not so different—only more indirect. “I can’t walk from point A to point B without feeling the male gaze. It’s uncomfortable. It’s charged. At first, I thought it was just Pakistan, but it’s everywhere I go.”

Portraying men, then, becomes a kind of role reversal. “As a young woman, I’m looking at men. In art history, it was usually the opposite: men looking at women, and no one questioned it,” she reflects. Still, she admits she sometimes feels sorry for her subjects. “The way I draw these border guards, they look clunky, short, stout, almost fragile. And then I’m like, wait, why do I feel sorry for them? It’s all very layered,” she acknowledges.

Ahmed enacts, through her art, a sharp human and cultural diagnosis—exposing the hypocrisies and paradoxes embedded in socially coded, gendered behaviors. With her cartoonish figures, she deciphers patterns of authority and performance. Aiza Ahmed observes society as a system shaped by power dynamics—and claims art as a space to imagine different ones.

When asked if she remembers being particularly drawn to political satire in newspapers or to the language of comics more broadly, she says she probably was not looking at anything specific. “I used to read the newspaper because my father would tell me to—just to know what was happening in the world,” she says, recalling how she often found it difficult and would flip straight to the illustrated sections. “It’s funny—I never connected that until now. Maybe that planted something,” she acknowledges, adding that she loved Roald Dahl and Quentin Blake and grew up watching a lot of Disney. “The Disney aesthetic really shaped me,” she reflects, describing how she recently discovered a Disney encyclopedia series in an antique shop in Doha. “One volume was called Great Leaders. It listed all these men and maybe two women—like Queen Victoria. It was fascinating, and the illustrations were unlike anything I’d seen,” she says. The find feels serendipitous, almost luminous, given the direction her work is now taking.

The fact that Ahmed constantly oscillates between caustic social indictment and a playfully theatrical or carnivalesque register pushes the grotesque into the realm of the fantastical and hallucinatory. As James Ensor once did, Ahmed’s line exaggerates expression to the point of derangement, using humor, absurdity and the grotesque to surface moral and psychological undercurrents, as well as the paradoxical fragility at the heart of today’s crisis of masculinity and the masculine-led world these performances of power seek to uphold. Applying the inverse of a more gentle, compassionate feminine playfulness, Ahmed’s work unsettles fixed ideas of nationhood, masculinity and belonging.

After all, it is playfulness and humor that often allow satire to resonate. They soften the critique just enough for the viewer to enter, while sharpening the underlying point. The best satire lets you laugh and wince at the same time.

This is why Aiza Ahmed’s work often takes on a theatrical presence, as she stages human drama within the space, suspended in dreamlike atmospheres. This was particularly evident in her solo debut with Sargent’s Daughters. Drawing its title, “The Music Room,” from Jalsaghar (The Music Room), Satyajit Ray’s mesmerizing 1958 film, Ahmed translated the movie into spatial terms through a multimedia installation of shifting characters rendered in monumental paintings and wooden cut-out figures. An original composition by historian, composer and guitarist Ria Modak further shaped the mise-en-scène, transforming the gallery into both a soundscape and a theater where these narratives unfolded with unsettling resonance in the present.

Evoking the film’s psychological portrait of India’s zamindar class, propped up under British colonial rule before facing dissolution amid land reforms and shifting politics in the mid-20th century, the music room here similarly becomes a stage for hollow rituals of nostalgia and masculine display. Ahmed’s figures appear as ghostly presences, drawn with raw, essential lines that balance humor and pallor, exposing the paradoxes and slow decay of any myth of masculinity. Crucially, in another act of inversion, she imagines a music room authored by women, turning their gaze back onto patriarchal and colonial power.

A similar impulse shaped her Spring Break Art Show presentation last May, where she first drew wider attention with a booth curated by Indira A. Abiskaroon, a curatorial assistant at the Brooklyn Museum. There, Ahmed reimagined the Wagah-Attari border ceremony, a daily ritual established in 1959 that draws thousands to watch soldiers from India and Pakistan march, gesture and parade as mirrored adversaries in a choreography that has long fascinated her for its oscillation between fury and restraint, rivalry and camaraderie.

In her installation, she amplified the spectacle to expose its built-in theatricality: bugle calls and Kishore Kumar’s bright vocals led visitors through hot pink drapes and onto a red carpet flanked by wooden soldiers, toward an imagined stage where painted and sculpted figures performed their own exaggerated version of the ritual. Within this draped, cardboard mise-en-scène, the soldiers’ postures, uniforms and expressions became social masks—revealing not only the codes through which authority and masculinity are enacted, but also the fragility those performances attempt to conceal. Her presentation at Art Basel Qatar will continue this narrative; she is currently working on new paintings, suspended muslin works and a series of wooden cut-out soldiers for the installation.

Ahmed’s visual and narrative approach is not far from the narrative strategies used in commedia dell’arte, which established the idea of fixed “characters” representing social types, each defined by a mask and exaggerated behavioral code—or pantomime, which strips these roles even further, reducing gesture to language and expression to narrative. Ahmed’s suspended storylines operate in a similar register. Much like in Pirandello’s work, she uses playful role-playing and seemingly naive humor to generate immediate empathy while simultaneously revealing the fragile, absurd theater of human existence and the drama of identity.

Thus far, Ahmed acknowledges, two main sources have shaped the origins of her work. One is her personal observation of societal rituals—weddings, funerals and ceremonies that exist in a liminal space between the public and the private, where she has been both observer and participant. The other is the India-Pakistan border, which she has studied in depth. Still, she notes, the overarching theme that continues to emerge is the spectrum of masculinity and the attempt to understand its psyche. What is going on in their heads—and how has that interiority hardened into a social rule that has long shaped a shared sense of reality?

When asked if her work is political, Ahmed says that every action can be a political act. “Even if you don’t voice it, you’re making a statement. Being a brown woman is already a political act. There are endless layers you can add to that,” she argues. And endless, too, are the dimensions in which Ahmed’s powerful imagination can evolve, as she continues to translate her both empathic and critical observations of the world around her.

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Whenever the art world reckons with its global overgrowth, people point to art fairs as a central culprit. This was especially true late last year, when headlines announced the shuttering of multiple high-profile galleries and satellite spaces, after which several more galleries announced that they’d be pulling back from the fair circuit. Since Art Basel launched in Switzerland in 1970 as the first truly global fair—initially joined by a handful of regional counterparts, such as the historic Art Cologne and the now-defunct FIAC—that circuit has expanded at a staggering pace in what is arguably one of the most impactful structural shifts in the modern contemporary art market.

When Frieze entered the London scene in the early 2000s—during the buoyant stretch between the dot-com crash and the 2008 financial crisis—it did so in a market still building momentum and hype, not only among connoisseurs but also a growing class of hedge fund collectors and would-be art investors. What followed was rapid global proliferation: from fewer than 50 fairs worldwide in the early 2000s to more than 400 by 2019, driven by corporate franchising models such as Art Basel and Frieze, and by shifting concentrations of wealth in Asia, Latin America and later the Middle East, which created demand for localized market gateways.

Although the pandemic briefly slowed this growth, the pause was short-lived. New fairs are already planned for 2026, many aligned with the Gulf’s rising economic and cultural clout, while the 12-fair marathon of New York Art Week—and an even denser calendar in Miami—signals a system pushed to its limit. The result is what is now widely referred to as “fair fatigue”—too many fairs showing the same galleries and chasing the same finite group of collectors, many of whom are no longer willing to travel nonstop, often just to see the same art. As a result, fair audiences are becoming visibly more regional, with Europeans appearing less consistently in New York or Miami and Americans traveling less frequently to Basel or London.

At the same time, as galleries have grown increasingly dependent on VIP traffic to justify rising participation costs beyond public engagement, fairs have pivoted toward maximizing ticket sales, capitalizing on art’s absorption into lifestyle storytelling and the broader experience economy. For many of today’s visitors, fairs have become as much about spectacle as commerce, aligning themselves with other forms of symbolically charged, Instagram-tailored entertainment. This is nowhere more evident than at Art Basel Miami Beach, which has evolved into a massive social event often disconnected from the buying process. While attendance continues to climb, galleries broadly agree that the pool of active collectors is shrinking, with fewer new buyers entering the market and established ones slowing down or stepping away.

According to the latest Art Basel & UBS market report, there were 336 art fairs worldwide in 2024—the lowest total since 2021 and 71 fewer than in 2019. A total of 31 fairs ceased to exist in 2024. Over half of those shuttered were based in Europe, including Masterpiece and the Olympia Art and Antiques Fair in London, the Outsider Art Fair and 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair in Paris and regional fairs in Belgium, Germany and Switzerland. Several fairs also ended in Asia, including Art Beijing, StART in Seoul (along with its South African edition), and both Art Hunt and Taipei Gendai in Taipei. Four U.S. fairs closed, including Fridge Art Fair and the San Francisco Tribal and Textile Art Show, which had run for more than 30 years. In 2025, ADAA The Art Show canceled its October edition, citing the market’s ongoing contraction and the need to rethink a model that has long shown signs of strain. “We’ve been listening carefully to our members, to the moment we’re in, and to the shifting dynamics of the art world,” a spokesperson told Observer. They will now host the ADAA Fair in November 2026. After a buzzy New York debut in 2023, PHOTOFAIRS skipped its Armory Week return in both 2024 and 2025 before canceling its Hong Kong edition last March, citing “logistical constraints.”

Galleries can’t afford fairs, but skipping them is worse

As the industry exits a game-changing 2025 and enters 2026 with open questions, a broad consensus has emerged that the current fair system is no longer sustainable. Yet paradoxically, even as slowing market conditions make it harder for galleries—particularly emerging and mid-tier spaces operating on razor-thin margins—to afford participation, many cannot afford to opt out either. Fair attendance has become a branding necessity, with the roster of fairs a gallery attends now functioning as a marker of status—defining its perceived tier much like FIFA tournaments do for national football teams.

Still, the dominant narrative casting art fairs—especially global corporate brands—as villains threatening the ecosystem’s sustainability overlooks a more complex reality. Even if fair reporting only offers a partial and occasionally misleading snapshot of market health, these events continue to drive momentum and collector energy. Early 2025 sales in London and Paris helped restore market confidence, with that enthusiasm carrying through to the fall season.

At the same time, fairs undeniably represent a financial gamble for galleries. Rising costs for participation, shipping and travel can easily become a death sentence for smaller galleries. But fairs can also, and not infrequently, reverse a gallery’s trajectory, offering a real shot at international exposure, institutional recognition and—on occasion—sales large enough to carry the year. This helps explain why, even amid tightening margins, the average number of fairs attended per gallery declined only slightly, from four in 2019, 2022 and 2023 to three in 2024.

Average booth fees are part of the precarious math. At Art Basel, booths typically range from $11,000 to $24,500 for curated sections like Positions or Nova in Miami, to between $50,000 and $200,000 for the main sector, depending on square footage. Even at fairs aimed at emerging dealers—such as NADA—booth fees now range from roughly $8,000 to $11,000 for project spaces and from $14,000 to $16,000 for a standard booth.

According to the 2025 art fair report by First Thursday, a new sales intelligence platform focused on dealer performance and market analytics, nearly half of the galleries surveyed spent more than £30,000 ($40,000) on average per fair. Nearly one in five reported spending between £50,000 and £100,000, while 6 percent exceeded £100,000 ($135,000).

According to the Art Basel & UBS report, art fair sales accounted for 30 percent of total dealer sales in 2024—a 2 percent increase from 2023. This growth was largely driven by overseas fairs, which remain essential entry points into new markets, enabling galleries to build followings and establish connections in new regions. Underscoring the role fairs continue to play in generating excitement and reactivating collector interest, the Art Basel & UBS Global Collecting Report found that 58 percent of collectors made purchases linked to fairs in 2024, up from 39 percent the year before.

Yet the same report highlights the system’s underlying imbalance, echoed in the fair’s own data: dealers with annual turnover above $10 million reported the highest share of fair-related sales, at 34 percent—up 4 percent year over year. For smaller galleries, the share either stagnated or declined, with the steepest drop among those with turnover below $250,000, whose fair-linked sales fell from 26 percent to 23 percent. As the market continues to split along a K-shaped curve, fairs increasingly reward scale while amplifying risk at the margins.

The central question galleries face is return on investment

According to a survey by First Thursday—a recently launched sales intelligence platform focused on dealer performance and market analytics—the average ROI of fair participation was just 2.6 out of 5. Not a single respondent awarded a perfect score. Yet 71 respondents said they valued exposure to new audiences and potential buyers more than immediate sales.

For galleries serving as bridges between continents—especially in Asia—fairs remain essential for market entry and long-term relationship building.

Since their inception, fairs have functioned primarily as platforms for visibility and access ahead of transaction, condensing supply and demand into temporary marketplaces that reduce the costs of search, comparison and negotiation. In the context of the art world, however, they have also come to compress social, symbolic and cultural capital—reshaping not only the market but the canon.

On the gallery side, as the market tightens and recalibrates—and sell-outs become far less predictable—being deliberate and strategic in approaching fair participation has become imperative. This applies both to how galleries tailor their presentations to each specific context and to which fairs they choose to attend—choices that must now align with artist trajectories and collector bases.

Earlier this year, Isaac Lyles, founder of New York gallery Lyles & King, confirmed that after years of attending every fair possible, he became more selective in 2025. “It’s really about intentionality and about choosing projects that feel specific and meaningful, rather than doing things out of habit,” he told Observer, explaining that the shift is less about quantity than about making the right choices. “Everything should be intentional—about the work and the context.” In practice, that means weighing short-term ROI against opportunity cost and long-term return.

Many galleries are taking an even more conservative approach to fair participation in 2026. That often means skipping first-time appearances in nascent markets and showing less tolerance for experimentation.

“I am not ‘anti-art fair,’ but my approach is increasingly strategic and selective,” said Emilia Yin of L.A.-based Make Room, explaining that her top priority for 2026 is positioning—being part of the “best” fairs that place the program in front of high-caliber collectors and a truly engaged audience. For a gallery like Make Room, which functions as an international bridge—particularly in Asia—art fairs remain essential for entering new markets and cultivating long-term relationships. Yin’s 2026 strategy will focus on each fair’s ability to foster meaningful conversations. “We are looking for platforms that don’t just provide foot traffic or a space to show, but prioritize quality interactions and help us reach new, intentional audiences,” she told Observer.

“Galleries are concentrating instead on fairs where they’ve seen strong historical performance, in markets where they already have an established collector base,” confirmed First Thursday founder Callum Hale-Thomson, noting that this shift reflects conservation rather than growth. “The risk-reward equation around fair participation just isn’t as favourable as it was even two or three years ago, particularly once you factor in rising costs and softer demand.”

At the same time, First Thursday’s survey highlights a deeper structural issue. Despite the financial stakes, many galleries still lack even basic sales strategies when it comes to fairs. Anyone who has spent time on the fair floor—especially during VIP previews—knows the drill: the adrenaline of those first hours, a blur of conversations, business cards exchanged, and notes scribbled in haste between booth visits. By the end of the day, exhaustion sets in, and follow-ups—if they happen at all—often come too late. Many galleries admit they struggle to read their own notes, fail to recognize returning collectors or, in some cases, lose inquiry books altogether. Several acknowledged having lost sales simply because they didn’t follow up fast enough.

Coming from a digital sales and data background, Hale-Thomson said he was struck by how many galleries still run fair operations on notebooks and spreadsheets. “There’s a significant amount of value being left on the table,” he said. “Fairs compress a huge amount of commercial pressure into a very short window, and if you’re purely dependent on on-booth sales, it becomes an all-or-nothing proposition.” According to First Thursday’s survey, 83 percent of galleries still use pen and paper to record inquiries at fairs, while 60 percent rely primarily on business cards.

Data from the Art Basel & UBS report supports the need for a more structured approach. While 14 percent of sales are made during previews, 70 percent are closed on-site and 16 percent take place after the fair—underscoring the importance of having a clear plan before, during and after the event.

In a more challenging market, galleries have to work harder for every sale, Hale-Thomson noted. “That might mean spending more time re-engaging past contacts before a fair, sending more personalized follow-ups, or simply getting back to people faster with the information they requested,” he said. “It still surprises me how many galleries take days to follow up with people they met on the booth.” That may have worked when sell-outs were common, but today it often means missed opportunities.

That gap is exactly what led Hale-Thomson to launch First Thursday. “We’re solving for this exact problem by building tools that help galleries maximize the return they get from every fair,” he explained. “That means having a complete profile of everyone they meet—what they liked, how they engaged with the gallery before—so galleries can be laser-focused on the right contacts and turn first meetings into long-term relationships.”

For the same reason, despite rising costs and tightening margins, many galleries are also trying to extract more value from the broader moment surrounding each fair. This helps explain the return of dinners, talks and off-site events designed to foster more meaningful and personal engagement beyond the booth. “Instead of parachuting in for a few days, galleries are investing more in local activations—collector dinners, curator conversations, even pop-up exhibitions that run alongside the fair,” Hale-Thomson said. “It’s about extending the fair into a longer, more relational experience.”

Fairs are becoming more experience-based and context-specific

On the fair’s side, the past year has brought more visible attempts to rethink and recalibrate the model, particularly around issues of financial sustainability, diversification and curated contextualization.

One notable shift has been in fair layouts and booth placement strategies—an area where galleries have grown increasingly vocal about the politics of visibility. Last spring, the Paris gallery Air de Paris publicly withdrew from Art Basel in Basel after 25 consecutive years of participation, citing its assigned booth placement as the reason. In an open letter, the founders explained that their space had been relocated from a long-standing, prominent location to a secondary position, which, in their view, “discredited the gallery.” The episode underscored a broader truth: placement at a fair is not neutral. It directly affects foot traffic, perception and sales—even as galleries pay the same fees regardless of location.

Against this backdrop, Art Basel Miami Beach’s floor plan in December adopted a logic long used by Frieze London, placing lower- and mid-tier galleries in more central, high-traffic areas rather than pushing them to the margins. In Miami, the curated sections—including the widely discussed Zero—were positioned near one of the main entrances, making them almost unavoidable for visitors. Still, the floor plan redesign followed a wave of high-profile withdrawals in the run-up to the fair: longtime exhibitors including Miguel Abreu, Chantal Crousel, Alison Jacques, Peter Kilchmann, Edward Tyler Nahem, Luisa Strina, Lia Rumma and BANK (Shanghai) pulled out, reportedly due to a mix of cost pressures, scheduling conflicts and strategic reprioritization. For many, this was the actual impetus for the new layout, as Art Basel simultaneously filled 12 last-minute openings from its waitlist.

That same week, Untitled Art Miami’s Nest sector highlighted the fair’s continued commitment to emerging voices and experimental practices. Through a redesigned booth structure, the fair created a dedicated section for a larger group of early-career galleries, offering progressive pricing, subsidized participation and smaller, more focused presentations—an approach that deliberately shifted the emphasis from scale toward access and visibility.

It’s precisely this kind of more targeted, supportive fair experience that galleries are now calling for in order to justify rising costs. “I believe there is a growing need for a new ‘social contract’ between fair organizers and participating galleries,” said Make Room founder Emilia Yin, noting that especially for a new generation of galleries like hers—ones committed to staying and growing—organizers must take on the role of active facilitators. That means going beyond booth logistics to introduce VIPs and institutions to newer participants. “These introductions are vital; they help us build the market confidence necessary to sustain long-term commitment to the fair and the region,” she told Observer, echoing a widely shared sentiment.

Dealers are increasingly asking not only for lower participation fees, but also for more flexible formats—such as split booths or commission-based models—and deeper support in collector engagement. This includes curated introductions, stronger local connections and post-fair tools that help convert initial interest into actual sales.

More fairs are also shifting toward context-specific, curatorially and experientially driven formats, responding to a collector base that is increasingly regional and less uniformly global. The upcoming Art Basel Qatar’s artist-led edition—closer in spirit to a biennial than a traditional fair—signals a more deliberate move toward thoughtful, context-conscious programming rather than simply exporting a “global event.” This shift is taking place even as the corporate-led expansion of fairs continues, with Art Abu Dhabi and the forthcoming Frieze Abu Dhabi in 2026. Notably, both initiatives were developed in close partnership with state tourism and cultural authorities—Art Basel Qatar with Qatar Museums and Frieze Abu Dhabi with the Department of Culture and Tourism Abu Dhabi—embedding the fairs within broader government-led cultural and economic strategies that demand more site-specific, locally attuned business models.

Over the past several years, both Art Basel Hong Kong and Art Basel Miami Beach have placed growing emphasis on the geographic and artistic ecosystems they represent—Asia and the Americas, respectively—foregrounding local scenes as central to their identities. Frieze Seoul has followed a similar path, beginning with its collaboration with the historical Korean fair Kiaf, then deepening ties with local institutions and, most recently, launching Frieze House to further connect with the Korean creative community. “The 2025 edition underscored how vital and resilient the art scene in Korea and across Asia is,” said to Observer Frieze Seoul’s fair director, Patrick Lee. “Even amid global uncertainty, the fair saw strong engagement from collectors and institutions, with thoughtful buying across the board.”

In New York, Independent 20th Century has adopted a similarly curatorially conscious approach, partnering with Sotheby’s to stage its upcoming September edition in the iconic Breuer building—a cultural landmark tied to the history of modern art. The choice of venue, with its architectural and historical resonance, aligns closely with the fair’s focus while enriching the visitor experience by tapping into the experience- and destination-driven economy.

This idea of spatial storytelling and symbolic value also defines the highly curated Design Miami Paris, staged inside the elegant interiors of a classic Paris hôtel particulier. A similar logic has long animated NOMAD, the boutique fair dedicated to collectible design, which reached a new crescendo in its Abu Dhabi edition last November by transforming a decommissioned airport terminal into a thematically cohesive fair. “By filling this iconic modernist terminal with collectible design and art, the entire experience shifts: people look differently at the architecture, at the light, at the scale of the space,” NOMAD founder and director Bellavance-Lecompte told Observer. “The fair allows them to rediscover a familiar landmark with new eyes, transforming the act of ‘passing through’ into an act of contemplation.”

As fairs have continued to grow in both scale and number, many collectors are increasingly gravitating toward smaller, boutique formats. A prime example—running concurrently with Art Basel Paris—is Paris Internationale, which has maintained a deliberately alternative character since its founding. From occupying raw, semi-abandoned spaces to developing a communication strategy targeting younger audiences, the fair has consistently resisted the standardized language of conventional fair halls, earning a loyal following among collectors. “From the beginning, we’ve chosen to inhabit spaces that are raw, full of history, sometimes imperfect, but always deeply Parisian,” director Silvia Ammon told Observer in a recent interview. “These places have a soul. They set a tone that’s very different from the uniformity of fair halls—a tone of intimacy, proximity and warmth.”

This climate has also encouraged the rise of more intimate, dealer-led satellite models across major art weeks. Chris Sharp—a gallerist who has launched two independent fairs while continuing to participate in established ones—told Observer that such experiments reflect growing dissatisfaction with the status quo. “I don’t know if Place des Vosges or Post-Fair are viable or sustainable alternatives to a model that works in normal times,” he said, “but they show that participation in contemporary art doesn’t require submission to that model—that you can build your own.”

This impulse strongly echoes what U-Haul Gallery has been exploring for years. The project began by parking a gallery truck outside major fairs around the world, eventually evolving into the inaugural U-Haul Art Fair, timed with Armory Week. There, 11 exhibitors—from emerging spaces to established galleries like Nino Mier—presented work from rented trucks parked near the main fair venues. Priced at the cost of a daily truck rental, the fair offered a deliberately low-cost, mobile alternative to the capital-intensive logic of traditional fairs.

Now in its second edition, the Esther art fair offers a similarly dealer-led, curatorially focused alternative. Founded by Margot Samel and Olga Temnikova, it prioritizes thoughtful presentation over scale, experimentation over white-cube polish and intimacy over broader offering. With low participation fees, Esther reduces transactional pressure, creating what Temnikova describes as “a warm, almost cozy experience”—a place to reconnect, experiment and engage more meaningfully.

On the other side of the world, following the successful two-year experiment of Supper Club, gallerists and cultural producers Willem Molesworth and Ysabelle Cheung are preparing to launch Pavilion, a new alternative platform for the Asia region. Pavilion will debut in Taipei on January 22-26, 2026, followed by a Hong Kong edition on March 23-28, 2026. “Pavilion builds on a long legacy of galleries self-organising art fairs. We put art and culture first, deconstructing the standard art fair experience and reconsidering what is established ‘best practice,’” Molesworth told Observer, describing the project as a hybrid between a fair, a small biennale, a performance festival and a symposium. “It’s a kind of medium and genre blending that feels very of the moment, but somehow also like a return to tradition. We draw inspiration from the friends, collectors, artists and scholars who gathered hundreds of years ago to write poems, paint landscapes and share the artwork and other curiosities that inspired them.”

For Molesworth, Pavilion is first and foremost an opportunity to engage with art as a holistic pursuit—something he sees as increasingly absent from today’s hyper-commercialized fair landscape. “We hope to bring this to the forefront of culture again. One aspect that also sets us apart is that we are introducing this boutique model across the region, fostering a unique collecting experience. This allows us to scale our impact without sacrificing our quality.”

After accelerating the art world’s globalization over the past two decades—transforming it from a relatively niche economy into a mass lifestyle phenomenon—art fairs are now being asked to be more accountable to both audiences and exhibitors, prioritizing purpose and context over sheer ubiquity and branding. As the sector moves forward in 2026, how this shift unfolds may become one of the clearest indicators of the art world’s long-term sustainability.

More in Art Fairs, Biennials and Triennials

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• What Zero 10 Can Tell Us About the Art World’s Next Chapter

The success of Sotheby’s move to capitalize on the dynamic market for collectibles was evident in its end-of-year figures, with its luxury division up 22 percent to $2.7 billion in 2025. The redesign of its main regional headquarters in Hong Kong, Paris and now the landmark Breuer Building into “Another World” of luxury was a part of the strategy. Conceived as a boutique experience, each new headquarters’ spatial storytelling and cross-category showcasing are designed to extend the auction house’s reach by attracting a more diverse set of audiences at different price points and enhancing the symbolic value of the brand and its offerings beyond art connoisseurship.

Rare spirits, particularly wine and whiskey, have emerged as one of the strongest-performing categories, proving especially effective at attracting first-time bidders, often younger collectors and buyers from emerging geographies such as the Middle East, India and the broader APAC region. Later this month, on Jan. 24 at the Breuer location, Sotheby’s will offer the most valuable collection of its kind ever to come to market in its first-ever live, single-owner American whiskey auction. Estimated between $1.17 million and $1.68 million, The Great American Whiskey sale includes 360 bottles from a meticulously curated private holding, auctioned across 320 lots. “The value, quality and rarity of these bottles are unparalleled,” Zev Glesta, Sotheby’s Whiskey Specialist and AVP, said in a statement. “This is not just a great American whiskey collection—it is the collection, bringing together the very finest examples ever produced. Each bottle tells a story, captures a moment in history and preserves the lineage of a craft that continues to grow and evolve today.”

This remarkable whiskey collection reflects years of dedicated collecting and stands as a testament to the history, artistry and technical knowledge of some of the most revered producers. This is particularly evident in the Van Winkle selection, which includes a group of exceptional lots representing the strongest expression of the brand’s heritage and lineage ever presented at auction. Ranked among the most prized and valuable American whiskeys in existence, many of the Van Winkle single-barrel selections—bottled for Sam’s, Binny’s, Blue Smoke, Delilah’s and Old Advocate—were produced in extremely limited quantities and largely consumed immediately, leaving only a handful of rare surviving examples.

Among them is an old Rip Van Winkle 20 Year Old Single Barrel “Sam’s” (1982, 133.4 proof), one of only 60 bottles produced and bottled exclusively for Sam’s Wines & Spirits in Chicago as the highest-proof Van Winkle ever released, offered by Sotheby’s with an estimate of $70,000-100,000. Also auctioned the same evening will be another exclusive single-barrel bottling, a Van Winkle 18 Year Old “Binny’s” (1985, 121.6 proof), estimated at $60,000-80,000, alongside a Very Very Old Fitzgerald “Blackhawk” 18 Year Old, privately bottled by the American Whiskies for the Wirtz family of Chicago Blackhawks fame, carrying an estimate of $50,000-80,000.

Another top lot of the sale will be four LeNell’s Red Hook Rye barrels, among the most celebrated rye whiskeys in the world. Each barrel is estimated at $24,000-35,000, with 852 bottles existing across all four barrels. The collection also features historic Old Fitzgerald Blackhawk bottlings and rarities from Buffalo Trace, Michter’s and Wild Turkey, which stand not only as rare testimonies of craftsmanship but also as historical symbols within the whiskey community.

According to Jonny Fowle, Sotheby’s Global Head of Whiskey & Spirits, the collection is a testament to the collectability of truly rare bourbon and rye whiskey. “Never before have we witnessed a collection of such sought-after bottles come to market from a single owner,” he said in a statement, noting that this is not only the most valuable American whiskey collection ever to be offered at auction, but also the most meticulously curated, featuring some of the hardest-to-find bottles in the industry. “This collection is truly a first in the world of American whiskey,” he added.

Sotheby’s continues to hold the record for the most expensive whiskey ever sold at auction: a Valerio Adami–labeled 60-Year-Old from the Macallan Distillery, auctioned in London in November 2023 for $2.7 million (£2.2 million), nearly double its high estimate. (The most expensive ever sold is a 30-year-old bottle of The Emerald Isle from The Craft Irish Whiskey Co. sold to collector Mike Daley for $2.8 million.) Multiple Macallan 1926 bottles have since sold in the high six-figure to low seven-figure range in 2024 and 2025 auctions, with many achieving prices between $1.5 million and $2.5 million, depending on label, condition and provenance.

While the whiskey auction market, after a significant boom between 2016 and 2022, experienced a sharp correction from 2023 to 2024, renewed momentum in collectible spirits—whiskeys in particular—is evident in recent auction results. Last October, Sotheby’s charity sale, Distillers One of One, held at Hopetoun House near Edinburgh, totaled $3.9 million, including buyers’ premiums, with $3.1 million donated to the Youth Action Fund to support training and education programs in Scotland. Thirty new whiskey records were set during the single sale, led by the Glenlivet SPIRA 1965 60-Year-Old, which sold for $693,682, a house record for the distillery. According to Knight Frank’s The Wealth Report, in the decade leading up to 2025, rare whiskey prices have soared 192 percent—and that excludes the downturn that began in 2022.

Recent results point to a period of recovery following the boom-and-bust cycle, and some experts see this as an opportune moment to begin collecting. As Simon Aron of Cask Trade noted in Money Week, prices for some casks—particularly new-make whiskey, the spirit just entered into cask—are currently “unbelievable.” He points to Tormore barrels priced at £1,995 as an example of strong value in new-make whiskey, as well as a three-year-old cask of Glenburgie at £2,750 for collectors seeking something slightly more mature.

Meanwhile, in the rare wine market, Setting Wines 2019 Cabernet Sauvignon (6 liters) holds the record for the most expensive wine ever sold at auction, achieving $1 million in November 2021 at the Emeril Lagasse Foundation charity sale. The previous record had been set by Sotheby’s, with a 1945 Domaine de la Romanée-Conti fetching $558,000 (£422,801; €481,976) including premium in New York on October 13, 2018—seventeen times its original $32,000 estimate.

Another notable single-owner sale, The Cellar of William I. Koch: The Great American Collector, held at Christie’s New York in June 2025, achieved $28.8 million, marking the highest such sale in North America. The auction was led by a 1999 Domaine de la Romanée-Conti Methuselah (6 liters), which sold for $275,000.

Returning to spirits, The Great American Whiskey sale could set new benchmarks in the category. The auction will be part of Visions of America, a week-long auction and event series celebrating American art, objects and innovation in the lead-up to the nation’s 250th anniversary—another play that could further deepen Sotheby’s engagement with the broader market.

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A continuous interplay between the physical, psychological and spiritual dimensions of reality defines the paintings of American Dominican artist Kenny Rivero. This symbolic layering is especially vivid in the new works featured in his latest exhibition, “Ash on Everything,” on view at Charles Moffett, New York, through January 24. His first New York show in over three years, the presentation reveals a clear evolution in Rivero’s practice—both technically and conceptually. These works reflect a heightened awareness of the universal resonance his subject matter can evoke, alongside a growing confidence in translating his expansive mythopoetic world onto canvas.

A new material richness matches the densely layered cultural references in these works. Rivero adopts a looser approach to painting, experimenting with varied techniques and incorporating real-world elements. The result is a collage of lived experiences interwoven with internal, psychological and spiritual realms—a complex orchestration that invites a more soulful reading of the world.

About fifteen years ago, Rivero was working almost entirely in collage before shifting to more traditional approaches on canvas. “This time, especially with the notes, I wanted something more real—materials that were older, archival, things I had collected,” he tells Observer. “Objects that had an aura, that carried energy, that had lived in my studio and accumulated stories.”

Yet his approach to oil painting is intensely tactile and physical, with passages where thick paint becomes strikingly plastic—an element unto itself—and others where the artist’s hand is visibly present in direct, gestural marks on the canvas. “I want the painting to feel like it was made by a hand,” he clarifies. “To make that presence undeniable. That’s really important to me.”

His work has long drawn from personal experience, shaped by his upbringing in Washington Heights as the child of Dominican parents and the daily challenges of diasporic life—an experience he has consistently sought to deconstruct and process through painting. In this new body of work, however, Rivero delves even further into the past, transmuting personal memories and traumas into a more universal epic that links the everyday struggles of urban existence to realms beyond the limits of time-bound physical reality.

In these paintings, time collapses—past, present and future blur and coexist, reaching toward something eternal. “It’s not nostalgia. It’s reframing time to reveal something universal about the human condition,” he says. “I’m building a fiction. I’m telling a story, but it’s not necessarily my story.” While his earlier work was deeply autobiographical, this body marks a shift. “It still relates to me in the sense that it draws from my experience of being in New York and being Dominican, but the story takes place outside of me and has nothing to do with my childhood, my personal history, or my family. It’s an entirely new story, one that exists beyond me, and that feels very new for my work.”

As Rivero reveals, it was only in the past few months that he was able to recognize the narrative taking shape across the paintings fully. “About two months ago is when I really started to see where the paintings were going—where the images would ultimately land and where the story was beginning to form. Up until then, everything was coming out of the process itself: thinking about color, and really wanting to focus on the figure more than I had before.”

Rivero’s process is, in fact, deeply intuitive. By surrendering to it, he can channel and translate symbolic narratives onto the canvas—narratives that precede language or rational frameworks. As an artist who moved from working as a night doorman and Zwirner custodian to graduating from Yale and selling out at major art fairs, Rivero has always preserved an original symbolic lexicon that remains untouched by trends or the conventions of traditional figurative painting.

For this reason, his characters often appear cartoonish or seemingly naïve—qualities that gradually reveal themselves as hauntingly symbolic and archetypal. These ghostly, hybrid figures—part human, part monster—emerge like spirits from another realm, attempting to communicate something just beyond reach. “They’re inspired by very specific people emerging from the past, but they’re not autobiographical—they are much more universal,” Rivero explains. “With this body of work, I’m starting to develop specific characters: they have identities, they function more like types and archetypes.”

Rivero’s characters are, in this sense, closer to the Latin concept of character or maschera: figures that represent human types rather than individual portraits. They operate less as autobiographical stand-ins than as constructed roles—embodiments of shared conditions, gestures and psychic states. Each carries an identity, but one that is symbolic rather than personal, shaped by collective experience rather than private memory.

“The characters support each other within the world I’m building. They function almost like a team. They’re on a mission together, trying to help one another in trying to communicate something,” Rivero reflects.

From this early part of our conversation, it becomes clear that these new works take up the human journey from a broader, more universal perspective: a shared search for meaning, especially within political, economic and social systems that are far larger than the individual and often alienate us from what is essential, primal and rooted in being—in the world, and in time.

Spiritual content has always coursed through Rivero’s work, shaped by a religious upbringing that fused Christianity, Catholicism and Afro-Caribbean spiritual practices. This hybrid foundation enabled him to form an idiosyncratic symbolic language that finds full expression in his work, allowing for a syncretic exploration of belief systems and their shared understandings of the afterlife, divination and ancestral connection. While his ghostly, often faceless figures most clearly reference Santería and Afro-Caribbean traditions, Christian iconographies—particularly those related to saints—are subtly interwoven into the painterly narrative, as seen in No Ice (Sin Yellow), 2025.

At the same time, elements of popular culture and urban vernacular are seamlessly woven into the work, suggesting how the spiritual and mythological can coexist within the concrete framework of a metropolis like New York. The brick walls of public housing, concrete sidewalks, the city’s streetscape and the silhouettes of chimney-lined industrial plants appear alongside symbols drawn from Afro-Caribbean daily rituals, as seen in cryptic yet evocative works like Shadow Mirror (2025). Together, these elements reflect Rivero’s ongoing exercise in world-building—something he says he’s practiced since childhood, even within the material and spiritual constraints of life in Washington Heights.

Yet even the most mundane, terrestrial forms are charged with symbolic meaning. Light bulbs, for example, recur across multiple works. “There’s the literal idea of power—electricity—and how unstable access to power can be in the Caribbean. But there’s also power in a more abstract, spiritual sense. In some paintings, like the mirror painting, power isn’t about electricity at all. The power the light bulbs are losing isn’t electrical—it’s spiritual. They’re meant to illuminate the figure in a different way.”

In Navigator (2025), the light bulbs activate another way of seeing—one that opens onto a parallel reality imagined or envisioned by the figures and projected across the room in Sub Maintenance (red shadow) (2025). Together, the two paintings set in motion a network of symbolic correspondences that intensify their luminous, metaphysical charge.

Every element that appears in Rivero’s paintings is tied to a place he has known. “Growing up in Washington Heights, there were abandoned buildings we used to play in as kids. In the Dominican Republic, too—empty houses we’d use for different things,” he recalls. “That’s where I learned to build worlds, and to understand the relationship between reality and fantasy. Those spaces were open to interpretation and reimagination.”

Imagination, through this exercise in world-building, offered Rivero a kind of sanctuary—a way to step outside the boundaries of childhood reality. Painting allowed him to continue that practice. “In the paintings, time collapses—past, present, and future exist together. It’s not nostalgia. It’s reframing time to reveal something universal about the human condition,” he adds.

Even the most cheerful, cartoonish elements borrowed from popular culture—particularly Caribbean culture, with its bright colors and kinetic energy—are tempered by a darker undercurrent and spiritual weight. “There’s always that darker side. Crisis, trauma—whether that trauma is colonial, or more contemporary, tied to nature, to hurricanes, to environmental conditions,” Rivero notes, pointing to the recurring airplanes, bombs and explosions that course through his compositions.

A sense of ongoing emergency unfolds across the works. “Everyone depicted in these paintings is functioning within a crisis—some kind of post-apocalyptic situation, or at least a moment of urgency,” Rivero confirms. “They’re trying to communicate with each other in secret, and that’s where the notes come in.”

In this exhibition, he elevates that interweaving into a layered meta-narrative. Small notes are embedded within larger compositions—tucked into waistbands, hidden under baseball mitts, set aflame at sea or emerging from sliced apples. In a series of trompe l’oeil-style paintings, these notes are then unfolded, revealing coded messages that read like survival instructions, drawing on ancestral knowledge shaped by generations of physical and psychological struggle.

This structure invites a deeper form of viewer engagement. The audience is called to follow the story’s thread, piecing together fragments that connect across the works. “I want the viewer to begin unpacking the story,” he explains. “My hope is that viewers will spend time with the paintings, sit with them, and start to understand how they speak to one another.”

While Rivero embraces the inherent openness and ambiguity of painting—and acknowledges that no single interpretation can be definitive—he suggests that meaning arises through the relationships between works. The narrative unfolds less through decoding fixed symbols than through attunement to subtle clues and a willingness to engage in shared resonance. That painting No Ice (Sin yellow) 2025, he says, sets everything up: “It establishes how to read the symbols in the show and defines the space in which everything is happening. The story then builds toward an ending that feels like an explosion. That’s what the bomb represents for me—not just destruction, but renewal. It’s about imagining how to build the next world.”

The works on view gesture toward a truth that transcends individual experience and everyday crisis. They offer a glimpse into a broader, more universal perspective—one that exceeds linear time and reconnects with something essential about human life as part of a larger whole. Here, the canvas becomes a portal—an access point into other symbolic systems and dimensions. His paintings function as devices that open onto spiritual and ancestral planes, where a primal sense of truth can be rediscovered beyond the constructs of contemporary life. They are at once instruments of healing, resistance against cultural erasure and acts of reconnection with the ancestral.

Like contemporary parables of the human condition, Rivero’s figures inhabit a metaphorical realm—an in-between dimension that acts less as illustration and more as a threshold. This symbolic field enables personal experiences to expand into shared understanding, giving form to what is hidden, repressed or difficult to articulate. The sequencing of works in the exhibition is intentional. Once they came together, Rivero could perceive the narrative they collectively revealed. The journey—through birth, coming of age, loss, decay and renewal—begins with a large painting of a sidewalk and a woman on fire, and concludes with a monumental image of a coconut bomb on the verge of explosion, bringing this mythic epic to a close.

Echoing Victor Turner, the liminal terrain these images occupy is marked by instability, transformation and ritual crisis: a “betwixt and between” phase essential to rites of passage, in which individuals are stripped of former identities and communal roles, without yet having assumed new ones. Yet it is precisely this in-betweenness that enables Rivero’s figures to exist not fully in one world or another, but suspended between collapse and renewal, destruction and possibility.

In building his own urban mythology, Rivero charts this transitional space as one of potential rather than resolution. Fire, explosions, coded messages and fractured architectures serve as signs of passage, not finality—staging a collective crossing through a moment of historical uncertainty. Within this symbolic framework, the coconut emerges as a central anchor. Rooted in Afro-Caribbean cosmologies and divinatory practices, it is closely tied to Ifá, the spiritual system Rivero follows. In that tradition, the coconut is used to seek guidance from ancestors and spirits—but only through the act of breaking. For Rivero, that gesture encapsulates the exhibition’s core logic: transformation, knowledge and renewal arise not through preservation, but through rupture. As Mircea Eliade suggests, here destruction is not simply an end, but a necessary act through which meaning is restored and renewed.

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The Kochi Biennale, which launched in 2012, was not only the first Indian biennial of contemporary art but also the most politically engaged and socially critical contemporary art platform in the country, addressing some of India’s most pressing issues despite being the only major government-funded exhibition. As such, it has retained a distinct civic responsibility. Conceived by artists Bose Krishnamachari and Riyas Komu with support from the Government of Kerala, the Kochi Biennale was modeled from the outset on large-scale international exhibitions like Venice and São Paulo while remaining rooted in the layered histories of Kerala’s port cities. Artist-led and experimental in ethos, the biennale is intentionally site-responsive, engaging directly with the historical fabric of the coastal city and its colonial past. It occupies heritage buildings, warehouses, godowns and public sites around Fort Kochi and Mattancherry, and places strong emphasis on public programming as an event conceived first and foremost for local people.

Under the curatorial direction of Nikhil Chopra and HH Art Spaces in Goa, the sixth edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale (KMB)—which opened on December 12 and runs through March 31, 2026—unfolds across multiple venues in Kochi and features sixty-six artists and collectives from more than twenty countries. Titled “For the Time Being,” this edition brings attention back to the body, to our physical, sensorial and emotional experience of the world now, in the present moment, acknowledging the limits and possibilities of being human as the only perspective available to us. At its center is the notion of time understood from a purely human perspective. “The idea is that we measure our experience in the distance between heartbeats,” Chopra told Observer, emphasizing how, in a time defined by artificiality and synthesis, the biennale focuses instead on the physical dimension—our embodied presence and lived experience of the world.

“We’ve really placed the body at the center of our investigation—our understanding, our research, our way of thinking, working and being,” he adds, noting that the notion of “being,” both as verb and noun, anchors this edition. “The biennale wants to take stock of what it means to be present on this planet together. Even though we inherit collective histories and memories, and we speak of ourselves as a people stretched across time, landscapes and geographies, one fact remains: we are here now,” Chopra reflected. “We are contemporaries of one another in the present, and we share this moment. That sense of presence is one of the forces driving us.”

Here, the human body is understood as the only filter, site of encounter and witness to temporality as we confront the present world. For this reason, presence—physical presence, specifically—sits at the core of the show and shaped the criteria for selecting artists. “Whenever we visited an artist’s studio, or when I looked back at artworks I’ve encountered around the world, we were asking: can we feel the artist’s presence? Not only through performance or liveness, though those are part of our programming, but in any medium—can you believe that the artist is truly here, in their work?” Chopra said. This approach led to the notion of “the neighboring body.” “We wanted to feel the sweat, blood and toil of the artist, whether in painting, sculpture or any other form, and we were looking for intelligence that emerges through making.” Ultimately, the biennale is about returning us to real encounters—with the work, with others and with the world.

In assembling this edition’s group of international and local artists, Chopra resisted the notion that an international curator must spend months in transit, endlessly flying between biennales, fairs and studios. Instead, he looked back on nearly 25 years of curatorial practice, revisiting longstanding relationships with artists who had been collaborators, interlocutors or companions across earlier projects. “Many of these relationships were formed through years of working together, exchanging ideas and navigating exhibitions side by side,” he explained. “That existing foundation naturally shaped the initial group of 66 artists, since the process was grounded in trust and longstanding dialogue rather than discovery through constant travel.”

Most of the curatorial research, time and resources were devoted to exploring India’s diverse and often overlooked artistic landscape, including regions outside the main metropolitan centers. “Rather than crisscrossing the globe, I spent time traveling across India, visiting studios in various regions and getting to know emerging practices more closely,” Chopra explained. “For many of these artists, this will be a first opportunity to present their work on a platform of this scale, alongside practitioners who are internationally recognized and have developed extensive, mature bodies of work.”

The artist list now spans major international figures like Ibrahim Mahama, Adrian Villar Rojas, Marina Abramović, Otobong Nkanga and Nari Ward, as well as rising international voices such as Sandra Mujinga, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Mónica de Miranda, Maria Hassabi and Shiraz Bayjoo. They appear alongside established, emerging and newly rediscovered artists from India and its diaspora, including modernist Gieve Patel, Monika Correa, Sapta Gupta, Bhasha Chakrabarti, Arti Kadam and Mathew Krishanu.

“The rigor, the practice and the resilience of some of these artists are incredible,” Chopra noted, referring particularly to the Indian artists included and emphasizing not only their craftsmanship but also the depth of their material investigations. “They are so deeply engaged with what’s happening around them: their research, their observations, the risks they’re taking in their practices, their commitment, their love for making, their love for process. The artists we’re inviting to the Biennale—especially the younger generation—are truly ready for this moment.”

The biennale, he reflected, becomes an important catalyst for a new generation of local artists—a place where different levels of experience meet, and younger practitioners can observe how more seasoned artists navigate the realities of complex exhibition-making.

The biennale also highlights overlooked figures often working outside mainstream circuits. Among them, Chopra mentions Malu Joy (Sister Roswin CMC), a nun who creates intimate drawings of elderly women she cared for. “The way she captures these deeply expressive, almost expressionistic faces—it’s absolutely the kind of work that deserves to be shown at any international exhibition,” he said.

At the same time, bringing established artists to India remains essential, as their experience with large-scale exhibitions becomes especially valuable in a context where production conditions can be demanding and unpredictable. “Artists here need agility; they need to shift, to shape-shift, to adapt their ideas to the realities in which we are making this exhibition,” Chopra said.

All the included artists were encouraged to think and act site-specifically, responding to venues directly connected to India’s history of trade and colonialism. This edition takes over spaces such as Aspinwall House, once the headquarters of the trading company Aspinwall & Company Ltd; Pepper House, a former spice warehouse on Vembanad Lake; and Island Warehouse on Willingdon Island, created in 1928 during the modernization of Kochi Harbour. Additional heritage venues include the 111 (KVJ Building), once a center of the rice trade in Mattancherry; Space, formerly the Indian Chamber of Commerce; and Durbar Hall in Ernakulam, originally the royal courthouse of the Maharaja of Kochi.

“The ghosts of the past are etched right into the walls of these warehouses—the very spaces the artists are showing in,” Chopra observed. “They’re not white, pristine cubes at all; they’re full of texture, memory, smells, history—distant voices still coming through. You can feel the Dutch, you can feel the Portuguese; their histories are woven into the warp and weft of Kochi itself. It’s part of the embroidery, the textile—the tapestry—of this place.” This, he explained, is why he titled the exhibition “For the Time Being.” It is about accepting and understanding what we have and who we are.

For Chopra, this biennale is an invitation to understand our relationship to the present in relation to the past. “In many ways, the voices coming from parts of the world that have been oppressed, exploited and enslaved are written into our DNA,” he considered. “We don’t choose our bodies, and that inheritance runs through us like a kind of cellular memory. It’s embedded in the place.”

Many of the projects grew directly out of site visits, prompting artists to develop work in response to the particularities of each location. “Artists were asked to react rather than simply act,” Chopra emphasized. Yet not all artists are activists. “There is an active, engaged quality in the way we present our ideas, but ultimately it’s the aesthetics, the desire and the poetics that shape the politics in most cases. We’re bringing those elements into the work, but we’re not foregrounding the politics in an overt, confrontational way.”

Being the only major cultural institution funded by public money also carries the risk of political oversight. Chopra acknowledged this obliquely, noting that over years of organizing projects in India, he and his team at HH Art Spaces have learned how to navigate potential censorship or controversy. “We’ve been around for about twelve years, working in Goa for the past ten. My own artistic career spans about twenty to twenty-five years. My practice has always been about subverting certain ideas. The politics are there, but they sit beneath the aesthetic surface. Over time, we’ve learned how to navigate and circumvent the powers that might oppose what we do. You have to arrive at those conversations slowly; you don’t just deliver everything upfront. It’s more like letting a drop of poison sit in a cup of wine. The work carries the charge, but it reveals itself subtly, not all at once.”

That civic responsibility also translates into a biennale conceived primarily for local audiences: roughly 90 percent of visitors come from Kerala within a 300 to 400-kilometer radius, and attendance this year is expected to reach one million. Developing a substantial public program was therefore essential, extending the biennale’s content well beyond the sixty-six artists and fifty-five new commissions. “This entire part of the city is going to come alive over the next four days,” Chopra said, noting the strong local appetite for art. “People come with a sense of curiosity, inquiry, joy, desire and wonder. They genuinely want to see contemporary art, and we try to feed that hunger—quite literally, actually.”

The Canteen Project, for instance, is a living, participatory collaboration between artists Bani Abidi from Pakistan and Anupama from India, conceived as a shared food project for visitors. Meals are prepared by a women’s empowerment collective in Kerala associated with a major state initiative. “So you have Indian and Pakistani women collaborating, an architect and an artist working side by side, and the meals being served by this women’s group. It feels like a big mama project—nourishing the collective, in a present moment of human encounter and sharing, and completely aligned with the spirit of this edition.”

The curator stressed that accessibility is fundamental. The exhibition, he argues, should connect with audiences through immediacy, delight and seduction rather than alienate them with dense language, heavy theory or works requiring extensive explanation. “The connection should begin with something immediate—seductive, delightful—because we’re still in the process of building a critical mass of contemporary art viewers. It’s important to invite people in, not make them feel uncomfortable about being here, and even when discomfort arises, it should feel like part of a welcoming experience.”

At the core of Chopra and HH Art Spaces’ curatorial approach for this sixth edition is a commitment to embracing the character of the place—its specificities, challenges and potential—rather than aspiring to resemble anything else. Instead of delivering a polished spectacle for the art world, VIPs or the international circuit, Chopra wanted to bring visitors into the act of making, into the energies of creativity, experimentation and exploration. “The goal isn’t to produce a Swiss exhibition; that doesn’t work here. The goal is to create something that matches the soul and the conditions of this place, and that’s the connection I’m trying to make.”

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They are central pillars in the dynamics of value creation—shaping narratives and visibility, advocating for artists and securing the resources and conditions needed to realize their visions. Their power no longer lies in interpretation, tastemaking or storytelling alone, but in their capacity to build cultural ecosystems: patron networks, artist pipelines, intellectual frameworks and cross-border collaborations.

By building and reshaping institutions, rewriting art-historical canons, commissioning new work and fostering opportunities for exchange, the following curators function as dynamic catalysts transforming the contemporary art system as a whole. Responding to the political, ecological and technological forces that define our time, they play a vital role in supporting—and quite literally “taking care” of—the circulation and production of artistic vision across the art world’s many tiers, contexts and voices.

Hoor Al Qasimi

• President and director | Sharjah Art Foundation

Hoor Al Qasimi has transformed the Gulf’s cultural landscape into one of the world’s most closely watched centers of contemporary art, while continually reshaping what biennials can be. Since co-curating the Sharjah Biennial in 2003 at just twenty-two, she has expanded its reach into a year-round infrastructure of residencies, commissions and educational initiatives, positioning Sharjah as a nexus for artists between East and West. Her curatorial approach foregrounds ecological, postcolonial and transregional perspectives that link Asia, Africa and the Middle East in critical dialogue. In 2025, she was appointed artistic director of both the Aichi Triennale and next year’s Biennale of Sydney, cementing her reputation as one of the most influential figures redefining the role and format of biennials in response to shifting cultural contexts. “A biennial has to engage with the city. It can’t be isolated,” she said in a discussion with Observer about the Aichi Triennale. “Some biennials are reduced to museum shows, but for me, the exciting ones are the ones that venture into public spaces, engage with people and develop as collaborative processes.” Most recently, ALESCO named Al Qasimi its 2025–26 Ambassador Extraordinary for Arab Culture, and she was appointed president of the newly established University of the Arts Sharjah, launched in December 2025.

Alex Gartenfeld

• Irma and Norman Braman Artistic Director | ICA Miami

Alex Gartenfeld has transformed ICA Miami into one of the U.S.’s most dynamic museums, particularly noted for its collection and contemporary programming. At only 37, he has overseen landmark acquisitions, groundbreaking commissions and now a major expansion through the planned acquisition of the neighboring de la Cruz Collection building, which will double ICA Miami’s exhibition space. His curatorial philosophy pairs experimentation with intellectual rigor—seen in shows like last year’s Keiichi Tanaami retrospective and his embrace of digital art—reflecting Miami’s dual identity as a regional city and global crossroads. “Over the last decade, we have been among the world’s most actively growing institutions for contemporary art,” he told Observer ahead of last year’s Miami Art Week. “Our collecting approach is global and interdisciplinary and includes various perspectives and narratives. Whenever we present works from the collection, we approach these presentations as scholarly curated exhibitions that highlight topical themes and histories and often bring new voices to the fore.” Gartenfeld’s leadership has helped define a new institutional model—nimble, patron-supported and conceptually ambitious—that positions ICA Miami as both an incubator for emerging voices and a significant force in next-generation museum practice.

Naomi Beckwith

• Deputy director and chief curator | The Guggenheim

Naomi Beckwith, newly appointed artistic director of documenta 16, is one of the most visible curatorial leaders redefining major institutions from within. Trained at Northwestern University and the Courtauld Institute of Art, she built her career at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, where she elevated discourse on race, feminism and conceptual art through exhibitions featuring Adrian Piper, Howardena Pindell and Lynette Yiadom‑Boakye as well as groundbreaking thematic shows like “Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America” at the New Museum and ”ECHO DELAY REVERB – American Art, French Thought,” which is currently on view at Palais Tokyo in Paris, through February 2026. Her move to the Guggenheim in 2021 marked a generational pivot toward inclusivity and intellectual depth at the top of American museum culture. Her appointment to lead documenta 16 was a welcome surprise. She is the first Black woman to curate the show in its 69-year history and only the second woman overall, after Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev curated the 2012 edition, and she has assembled an all-women curatorial team. Beckwith is notably one of the first artistic directors of documenta without significant biennial experience. She served on the curatorial committee for one edition of SITE Santa Fe’s SITElines biennial and the awards jury for the 2015 Venice Biennale, but her long career staging major museum exhibitions and her standing as a global cultural force shaping new institutional narratives was qualification enough.

Thelma Golden

• Director and chief curator | The Studio Museum in Harlem

Thelma Golden has spent three decades defining the contours of Black art within contemporary American discourse. As director and chief curator of the Studio Museum in Harlem since 2005, she has mentored generations of artists—among them Kehinde Wiley, Jordan Casteel and Mickalene Thomas—and established the museum as an incubator of talent and thought. Her curatorial landmark “Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art” (Whitney Museum, 1994-95) remains a touchstone in art history, as does her concept of “post-Blackness,” which expanded understandings of identity beyond essentialist frameworks. Now overseeing the Studio Museum’s reopening in its new David Adjaye-designed building, Golden continues to shape how American institutions narrate race, community and culture in the 21st Century, as well as how they serve their communities. ​​“We felt it essential that there were areas throughout the museum that could be used for communal gathering,” Golden told Observer, noting that the newly introduced Stoop (descending steps that double as seating) was intentionally designed as a public space—an extension of the museum into the neighborhood, where the community can gather for lectures, performances and films.

Tyler Blackwell

• Curator of contemporary art | Speed Art Museum

Tyler Blackwell represents a new generation of curators revitalizing regional institutions through patron engagement and top-quality acquisitions. His work focuses on expanding the museum’s holdings of living artists and building a collection that speaks to today’s social and cultural dynamics. In just three years under his curation the museum was able to acquire over 50 works by leading names of our times, including Igshaan Adams, Rita Ackermann, Anthony Akinbola, Teresa Baker, Hernan Bas, María Berrío, Jordan Ann Craig, Tony Cokes, Anthony Cudahy, vanessa german, Hugh Hayden, Oliver Herring, Esteban Jefferson, Young Joon Kwak, Simone Leigh, Leslie Martinez, Danielle Mckinney, Rebecca Morris, Angel Otero, Naudline Pierre, Ebony G. Patterson, Christina Quarles, Celeste Rapone, Jacolby Satterwhite, Kathia St. Hilaire, Chiffon Thomas, Salman Toor, Michaela Yearwood-Dan and Jimmy Wright—artists whose practices span abstraction and figuration, identity and material experimentation and whose inclusion underscores Blackwell’s commitment to an inclusive, forward-looking curatorial vision. Through acquisitions and exhibitions that connect local narratives to national conversations on equity, ecology and materiality, Blackwell has elevated the Speed’s profile beyond its locality to a truly global perspective. His approach underscores a broader shift in U.S. museum culture—one in which regional institutions reclaim contemporary relevance through thoughtful collection-building and attention to the most pressing matters of our time.

Carla Acevedo-Yates

• Independent curator

Carla Acevedo-Yates, the Puerto Rican curator, researcher and critic recently tapped for Naomi Beckwith’s documenta team, has established herself as a vital force in fostering dialogue between the Caribbean, Latin America and the United States. After holding curatorial positions at the Michigan State University Broad Art Museum, Acevedo-Yates joined the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago in 2019, where she curated groundbreaking group exhibitions on Latino and Caribbean diasporic exchanges and identities, including “Forecast Form: Art in the Caribbean Diaspora 1990s–Today” and “entre horizontes: Art and Activism Between Chicago and Puerto Rico.” Her curatorial practice today explores how colonial legacies, global capitalism and migratory experiences shape contemporary aesthetics, often situating local Caribbean narratives within global frameworks. By connecting rigorous research with poetic curatorial storytelling, Acevedo-Yates has become a leading advocate for artists working across geographies and histories, prompting institutions to adopt a hemispheric understanding of the Americas and their interconnected cultural landscape.

Xiaoyu Weng

• Director | Tanoto Art Foundation

Xiaoyu Weng has built an exceptional international career bridging North America and Asia. While excelling in her role at Tanoto Art Foundation in Singapore, Weng was appointed director of New York’s experimental Art in General before being named one of the curators for documenta 16. A graduate of the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing and California College of the Arts, she previously led the modern and contemporary art department at the Art Gallery of Ontario, curated the inaugural Ural Industrial Biennial of Contemporary Art in Yekaterinburg and worked at the Guggenheim Museum as Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Associate Curator of Chinese Art, where she created an online series examining anti-Asian racism through contemporary art that gained wide attention during the pandemic. Earlier in her career, in 2010, she was the founding director of Asia Programs in Paris and San Francisco for the Kadist Art Foundation. Weng’s exhibitions often address the entanglements of ecology, technology and feminism within globalization, positioning her as one of the most incisive voices exploring how decolonial and environmental thought inform artistic practice. Her simultaneous leadership roles exemplify the agility of a new generation of cross-border curators redefining institutional models on a global scale.

Marcela Guerrero

• Curator of the 2026 Whitney Biennial

Marcela Guerrero brings a transnational sensibility and deep expertise in Latinx and Caribbean art to one of the world’s most closely watched exhibitions. As the Whitney Museum’s former associate curator, she helped reshape acquisitions and programming to reflect the multiplicity of American identities, championing artists long excluded from mainstream narratives. She has also curated landmark exhibitions that foreground Latinx and Caribbean artists. Most notably, in 2022, she organized the critically acclaimed “No existe un mundo poshuracán: Puerto Rican Art in the Wake of Hurricane Maria,” a powerful exhibition that examined the profound social and political consequences of the hurricane and how Puerto Rican contemporary artists confronted, processed and reimagined its aftermath. Additionally, Guerrero co-curated the solo exhibition of paintings by Colombian-born Ilana Savdie in 2023 and was part of the curatorial team that organized a critical survey on the relations between Mexican muralists and American art: “Vida Americana: Mexican Muralists Remake American Art, 1925–1945.” Her upcoming biennial, which she’ll co-curate with Drew Sawyer (the institution’s Sondra Gilman Curator of Photography), is expected to expand that vision, foregrounding how migration, hybridity and language define the contemporary American condition.

Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung

• Director | Berlin’s Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW)

Cameroonian curator, theorist and writer Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung has emerged as one of the most forward-thinking curators today. As director of Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) in Berlin, he has transformed the institution into a laboratory for decolonial and global thinking, connecting art, science and sound into fluid intellectual ecosystems. His appointment as curator of the 2025 São Paulo Biennial—where he led a conceptual team that included Alya Sebti, Anna Roberta Goetz, Thiago de Paula Souza, Keyna Eleison and Henriette Gallus—extended this approach, reimagining exhibition-making as a space of epistemic repair, solidarity and collective healing. Before stepping into his current role, Soh Bejeng Ndikung founded SAVVY Contemporary in Berlin, an independent space and discursive platform that bridges art-world geographies and epistemologies. In 2017, he served as curator-at-large for the ambitious and memorable documenta 14 with an extensive program between Athens and Kassel. Ndikung’s transdisciplinary practice embodies a new curatorial paradigm—one that sees art as a vehicle for ecological awareness, historical redress and imagination beyond Western perspectives.

Massimiliano Gioni

• Artistic director | The New Museum

Massimiliano Gioni has long been one of the most influential curators shaping the intellectual climate of contemporary art. Known for his conceptually and encyclopedically ambitious exhibitions such as “The Encyclopedic Palace” at the 2013 Venice Biennale and “The Great Mother” in Milan, he blends rigorous scholarship and curatorial inventiveness with humanistic acuity. “I try to make shows that still entail a process of discovery,” he told Observer earlier this year. “When staging shows, they must be somewhat physically and visually memorable. If I think of a room in an exhibition, I need to be able to read it at once as a whole and then go into the details. But it doesn’t mean it should be clear to the point that it’s so transparent you don’t want to engage with it.” Under his leadership, the New Museum—now reopening after a major renovation—has become a crucible for experimental practices and cross-generational dialogue. Gioni’s work bridges European and American perspectives, reaffirming the New Museum’s role as an institution where boldness meets philosophical depth.

Cecilia Alemani

• Artistic director | High Line Art

Cecilia Alemani, curator of the 2022 Venice Biennale, has been internationally celebrated for her lucid, imaginative and politically resonant curatorial language. Conceived during the pandemic, her groundbreaking Venice exhibition “The Milk of Dreams” reframed surrealism through a feminist and posthuman lens, positioning imagination as an act of resistance in a time of destruction and crisis. In addition to her ambitious public art commissions along the High Line, this year she curated the widely acclaimed SITE SANTA FE International, continuing to merge conceptual sophistication with accessibility. “You see a contemporary art exhibition, but something is slightly different,” she said, giving Observer a window into her concept. “When you get close to the art, you will see that it is the telling of the story of a person. They might be a healer,  a writer or even just a character from a book and this could be illustrated with a story, but also maybe with an object they left behind. It doesn’t need to be an art object. It can be like a matchbox in their pocket or a cup they were drinking from. That story will let you see the art around you differently.” Ultimately, Alemani’s exhibitions transform public space into sites of archetypal and mythic encounter, fostering collective reflection and universal understanding.

Pedro Alonzo

• Independent curator

Pedro Alonzo has built an international reputation for transforming public space into a curatorial medium. Formerly adjunct curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston and Dallas Contemporary, he has long bridged institutional exhibitions and civic-scale interventions, organizing projects such as “Open Source: Engaging Audiences in Public Space” in Philadelphia and “Art & the Landscape” with The Trustees in Massachusetts, commissioning artists including Doug Aitken, Alicja Kwade and Jeppe Hein. His recent curatorial roles—as curator of “Noor Riyadh” in Saudi Arabia in 2023 and artistic director of the inaugural Boston Public Art Triennial this year—demonstrate the potential of public art as both an agent of change and a tool for civic dialogue, transforming urban environments into platforms for inclusive, community-based and transformative storytelling. “I realized Boston is a city operating on a global scale, with far-reaching impact,” he told Observer during a walkthrough of the Triennial. “The question became: how can we connect artists to that energy, to those networks and allow their work to respond, resonate and contribute to amplify or make more accessible or more impactful this knowledge and talent?”

Doryun Chong

• Artistic director and chief curator | M+

Doryun Chong is actively redefining how Asia’s recent artistic history is understood and experienced, while paving the way for a fuller appreciation of some of the region’s most promising emerging talents. Formerly at MoMA and the Guggenheim, he has long championed transnational rather than regional frameworks for Asian art, emphasizing cultural circulation over fixed geography or limiting categories. At M+, Chong has helped build a curatorial ecosystem that integrates art, architecture, design and film, reflecting the multiplicity of contemporary life while situating Hong Kong as a critical node between local heritage and global culture. His recent international projects—including the landmark Lee Bul exhibition at Leeum Museum and “Prism of the Real” in Tokyo—extend this vision beyond the museum’s walls, underscoring his commitment to presenting Asia’s artistic narratives with intellectual depth, regional rootedness and international resonance.

Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath

• Co-directors | Hamburger Bahnhof

The curatorial duo Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath exemplify the rise of collaborative curatorship as a form of global translation. Over the past decade, they have curated major biennials and museum exhibitions that traverse cultures and histories with intellectual dexterity. At Hamburger Bahnhof, they are reshaping the museum’s curatorial direction toward greater inclusivity and international dialogue. Bardaouil, in conversation with Observer, has described the programming at Hamburger Bahnhof as being in a “continuous state of becoming”—never static, always porous. “It is shaped by artists who confront the urgencies of our time with the courage of their imagination.” It may come down to his and Fellrath’s unique curatorial partnership, which blurs the line between institutional leadership and artistic collaboration, offering a model for museums in flux—rooted in plurality and community engagement rather than hierarchy. Most recently, the pair curated the 14th Taipei Biennial, titled “Whispers on the Horizon,” which explores themes of collective yearning and shared futures.

Ebony L. Haynes

• Global head of curatorial projects | David Zwirner

Ebony L. Haynes has carved out a distinct role within the commercial art ecosystem, transforming David Zwirner’s 52 Walker in Tribeca into a locus of critical inquiry and museum-caliber exhibition-making, redefining what a blue-chip gallery can be. Her vision—of a research-led, time-based, and multimedia space that privileges ideas over transactions—led to her recent appointment as global head of curatorial projects at Zwirner, formal recognition of her role in pushing the gallery’s scope beyond the purely commercial. Since inaugurating 52 Walker with Kandis Williams’s “A Line” (October 2021-January 2022), Haynes has curated a series of conceptually sharp and visually disciplined exhibitions with Nikita Gale, Nora Turato and Tiona Nekkia McClodden. Each show has interrogated systems of race, identity, performance and language through minimalist yet charged forms that command both academic and collector attention. Her approach positions Black artistic production not as a thematic niche but as a structural force shaping the discourse of contemporary art. One of Haynes’s most notable curatorial interventions came with the 2023 exhibition “Bob Thompson: So let us all be citizens,” a deftly staged landmark revival of the late artist’s work that reaffirmed her commitment to rewriting art-historical narratives and bridging institutional and commercial contexts. Haynes’s curatorial independence within one of the world’s most powerful galleries stands as proof that institutional critique can still thrive within a commercial infrastructure.

When people are still discussing an artwork weeks after a gallery exhibition or fair, it becomes clear that the piece has done more than simply go viral. Something about it has opened the door for critical debate, inspiring timely reflection on where art is and where it might be heading next. Consider, too, that many much-discussed works that ultimately reshaped the course of contemporary art history—Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain being the most obvious example—were initially rejected by the art world’s gatekeepers.

The latest work to generate this kind of sustained buzz was arguably Beeple’s robotic performance, Regular Animals, which stole the show at the most recent edition of Art Basel Miami Beach. In the process, it pulled the art world’s focus toward Zero 10, the fair’s inaugural sector dedicated to digital art, and to how these practices currently operate within the contemporary art ecosystem.

Beeple—a.k.a. Mike Winkelmann—had suspected the performance might go viral. When we spoke to him just after the fair, he said that when he’d shown different versions of the robotic dogs at studio events, audiences always responded strongly. Earlier this year, someone recorded one of those presentations, posted it online and the video quickly racked up views. Still, presenting the work at Art Basel Miami Beach propelled it far beyond the digital art community Beeple is a part of. “We knew it was getting traction, but we had no idea it was about to blow up to the point where it would be on global news and literally live on CNBC the next day,” he told Observer. “Every outlet picked it up—Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, everyone. We had no way of expecting that. It wasn’t like, ‘Oh yeah, today’s the day this is going to explode.’”

At the time of our conversation, the videos had already amassed nearly 100 million views, according to Beeple’s team. “Making noise means bringing people in, especially during a week when there’s so much happening, and everyone’s trying to be at the center of the conversation,” he reflected, suggesting that while the scale of the reaction was unexpected, it made sense within the broader cultural moment.

“Honestly, the reason is that a lot of the works in the fair are not talking about things people actually care about. It’s full of conversations that don’t apply to anyone’s daily life,” he said. “Technology—and the impact it has on your life every single day—is an insanely relevant topic. I’m genuinely bewildered that more people in the art world aren’t talking about it. To me, this is the conversation of our time. The impact of technology is massive, and there are so many layers and nuances to it. It permeates everything.”

While ArtNews editor in chief Sarah Douglas brutally described Zero 10 as a wake-up call that “the barbarians are inside” in a recent ArtTactic podcast, the fair’s fledgling digital art sector felt less like an invasion than an acknowledgement of new media’s relevancy. Technology is now so deeply embedded in how we perceive, process and represent the world, and the artists who showed in Zero 10 interrogate and challenge it.

Many of the presentations in Zero 10 operated in a hybrid space between physical and digital forms, raising the question of whether it still makes sense to treat these practices as a separate category. That hybridity may also help explain why traditional collectors are becoming more receptive. Faced with unfamiliar technologies, audiences often look for points of recognition, and as digital art intersects with established visual languages, it becomes easier to situate it within existing cultural (and collecting) frameworks.

Beeple is convinced that, over time, digital artwork will become part of the broader structure of the fair. “Right now it still gets its own section, and that’ll probably continue for a while, but eventually Gagosian is going to have a roster of digital artists, as well as all the other art galleries,” he argued. “It’ll just become another medium—photography, sculpture, painting, digital. There’s zero doubt in my mind that it will eventually be seen that way.”

If that integration has been slow, it’s still just a matter of time. “Digital art has obviously existed for decades, but for most of that time it got lumped into ‘mixed media,’ which never felt right,” he said, noting that what he is doing in 2025 bears little resemblance to Nam June Paik working with VCRs in the 1970s. “That’s video art—nothing against it, but it’s a different medium than me sitting down with A.I. today and producing something completely different.”

Our understanding of digital art as a distinct medium is relatively new. “It really crystallized with NFTs, when a consensus emerged around a natively digital way to collect the work,” Beeple explained. “That brought a huge community along with it—something digital art never had when it was buried under ‘mixed media.’” At the same time, digital art has historically circulated outside the traditional market, developing community-driven systems of exchange with different expectations around authorship and value, particularly in peer-to-peer economies that operate very differently from gallery-based structures.

But he’s less interested in debates about whether decentralized marketplaces will replace galleries. For him, those platforms are simply another option. “Gagosian could sell digital art tomorrow—nothing is stopping any gallery from doing it. They simply haven’t thrown their weight behind digital artists yet. But if a major gallery suddenly decided, ‘This matters, we’re going to represent this artist and put their work in our next booth,’ people would immediately understand digital art as part of the gallery ecosystem.”

That said, in Zero 10, most of the participating artists were represented by galleries; Jack Butcher and Beeple were the exceptions. “The reality is that many artists don’t want to handle the things we handle,” he said. “They want to focus on the work and have a gallery represent them, contextualize it, manage logistics, and provide infrastructure. That’s completely valid.”

He doesn’t see digital art as a threat to the gallery model. “Galleries still have a purpose: they educate, contextualize, support production, and handle the operational side that most artists don’t have the resources or desire to manage,” he said. “I can do more in-house because of my situation, but that’s not the norm.” What he was most proud of at Zero 10, he said, was the level of experimentation around how work could be presented at a fair. Several artists explored new forms of interaction. “I loved what Jack did with allowing anyone to get a piece of art for any amount of money.” In Beeple’s booth, more than one thousand artworks were given away. “I’m excited to see where that experimentation takes us in the future, and I think this will be a massive differentiating factor for digital art at art fairs.”

Beeple rejects the idea of a rigid divide between digital and traditional art worlds. “I don’t see any of this as being ‘against’ the traditional art world: it’s one community and another community, and both will exist in the future. For me, the real focus is on what it means to engage with technology at this stage of civilization—that conversation is more interesting than the mechanics of distribution.”

How the work gets sold is, in fact, the least interesting part for him. He notes that they did accept payment in crypto from one buyer, but downplays the significance. “It really isn’t very complicated and can, of course, be converted to fiat immediately,” he said. “I really am, honestly, a bit surprised that this has not been adopted more generally.”

He calls himself a “digital artist exploring a technology and a medium and what it can express,” adding that “the work will get sold or it won’t. If something is genuinely compelling, it will eventually find its way into people’s hands.” Distribution models, he suggested, will evolve naturally around what proves most effective.

He acknowledged that this position contrasts sharply with the speculative frenzy of the NFT boom, when crypto wealth drove demand for digital objects not always positioned as art. What matters now, he argues, is the broader cultural discourse. “I think a lot has changed since 2021, but overall I think everyone had a bit of time to chill out and maybe get a bit more used to the idea of virtual objects having value,” Beeple said. “When you stop for a second and evaluate the actual artwork divorced from the hype, you see a lot of really smart, interesting works that have craft, intention, and true artistic merit.”

And it’s worth reiterating that digital art is not just crypto art. “The crypto component is just one slice of a broader digital practice,” he emphasized, noting that he had only learned about NFTs four months before his landmark sale, despite having worked digitally for two decades. “My focus is on what digital art can do across social media, A.I. imagery, immersive environments, video games and all the other forms the medium now touches. Crypto art is just one piece of that ecosystem.”

Beeple sees Zero 10 as a continuation of the momentum that began building in 2021, but he also acknowledged that there’s plenty more to do. “One of the things that makes it both exciting and challenging versus other media is that it is changing very rapidly,” he said. “What is possible, the tools, etc., are moving at an insanely rapid pace relative to other mediums.”

That speed complicates institutionalization. Unlike painting and sculpture, which evolve incrementally, digital art is shaped by accelerating technologies. “In just the past three years, the capabilities introduced by A.I. alone have dramatically altered what is possible,” Beeple pointed out. “This constant acceleration is both energizing and challenging: it makes the medium fertile and dynamic but also makes it difficult for curators, collectors and institutions to keep pace.”

Still, he sees growing momentum toward integration. Institutional exhibitions—such as the Toledo Museum of Art’s recent show, “Infinite Images: The Art of Algorithms”—have brought together artists working across digital and traditional practices, signaling a shift in perception. In contrast to photography, which took nearly a century to gain full artistic legitimacy, digital art may achieve this integration much faster. “I don’t think digital art will need 100 years,” Beeple asserted. “What also feels different now is a clearer distinction between artistic practices and commercially driven NFT projects. That distinction is becoming easier to recognize.”

At its core, blockchain technology enables ownership of a virtual object, but what that object can be remains an open question. Digital art, he suggested, is still in its nascent stages, comparable to the early days of the web, and the medium continues to expand in form and possibility.

Asked about the role of A.I., Beeple sees it as a tool that expands creative potential rather than a threat to human intelligence. “I think A.I. is both inspiring and, honestly, a little scary. I’m not firmly on one side or the other. It’s going to be extremely disruptive,” he said, acknowledging that certain crafts and jobs will disappear. But critics who dismiss A.I. as mere “remixing,” he added, misunderstand creativity itself. “That’s exactly what humans have always done. Creativity has always been recombination: taking what exists and transforming it. The idea that anything has ever emerged fully formed, untouched by influence, is a fantasy.”

Rather than ending creativity, Beeple believes A.I. will accelerate it. “We’re heading toward a kind of golden age for content, film, and storytelling, because the barriers to participation are collapsing.” As production becomes easier, expectations rise, and “as the volume of content explodes, only work that’s novel and compelling will rise to the top.”

More in new media art

• What Zero 10 Can Tell Us About the Art World’s Next Chapter

• The Myth of the Digital Threat: How Technology Expands Art’s Reach

• The Algorithm Thinks You’re Ugly: An Interview With Artist Gretchen Andrew

• In New York, Heft Gallery Brings Curatorial Rigor to New Media Art

• Angelo Sotira Wants to Set the Standard for Displaying Code-Based Art

Minimalism emerged as both an act of resistance and a direct response to the exuberance of mass media and mass production—forces celebrated as progress that fundamentally reshaped how we relate to objects and to material reality itself. Seen from today’s vantage point, works made during the height of the movement in the 1960s and ’70s reveal a radical and strikingly timely philosophical and political interrogation of our modern sense of reality that feels particularly urgent in an era defined by the mediatization and spectacularization of the digital sphere.

Against the promise of endless availability and the relentless cycles of production, circulation and consumption—including the infinite reproducibility of the digital image—Minimalism’s artists embraced an ascetic discipline of reduction, stripping the artwork to its essential terms and events while intensifying its effects. In doing so, they underscored how an object, through restraint, can shape perception and reconfigure the very space and architecture that contain it.

“Minimal,” a major exhibition that opened at La Bourse de Commerce in October, brings together over 100 works, including a core group drawn from François Pinault’s collection, alongside international loans from the Dia Foundation in New York and other institutions. Curated by Dia director Jessica Morgan, it traces, likely for the first time, both the diversity and the global reach of the movement launched by a generation of artists who initiated a radical approach to art that later took on different forms around the world.

The exhibition unfolds as a journey that allows for multiple discoveries and rediscoveries, showcasing how artists from diverse cultural backgrounds across Asia, Europe, and North and South America similarly challenged traditional methods of art production and display. At its core is a fundamental reconsideration of the artwork’s placement in relation to the viewer and within the cyclical flow of energy and matter that underpins the cosmos itself.

The works in the show were born out of a shared attempt to stage raw encounters with matter and to engage the most primordial and authentic structures of human experience. Conceived with both conceptual and spiritual rigor, they privilege presence and perception over form, becoming experiential sites of “lived perception”—embodying an entire mode of thinking in an art object that places the physical self at the center of understanding the world.

Philosophically, Minimalist artworks foreground a mature awareness of reality as inherently interrelational, something that arises only in the encounter between object, viewer and environment. A radical manifestation of this interdependence appears in the central installations by American artist Meg Webster, which dominate the Bourse’s scenic, frescoed rotunda. Conceived and realized in collaboration with natural processes, their final form stages a tense resistance to entropy, which inevitably alters their shape and appearance over time beyond any claim to human formal control or perfection. Natural processes are embedded within these seemingly simple structures, which ultimately draw an entire ecosystem into Tadao Ando’s spare architecture. Here, the total choreography matters as much as its individual components, as Webster constructs an interior landscape at the building’s core.

Merging nature and culture, matter and energy, Webster’s process-based sculpture is infused with a prescient ecological consciousness. Poised between the elemental and the formal, between human-shaped material and natural transformation, her work prompts reflection on sustainability and our relationship to the earth—particularly resonant today as she receives long-overdue international attention through this presentation, which runs in conjunction with her year-long exhibition at Dia Beacon.

If Minimalism has long been interpreted as an aesthetic reaction to the subjective overflow of Abstract Expressionism and the figuration of Pop Art, the global perspective and breadth of this exhibition make clear that the approach often extended far beyond a purely aesthetic exercise. In doing so, it prepared the conceptual ground for a substantial share of contemporary sculpture and Conceptual Art, pushing the logic of economy of means to the point of privileging the idea over its realization. This shift opened up possibilities for many contemporary artistic practices that operate beyond, or are no longer confined to, fixed traditional media.

The exhibition is organized into seven thematic sections: Light, Mono-ha, Balance, Surface, Grid, Monochrome and Materialism. The titles signal the core elements these artists investigated in their inquiry into the most radical ways of translating reality through art reduced to its most essential components. Unadorned by any pretense of figuration or narrative and detached from the biographical identity of its maker, each work functions simultaneously as proposition and question.

Underlying the pieces on view is a shared desire to situate the audience within the same perceptual field, calling for a bodily correspondence between artwork and viewer through scale and proximity. In many parts of the world, this reconceptualization of three-dimensional form and perception led to a dialogue with performance, whether through process-based making, choreographic collaboration or direct physical interaction with the work.

The exhibition naturally includes the early generation of American artists most closely associated with the movement, including Donald Judd, Carl Andre and Dan Flavin, though they do not occupy center stage, reflecting an effort to decentralize and broaden the narrative. As at Dia, the show presents artists from the 1960s who pursued a similarly radical engagement with the canvas, exploring austerity and mathematical rigor through monochrome and grid-based structures. Figures such as Robert Ryman and Agnes Martin are represented by some of the most significant works drawn from Pinault’s collection.

Particularly compelling is the dialogue established with parallel aesthetics emerging from markedly different cultural, philosophical and spiritual contexts outside the United States. Among these, the Japanese Mono-ha group offers one of the exhibition’s most resonant contributions. Pinault’s holdings include one of the most substantial collections of Mono-ha works outside Japan. Artists such as Lee Ufan, Kishio Suga, Koji Enokura, Susumu Koshimizu, Nobuo Sekine and Jiro Takamatsu foreground the interrelation of object, space and viewer, staging “things” together in their natural or industrially fabricated states. By embracing the delicate balance and tension produced by their transitory condition, these artists investigated a form of material intelligence, examining how matter retains identity even as form shifts, prioritizing material presence over sculptural expression and over any symbolic or linguistic framing.

Another compelling perspective included in the exhibition is the organic and participatory reinterpretation of geometric abstraction developed in Brazil through the Neo-Concrete movement, exemplified by Lygia Pape, Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica. A capsule exhibition dedicated to Pape, “Weaving Space,” which opened a month earlier and runs concurrently, served as a prelude to “Minimal.” It traces key moments in her oeuvre, from Max Bill-inspired geometries to an increasingly organic and participatory use of abstraction, presenting works that range from her first abstract engravings to her monumental Livro Noite e Dia III (Book of Night and Day III) from 1963-76, alongside experimental films that emerged in response to Brazil’s sociopolitical context at the time. At the heart of the presentation is her poetic, full-room installation Ttéia 1, C (2003-2017), in which she literally weaves space into a new architectural structure using delicate gold threads, transforming the environment into a luminous and diaphanous site of exchange between physical presence and imagination, light and darkness.

One of her most radical works, Divisor (1968), was restaged during the show’s opening weeks. As in its original enactment in Rio de Janeiro, a hundred participants moved as one beneath an immense perforated white sheet, forming a living metaphor for a shared social fabric. In this gentle merging of forms, hierarchy is suspended, and the work invites a collective, participatory meditation on equality, employing abstraction as a universal language that transcends individuality and binds participants within a shared structure.

Occupying the entirety of the rotunda is On Kawara’s Minimal Chronology of Dated Paintings, forming a minimalist diary and record of personal and collective time. By painting the numbers that denote each passing day, Kawara creates a fragment of space and materiality in which the durational act of painting absorbs the multiplicity of events and meanings implied within a single date, set against the relentless flow of time. By confronting the idea that linear time itself is a conventional and ultimately arbitrary human construction, Kawara’s date paintings distill life to its most essential marker—time alone—aligning with Minimalism’s drive toward radical reduction through their emphasis on the viewer’s direct encounter with the present. Meanwhile, in Europe, movements such as Zero in Germany and Arte Povera in Italy pushed the boundaries of sculpture through minimalist vocabularies and a direct engagement with space as a hybrid, active presence.

The additional perspectives and less expected figures presented in the Light section offer a fresh reading of how Minimalism enabled artists to investigate one of the most phenomenologically charged elements through which we access physical reality. In the 1960s and ’70s, light became a primary material. Artists including Dan Flavin, Nancy Holt, François Morellet, Robert Irwin, Mary Corse, Keith Sonnier and Chryssa worked with fluorescent tubes, neon, black light, projected light and natural illumination, driven by a broader inquiry into perception and immateriality as artificial and industrial lighting came to dominate the urban environment. Flavin’s fluorescent structures redefined spatial boundaries and architectural features, while Holt and Irwin explored the relational, phenomenological nature of light, focusing on how it organizes perception and bodily movement. Corse, meanwhile, experimented with Tesla coils and argon gas, producing works that appear to capture and hold light itself.

It is in these perspectives that we gain further evidence of how, through a minimalist language, these artists were already posing urgent questions that remain, or have become even more timely today. Ultimately, Minimal art, in its various declinations, was already probing the dynamics and structures that shape our relationship to reality and our physical position within a world of things transformed into products and meaning through human-made symbols and systems that often attempt to contain or neutralize, through illusion, the entropic nature of reality beyond human cognitive and sensory grasp.

The emphasis in these works rests on the moment of encounter itself: the phenomenology of seeing before and beyond any process of signification. Form becomes secondary to process, presence and the inherent agency of materials. Through deconstruction and reduction, these works introduce profound existential doubts rather than offering closed propositions, redirecting attention to a pre-linguistic register of experience—the first contact with reality, which already carries its own phenomenological truth. What they propose is an epistemology grounded in dynamic, open-ended relationships with matter. In doing so, the works cultivate a heightened awareness of the sensory core of our experience of the world, our only access within the limits of embodied perception.

In a culture saturated with mediated images and, increasingly, with algorithmic simulations and machine-generated forms, Minimalism restores the body as the primary filter and medium through which the world is apprehended—an insistence on embodied perception that feels newly urgent in a desensitized and increasingly alienated society, where digital mediation and elaboration govern, or can potentially substitute for, much of our experience of reality.

More exhibition reviews

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• At SLAM, Anselm Kiefer’s Material Transformations

• One Fine Show: “The Stars We Do Not See, Australian Indigenous Art” at the National Gallery of Art

• In Rotterdam, Mandy El-Sayegh Offers Up an Assault on the Senses

• Samuel Sarmiento’s Ceramics Channel Universal Memory in His U.S. Debut

Yet even as the headlines remain bleak, many institutions are treating this moment as a catalyst, testing new fundraising models, corporate partnerships and membership structures while embracing digital and analog strategies to grow audiences and stabilize revenue. Others are looking outward, forging international partnerships and organizing traveling exhibitions that make ambitious programming possible by sharing both labor and cost. What that means is that there is no shortage of major museum shows set to open around the world in 2026. Here are 10 worth traveling for:

“Frida: The Making of an Icon”

• Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH)
• January 18 – May 17, 2026
• Tate Modern, London
• June 25 – January 3, 2026

The legendary Mexican artist’s 1940 self-portrait El sueño (La cama) (The Dream (The Bed)) recently became the most expensive work by a woman ever sold at auction when it fetched $54.7 million at Sotheby’s, stealing the scene during November’s multibillion-dollar marquee sales. The result sets the stage for Kahlo’s survey at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH)—where the record-breaking masterpiece will also appear—before the exhibition travels to Tate Modern in London. Focusing on her enigmatic and densely symbolic self-portraits, the show examines “the making of an icon,” tracing how Frida Kahlo’s singular personality and potent visual imagination forged an aura and legend that continue to surround her. By fearlessly confronting the darker reaches of her psyche and the emotional intensity with which she experienced the world, Kahlo shaped a mythology that has only deepened over time. Featuring more than 130 works, including many of her best-known paintings, the exhibition will also present documents, photographs and memorabilia from her archives, alongside work by more than 80 of her contemporaries and artists she later inspired.

“Noah Davis”

• Philadelphia Art Museum
• January 24 – April 26, 2026 

Marking the final stop on an international tour organized with DAS MINSK in Potsdam, the Barbican in London and the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, this highly anticipated Noah Davis survey will arrive on the East Coast at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Charting Davis’s practice across painting, curating and community-building, the exhibition brings together more than 60 works that reveal his rare ability to capture the humanity of his subjects in moments that feel unfiltered yet are dense with emotional and narrative force. Linking personal and collective experiences, Davis offers an empathetic portrait of contemporary urban life, tracing the internal and external conflicts individuals navigate within the societal, political and economic structures that shape their existence. Organized chronologically, the exhibition will feature work made from 2007 until his death in 2015 at the age of 32. Paintings that move fluidly between styles and techniques—depicting dreamlike, joyful and melancholic scenes—will appear alongside experimental sculptures and works on paper that illuminate the conceptual foundations of his career.

“Marcel Duchamp”

• MoMA, New York
• April 12 – August 22, 2026
• Philadelphia Art Museum
• October 10, 2026 – January 31, 2027 

At a moment when technologies like A.I. are forcing a fundamental reexamination of creativity and authorship and further collapsing the already blurred boundary between digital and physical production, Duchamp’s elevation of the “idea” as the true locus of art feels more resonant than ever. His insistence that the concept could precede or even eclipse the crafted object has become a crucial lens for understanding many contemporary practices today, a legacy that will be underscored in 2026 with the first major North American retrospective of Marcel Duchamp’s work in more than 50 years. Offering audiences a rare chance to see the full sweep of his output and its enduring relevance, the exhibition will debut at MoMA in the spring before traveling to the Philadelphia Museum of Art in the fall. Tracing six decades of Duchamp’s career across painting, sculpture, film, photography, drawing and printed matter, it will highlight works that reshaped the course of modern art, including Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2) with its fragmentation of the body, the scandalous readymade Fountain signed “R. Mutt,” the monumental glass construction The Large Glass and the miniature “portable museum” Box in a Valise. The show’s central argument is that Duchamp did not merely expand the definition of art but detonated it, completely reconceiving its terms. The last retrospective of comparable scale was the 1973 survey co-organized by MoMA and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which now holds the world’s largest repository of his work, including the mysterious and iconic Grand Verre. A version of the exhibition, organized by Jeanne Brun, deputy director at the Centre Pompidou – Musée National d’Art Moderne, in collaboration with Pauline Creteur, research assistant to the deputy director, will be presented at the Grand Palais in Paris in spring 2027, co-produced by the Centre Pompidou and the Grand Palais.

“Lee Bul: From 1998 to Now”

• M+ Museum, Hong Kong
• March 14 – August 9, 2026

After emerging as one of the standout highlights of Seoul Art Week in September, Lee Bul’s major survey travels next to M+ in Hong Kong, serving as the marquee institutional show during the city’s buzzing Art Basel week. Working across performance, sculpture, installation, architecture, printmaking and media art, Bul has spent more than four decades engaged in a restless act of world-building, reflecting on technological innovation, interrogating the shifting relationships between humanity, nature and machine and imagining dystopian themes alongside the possibility of alternative futures. From her beginnings in the late 1980s, when her confrontational body-based performances scandalized South Korea’s patriarchal respectability, Bul established herself as one of the country’s most provocative artists, with those early raw political gestures soon expanding into the futuristic soft sculptures and cyborg forms of the 1990s, works that fused eroticism, technology and critique into a visionary and often cryptic multimedia lexicon seemingly projected from a future dimension. Yet her first major survey is conceived less as a chronological overview than as a spectacular Gesamtkunstwerk that choreographs disparate works into a spatial experience deliberately resistant to logical sequence and script. The exhibition instead unfolds as a “Mannerist labyrinth,” a path of paradoxes and open-ended interpretations structured according to what the artist calls “Via Negativa,” a nonlinear, multilayered architecture that rejects fixed hierarchies of center and periphery.

“Roy Lichtenstein”

• The Whitney, New York
• Fall 2026

The Pop artist has seen a renewed surge in market interest after the Lichtenstein estate, working with Sotheby’s, placed a significant group of works strategically across the season’s major auctions, with more than $60 million in material sold so far—often meeting or exceeding expectations. Further fueling this momentum, the Whitney will stage a highly anticipated and expansive survey that recontextualizes and foregrounds Lichtenstein’s semiotic and critical investigation of mass-produced and mass-printed visual storytelling. Spanning major paintings, prints, drawings and sculptures across six decades, the retrospective will offer a comprehensive re-examination of his contributions to Pop Art at a moment when his exploration of mechanical reproduction feels newly urgent in light of contemporary anxieties around endless image replication and automated creation through A.I. Looking ahead to 2026 and 2027, the estate is also preparing a dedicated sculpture exhibition for the Nasher Sculpture Center and the Dallas Museum of Art, along with two additional solo presentations at Kunstmuseum Basel and the British Museum in London.

“Ana Mendieta”

• Tate Modern,  London
• July 15, 2026 – January 17, 2027

Ana Mendieta is best known for her unforgettable “Silueta” series, which positioned her as a pioneer of ecofeminism by blending ancestral rituals of connection to the land with a dense personal symbology shaped by her heightened and often painful sensitivity to her surroundings. Exploring presence and absence through the imprint of the human body, she used natural materials such as fire, water and flowers to create ephemeral works that survive today only through photographs and film, later becoming a haunting premonition of her own tragic and premature disappearance. Active in the 1970s and early ’80s, the Cuban-born American artist posed profound questions about displacement and identity, connection and rupture with the land and the physical and spiritual essence of our existence as vibrating bodies in the world—questions that feel urgent amid the ecological and societal crises we are living through today. Organized in collaboration with the artist’s estate, this exhibition marks the first in-depth U.K. presentation of her work in more than a decade, reaffirming Mendieta’s status as one of the most important artists of the 20th Century.

“Marina Abramović: Transforming Energy”

• Gallerie Dell’Accademia, Venice
• May 6 – October 19, 2026

Marina Abramović is one of those artists who has never stopped giving the art world something to talk about, from the early provocative performances that pushed the limits of endurance and transformed visceral traumatic catharsis into art to her later shift toward more spiritual and energetic rituals aimed at collective healing and reconnection. Over the decades, she has continued to reinvent the possibilities of performance, turning the body, her own and the audience’s, into a site of vulnerability, transformation and shared experience, in the process becoming both an icon of contemporary art and, in many ways, a shamanic healer for a troubled collectivity. In 2026, Abramović will make history as the first woman to receive a major exhibition at the Galleria dell’Accademia in Venice, which opens at the height of the art calendar during the 61st Venice Biennale. Marking the artist’s 80th birthday, “Marina Abramović: Transforming Energy” will stage a resonant dialogue between her pioneering performance practice and the Renaissance masterpieces that have shaped Venice’s cultural identity. Iconic works such as Imponderabilia (1977), Rhythm 0 (1974), Light/Dark (1977), Balkan Baroque (1997) and Carrying the Skeleton (2008) will appear alongside projections of early performances. One of the central highlights will be Abramović and Ulay’s Pietà (1983) shown in direct dialogue with Titian’s final unfinished Pietà (c. 1575-76), an unprecedented historic pairing that reframes Renaissance themes of grief, transcendence and redemption through a contemporary lens while underscoring the body’s enduring role as a site of suffering and spiritual elevation. Curated by Shai Baitel, artistic director of the Modern Art Museum (MAM) Shanghai, in close collaboration with the artist, the exhibition will unfold across both the museum’s permanent collection galleries and its temporary exhibition spaces, a first in the institution’s history, embedding Abramović’s work deep within the city’s artistic patrimony. At its core, “Transforming Energy” is an encounter between past and present, material and immaterial, body and spirit, revealing how Abramović’s lifelong exploration of endurance, presence and transformation resonates powerfully within Venice’s centuries-old visual language.

“Carol Bove”

• The Guggenheim, New York
• March 5 – August 2, 2026 

In 2026, American sculptor Carol Bove will take over the iconic rotunda of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York with her first and most extensive museum survey to date. Spanning more than two decades of risk-taking and formal exploration, the exhibition foregrounds Bove’s singular ability to reshape space, material and perception, improvising playfully while also precisely engineering the relationships between form, scale, color and architectural setting. Engaging directly with the legacies of modernist sculpture—from Constructivism to Minimalism—Bove subverts those histories through unexpected combinations of surface, color and structure, reframing canonical vocabularies without repeating them and creating a charged dialogue between historical abstraction and contemporary sensibility. Working across steel, stone, mirror, neon and found objects, she reconfigures art-historical references and architectural forms into dynamic environments that test the boundaries of abstraction and the physical presence of sculpture, with works that operate as phenomena of matter and energy, complicating the viewer’s multisensorial experience and their relationship to the surrounding space.

“Cézanne”

• Fondation Beyeler, Basel
• January 25 – May 25, 2026 

For the first time in its history, Fondation Beyeler will present a monographic exhibition dedicated to Paul Cézanne, drawing on its significant holdings and major international loans to focus on the modernist pioneer’s late and most consequential period, when he reached the height of his synthesis of time, space and perception. Through the methodical layering of his distinctive plastic brushstrokes, Cézanne created enigmatic portraits, idyllic scenes of bathers, evocative landscapes of his native Provence and endlessly inventive reinterpretations of his favored motif, the Montagne Sainte-Victoire. Seeking to translate “the immensity, the torrent of the world, in a tiny thumb’s worth of matter,” as he once described it, Cézanne adopted an analytical approach, “constructing” a picture rather than merely painting it, through long repeated sessions aimed at capturing a unified synthesis of spatial and temporal experience. In his mature works, even a simple apple assumes a sculptural presence, with each object, whether still life, landscape or figure, appearing to be observed not from a single viewpoint but from several, its material properties reassembled into what he famously called “a harmony parallel to nature.” It was precisely this analytical and time-based practice that led the future Cubists to claim Cézanne as their foundational mentor, opening new conceptual and abstract paths toward contemporary artistic representations of reality.

“Paulo Nazareth”

• Punta della Dogana, Venice
• March 29 – November 22, 2026 

Turning his artistic practice into a nomadic lifelong performance, Brazilian artist Paulo Nazareth has spent more than 15 years methodically traveling across continents—walking barefoot from the Americas to Africa. This act of endurance and survival operates as both a personal and collective ritual, retracing ancestral routes and honoring enslaved forebears who were stripped of footwear as a sign of subjugation. Through this ongoing performance, Nazareth exposes how colonial cartography and systemic racism have shaped the landscapes of modernity, with his slow and deliberate journeys becoming a form of storytelling that reveals how movement inscribes histories into bodies, languages and borders. Although much of his practice resists categorization and the art world’s dynamics of objectification and commodification, Nazareth’s finished works often crystallize from precise and decisive actions designed to confront urgent questions of immigration, racialization, globalization and colonialism, and their impact on the production and circulation of art in Brazil and across the Global South. Unfolding on the upper level of Punta della Dogana in Venice, the exhibition draws on an exceptional group of works by the artist held in the Pinault Collection and is set to be another standout must-see during the Venice Biennale.

After a slow start to the year, with several high-profile closures among both mid-tier and established galleries, 2025 ended on a quieter yet telling note. The narrative gradually shifted from crisis to calibration and then more recently toward renewed momentum, tracing a curve that closely mirrored other global markets and the art market’s own familiar cycles, marked by periods of exuberance and inevitable correction and reassessment. The art world is set to close out the year in a mood of cautious steadiness, and as attention turns toward 2026, that sense of stabilization is accompanied by measured optimism and a growing set of questions about what the next chapter will bring.

A secondary-market rebound driven by quality and collectibles

After a difficult 2024—when the auction market contracted by 25 percent—Christie’s, Sotheby’s and Phillips closed out 2025 with a decisive rebound, as confirmed by strong year-end results released this past week. Sotheby’s projects $7 billion in consolidated sales, up 17 percent from last year, while Christie’s expects to finish at $6.2 billion, a nearly 7 percent increase. Phillips reported $927 million in global sales, representing 10 percent year-over-year growth.

The year began quietly, as the May auctions largely mirrored 2024’s subdued tone, with thin bidding and only a handful of moments of heightened competition sparked by major consignments, including the $272 million Leonard & Louise Riggio collection at Christie’s and the Barbara Gladstone and Daniella Luxemburg collections at Sotheby’s. Still, the season was ultimately overshadowed by the dramatic failure of the $70 million Giacometti at Sotheby’s evening sale—a moment that underscored just how essential precise pricing and strategic orchestration have become, particularly around guarantees and irrevocable bids.

Momentum returned after the summer. Deep, competitive bidding in the $136 million Karpidas sales across its October auctions in London signaled renewed confidence, setting the stage for the multibillion-dollar fall season in London and New York. Sotheby’s capped its year with a $2.3 billion November week and strong December Luxury and Design sales, finishing 2025 with $5.7 billion in auction revenue—a 26 percent increase—driven by high-caliber fall consignments such as the $527.5 million Lauder collection, led by the $236.4 million Gustav Klimt, and by the continued expansion of its luxury division, which reached a record $2.7 billion.

Christie’s reported an 88 percent sell-through rate and a hammer-to-low-estimate index of 113 percent, reflecting how strategic pricing aligned with sustained bidding, with performances similarly anchored by major single-owner collections in the Americas and MEA regions. Phillips positioned itself as the most digitally fluent and cross-category-oriented of the three, achieving an 88 percent global sell-through rate, a 122 percent hammer-to-low-estimate index, seven white-glove auctions and more than 110 world records. Its new Priority Bidding system—offering reduced buyer’s premiums for early bids—nearly quadrupled advance bidding, rising 275 percent.

Yet fine art remains the core business. Across all three houses, sales of Old Masters, Impressionist, Modern, Post-War and Contemporary art totaled $4.56 billion in 2025, representing an 11 percent increase over 2024, though still 42 percent below the 2022 peak. Performance, however, was sharply polarized. Strength concentrated at the top end, where Modern and blue-chip works outperformed as higher-quality trophy consignments finally came to market this fall. By contrast, the ultracontemporary and emerging Contemporary segments contracted unless already supported by institutional recognition, signaling a market moving beyond the speculative highs of the recent boom. That shift also resulted in far fewer “fresh paint” works appearing in marquee evening sales. As the value of evening-sale guarantees in the Young Contemporary segment continued to decline, reaching its lowest level since 2015, the average holding period for these works increased to 3.5 years, up from 3.2 years in the previous year.

ArtTactic’s Art Market 2025: A Year in Review report confirms this shift. The Young Contemporary sector extended its correction, falling 39.1 percent year over year and deepening a multiyear decline. Overall, Contemporary sales dropped 14.4 percent, from $1.31 billion in 2024 to $1.12 billion in 2025. ArtTactic’s top ultracontemporary performers—Matthew Wong, Noah Davis, Michael Armitage, Nicolas Party, Yu Nishimura, Lucy Bull, Firelei Báez, Lucas Arruda, Flora Yukhnovich and Refik Anadol—are all artists with ongoing institutional support. The sole outlier was the 2025 market phenomenon Yu Nishimura, whose ascent nonetheless reflects a more sustainable, gallery-driven market carefully built through an international network rather than speculative hype.

By contrast, the Old Masters, Impressionist and Modern categories experienced record demand, growing 42.3 percent in 2025. Sotheby’s achieved its highest Modern-art total in a single week, generating $843 million during its November sales, while Christie’s reported growth of 15 percent and 24 percent in its Classics and Old Masters categories, producing $285 million and $182 million respectively. Those results were driven in part by an extraordinary July auction week in London, marked by an exceptional concentration of high-quality consignments and strong presale commitments covering 80 percent of the total hammer price—the highest percentage ever recorded for a July London Old Masters Evening Sale at Christie’s, according to Pi-EX analysis. ArtTactic further notes that in 2025 the Old Masters category delivered one of its strongest auction performances in recent years, with sales rising 68.7 percent to $282.5 million. The top three selling works of the year were a $39.0 million Canaletto at Christie’s, followed by a $16.5 million Rembrandt and a $12.8 million Pieter Brueghel II.

Overall, if the primary drag on the global art market since 2022 has been the steep decline in $10 million-plus works coming to auction, that segment finally began to recover in 2025, rising 19.4 percent to $1.48 billion and playing a central role in the year’s rebound. Major single-owner collections proved decisive. The Lauder, Pritzker and Karpidas collections together generated $884.9 million, accounting for 32.9 percent of all auction sales in the second half of the year, according to ArtTactic.

Surrealism continued its momentum in 2025, particularly for women artists. Following Surrealist highlights in the Karpidas sales, Sotheby’s achieved the highest total for Surrealist art ever sold in a single night. Exquisite Corpus alone brought in $103 million, led by the $54.7 million Frida Kahlo. Looking ahead to 2026, one of the strongest long-term investment trends may well be women Surrealists and Latin American artists, exemplified by the extraordinary rise of Olga de Amaral, whose prices climbed from four-figure sales in Colombian galleries just a few years ago to a record $3.12 million for Pueblo H (2011) at Christie’s in November.

Across all houses, luxury and design have emerged as essential growth engines, attracting new, younger and increasingly global buyers. Phillips’ watches division achieved more than $290 million, its highest total ever, while its Design department set new records for Judy Kensley McKie, Guy de Rougemont and others. Christie’s Luxury sales in 2025 reached $795 million, up 17 percent, with its automotive division through Gooding & Company totaling $234 million—an increase of 14 percent and the highest in the company’s history. Luxury became Christie’s most effective on-ramp for new clients, accounting for 38 percent of first-time buyers, particularly in the Asia-Pacific region.

Sotheby’s, however, likely executed the most successful luxury strategy under its holistic “Another World” approach, transforming hubs from Hong Kong to Paris and the recently inaugurated Breuer building into cross-category cultural–consumer destinations. Luxury sales reached a record $2.7 billion, up 22 percent year over year and surpassing $2 billion for the fourth consecutive year. These sales, spanning jewelry, automobiles and design, are expanding Sotheby’s reach across regions and generations, contributing to strong performance in emerging markets such as the Gulf, exemplified by the $133 million Collectors’ Week in Abu Dhabi. In June, Sotheby’s set a new record by selling the most valuable handbag ever, the $10.1 million Jane Birkin Original Hermès Birkin. Automotive sales exceeded $1 billion for the first time, while Design grew 65 percent year over year, culminating in the $58.4 million inaugural design sale at the Breuer, the highest total ever for the category worldwide.

The rapidly shifting landscape of 2025 underscores how demographic and geographic changes are reshaping the art market’s trajectory, as expanding to a broader and more diversified buyer base becomes essential to sustaining today’s level of global offerings. Millennials and Gen Z now represent a growing share of new buyers—33 percent at Phillips and nearly half at Christie’s—and online bidding has become central to reaching them, with Christie’s selling 81 percent of works online and Phillips nearly 70 percent. Women collectors are also expanding their influence, outspending male peers on average and driving demand for digital and emerging art, often with a focus on supporting female artists.

Taken together, results from Christie’s, Sotheby’s and Phillips point to a market in recovery, but one whose future increasingly depends on strategic expansion into luxury, technology, design and the evolving geography of global wealth.

Sotheby’s is already leaning hard into these new dynamics, with a branding strategy that—as its recent “Icons” show at the Breuer building made unmistakable—positions the auction house somewhere between a museum, a luxury retailer and a global cultural-entertainment brand. By acquiring a historic building long associated with major museums and then staging a greatest-hits showcase of masterpieces it once sold, Sotheby’s is asserting itself as a permanent cultural landmark. The newly introduced gift shop pushes that logic further, extending the brand beyond a memorable spatial experience and across every register, from a scholarly Breuer monograph with Phaidon to 2,000 limited-edition small bags and T-shirts featuring Banksy’s shredding piece, allowing visitors to leave with a fragment of the Sotheby’s aura at almost any price point. This is a deliberate and already effective strategy of brand dilution through experience, close to the one long applied by luxury fashion houses such as Louis Vuitton: the more both niche and mass touchpoints a brand accumulates, the more symbolic capital it generates in an economy where visibility, experience and lifestyle identity drive engagement as much as expertise.

Meanwhile, the secondary market in 2025 has been reshaped by the rise of advisory firms and new conglomerate-style partnerships, as liquidity, confidentiality, expertise and global reach become essential at the top end. The launch of New Perspectives Art Partners, a new powerhouse advisory group comprising market veterans such as Brett Gorvy, Patti Wong, Philip Hoffman and the Dolmans, illustrates this shift. “Between the six of us combined and the resources The Fine Art Group can offer, we can probably reach most of the major collectors in the world,” Hoffman told Observer. By offering data-driven valuations, discreet sourcing, estate planning expertise and global buyer networks, NPAP caters to the middle-to-upper tier, where sellers seek neutrality and transparency and buyers demand sophisticated guidance.

At the same time, new gallery conglomerates—most notably the partnership between Pace Gallery, Emmanuel Di Donna and David Schrader—signal meaningful consolidation in the high-end secondary market. The joint boutique gallery combines Di Donna’s deep expertise in Modern and Post-War art with Pace’s global infrastructure and Schrader’s private sales acumen, forming a vertically integrated ecosystem capable of handling private sales, institutional placements and estate representation on a global scale. Schrader, who spent a decade building Sotheby’s private-sales engine, described the partnership as “a strategic and structural response to a market that has outgrown its old architecture.”

2025 revealed the limits of the primary market

If the auction houses roared back after the summer, the primary market exposed the fragile economics of today’s galleries. The hot months, historically the slowest period for galleries, were punctuated this year by a string of high-profile closures. In L.A., veteran space Blum & Poe shut its doors after nearly three decades, followed a few weeks later by Adam Lindemann’s Venus Over Manhattan, which opted to return to the pleasures of collecting rather than continue under the pressure of today’s market. CLEARING, once the quintessential Brooklyn avant-garde success story, closed with great fanfare, followed a few months later by High Art in Paris, which operated at a similar level. Both played a decisive role in developing the market and institutional recognition for several emerging artists. Even more established anchors of their local ecosystems—Altman Siegel in San Francisco, Sperone Westwater and Tilton in New York and L.A. Louver in Venice—either shuttered entirely or transitioned to private-dealing models after runs spanning five decades.

These closures generated the usual apocalyptic headlines about the “end of the gallery model,” but each followed its own internal logic. Some reflected a generational shift, as dealers who emerged from the early-2000s ecosystem chose to step back due to “system fatigue” or “burnout” produced by today’s overextended global art system, rather than adapt to the speed, cost and international competitiveness of the current market. Others laid bare deeper structural pressures: steadily rising operating costs paired with razor-thin margins and the growing financial risk of participating in an endless fair calendar, escalating logistics expenses and a markedly more discerning collector base.

None of this is new—but in 2025, the margin for error has become smaller, a few years after the end of the pandemic’s exuberant market. Many dealers moved into defensive spending mode, closing secondary branches—Tanya Bonakdar in L.A. and Stephen Friedman in New York among them—or reassessing international commitments. Meanwhile, Almine Rech closed their historical location in London, Pace closed its Hong Kong flagship, while Perrotin’s relocation to Central left the future of its former headquarters unclear amid a broader pullback in Chinese buying.

Unlike the secondary market, where auctions provide clearer public metrics, fairs often remain the only visible indicators in the primary market—even though their reported “sales” rarely reflect final invoiced numbers after discounts, negotiations or unpaid reserves.

Yet art fairs remain a vital tool for galleries seeking to connect with new buyers and drive sales. According to the UBS and Art Basel report, 31 percent of dealers still consider fairs their primary source of leads, followed by in-person gallery walk-ins at 23 percent and client referrals at 16 percent. At the same time, fairs have become existential pressure points. A strong week can carry a gallery’s financial year, while a weak one can break it. That was the case for experimental space Hot Wheels, whose closure followed a difficult Frieze London, underscoring how thin margins remain for younger galleries participating in major international fairs while operating far from the blue-chip tier.

Fair reports this year nonetheless revealed a clear pattern, particularly once the market picked up again in the fall. At Art Basel in Switzerland, the pace remained slow as buyers balked at prices that often felt too high for the moment, especially on the contemporary side. From the Armory in September and then with Frieze London and Art Basel Paris in October, sentiment visibly improved, fueling renewed confidence across borders. By Art Basel Miami Beach, confidence had returned in force, with dealers placing works across price tiers, from David Zwirner’s $5.5 million Richter sold during preview to Lévy Gorvy’s reported $18 million Warhol in the days that followed, alongside steady activity in Nova and Positions, where newer offerings found traction.

Taken together, the season’s fair data points to an increasingly polarized landscape. Sales concentrate at the top of the pyramid around historical, blue-chip and institutionally anchored artists whose markets are closely tracked and whose value is underwritten by museum visibility, catalogue raisonnés and stable comparables. At the opposite end, emerging artists remain the most dynamic. Works priced up to $20,000 continue to move, with the $5,000-10,000 bracket serving as the true entry point for younger collectors who can participate without incurring outsized risk.

At the same time, cities such as Abu Dhabi, which have long relied on importing global museum brands as anchors for cultural development, are also investing in amplifying local heritage and emerging artistic production as a way to shape future identity. Initiatives including Manar Abu Dhabi and Noor Riyadh combine high-tech, light-based installations with historical and archaeological sites, positioning cultural heritage and technological experimentation side by side. Across the region’s expanding network of biennials, a distinct aesthetic is taking shape: highly produced, site-specific and context-responsive projects that move decisively away from the globally homogenized blue-chip language that characterized earlier boom periods in places such as China. This sensibility is reflected in the upcoming Art Basel Qatar, which is designed to function more like a curated biennial than a traditional booth-based fair, led by artist Wael Shawky as artistic director alongside Art Basel global director Vincenzo de Bellis and presenting a focused group of solo projects by artists connected to the region and its narratives.

Two elements, in particular, distinguish the Gulf’s cultural development model. The first is a pronounced emphasis on new technologies across the production, circulation and experience of art and culture. The second is the degree to which this wave of institutional expansion has aligned with and accelerated the empowerment of women. Across Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the U.A.E., young women now lead many of the region’s major cultural initiatives and institutions, reshaping long-standing gender hierarchies and contributing decisively to the identity of this emerging cultural geography.

The Gulf, however, is not the only region gaining traction in the art-world news cycle. A parallel shift in attention has been sparked by new cultural activity in Central Asia, where institutions such as the Bukhara Biennial, launched in Uzbekistan with significant state backing, and the forthcoming CCA Tashkent, the country’s first major contemporary art center, have quickly positioned themselves on the international radar.

Meanwhile, Southeast Asia and India, singled out by economists as among the world’s fastest-growing economies over the next decade, are gaining increasing importance within the global art-market ecosystem. Sales data from major auction houses across the APAC region continue to highlight India, Indonesia and Singapore as rising markets, with all reporting expanded buyer bases from South Asia and accelerated demand for Modern and Contemporary Indian art. At the same time, the gallery landscape is shifting. The upcoming edition of the India Art Fair in New Delhi includes a growing roster of major international galleries, including David Zwirner, Galleria Continua, Carpenters Workshop Gallery and neugerriemschneider, while established Indian galleries are appearing with increasing frequency at both Frieze and Art Basel.

Digital art for a digital world

In a year when A.I. and the expanding power of global tech giants dominated public discourse, and technological change accelerated at a pace that left entire industries scrambling, it has become almost anachronistic for the art world to imagine itself outside these forces. The influence of technology now extends far beyond the pandemic-era shift to online circulation, digital sales and the Instagram-driven transformation of buying and selling behaviors. It is increasingly shaping the act of artistic production itself. As technology becomes inseparable from daily life, from perception and communication to how we interact with our environments, digital tools, computational systems and algorithmic processes have entered the contemporary artist’s natural vocabulary, no longer functioning as niche or novelty. That evolution was unmistakable in the hybrid works presented in Art Basel’s inaugural digital section, Zero 10, last month.

The arc of digital art over the past four years has been defined by extremes: the speculative peak of the NFT boom, its rapid collapse into skepticism and cultural fatigue and now a quieter, more durable integration into the mainstream art system. Major institutions have begun to incorporate digital practices into their core programming, and major fairs are following suit, no longer relegating them to satellites or marginal sectors.

Beeple’s 2021 record-breaking sale crystallized the speculative era. By contrast, the packed VIP opening of Zero 10 at Art Basel Miami Beach, anchored by his viral robotic performance Regular Animals, signaled a new phase. Demand was real and diversified, the enthusiasm clear and largely detached from hype. The section was crowded from the earliest VIP hours, drawing not only art-world insiders but also long-time tech collectors, many of whom had never previously attended the fair. Positioned at the main entrance and occupying 10,000 square feet of prime floor space, the sector made digital art an integral part of the fair’s core ecosystem. Exhibitors reported steady sales in the four- to six-figure range, with many noting serious engagement from buyers who were collecting digital work for the first time.

These results aligned with findings from the 2025 Art Basel & UBS Survey, which reported that digital art is now the third-largest fine-art spending category, with fifty-one percent of high-net-worth collectors making digital acquisitions and Gen Z showing the highest participation of any demographic.

Taken together, the outcomes at Zero 10 read less as a side experiment than as clear evidence that the digital-native ecosystem has reached a level of maturity the traditional art market can no longer ignore and may, in fact, need to learn from. Its decentralized models of authorship, distribution and value creation prioritize peer-to-peer communities over traditional gatekeeping, generating a sense of shared belonging and momentum that continues to attract younger and more diverse buyers. These are precisely the audiences contemporary art needs, yet often struggles to reach unless they arrive through adjacent collectible markets.

At the same time, several booths accepted cryptocurrency and executed sales in ETH and stablecoins, underscoring how crypto wealth continues to support digital art even amid volatility. For many buyers, digital artworks function as familiar and relatively liquid on-ramps for crypto-generated capital, offering an alternative to the slower and more opaque structures of the traditional art market.

Given the concentration of power and wealth in the tech sector, the art world would clearly benefit from engaging these collectors through artworks, formats and business models that align with their lived realities. If successfully cultivated, this generation of technology-driven patrons, both private and corporate, could become to the art world what finance and hedge-fund buyers were in earlier decades, but with fundamentally different expectations around participation, transparency and value. What remains to be seen is whether the art system can absorb the lessons embedded in these digital-native ecosystems, which are less hierarchical, more collaborative and more fluid in circulation.