Waves are lapping everywhere you look. Outside, the Atlantic Ocean stretches in front of Tate St Ives over an overcast sandy beach. Inside, multi-channel films of life-giving oceans and rivers are arranged in the gallery’s temple-like space. Emilija Škarnulytė’s works occupy two main gallery rooms in a major eponymous exhibition contending with personal memory and collective history, both understood in expansive terms.

The Lithuania-born artist’s ambitious work is devoted to deep time, speculative archaeology and mythologies. The show starts with Riparia 2023, a photo representing a character emulating the image of a female masked divinity, half human, half reptilian. This sets the tone for “Emilija Škarnulytė,” which focuses on the complex exploration of time and narratives and how strata—geological, mythological and political—intertwine in that meaning-making process.

Aldona (2013) is a short film documenting ritual, the passage of time and political legacies in sensory terms. Aldona, the artist’s grandmother, lost her eyesight during the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear fallout. She lives at the border with Belarus in her traditional home and garden (recently plucked medicinal herbs hang from the room’s ceiling). In the film, remembering and forgetting coalesce into two sides of the same affliction—a familiar dance of the mind for the Homo post-Sovieticus. Without sight, Aldona relies on other senses, including hearing and touch. In some of the film’s most moving scenes, the radio plays ancient tales in her kitchen; in others, Aldona’s fingers explore the face of a gigantic Lenin statue in a sculpture park.

In the second gallery room, lit by blacklight, we come across a collection of sculptures and video channel installations. Here, we transition from personal to collective myths, from material history to spiritual presences and transcendence. Škarnulytė thinks about space and how we move in the exhibition, and we often hover below the surface of what is visible, as if we were marine explorers following a dive line.

Installation elements can be experienced on their own or in relation to one another. If Water Could Weep (Mermaid Tears) (2023-2024), displays lachrymiform-shaped glass phosphorescing in blue and red hues, which evoke the Lithuanian myth of a weeping sea goddess. In Nucleotides (2025), various cell organisms are printed on a wall, providing a visual and physical bedrock, halfway between abstract and organic visualizations. The installation “Wheel of the Goddess” features various videos from 2021 to 2023, playing in a continuous loop on a four-screen central rotunda perforated by four openings, which are conceived as mirroring the architecture of Tate St Ives and the cardinal directions. The four interspaces provide an opening and a fresh way to see the works engage with each other. Films gathered in this rotunda encompass Sunken Cities (2021), peeking above the marine Roman archaeological site of Baiae; Aphotic Zone (2022), filmed four kilometers deep into the Gulf of Mexico to find species surviving global warming and ocean acidification; Riparia (2023), where the artist follows the Rhone River from Swiss glaciers to the French Camargue region featuring serpent-like creatures; as well as Hypoxia (2023), set in the Baltic Sea’s low-oxygen “dead zone.”

Through one aperture, we move from “Wheel of the Goddess” to another video loop channel, “A Liquid Abyss,” projecting films including Æqualia (2023), Rakhne (2023) and t ½ (2019) on the gallery’s end wall. Other works in the show honor Lithuanian artists influential in Škarnulytė’s practice—notably Marija Gimbutas’s pioneering research on archeomythology—and follow Neolithic traces present in England’s Cornwall, explored during an artist residency in the region.

While the sheer number of individual works may seem overwhelming at first, on the scale of a survey, they form a strong, cohesive proposition to help us make sense of relics and memory. Dolmens, megaliths, shapeshifting sea divinities, ancient sites, modern toxic waste, celestial objects and more connect and reconcile despite their apparent tension and opposition. This is our world, the artist seems to tell us, a world that predates—and will outlive—humans, yet remains irascibly shaped by them. Understanding this human embeddedness becomes a driving force.

“Since childhood, I’ve been fascinated by hidden worlds. My experiences of growing up in Lithuania during the final years of the Cold War, surrounded by a sense of decay as an empire fell apart, deepened my interest in what lies beneath the surface,” the artist said in a recent interview.

There’s a reason why humans have always feared the deep seas: it’s a terrifying realm of many unknowns that Škarnulytė slowly peels off, one that conjures incredible beauty, mysteries and the sacrilegious stain of pollution. Many of these films sit at the edge of ecological sci-fi. We visualize the Anthropocene in all its obscenities: the climate crisis, human neglect toward nuclear and other waste, and irreversibly changing ecosystems. Amid this contemplative anxiety, the presence of sirens stands as a symbol of permanence in impermanence, incarnating the force of matrilineage and folk beliefs operating in other spheres and laws. We hear echoes of the Great Mother and Old European goddess myths, including the triple female archetypes of maiden, mother and crone.

Škarnulytė, who graduated with a degree in sculpture, spoke during the show’s preview of “moving images as sculptures.” One of her intentions is to capture texture and dimension in her films. The result is not so much a traditional sculpture as a total meditation that involves architecture, visual immersion and hypnotic sound. This aggregate of aesthetic works beautifully constructs a state of mysticism in which we are invited to roam freely. Realizing this ambition, the artist stages a dialogue between human and nonhuman, material and metaphysical languages that often leaves us wondering about our own ignorance and unmet curiosity as a species briefly hosted in a universe we know so little about.

Through strange, asymmetrical temporalities, we are left to contemplate what resists erosion and forgetfulness. Is decay a step toward an end—death, nothingness—or an evolution to a new state? Who will be the future ancestors to tell our stories, both real and fictional? Committed to the art and act of witnessing, Škarnulytė sketches the outline of an eco-feminine spirituality, a hopeful journey into the recesses of weathering and embodying infused with awe. Her personal cosmology is a phenomenology of time—a temporal awareness and consciousness. Time becomes object and subject, a lens through which everything else can be appraised. For the artist, it is nonlinear, cyclical and bending. She displays those qualities in an intentional scenography that elevates this alchemical show into a breathing, pulsating form of surrender.

More exhibition reviews

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

• Robert Therrien’s Ordinary Uncanny at the Broad in L.A.

• Elia Arce’s ‘No Time to Mourn (An Excerpt)’ Is a Monument to Grief

• From Rejection to Revolution, Santa Barbara Museum of Art Charts the Rise of the Impressionists

• “Dirty Looks” at the Barbican Art Gallery Is Intentionally Messy

A small number of galleries closed this year—each for reasons so idiosyncratic that no narrative could be assembled from these developments one way or the other. I imagine that Tim Blum is comfortable in his retirement, having relinquished the throne as Los Angeles’s top dealer. Meanwhile, the young Angeleno Matthew Brown proved that savvy up-and-comers can still make a splash with a recent expansion to New York, where, this year, he stole living legend Carroll Dunham from Gladstone.

Hauser & Wirth had a good year, not that they’ve ever had a bad one. This spring, several of their artists opened exhibitions at three of New York’s top museums, including Amy Sherald at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Jack Whitten at the Museum of Modern Art and Rashid Johnson at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. That’s a rare accomplishment, even for a gallery with pockets as deep as Hauser’s—shoutout to Marc Payot. Next year, the gallery will open a space in Palo Alto, following Marc Glimcher and Pace in their quest to determine whether or not tech guys will ever collect anyone besides Alec Monopoly.

Issy Wood impressed a certain set by rebuffing Gagosian in that New Yorker profile, but absorbing young artists has become a trend for the blue chippers, in part because their lower price points represent the amount of money that collectors today want to spend. David Zwirner has recently absorbed Yu Nishimura, Sasha Gordon and Emma McIntyre, and the gallery’s space at 52 Walker feels like a farm team. In Mexico City, where young artists abound, kurimanzutto takes the opposite approach, distinguishing itself by staging museum-quality exhibitions with the biggest names possible, which can be confirmed by anyone who saw their Haegue Yang survey during ZONAMACO this year.

On this iteration of our Art Power Index are a number of auction-world personalities, and here again, we must talk about the New Yorker, because the auction world is a duopoly, and the story of Christie’s success is also that of Sotheby’s failure. Sam Knight’s recent profile of Patrick Drahi, who purchased the house in 2019, implies that the owner is less concerned with success than with lining his pockets and giving his children jobs. Hong Kong rainmaker Patti Wong left in 2022 after Drahi put his son Nathan in charge of the formerly successful office. Now, “literally half of the H.R. department’s job is trying to manage Nathan’s damage.” At least Guillaume Cerutti and Alexander Rotter have been having a good time—at the auction previews in the spring, Rotter could be seen palling around with his former coworker Loïc Gouzer, who brought his Fair Warning startup venture to Christie’s that season. The two were so ebullient you would have never suspected that, according to the 2025 Art Basel and UBS Global Art Market Report, public auction sales were down 19 percent, or $25.1 billion—the steepest fall since 2009.

Clare McAndrew, author of that report, appears on this power list because it remains authoritative despite recent forays into the space by outlets such as Artnet and Artsy. This is, perhaps, a testament to the Art Basel brand. Honcho Noah Horowitz and Chief Artistic Officer and Global Director of Art Basel Fairs Vincenzo de Bellis must be doing something right; everyone who’s anyone went to Art Basel Paris this year. On the other side of that particular duopoly sits Ari Emanuel, who took personal ownership of the Frieze fairs (via new venture MARI) from his agency Endeavor, which went private this year. Even when sales at the fairs are down—and they are down, representing just 31 percent of annual sales for galleries from a pre-pandemic high of 43 percent—the fairs themselves always seem to make money through their booth fees and ticket sales. Who doesn’t like it when the circus comes to town?

But all that power pales in comparison to the kind exercised by museums. This year saw the loss of Agnes Gund, the patron par excellence, and the continued rise of MoMA’s young board president, Sarah Arison, deemed “her generation’s Agnes Gund” by Town & Country. Max Hollein remains his generation’s Max Hollein, ubiquitous as New York gallery-opening scenester despite moonlighting as director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. This year’s opening of that institution’s refreshed Rockefeller Wing shows its dedication to new ideas, and they’re already on to the next project: a new wing that promises 50 percent more gallery space for the museum’s 20th- and 21st-century collections. Across the country, construction has nearly been completed on Michael Govan’s brand-new LACMA, which was designed by Peter Zumthor and promises to reshape the social fabric of the city. If that isn’t power, what is?

Keep reading for more insight into the people whose actions, tastes and endorsements move the needle on valuation and the people who decide who gets in and what gets seen (and what gets left off the gallery wall). Each year, our Art Power Index spotlights the figures shaping how capital and vision move through today’s art world. It turns out that the reports of the art industry’s demise were premature, but it is changing, and our 2025 honorees are the ones reinventing its structures and steering its evolution into unexpected new territory.

Refik Anadol

• Dataland | Founder & Artistic Director

It’s hard to think about A.I. art without thinking about Refik Anadol—that’s how profoundly he’s shaped the field. From blockbuster installations like Unsupervised – Machine Hallucinations at MoMA to his relentless pursuit of A.I. as a creative medium, Anadol has transformed how we experience data, memory and perception. His work, which merges machine intelligence, architecture, and new media art, is part of major institutional collections, including MoMA, Kunsthaus Zürich, Istanbul Modern and the Museum of the Future.

Now he’s pushing boundaries again with Dataland, the world’s first A.I. art museum, originally set to open at The Grand LA this year but now debuting in spring of 2026. “While Dataland will primarily focus on creating new, site-specific projects exclusive to the museum, we plan to also feature some key projects from our past to offer visitors a glimpse into the broader context of our work,” Anadol told Observer. The space will also support emerging artists and expand the place of digital art in mainstream culture. “Since beginning my journey, I’ve dreamed of moving digital art out of the margins and into the mainstream. It’s inspiring to witness this vision coming to life,” he added. A vocal advocate for ethical A.I., Anadol launched the “Make It Fair” campaign to promote transparency and accountability in creative technology—a mission that earned him recognition on the TIME100 A.I. Impact Awards list in 2025.

Sarah Arison

• YoungArts | Board Chair
• Arison Arts Foundation | President
• Museum of Modern Art | President, Board of Trustees

A quiet but mighty powerhouse of arts philanthropy, Sarah Arison has used her influence to subtly but decisively shape the contemporary art landscape. As president of the Arison Arts Foundation, a family legacy, and the youngest-ever president of MoMA‘s Board of Trustees, she is known for championing emerging U.S. artists across disciplines early in their careers through sustained patronage and partnership. Her leadership was on full display this year when she delivered remarks at MoMA’s annual fundraiser and co-chaired the 2025 MoMA PS1 Gala, events that underscored her status as one of the country’s most influential private grantmakers.

“Institutions, funders and collectors are looking more closely at how artists are uplifted at all stages of their careers and how communities of practice form around them,” Arison tells Observer. “Much of my work focuses on creating environments where emerging artists can take risks, engage in dialogue, and build networks that sustain them over time. Rather than focusing on visibility alone, we are working to build durable networks of care that allow artists to evolve and lead the conversations that shape the cultural landscape.”
 
Based in Miami, the Arison Arts Foundation awarded more than 100 grants last year, distributing nearly $30 million to artists and institutions. Arison also continues her family’s legacy as Chair of the Board of YoungArts, the multidisciplinary arts organization founded by her grandparents Lin and Ted Arison. At YoungArts, she has helped advance a model of lifelong support for literary, visual and performing arts that begins when artists are still in high school and continues throughout the full arc of their careers. This work sits alongside her leadership at MoMA and MoMA PS1, as well as support for numerous grassroots programs that provide fellowships, community-building, and relief for artists facing financial hardship. Arison has emerged as a pivotal force in reimagining how arts philanthropy operates, emphasizing cooperation over competition. “When we invest in the full arc of an artist’s journey, the entire cultural landscape benefits,” Arison says.

Vincenzo de Bellis

• Art Basel | Chief Artistic Officer & Global Director of Art Fairs

At the helm of Art Basel since 2022, Vincenzo de Bellis has redefined what it means to run a global art fair brand. As director overseeing all fairs and exhibition platforms, he has shaped the format, tone and exhibitor selection across Basel, Art Basel Miami Beach and Art Basel Hong Kong—while steering the brand into new territory with the launch of a Paris edition in 2022 and the upcoming inaugural edition of Art Basel Qatar, slated for early 2026. What distinguishes his approach is a commitment to rooting each fair in its local cultural and market ecosystem, creating distinct identities that feel both globally connected and regionally grounded. Art Basel Paris has quickly established itself as a must-attend European event, while Art Basel Qatar aims to tap into the Gulf’s accelerating creative and economic transformation.

Now deep in preparations for the Qatar debut, De Bellis is applying a proven balance of curatorial rigor and industry savvy, building strategic alliances with regional players such as Qatar Sports Investments (QSI) and QC+, while putting acclaimed Egyptian artist Wael Shawky in the driver’s seat as artistic director—a move that underscores the fair’s intent to connect institutional ambition with local voices. Beyond the fairs themselves, De Bellis has also strengthened Art Basel’s role as a thought leader within the art world, introducing the Art Basel Awards in 2025 to honor organizations and individuals driving innovation. Under his leadership, the brand has evolved from a marketplace into a global platform for dialogue, vision and cultural exchange.

Christine Berry & Martha Campbell

• Berry Campbell | Owners

Specializing in postwar American artists who were long overlooked or underrepresented, Christine Berry and Martha Campbell have built Berry Campbell gallery into one of the most influential forces behind recent market rediscoveries. “We were looking for postwar artists we could potentially represent, so we went to the Archives of American Art,” Campbell told Observer earlier this year. From there, they took a deeply hands-on approach, reaching out to the families and estates of forgotten artists, unearthing archives and cataloguing works that had slipped through the cracks of art history. Their training as art historians became the foundation for rebuilding these artists’ legacies, connecting the missing dots that institutions and markets had ignored for decades.

That persistence has paid off. The gallery’s exhibitions have ignited new visibility—and new valuations—for once-neglected painters. Bernice Bing, whose works sold for around $30,000 only a few years ago, reached $850,000 in 2024. Alice Baber, long undervalued at roughly $3,000, sold for a record $700,000 following her first major exhibition in more than 40 years. Lynne Drexler’s market followed a similar ascent. By championing these artists with scholarly rigor and curatorial conviction, Berry and Campbell have not only altered their markets but reframed the larger story of American modernism, ensuring that women and other marginalized voices occupy their rightful place in it. 

“As two women business owners for over a decade now, we have watched wealth change hands to where more women are making the buying decisions,” the duo tells Observer. “Naturally, as this happens, women are being more inclusive in buying women artists. It is exciting to witness (and be a part of) this evolution.”

Michael Bloomberg

• Bloomberg Philanthropies | Founder

Michael Bloomberg isn’t just a philanthropist—he’s the top philanthropist in the U.S., with a record of supporting art initiatives with a focus on urban renewal and access. (He reportedly gave $3.7 billion last year, putting him at the top of the Chronicle of Philanthropy’s latest Philanthropy 50 report.) His foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies, partners with more than 700 cultural organizations worldwide, and through his donations, the former mayor of New York City has built a legacy of supporting small, medium and large organizations and initiatives—particularly in urban environments. The annual $100,000 Asphalt Art Grants transform streets and public spaces with artworks designed not only to activate underutilized areas but also to enhance street safety. Then there are the $1 million Public Art Challenge grants, which fund projects that address civic challenges like health equity, climate resilience and urban revitalization through the installation of artworks.

“The arts have always been at the center of movements for change,” Bloomberg tells Observer. “Today, they can play a role in spurring progress in the fight against climate change. Artists are drawing attention to the problem in powerful ways that encourage people to take action.”

In addition to doubling down on public art as a lever for urban change in the U.S., Bloomberg has a reputation for directly and indirectly supporting culture around the world. He’s chairman of the Serpentine Board and opened the London Mithraeum Bloomberg SPACE. This year, he made the largest private donation ever recorded to the London Museum—a £20 million contribution plus a donation of 14,000 Roman artifacts uncovered during the construction of the Bloomberg European headquarters in London. On the accessibility side, the Bloomberg Connects app offers free digital guides to hundreds of museums, galleries, sculpture parks, gardens and other cultural institutions around the world. “The more we do to support both arts and arts organizations, the more we can capitalize on their potential to drive progress,” Bloomberg says. Ultimately, the scale and scope of Bloomberg’s giving affords him significant influence over the institutions, artists and stories that will be funded and amplified.

Tim Blum

• BLUM | Founder

Tim Blum has spent decades redefining how Western audiences engage with Asian art—and now he’s redefining what it means to run a gallery. The veteran dealer, who introduced Japanese and Korean postwar masters to the U.S., stunned the art world this year by announcing the closure of his galleries in Los Angeles and Tokyo, as well as the shelving of plans for a New York outpost. “We’ll begin a new chapter: transitioning away from the traditional gallery format toward a more flexible model,” he explained. “Without a permanent public space or formal artist roster, this structure will allow us to engage with artists and ideas in new ways, through collaborations, special projects and longer-term visions still in development.” It was a decision years in the making, reflecting the mounting pressures of a gallery system stretched by nonstop programming, art-fair fatigue and the gravitational pull of the mega-galleries that dominate global attention and resources.

Blum’s exit from the brick-and-mortar model has become a lightning rod for broader conversations about sustainability, leadership and intentionality in the art world. His pivot toward a leaner, more fluid structure signals a move away from the volume-driven expectations that have defined the industry for decades. In doing so, he’s opened a pathway for a new kind of dealer—one focused less on scale and spectacle and more on depth, collaboration and long-term vision. Still, don’t expect him to vanish anytime soon. “Of course I’ll still be buying and selling art,” Blum said. “It’s part of my DNA.”

Bonnie Brennan

• Christie’s | CEO

Auction veteran Bonnie Brennan took the helm as CEO of Christie’s in early 2025, marking one of the year’s most closely watched leadership transitions in the art world. Formerly head of Americas—where she drove nearly half of the auction house’s global sales—Brennan now oversees an operation that brought in $2.1 billion in auction revenue in just the first half of 2025. Seven of the ten highest-priced artworks sold globally during that period went through Christie’s under her leadership, including Piet Mondrian’s Composition with Large Red Plane, Bluish Gray, Yellow, Black and Blue (1922) and Canaletto’s Venice, the Return of the Bucintoro on Ascension Day. Her ascent signals both continuity and evolution at a firm balancing tradition with transformation.

Brennan has made it clear she intends to broaden Christie’s reach, engaging younger and more diverse buyers while keeping a steady hand amid market headwinds. “We are deepening our connectivity in these growth markets—listening closely, partnering locally, and ensuring we are part of the cultural dialogue taking place across every continent,” Brennan tells Observer. “This widening landscape of creativity and collecting represents one of the most exciting opportunities in the art market today.” From exploring A.I. applications to rethinking the global sales calendar to committing to an ethos of sustainability, Brennan’s leadership reflects a pragmatic understanding of where the auction world is heading and a determination to keep Christie’s leading the charge. “We see ourselves as an important part of helping to ensure that growth in the art world happens with purpose, integrity and inclusion.”

Maria Brito

• Maria Brito LLC | CEO

New York art advisor Maria Brito has moved more than $150 million for A-list stars and financiers (the vast majority of her clients are U.S.-based). She publishes The Groove, a widely read weekly newsletter that reaches 32,000 engaged readers, and she regularly shares market tidbits, cultural commentary and art obsessions with her 142,000 Instagram followers. “Globalization has made the market faster, bigger and more connected, while younger collectors demand purpose and transparency,” Brito tells Observer. “My role is to bridge worlds, combining knowledge, data, relationships and intuition so collectors can navigate this landscape with clarity and confidence.”

Her analyses of the art market—whether through interviews, in The Groove or on social media—are generous, engaging and accessible. With headlines like “Do artists need galleries?,” “Can art still shock us?” and “Can you love the art but hate the artist?” Brito uses her platforms to curate far-ranging conversations on the state of the art sector today, turning her into an influential voice among the traditionally tight-lipped art advisory world. Power, she adds, has become more distributed and far less predictable. “The old hierarchies still stand, but influence now moves through new collectors, new media and access to quality works… It’s not about disruption for the sake of it. It’s about evolution: making the art world smarter, more inclusive, and more transparent without diluting its excellence. That’s the real opportunity.”

Read our full Q&A with Maria Brito

Matthew Brown

• Matthew Brown Gallery | Founder

Matthew Brown was just 23 when he opened his first gallery in Hollywood in 2019. Five years later, he has two spaces in Los Angeles and opened a location in New York in 2024, defying both the COVID slowdown and a recent trend of gallery closures. Brown learned the ropes working simultaneously for mega blue-chip powerhouse Gagosian and experimental gallery Hannah Hoffman (soon to be Hannah Donahue). He was then unofficially mentored by groundbreaking dealer/curator Jeffrey Deitch, who provided guidance as Brown worked to set up his own space and build his niche (L.A. artists who were not showing in L.A.). Brown’s roster has expanded to more than 20 artists, including painter Carroll Dunham, whose drawing retrospective will open at the Art Institute of Chicago in January 2026. Early next year, he’s moving the Los Angeles gallery to a new space that he’ll inaugurate with an exhibition of works by Mimi Lauter, who he says he’s “long admired.”

Brown’s fast rise in art world circles may come down to his willingness to approach anyone with an ask (he approached Deitch at a fair), but there’s no denying that he has reshaped market dynamics by connecting Gen Z and Millennial collectors with artists on an upward trajectory, nurturing both a younger generation of collectors and platforming emerging artists without succumbing to speculative demand. “The new generation of collectors is more fluid: they’re digitally native, more global and often less tied to one genre, medium or even art historical period,” he tells Observer. “Their approach is intuitive, more lateral.” His artists have been shown by LACMA, the FLAG Art Foundation and El Museo del Barrio in New York City. Young he may be, but by all accounts, his approach is decidedly old-school: focus on the artist, and visibility and valuation will follow. 

Amy Cappellazzo

• Art Intelligence Global | Founding Partner

What Amy Cappellazzo touches tends to turn to gold. She rose through the ranks at Christie’s, transforming its postwar and contemporary art department into a market-defining powerhouse that reshaped valuations and sales across the industry. She then co-founded Art Agency, Partners, which Sotheby’s acquired for $85 million, and went on to serve as chair of Sotheby’s Fine Art division—overseeing strategy across Old Masters, Modern, Contemporary, Impressionist and Asian art. After years of rewriting the rule book at the auction house, she stepped down in 2021 to build something of her own.

That something became Art Intelligence Global (AIG), the firm she co-founded with Yuki Terase to bridge the U.S. and Asian markets through high-end art advisory and private sales. Headquartered in New York City and Hong Kong, AIG has quickly positioned itself as a next-generation player in an evolving art economy. This year, Cappellazzo brought in Matt Bangser as senior director—a move that signals her commitment to a holistic, ecosystem-wide strategy that connects artists, galleries, collectors and institutions. “Because he’s worked in galleries, at auction houses and directly with artists, he brings a range of experience that’s incredibly valuable—especially now,” Cappellazzo told ARTnews. It’s a statement that captures her ethos: art advisory not as a niche service but as a bespoke service that offers premium market intelligence and blurs the traditional boundaries between galleries, advisors and auction houses.

Guillaume Cerutti

• Pinault Collection | President
• Christie’s | Chairman of the Board

Guillaume Cerutti stepped down as CEO of Christie’s in 2025, handing the reins to Bonnie Brennan after a transformative tenure that redefined the auction house’s global footprint. Under his leadership, Christie’s delivered some of the most significant milestones in market history—from the record-breaking sale of Salvator Mundi (still the most expensive work of art ever sold) to the $1.6 billion auction of Paul Allen’s collection—and pushed the industry into the digital age through its pioneering collaboration with Beeple to sell the first purely digital NFT artwork offered by a major auction house. Cerutti proved that heritage and innovation could coexist, guiding Christie’s through the volatile years of online adoption and cementing its reputation as a leader in the next-gen art landscape.

Now chairman of the board for Christie’s and president of the Pinault Collection, Cerutti stands at the intersection of commerce, culture and policy. As such, his vision extends beyond the market: he recently proposed a €50 million European fund to enable joint acquisitions among museums that could foster cross-border partnerships and shared cultural stewardship. The initiative reflects a pragmatic solution to funding constraints and a bold reimagining of how institutions and private collections can work together—something he sees as increasingly necessary. “In a more fractured and brutal environment, the art world has a vital role to play: as a refuge, as a space for dialogue and as a provider of meaning,” he tells Observer. ”At the same time, other events, such as the theft at the Louvre, have reminded us of the vulnerability of these spaces. All players in the art world face this dual challenge: they are more relevant than ever, but also more exposed.” Collaboration, as modeled by Cerutti, could offer protection.

Elizabeth Diller, Charles Renfro & Benjamin Gilmartin

• Diller Scofidio + Renfro | Partners

The studio lost its beloved co-founder, Ricardo Scofidio, this year, but Elizabeth Diller, Charles Renfro and Benjamin Gilmartin remain firmly at the helm. DS+R has never been a conventional architecture firm—it’s the creative force behind some of the world’s most celebrated cultural landmarks, where architecture, art installation and performance converge. Co-founded by Diller in 1981, the studio has shaped the modern city’s cultural identity through projects like New York’s High Line—an eight-million-visitors-a-year phenomenon praised worldwide for its inventive reuse of industrial infrastructure and approach to urban rewilding. DS+R also designed The Shed, MoMA’s renovation and expansion, the $1 billion restoration of Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art, The Broad in Los Angeles and its extension, currently underway and slated for completion before the 2028 Olympics.

The studio’s acclaim and collection of awards stem from its ability to transform how the public engages with architecture. DS+R’s work consistently rethinks the civic role of buildings, emphasizing cultural purpose and spatial context within the city. Each project invites participation rather than passive observation, merging design with social experience. Continuing that legacy, Gilmartin assumed the presidency of the American Institute of Architects (AIA) this year, launching the initiative “See You IRL: Designing for Public Life,” a program exploring how shared physical spaces shape the social fabric of New York City and beyond. Renfro led DS+R’s first international projects, including The Tianjin Juilliard School in China and Zaryadye Park in Moscow. He also shaped much of the studio’s academic work, with projects at Rice, Columbia, Stanford and UC Berkeley. Beyond design, Charles has been recognized for his support of LGBTQ+ and BIPOC artists through BOFFO.

Felipe Dmab, Pedro Mendes & Matthew Wood

• Mendes Wood DM | Founding Partners

Pedro Mendes (who is from Minas Gerais, Brazil) and Matthew Wood (a New Hampshire native) were onto something when they established their first artist residency in rural Brazil and their gallery 15 years ago. The idea germinated from their time studying in Paris, seeing that Brazilian artists struggled to be included in top galleries and institutions. “There was never a business plan,” Mendes said in an interview. “It was 100 percent intuitive, it was instinctual.” Their initial address was an auspicious one, next door to Felipe Dmab’s early concept gallery, and so fate gave us the visionary trio known for moves like championing living Afro-Brazilian artists on the global art stage for the first time—including self-taught Sônia Gomes, who a year after joining the Mendes Wood DM roster was included in the 2015 Venice Biennale and today has works in major institutional collections. They capitalize on their cultural differences and diffuse connections when demonstrating that Brazilian art has the potential to reach international markets and institutions, but also to shape intellectual debates and conversations. 

The trio has been the driving force in many cutting-edge conversations taking place in the art world around decoloniality, trans-Atlantic connections, ecology and social justice. Mendes Wood DM is now a multi-city network of galleries with operations in São Paulo, Brussels, Paris and New York and regularly brings work by artists from its roster to the major fairs—including Art Basel Hong Kong—strengthening cross-continental sales of work by Brazilian artists like Solange Pessoa and Rubem Valentim.

Edward Dolman

• Dolman Partners | Co-Founder
• New Perspectives Art Partners | Founder

Ed Dolman knows auctions. Rising from furniture porter to Christie’s CEO and chair, he spent more than a decade at the top, overseeing historic sales, including those leading to the restitution of Gustav Klimt paintings to Maria Altmann and her family. At Phillips, he turned a once-niche house into a billion-dollar contender, driving sales from $398 million in 2014 to $1 billion by 2023. During his 10-year tenure, he expanded the company’s global reach, establishing a Hong Kong office ahead of many Western rivals and betting early on the ultracontemporary market. Dolman’s willingness to embrace risk and innovation (for example, investing in the volatile segments of the art market) helped redefine Phillips’ appeal among younger, more adventurous collectors.

“Taste always changes and evolves, and we are now at a moment when young and new collectors are searching for direction,” Dolman tells Observer. “We have seen a move recently into ‘safer’ and ‘classic’ late 19th- and 20th-century art, but this will not last as the market recovers and the number of collectors grows.”

Late last year, Dolman stepped down as Phillips’ CEO. This year, he helped found and launch New Perspectives Art Partners, the high-end advisory venture poised to reshape the global art-advisory landscape amid generational transitions in collecting. “The art market is more complex and global than it has ever been,” Dolman says. “Private sales need to be able to connect buyers and sellers from completely different parts of the world. It’s a good time to seek independent advice if you’re buying or selling.” Dolman’s deep familiarity with the Middle East’s fast-rising art scene (he previously served as acting CEO of Qatar Museums and remains close to Sheikha Al-Mayassa bint Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani) will position the auction veteran well in this next chapter.

Ari Emanuel

• MARI | Founder & Principal Investor

Ari Emanuel is never far from the spotlight thanks to a series of major industry moves. The Hollywood power broker made headlines last May with his personal acquisition of the Frieze art fair and media group from Endeavor—a $200 million deal that cements his influence in the arts and puts Frieze’s global fair portfolio (New York, Los Angeles, London and Seoul along with EXPO Chicago, The Armory Show, Frieze magazine and the No.9 Cork Street gallery in London) under the control of his new holding company, MARI. Rather than a shake-up, the move signals long-term stability: Frieze’s senior leadership remains in place, and Emanuel, who previously helped drive the brand’s expansion, appears intent on strategic growth rather than reinvention. To wit, the recent announcements of Frieze House Seoul (a No.9 Cork Street analog) and the fair’s Gulf play, Frieze Abu Dhabi.

For Emanuel, Frieze is both a business and a passion project. His background steering Endeavor/WME’s entertainment empire—including global event platforms like UFC and WWE—makes the acquisition part of a larger play in the live experience economy, where art fairs, fashion and entertainment increasingly intersect. “Frieze has always been a source of inspiration for me—both professionally and personally,” Emanuel said in a statement. While talk of art fair fatigue lingers, Frieze remains a global brand synonymous with prestige and cultural cachet. Under Emanuel’s watch, it’s poised not just to endure but to expand its reach, merging art-world sophistication with the scale and polish of a seasoned entertainment executive.

Katherine E. Fleming

• J. Paul Getty Trust | President & CEO

Katherine E. Fleming oversees one of the most powerful cultural endowments in the world—more than $9.45 billion—and leads a constellation of institutions that includes the Getty Foundation, Getty Research Institute, Getty Conservation Institute and its two museums. Last year, she told Observer that the organization was trying to “think really carefully and creatively about what it means to be wealthy” in one of the most expensive neighborhoods in L.A. That reflection became strikingly literal in January 2025, when the Palisades wildfires tested the Getty’s state-of-the-art fire protection systems—an elaborate defense network of concrete barriers, sealed air systems, water reserves and fire separations designed to protect both the Getty Center and the Getty Villa. “The wildfires really brought home to me, in super concrete terms, what it means to be a repository of global cultural heritage,” she tells Observer. “The art that we own, we own on behalf of humanity. Museums are like a cultural version of Norway’s seed bank. It is vital that we take that responsibility very seriously, even as we try to make our collections as accessible as possible.” 

Beyond preserving the institution’s own treasures, she also turned the crisis into an opportunity to lead by example. The Getty helped launch the $14.3 million L.A. Arts Community Fire Relief Fund to support artists and cultural workers whose homes, studios or workplaces were damaged in the fires. “It made me think a lot about how important cultural institutions are for the resilience of humanity in the face of the multiple disasters that seem to surround us in the contemporary world,” she adds. “We play a vital role in connecting people to the past, to the future, and to one another, and in helping calm them and give them resilience during chaos.” Ultimately, Fleming created a roadmap of how institutions can be more than just fortresses of art and scholarship, serving also as responsive civic resources that use cultural wealth to support community resilience in moments of crisis.

Read Our Full Q&A With Katherine E. Fleming

Vanessa Fusco

• Christie’s | International Director, Head of Impressionist & Modern Art, Americas

As the story goes, Vanessa Fusco was on track for a PhD in art history before realizing she missed the pulse of the auction floor—so she returned to Christie’s, where she’s since become one of its sharpest operators. Now head of the department for Impressionist and Modern Art in the Americas, she advises clients on multimillion-dollar works by the greats of the 19th and 20th Centuries, handling masterpieces with the precision of someone who knows both art and market inside and out. As head of the department, she shapes how blue-chip lots are positioned, priced and ultimately placed in private collections. At the last marquee sales, she presented Claude Monet’s Peupliers au bord de l’Epte, crépuscule (1891)—a performance that reminded everyone why she’s one of the best in the business.

Her strategy blends connoisseurship with global reach. Peupliers was unveiled in Taipei, a calculated move that paid off: “Taipei, in particular, has really had strong interest in classic Impressionism,” Fusco told ARTnews. The work went on to sell for $43 million after fees, a new world record price for the series, surpassing estimates amid competitive regional bidding. Fusco was at the helm of running the inaugural 20th Century Evening sale, a format introduced in May 2021, which combines the best of impressionism, modern and postwar Art into one masterpiece sale. That auction included Picasso’s Femme assise près d’une fenêtre (Marie-Thérèse) (1932), which topped $100 million—the first painting to do so since 2019, and Fusco was on the telephone with the winning bidder. Ultimately, Fusco is orchestrating confidence in a market that still hinges on trust, taste and timing.

Larry Gagosian

• Gagosian | Founder

There’s no contemporary art world without Larry Gagosian, its billion-dollar kingmaker and overall heavy-lifter. While others set up mega-galleries, Gagosian built an empire. He continues to represent the most significant artists and estates, mounting impeccable museum-caliber exhibitions and curating punchy fair booths that set the bar for everyone else while sustaining audiences through his editorial venture Gagosian Quarterly. With such a legacy, no one would blame Gagosian for sitting back to enjoy the fruits of his labor. But in 2025, he delivered head-turning shows, featuring Cy Twombly, Picasso’s rarely seen works in partnership with the artist’s daughter, Paloma Picasso, as well as Willem de Kooning and Takashi Murakami, among others. He opened a new gallery in Seoul in 2024 with plans for expansion in West Hollywood.

Following the end of his Madison Avenue lease in 2026, the art world will hopefully get an answer to the now-perennial question: Who can replace Larry? Gagosian’s succession remains elusive—or close to the vest, your pick. His “council of the wise” (an advisory board peppered with cross-disciplinary luminaries, including Guggenheim chairman J. Tomilson Hill, financier Glenn Fuhrman, LVMH exec Delphine Arnault and filmmaker Sofia Coppola) has been mapping the gallery’s future and providing strategic guidance through leadership shake-ups that muddied earlier theories on possible heirs.

Lina Ghotmeh

• LG—A | Founder & Architect

Lina Ghotmeh is shaping some of the most high-profile art and architecture commissions of our time and changing how we engage with art in the process. In 2023, she designed London’s Serpentine Pavilion “À table,” a witty, design-forward structure that turned the act of breaking bread into an artistic and communal experience. Her international visibility has surged since then. She created the Bahrain Pavilion for the 2025 Osaka Expo and was tapped to lead three major cultural landmarks: the new Qatar Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, the Jadids’ Legacy Museum in Bukhara, Uzbekistan—housed in a restored 19th-century residence—and the sweeping redesign of the British Museum’s Western Range, which encompasses nearly a third of the London institution’s footprint. “It’s an invitation to reframe how we tell the story of humanity through art—decentering traditional hierarchies and embracing a more interconnected, equitable cultural landscape,” she tells Observer. “We are finally witnessing the rise of influential perspectives from historically underrepresented regions. This expansion of voices is not only reshaping who gets to speak but also how and where art is being shown.”

Projects like the AlUla Contemporary Arts Museum in Saudi Arabia “sit at the crossroads of this transformation—where local narratives meet global dialogues,” she says. Across continents, Ghotmeh’s projects share a distinctive ethos rooted in what she calls the “Archaeology of the Future”—an architectural philosophy that insists buildings must rise from the spirit of their place, history and environment rather than sit apart from them. This sensitivity to context infuses her work with cultural depth and visual clarity, producing spaces that both honor their surroundings and reimagine how art, architecture and heritage can exist in conversation. “I’m deeply interested in rethinking how we show art and in reaffirming its central role within society,” she adds. “I believe museums and cultural spaces should evolve into living environments.”

Marc Glimcher

• Pace Gallery | CEO

At the helm of Pace since 2011, Marc Glimcher has overseen significant evolutions and expansions, propelling the gallery into a global brand and powerhouse through a strategic blend of robust programming and market leadership. Pace opened a new location in Tokyo in 2024, consolidating its presence in the Asian market and bringing the total number of cities under the mega-gallery’s wing to eight. The gallery also opened a new space in Berlin in collaboration with Galerie Judin in 2025. All of this belies a long history: Arne Glimcher founded Pace in 1960; the gallery has built relationships with artists and estates as recognizable as those of Alexander Calder, Jean Dubuffet, Agnes Martin and Mark Rothko; and it launched one of the longest-standing gallery imprints.

The gallery has championed Abstract Expressionists and Light and Space movement artists, with a head-spinning roster of the most prominent modern and postwar artists and estates that withstand broader market downturns. Under Glimcher’s vision, Pace Gallery has adopted frontier and innovative projects, including Pace Live in 2019, placing its West 25th Street space as a multidisciplinary cultural hub and Pace Verso in 2021, delving into the world of NFTs. It’s this blend of steady and new that keeps Pace at the center as it proudly celebrates its 65th anniversary this year.

Brett Gorvy

• Lévy Gorvy Dayan | Co-Founder & Partner
• New Perspectives Art Partners | Founder

In 2025, Brett Gorvy joined an elite group of seasoned industry experts to launch New Perspectives Art Partners, a new collaborative consultancy launched specifically to reshape the landscape of high-end art advisory. He brings extensive experience in auction house and gallery leadership to the table. Before stepping down as chairman and international head of Postwar and Contemporary Art at Christie’s to become a dealer, his department was the auction house’s highest-earning and, through it, he shaped the art market as well as art history by shifting the valuations of canonical contemporary works and artists (notable among them a Picasso for $179 million and a Modigliani for $170.4 million). His semi-recent venture, the blue-chip East 64th Street gallery Lévy Gorvy Dayan, of which he is a co-founder and partner, has mounted critically acclaimed exhibitions of artists including Alexander Calder, Lucio Fontana, Ellsworth Kelly, Yves Klein, Andy Warhol and Gerhard Richter. 

“In the last five years, there has been an explosion of interest internationally in young contemporary artists, especially female artists and artists of color,” Gorvy tells Observer. This market has become very challenging, especially with the difficulties in Asia. Asian collectors have been responsible for much of this boom. As advisers, there is a need for greater scrutiny of younger markets and a focus less on pure financial return than greater curatorial focus.”

Gorvy, an art world heavyweight (and Instagram whiz with 164,000 followers), is now focused on turning New Perspectives Art Partners into a top-tier advisory service for top-of-market collectors navigating the current market challenges. “We’re in a market that’s shifting in real time and it’s happening in complex, layered ways,” he told Observer, certain that the McKinsey-like dream team of which he is part will be able to reshape the landscape of high-end art advisory in 2026 and beyond. “We aim to act like a management consultancy coming in to assess a project,” added Gorvy, whose in-depth knowledge of modern, contemporary and U.S. markets will no doubt set new standards in advisory services.

Loïc Gouzer

• Fair Warning | Founder

Making his name at Sotheby’s and Christie’s, Loïc Gouzer is the maverick who orchestrated the record-shattering sale of the Salvator Mundi in 2017. Considered by many the “Federer of the art market,” he’s now set on reinventing the auction model through his app-based venture Fair Warning, rebooted in 2024 after raising $5 million. It cuts out the traditional auction house, curating single-piece sales of mid-tier works by artists like Basquiat and Picasso for a members-only audience of digitally fluent collectors who bid via the app. It’s not about breaking records but about reshaping access, luring a younger, tech-native generation more comfortable wielding a digital paddle than a physical one.

“Algorithms now shape taste more than Gertrude Stein ever did,” Gouzer tells Observer. “Social media does to art what the food industry does to food: it sucks out the nutrients, flattens the flavor, standardizes the recipe, and sells it back as culture. Freeing oneself from this master will be the existential cause of artists and collectors alike.”

This experiment in one-off auctions builds on Gouzer’s earlier venture Particle, which offered fractional art ownership as part of a move to democratize blue-chip collecting. (Two years ago, Particle sold 500 shares of H.R. Giger’s sculpture of the famous Xenomorph featured in Alien.) Fair Warning has already surpassed $50 million in auction sales, with private transactions exceeding that total. Still, Gouzer insists it’s not about hype but integrity—proof that innovation in the art market doesn’t have to come at the expense of connoisseurship. Or, as he famously put it: “quality, quality, quality.”

Michael Govan

• Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) | CEO

Michael Govan has redefined Los Angeles as a global cultural capital and transformed LACMA into one of the world’s most forward-looking museums. Since taking the helm in 2006, he has overseen the acquisition of more than 35,000 artworks and artifacts, expanding the museum’s scope across continents and centuries while strengthening ties to Los Angeles’s own creative communities. Under his leadership, LACMA has deepened partnerships with organizations such as East West Bank and launched initiatives like rotating loans with the new Las Vegas Museum of Art, reinforcing its role as a connector between local and international audiences.

Now Govan is steering LACMA through its most ambitious transformation yet: the $725 million David Geffen Galleries refurbishment and expansion, set to debut next year. “We had a vision of creating something truly unique—rooted in our locality but with a global perspective. And we’re incredibly excited about what we’ve been able to achieve,” he told Observer this summer during a preview tour of the space. The reimagined galleries will abandon traditional divisions by geography or chronology, instead emphasizing cross-cultural exchange and dialogue—mirroring Los Angeles’s own mosaic identity. With its open, park-like design and new public gathering spaces, the project redefines what a 21st-century museum can be: accessible, interconnected and alive to the global conversations that art can spark.

Philip Hoffman

• The Fine Art Group | Founder & Chairman
• New Perspectives Art Partners | Founder

Christie’s prodigy Philip Hoffman—CFO before he turned 30 and on the Global Management Board by 33—is CEO of The Fine Art Group and a founding member of the powerhouse collective New Perspectives Art Partners, launched this year. Renowned for turning art into a bona fide asset class, Hoffman has redefined high-end collecting and professionalized the advisory field with a financier’s precision. Since founding The Fine Art Group in 2001, he has built it into a global empire, launching eight art investment funds, advising on more than $20 billion annually and transacting over $1.4 billion in artworks and jewelry. 

“One of the biggest changes I’ve seen is how proactive collectors have become,” Hoffman tells us. (It is a topic about which he regularly shares insights with Observer.) “They’re more informed, more mobile, and far more attuned to the financial side of collecting than ever before.”

Representing 350 family offices across 28 countries, Hoffman has strategically expanded his global reach through partnerships, including a 2023 collaboration with Patti Wong & Associates in Asia—and now aims to amplify that model through New Perspectives Art Partners. The venture, he told Observer, “could pick up the phone to probably 1,000 or 2,000 of the world’s top clients,” emphasizing the scale of his infrastructure. “We’ve got warehouses and operations in every country.” Few can make that claim—and even fewer with such authority.

Max Hollein

• Metropolitan Museum of Art | Director & CEO

Max Hollein is steering the Metropolitan Museum of Art through one of the most ambitious periods of change in its history. Since becoming director and CEO in 2023, his unified leadership has allowed him to guide the Met’s evolution with clarity and purpose—addressing head-on the complex issues of provenance, deaccessioning, cultural heritage and institutional inclusivity. Under his watch, the museum has strengthened its provenance research capacity with the appointment of Lucian Simmons and a dedicated team, signaling a deeper institutional commitment to transparency and accountability in the stewardship of its global collections.

Equally transformative is Hollein’s effort to reframe how the Met presents non-Western art. The reopening of the Michael C. Rockefeller Wing earlier this year marks a major step in that direction, with renovated galleries that reflect new scholarship on the arts of Africa, the Ancient Americas and Oceania—bringing forward fresh curatorial perspectives and cross-cultural connections. “Together with our collaborative and community-based approach to curating these collections, the transformation of these galleries allows us to further advance the appreciation and contextualization of many of the world’s most significant cultures,” he told Observer. More rethinking is underway: a 15,000-square-foot suite dedicated to ancient art from Cyprus and West Asia will open in 2027, aiming to transcend outdated East-West divides, while the long-awaited Tang Wing for Modern and Contemporary Art—slated for completion in 2030—will further redefine how the Met engages with the art of our own time.

Noah Horowitz

• Art Basel | CEO

Art Basel isn’t just about fairs anymore. Since taking over as CEO in 2022, Noah Horowitz has transformed the organization into a multifaceted global culture brand—one that extends far beyond the convention halls. Under his leadership, Art Basel has strengthened its international footprint, reinforcing its Hong Kong edition with a three-year partnership with the Hong Kong Tourism Board and increasing first-time exhibitors by 37 percent in 2024—a growth trend that continued this year. In Europe, he solidified the brand’s presence, renaming Paris+ to Art Basel Paris and aligning it with Basel’s other flagship cities, while anticipation builds for the debut of Art Basel Qatar in 2026, set to redefine the fair model for the Gulf region.

But Horowitz’s ambitions stretch further. This year, he launched the Art Basel Awards to celebrate and support the wider art ecosystem, signaling a shift from pure market focus to cultural leadership. He’s also ventured into brand collaborations and partnerships—including one with Hugo Boss for the awards—and expanded into the lifestyle space with last year’s launch of the Art Basel Shop concept store. Alongside these initiatives, Art Basel continues to set the tone for global art-market analysis through its annual Art Market Report. The result is a newly energized, forward-facing Art Basel that’s reshaping the art world instead of responding to it.

Steve Ivy

• Heritage Auctions | Co-Founder & CEO

While other auction houses are grappling with double-digit declines in sales volume, Heritage Auctions continues to defy gravity. The firm reported $962 million in total sales through June 2025—its highest midyear figure ever—surpassing last year’s then-record $924 million. It ultimately closed 2024 at $1.86 billion in total sales. Now the world’s third-largest auction house, Heritage boasts nearly two million registered bidders across categories that span fine art, numismatics, jewelry, design, science and pop culture. Under CEO Steve Ivy, Heritage has broadened its reach by expanding into unconventional collectible markets and capturing the attention of first-time and younger buyers. The company has redefined the boundaries of art sales to include comic books, film storyboards, sports memorabilia and other cultural artifacts once considered peripheral to the fine art market. 

Behind this growth lies a radically transparent consignment and bidding model across its 50 departments—an approach that contrasts sharply with the opacity of its older rivals.
“Gen-Next and Millennial collectors have replaced their Baby Boomer parents as the most active participants in the auction market, and they are not as interested in $10 million and above contemporary artworks,” Ivy tells Observer. “They have a much stronger preference for transparency and lack of friction in their auction buying. Additionally, they have been turning to collectibles, and this has benefited Heritage tremendously. We were the first auction house to invest heavily in these sectors beginning in the early 2000s.” It’s a pragmatic formula built around steady innovation, disciplined risk and an eye for where new collectors actually live.

Megan Fox Kelly

• Megan Fox Kelly Art Advisory | Founder & Principal

The art advisory field has evolved dramatically since she began, but Megan Fox Kelly remains at the top of it. Through her namesake firm, she manages more than $3.5 billion in art assets, guiding ultra-high-net-worth collectors and institutions through every stage of building, managing and preserving major collections. Her clientele reads like a who’s who of contemporary collecting, from the estate of Faith Ringgold and the Robert Indiana Estate (Star of Hope Foundation) to Michael Crichton and the Robert A. and Beatrice C. Mayer Collection, to the Terra Foundation for American Art, the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation and the estate of Robert De Niro Sr. Yet her work extends beyond private counsel. “This is about professionalizing advisory practice beyond just transactional brokerage, and building long-range strategies that sustain value for collectors and, for artist estates, build scholarship and access,” Kelly tells Observer. “If you’re managing a specific collection or an artist estate, you need bespoke analysis—what’s happening with pricing in this particular segment, what are the trends that matter for these works?” 

As a contributor to Observer, Kelly writes about collection legacies, art fair strategies, and market forecasting. As host of the Reading the Art World podcast, she helps demystify the business for a wider audience. A former president of the Association of Professional Art Advisors, Kelly is a regular presence at TEFAF Maastricht, The Art Business Conference and The Armory Show, where her perspective carries the authority of both experience and discretion. Behind the NDAs and closed doors, she is a strategist; onstage and in print, she’s a translator of market complexity. Her advice to her colleagues remains succinct and timeless: “What it takes to make this real is collaboration. Financial advisors, attorneys, and art market professionals actually working together instead of in silos. That’s how we better serve both collectors and estates.”

Read our Full Q&A with Megan Fox Kelly

Tina Kim

• Tina Kim Gallery | Founder & Owner

Tina Kim keeps a foot on both shores of the Pacific. Born in South Korea and raised in California, she was destined to build bridges long before the “Korean wave” went global. After getting her start organizing exhibitions for the influential Kukje Gallery in Seoul, founded by her mother, she established her eponymous gallery in New York City in 2001. “I’ve always seen my work as a cultural bridge—initially bringing Korean art to a wider audience, and now expanding that to connect more diverse voices,” Kim tells Observer. “The art world today feels less centralized and more interconnected, and that’s exactly the kind of landscape I want to help build.”

Through her New York program, Kim has been instrumental in bringing Korean and Asian diasporic artists to international prominence. She has championed figures like Park Seo-Bo, Ha Chong-Hyun, Kim Tschang-Yeul, Pacita Abad and Lee ShinJa, placing their work within major institutional collections and critical discourse, while amplifying the global visibility of a new generation, including Mire Lee and Maia Ruth Lee. Kim is widely credited with introducing Dansaekhwa—the influential postwar Korean monochrome movement—to a global audience, organizing a landmark collateral exhibition at the 2015 Venice Biennale, and this year, publishing a major new volume of artist letters translated from Korean, thereby contributing critical primary documents to the study of modern Korean art.

As a member of Frieze Seoul’s selection committee, Kim has helped shape the fair’s growth and visibility within the region from inception. With a surging Asian market and growing U.S. demand, Kim remains at the forefront. “Seoul will only continue to grow as a cultural capital in Asia—next year will be particularly exciting with the Gwangju and Busan Biennales coinciding with Frieze Seoul,” Kim says. “What it will take now is genuine exchange: artists, curators and audiences engaging directly, across regions. The future of the art world will depend on connection, not hierarchy.”

José Kuri & Mónica Manzutto

• kurimanzutto | Founders

Last year, the husband-and-wife duo Mónica Manzutto and José Kuri celebrated their 25th anniversary at the helm of kurimanzutto, the once itinerant Mexico City gallery. In 2022, the pair put down roots in New York with a permanent gallery space in Chelsea. While CDMX Art Week is now an established date in the global art market calendar for collectors and curators alike, this wasn’t always the case; Manzutto and Kuri have done a lot to elevate the visibility and valuation of contemporary Mexican and Latin American art in the U.S. by giving these artists a platform domestically and abroad. “It was a desert. You could count on one hand collectors in the city,” said Kuri of the Mexico City art market during the 1990s in a recent interview. Today, they no longer need to individually call collectors after each show; instead, collectors rush to Mexico City, with demand and pricing momentum projected to steady levels into 2026. “The most transformative shift in the art world’s power dynamics has been the emergence of multiple narratives,” the duo tells Observer, adding that this has informed their strategy to “insist, insist, insist.”

Manzutto and Kuri can arguably boast of having successfully skyrocketed contemporary Mexican art to the global art scene and made Mexico City a hub in global conversations. They’ve propelled prominent artists like Gabriel Orozco and Abraham Cruzvillegas, securing major institutional exhibitions and the representation of estates like that of John Giorno, catalyzing collector demand by building international relationships with museums, curators and collectors, making Mexican artists accessible to global markets and boosting their liquidity and prestige. (Sotheby’s, for instance, recently reported that sales of works by Latin American artists have climbed more than 50 percent above pre-pandemic levels.) Concurrently, there’s been a notable accumulation of wealth in the Latin American region and within the Latino diaspora, and Mexico City has become an arts destination in its own right. Looking ahead, they are most looking forward to “privileging knowledge and critical thinking over influencers and oversimplifiers of the complexities of art and its ecosystems.”

Philomene Magers & Monika Sprüth

• Sprüth Magers | Founders

One of the few German galleries to establish a truly global presence, Sprüth Magers has infrastructure spanning Berlin, London, Los Angeles and New York. In March, Philomene Magers told Observer she sees its priorities “in a much wider global system.” While the gallery represents a long list of artists globally, it remains at least partially focused on groundbreaking German artists like Anne Imhof—who won a Golden Lion at the 2017 Venice Biennale and more recently brought DOOM: HOUSE OF HOPE to the Park Avenue Armory—and Andreas Gursky, who brought “New Works” to Gagosian Paris, had a solo show in the gallery’s New York space earlier this year, and just opened a show at White Cube Mason’s Yard in London. The band/art project Kraftwerk also has a long-standing, albeit not-quite-representational, relationship with Sprüth Magers. “It shows that iconic and important figures continue to emerge from this cultural background,” said Magers. It also shows that the gallery has been savvy and laser-focused on positioning German contemporary art, with a high level of curatorial commitment.

The “re-centering of artists,” Monika Sprüth tells Observer, has been the most transformative shift in the art world’s power dynamics over the last year. “What emerges is not merely a new market logic, but a new cultural syntax. The next chapter of the art world won’t be defined by exclusivity. I see this moment as an invitation to exchange between cultures, technologies, and generations of artists and collectors alike.”

During their four-plus decades in the business, the pair has developed a sharp knack for identifying talent, including the likes of Barbara Kruger, George Condo (who recently left Hauser & Wirth for joint representation by Sprüth Magers and Skarstedt) and Jenny Holzer, who are among a roster of more than 70 artists and estates—and staying ahead of the curve despite pressures at home, with Berlin’s place as a major artist hub waning in recent years. Magers summarized their quest for talent, an ethos that transcends short-term trends: “To reimagine what the art world could become may require new kinds of alliances between galleries, collectors and institutions that are all defined together. We should always be open to operating beyond the structures that have historically been in place.”

Clare McAndrew

• Arts Economics | Founder & Cultural Economist

Dr. Clare McAndrew is the economist behind the data that defines the art world. As founder of Arts Economics and author of the annual Art Basel & UBS Art Market Report (as well as several others on art and collectibles), she produces the most authoritative snapshot of the global art economy—September Vogue with charts instead of couture. When the yearly report drops in March, dealers, collectors, institutions and journalists alike turn to its findings to gauge the market’s health, whether it’s rebounding, contracting or simply shifting shape. Its headline figures—sales volumes, sector shares, regional trends—are matched by nuanced analysis of global economic forces, auction performance and dealer sentiment, offering an unparalleled outlook for the year ahead, along with some much-needed clarity. “As most of what the mainstream media reports on is the multi-million-dollar sums paid for this very small number of artists’ works, new buyers are led to believe that the art market is out of their reach, and that you can only get a quality work of art if you have a budget of over $1 million or so, when in fact there are so many other less publicized artists and works available at much lower prices,” she tells Observer.

McAndrew has managed what once seemed impossible: to quantify the notoriously opaque art market. By applying rigorous economic methods, she has developed a research framework that combines surveys, data modeling, and a mix of quantitative and qualitative analysis to produce consistent and comparable insights across regions and sectors. The result is a report that helps the industry reflect on the past year while strategizing for the next, exposing how sales respond to shocks, trends and evolving collector behavior.

In 2024, she expanded her scope with the first-ever Japan Art Market Report—a detailed national study continuing her focus on regional “spin-offs” as emerging markets and shifting collector bases demand sharper, more localized intelligence. She also points to ongoing changes in what’s being sold in the art market, including an expanding range of collectibles and luxury products being sold by dealers and at auction houses and new digital mediums and channels for accessing these works. “The traditional mediums still dominate by value for now, but that could change in the future,” McAndrew says, adding that “how we account for and measure these sales will become increasingly important in understanding the activity in the sector as a whole, especially when we’re trying to assess its economic and social impact.” 

Julie Mehretu

• Artist | Marian Goodman Gallery

Can a major contemporary artist also become a meaningful patron? Julie Mehretu just proved it. When the Whitney Museum raised its admission price from $25 to $30 in 2023—another sign of the art world’s rising inaccessibility—Mehretu stepped in with a $2.25 million gift to fund the institution’s “Free 25 and Under” program. “If you’re waiting tables in New York like I used to, you can’t afford to go to a museum all the time,” she said. “But young artists need access to art.” Her act wasn’t about spectacle—it was about restoring one of the core promises of public institutions: access and equity. It was also a reminder that philanthropy doesn’t have to mean billion-dollar endowments; timing, intention and empathy can be just as transformative.

Mehretu’s gesture comes as her own career reaches new heights. Her acclaimed retrospective “Ensemble” at Palazzo Grassi coincided with the 2024 Venice Biennale, spanning 25 years of work, while this year’s “KAIROS / Hauntological Variations” in Germany marks her largest European survey yet, featuring more than 100 pieces. Her auction market remains robust, but her growing role as a philanthropist might become an equally enduring legacy—showing that influence in art isn’t just about the work you make, but the access you help others gain.

Marc Payot

• Hauser & Wirth | President

This year, Marc Payot celebrated a quarter century with Hauser & Wirth, and what a year it’s been. A remarkable number of the gallery’s artists and estates headlined exhibitions at New York’s top institutions: Amy Sherald at the Whitney, Flora Yukhnovich at the Frick, Jack Whitten at MoMA, Lorna Simpson at the Met and Rashid Johnson at the Guggenheim. Numerous others—Jenny Holzer, Firelei Báez, Glenn Ligon and Annie Leibovitz, among them—commanded major museum shows across the U.S., Europe and Asia. The gallery, now spanning 18 locations across the United States, Europe, Hong Kong and the U.K., published 17 titles under its Hauser & Wirth Publishers imprint, a testament to the scope of its cultural reach. Next year, it will add new physical spaces in London and Palo Alto, further expanding its presence.

The empire’s builders, Manuela and Iwan Wirth—who are now busy redefining the model of a cultural enterprise that fuses art, publishing, real estate and hospitality—have left the gallery in formidable hands. Under Payot’s leadership, 2025 was marked not only by institutional success but also by growing engagement and notable collaborations. To wit: Hauser & Wirth launched its “In the Studio” series of compact, illustrated books offering deep dives into artists’ practices; forged collaborations with arts organizations, including London’s Royal Drawing School and Whitechapel Gallery; and partnered with The New Art School Modality to provide free hybrid art courses. Then there’s the Collective Impact initiative—a project in which Hauser & Wirth joins forces with smaller, younger galleries to represent artists in an approach defined by parity, transparency and mutuality. “It’s clear to us that ‘success’ is not a zero-sum game in a delicate ecosystem like the art world,” Payot tells Observer. “We’ve been putting a lot of energy over the last few years into collaborations with our colleagues who operate at different scales, so that we can contribute in concrete, measurable ways to the health of the wider field.”

Emmanuel Perrotin

• Perrotin | Founder

Emmanuel Perrotin’s eponymous mega-gallery continues to chase global domination by expanding into prime global markets, but with a lean and measured approach to growth. Perrotin represents approximately 70 artists and collaborates with 30 others, including emerging and established mid-career artists, as well as estates. Currently, the gallery has a presence in nine cities worldwide, with bookstores in Paris, London, New York and a pop-up at the Bellagio in Las Vegas. In 2025, Perrotin opened new galleries in London and Dubai and relocated its Hong Kong outpost to a different part of the city. Earlier this year, after two years of negotiations, Perrotin sold a majority stake in the gallery (51 percent) to private equity firm Colony Investment Management in a move he calls “a monumental decision for us and the first of this kind in the contemporary art world.” In doing so, he amplified the financialization of contemporary art, ushering in increased capital flows, accelerating global scaling and setting new market expectations in the U.S. and beyond.

At the same time, Perrotin hasn’t shied away from expansion or experimentation. “When I started my gallery in Paris in 1990, I had a mission to make more people interested in contemporary art,” he tells Observer. “To do this, I had to find links with other disciplines—I was already connected to people who were in fashion and music, so I started these collaborations early on.” Joining its existing locations in Paris, New York City, Shanghai, Seoul and Tokyo are new spaces in Los Angeles (opened in 2024) and, in 2025, Paris, London and Dubai, where the gallerist recommitted to the Emirati city and its regional art scene with a primary-market venue. Now with private equity support, Perrotin told Bloomberg he would consider opening galleries in cities like Zurich, Bangkok or Istanbul. Or, he added, buying rivals—because consolidation among art galleries may be the future of the industry.

Magnus Renfrew

• ART SG & Tokyo Gendai | Co-Founder
• ARTHQ Group | Managing Director

Magnus Renfrew wants the art world to look east—and he’s giving it every reason to. As co-founder of ART SG and Tokyo Gendai, Renfrew has spent the past two years strengthening the art fair portfolio that he leads. A master of regional infrastructure building, he’s creating new platforms for galleries and collectors while also advising private clients, artists’ estates, institutions and governments through his consultancy ARTHQ, shaping how the region’s art economies connect and grow. Positioned as the leading art fair in Japan, Tokyo Gendai has already drawn global attention in one of the world’s most dynamic emerging markets. The rise of ART SG reflects the shift from the Asia Pacific to the Indo Pacific. “I’m looking at how I can engage this new demographic of people who are proud of their cultural roots, particularly from Asia and Southeast Asia, yet open to artistic expressions from other regions,” Renfrew tells Observer of his current priorities. 

Renfrew’s confidence is earned—he was the founding director of Art Hong Kong, which later became Art Basel Hong Kong, and his leadership helped put Asia-Pacific firmly on the international art map. He’s particularly excited, he says, about deepening the infrastructure for art in Southeast Asia. “Technology, globalization and demographic change are all accelerating a decentralization of the art world… This is enormously exciting. Technology has democratized access to information, allowing collectors to discover artists wherever they may be. Globalization has brought new perspectives and cultural narratives to the fore. The younger generation of collectors is approaching collecting with a new sense of purpose and curiosity.” And his fairs will be there to answer their call.

Alex Rotter

• Christie’s | Global President

Alex Rotter was appointed global president of Christie’s in May 2025—a natural progression for an executive who has spent the past decade redefining how the auction world operates. In his new role, he’s charged with shaping strategy for both auctions and private sales in concert with regional presidents and global chairs, all while continuing to serve as global chair of 20th- and 21st-century art. Few understand the nuances of market psychology and collector behavior quite like Rotter, whose tenure has been marked by bold structural innovations and a willingness to rewrite the rulebook when convention no longer serves.

His decision in 2020 to collapse Christie’s traditional art categories—merging Impressionist, Modern, Postwar and Contemporary art under a single “20/21” banner—was initially radical but ultimately visionary. It acknowledged a collector base less bound by chronology and more attuned to cross-era dialogues, streamlining consignment strategies and strengthening Christie’s market dominance. When the pandemic upended live auctions, Rotter adapted again, introducing the relay auction: a hybrid, live-streamed event that seamlessly passed from city to city, transforming sales into global spectacles. He remains candid about market turbulence yet unflappable in the face of it—and consequently known for turning headwinds into opportunities.

Mary Rozell

• UBS | Global Head, UBS Art Collection

Mary Rozell oversees one of the most influential corporate art collections in existence, comprising 30,000 works spanning canvas, paper, photography, sculpture, video and installation, amassed over decades of collecting. What began as a scattering of individual acquisitions coalesced in the 1960s into a distinctly contemporary collection that has since grown into a global cultural asset. Only works by living artists and those acquired directly from galleries make the cut, and today pieces by Lucian Freud, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Philip Guston and Cy Twombly hang across UBS’s 700 offices worldwide. They serve not just as conversation starters but as quiet assertions of taste and intellect, transforming corporate hallways into a museum-grade experience for employees and visitors alike.

When Rozell, an art lawyer and former director at Sotheby’s Institute of Art, stepped into the role, her mandate was clear: unify the disparate collections under a single, forward-looking vision. She approached the task with both precision and openness, expanding the collection’s diversity while maintaining its exacting standards. “Generally we’re not buying an artist at their first show—it’s the second or third, when they have some traction but before they get too much recognition,” Rozell told Observer of her acquisition strategy. Among her most meaningful contributions has been lifting the velvet rope around a once-insular collection. “I feel like some of our pieces are so important that we have a responsibility to share them with the greater public,” she said—a sentiment that has helped redefine UBS’s art holdings as a cultural resource.

Antwaun Sargent

• Gagosian | Director

Curator and writer Antwaun Sargent has been dubbed the “Art Star Maker” for his ability to not only celebrate Black creativity in art, fashion and design but also to leverage people and platforms to bring it market and institutional attention. “I still think the best way to encourage an art ecosystem I believe in is to create it,” Sargent tells Observer. Since his appointment to director at Gagosian in 2021, the 30-something has rapidly become a high-profile tastemaker, but he was shaping discourse long before joining the mega-gallery, with bylines in the New York Times, the New Yorker and scores of art publications, where he questioned the relationship between art institutions and Black artists. His book credits include The New Black Vanguard: Photography between Art and Fashion, which he wrote, and Young, Gifted and Black: A New Generation of Artists, which he edited. 

Both his curation and his commentary have been seminal in reshaping conversations, collector taste and boosting the visibility of historically underrepresented Black contemporary artists. His debut show with Gagosian, “Social Works,” explored the relationship between the physical spaces we engage with and Black social practice. He was behind Virgil Abloh’s “Figures of Speech” at the Brooklyn Museum and “Barkley L. Hendricks: Portraits at the Frick,” the institution’s first solo show dedicated to a Black artist. These are just a few of the 30-plus critically acclaimed and commercially successful shows he’s curated, and yet his approach is deceptively simple: “My only strategy is to believe in artists, which is to say I do whatever possible to make their visions a reality.” Lauren Halsey, Rick Lowe, Tyler Mitchell, Cy Gavin and Derrick Adams are among those artists—they make great work, Sargent asserts, and his job is to support them. “The evolution of the art world and its centers of power have been greatly exaggerated,” he adds. “The only thing I’m interested in is putting more power in the hands of artists.”

Read Our Full Q&A With Antwaun Sargent

Muys Snijders

• Private Client Select | SVP, Head of Art Services

With over 25 years in the international art world, Muys Snijders is a leading expert in fine art insurance. As head of art services at Private Client Select, she oversees risk management for a portfolio insuring over $50 billion in fine art and collectibles across 50,000 policies. In an era of intensifying climate threats, Snijders is redefining how the industry protects cultural patrimony. “Many new technologies have been introduced in recent years to support mitigation efforts,” Snijders told The Art Newspaper, citing innovations like automatic fire suppression and hypoxic storage now being implemented for collections in wildfire zones. Over the years, Snijders and her team have provided bespoke coverage to some 60 percent of the top 200 ARTnews Collectors, conducting site visits worldwide to ensure proactive protection. 

At this year’s Aspen Art Fair, Snijders moderated “A Collector’s Point of View: Curated Approaches in a Contemporary World,” with collectors including Nancy Magoon, Sharon Hoffman and Christine Mack. Snijders is also steering Private Client Select toward a new era of corporate collecting, championing acquisitions by diverse artists and launching commissions focused on sustainability. The firm’s new managing general underwriter (MGU) structure, she says, reflects a changing insurance landscape—one where agility and tailored solutions are paramount.

Snijders serves on the Guggenheim‘s Young Collectors Council Acquisition Committee, ICA Miami‘s International Council, and the Aspen Art Museum‘s Director’s Circle, among other board and advisory roles. Before joining Private Client Select (formerly AIG Private Client Group), Muys launched her own art consultancy firm and served as the managing director of Christie’s Americas. With natural catastrophes mounting, her steady leadership is preserving art for generations to come.

Sheikha Al-Mayassa bint Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani

• Qatar Museums | Chairperson

Sheikha Al-Mayassa bint Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani has become the current that moves the Gulf’s entire cultural tide. As chairperson of Qatar Museums, she has not only cemented Qatar’s position on the global art map but ensured it will stay there for decades to come. With access to both immense family wealth and a sharp curatorial instinct, she recently helped broker the landmark Art Basel Qatar, set to debut in February 2026 through a partnership between Art Basel, Qatar Sports Investments and QC+. She also championed the launch of the new Qatar Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, which debuted at this year’s architecture edition—a clear signal that her ambitions extend well beyond Doha.

This outward expansion follows years of building a formidable cultural foundation at home—consolidating acquisitions, infrastructure and institutional strategy while elevating Qatar’s artistic profile across the region. Her vision has translated into major public art initiatives, including Richard Serra’s East-West/West-East, and into making Qatar a first-choice destination for artists, curators and global institutions alike. Under her leadership, dynamic platforms such as Mathaf (Arab Museum of Modern Art), the Lusail Museum, the Art Mill Museum (opening in 2030) and the Fire Station have flourished, alongside high-profile exhibitions such as “LATINOAMERICANO | Modern and Contemporary Art from the Malba and Eduardo F. Costantini Collections” and “Seeing Is Believing: The Art and Influence of Gérôme.”

Yü‑Ge Wang

• Christie’s | Associate Director, Senior Client Advisor & Auctioneer

After joining Christie’s more than a decade ago, Yü-Ge Wang quickly rose through the ranks to become associate director and senior client adviser, specializing in Asian collectors. She was the lead auctioneer at Christie’s 21st Century Evening Sale last May, commanding $96.5 million with a 92 percent sell-through by lot and 97 percent by value—an impressive feat in a tightening market. Under her gavel, visibility and valuations surged for women artists and contemporary stars, like Carmen Herrera, Cecily Brown and Elizabeth Peyton. She hammered Miss January by Marlene Dumas for $13.6 million, setting a record for a living woman artist. “Innovation isn’t just about digital tools,” she tells Observer. “It’s about who gets to be part of the conversation, whose stories we tell, and how we authentically interact with a much more diverse and global community, so people feel heard rather than excluded.” 

Having worked across China, Germany and England, Wang bridges languages, markets and cultures with rare fluency, and her star is on the rise. “Collecting motivations and strategies are changing and creating meaningful dialogue is more important than ever,” she says. “As an auctioneer, I learned to create this dialogue also on stage by using my language skills to connect with bidders from different countries and my body language to engage with the audience in the room or online.” She frequently appears on panels exploring how media and photography can ignite cross-cultural dialogue, while using that same instinct for connection to drive sales with confidence, charisma and sharp market intuition. For Wang, learning to engage with other cultures isn’t just about boosting bottom lines but also a sign of respect—one that “helps colleagues from diverse backgrounds feel seen, valued and included, as well as being essential for long-term relevance.”

Martin Wilson

• Phillips | CEO

Art lawyer Martin Wilson rose to CEO of Phillips in early 2025, stepping into the role after Ed Dolman left to launch New Perspectives Art Partners. A seasoned art and auction veteran, Wilson was brought in during a turbulent market moment—an era of softening demand and growing regulatory scrutiny. Brought in as a “safe pair of hands,” he drew on his deep legal and compliance expertise (and the authority of being the author of Art Law and the Business of Art) to stabilize operations amid a 17.5 percent sales decline. His steady leadership has been defined by pragmatism and a measured confidence that Phillips will adapt rather than contract. “We’re seeing a real ‘taste transfer’ happening alongside the ‘great wealth transfer,’” Wilson tells Observer. “The challenge for the market is to anticipate and understand the expectations of these new collectors, both in terms of their taste but also how they prefer to engage with the art market.”

It is at inflection points like this, he says, that opportunities for innovation present themselves, and he’s already steering Phillips toward the future. He has appointed new heads for modern and contemporary art and private sales, while introducing a flexible premium structure designed to counter early bid hesitancy and soothe wary consignors. The new pre-auction bidding model allows early participants to benefit from reduced premiums while generating more authentic competition in the room. “We have a history of delivering positive results for our clients, as evidenced by our 90 percent sell-through rate this spring,” Wilson said this year. “Our aim now is to build on that by encouraging early engagement to generate spirited bidding and provide greater certainty for sellers.”

Read our Full Q&A With Martin Wilson

Andrew Wolff

• Beowolff Capital | CEO

Andrew Wolff stormed into the online art market in 2025 with a pair of headline-making plays: acquiring a controlling stake in Artsy and launching a €65 million delisting and takeover of Artnet, in moves that were less about buying legacy names than about combining market intelligence and reach. It’s not about the multi-brand cachet, but about building a vertically integrated digital empire, merging reach, data and market intelligence to rewire how art is discovered, priced and sold. “I think the world is moving from static forms of power to a more fluid model of networked authority and strength—one in which power and influence are built on the foundations of interconnected communities,” Wolff tells Observer. “Old-school power structures build walls to protect themselves. But our younger generations are skeptical of centralized gatekeepers; they want access, participation, transparency, consistency, objectivity.” 

His aim is to provide it with innovation, using analytics and A.I. to unlock the latent power of two of the art world’s most influential tech platforms. “We embrace A.I. not to reduce the role of human expertise in the art market, but to amplify it,” he says. “Not to steal the voices of artists, but to allow them to expand their reach. After all, in a world where machines can do more and more, the ability to create and feel the power of art is an increasingly critical part of what makes us human.” For now, Artsy and Artnet remain separate, ostensibly rivals, but his long game likely involves strategic complementarity: Artsy’s dominance in the primary market paired with Artnet’s unrivaled secondary market data. If and when those worlds merge, Wolff will control an ecosystem linking 67 million annual users to the world’s largest online marketplace for fine art—a rare position from which to shape the digital future of collecting.

Read Our Full Q&A With Andrew Wolff

Patti Wong

• Patti Wong & Associates | Co-Founder
• New Perspectives Art Partners | Founder

As one half of Patti Wong & Associates with Daryl Wickstrom, Patti Wong commands an unrivaled network across Asia, where the art market continues its ascent, powered by new institutions such as M+, where she now serves on the board. That appointment, along with her role as a founding partner of New Perspectives Art Partners alongside Brett Gorvy, Philip Hoffman and Ed and Alex Dolman, underscores her status as one of the region’s most influential cultural figures. 

“We foresee opportunities to build comprehensive advisory relationships with collectors and institutions in these regions, working with clients on long-term goals, legacy planning and collection dispersals that go beyond major collection sales at public auction—helping collections evolve in a way that can be passed down through generations or even transitioned into institutions,” Wong tells Observer. “It is about looking beyond the transaction and focusing on the bigger picture of what art legacy means and how art endures.”

From the outset of her career, Wong aimed to make Hong Kong a market force equal to New York and London—and she did. Over three decades at Sotheby’s, she transformed the city into a global art capital, introducing Asian collectors to Western postwar and contemporary art, elevating the international valuations of Asian artists, and overseeing record-breaking sales that established Hong Kong’s auctions as unmissable events on the global calendar. “We have always believed that understanding how different cultures collect, what motivates them and how they engage with art is key,” Wong says.

Following her 2023 collaboration with The Fine Art Group and her departure as International Chairman and Chairman of Sotheby’s Asia, Wong’s independent firm has quickly become a powerhouse in its own right. It has, she says, “generated a total transaction value for our clients in excess of $1 billion”—evidence that the Asian market remains active and resilient, even if it’s no longer operating at the inflated pace of its most frenzied years.

Jeffrey Yin

• Artsy | CEO

Jeffrey Yin runs the world’s largest online marketplace for fine art—a platform whose scale and sophistication have redefined how art is bought and sold. Artsy connects more than one million available works to millions of collectors globally through partnerships with over 3,000 galleries and auction houses. It combines editorial authority, curatorial intelligence and data science to power a marketplace that has become indispensable to the art world’s digital ecosystem. For example, Yin tells Observer that a collector might discover a work through Artsy’s personalized recommendations, save the work, receive an offer directly from the gallery, and finalize the purchase online—all within a few days. “The average distance between buyer and seller on Artsy—about 2,500 miles—says a lot about how technology is expanding reach and redistributing opportunity across the art ecosystem,” he says.

Under Yin’s leadership, Artsy has seen record momentum: first-time buyers are on the rise, and 2024 sales climbed 15 percent year over year—the platform’s strongest growth since 2021. The number of artists with commercial activity on the platform has grown by 20 percent since 2020, and galleries are now selling works by 40 percent more artists. The Artsy mobile app, now a fixture among younger collectors, continues to expand the company’s reach, while its inaugural 2025 Art Market Trends report and new collector follow-up tools mark a push toward data-driven personalization and higher conversion. The biggest opportunity, he says, will involve not just guiding the next generation of collectors but also sustaining their engagement over time. “The foundation of transparency and global access is now in place; the next step is helping collectors navigate the overwhelming volume of art online in a personal, meaningful way,” he says. “Our goal isn’t to automate or remove the human experience from collecting, but to meet people where they are.”

Read our Full Q&A With Jeffrey Yin

David Zwirner

• David Zwirner | Founder

Mega-dealer David Zwirner knows how to weather art market headwinds. He cancelled a massive expansion project in 2023—a swanky Renzo Piano-designed, 50,000-square-foot building on West 21st Street in Chelsea—only to rebound with an office on West 20th Street and an 18,000-square-foot gallery designed by Annabelle Selldorf on West 19th Street, which opened last May with a major solo show of work by Michael Armitage. Zwirner has demonstrated similar agility in his art-tech ventures, including the digital marketplace Platform, which he has reshuffled whenever needed to stay ahead of key blue-chip competitors, all of which have been in expansion mode in recent years. 

Zwirner’s fire-tested commercial operation remains as relevant as ever. His global network of galleries in New York, L.A., London, Hong Kong and Paris shapes consumer taste through bespoke programming and market experimentation. A prominent roster of estates, emerging artists and new talents drives high-end primary market sales. Most recently, he poached artist Yoshitomo Nara from Pace—the artist joins a robust roster that includes the estates of Donald Judd, Diane Arbus and Paul Klee and contemporary talents Gerhard Richter, Yayoi Kusama and Félix González‑Torres, among others. Likewise, he poached Alex Marshall (now a senior director) from Christie’s after elevating Ebony L. Haynes to global head of curatorial projects. State-of-the-art content production via David Zwirner Books, a line of prints and editions, and the podcast Dialogues diversifies Zwirner’s influence at a time when galleries everywhere are seeking to hook the attention of the growing (and much coveted) market of young collectors.

Deeply influenced by her Shona heritage and Christian faith, artist Portia Zvavahera’s work explores the realm of dreams. Born in Harare, Zimbabwe, where she is based, she consigns and translates her powerful dreams and spiritual beliefs into large-scale, visually captivating artworks that often feature spectral characters and symbolic animals. Her paintings are richly constructed, blending techniques such as batik and printmaking often found in Zimbabwean textile design. The works form a vision into otherworldly realities, interrogating themes such as family, community, faith, metamorphosis and protection.

Zvavahera has gained international recognition—she represented Zimbabwe at the 2013 Venice Biennale, “The Encyclopedic Palace,” and her works in the 2022 Venice Biennale, “The Milk of Dreams,” positioned her in the lineage of women Surrealists and their contemporary legacies. She joined David Zwirner in 2021 in collaboration with Stevenson gallery. And her works have been presented in solo shows in France, the United Kingdom and Germany this year alone, with an upcoming show at David Zwirner Los Angeles opening in November.

Observer caught up with Zvavahera on the occasion of the opening of her solo show at ICA Boston, “Hidden Battles / Hondo dzakavanzika,” which has works from 2021 to 2025 and is on through January 19, 2026. It’s her first solo museum exhibition in the United States.

The title of your new show suggests the possibility of confronting and healing. Could you unpack for us the personal, collective and symbolic significance of these invisible struggles and how they have come together through the works presented at ICA Boston?
Looking back at my work from where I started to where I’m going, I’m always in battles. I’m always fighting for my life, fighting for my children, fighting for my parents, fighting for the people around me, in a spiritual sense. These are the battles that I’m talking about, but you can’t physically see them because they’re hidden in the spiritual world. They come to me when I sleep—sometimes from bad dreams, bad energies, or when you hear somebody’s not feeling well. Sometimes the dreams are related to my daughter or my family. These are the spiritual battles that I’m talking about, the hidden battles that we don’t see.

Your new paintings for this exhibition have more overt symbolism. Can you expand on the meaning behind them?
The two-headed snake you see in Kuriwa hupenyu is significant because I saw it on my way to visit my grandmother, who was unwell at the time. In our culture, it’s not a good thing to see this two-headed snake. It means death. It’s not something you’re supposed to see. And the trees in Hondo yakatarisana naambuya symbolize life, physically and spiritually. They provide the oxygen that we breathe, and in my imagination, our spirits and souls are connected to them when we physically leave this world.

Surrealism celebrated its hundredth anniversary last year. How do you relate to the movement’s legacies and influences, particularly as it celebrated dreams as a creative force and gateway into the unspoken and unknown?
For me, painting is a way to record dreams. When I was a child, I used to sit with my grandmother, my mother and sometimes my father, and exchange stories about our dreams and the worlds within them. In my journey as an artist, I decided that I wouldn’t let my dreams just go away and be forgotten. I thought: why not record them by painting? For me, painting my dreams is not just a healing process but a process of documentation. Especially when I look back on previous paintings with hindsight, I recognize that I am recording my future in a way. Whether this relates to Surrealism, I don’t know, but painting is my solution for understanding my recurring dreams.

Can you walk us through the different animals featured in the show and their meanings in your dream world?
The bad spirits and energies that I am battling in my dreams are crystallized into physical forms of animals, like rats and snakes, in my paintings. The use of animals is inspired by a story in the Bible where Jesus is confronted by a man possessed by demons, who asks Jesus to remove the bad spirits and transfer them to a nearby group of pigs.

Can you tell us a bit more about the “victory” painting you often include to finish a show or series?
Whenever I am doing a series or preparing for a show, I always have a victory painting. They tend to be records of when I feel like I have conquered something that I’m going through. The victory painting isn’t something that I just paint; it has to come from an experience and a personal win.

What role does color play in your creative process? You’ve mentioned that you experience monochromatic dreams, yet your palette is often saturated with rich plum, vibrant burgundy and other hypnotizing hues.
In all honesty, I have no idea where color comes from or its role in my creative process. When I am in the studio, I want to bring out the emotion and feeling from the specific dream I am painting, so the colors are instinctive rather than purposeful symbolism. I am sure there is somebody who can look at my paintings and define a meaning behind my color selection and apply a language to it, but I don’t have an explanation of my own.

You’re based in Harare, Zimbabwe. There are a number of exciting artists, galleries and fairs picking up there that perhaps a lot of U.S. collectors are not yet aware of. What do you feel is still lacking to increase the visibility of the local art scene abroad? What’s your top not-to-miss recommendation for an art lover visiting Harare?
Raphael Chikukwa is doing a lot for the art scene here. He was the founding curator of the Zimbabwe Pavilion in Venice in 2011 and started the conversation between Venice and Zimbabwe, which is such a big platform for visibility. But if anyone is coming to Harare, I recommend visiting the National Gallery of Zimbabwe, where Raphael is also the director.

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Led by artists Jawad Selim and Shakir Hassan Al Said, the Baghdad Modern Art Group sprang up in the roaring art scene and political ebullience of 1950s Iraq. Through painting, sculpture, architecture, scholarship and more, these artists and educators shaped Arab modernism via aesthetics, seeking to marry Iraqi heritage with new forms. Like the Casablanca Art School in Morocco, the Baghdad Modern Art Group played a seminal role in reinventing postcolonial identity through avant-garde art.

“All Manner of Experiments: Legacies of the Baghdad Modern Art Group” explores this important chapter of Arab modern art in an expansive survey currently on show at Bard’s Center for Curatorial Studies. Observer spoke with curator Dr. Nada Shabout, regents professor at the University of North Texas and visiting professor and investigator at NYU Abu Dhabi, about the Group’s recognition and shifting perspectives on modernism as a global, polyphonic movement. Our interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Many people would be surprised to know that Baghdad was once the capital of Arab modernism. Can you tell us more about that and the significance of the Baghdad Modern Art Group?

Very few people know that Baghdad was a vibrant city in the mid-20th Century, which was a time for vision building, for hope and optimism, when Baghdad was being modernized. Major architects, like Frank Lloyd Wright, visited and made proposals for buildings. It was what we think of Dubai today, but in the 1950s.

It was a very dynamic decade. There was a lot happening on the ground and a lot of potential for moving forward that led to the 1958 revolution in Iraq [a coup d’etat that toppled the monarchy and established the Republic of Iraq], which was ultimately optimistic for all people, including artists. The Baghdad Modern Art Group emerged at that very decisive moment of shift in history.

These artists tried to represent their new realities, their new country, their understanding of what it means to have a country with borders and a national identity. They were radical in the sense that they wanted major change. They rejected the sort of naturalism and old styles that were already dominant in Iraq. They were interested not only in representing themselves but also in connecting and contributing to the larger modernism of the world. They never thought of themselves as only local. They thought of themselves as part of a larger fabric.

Seeking inspiration from heritage was very important to these artists, an intention captured in the Arabic phrase of istilham al-turath. Can we unpack what it means?

It is not necessarily a new concept. Every post-colonial nation goes back into its history to consider what point in their history represents them or what they want to be represented by, generally a moment of prosperity, their golden age, so to speak. But what the Baghdad Modern Art Group did was to coin it in a formula that was very specific to them. Many artists at that time were also working at the Iraqi National Museum of Antiquities. They’re in the museum, they’re seeing their heritage [Assyrian, Mesopotamian, Sumerian, etc.], and they also come across the copy of a journal that was published in the 1940s, which included images from Maqamat al-Hariri [a medieval Arabic collection of tales]. In it, they saw a 13th-century painter, Yahya al-Wasati, who was doing two-dimensional representations that were not naturalist, not aiming to represent reality, but an autonomous world of their own. For that reason, they developed the notion of istilham al-turath.

The idea of istilham al-turath continues throughout the history of Iraq, which is not as simple as “seeking inspiration.” I argue that it is a dynamic concept drawing from history to an innovative contemporaneity, which is the modern moment for Iraq. There is mediation between the past and the present into a specific aesthetic that looks at, let’s say, the hilaliyat crescent shapes that Jawad Selim formulated, which takes the almond-shaped eyes of the Sumerians, for example, as well as the crescent shape. He produced work that looked like an arabesque, a decorative sort of surface, but it was also populated with action figures—it was dynamic. This is just one example of how the Group distilled this notion of istilham al-turath.

There’s a tendency to think of modernism as a Western innovation. Picasso, who is mentioned in the Baghdad Modern Art Group’s 1951 Manifesto, was a hugely influential figure for these artists. Can we nuance a view of history that often reduces modernism as a movement from the West to “the rest”?

I totally reject this notion of a hierarchy of European modernism. If we look at Picasso and think of his background as a Spaniard, Spain’s heritage is also rooted in Islamic history. We also know that modernism in Europe was rooted in colonialism and imperialism, so one wonders: Would modernism in Europe have developed in the way it did if the Impressionists had not gone to North Africa or had archaeological artifacts not moved to Europe?

If we think about modernism in Europe, we think about it as a rupture. We can’t think in these terms for Iraq, or that region, because abstraction was in their history and in their collective memory. It wasn’t something new. We have to put these things within the right context.

People in the Baghdad Modern Art Group understood that. Shakir Hassan Al Said wrote a lot and left a wealth of journals and discussions. When the Group was formed in 1951, he was a student of Jawad Selim in the Fine Arts Institute in Baghdad. He had not yet traveled. Iraqis knew modern art before they even went to Europe, but when they went to Europe, they also understood the roots of modern art in their own heritage, in their own abstraction. Selim looked at Henry Moore and didn’t think of Henry Moore as inventing something new. Moore used the same resources that Selim would use to develop new forms, which traced back to Mesopotamian heritage.

Cubism, for example, is a very naturally, instinctively accepted concept in most of the non-Western world. You look at miniatures, and you can see it. Picasso takes Cubism in a different direction, more applicable to his era, as opposed to what Muslim artists did in the 13th Century. We can’t think of European modernism as an origin and everything else as a copy.

The show presents works spanning from 1946 to 2023 from prominent artists in the Group, including Jawad Selim and Shakir Hassan Al Said, but also some who may not be household names for a wider audience today. Do you feel that there is still a deficit of recognition?

Jawad and Shakir are towering figures now—they got their space. But we also have to remember that women artists, such as Naziha Selim, Widad al-Orfali and Suad al-Attar, are not underappreciated in Iraq; they are underappreciated in the West. This notion of discovery, that they only exist when the West recognizes them, is also a problem. These artists have always been known and appreciated. It’s only now that the rest of the world is learning about them, and so they only now seem to warrant greater attention.

Using pure wool and natural dyes, Afghanistan’s handmade carpet-making tradition dates back several centuries, and its artisans have excelled in producing precision and beauty, a heritage recognized by UNESCO in 2003. These rugs carry tribal and regional elements, which distinguish various areas of production. In London, a series of mesmerizing Afghan “war rugs,” militaria on textile showing singular vignettes of foreign invasions, is on view at the British Museum. One thread at a time, these unique carpets provide a striking visual record of more than fifty years of political turmoil, bringing a contemporary twist to conventional tapestry.

War rugs, which integrate the representation of military objects and scenes into traditional carpet-making, emerged in Afghanistan during the 1980s. War rugs are unlike the more common examples featuring highly elaborate geometrical designs embellished with flowery or botanical touches in that they frame radically different pictorial motifs, such as the Soviet invasion of 1979 and subsequent war through 1989, but also the U.S.-led “War on Terror” post-9/11, that culminated in the full withdrawal of U.S. troops in 2021 and the return of the Taliban to power the same year.

Nested in its Islamic world gallery behind glass displays, the British Museum chronologically presents nine of such war carpets of various sizes along with objects used in Afghan carpet-making as well as archival material, such as photographs. We start our visit with an early war rug, a three-tiered design rich in plum and ochre colors. At first, it resembles an abstract garden with blossoming flowers. The artists’ subterfuge—assuming that many sets of hands rather than one were involved in the rug’s production—is subtle. Instead of birds, the weavers have included looming Soviet military helicopters, a substitution which references how Afghans experienced changes in the sky following the deployment of airborne troops and equipment from the Soviet Union.

The following rug is more explicit in its depiction of the brutal ten-year war that contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the rise of the Mujahideen guerrilla groups, resulting in the death and forced displacement of millions of Afghans, including in neighboring Iran and Pakistan. The carpet subverts the traditional border that typically frames a central panel or scene by including images of Soviet tanks, lined geometrically as if rolling in their own parade. The rug’s field concentrates more visual inserts: Afghans recognizable with their distinctive hats, richly decorated camels, more helicopters and horn-bearing white demons known as “divs” in Middle Eastern lore, along with inscriptions in Dari, one of Afghanistan’s official languages.

This pictorial rug is allegorical. In Shahnameh, a 10th/11th-century Persian poem popular in Afghanistan, poet Ferdowsi narrates how warrior Rustam eventually triumphs over the White Div, the leader of demons. The inclusion of these diabolical creatures in the carpet encourages us to see the resistance of Afghans to the Soviet invasion (represented by the mythological divs) as a heroic undertaking as well as a spiritual one.

Spiritual overtones are also found in another carpet produced during the same period (1980–1990). Labeled Carpet with gun ‘hand,’ an ominous red shape stares at us: a hand, whose fingers are elongated with the barrels of anti-aircraft guns. Besides the recurrent images of tanks and the inclusion of new motifs, such as opium poppies, grenades and missiles, the symbol of the hand hails back to other cultural references.

As the hand of Fatima, Prophet Muhammad’s daughter, the symbol is used for protection across the Islamic world, but here it most likely nods to the standards used during Shi’a ritual processions commemorating the martyrdom of Husayn and Abbas in the battle of Karbala in 680 CE, in which the latter lost his hands in an act of sacrifice and loyalty. Directly invoking faith, the rug recalls that the Afghan-Soviet War was also about affirming Islam’s place in the social fabric of the country over the Communist regime’s atheistic tenets.

The last carpets on show jump to the more recent period of the U.S.-led coalition post-9/11. One from 2002 depicts a map of Afghanistan surrounded by its neighbors together with the American and British flags—as members of the multinational military mission (the International Security Assistance Force, or ISAF) active through 2014. Altogether stripped of its traditional motifs, the carpet shows military equipment, fighter jets and mountains along with the inscription “Tora Bora,” commemorating the coalition-led airstrikes against the Tora Bora mountains cave complex in Afghanistan, where Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden was believed to hide. Written in English, this carpet is stylized for a Western audience, marketed as a souvenir from Afghanistan—for the soldiers, diplomats and humanitarians who have begun to buy these memorabilia keepsakes from their time in Kabul and elsewhere.

One can view these war rugs as a medium for political commentary on ongoing conflicts from the vantage point of local people. Not quite postcolonial propaganda posters-on-textile, the rugs have nonetheless defined an evolving iconography of war, resistance and national identity. From their rise in the early 1980s, their production declined after 1992 and the start of the Afghan Civil War, a time of dire socioeconomic conditions and fierce group infighting. They resurfaced after 9/11 and have only recently experienced institutional recognition as distinct art forms. The International Folk Art Museum in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and the Drill Hall gallery at the Australian National University organized exhibitions devoted to Afghan war rugs in 2020 and 2021, respectively. “Rug-making families wanted to record the war engulfing their country even as they were creating a commercial product to be sold, as with all Afghan rugs, primarily to foreigners,” writes Tim Bonyhady, co-curator of “I weave what I have seen: The War Rugs of Afghanistan,” in Canberra, Australia, in the accompanying book of the same name.

As creative works primarily destined for the commercial market, these war rugs question intentionality, audience and authorship: to what extent are their narrative expressions indigenous or blended with copying formatted or commissioned templates to meet buyers’ demands? Most of the artists remain, sadly, anonymous. Produced in traditional carpet-making studios, they also carry the mark of exile, chiefly by women and girls displaced in Iran and Pakistan, many of whom are illiterate. In the refugee communities of Pakistan and Iran, men and boys became more involved in weaving over time.

The rugs embody a form of vernacular-commercial art and bring innovation to folk tradition. Their use has also mutated: from adorning floors to being hung on walls, in galleries or private collections, they have transformed into a movable “postcard” of an embattled country. Formerly utilitarian and functional—a carpet to warm and enhance the appearance of an interior—these war rugs have become art objects.

The British Museum display is rather sparse given the richness of the subject matter, and one wishes for a more ambitious survey. Though weaving equipment such as looms is included in the exhibition, other objects, like boots once belonging to a member of the Hazara community in Afghanistan during the 19th Century or a goat skull talisman, are less obviously related or relevant to the war rugs. This creates a confusing, overlapping scenography which tries to tell too many stories at once: presenting the history of Afghanistan, explaining the process of carpet-making, showcasing Afghanistan’s cultural and ethnic diversity and highlighting recent invasions. Unintentionally perhaps, the ethnographic objects feed into a continuum of empire and violence (the first Anglo-Afghan War took place during 1838-1842), which sees attempts at contextualizing Afghanistan mainly through a foreign gaze.

Crowding out other visual renditions of storytelling, the war rugs probe the aestheticization of war and the risk of defining a country primarily by its violent past and present at the expense of other images or narratives. Interest from Western buyers and collectors may lead to an extreme form of commodification and trivialization without pausing on the conditions of production, their implicit dependencies and modes of extraction, which are very knotty indeed.

“War rugs: Afghanistan’s knotted history” is on display at the British Museum through September 14, 2025. 

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• Ali Cherri Honors Life, Loss and Defiance in ‘How I Am Monument’

We are of earth and sky, an amalgamation of material and spiritual interconnectedness that Ali Cherri excavates and sublimes in “How I Am Monument,” an expansive show curated by Emma Dean at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Arts in the U.K. In film, sculpture, watercolor painting and installation, including new commissions, the multidisciplinary artist explores what grounds and connects humans through mythical time and incarnated places. Here, monuments are conceived as both legacies and soil from which possibilities emerge.

The show is articulated around three broad segments that interlace to create a cohesive meditation on beginnings and endings. We move from earth to sky, construction to degradation, from what lies beneath to what—possibly—awaits above. In the first segment are the large-scale mud sculptures that have become Cherri’s signature. In dim light, their appearance is at once dramatic and totemic. Some are inspired by Surrealism, such as All That is Solid Melts Into Air (2024), in which a character’s arms and face disappear into a vision-impaired, hand-shaped crawling walking stick. Others are inscribed in a more mystical realm. This is the case of Titan 2 (2022)—shown at the 2022 Venice Biennial, where Cherri was awarded the Silver Lion—which incorporates a Mayan cult vase into an aggrandized mud figure.

In Sphinx (2024), we contemplate various overlays of symbolisms: the figure of the sphinx itself, an ancient spiritual guardian of ancient Egypt, which here looks part-Assyrian part-Italian Futurist with a visible armature, a slithering snake at the base of the sphinx, a plinth adorned with a mysterious city skyline that connects modern places like New York City and the ancient tall mud houses of Yemen’s Hadramout. The sphinx is amputated. It rests on bronze prosthetic legs with leonine paws, creating a visual tension through a sensation of instability. In the merging of mud and bronze lies a commentary on human civilization, often reduced to offensive hierarchies. In Cherri’s Sphinx, bronze holds mud, but mud prevails overall because it will corrode bronze.

His raw sculptures evoke a timeless encounter with material and human societies, connecting contexts to power and violence. Mud is the base material for Cherri’s sculptures. At once fragile and primordial, mud acts as a thread connecting these sculptures with Of Men and Gods and Mud (2022), a three-channel film narrating the story of the Merowe Dam in Sudan through the lens of mud brick workers along with their relationship to the land and the stars.

Progressing through the show, visitors encounter another segment devoted to conflict fatigue and the impact of war on humans and nature alike. The Watchman (2023) is set on the divided island of Cyprus, where a demarcation line strewn with observation towers between the Republic of Cyprus and the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus remembers a vivid wound. “There is no such thing as a good war,” an elderly woman summarizes in the film.

Centering on a young Turkish Cypriot soldier on watch, The Watchman follows his boredom and hallucinations. He stands erect, like a living monument. He is assailed by exhaustion (“wake up, soldier, open your eyes” are warning words etched on the watchtower’s walls). Yet the only incoming threat along this contested zone is of a bird which lands on the window glass, an absurdist touch as well as an omen. The soldier’s long days and nights of nothingness staring at the vacuous no-man’s land are punctuated by eerie flashes of light. In this film, as well as Of Men and Gods and Mud, flickers of light convey a signal, a message and a portent. These lights say that there is another world, a cosmic and spiritual dimension that blinks at us if we pay close attention to it. This is reinforced in The Watchman by an uncanny encounter toward the end of the film that not only probes the space between dreaming and reality but also the spectrum of sanity and agency that one can retain under such circumstances.

The film’s spectral encounter is re-enacted and incarnated in The Seven Soldiers (2023), monumental heads of closed-eyed soldiers on pikes lined as if part of a forest of the undead, an army of sleepers. A series of watercolor paintings representing The Watchtower’s crashing bird and a prickly pear’s various stages of decomposition illustrate Cherri’s artistic range as a sculptor, filmmaker and painter, and capture the show’s parable: what is destined to live will die eventually; what dies may rise again.

The final segment on the flanks of the Baltic’s large exhibition space displays new commissions. Behind the museological-looking glass stand wooden maquettes of empty plinths commemorating monuments toppled in recent years. Toppled Monuments 1–6 (Kharkiv, Aleppo, Baghdad, Richmond VA, Vienna, Bristol), 2024, embody transience and the implacable arrow of history. These monuments, once erected to honor imperial slave traders, dictators, Confederate leaders and other infamous figures, show history in perpetual movement and the collapse of mythmaking.

Cherri investigates metamorphosis from materiality to more metaphysical reflections. Artefacts—ancient masks that feature in his sculptures—make a statement on the value of auctioned art to give them new meaning and accessibility outside private collections. At a more symbolic level, metamorphosis is contained in mud. And if legends tell us that men were created from mud, then mud is an avatar for the will to live. Yet in this picture, war intrudes.

Violent conflict is a disrupter as much as an untimely accelerator of this mythical fall; its toll and confusion yield destruction and uncertain salvation. Such fissures reveal liminal spaces (one thinks of barzakh, the Islamic intermediary stage between death and the Day of Judgment), zones of physical disorientation and penetrating clarity that Cherri invites us to inhabit. These ruminations are cyclical, and there is a faint beacon of hope that something new can spring from the ashes.

Ali Cherri is seemingly everywhere these days with recent shows at the Swiss Institute in New York City, the Bourse de Commerce and FRAC Bretagne in France, Vienna’s Secession and the 12th SITE SANTA FE International, to name a few. This is why some of the works may feel like they have been shown elsewhere—they have, in large part—but that does not diminish the timeliness of Cherri’s prolific catalogue and message of whether we can ever become responsible future ancestors living according to our material and spiritual realities and purpose.

Born during the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990), Cherri was directly affected by Israel’s aggression against Lebanon in 2024. The theme of war’s impact on nature and humans is, for the artist, not an abstraction. At once necropolis and chrysalid with its own possibility of rebirth, “How I Am Monument” can also be seen as a testimonial to resilience and survival more broadly. Each one of us is embodied—a defiant monument in the making.

“How I Am Monument” is on show at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Arts in the U.K. through October 12, 2025. 

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Once dubbed the “New York of Europe,” Liverpool continues to leave a mark on art and culture. From a significant 18th-century imperial port city to the beating heart of rock band counterculture in the 1960s and the seat of a vibrant soccer passion, this city contains many lives and faces, a magnetic lifeforce honored at this year’s edition of the Liverpool Biennial, the largest free contemporary art event in the U.K.

Titled “BEDROCK,” the biennial opened earlier this month with an evocative theme asking artists and visitors to contend with foundations and energy. For its 2025 edition, the biennial presents the works of thirty artists and collectives, including dozens of new commissions, in eighteen sites across Liverpool, less than three hours from London by train.

For Marie-Anne McQuay, guest curator and a long-time Liverpool resident (she headed programs at Bluecoat, a local art institution with zest and one of the biennial’s sites), “bedrock” can channel several ideas. In her curatorial statement, she explains her interpretation of the term, linking it to geology, soil and long, mythical time. Bedrock also nods to the city’s “civic values haunted by empire” and the vital social as well as physical bedrock that spaces and loved ones provide us. As such, bedrock is a concept articulated in time and space, disputing notions of center, periphery and linearity.

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We quickly understand through this curation that Liverpool contains more than the sum of its parts. McQuay restituted Liverpool’s stature as a significant crossroad, a global meeting point, a place of deep, non-linear connections and dialogues. Historically, the city’s wealth was largely derived from its entanglements with the transatlantic slave trade and other economic extractions during the British Empire. Today, its richness is made fuller by hosting some of the oldest Black and Chinese communities in Europe and being a recent home for new immigrants boosting the city with new accents and multicultural dynamism.

For such an outward-facing city, it’s no surprise that migration and its ramifications feature so prominently across many of the biennial’s artworks. In Liverpool’s imposing cathedral we stagger upon Maria Loizidou’s Where Am I Now? (2025), a scintillating installation of monumental scale showing handwoven migratory birds rescuing fallen humans—asylum seekers—nodding not only to the human tragedy unfolding in the Mediterranean Sea close to Loizidou’s home of Cyprus but also to the legacies of the diverse migrants who have transformed Liverpool over time. Questioning our relationship with borders and freedom, Loizidou represents mythological birds such as the ibis as well as local species. This depiction of salvation and sanctuary seamlessly blends into the Cathedral’s architecture.

Elizabeth Price’s film HERE WE ARE (2025), shown a few steps away from the Cathedral, also speaks to the way that migration imprints beliefs and physical structures. The video essay looks at the modernist architecture of Catholic churches in Britain and their underpinning communities—the Irish, an instrumental workforce during WWII, particularly in arms factories and Africans more recently. The 2012 Turner Prize winner asks to what extent a building’s physical layers can be removed from its double and often ambiguous lens of community differentiation and belonging at a time of mainstream anti-migrant politics in the U.K.

In Liverpool’s old Chinatown, diasporic artists engage with representations and memory. ChihChung Chang’s wall mural Keystone (2025) reclaims public space and forms a visual continuum with the city’s Imperial Arch, the largest arch outside China and a manifesto for commune-like popular art. Meanwhile, Canadian artist Karen Tam activates Pine Court, a 1986 housing association, with an immersive installation recreating Chinese opera backstage and props (Scent of Thunderbolts 雷霆之息, 2024). The latter integrates so perfectly in the association’s venue that it acts as a trompe l’oeil at first, embodying the spirit of artifice found in theatre and entertainment.

The biennial’s venues include outdoor spaces but also a shoe store and a pharmacy, a playful guerrilla curation to democratize art viewing, inviting visitors to embark on a treasure hunt for art nuggets across the city. For first-time Liverpool visitors, this is a treat. This diversity balances more mainstream venues and institutional spaces such as Tate Liverpool (temporarily located at the Royal Institute of British Architects North, or RIBA North, during refurbishments), the Walker Art Gallery, Open Eye Gallery, Bluecoat and FACT Liverpool.

At Tate Liverpool + RIBA North, Mounira Solh’s portraits of exile and survival (I Strongly Believe in Our Right to Be Frivolous, 2012-ongoing) showcase individual stories of resilience and loss, for example, from Sudanese and Syrian refugees. These testimonials ask us to contemplate what grounds human beings when their lives are brutally uprooted by war and violence. Solh’s drawings enter into conversation directly with Hadassa Ngamba’s cartography of systematic extraction. In Cerveau 2 (2019), Ngamba invites us to visualize the exploitation of minerals in her native Democratic Republic of the Congo through reimagined maps that evoke those of colonial explorations or geological surveys. In these two geographies—of the Arab world and of Central Africa—global solidarities can emerge and form a new “bedrock” against oppression.

In nearby Open Eye Gallery, Katarzyna Perlak and Widline Cadet celebrate intimacy and bonds as essential sparks of life. Perlak’s film The Land Beneath Sleeps Lightly (2025), set in Liverpool’s iconic Adelphi Hotel—a landmark stay for transatlantic travelers in the early 20th century—stages queer joy and hedonism tinged with horror. Aesthetically maximalist, the film becomes a hypnotizing visual poem to tolerance and queer love. In another room, Cadet’s sorority-filled portraits channel an otherworldly hazy effect where a family’s protective embrace transcends daily hardships in Haiti and perhaps this world also. In different registers, both artists engage with tenderness and the expanse of kinship.

Elsewhere, Indigenous sustenance and agency—incarnated in soil and lived through embodied presence—exist despite dispossession in the brilliant installations of Nour Bishouty and Imayna Caceres at the Walker Art Gallery and 20 Jordan Street, respectively.

This biennial’s vision comes together convincingly, and one credits McQuay for sublimating the city’s polyphony while articulating global resonances and commonalities. Her understanding of Liverpool’s pulse, fabric, ambition and darker recesses makes this a home run. It creates something bold, something that itches and sticks.

During the press viewing, Ugandan artist Odur Ronald led a performance near his installation Muly’Ato Lima – All in One Boat (2025), which sources aluminum to recreate an empty vessel where fictional passports of a “Republic of Opportunities” hang above amid empty chairs. The work superimposes the trauma of the transatlantic slave trade with the injustice of current visa enforcement policies that push asylum seekers and migrants to take dangerous maritime routes.

“Do you know how hard it is for someone like me to access spaces?” he asked. Not Liverpool, for once, and we’re all the better for it.

The Liverpool Biennial, “BEDROCK,” runs through September 14, 2025, in Liverpool.

London-based Iranian artist Fa Razavi paints astonishing sculptural bodies and a desire to interrogate the gaze and limitations we impose on them. “Opera Rose,” now on at Palo Gallery and curated by Kollectiv Collective, includes a succession of narrative images contained behind a chromatic veil of haunting hues. These include baby pink and eerie viridian that together create a phantasmagorical décor and atmospheric stage to propel imbricated characters and scenes in eight large-scale paintings.

The show opens with Opera Rose (2025), in which three characters stand on a plinth. One of them shatters the fourth wall to directly stare at the viewer, her legs defiantly open, while the others symmetrically extend their hands to two acolytes on the floor as if trying to rescue them. The implication is they’re fighting an invisible force that has kept them down, and the use of pink could allude to the glass ceiling that most women and minorities struggle to break.

“When I began to paint, I relied on what I knew about art in terms of sculpture,” Razavi tells Observer, alluding to attention to form, depth and volume that make her paintings feel very third-dimensional and erect.

Opera Rose’s theatrical arrangement nods to the aesthetics of an artist’s studio with the inclusion of sheets and props. The characters “model” for us, the viewer, placing us in the position of the painter (a similar composition features in Session, 2025). There are also subtle references to canonical works such as Théodore Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa (1819) and Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam, with dainty fingers that elongate to give life. Here, Razavi explores the classical nude and non-binarism (one subject is intersex) as well as the tension between representation and voyeurism in a dramatized expression—themes that form a common thread across her paintings.

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Razavi mixes tenderness and violence in tableaux infused with Baroque and Renaissance extravagance. In Laundry (2024), infants look up to adults, a pregnant woman holds the empty space created by the shadow of an AK47 and a smudged sweep creates a suffocating choke. The full range of human existence is on display, from cradle to aging silhouettes, reflecting on the cyclical experience that exists outside the artificial boundaries of past, present and future. In this world, Razavi says, the figures meet and overlap: “There is no clear start or end. I don’t think we have a definitive beginning or conclusion in life. Age happens in a cycle. Maybe one of these kids in one painting becomes an adult in another painting.”

Chiaroscuro-infused scenes emerge out of a dream-tinted uncanniness. Outside the semblance of the artist’s studio, characters are immersed in domestic life, such as in No Place Like Home (2025), a viridian-dominated triptych that exposes the invisible labor of women and their caretaking responsibilities. Razavi also places her subjects in more surreal environments—realms where their mass and assembly morph into the mechanical, asking us to view the human body as part of a larger whole of depersonalization, role-shifting, dramatic chaos and hellscape-ish confusion.

Green is a significant “heavy” color for the artist and one that embodies much of her expressive journey. “I would call it ‘sweet revenge’ somehow. It’s the color of my past, the color that I saw growing up [in Iran],” she says. “It reminds me of the rules I had to navigate.”

Our walkthrough begins with the lightness of Opera Rose’s pink and progresses to the imposing recesses of this moody green, yet Razavi composed her body of work in reverse, starting from a place of negotiating her green memories toward what she calls a healing “shift” one morning as she worked overnight on Opera Rose. Simplifying her palette allowed her to focus on the emotion being conveyed, which creates a synesthesia-like aura for each painting.

The artist inscribes resistance in her depictions of naked figures—female, intersex—and channels mythology as a storytelling device. The gracefulness of a Venusian woman befriending a dove in Mothers “Victory” battle scene (Snakes and ladders) from 2024 is contrasted with a more contemporary vignette of a mother trying to find privacy and peace on a toilet seat in No Place Like Home (2025). Can women exist beyond these extremes?

The works offer a range of symbolism and wider social commentary on movements in her native Iran, such as the women-led “Women, Life, Freedom” protests that have erupted across the country following the brutal death of 22-year-old Jina (Mahsa) Amini in the hands of Iran’s morality police in 2022. And there are certainly traces of this context. In Untitled (2024), characters climb on a cube whose shape reminds one of the Kaaba located in the great mosque of Mecca, Saudi Arabia. One of them, an ethereal figure holding a soft veil, dances on top of the cube: she’s free, she’s radiant, almost bacchanalian. (Iranian women have defied the morality police by dancing publicly in solidarity with the “Women, Life, Freedom” movement.)

Razavi’s use of a colorful glaze dressing her paintings hints at the mandatory hijab covering, of course, but also more largely at the presence of a veil of truth, artifice and dissimulation in our lives. In many ways, Razavi’s characters are captive to the painting’s frame and to our eyes, but we sense that they want to leap forward and out. In each painting, at least one figure sustains our observation as if conscious of their own performance and makes us acutely aware of that staged illusion.

“The timing of the series was never meant to be present,” Razavi adds. Beyond an initial, literal reading of her work as an attempt to defy gender roles and attributes in Iran, many of her paintings resituate humans within a fantastical genealogy where spectral characters inhabit a spiritual world. This invites cross-cultural conversations and dialogue, such as with the mythical renditions of contemporary artists Naudline Pierre or Sara Anstis, at a time when two other Iranian artists, Reza Aramesh and Ali Banisadr, also question the human figure and narratives in their latest shows (“Fragment of the Self” and “Ali Banisadr: The Alchemist” respectively).

In “Opera Rose,” Fa Razavi delivers a compelling meditation on form and modern mythology via an exploration of the classical nude and human archetypes. Letting her brush paint a glowing subconscious, Razavi examines the various molds used to fabricate an image—a narrative. The notions of mother, child, and maiden are sublimated and transcended through a life force that lingers.

“Opera Rose” is on show at Palo Gallery, New York City, through May 3, 2025.

Art is a space where conversations collide in Maryam Yousif’s whimsical, cheeky and thoughtful three-dimensional works—exchanges that connect the women of Mesopotamia’s long history with family memories of exile and the vibrant aesthetics of the Bay Area Funk movement.

Deeply connected with her Chaldean and Assyrian roots, Yousif’s visit to the British Museum in 2018, where she saw ancient Iraqi artifacts, became a decisive moment in the young artist’s formative years. This visit exposed her to a rich past and visual culture around the time that she began experimenting with clay. While Yousif and her family left a turbulent Iraq in the 1990s, this uprootedness gave way to an embrace of diverse influences and creative hybridity that permeate her various shows, including two new solo exhibitions this year: “Tremble Like Reeds” at Rebecca Camacho Presents and “Riverbend” at the Institute of Contemporary Art San Francisco.

Yousif explored the percolating influence of Iraq and its multilayered history as early as 2017 in her first show that engaged with the legend of Assyrian Queen Shamiram (also known as Shammuramat or Semiramis). This queen, who lived in the 9th century BCE, unusually kept her status upon the death of her husband and into her son’s reign, leading many researchers to affirm that she may have co-ruled. The details of her personality remain enigmatic, yet she was powerful during her lifetime and inspired later authors and artists to see in her a warrior-queen and mythological builder of Babylon. This potent figure prompted Yousif’s altar-like installation mixing old iconographies (a horse-drawn carriage) and more modern ones (hands holding crossed sabers reminiscent of Baghdad’s triumphant Victory Arch, which commemorates the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s).

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In 2018, the artist turned her gaze to Queen Puabi—another Mesopotamian female ruler whose extravagant tomb excavated in the 1920s in Ur showed opulence and personal taste—reimagining items used in her lavish burial. This led to an eclectic installation that included sculptures of crowns and regalia, amphoras, jewelry and musical objects.

These experiments charted a course for Yousif to explore the achievements and legacies of other prominent Mesopotamian women such as Enheduanna—history’s first recorded author, who the Morgan Library recently recognized—an influence pulsating across “Tremble Like Reeds,” whose title borrows from one of Enheduanna’s verses.

Poet; high priestess of Sumerian goddess of love, fertility and war Inanna (later known as Ishtar); and daughter of King Sargon, Enheduanna lived more than 3,000 years ago. “Enheduanna was an arm of her father’s kingdom which expanded to the south. She was a bridging factor in this new cult,” Yousif tells Observer, underscoring her admiration for this extant ancient poetry and style. In her famed Exaltation of Inanna, devoted to the goddess she served, Enheduanna writes: “At her loud cries, the gods of the Land become scared. Her roaring makes the Anuna gods tremble like a solitary reed. At her rumbling, they hide all together.”

In this latest show, Yousif invites us on an allegorical journey through fecund time and place nested in Iraq’s two mighty rivers—the Tigris and Euphrates—considering transmission as an overarching theme. The goddess’ strength (and women’s agency more generally) is shown through embodied work. We contemplate the metaphorical nakedness of a single reed and divine wrath in sculptures and installations that revisit these famed Mesopotamian mythologies and folklore, as well as more intimate stories.

The works in Yousif’s “Habibti” series (“a term of endearment” for the artist) are buff clay sculptures of voluptuous women that channel the ancient form of Sumerian votive statues crafted to petition the gods on behalf of devotees. Here, they are playfully adorned with flowers, ruffles and reeds. In Lion of Babylon with Seated Ishtar (2024), we see the goddess mounting a lion—an animal long associated with Inanna/Ishtar. Yousif’s statue represents another located in the ancient site of Babylon showing a lion seemingly mating with a human figure. In the original sculpture, the lion wears a saddle, on which people believed the goddess may have sat. Yousif reimagines this absence at the same time as she reckons with personal loss. Her family used to visit the site before their exile from Iraq, as a family photograph memorializes.

Migration (2024) shows birds on tree branches about to begin their seasonal flights, and we wonder, perhaps like Yousif, about their eventual return and how much the journey might transform them. These ruminations about Iraq’s collective and family history take us to familiar landscapes—palm trees, marshlands, riverine crossings—once imagined eternal and that are now under increasing danger due to conflict, climate change and careless policies. They are reminiscent of a golden age often steeped in the nostalgia and curiosity that commonly tint diasporic inquiries.

Yousif came of age with the U.S. invasion of her native country. This violence—at once made physically distant by exile and excruciatingly close and painful—features in her other solo show, “Riverbend.”

Riverbend was a 20-something anonymous blogger who chronicled life under the U.S. occupation in her blog, Baghdad Burning. Writing in English, Riverbend related her frustration with the political class, the civilian impact of sectarian strife, the electricity outages and the disenchantment of young people wishing for a better life in clear-eyed, no-nonsense posts. (from Riverbend’s blog: “Is the American soldier that died today in Anbar more important than a cousin I have who was shot last month on the night of his engagement to a woman he’s wanted to marry for the last six years? I don’t think so.”)

“It’s hard to make work based on things that are more recent because you could never do it justice, you’re not the one who’s experiencing that much pain and trauma,” Yousif said. “I wanted to honor her voice.”

Riverbend eventually left Iraq to resettle elsewhere. And like Yousif’s many other leading female characters, Riverbend’s mystery and voice are deeply enthralling, resonating with Mesopotamia’s many women storytellers while at the same time questioning, witnessing and authoring.

“Iraqis are very proud of their two rivers,” Yousif explained. “When I thought about Riverbend, visually, I felt a little pain—the rivers are changing, there’s a bend in time. I was thinking about her name in a different way than she perhaps intended. She was more hopeful. Her name meant a lot to me.”

“Riverbend” the exhibition includes an eclectic number of artifacts arranged in an excavation-like trove. Yousif’s imagery is expansive and generous. Works are framed in panels that recall comic strips as well as the architectural style of old Iraqi building facades and balconies. Arab divas, such as singers Fairuz and Majida El Roumi, whose songs the artist listens to while working in her studio, naturally find a place among Mesopotamian female icons and heroines. In a similar intention to blend timelines and symbolism, Iraq is also celebrated as the cradle of Arab modern art with distinct nods to pioneer painter and sculptor Jawad Saleem’s famous subjects.

The persistence of the archetypal mother and its pluralistic incarnations as goddess, queen and river anchors the significance of matrilineage and the influence of Yousif’s own mother in her artmaking.

“I’m looking to the past but retelling in my own way with a sense of agency that comes from my mother,” Yousif said. “She was my first clue into how to interpret culture visually.”

Her mother, who drew when living in Baghdad, kept a painting from the 1970s that made a lasting impression on Yousif’s own exploration of figurative possibilities and ways for art to subtly convey desires for looseness and emancipation.

Paired with Bay Area Funk visual cues with a sensitivity to vernacular expression, absurd cartoonish characters and bold color schemes, Yousif playfully evokes the distant past made familiar with intimate relics of memory and self-affirmation. The result is an exquisite rendition of an original artistic grafting process that leaves one under an enduring spell.

“Maryam Yousif: Tremble Like Reeds” is on view at Rebecca Camacho Presents through December 20, 2024. “Maryam Yousif: Riverbend” is on show at the Institute of Contemporary Art San Francisco through February 23, 2025.

“This summer the roses are blue; the wood is of glass,” André Breton wrote in 1924. “Existence is elsewhere.” His Manifesto of Surrealism propelled a global, revolutionary art movement that defined 20th-century cultural history. Celebrating its one-hundredth anniversary this year, Surrealism continues to illuminate invisible shapes and forces through an evolving canon as well as in the works of contemporary artists reckoning with its heritage.

Surrealism on the international stage

Surrealism’s core message was one of championing radical freedom of thought and modern experiments in literature and visual arts. The strange becomes familiar; the familiar becomes strange. It disrupted figurative realism, logical thinking and rationalism, an emancipatory desire shaped in response to the horrors of World War I and the emergence of Freudian psychoanalysis with its daring understanding of the unconscious, enriched by encounters with other movements such as Dadaism. Its sweeping potential was explored by a group of artists who gravitated around Paris, yet its reach extended beyond the cafes of Montmartre. In 1938, the International Surrealist Exhibition sought to convene multicultural propositions on dream imagery, symbolism, “automatic” creation and visual illusions.

Today’s ever-growing celebration of iconic women artists such as Frida Kahlo, Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo confirms a sharp interest in feminizing and globalizing the Surrealist canon outside its usual household names—Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst or René Magritte just to name a few. While the Mexico-based surrealists have benefited from much attention recently—the 2022 Venice Biennale honored Carrington’s Milk of Dreams and a new edition of her novel The Stone Door is forthcoming—Surrealism also imprinted other parts of the globe.

For example, in the Arab world, Surrealism resonated with cultural movements and schools seeking to liberate the arts from traditional impositions. In Egypt, painter Ahmed Morsi recreated eerie anthropomorphic tableaux that redefined the expanse of landscapes, often nodding to his native Alexandria with seascapes and scenes wrapped in variations of poetic blue. Morsi juxtaposes otherworldly, mythological characters who seem to exist outside conventional time and space, a dislocated feeling that echoes a sense of loss. The Institute of Contemporary Art in Miami presented a much-anticipated survey of Morsi’s works earlier this year. Adonis, towering Arab poet and modernist intellectual, wrote an entire book-length essay on the commonalities between Surrealism and Sufism in their shared quest for the Absolute. For Japanese artist Ichiro Fukuzawa, who studied in France during the 1920s and influenced numerous post-war Japanese artists, Surrealism was strongly correlated with social justice and criticism against the rise of Japanese imperialism (he was arrested by military authorities in 1941). In the Caribbean, Surrealism engaged with négritude, including via syncretic religions such as Santería. These are only a few examples showing how Surrealism in visual arts intersected with local contexts, often with a political tint.

Surrealism in contemporary art

This anniversary is an opportunity to illuminate contemporary artists who uphold Surrealist tenets and explore invisible dream worlds, the uncanny and the occult in their works.

Among them, David Alabo and Portia Zvavahera are at the forefront of Afro-Surrealism. Ghanaian Moroccan artist David Alabo uses Surrealist sleek compositions to celebrate Afro-Futurism as a site of narrative speculation steeped in digital culture. A winged silhouette rides a whale. Elegiac fossilized animals suggest a post-human fate. Disembodied robot-meet-mannequin characters occupy deserts alongside spheres and vanitas craniums. “Afro-Surrealism focuses on augmentation, on overcoming the many struggles that define our history and assuming the agency of our narrative. It calls on us to ask what freedom for Black people will look like in the future,” Alabo, who champions new media and commercial projects, said in an interview concerning his artistic lineage.

More expressionistic, Zimbabwean artist Portia Zvavahera—also included in the 2022 Venice Biennial—infuses her works with strong pictorial quality. Her paintings are self-contained worlds in which characters become suspended icons protected by fetal-like pigmented envelopes—they nest, die, regenerate. Dreams play a significant role for Zvavahera in exploring hidden dimensions, spiritual revelations and a cornucopia of creatures, many of which radiate in intensely nocturnal plum and wine hues.

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In Sara Anstis’ feminist take on Surrealism, the nude is elevated as a return to a primordial essence. Her female nudes strip specific markers of time and place. From their no-place, women often break the fourth wall to directly gaze at the viewer. Clouds have faces and animals playfully engage with the characters. In these single-image glimpses, her paintings often exude tarot-like potency. For example, The Itinerant Mourner (2022), which was presented during her first New York City solo show at Kasmin, depicts a naked woman wandering in the lavender night. She holds a staff with blooming twigs; a dog is perched on her crouching back. Tiptoeing in darkness, she’s as much a seeker of truth and light as a mourner. Her sight is set forward, ahead, above danger and hardships. In The Island (2023), Anstis paints a sapphic scene of two naked women on a beach, with octopi latching onto their bodies. A storm is brewing. The Venetian blond characters recall Botticelli’s rendering of the goddess of love Venus, but Anstis’ added eeriness suggests a new terrain of mythology where strangeness, pastoral love and looming violence coexist in dream memories.

In her show at San Francisco’s gallery Wendi Norris, “Tiger in the Looking Glass,” which opens September 13, Brooklyn-based painter Chitra Ganesh experiments with oneiric jungle scenes, whereby night conjures day. Images of characters in lush rainforests contrast with the minimalist line work underpinning the more dreamlike visions dominated by deep blues, purples and charcoal.

“A vital aspect of surrealism’s legacy that I have always been drawn to is how this movement centers on contemplating the link between psychic and political liberation,” Ganesh told Observer, citing concerns such as climate justice and the rise of authoritarianism. “Surrealism’s impulse to render the familiar strange, contingent, or even untenable resonates more than ever, a hundred years on,” she added, explaining how her own practice draws on surrealist techniques such as collage and “automatic writing.”

Myths are powerful connectors of history, culture and people. Surrealism’s infatuation with cosmological and mystical themes echoes in the works of Mumbai-born Rithika Merchant. Her cohesive series re-enchants the realm of knowledge and perception with mesmerizing frescos that interrogate the depths of our senses and intuition, such as her most recent Terraformation (2022-2023), Festival of the Phoenix Sun (2021-2022) and Return to Stardust (2021). Merchant embraces duality, whether in evocations of black and white accents reminiscent of Hilma af Klint’s dichotomous works or through characters who channel primeval masculine and feminine energy. Parahuman and animal worlds mingle—birds are regular features—in addition to nods towards ancient divinities which are recognized in anthropomorphic attributes and masks. These include traits suggesting ibises and falcons, species that were associated with ancient Egyptian gods (Thoth and Horus, respectively). Amid lunar cycles, watchful eyes, serpents, trees of life, volcanoes and more, Merchant explores a collective unconsciousness connecting the divine with a sensitivity toward symbolic storytelling. Influenced by collage, her complex compositions encompass geometrical as well as looser components that together carry a strong visual identity.

“Can’t the dream also be used in solving the fundamental questions of life?” Breton had asked. When does a dream end and reality emerge, one may want to similarly ask. With Surrealism continuing to question our sleeping and waking states, these two notions often blur. In that space, infinite creativity emerges.

Paul Klee’s interwar works, in which the subconsciousness is presented as a site of ebullient creativity propelling line work and color to conquer modern heights, are currently on view in David Zwirner’s “Psychic Improvisation.” The show mainly showcases works on paper elevating Klee’s drawing skills, divided between new forms and reconnecting with symbolic expression. The juxtaposition of colored painted next to rawer crayon-drawn works invites the viewer to consider Klee’s artistic practice as an unfinished process.

The line is an extension of the artist’s free-flowing traits. Klee’s infatuation with characters comes to light. Beat carpet orient (1939) shows a cartoonish, pulpous figure in action. Its body—somewhat feminine—is projecting force toward an invisible object. Limbs and hands are disproportionately large, a hair strand painted a vivid blue. This playful silhouette has the energy of a modern vaudeville’s main cast. Other characters populate the show exuding various degrees of dream-like qualities. This is the case of There is more to come (1939), which depicts a curvilinear three-quarter-profile portrait. The minimalistic rounded lines add texture and dimension to the work, which seems to hold multiple figures at once. Yet it poses like a strange specimen, with a face part animal, part mask-like. Drawn at the dusk of Klee’s life, we’re left to wonder whether we’re gazing at a reimagined dawn of humanity linking humans with other more enigmatic species.

Similarly, in Mischief (1940), a sorrowful, human-demiurge seems to embody a pitiful scale of justice from which two other figures hang. Eyes are cast downward. On the right-hand side, a puppet tries to keep balance, while on the left, a spectral silhouette holds a ladder—leading nowhere. These shapes are reduced to their most simplistic forms—an outline—which conveys a need to say or feel more with less. Glancing sideways I (1928) represents another humanoid form, with an elongated large face, hair arranged in an infinity knot, with strokes suggesting pilosity. Klee aptly captures moods and atmospheres with this latter work suggesting awkwardness. The character’s left hand is retracted behind his back while the side eyes allude to shyness.

This knack for sketching human characteristics applied to more abstract qualities confirms Klee’s hybridity and his ability to channel depth in subtle ways: side-glances, saggy necks, rounded shoulders. His study of worm-like shapes and spirals enables Klee to reflect on the expanse of life and creation. Rock tomb (1932) borrows the visual cues that are familiar to this work—a fetal envelope, an omniscient red sun, shadows and fish of abundance. In this symbolism, the rock is soil and womb inhabited by cells and hard-edged chromosomal thread with modulated gradients of reds and yellows. The scene is self-contained, with the rock’s surface warming as it gets deeper. The earth and sun provide vital energy while the presence of a black fish evokes a more unconscious world. In bare pencil and grease crayon, Klee reimagines primordial myths and cosmogonies, letting his “psychic improvisations” run loose to achieve complex insights. This image and others such as New medals (1938) offer new idioms—a fresh grammar to make sense of the invisible and the subjective.

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What these have in common is to let us inside Klee’s mind as his drawings remain suspended in time and place. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Girl at the window (1920) and Cemetery (1920), which, despite their completed appearance, channel a long silence and post-war grief. An androgynous girl looks outside the window of a double structure resembling a church. Klee put down colors as a series of blushes and blots against an architectural grid pattern. This creates a stained-glass appearance which reemerges in Cemetery and compliments the solemnity of the subject matter. Crosses coexist with trees, both erect to bear witness to cubistic hills and mounts where we imagine humans to rest. This landscape reminds one of the sinister trenches of Verdun and the gruesome frontline battles of World War I in which his friends, painters August Macke and Franz Marc, lost their lives.

A form master at the Bauhaus avant-garde school from the early 1920s, Klee taught in two studios during a time of prolific artistic experimentation with design, color theory and modernism. He was then joined by Wassily Kandinsky, his old peer from the pre-World War I early Expressionist Blue Rider group, when color’s raging potency seemed boundless and audacious.

1933 turned out to be a fateful year for Germany and for Klee. Hitler rose to power and his ascent unbridled Nazi ideology in arts and culture. Klee’s artworks, which did not conform to the Nazis’ artistic vision exalting nationalistic ideas, was stamped as “degenerate” (“Entartete Kunst”). The Gestapo stormed into his house and, upon being fired from the Dusseldorf Academy, he sought refuge in his native Switzerland with his family. That same year, Klee experienced physical ailments later diagnosed as scleroderma, a chronic and fatal illness that includes skin lesions, stiffness, esophageal tightness and pain.

This intimate struggle between internal turmoil and external circumstances likely explains a willingness to reunite with the essence of art: drawing. Klee consigns his musings on these paper vignettes like a visual journal, a mood board or a resistance to despair. His works were included in the infamous 1937 Munich Degenerate Art exhibition along with those of many other modernists deemed “un-German.” The Nazis further confiscated several of his artworks, and, despite his dying wish, Switzerland refused to grant him citizenship during his lifetime despite being born in Switzerland.

From a 1908 diary entry, in which he reflects on line work and naturalism, Klee wrote: “I may dare to enter my prime realm of psychic improvisation again. Bound only very indirectly to an impression of nature, I may again dare to give form to what burdens the soul. To note experiences that can turn themselves into linear compositions even in the blackest night.” He added: “Working in this way, my real personality will express itself, will be able to emancipate itself into the greatest freedom.” A practice and ethos, these improvisations ground the artist to experience a form of authentic truth.

While the works included in “Psychic Improvisation” are sensitive and personal, these are hardly Paul Klee’s most iconic pictorial works—in general as well as during the interwar period revisited. One can think of the famed Angelus Novus (1920), Ad Parnassum (1932), Fish Magic (1925), or even Struck from the List (1933) which all demonstrate a mastery of line work, perspective, deep affect, and form. This is not to casually minimize his lesser-known works but to acknowledge that the show presents second-order works on paper for the most part, which will satisfy many Klee fans but leave others wanting. The curatorial selection also lacks cohesiveness as well as an attempt to broaden the frame to wider inquiries. It’s unclear whether it proved too difficult to arrange for prized loans or whether the gallery wanted to deliberately shed light on more mundane process-oriented works whose arrangement feels somewhat haphazard. But one thing is certain: New York City needs an ambitious retrospective of Klee’s works. With past retrospectives at the Guggenheim and MoMA now decades old, it’s about time.

“Psychic Improvisation” is on show at David Zwirner’s 20th Street gallery through June 15.

I met French filmmaker Mathilde Lavenne in Corsicana, Texas, on the day of the total solar eclipse. On the roomy rooftop of the 100W Artist & Writer Residency, Lavenne adjusts her camera and ND filter. She takes her time to stabilize the equipment, aiming at the right angle amid footsteps vibrating the roof. The building is old, nested in a former 19th-century lodge of the Odd Fellows fraternal order.

Lavenne, with felt hat, leather booties and eclipse sunglasses in hand, is giddy. “Do you want to see the sun?” she asks 100W residents and friends there to observe the growing obscuration of the sun. We comment out loud on alterations in lighting—more desaturated, eerie—and on the cooling temperature. When the eclipse achieves totality, I am reminded of our discussion the previous night about seances and Lavenne’s uncanny encounters with the esoteric world. We witness the sun’s disappearance for a few minutes, a suspended time interrupted by our collective gasps at what feels truly magical.

In Lavenne’s work, astrophysics and esoteric practices are approached as forms of seeking and storytelling, two modes of inquiry into how science is validated, scientific hierarchies fabricated, in which women involved are chronically under-recognized. One such woman is Annie Buchanan, a Black psychic born into slavery in the late 19th Century. In an interview from the 1950s, Buchanan posited that she could see the past as much as the future. Her skills earned her a diverse clientele, and the Corsicana seer allegedly assisted early industrials in pinpointing the first well of the Mexia oil fields in 1920, thus spearheading an oil boom and the advent of commercial oil extraction in Texas.

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Spending time between Corsicana and other locations across Texas, Lavenne interrogates the role of women in science and the occult, both contributing to “making the invisible visible” via experimental film. In clear-skied Marfa, she records light phenomena and interviews women scientists in partnership with the MacDonald Observatory, following a desire to look more closely at a universe that resonates with our shared experience of the solar eclipse.

The artist, who first encountered Buchanan’s story last year, is one of the international creatives selected in 2024 by French cultural institution Villa Albertine for one of its exploratory embedded residencies. The organization, established by the French Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs in 2021 in the U.S. to promote arts and ideas, launched this year’s cohort of fifty projects-in-residence in twenty-six cities after a juried selection presided by MoMA Director Glenn Lowry. Projects span locations, disciplines and interests ranging from sustainability to multicultural dialogue interrogating legacies, spirituality and fragile ecosystems in partnership with international and local institutions. The residents have backgrounds in film and the visual arts, music and other performing arts, museums and heritage, design, literature and research.

Lavenne is using part of her Villa Albertine residency to engage with the local community and institutions, among which are Corsicana’s MLK Center and the Briscoe Center for American History in Austin. Together they excavate archival materials recouped with interviews to shed more light on Buchanan’s vibrant life at the intersection of race, gender, and mysticism. “It was important to return,” she told me. She plans on using Virtual Reality—based on 3D scans of Corsicana—to connect more deeply with Buchanan’s psychic talents and to use film to experiment with “shifting” to other worlds.

This dialogue between art, science and community is also a core tenet in other residencies supported by Villa Albertine. For example, archeologist Claire Houmard is pursuing a multi-year conservation and excavation project in the Yup’ik village of Quinhagak, Alaska. The nearby 16th-century site, abandoned after an attack, was at risk of coastal erosion off the Bering Sea coastline. Research efforts spearheaded by Houmard will inform on pre-European encounter lifestyle and the effects of climate change on this community while providing material evidence to a rich oral culture that is still honored by today’s descendants.

Many artifacts, of which over 100,000 remain in the village, have been digitalized as part of the Nunalleq Digital Museum. They include objects of daily life, often made of driftwood, such as kayak paddles, arrow points, vessels, toys and jewelry, as well as more ritualized objects. Young people have recently begun reviving formerly forbidden ceremonies, such as those involving masks and dances, which had been frowned upon during Christianization.

Scientific collaboration such as Houmard’s helps promote Yup’ik cultural heritage and engage with oral traditions, connecting the past with present community members whose traditional livelihoods are endangered. Houmard will be joined in the summer by journalist and former Villa Albertine resident Charlotte Fauve to chronicle the archaeological digs, ecosystem and stories of the Yup’ik, with the view of raising awareness of the dire socioeconomic challenges faced by the community. “They know that they will have to move in the next thirty years,” Houmard tells me. “It’s a hot topic.”

From obscured futures to complex historical legacies, this year’s Villa Albertine residency is also hosting 2023 Marcel Duchamp Prize Laureate Tarik Kiswanson. His interest in sculptural works and incarnated memory inspired a project that involves following the steps of two cabinetmakers active during dark chapters of American history—specifically the Jim Crow era and the internment of Japanese Americans and Japanese immigrants during World War II.

A freed Blackman from Virginia, Thomas Day established a well-respected cabinetmaking workshop in North Carolina in the 1820s. His business grew; his creations are still on display and in use today. But what sets him apart is that his complicated life—he owned slaves but moved in abolitionist circles—evades linear narratives about antebellum social roles.

“If he wanted to be in the practice of using slaves, he could have had hundreds. He only had a few. And according to our family lore, he purchased these slaves to rescue them,” one of Day’s descendants told NPR.

Decades later in 1942, woodworker George Nakashima was sent to Camp Minidoka in Idaho, along with his family, under President Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066, which affected more than 100,000 people of Japanese origin. In the camp, he mastered Japanese woodworking joinery techniques with other interned Japanese, which would elevate his craft when he designed unique pieces upon his release. His house, studio and workshop in New Hope, Pennsylvania, are now a National Historic Landmark. For Kiswanson, the production of these historical moving objects testifies to the links between the intertwined histories of design and violence, as well as the need to understand the broader conditions behind craftsmanship.

Lavenne, Houmard and Kiswanson will be joined by dozens of other residents from around the world, including the African continent, on projects unfolding in Atlanta, New Orleans, DC, Miami and other locations where Villa Albertine is active via its “antennas” or through a broader network of partners. Among whom, Louisa Babari, a recipient of the 2023 AWARE award for female artists, will document a fictionalized dialogue between two characters from former soviet communities in New York City to reveal entangled legacies and narratives of exile, while Arash Nassiri will immerse in “Tehrangeles” and the extravagant Iranian diasporic mansions erected in Beverly Hills. A strong sense of place and dialogue with communities define this year’s diverse cohort. The young program, now in its third year, has bright days ahead.

1-54 moved to Chelsea this year, leaving behind the cozy atmosphere in Harlem for the less intimate—and more conventionally dull—art fair vibe at the Starrett-Lehigh Building. While the more central location did offer the benefit of attracting a greater number of visitors during Frieze Week, the more than thirty domestic and international galleries represented still reported mixed sales on closing day.

Setting aside the venue change, this year’s 1-54 in New York had a lot to offer. These seven booths, in particular, really stood out.

The African Art Hub (TAAH)

UK-based TAAH presented the works of two artists in a show titled “Strength in The Silent Storm.” Nigerian Ibrahim Bamidele and South African Reggie Khumalo mixed portraiture with storytelling and texture in scintillating vignettes of reenchanted lives. Bamidele takes inspiration from European art history and traditional print fabrics to create multilayered works interrogating representation, Black aesthetics and social issues. In Against Hope, We Live in Hope (2024), Divination (2024) and Private Space II (2024), eyes linger on the yellow drapery hugging the models’ intensely pigmented skin. This high contrast is sublimed by the artist’s confident brushstrokes. The paintings exude the physicality of sculptural works while subverting canonical motifs of Western art.

Khumalo also elevates material culture, among which fabrics escape the painting’s frame to reclaim an autonomy. His female portraits, such as Never Alone I (2024) honor a matriarchal lineage and anchor the individual within a broader filiation. Ancestors, family and friends hover above and behind in a leafy décor to quietly give strength.

Berman Contemporary

What first draws our gaze to Berman Contemporary’s booth is its bold monochromatic curation. Luminescent black dominates one side where “trans-dimensional farmer” artist Cow Mash erected totemic sculptures and altars somewhere at the intersection of Pierre Soulages and Simone Leigh. Mash identifies as a cow; she adopted the name. The hands of her characters are disproportionately large, hinting at farm work and manual labor, large teats symbolize prosperity and leather inserts evoke the continued influence of the nurturing animal.

This communicates in extremes with a more complex exploration of desaturation and depigmentation led by Athenkosi Kwinana. Living with Albinism, her soft color pencil-drawn self-portraits dive into the pain of holding a mirror. Inspired by selfies, they interrogate beauty standards and the stigmatized life at the margins with sensitivity and depth. In her native South Africa, people living with Albinism are regularly persecuted due to traditional beliefs. As a result, they often withdraw from society and Kwinana documents a painful diary of isolation. Both artists are joined by Hazel Mphande’s focus-shifting monochromatic photographs exploring mental health and trauma.

Galerie La La Lande

First-time participant Galerie La La Lande chose to highlight the works of a single artist, Tunisian Aïcha Snoussi. In doing so, we are stepping into Snoussi’s fictional fragments of ancestral memories and genealogies in a cohesive multi-media installation. Dominated by a sepia palette, pieces of fabrics (RITUAL TUNICS OF LOVE AND RESISTANCE West and north Africa, West Asia 5k B.C, 2024) hung like resting banners on the wall revealing enigmatic signs and language into their folds. Snoussi’s loose lexicon reminds of the initiated grammar of Algerian artist Rachid Koraïchi. Yet they also include representations of human forms and other more abstract, symbolic silhouettes. The lined-up cloths, together with tools and votive-like offerings arranged on a long central table, seem to be artifacts excavated from an archeological site or salvaged from a shipwreck. Dimly soteriological, there is a conflicted notion of erasure and survival inscribed into the works, which also expands the realm of identity and geographies.

LIS10

Two female artists were showing at LIS10 gallery. Laetitia Ky from Ivory Coast and Tope Fantunmbi from Nigeria express in photography and painting the visual potency of Black hair. Ky creates gravity defying sculptural works with hair, used as avatars of feminist agency and empowerment. Hair is reclaimed as an extension of the self, a “hairtistry” and activism exposed in iconic images. Against pastel backgrounds—pink, yellow, beige—Ky’s hair morphs into a pan-African manifesto and a call to respect women. For example, the words “be sexy and shut up” can be read above her head as a societal injunction to remain docile to the male gaze. Fantanmbi’s depiction of hair is less self-assured, more affective. Hair styling is an act of love and transmission, rendered in vivid, enamored tones.

Gallery Nosco

The mixed textile works of Angolan artist Januario Jano at Gallery Nosco’s booth dazzle. They fight against amnesia; the images want to be seen and heard. In Untitled (The Last Royals), 2022, we study a couple in regalia. Their image is transferred onto unprimed canvas. Using a technique of collage adorned with blue wool, the image carries a historical sheen while superimposing narratives. Who is this couple, those “last royals”?

Similarly in Untitled M0010, 2021, a single portrait raises questions on provenance and colonial legacies. The feel of the image evokes colonial-era postcards that intrusively bared their exotic subjects at the border between ethnographic interest and pornographic lust. One can read the description “a native maiden” below the woman’s photograph. Textile frames the image with dignity and honor—perhaps an attempt by the artist to shield her body from predatory intentions. As if conversing, Caio Marcolini’s twisted brass wires embody the sinuous roads toward postcolonial healing.

Vigo Gallery

Vigo lends its booth to Ibrahim El-Salahi’s “Pain Relief” series. Battling sciatica and Parkinson’s disease, the great Sudanese modernist resurrected in form the small-scale drawings he used to make during his arbitrary imprisonment in a Khartoum jail in the 1970s. Then using a smuggled pencil, El-Salahi used to draw on repurposed cardboard or envelopes, the outcome of which was both quick and urgent. This restriction, reenacted in this series, channels the will to overcome limitations. Presented across the walls of the booth, they evoke the tightness of a prison cell and represent multiple screams, multiple windows. The abstracted forms carry a ritualistic dimension, that of controlling the line work, of feeling the pressure of the pencil against the surface. Often intricate, they integrate language with physical, imaginary and syncretic landscapes. As with the past, the drawings and the artist want to be set free.

NIL Gallery

Presenting artists from northern Africa and Ghana, NIL gallery invites the viewer to examine the ways that identity can be celebrated and remembered. “Dry Land,” a series by Moroccan photographer Sara Benabdallah, rejects common passive and lascivious tropes attached to women from the Maghreb. Wearing a blue gown with moon, crescent and star motifs in Labsa Lakbira (2024), the model confronts the camera; she’s in charge. Her attire is wedding-like but there is no partner. Her stance is that of a fiercely independent woman.

Identity is more nostalgic and spectral in the work of Nabil El Makhloufi in which young men are overshadowed by a viridian blue haze, such as in Milky Way I (2024), which at times suggests a verdigris patina over suspended time. The painting underscores male friendship as well as the evanescence of adolescence and young adulthood. Do these memories fully vanish? What remains afterward?

Humans, drawn to both the natural world and fantastical characters, seem to have an inborn knack for combining the two in our imaginations. “Beatrix Potter: Drawn to Nature,” created by the V&A Museum in London and curated for the Morgan Library by Philip Palmer, honors Beatrix Potter (1866–1943), the creator of numerous and unforgettable animal characters including Peter Rabbit and Mr. Jeremy Fisher. In the exhibition, we (re)discover a prolific artist through her life and creations. The exhibition encompasses preparatory sketches, illustrated postcards or ‘picture letters,’ encoded journal excerpts and completed folios, in addition to personal artifacts from her later life as a farmer in Hill Top.

Though Potter grew up in London, her attraction to nature came at a young age. She kept pets, such as lizards and a rabbit, and became quickly fascinated by the countryside and its rich offerings. In her visits to Scotland, Devon, Cornwall and northern England’s Lake District, where she spent the remainder of her life, Potter observed, documented and collected species and specimens, which served as materials for her famous illustrations and picture books.

The first of such books, The Tale of Peter Rabbit (1902), which she wrote and illustrated, was an immediate success. Centered on young and naughty rabbit Peter entering the delicious garden of Mr. McGregor, the book contains much of what would become Potter’s mark and appeal: mischievous animal characters, watercolor-based illustrated vignettes, a narrative weaving tenderness and light transgression. She published dozens of animal tales following Peter Rabbit, including The Tale of Benjamin Bunny (1904), The Tale of Mr. Jeremy Fisher (1906) and many others.

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Her animal characters include frogs, foxes, squirrels, hedgehogs, cats and mice—an ode to the English countryside. They depict, in Potter’s words, the “strength that comes from the hills” and a “pleasant, unchanging world of realism and romance.” Even in her scientific illustrations, such as of mycology, Potter’s drawings reveal a sensitive quality to connect with her subject matter. In her children’s books, animals channel human qualities. Their anthropomorphic behaviors—hedgehogs wearing clothing or Mrs. Rabbit tucking Peter to bed with a chamomile tea—create a fantastical atmosphere resembling human life; characters adopt both human and nonhuman manners.

Not solely confined to a young readership, animal tales have remained popular in old and new forms. Written explicitly for adults, Bernardo Zannoni’s My Stupid Intentions (2023), a fictional autobiography of a beech marten, and the new translations of Felix Salten’s original Bambi (1923) remind of the genre’s potency to convey messages—light or dark—about human predation and the leveling cruelty of time. Animals talk, act, feel. They survive seasons and the harsh lessons that come with penurity, hunger, and pleasure-seeking. They encounter humans, a strange species that often infringes on their well-being.

These tales inform our relationship with the natural world and notions of interdependencies and rekindle deep entanglements between humans and other species. They also nourish our cravings for enchantment and a restoration to pre-modern times. Often focused on quests, predator and prey or hero stories, as well as the dangers of failing to anticipate hardships and changes of fortune, animal tales reveal truths about frailty and resilience in idealized landscapes of abundant forests, rivers and warm dens. Yet these settings, and their characters, change, and when they deviate, a moralizing message emerges.

Analyst Marie-Louise von Franz examined the psychological dimensions of the fairy tale in a series of books, in which she highlighted their resonances with Jungian concepts, such as the shadow or archetypes, for example, the Great Mother or the Hero. Van Franz connected the fairy tale with everyday life and, in Interpretation of Fairy Tales (1970), considered such stories as “the purest and simplest expression of collective unconscious psychic processes” for its meaning is “contained in the totality of its motifs connected by the thread of the story.” Through a symbolic series of pictures and events, the tale conveys “the Self” in myriad ways, which van Franz explains as “the psychic totality of an individual and also, paradoxically, the regulating center of the collective unconscious.”

One does not need to experience Potter’s English countryside and its fauna to understand the dangers of a rabbit crossing into a human garden or the effects of gluttony and fear. Thus, the tale—like its corollary, the myth—carries core teachings transcending place. “Fairy tale language seems to be the international language of all mankind,” added van Franz. As a guiding “system,” the fairy tale can be interpreted analytically, intuitively, sensorily and emotionally.

What Beatrix Potter’s drawings also represent are artifacts of communion and transmission. They draw us to a certain innocence of childhood, the warmth of cold evenings and our ability to imagine worlds outside our own parameters. The show underscores Potter’s legacy and the significance of nature in her life, as an illustrator and storyteller but also as a leader of conservation efforts who donated her land (and most of her illustrations) to the National Trust.

Further investigating the expanse of the natural world and the contemplative power of images, the Morgan Library will also feature next month more than sixty sketches, drawings and paintings by Walton Ford (whose Lion of God will be on view at Ateneo Veneto in Venice starting April 17) of wild animals, shown for the first time publicly. These works question the didactic nature of bestiaries, zoos and the visual representation of fauna across time, including our reception at the age of the Anthropocene. Their uncanny familiarity and strangeness become objects of inquiry, and the subjects lend themselves to inviting a dialogue with artists such as Gustave Doré and Max Ernst, among others, also on show. For example, Ford follows the snowy wanderings of a black panther who escaped the Zurich Zoo. The motif of the Barbary lion evokes strength, as well as the mourning of a species now virtually extinct. Placed alongside a 17th-century card of an elephant running after its trainer in Rajasthan, these images emphasize a desire for agency and the animals’ ability to populate new imaginary landscapes.

Together, the two exhibitions introduce new ways of looking at nature, asserting that humans are, in the end, just a different breed of animal in need of further insights into the world around them.

“Beatrix Potter: Drawn to Nature” is on view through June 9 while “Walton Ford: Birds and Beasts of the Studio” will open April 12 and run through October 20—both at the Morgan Library.

Like other shows that have sought to shed new light on artists known to a wide public, such as the Met’s “Van Gogh’s Cypresses,” “Matisse and the Sea” at the Saint Louis Art Museum illuminates the permanence of the ocean in Matisse’s works and how they evolved. Through more than seventy paintings, ceramics and sculptures plus his famous paper cut-outs, Henri Matisse is revealed as not only a visionary but also a disciple and a collector.

The exhibition, which considers how Matisse’s stays along the Atlantic, Mediterranean and Pacific coasts transformed his practice. follows an overall chronological course. It first examines his avant-garde artistic milieu and those who influenced him, such as Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, Aristide Maillol, Louis Valtat, André Derain and Pablo Picasso. The show includes work by many of these artists to demonstrate commonality in style and form in pushing the boundaries of post-impressionism. For example, Valtat’s pointillistic garden landscape, Garden at Anthéor in Spring (1902), exudes light and airiness, set in the colorful outdoors of southern France while Maillol’s curvy models foreshadow Matisse’s own bent and arched human compositions.

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Cézanne’s Three Bathers (1879-1882), acquired by Matisse in 1899, established his deep interest in the genre of bathers and nudes (often, nude bathers). In it, three naked female bathers gather near a river in what appears to be a forest, perhaps at dawn. Cooler hues cast blue and purple shadows on their exposed skin. Color is applied in thick impasto creating a vivid expression, unlike the more academic nudes that emulate classical scenes. Here, the women mostly turn their backs to the viewer, retreating in their friendship and the pleasure of their shared moment.

Carrying a deep reverence for Cézanne, Matisse’s ruminations over the possibilities of the nude and reimagining landscapes will grow from Three Bathers and his encounters with non-Western art. In Music (Sketch) executed in 1907, Matisse paints four paean characters in an unspecified landscape. This work already exudes many of the painter’s characteristics: the nude as an essentialized quality, androgynous curved figures, as well as the use of bold yet minimalistic color. The curvilinear, aquatic-like line work already channels his famous Dance (1910). One of the characters sits pensively, in a crouching position that Matisse will further explore in other works, such as in Bather (1909), where the painter grappled with his character’s hunch as they enter a body of pure ultramarine blue. In these early paintings, water is first a physical and symbolic stream.

The show also follows a geographical itinerary. As Matisse moves to Nice, he is captivated by the changing colors of the Mediterranean Sea, which he observes from his studio. He paints interiors in which the ocean becomes a focal point rather than an ornamental detail. To him, the sea is more than an object of artistic scrutiny, it is an engrossing panorama and a lifestyle. Matisse is actively involved in Nice’s nautical club, for example, and we later observe how much his own time bathing, swimming and diving inspired his intuitional and sensitive relationship with oceans.

There are several stand-out works in “Matisse and the Sea”, such as Bathers With a Turtle and its three naked female figures observing and playing with a turtle. Their fertile bellies and breasts are protruding, like the African sculptures in which Matisse took a liking. The two “Oceania” tapestries, The Sea and The Sky (both printed on linen in 1948 after Matisse’s transformational stay in French Polynesia in 1930) represent abstracted marine life forms—fish, seaweed, crustaceans, corals—but also birds projected against a sandy background. They appear like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle to complete the vision of an architect. Considered together, these three works communicate with one another, highlighting Matisse’s consistency in his repetitive exploration of motifs. 

In Bathers With a Turtle, he changed his mind. An analysis of the painting reveals that Matisse intended a pond or river as well as two landmasses to feature in the background, in the manner of Cézanne. At a later stage, he chose to extend the body of water to the sky, which accentuates a gradient of green-blue hues and, as in the “Oceania” tapestries, serves to cosmologically approach earth, water and sky into an interconnected system of harmony.

The paper cut-outs presented show us the artist “painting with scissors.” They tie an intention to radically experiment with color, abstraction, geometrical shapes and negative spaces, elevating “childishness” as a notion of untainted truth, in line with “primitivism”, a movement en vogue during Matisse’s time.

French critic Philippe Dagen qualified primitivism as a “modern invention.” Historically, the intellectual and cultural movement raised the “primitive” as an artificial antidote to the ills of modern society. Mainly encompassing non-Western references to tribal organizations of society and visual art, primitivism also became interested in childhood, madness and prehistorical art as sites of unobstructed expression of human truth. It led artists to explore essentialized versions of the strange, the faraway and the “other” to engage with myths, enchantment, dreams and escapism. Largely resting on a fabricated and sublimed notion of pre-modern or pre-historical precedence, primitivism sought to go “backward” to propel new propositions.

Beyond Matisse as the towering cultural guru of mid-century aesthetics, exhibition curator Simon Kelly aptly recalls the importance of historicizing the artist, to “see his artwork as imbricated within the wider colonial project of domination,” as he wrote in one of the exhibition catalogue’s essays. Matisse’s oceans also represent France’s imperial ambition through its exploitation and control of territories as diverse as Algeria, Martinique and Polynesian atolls. When Matisse vacations in Tahiti or Tangiers, he does so as an embodiment of power.

Matisse painted numerous reclined “odalisques” inspired by his Northern Africa travels. While he modernized the style of the old Orientalists, he did so without fundamentally subverting a gaze of subjugation at the time of colonial exhibitions that recreated monuments, vistas and sometimes human zoos with proprietary grandeur in Marseille (starting 1906), Paris (starting 1907) and other French cities.

Matisse rigorously collected non-Western works. Together with Picasso, Braque and Derain, he contributed to an enthusiasm for “negro art” during the early 20th Century. But when does homage become appropriation, and when should it be a concern? European modernists largely redefine figurative art via the extensive poaching of these cultures. Demoiselles d’Avignon largely exists because of Picasso’s encounters with African art.

In the works presented in “Matisse and the Sea,” we find traces of collected African “fetishes” in the facial expression of the violin player in Music, the pairing of male and female attributes and in the fleshy, rounded figures the artist painted and sculpted. At the more abstract level, Matisse was also mesmerized by patterns derived from Pacific Islands’ tribes—whether fabrics or war shields. While this is a sign of growing globalism and of Matisse’s intellectual curiosity and openness, these remain restless objects with their own history of uprootedness.

“Matisse and the Sea” captures a bountiful love of nature and the artist’s celebrations of freedom. Unlike Caspar Friedrich’s romantic ocean that makes humans shrink, Matisse’s sea grows and we grow with it. In many ways, Matisse used known surroundings and his love of the sea to paint a collective unconscious, in which water becomes the vessel of universal creation and fertility. In doing so, he also sought influences from other national cultures and visual traditions, including highly revered objects and symbols.

The curatorial choice to include Matisse’s works alongside others that have marked his practice elevates the works of unnamed artists from modern-day Gabon, Mali or Papua New Guinea and duly credits their significance. It also evokes the curatorial take from MoMA’s landmark 1984 show “‘Primitivism’ in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern” to underscore these entanglements. By and large, there is no Matisse without the so-called rest of the world.

“Matisse and the Sea” is on show at the Saint Louis Art Museum through May 12.

The lights have been dimmed. On the ground floor of the Invisible Dog, benches, a coat rack, a table, a chandelier and stacked lockers arranged in an L-shape have been tightly organized and greet us in an otherwise large space that fades into darkness. The chandelier contrasts with the industrial make of the Boerum Hill building, exuding an uncanniness that echoes throughout the performance’s theme. This is the New York City premiere set of Tania El Khoury’s “Cultural Exchange Rate,” which engages with identity, belonging and exile.

Sets of numbered keys are handed to each participant, of which there are fewer than ten on the night I join. Matched to each of these keys are lockers that open the doors to an archival treasure hunt that unfolds in no particular order. Upon opening the lockers, we insert our heads through mesh barriers to discover self-contained snapshots of El Khoury’s family memoirs, narrated by voice or video by the artist and enhanced by atmospheric decor. One of the lockers includes a collage of ID cards, another a dessert platter, fairy lights and fragrant olive oil soap. Each of these elements supports the locker’s divulged secrets. For example, the olive oil soap is a physical memento of El Khoury’s grandmother’s scent and the intimate bond the two women developed when her grandmother allowed El Khoury to comb her hair.

Their closeness forms the foundation of the environment that generates El Khoury’s abundant storytelling. In “Culture Exchange Rate,” the artist retraces in these locker vignettes her family’s journey of displacement and exile, from the late 19th-century migration from the Levant to the New World to the devastating effects of Lebanon’s current economic collapse via many wars. Her home village, situated at today’s border between northern Lebanon and Syria encapsulates in-betweenness and fluidity: When does a border indicate an end, rather than a beginning? And fundamentally, who gets to decide?

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The performance metaphorically and physically draws us into the many strands of a multifaceted quest: investigating traces of relatives in Mexico while seeking dual citizenship as an escape route from Lebanon, questioning the affective and relational nature of currency in a country where the Lebanese lira has lost more than 90% of its value in 2023, and interrogating proximity and transmission as a mode of exchange between family members and strangers.

The lockers lend themselves to this archival, forensic probe, as the participants become witnesses and associates to El Khoury’s retelling. We sometimes need to kneel or raise our toes; we peek inside allegorical windows and open reconstituted vaults. The way the audience moves in this maze evokes the ruminations of the mind, unreliable and scattered memory, and how historical discontinuities affect our ability to tell a linear story from beginning to end. There is no center, no resolution, as we jump from one snippet of personal history to the next, creating an impression of superimposed narratives that all co-exist at once.

In one of these, El Khoury, who lives between Beirut and London, visits her home village and meditates on the river that now separates Lebanon from Syria—a material border that did not exist at the time of her grandmother’s youth. The idea and reality of a border are a departure point from which to excavate her family’s rhizomatic experience of displacement and exile, which is often revealed through the memories of women: her grandmother fleeing the Lebanese Civil War and facing soldiers or her ancestor who married in Mexico and returned to Lebanon penniless with children in tow some 100 years ago. When El Khoury becomes a mother herself, concerns of identity and survival take on new existential meanings. Her Palestinian-Lebanese daughter won’t be able to carry either of her parents’ nationalities. Palestinians remain stateless while Lebanese mothers are not allowed to pass down their nationalities to their children (only fathers do). And so, in that crevice, El Khoury suggests a tension between the need to transform and the need to preserve.

This is evidenced in one of the vignettes which recalls El Khoury’s visit to Mexican archives searching for her ancestor’s birth certificate. The query yields no results, which leaves El Khoury desperate as dozens of family members await news on a WhatsApp group, her hopeful updates that they may soon have a future in Mexico by claiming direct descendency and citizenship. She tries various spellings in vain, and that lack of results awakens feelings of repeated erasure. Where is her ancestor—who exists in the family’s oral histories and appears on an immigration card but not in other official records—and where is El Khoury?

The artist is absent. The interactive and sensory performance is led by the participants themselves and as such, the border between performer and audience blurs. We don’t know what it feels like for El Khoury to have strangers scavenge through family memories in sounds, images, videos and artifacts. She isn’t there to witness. In some ways, that asymmetrical relationship reminds one that sees the “pain of others” as a semi-voyeuristic enterprise, an external gaze that Susan Sontag wrote about in her 2003 essayistic book on the aestheticization of suffering. How can one grapple with a sudden and shocking economic collapse that sees savings and pensions vanish nearly overnight, or that migration, far from being an entrepreneurial desire, is a painful necessity to survive? Are we lusting at the victimization of El Khoury’s family and the ordeals that she and her family go through?

Far from it. For all the serious evocations of her work, El Khoury introduces humor when least expected and chooses narrative devices that amplify agency and voice. Very much in charge of having orchestrated our meandering, she discloses what she wants and keeps us suspended on an ending that never comes. In that, El Khoury channels the art of hakawatis, the bards of the Levant who used to tell stories and stories on end in cafes and other semi-public places in their long robes and modulated accents, keeping their audience on edge. Hakawatis used to play a critical role in society as guardians of tales and transmission, popularizing folk stories into shared cultural references while cementing social bonds. Stories told by an experienced hakawati both entertained and educated. Like them, El Khoury peels off layers of memoirs to unveil tales of resistance and empowerment etched in the politics of displacement.

Premiered in the Fisher Center’s 2019 LAB Biennial: Where No Wall Remains, “Cultural Exchange Rate” debuted in New York City as part of the 2024 Under the Radar theater festival. El Khoury, who has received multiple distinctions including winning the 2017 ANTI Festival International Prize for Live Art and being awarded the 2019 Soros Art Fellowship, is currently an artist-in-residence at Bard. She co-founded the collective Dictaphone Group in Lebanon.

“I think about my work as producing knowledge that can contribute at a later point to an archive, but at the moment it’s concerned with the conversations that are happening right now in politics,” El Khoury told Art Papers in an interview concerning her practice. The artist worked on “Cultural Exchange Rate” for ten years, amassing interviews and archives until the materials developed into an idea for an art performance. While underpinned by a personal story of many ramifications, the performance does speak more broadly to an attempt to frame intergenerational trauma and healing through the right to narrate.

During the late aughts and early 2010s, “Gulf Futurism,” a cultural concept articulated by artist Sophia Al-Maria, sought to articulate trends and changes affecting the region, where the advancement of a future enabled through the wide application of technology and innovation often implied tensions between tradition and modernity.

Since then, contemporary art in the Gulf, or Khaleej, has seen the emergence of Khaleeji women artists interrogating a wide range of themes such as belonging, post-oil futures, ecology and dissonance through their visual practices.

Of these artists, Abu Dhabi native Farah Al Qasimi frequently finds inspiration in the mundane and what she calls “so muchness” to critique Khaleeji materialistic tastes and visual saturation. In her multimedia works, exhibited in group and solo shows since 2014, Al Qasimi turns the excessive dimensions of a hyper-consumerist lifestyle into intimate objects of contemplation—incarnated in draped textiles, smoke, shimmery maximalist home decor, malls, loud billboards and digital culture.

Her photograph series “The World is Sinking” (2014) glimpsed at such fragments—a disregarded pomegranate, a dress blending into tapestry patterns—that are reinterpreted as societal mementos and fetishized through manipulated imagery. In the video work Arrival (2019), Al Qasimi used the voice of a Ras Al Khaimah jinn to discuss modernization and disorientation. The figure of the jinn returns in one of her latest projects Um Al Dhabab (Mother of Fog, 2023) presented at Sharjah Biennial 15, decolonizes Western narratives about piracy in the region and engages with the fabrications of past and present via kitsch folklore, pastiche, and surrealist elements.

While the recent NYU Abu Dhabi Art Gallery exhibition “Khaleej Modern” highlighted the pioneering role of Modern artists of the region before 2007, there is no consensus on what constitutes “Khaleeji contemporary art,” a field as fluid and diverse as the people who make up its fabric.

For instance, Budoor Al Riyami, winner of the 13th Asian Art Biennale Grand Prize in 2008, often features more minimalistic motifs and themes in her work. She captures and uses Omani landscapes and other images to question the role of land and the environment in the formation of modern-day identity while considering bodies as the site of desired spirituality and enduring labor. Al Riyami is associated with the Circle, a movement established by Oman’s avant-garde artists of the 1990s, and her visual work draws on other passions and fields, for instance, poetry.

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Brooms of Wisdom (2007) exposed the lived reality of Muscat’s street cleaners—often ignored and marginalized—through compositions focusing on their brightly-colored brooms and immigrant silhouettes. Her photo series “Salt” (2014) discusses vulnerability and truth. An unhealthy-looking date tree goes from fully covered with a white garment to progressively more naked.

Similarly, in Breathe (2022), an installation presented in the inaugural Omani National Pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennial, Al Riyami mixed sculpture and film to question appearances. Large, suspended rock-like structures evoke an Omani natural asset, peridotite, a carbon-capturing material found in the Al Hajar mountains. At the base of these sculptures, a deceiving pool of water serves as a window screen that plays a video of people manipulating the mantle rock. We are left to wonder about erosion and the ways we make peace with nature.

“For me, she’s an artist who’s been very important, very innovative, and a central figure in the conceptual movement that developed out of Oman,” said Dr. Aisha Stoby, who curated “Destined Imaginaries” for the Oman Pavilion in Venice, about Al Riyami’s work and influence.

“Although contemporary art in the Arabian Peninsula has a history that can be traced back to a few decades, the academic interest in this subject is recent and there is still a lot to be done to conceptualize and theorize this. As a researcher working on the topic—with a focus on the UAE—I’d say there is still a discrepancy between the dynamism and depth of the regional art scenes, on the one hand, and its coverage and recognition on the other,” Océane Sailly, founder of Hunna Art, a UAE-based gallery that specializes in representing emerging women artists from the Arabian Peninsula in the region and at the international level, told Observer.

Sailly’s roster of up-and-coming artists, which include Razan AlSarraf, Eman Ali, and Zayn Qahtani, just to cite a few, are showing distinctive styles and maturity in engaging with their region’s multifaceted heritage while interrogating representations.

Whether through conceptual forms, reviving forgotten ancient mythologies, relying on extensive research or convoking their lived experiences, the women of this generation represent critical voices amid a rapidly burgeoning art scene.

“My art is my way to express our time,” Emirati conceptual art pioneer Ebtisam Abdelaziz told Observer. She has been innovating in performance-based art, pushing the boundaries of geometric shapes and optical illusions in her mixed-media work, since the early 2000s.

“We don’t need to have a similar scene as Europe,” she adds, reflecting on her journey breaking taboos, such as when she used her body to discuss social issues related to womanhood or race. “I had to convince [people] that it was an art piece.”

Since then, mindsets have evolved as these women continue to shape different cultural perspectives in the region amid significant societal transformations. Saudi-born Manal AlDowayan has championed feminist themes throughout her career. At the first Diriyah Biennale in Jeddah in 2021, AlDowayan presented a mixed installation honoring Saudi heritage and elevating matrilineage. Her prompt question “When do women disappear from memory?” is an invitation to contemplate genealogies, oral histories and the role of women in society, turning the visitor into an active participant, a practice she replicated in her one-time performance at the Guggenheim last year, “From Shattered Ruins, New Life Shall Bloom.”

“My approach to art over the last two decades has given me the chance to be part of a transformation that is taking place in my country,” AlDowayan said in a statement. The artist will represent Saudi Arabia at the upcoming Venice Biennial, and she has been commissioned new work for the anticipated Valley of the Arts in the desert site of AlUla.