Art Basel’s Zero 10 debuted in Miami, where—true to form—it was mostly defined by the hype around Beeple’s Regular Animals, then found natural terrain in Hong Kong’s digitally fluent and crypto-native crowd before landing at the historic Swiss edition with a far more institutional format. Trevor Paglen, a pioneer at the intersection of art and new technologies who was honored at the Guggenheim earlier this spring, received the LG Guggenheim Award and holds a MacArthur Fellowship, curated the section alongside digital art strategist Eli Scheinman. Their goal was to contextualize these practices within broader art history and encourage connoisseurship beyond hype and speculation.

Together, the two cleverly conceived Zero 10 as an exhibition finally aimed at providing a more cohesive narrative of the past, present and future of digital art practices, advancing the discourse around them and fostering a deeper understanding of how they are already contributing to and shaping the future of artistic production. It was the survey that many in the community and beyond have long been waiting for: more concise in scope, but with contributions from various established key players in the digital art space.

To Paglen, the distinction between digital art and non-digital art has become increasingly artificial. Most contemporary painters use Photoshop, most sculptors use digital modeling software, and nearly all artists rely on technological mediation in some form. From this perspective, digital art is not a separate category but an integral part of contemporary artistic practice. “The argument we are making with this exhibition, and in general, is that all art is digital art at this point,” he told Observer before the fair opened. “Every painter I know makes their painting in Photoshop. Every sculptor I know makes a 3D rendering of their sculptures, then turns it into a physical thing. When you use that definition, it is all digital art.”

Artists and creative practitioners increasingly use computers and, perhaps surprisingly, A.I.-powered technologies to create work, inform distribution channels and build new touchpoints with emerging communities. After all, we now all interact with the world through technology; most of our experiences are filtered, amplified or expanded by devices. As Art Basel CEO Noah Horowitz acknowledged in an interview with The Art Angle ahead of the fair, Zero 10 was launched specifically to meet and attract these new audiences and communities where they are, while helping to build a bridge to the traditional art world on both the institutional and market sides.

Importantly, as Scheinman confirmed to Observer, Zero 10 is not based on the conventional open-call model, as in other sectors, but rather on a mix of direct invitations and inbound interest from galleries and artists. This allowed them to shape a narrative—particularly important in this Basel iteration, where the context is very different. According to Scheinman, or much of the Basel audience, the language of crypto and NFTs remains largely abstract.

The curatorial structure of Zero 10 in Basel was grounded in three interconnected pillars: historical pioneers of computer-based art; established contemporary artists whose practices are deeply informed by digital technologies; and younger artists working at the frontier of internet-native, blockchain-native and computational culture. By bringing these groups together, the exhibition demonstrated continuities that are often overlooked while confronting how to think about and engage with the technological conditions that shape contemporary life. Their primary objective was to articulate a historical lineage of digital art, tracing connections from computer artists of the 1950s and 1960s to contemporary practitioners working with code, A.I., blockchain, networked technologies and hybrid works generated in real time on site.

Take, for instance, the work of digital art pioneer Vera Molnár, presented by Oniris.art and Interface Gallery, timed to coincide with her solo presentation at the Kunstmuseum Basel. She was one of the first academically trained artists to embrace algorithmic image-making, approaching the technology’s creative potential as a new language and a powerful vehicle for artistic expression, as was evident in the presentation “When Algorithms Draw: The Vision of Vera Molnár.” Another example is Harold Cohen, the British pioneer of computer and machine-generated art. At Zero 10, Gazelli Art House presented All Four (1964), a major early abstract painting exhibited at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1965, alongside his later machine-generated works, showing an already groundbreaking dialogue and continuity between his painterly practice and his later computational systems.

Cohen’s early interest in systems, structure and rule-based image construction found a contemporary echo nearby in the work of Paris-based artist William Mapan, whose Paysages Plausibles use machine-generated images as the starting point for painterly translation through oil. When we spoke, Mapan described a practice suspended between drawing, painting and code. “I generate the wireframe, the black-and-white lines, and then the composition makes me think of a photo or a location I’ve been to.” He said he considers himself simply an artist, working between the mediums available today. “I have two practices: I paint, and I draw, but I also code. I’m trying to combine the two. I make something in the middle.” Mapan added that the algorithm is collaborative rather than substitutive. He has a complicated relationship with A.I., he admits, and does not really use it; instead, code becomes a tool for iteration and surprise, almost like an assistant within a larger artistic process. The results evoke something of Cézanne’s structural decomposition of planes into tesserae of color, but here the landscapes expand without horizon into a potentially infinite, perspectiveless digital space. Inspired by real locations yet depicting places that do not exist, they reflect how our notion of landscape now inevitably combines physical and digital experiences.

The presentation sold out, with interest from institutions including the Centre Pompidou and the Guggenheim. Mapan’s work is already in the collections of LACMA, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Toledo Museum of Art, the Museum of Art + Light, the Alan Howard Family Office and the Kanbas Collection, among others. In the booth, Mapan also presented Dances on Shadows (DOS), software linked to a robotic machine that invited collectors and visitors to take a direct role in the process of image generation: through an interactive interface, they could explore the code, navigate its iterations, select one and watch it rendered in real time by a machine plotter. Art Blocks, which presented his work at Zero 10, sold a large painting for $80,000, five medium works for $28,000 each and six plotted drawings with accompanying digital artworks for €3,000 each.

Nearby, ArtMeta’s booth offered the section’s strongest historical presentation of early digital art. Its exhibition, “From Code to Canon: Celebrating 70 Years of Digital Art,” traced computer and electronic image-making back to the 1950s, beginning with works such as Ben F. Laposky’s Oscillon No. 59 and the oscilloscope imagery of Mary Ellen Bute and Desmond Paul Henry. Emerging alongside early mainframe computers, cybernetics and information theory, these experiments positioned digital art as something born from light, signal and machine-mediated perception before the digital image existed as a file. Structured in seven chapters—SIGNAL, SYSTEM, GRAPHIC, NETWORK, GENERATIVE, INTELLIGENCE and PROTOCOL—the booth connected early electronic signals and algorithmic graphics to contemporary A.I. and blockchain-based practices, with prices ranging from $12,000 to $200,000. Among its gems was Charles Csuri’s Numeric Milling (1968), one of the earliest 3D physical sculptures created through a computer algorithm, carrying a $200,000 price tag. By Sunday, the gallery confirmed the sales of his Random War (1967), priced around $80,000, alongside David Em’s Transjovian Pipeline (1979), sold for around $50,000, and Herbert W. Franke’s Tanz der Elektronen (1961-1962), priced at $30,000. The gallery also sold its most historical works, including Ben F. Laposky’s Oscillon 4 (1950s) and Oscillon 1184 (1961), each for $30,000, and Mary Ellen Bute and Ted Nemeth’s Oscilloscope Test (1950/1951) and Oscilloscope Tests (1950/1951), each priced at $15,000.

The dialogue between these early experiments and new practitioners was particularly compelling, particularly in light of a nearby solo exhibition of generative digital and physical art by artist-engineer 0xDEAFBEEF, presented by Asprey Studio. Moving between coding, sound, electrical engineering, computer graphics and metalworking, 0xDEAFBEEF uses software and forged iron to explore the tension between generative systems and manual craft. “With both, you use tools to make your own thing through your creativity,” he told Observer, describing a practice rooted as much in the blacksmith’s workshop as in computational media.

At the center of the presentation were his Synth Poems, on-chain generative audiovisual works paired with forged-iron sculptures modeled on oscilloscopes. Generated at the moment of minting from a unique hash, each work produces distinct combinations of tempo, timbre, pitch and structure, with visuals derived directly from the audio signal. The result is an homage to early electronic image-making, especially Ben F. Laposky’s 1950s Oscillons. Another key work, Glitchbox, added a participatory, ludic dimension: functioning like a programmable audiovisual instrument, it lets viewers manipulate sound and image in real time through knobs and switches. Across the presentation, forged iron introduced an almost anachronistic industrial presence, carrying visible evidence of hand labor. For 0xDEAFBEEF, that physicality is a reminder that craft takes on new meaning in an age of automated production. “Touch as a sense is still there in the digital world,” he told Observer. Asprey Studio sold Synth Poem: Oscilloscope for $40,000, along with four forged-iron sculptures with digital artwork and prints for $7,500 each.

Art Basel-nominated Uzbek artist Aziza Kadyri, presented by eastcontemporary, similarly navigated the intersection of traditional craft and advanced technologies such as A.I. and machine learning. In a show-stopping, red-toned installation that paired textiles and screens in seamless integration with pixel coding and ancient weaving codes, Kadyri used suzani, a Central Asian embroidery tradition passed down through generations of women, as the starting point for training A.I. The system absorbs the ancestral symbologies and culture of this matriarchal knowledge, turning them into a disembodied “style,” but the works are ultimately brought back into the world through traditional artisans in Uzbekistan, restoring touch, labor and cultural specificity to images that might otherwise remain suspended in algorithmic space. In a fertile back-and-forth between human and machine intelligence, the installation prompts timely questions of authorship, agency and cultural transmission. A.I. can contribute to the preservation and repair of collective memory in the digital age, but is also subject to misinterpretation and misappropriation. Here, hand-based knowledge is negotiated with a machine that can read style but not inheritance. The questions of representation are especially charged, as Central Asian visual traditions have often been flattened, exoticized or made peripheral within broader art-historical narratives, and A.I. risks accelerating that abstraction by detaching motifs from the social and embodied knowledge that produced them.

The gallery’s founder, Agnieszka Fąferek, told Observer that traditional collectors were looking at works that use new technologies with curiosity but also with a certain degree of skepticism. Collectors from the digital world, on the other hand, were trying, with the same curiosity and skepticism, to identify the technological component in Aziza’s textile works. Still, the gallery closed several sales, and the first work sold was one of her interactive installations for $23,000—probably the most complex work in the presentation and one Fąferek never expected to sell. Even more impressive was the institutional response. “Numerous curators and professionals returned to the booth several times to study the project in greater depth, a sign that Aziza’s research is engaging with questions that feel very current and urgent,” the dealer said.

From these few examples, it’s obvious how Zero 10 in Basel sought to situate digital art within a broader history of artistic engagement with technology. By placing contemporary practitioners such as William Mapan alongside figures like Andreas Gursky, presented by Sprüth Magers, Avery Singer with Hauser & Wirth or Hito Steyerl with Esther Schipper, and by having these mega-galleries share context with Art Blocks, Fellowship and Asprey Studio—which specialize more on the digital side and have only recently entered the Art Basel orbit—the section created juxtapositions that aimed to reframe the medium within a broader art-historical discourse. It also established a shared ground for artistic experimentation alongside ongoing changes in society and in the way we relate to and perceive the world.

The point, Scheinman suggested, was not only to show digital art as a niche category but to demonstrate how deeply digital processes already run through contemporary art. “We wanted to have this historical arc. We wanted artists who are unambiguously celebrated as great contemporary artists, familiar to anyone, and then to show how many of those artists, whom you might not think of as digital artists, are, in fact, digital artists,” Paglen added, pointing to Ocean V (2010), part of Gursky’s ongoing series in which he constructs composite oceanscapes from satellite imagery taken 35,000 kilometers above Earth. Inspired by a nighttime flight from Dubai to Melbourne, the work turns the image into an almost alien, unfamiliar landscape suspended between the earthly and the celestial, while inevitably prompting an observation of our planetary condition, with shifting borders and landscapes shaped by global conflicts, extraction and climate change.

Several works on view used new technologies as tools to probe the complex systems shaping contemporary life. Avery Singer’s Shit Coin Maxi (2025), a composite layered image depicting two digital wallets found on Twitter, reflected on the entanglement of gambling, finance and technology, as well as the speculative crypto cultures that have shaped and often distorted the broader perception of digital art. Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s Panoptic Chiasma, presented by Galería Max Estrella and bitforms gallery, similarly transformed interactivity into critique, exploring the intersection of human perception, computation and artificial intelligence while questioning how technological inputs are already embedded in our daily experience of reality. The gallery placed Lozano-Hemmer’s powerful LED lightbulb and light-dimmer installation Pulse Agglomerate (2024) on day one for $180,000 with a private foundation in Ukraine. Additional works sold by the end of the fair at prices between $90,000 and $240,000, including another Pulse Agglomerate (2024), which sold for $25,000-175,000 to CityX Foundation, with an agreement that it will be donated to a major institution.

Presented by Almine Rech, Japanese composer and visual artist Ryoji Ikeda’s epic series data.gram (2022) created a monumental dynamic installation of wall-mounted works that distill vast scientific datasets into 13 sequences. Developed after years of research with institutions including CERN and NASA, the series draws on reprocessed data to explore the aesthetic potential of scientific information, visualizing aspects of the universe that remain difficult to grasp, from quantum particles and hidden matter to human-scale environments and clusters of galaxies. Moving across radically different scales of existence—from the cosmic and seemingly infinite to the human, the microscopic and the barely perceptible—Ikeda explores the potential of new technologies to enhance our understanding of our position within a broader cosmic system. Priced from $25,000 to $325,000, the works somehow make the hidden architecture of the cosmos visually and sonically legible, while pointing to the politics and opacity of digital systems themselves, prompting questions about who owns this knowledge and who can actually access it.

Other works extended that ecological and systemic inquiry, using digital technologies to stage new relationships between natural processes, collective participation and extractive power. Hito Steyerl’s Green Screen (2023), jointly presented by Esther Schipper and Andrew Kreps, combined an experimental LED wall made from recycled glass bottles with living plants and A.I.-generated imagery. Bioelectrical signals from the plants shaped the work’s evolving sound and low-resolution animations of blooming flowers, creating a dialogue between organic life and digital systems while reimagining plants as active agents within contemporary media environments.

That idea of a living, evolving system took a more participatory form in Leander Herzog’s Infinite Garden (2025), presented by Nguyen Wahed. Built as an evolving blockchain-based ecosystem, the interactive installation turned collectors into active participants, inviting them to assemble and share ever-changing digital flora in a collective garden shaped by distributed contributions. The gallery placed it for $9,000, alongside 15 custom generative algorithm works by Andreas Gysin, each for $4,500.

At the entrance, John Gerrard’s triptych STANDARD (2023), Flare (Oceania) (2022) and Western Flag (Spindletop, Texas) (2017), brought by Fellowship, pushed those questions toward environmental crisis, fossil fuel extraction and systems of power. Generated live through custom software, Gerrard’s digital sculptures exist in perpetual, unrepeatable motion, transforming wind, smoke, fire and light into contemplative meditations on climate, energy and technological perception. The first work of the triptych sold for $500,000 to one of the most significant private U.S. collections of classic and contemporary art. Flare (Oceania) (2022) was also sold to a private collector by Sunday for $380,000.

If the number of sales closed by Sunday suggested that digital art is already fully integrated into the contemporary system, our conversation with Paglen and Scheinman ahead of the opening addressed some of the challenges still preventing even broader acceptance. Chief among them was the notion of creative authorship, especially in relation to A.I. When is a digital output truly “creative” enough to be considered art, particularly now that A.I. can potentially help anyone make art? “When I take people around the fair as soon as I mention A.I., I often get feedback like, ‘Why do you need the artist?’ or ‘Isn’t the A.I. just doing this?'” Scheinman said. “There are questions of authorship and ownership. These conversations are critical to have right now.” To Paglen, the key difference is that making art is not only about producing objects but about producing stories, contexts and languages around those objects. A prompt-generated image may be someone’s art, he explained, but that does not automatically make it good art. For him, strong art offers a way of seeing the world differently. “When something is an artwork, a lot of that has to do with the language you are using to make that object. Am I telling a story that connects to artists in the past who asked the same questions in different ways? Is it trying to talk to artists who have not yet been born? Is the language there? You are also creating a story around the object, which prompts somebody to see that object in a particular way.”

Another challenge, both Paglen and Scheinman agreed, is scholarly and institutional accreditation. “I think a lot of curators and professors were trained to look at art from the distant past. Even if you get an art history degree and write something about Warhol, that is still considered pretty new,” Paglen bluntly argued. “A lot of people, when they look at technology, do not understand it, and they know they do not understand it. Their instinct is to go back to a safe place in the 19th Century.”

Educating collectors and institutional buyers is vital, as digital art and its new outputs often require different ways of acquiring them, or different forms of support and participation in the work, rather than mere acquisition. “A lot of institutions were created to hang things on walls, which made sense for the last couple of hundred years. But that makes less and less sense now,” Paglen reflected, pointing to collectors who have pioneered the new media realm, such as the Julia Stoschek Collection, as figures already reimagining what kinds of museums or institutions should exist and how they should adapt to the latest evolutions of artistic practice. At Zero 10, works such as Leander Herzog’s Infinite Garden offer an example of a piece in which the network itself becomes part of the artwork: a model for a more participatory culture, networked ownership, co-creation, distributed authorship and collective stewardship that already prevails in the digital space, but might also offer the art world alternative models of sustainability for artistic production. In that case, blockchain is not merely a speculative market tool but a way to circulate work sustainably, structuring participation, ownership and community around it.

Moving from the early pioneers—the avant-gardes of digital art—to newer artists who are more internet-native or blockchain-native, and whom institutions are only beginning to examine seriously, Zero 10’s historical arc places these practices within a larger question: what happens to art in an age of rapidly advancing technology? This is a question Walter Benjamin first gave its modern theoretical urgency in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, and one that generations of thinkers have continued to pursue since. For Scheinman and Paglen, that broader framing is essential to addressing one of the lingering questions around digital art: whether it still needs to be treated as a separate category or whether it should simply be understood as part of art history’s longer negotiation with tools, systems and machines.

Scheinman sees the answer as still being tactical rather than ideological, following the rules the art world has long used to legitimize new forms of artistic expression as they emerge: first cohesively presenting them, then drawing critical attention—often through journalists, sometimes even through hype, given the dynamics of contemporary media culture—and finally building the historical framework that allows them to be contextualized within a more academic discourse. At this moment, he said, a dedicated section is still doing necessary work by helping audiences understand the history, context and breadth of digital practices. Many of the artists think of themselves simply as artists, not digital artists, but the section creates a space in which viewers can recontextualize those practices within a broader lineage of artists who, since the industrial revolution and the historical avant-gardes, have tried to engage with, absorb and creatively repurpose the new mediums made available by technological and scientific change. One could trace that impulse through Futurism, Ballet Mécanique and the many later moments in which artists sought not merely to use new tools but to possess them imaginatively and creatively.

The hope, according to Scheinman, is that over time those distinctions will become increasingly blurry, until the separate category no longer feels necessary, and we might begin to understand how these artists are already exploring new ideologies and epistemologies through their making. In doing so, they might offer ways to resist the technocratic hegemony advancing as A.I. companies enter public markets and as an expanding, interlocked system of political, financial and social control reveals both its threat and its potential. The art world, meanwhile, may discover in these practices new ways to maintain artistic integrity, creativity and sustainability from within.

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As the art world has grown accustomed to the boutique fair format, an increasing number of satellite events are, ironically, trying to counter fair fatigue with more contained, context-specific models. There’s also the experiential factor: unique and unexpected venues, after-hours and public programming, and an irreverent vibe can veil the still-extant commercial aim. But who can resist the seductive promise of thoughtful, site-specific curation? Not us, which is how we found ourselves in a vacant multi-story office building designed by Diener & Diener, a few minutes from Basel SBB station, for Basel Social Club, a multilevel, self-contained art ecosystem that pairs site-specific presentations with activations and a program running from 2 p.m. to 3 a.m.

With an even more ambitiously expansive format than last year, the 2026 edition is a hymn to anti-productivity—a ludic experiment that reconsiders the workplace not as a site of production but of playful engagement and creativity. “It’s an invitation to ‘tune in, turn on and drop out’ of productivity culture,” Basel Social Club co-founder Robbie Fitzpatrick told Observer, noting how in occupying spaces built for work, the fair, open through June 20, turned them into spaces for drifting, lingering, encountering and resisting. “For us, anti-productivity is not about doing nothing; it’s about pushing back against the idea that time, attention, and imagination must always be put to work.”

The building has been transformed into a cinematic device and a participatory playground. In its labyrinth of corridors, utility spaces, meeting rooms, abandoned administrative corners and strange dead ends, art appears between residues of labor, creating pockets of absurdity.

In a moment of growing depersonalization of and dissociation from human labor, accelerated by remote work and A.I., Basel Social Club prompts timely reflections on the value of work, motivation, creativity and rest via a series of informal encounters with artworks, as well as exhibitions, live performances, music and gastronomy. The variety of those parallel activities runs the gamut. You can get a spray tan or take a cold plunge before visiting a chiringuito for Hawaiian toast and pineapple margaritas, successfully turning the fair from a place of business into a place of leisure. Still, no one is leaving commerce behind;  some dealers noted that while Liste and Art Basel were thick with sales, it’s much harder to close deals here. People enjoy and engage, but ultimately approach the fair as an exhibition, seldom asking about prices—perhaps understandably, as many of the works on view here are notably installation-based.

Which isn’t to say that Basel Social Club isn’t worth exploring. The first thing you see is Esben Weile’s golden rat, Kjær, Lions!. Inside a parked car, there’s news from New York for those who want to share in the excitement of the recent Knicks win. Proceeding in the semidarkness, you encounter an organ installation by Mexican artist and composer Fresco Sonoro; conceived as both an instrument and sound sculpture, the work explores the plastic qualities of sound by reimagining the pipe organ as a mutable sculpture in a continuous state of becoming. It is a meditation on listening, materiality and space, and a reactivation of the organ’s powerful invitation to transcendence, made accessible beyond its church and religious associations. The result is a kind of sonic architecture, a mutable environment that absorbs the audience into its own rhythm.

Sound is a key factor shaping the Basel Social Club journey, making the experience truly immersive. The usual choreography of booths is fully replaced by carefully staged encounters, installations as acts and sound as a spatial force. The club becomes a true club, gradually unveiling itself as an experimental, labyrinthine sequence of spaces where sound, sculpture and atmosphere keep collapsing into one another. Unfolding vertically across the building’s stacked floors, the architecture becomes part of the curatorial framework, as the fair’s organizers explained in a statement.

And if you get lost, no worries: it is part of the experience. The complexity of both spatial and experiential layers through the circulation aims to echo contemporary notions of the “underground,” turning the fair—or better, the show—into a site of cultural resistance and a metaphor for the hidden structures and tensions of late capitalism. “With the scale of this building, this edition is more than ever an invitation to simply be. You don’t need to find the work, follow the right route or get somewhere in particular,” co-founder Yael Salomonowitz explained. “You can experience the art, the social life, the bar, the conversations—whatever unfolds—and allow yourself to get lost. It is a form of resistance to productivity: entering an experience without trying to master it. You just go into it, and see where it takes you.”

The entire fair reflects on how the office, once a symbol of efficiency and growth, has been hollowed out by digitalization, while acceleration, automation and platform economies erode the boundaries between labor and leisure. Productivity now extends beyond the workplace into private life, while rest, wellness and self-improvement are increasingly absorbed into a relentless culture of performance and maximization.

Shouldn’t you be working? asks a text installation by Silvio Larusso along the first stretch of the journey. And what if, after the full marathon of a day at Art Basel, the most compelling exhibitions were not more booths in a maze of white walls but art mounted somewhere one has to actually slow down and tacitly agree to follow a mood rather than a map?

QR codes allow visitors to identify the works and galleries, often without the pressure of having anyone around, as curiosity is continuously stimulated while one navigates these staged, curated encounters and dialogues. In one of the first rooms, a fan canister turns into a butterfly in the work of Olivia Erlanger, brought by Soft Opening and placed in dialogue with the work of Anna Gonzalez Noguchi by Gallery Vacancy, which transforms office items into micro-worlds.

Nearby, Bernat Daviu with Bombon Projects creates a waiting room with a clock where time is suspended, inviting you to stop and wait—for what, who knows, but the clock has stopped running. Time, the invisible master of productivity, is suspended and made useless. The Barcelona gallery is also presenting the work of Pere Llobera, where the figure of Pinocchio becomes a metaphor for contemporary alienation, his elongated nose pointing beyond the lie of self-improvement and individual deception toward political and economic systems sustained by the constant production of discourse, simulation and corruption.

Ghosts of labor, bureaucracy and corporate exhaustion appear throughout, often in a surreal register. Take, for instance, the office party room, filled with purple balloons as part of an installation by Mexican artist Marek Wolfryd.

Another strong installation is delivered by Swiss artist Thomas Liu Le Lann. HUMAN RESOURCES, presented in collaboration by New York gallery Spielzeug and London’s Copperfield, scatters fictional control documents around the room rating the performances of seductive glass ducks and geese, which have been scanned only to be recognized in their mediocrity. The unsettling staging becomes a metaphor exploring power relations, vulnerability and the friction between human emotions and corporate systems.

Elsewhere, an unused meeting room becomes a hall of dissonant voices, a chorus of absent technology, missing computers and bodily residue in a sound installation by SOMA curated by Kristina Grigorjeva. The space seemed to speak with the anxiety of systems that keep running after the people have left. Across these rooms, Basel Social Club staged a timely reflection on alienation, dissociation and the futility of labor.

In another room, Willmann Gaspar’s hallucinatory painting suggests that closing one’s eyes changes nothing, while Lou Fauroux’s K-Detox (the Internet Collapse), presented by exo exo, pushed that dissociation toward the exhausted edge of technological life.

Shamiran Istifan’s installations made the critique of white-collar labor explicit, framing the corporate office as a late-capitalist religion where devotion, compliance and selflessness are performed, tracked and measured until the worker’s worth replaces the work itself. In one installation, a luminous curtain spelling out “Family” exposed the office’s most weaponized fiction: intimacy used to reassert hierarchy. Elsewhere, chrome-colored pillows sewn with cherubs sit beneath an all-seeing electronic eye, turning heavenly guardianship into surveillance. Visitors who linger long enough are captured by facial-recognition software and printed with a randomly assigned motivational quote, reducing the body once again to data, image and instruction.

Also addressing the effects of labor is Alejandro Cartagena’s celebrated photographic series Carpoolers, recently on view at SFMOMA for his major retrospective. Made in 2011-12, the series shows workers traveling in the backs of pickup trucks in Monterrey, Mexico, photographed from above from freeway overpasses. The images are formally striking, almost diagrammatic, but what they reveal is brutal: bodies folded into the infrastructure of suburban expansion, commuting not as a lifestyle choice but as a condition of economic necessity.

Materializing the fear of A.I. into monsters, Sahej Rahal’s interactive A.I. simulation Atithi instead encourages a direct confrontation with them through video game aesthetics and interaction. Summoned into existence by video game software, a shimmering tentacular creature roams the piece’s virtual terrain.

The ludic aspect recurs throughout the rooms as a counteraction to capitalist productivity. Brennan Wojtyla, for instance, turns another office space into a gaming room, inviting people to play rather than work, with 10 computers connected locally, their cables fully exposed, running Counter-Strike: Source, the 2004 multiplayer first-person shooter.

Other interventions lean more simply toward the club and music scene, transforming vacant offices into dance halls, as with the installation of Marco Siciliano presented by French Place. Others turn the office into a place to hang out and exchange socially—a bar or speakeasy—as Jeremy Deller did by creating an exact replica of a beloved café from Bury Market in Manchester, a legendary gathering place for a full cast of everyday city life. Meanwhile, Nick Doyle stages the Human Resources Bar, a “friendly neighborhood kink bar” where visitors can drink “blood,” “sweat” and “tears” from water coolers, step into “The Box” for a Polaroid portrait or encounter elements that blur the boundaries between corporate ritual and bodily experience, unveiling the dynamics of power, hierarchy, repression and desire that intersect in any workplace.

In total, Basel Social Club features 500 artists, pairing work by emerging voices with gems by established ones, including Marina Abramović, John Armleder, Cosima von Bonin, Allen-Golder Carpenter, Maurizio Cattelan, Bernadette Corporation, Valie Export, Chim↑Pom, Jeremy Deller, Liam Gillick, Carsten Höller, Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, Julia Scher, Laurie Simmons, Anastasia Susonova, Hajime Sorayama, Andy Warhol and David Weiss, among others. In a small secretary’s room, Christian Marclay’s iconic video installation Telephone could not have found a stronger setting. Abramović presents The Bus, a collaborative work with Mirjam Varadinis that transforms a former school bus into a mobile exhibition space and meditation room on wheels.

Beyond the presentations, the building is continuously activated by more than 150 performers in a nonstop experiential flow that defies the boredom and desensitization brought on by art week overstimulation. Whether we can still call it an art fair is an open question, but Basel Social Club has shown this year that it can be the after-fair platform that experiments with a radically different format to engage and involve people, providing support for contemporary production. More art playground than art fair, it is also a hymn to leisure and a critique of the systems that make anti-productivity feel almost utopian. In an increasingly commodified art world, this is a place where creativity doesn’t feel dependent on returns and maximization.

More in Art Fairs, Biennials and Triennials

• In Basel, a Cautious But Committed Market Rediscovers Its Nerve

• At Liste Basel, Market Trends Give Way to Explorations of Contemporary Anxiety

• Global Art Biennials: Renovation, Revelation—or Repetition?

• Observer’s 2026 June Art Fair Calendar

• The Venice Biennale’s Most Powerful Pavilions Tune into Shared Consciousness

Konstantina Krikzoni’s work has always inhabited the liminal yet generative threshold between figuration and abstraction, her characters finding their archetypal and mythological shape in the movement and gesturality of her body, channeled and projected onto the canvas.

Both her technique and her subjects deal with women’s bodies, identity and sexuality, intersecting with ancient Greek mythology, ancient Western knowledge and literature. Proceeding with organically fluid, continuous lines and delicate washes of translucent oil paint, she builds magmatic, non-hierarchical compositions that test the limits of painting not only as a medium but also as a conduit for her self-expression.

Her latest solo show at Jarvis Art showcased a new level of awareness for the artist—of her position as a woman, as a body and soul made of irreparable dualities. Her exploration of femininity has always taken physical form: voluptuous bodies that appear and dissolve fluidly, unapologetically reclaiming their feminine sensuality and power as they fluctuate freely in space, resisting shame and the scrutinizing expectations imposed on female behavior by patriarchal society. In her newer works, the bodies become both more graphically defined in their anatomies and more androgynous, most often defying gender identification. These are warriors, as the title of the show suggests—cohorts of Amazons standing together against the world, with their fiercely gentle feminine force.

The more condensed gestural rhythm and more rigorous structure make it clear that the artist is in a very different mental space from the one that produced her earlier, more visceral works. After her father’s recent death, Krikzoni experienced what she describes as a major breakthrough in her painting. “I wanted to disrupt everything and give more emphasis to female agency, but in terms of the mental space of these figures and how they occupy the surfaces with meaningfulness,” she told Observer after the exhibition’s opening. “That was how I wanted to process my own pain, in a way. They gave me a sense of company.” The figures now suggest feminine solidarity and collective energy.

Returning to Greece, her home country, for a period, Krikzoni found herself drawing ancient Greek statues of youths—the male Kouroi and female Korai—in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens: hybrid, androgynous, austerely neutral and idealized characters meant to crystallize an ideal of timeless beauty. “They have something very otherworldly and a very intense presence, and it was important for me to remember that these sculptures were protecting graves. There was something about that,” she said. Back in the studio, she used these drawings to restore their suspended, dignified presence as symbols of resistance and resilience, sheltered from grief and pain in their immutable, archaic and archetypal form. That they seemed to combine male and female qualities also offered her a way to find balance rather than erasure. “I think what we ask for as women in the art industry, or in general, is to be equal, not for men to disappear. There needs to be some sort of balance.”

In Jungian terms, the psyche contains both masculine and feminine principles—the animus and the anima, not as fixed gender identities but as complementary psychic energies that must be acknowledged and integrated for the self to move toward wholeness. If Konstantina’s earlier paintings often seemed charged by conflict, as if trying to wrest feminine agency back from the structures that had contained or distorted it, these new works feel less combative and more reconciliatory. They do not abandon the feminine but allow it to coexist with a renewed, solemn masculine energy. The result is a body of work in which the self appears less divided than assembled from two necessary forces, held in tension but no longer at war.

Most importantly, this inspiration allowed Krikzoni to find a notion of the body that remains young, hybrid and open to possibility. “I feel there is something in me that has been stuck at that age of being younger, being excited about life and thinking about possibilities,” she reflected. “I think that is also what happens metaphorically with painting.” For Krikzoni, this is also a way to think about the male gaze and how to subvert the sexualization of the female body. “You can do it without making overly sexualized bodies. It can be less literal, in a way, but still give you a lot of strength and dynamic.”

The color palette has shifted just as decisively: the earlier red and pink palette, associated with blood, bodily interiors and other liquids, has given way to blues, greens and more electric or earthy tones. “I think I let myself be free to choose the colors that instinctively come to my mind,” she says, acknowledging how many of the colors remind her of the Greek landscape and bring a watery or organic quality to the surface. “It is more about embodying nature than showing it directly or being literal,” she clarified—a way to embody both a physical and emotional landscape through color and atmosphere. More fluid, blue-toned compositions like Agalmata (2026) evoke the luminous atmosphere of waves crashing and water shimmering on the Aegean coast, while suggesting the possibility of continuous metamorphosis.

More generally, the objects and motifs that appeared in earlier work now operate more metaphorically, allowing her work to transcend the viscerally intimate personal narrative that once accompanied it, opening it up to the universal. “If you want the works to be open, free and inclusive, they also need to be inclusive with color and with the possibilities of paint,” she argued, acknowledging how everything started to feel freer once she moved away from her red and pink palette to embrace a new space of experimentation.

The painting process itself has also changed: the shifting gesturality already suggests how the artist must have continuously moved in and out of the canvas, almost like a dance, rather than being wholly inside it. Krikzoni said she hadn’t thought of it that way but recognized that, in the early months after returning to the studio, the space felt suffocating. “I felt I needed less time in the studio, to work faster, spend less time inside and be more outside.” Over time, that shifted, but the change in temporality had already entered the work. “The process has become more intuitive and more meditative.” Drawing was crucial during this period because it created a direct connection between mind and hand. “When you draw, there are moments when you forget about everything. There are nerves in the fingers, and they say that when you are sewing or knitting, they connect you to parts of your brain that help you heal.”

This latest body of work clearly emerged as part of a cathartic process: processing loss, overcoming grief and, within that time and journey, finding herself and reconciling with who she is and where she comes from. Krikzoni feels that whatever comes next from the studio will be exciting. She is trying to maintain that openness, embracing ambivalence as a possibility while reaching a necessary rapprochement with her own background. “I was not expecting it. It was very organic, and it brought something back that has to do with my identity and where I come from.”

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The OG Art Basel has long been the main market test for not only the European market but also the global market. It opened to VIPs yesterday (June 16) with a mood far less bombastic than in years past. Spirits were high, certainly, but the audience was much more regional and selective. To combat what could be perceived as a contraction, given fewer visitors from the U.S. and Asia, the fair has tried to restore a sense of eager anticipation by launching a new initiative that kept selected major works unseen—no digital previews, no PDFs—until the fair opened to ensure visitors’ first encounters with the year’s presentations would be in person.

And there are plenty of masterpieces waiting to be encountered, though it’s unclear whether these are Basel exclusives or will reappear in Paris. The top sale of the VIP preview day was made by Swiss powerhouse Hauser & Wirth, which sold a 1963 Picasso for a remarkable $35 million. The gallery’s booth, taken as a whole, has great range, with a Picasso plein air work paired with an impressive Lucio Fontana slashed canvas, a sought-after abstract Richter and a sculpture by Louise Bourgeois. By 4 p.m., the gallery had also sold a Cy Twombly at $5 million, a Louise Bourgeois at $2.5 million, a Maria Lassnig at $1.75 million, a Piero Manzoni and a Zeng Fanzhi at $1.5 million each, an On Kawara at $1.4 million and works by Ed Clark, Isa Genzken, Günther Förg and Henry Taylor at roughly $1.2 million each. Gallery president Iwan Wirth described the first day of the 2026 edition of Art Basel as the strongest they had ever had. Other reported sales included works by Amy Sherald at $850,000, Christina Quarles at $800,000, Rashid Johnson and Cindy Sherman at $750,000 each, Nairy Baghramian and Luchita Hurtado at €600,000 and $600,000 respectively, Charles Gaines at $595,000, Nicole Eisenman at $575,000, Lorna Simpson at $425,000, Zhang Enli at $350,000, Lee Bul and George Rouy at $300,000 and £300,000 respectively, Pipilotti Rist at $230,000, Phyllida Barlow at $200,000 and $50,000, Ambera Wellmann at $150,000, Uman at $120,000 and a smaller George Rouy at £75,000.

Almine Rech also sold a Picasso—an Art Basel premiere—in the $6,000,000-6,500,000 range, alongside a painting by Serge Poliakoff (€600,000-700,000), a dynamic abstraction by Martha Jungwirth (€550,000-600,000), a ceramic by Pablo Picasso ($350,000-450,000), a painting by Ha Chong-Hyun ($400,000-450,000), a painting by Javier Calleja (€350,000-400,000), a painting by Youngju Joung ($75,000-80,000), a painting by Ji Xin ($65,000-75,000) and a work by Taryn Simon ($35,000-40,000). “There’s a really good energy at the fair this year, and we’re happy to have made notable sales on this first day in Basel,” Rech told Observer, noting how the new Basel exclusive initiative created some anticipatory excitement. The gallery also placed two sculptures by Leonora Carrington (€170,000-200,000 each) following the announcement, just days earlier, of a new collaboration between it, the artist’s estate and rossogranada to exclusively represent the Surrealist internationally.

David Zwirner anchored its booth with a large Joan Mitchell from 1992, a small Rothko from 1968, a golden Judd from 1969 and a Chamberlain, along with works by Victor Man and Ruth Asawa. The gallery reported a strong first day, with primary-market sales led by an Isa Genzken installation in the Unlimited sector, which sold for €1.2 million to a European museum, and two new paintings by Victor Man, one of which sold for €1 million. Other first-day primary sales included three Josef Albers paintings at $650,000, $800,000 and $850,000; a new Luc Tuymans painting for $800,000; a Steven Shearer painting for $700,000; a Chris Ofili painting and a new Amy Sillman painting for $650,000 each; two new Lucas Arruda paintings for $280,000 each; a new Dana Schutz painting for $350,000 and a work on paper for $100,000; two paintings by Francis Alÿs; a new Lisa Yuskavage work on paper for $320,000; a new Suzan Frecon painting for $250,000; two Philip-Lorca diCorcia photographs for $50,000 and $30,000; works on paper by Al Taylor and Tomma Abts for $30,000 each; an Alice Neel print for $20,000; and six Wolfgang Tillmans works priced between $12,000 and $100,000. The gallery also reported a busy first day on the secondary market, placing works by Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Joan Mitchell, Yayoi Kusama, Gerhard Richter, Richard Serra, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Cecily Brown, Josef Albers, On Kawara, Donald Judd, Ruth Asawa, Victor Man, Dan Flavin, Cy Twombly, Sigmar Polke, Michaël Borremans, Francis Alÿs, Lucas Arruda, Mamma Andersson, Suzan Frecon, Elizabeth Peyton, Raymond Pettibon, Carol Bove, Yu Nishimura and Tomma Abts.

White Cube also reported a good first day, led by Lynne Drexler’s Untitled (1960) at $2.5 million and Doris Salcedo’s Untitled (2008) at $1.25 million. Other sales included Cai Guo-Qiang’s large Blue Pine Forest No. 1 (2022), which occupied an entire wall with a price tag of $750,000, alongside a Tracey Emin painting from 2017 for £750,000, a sculpture by Antony Gormley for £600,000 and Isamu Noguchi’s Figure Emerging (1982/84) for $450,000. The gallery also placed Mona Hatoum’s Still Life (medical cabinet) VII (2026) at £185,000, Ibrahim Mahama’s Kulala (2026) at €100,000 and Sara Flores’s Untitled (Maya Kené 13, 2023) (2023) at $90,000. By Monday, the gallery had also placed an installation by Tracey Emin, Knowing My Enemy (2002), presented in the Unlimited sector, for £1.25 million.

Austrian dealer Thaddaeus Ropac pointed out that there were fewer Americans in the aisles than in years past but clarified that what was more significant was the number of important collectors from across Europe buying very actively. The gallery placed several works on the VIP preview day, including Pierre Soulages’s Peinture 146 x 97 cm, 31 janvier 1954 (1954), which sold above $3 million, a stunning Helen Frankenthaler dated 1982 that sold in the range of $3 million and a Lucio Fontana, Concetto spaziale, Attese (1965), for €1.8 million. Also sold by end of day were Georg Baselitz’s Ach, Mädchen grün (2010), with an asking price of €1.2 million; a Robert Rauschenberg ($950,000); Sturtevant’s Warhol Flowers (1990) (€750,000); a Robert Longo homage to Baselitz ($750,000), alongside works by Frank Auerbach (€700,000), Antony Gormley (£450,000), Martha Jungwirth (€250,000, €200,000 and €100,000), Zadie Xa (£80,000), two other Georg Baselitz works (€85,000 and €70,000) and an Oskar Schlemmer (CHF 55,000). The gallery chose Art Basel as the venue to announce its representation of the estate of Leoncillo, one of the most important Italian sculptors of the postwar period, celebrated for transforming clay into a vehicle for the expressive ambitions of modern art, ahead of a dedicated show at its new Milan gallery in September.

If the death of Georg Baselitz in April of this year translated into swift sales, the impact of the even more recent passing of David Hockney on the market has been palpable at Art Basel. On preview day, GRAY sold his Studio Interior #2 (2014) for $8.5 million, an iPad drawing from “The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate” series (2011) for $650,000 and Kenneth Noland’s No End (1961) for $2 million.

American postwar abstraction sold particularly well on preview day, but with a new mythology and a more feminine inclination. Yares Art reported sales of Helen Frankenthaler’s Gliding Figure (1961) for $2 million, a Joan Mitchell work on paper from 1958 for $1.2 million and Larry Poons’s Toccata Mambo (2014) for $190,000.

Dominating Gagosian’s booth was a monumental Henry Moore, Large Four Piece Reclining Figure (1972-73, cast 1984), measuring over 6.5 x 13 x 6 feet. While the sculpture will no doubt take some time to sell, the mega-gallery reported the sale of Willem de Kooning’s No Title, dated 1984, for a high seven-figure sum to an important private collection in Asia within the first hour. De Kooning’s more elegantly minimal abstractions from the 1980s are particularly in demand in Asia, as recently confirmed by Brett Gorvy in announcing the launch of their new in-house auction venture, LGD Hammer with a 1984 work. Another large 1983 work was on view at Skarstedt, alongside a few Picassos and postwar gems, including Warhol’s Mao, as well as rising contemporary stars such as Yuan Fang.

Twenty-five years after her first presentation, Marianne Boesky shared that opening day was one of the best she had ever had, reporting that she had nearly sold out the booth by evening. “I’m thrilled to say that this year’s edition has brought one of the stronger energies I can remember,” she told Observer. “The fair opened with a big crowd and very good vibes, and it stayed busy all day. Collectors have been confident and decisive.” Among the notable placements, the gallery sold a Mary Lovelace O’Neal painting from 1990 to a European museum. The gallery also placed a painting by Celeste Rapone for $85,000, four Jammie Holmes paintings in the range of $50,000-60,000, two Tianyue Zhong paintings by the newly represented Boesky Gallery artist for $30,000, two Hannah Van Bart paintings in the range of $35,000-45,000 and Aubrey Levinthal paintings in the range of $18,000-36,000.

Despite recent headlines generated by its downsizing, Pace also reported a highly successful first day, selling 20 works in the early hours. The fair marked the international debut of the new collaboration Pace Di Donna Schrader Galleries, and demand was particularly strong for contemporary names, with sales of works by Robert Longo ($750,000), Kenneth Noland ($500,000), Loie Hollowell ($450,000), Nigel Cooke ($385,000), Elmgreen & Dragset (€260,000), Joel Shapiro ($250,000), Marina Perez Simão ($195,000), Alicja Kwade (€175,000), Arlene Shechet ($130,000 and $130,000), Pam Evelyn ($95,000), Mika Tajima ($90,000), Maysha Mohamedi ($75,000), Lauren Quin ($75,000), Mao Yan ($68,000), Yto Barrada (€40,000), Irving Penn ($40,000 and $25,000) and Trevor Paglen ($7,500). The gallery also placed a monumental sculpture by Torkwase Dyson, Way Over There Inside Me (A Festival of Inches) (2022), presented in the Unlimited sector in collaboration with GRAY gallery. More historical pieces placed during the VIP preview included a Kenneth Noland priced at $500,000 and Lynda Benglis’s Power Tower (2019) for $1.4 million.

There were several overlaps in names and sales with San Francisco power dealer Jessica Silverman, who also placed a new painting by Loie Hollowell for $450,000 and a work by Trevor Paglen on opening day, alongside works by Judy Chicago ($225,000), Atsushi Kaga ($125,000), a porcelain butterfly-wing sculpture by Rebecca Manson for $120,000 coming from her recent solo and a Kaga work on paper for $26,000. Other major sales included three 2026 paintings by Clare Rojas in the range of $60,000-90,000 each, Hayal Pozanti’s A Sudden Surprise of the Soul (2026) for $80,000, two 2026 paintings by Julie Buffalohead for $50,000-55,000 each, two handmade pigment-on-linen works by Rupy C. Tut for $55,000-90,000 each and two editions of Woody De Othello’s bronze sculpture the unknown has never let me down (2026) for $50,000 each. Also placed were Rebecca Ness’s Abe in the Ring (2026) for $60,000, Andrea Bowers’s 2026 acrylic-on-cardboard work for $38,000, Marilou Schultz’s Bold Fire (2026) for $40,000, three Trevor Paglen photographs for $7,500 each and two works on paper by Koak for $6,000 each. “Day one of Art Basel has proven once again that the Swiss fair is unparalleled in deepening our global relationships,” Silverman told Observer at the end of the day. “We sold 28 works destined for Europe, Asia, and America. Our spacious, prime corner location gave us a fantastic platform to showcase new and historic works by artists on our roster and to connect with curators and collectors.”

Meanwhile, Brussels powerhouse Xavier Hufkens placed Couple (2002), a Louise Bourgeois sculpture of two floating figures embracing, for $2.2 million, three editions of monumental owl sculptures by Thomas Houseago for $550,000 each and several other works. As Hufkens shared in a statement, “Art Basel remains the most important fair of the year… It starts strong, and it stays strong.”

Gladstone also reported strong results, placing a work on paper by Marisa Merz for €500,000, just as the artist is being celebrated with an extensive three-venue survey starting at Castello di Rivoli in Turin. Other sales included an epic painting by Robert H. Colescott ($275,000), one of Elizabeth Peyton’s always-in-demand portraits ($875,000), multiple watercolors by Ugo Rondinone ($55,000-60,000 each), two paintings by Rachel Rose ($65,000 and $35,000), five silver metallic prints by Carrie Mae Weems ($125,000) and a new, captivating painting by Andro Wekua (€100,000).

Upstairs, the booths turned toward the contemporary and grew more ambitious, starting with Esther Schipper’s strong presentation of mixed-media installations, video and a striking new work by Simon Fujiwara inspired by The Birth of Venus. The booth also had works by Anicka Yi, Pierre Huyghe and Philippe Parreno, along with Ryan Gander’s “machine to imagine simultaneous views of multiple characters’ actions, narratives and associations.” Still, the upstairs section felt much quieter than the fair’s more active ground-level traffic.

Perrotin sold more than 41 works on the preview day, including one at $1.5 million, and a further 40 works were already reserved. The opening of the art fair marked the debut of its new collaboration with Danish artist Jeppe Hein, with an entire section of the booth dedicated to his work, including his metallic balloons wrapped within a fully painted wall of his inhale-exhale waves, priced between $10,000 and $400,000.

Italian power dealer Massimo De Carlo confirmed how, even after more than 20 years of showing at Art Basel, the fair remains one of the most important moments of the gallery’s year. “The market is cautious, but we’re seeing positive responses, and you can feel an energy,” he told Observer. “You come here with the artists and the works that represent you, and that’s what we’ve done.” The gallery is presenting a significant new work by John Armleder in Unlimited, while its booth is eclectic and wide-ranging, with a special focus on Italian artist Pietro Roccasalva. There were several sales during the preview, including Elmgreen & Dragset (€200,000-250,000), John Armleder (€100,000-130,000 each for three works), a painting by Pietro Roccasalva (€50,000-100,000), Ferrari Sheppard ($50,000-100,000), Xue Ruozhe (€20,000-50,000) and Lily Stockman ($20,000 each for three works).

New York gallery P•P•O•W sold more than 10 works by Grace Carney, Kyle Dunn, Ishi Glinsky, Hilary Harkness, Sanam Khatibi, David Wojnarowicz and Martin Wong for a combined total in the range of $500,000-750,000, most going to collectors in the U.S., Canada and Norway. The gallery also sold Ishi Glinsky’s Inertia – Here and Home (2026), a large-scale sculpture presented in collaboration with Chris Sharp in the Parcours sector and installed theatrically in a street-facing window gallery on Clarastrasse. Priced at $50,000-75,000, it went to a prominent U.S.-based collector with a private foundation.

South Africa’s Goodman Gallery is celebrating its 60th anniversary at Art Basel, as well as more than four decades showing at the fair (it was notably the first African owned gallery to participate). Anchored by a monumental equestrian sculpture by Yinka Shonibare, the booth has works by key names on the gallery’s roster, and day-one sales included works by William Kentridge, Carrie Mae Weems, Alfredo Jaar, Atta Kwami and Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum.

Filipino gallery Silverlens made its long-awaited debut at Art Basel after more than a decade of trying to get in, the founder told Observer; this was the first Basel appearance for several of its Filipino artists, among them Geraldine Javier, ahead of her New York solo exhibition in September. Particularly striking was her installation Mt. Maculot. “All that you touch, you change. All that you change, changes you.” (Octavia E. Butler) (2025), which brings together 267 pieces of hand-embroidered, eco-printed fabrics, leaves, flowers, natural dyes, threads, treated wood and postcards, with canvases stacked in clusters like trees in a forest to form a mountain. Nearby, her “Shades of Grey” series channels anxiety about the climate crisis through muted grays and blues, punctuated by earthy tones and eco-printed plants, signs of the artist’s still-persistent hope in humanity. Also making her Basel debut with Silverlens was Nicole Coson, who was previously shown by the gallery at Art Basel Miami Beach.

The Kabinett sector also delivered focused, interesting offerings this year. Deborah Schamoni presented a focused installation of significant works by Bracha L. Ettinger, a leading figure in contemporary art and feminist psychoanalytic theory, timed with a pivotal moment in the artist’s career following her recent retrospective at K21 in Düsseldorf, her exhibition at the Centre Pompidou and the publication of a comprehensive monograph with Skira. Installed against a deep blue wall, a chromatic signature of Ettinger’s exhibition practice, the presentation brought together works on paper and canvas that distill her sustained engagement with memory, trauma and relationality. Central to the booth is Angel of Carriance, Medusa n.1 (2017-2023), a work that embodies Ettinger’s concept of “carriance,” or a form of holding-with and caring for the suffering of the other. Prices for paintings have now risen to €40,000-90,000, while drawings remain more accessible at roughly €12,000-15,000.

Another compelling discovery in Kabinett was Zhi Wei, presented by Beijing Commune. Her solo project “Shell” unfolded through textile paintings and soft sculpture, extending across both material and metaphor. At the threshold were snail-like figures, self-protective yet armored, drawing on medieval manuscripts, hermit crabs exchanging borrowed homes and Hermann Finsterlin’s utopian spirals, each suggesting its own crisis of knowledge, existence or humanity. The use of fabric is also tied to her personal material history, as her parents worked in the textile industry: her practice turns fabric into a way of containing entropy, memory and inherited worlds. Works are priced around €34,000.

Colombian gallery Casa Reigner dedicated its Kabinett section presentation to Luz Lizarazo, wrapping the presentation in wallpaper that is, in fact, a “skin” made from women’s nylon stockings, framing her gouaches and sculptures as a meditation on feminine energy, solidarity and the cycles of nature. Titled “The Force of the Feminine,” her versatile body of work—drawings and breasts cast in bronze—references diverse aspects of the feminine realm: intuition, instinct, nurturing essence and sensuality. Through her practice, Lizarazo reveals the strength of the feminine as something deeply tied to life, healing and creation, while pointing to the persistent imbalance between the feminine and the masculine in a society still shaped by patriarchal structures.

But as usual, the boldest presentations are in the curated sectors, Feature in particular, dedicated to discoveries and rediscoveries from the 20th Century. Standing out among the booths, Richard Saltoun presents works by Manina, a recently resurfaced Austrian-Italian Surrealist whose market remains relatively accessible, with prices ranging from roughly $13,000 to $200,000. Born in 1918, Manina began painting in 1946 after meeting Frida Kahlo. Facing rising antisemitism in France, she fled to Los Angeles in 1938 with her husband, the screenwriter Robert Thoeren and remained there for the next decade before moving to New York. Returning to postwar Europe in 1952, first to London then Paris, Manina settled in Venice, where, with her second husband, the French Surrealist poet Alain Jouffroy, she founded the first Surrealist group in the city. Gaining early recognition for her dream-like visions, Manina exhibited at New York’s Hugo Gallery in 1951 alongside René Magritte; the gallery was run by Alexander Iolas. She subsequently exhibited at Jean Cocteau‘s “Galleria Cocteau” at the Jardin du Palais Royal in Paris the following year. André Breton admired her work, though she resisted formally aligning herself with the Surrealist movement. Now newly rediscovered, the gallery is working with the estate to position her as one of the more compelling historical finds in the section.

L.A. gallery Château Shatto is leaning into the work of Aboriginal artists Mabel Juli Wirringgoon, Freddie Timms and Ramsey Ramsey. Given founder Olivia Barrett’s Australian background, the presentation felt like a natural way to tap into the rising institutional and market interest in Aboriginal art. Rooted in ochre tones and deep relationships to land, memory and ancestral knowledge, the works are priced between roughly $18,000 and $60,000, even though the artists are all of the same generation as Emily Kame Kngwarreye, whose works are already in the high six-digit range.

Another standout is Rosa Elena Curruchich, the first female Indigenous artist from Guatemala, presented by Proyectos Ultravioleta. Her grandfather had begun painting to document ceremonies and transmit cultural knowledge, but that visual tradition had largely been reserved for men. As the only female painter in her community, Curruchich at one point faced rejection and even sexual abuse, eventually moving to the outskirts, where she continued painting and turned the practice into a personal mission. The works are much more than folklore: they are intimate acts of witness, preservation and self-assertion. Following her inclusion in Adriano Pedrosa’s Venice Biennale in 2024, her first solo institutional exhibition is now slated to open at MASP in São Paulo in October, adding momentum to a presentation that emphasized small, direct encounters with history, gender and Indigenous memory. All priced at $10,000, the gallery had already sold nine works by evening.

Japan’s Kotaro Nukaga offered another strong rediscovery with Saori Akutagawa, also known as Saori Madokoro, whose dyed-fabric works extend modernist abstraction into the realm of imagination through her fantastical alien figures and cosmic abstractions. Priced between $40,000 and $100,000, the artist has recently been acquired by leading institutions in the country and broader region, including M+ in Hong Kong.

The Premiere sector offers more opportunities for discovery, dedicated to new artistic productions. Particularly compelling here is the intuitive timeline of Dora García presented by La Veronica, in which politics, collective psychology and speculative prediction collapse into an escalating vision of self-destruction. The work moves through projected historical ruptures and future catastrophes: total ecological collapse by 2050, the end of capitalism by 2060, the end of the nuclear family, the abolition of marriage and the end of heteronormativity. The polar bear’s extinction arrives later, in 2100, followed by the precession of the Earth’s poles by 3050 and, finally, total human extinction by the year 10,000. It is both absurd and chilling, an ominous prediction that reads more as a fever chart of contemporary anxieties.

SpazioA from Pistoia, Italy, is spotlighting the work of Chiara Camoni, timed with her Venice Biennale momentum. With works ranging from drawings at €6,000 to sculptures at €25,000 and a full installation priced at €75,000, the presentation shows how her poetic universe can hold together ritual, material intelligence and an almost devotional relationship to collective making, inherited knowledge and interspecies harmonious alliances.

Also in the section, Selma Feriani presented a group of promising Tunisian artists, anchored by a large canvas by Monia Ben Hamouda, priced at €35,000 and timed with her spectacular installation at the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, curated by Fondazione Bvlgari. With her seductively dynamic abstractions, Ben Hamouda’s work confronts her generational Muslim heritage through what she has described as a shamanic process, producing paintings that function as gestural exorcisms of the expectations imposed by tradition and the politicized present. Produced in Tunisia with soil gathered from different regions of the country, then activated through clay, earth and spices thrown onto the canvas, her paintings operate between love and sacrifice, crisis and fragmentation, ancestral memory and its contemporary reactivation through art. The booth also includes Mohamed Amine Hamouda’s tactile woven palm-fiber sculptures, made in response to the oasis of Gabès in southern Tunisia, the only maritime oasis in the Mediterranean. What first appears almost like a tapestry becomes a reminder of the fragility of that ecosystem and an act of resistance and resilience. The works were priced around €20,000. Nearby, Nidhal Chamekh’s sculptures echo Classical art to reflect on Carthaginian history, navigating between archaeology, ecology and the unfinished politics of place.

Statements is the best sector for emerging voices and new findings. Here, Mumbai gallery TARQ debuts at Art Basel, presenting a solo booth by Indian artist Rithika Merchant, whose dense symbolic language draws on myth, cosmology, ecology and female archetypes. Anchored by a multipanel standing screen that becomes a full mythology, her unique luminous works start at $12,000. Merchant’s art is an exercise in mythopoiesis and worldbuilding, her watercolors becoming portals into a parallel reality, her own speculative cosmological universe.

Meanwhile, Jakarta gallery RHO Projects presents a solo booth by Korean collective ikkibawiKrrr with an installation that traces nature and inherited mythologies as a living field populated by almost prehistoric creatures, hybrid beings and animistic presences moving through vegetal and geological worlds. Their charcoal rubbing technique, which they affectionately describe as “rock n’ feel,” becomes a way to touch time through physical contact with weathered stone surfaces. Continuing their focus on stones and places that endure time through their seclusion from urban life, the installation brings together research conducted across South Korea and Central Sulawesi, Indonesia, developed in an ongoing relationship with communities who maintain unbroken proximity to their ancestral lives, rather than treating preserved relics as heritage.

Last but not least, another booth worth stopping at was Egyptian gallery Gypsum’s solo presentation by Egyptian multidisciplinary artist Hana El-Sagini, centered on a sculptural installation of braided bronze forms and wall reliefs that spread through the booth like hair, roots, veins and nervous systems in states of rupture, renewal and growth. Drawing on her experience of breast cancer treatment, El-Sagini explores fragility, resilience and regeneration by casting braids in bronze using the same Cairo foundry that worked with her grandfather, the pioneering modernist sculptor Gamal El-Sagini.

What VIP day at Basel seemed to suggest was a market that remains active but is, more importantly, finding more stable and calibrated ground after the speculative excesses of recent years. “Collectors are ready to buy, but they’re being very selective,” art advisor Adam Green told Observer. “That’s the story of Art Basel and the market more broadly. Demand exists, but it’s focused on high-quality works that are priced right. The result is some galleries are selling well, while others are seeing slower sales.”

As Wendy Olsoff, co-founder of P•P•O•W, put it, collectors are looking beyond trends and speculation to acquire works that seriously grapple with ideas that thoughtfully reflect our current moment. “Whether it’s a painting, weaving, ceramic, or video work, what seems to be resonating most are works that challenge the imagination,” she told Observer. “Galleries that have consistently championed diverse voices with conviction and a clear point of view are also being supported,” she added, noting how fairs, and Art Basel first among them, remain spaces where radical cultures are nurtured and promoted in plain sight. Paris or no Paris, the original Swiss edition continues to confirm its importance as a place to take the temperature not only of a market that is evolving, adapting and restructuring but also of a contemporary culture shifting rapidly alongside a society at a fragile historical juncture of major ruptures. Ideally, art can still contribute to the formation of new ways of seeing as older systems continue to collapse.

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Liste Art Fair opened yesterday, June 15, with an edition that feels markedly more expansive and diverse than its usual German and Eastern European conceptual minimalism—thanks in particular to a group of emerging galleries from Asia and Southeast Asia that brought fresh voices to the conversation. By noon, the aisles were already crowded with collectors, curators, museum directors and arts professionals from across Europe and beyond. “The atmosphere is good; everyone is in good spirits,” Austrian collector Andreas Huber told Observer. Still, on day one, the crowd skewed European, if not largely drawn from the nearby German-Swiss region, with many Italian and French collectors seemingly choosing to skip the opening or drive to Basel later in the weekend for a single-day visit. And the usual sense of urgency was lacking, with none of the opening-day rush to secure the best discoveries that once characterized this fair.

Thematically, at the center of many presentations were explorations of geological and natural time, anthropological and psychological studies of human behavior, the tension between nature, humanity and society’s systems of knowledge and classification, alongside a contemplation of the fragilities of contemporary existence and the indecipherability of a reality under constant threat of manipulation. Seoul-based G Gallery, for example, staged a booth focused on a suspended cosmology around the different rhythms and cycles of matter’s transformation and dissolution. The magmatic paintings of Lim Heejae condense, within a contained canvas, the miracle of creation itself in a fluid drama that unites the earthy and the celestial. These stand in dialogue with the sculptural cosmologies and alchemical compositions of Moon Isaac—fragmentary remains or specimens dispersed in space, waiting to find new form in a continuous cycle. Modestly priced between $800 and $5,000, several small canvases by Heejae were sold or on hold by noon.

Another Korean gallery worth checking out is Cylinder, which, for its third time at Liste Basel, has put together a thoughtfully curated pairing of Jonghwan Lee’s formal exploration of the expressive and pictorial possibilities of materials with Minseo Kang’s embrace of the fragments and ruins that build our storytelling and mythopoiesis over time, pursued and revived with the tradition and precision of tempera. With prices ranging from $2,500 to $7,000 depending on dimensions, the gallery reported strong interest in Lee’s hybrid forest of paintings.

Several galleries from Japan are also participating this year, as the country’s vibrant art scene finally catches up with its long-delayed internationalization. The Waiting Room from Tokyo presents both visceral paintings and more playful textile and soft compositions about the body and identity by young Japanese artist Rikako Kawauchi, as the boundaries between the interior and exterior of the body blur ambiguously through the motif of a spider web. Centered around the large-scale embroidery work House of the Mouth (2026), the presentation organically combines the ball-shaped sculpture Beating (2026), the painting Sew (2025) and multiple drawings, composing the entire booth as a single installation. Prices range from $1,180 to $45,000, with several of the ball sculptures sold by noon at $3,000 each.

Also from Tokyo, Parcel spotlights the suspended, melancholic landscapes of Masamitsu Shigeta. His paintings function as portable cartographies shaped by walking, memory and movement, tracing emotional geographies of the places he traverses, with the frame becoming a portal between physics and imagination. By noon, the gallery had sold half the booth, with paintings priced between $4,000 and $6,000.

Nearby, another Tokyo gallery, Yutaka Kikutake, presents poetic paintings on stone by Tomoya Matsuzaki, conceived as an exploration of the ecosystem and our relationship with the external world—between the material and the immaterial, as suggested by the small found objects placed on threshold-like shelves as offerings. Priced between $4,000 and $16,000, Matsuzaki’s work was paired with wood sculptures by Kineta Kunimatsu, inspired directly by trees and their unique shapes, formed over many years in the rugged northern landscape. Also of note from Japan is the residency program and gallery Numanohashi, which is presenting a duo between Shihui Saito and Toru Otani, both exploring how images emerge from material and surface.

On the Southeast Asian side, a must-stop this year is Yeo Workshop, returning to Liste Basel for a second year with new and recent works by Singapore artists Wei Leng Tay and Brandon Tay. Both examine how images, technologies and inherited systems shape perception, memory and belief. Wei Leng Tay’s new series, Cuts | Traces | Arrangements (2026), begins with archival photographs of ikebana arrangements from a 1963 competition in Penang, Malaysia, in which her mother participated, translating those postwar, postcolonial images through sanding, repetition, digital intervention and installation. Brandon Tay’s sculptures, meanwhile, turn scientific discovery and media infrastructure into speculative mythologies: Serpent Vessel (2025) draws on Friedrich August Kekulé’s dream of the ouroboros and benzene’s ring structure, while Votive Spiral (2025) references the discovery of DNA’s double helix and DOOMSCROLL DREAMACHINE (2025) reframes social media as an altered-state technology. Together, the presentation looks past the surface of images and platforms to ask how our ways of seeing, remembering and believing are actively engineered.

New to Liste and just a year old, ara contemporary from Jakarta has mounted a solo booth by Thai artist Natalie Sasi Organ, “40 40 Home!,” an orchestration of delicate gestures and spiritual symbologies that turns the booth into a fluid playground of collective memory and introspection. Named after a childhood game and rooted in matriarchal connections, the works reflect on visibility, belonging and the desire to inhabit a space of recognition. With prices under $10,000, the artist’s works found international buyers in the art fair’s early hours.

From Taipei, ssspacespace brings together two Taiwanese artists from different generations, Teyu Wang and Sara Wu, whose practices explore space through the body, perception, the conditions of presence and the unstable ground of existence. Poetically titled “Unstable Grounds,” the presentation features fragmented interiors and domestic poetry interrupted by a large inflatable, becoming an intuitive, allegorical rumination on the precarious existential essence of contemporary navigation—through interior psychological space as much as external urban space—continually negotiating spatial conditions, perceptual habits and accumulated histories. Prices range from $1,570 for the small compositions to $24,000 for the large inflatable.

With Asian ties but operating in New York, Yve Yang Gallery drew an impressive response on opening day to its resurfacing of the paintings of William Feaver, a critic, curator and author now in his 83rd year. Feaver has maintained a lifelong painting practice, producing plein air landscapes of northeast England that attracted collectors with accessible prices (between £6,000 and £8,000).

Also Chinese in spirit but based in Berlin and functioning as a bridge between worlds, Hua International brought Italian-born Swiss artist Alfredo Aceto into dialogue with Beijing-based artist Shi Yi. Engaging Craig Owens’s notion of allegory, the two artists examined masculinity and local cultural codes: Aceto’s Tongue Twister fragments the male body, while Bocca con Matita replaces speech with writing through the image of a pencil held between parted lips. In his European debut, Shi Yi merges Chaozhou painting traditions with Western motifs. His works, priced at €3,000, found easy traction, with all four works in the booth sold, two additional works placed from Liste storage, and a Basel private collection acquiring both a small and a larger painting, the latter priced at €9,000. Aceto’s works, all priced at €4,000, are also on view at Basel Social Club and the Swiss Art Awards. The gallery is still looking to place one of his larger bronze sculptures, priced at €16,400.

Several galleries from Turkey are also participating this year. Among them, Pilot Gallery stands out with a booth centered on Turkish artist İrem Tok’s reproduction of the Ephesus library, made from fragments of books. Investigating the fragile archaeology of knowledge, Tok transforms books, atlases and encyclopedias to question what we keep transferring—its weight, its fragility and its distortions—shifting perspectives through details like ants crawling across an atlas and quietly destabilizing the authority of inherited narratives. Works range from $6,000 to $38,000 for the epic book sculpture. The gallery paired her work with that of South Asian Pakistani artist Hamra Abbas, who now works between Boston and Lahore. Having returned to Pakistan to engage more directly with heritage, lineage and the geological memory of place, she uses lapis lazuli—a material central to the great history of Western art but dense with associations of trade, domination and extraction—to portray figures historically linked to lower social status, elevated here through one of the region’s most precious hard stones, turning material itself into a form of dignity, memory and cultural repair.

Also engaging with the alchemical and geological stratification of materials was CrossLypka, the collaborative duo of life partners Tyler Cross and Kyle Lypka, presented by L.A. talent scout Chris Sharp. Neither painting nor sculpture, the works recall Donald Judd’s “specific object” but complicate that lineage through fluid, curvilinear forms rooted in drawing, semiotics and embodied natural time. The free-standing and wall-mounted ceramic sculptures extend the sensuous line of the body into the rugged coastal geology of Northern California, their loamy, alluvial surfaces buffeted smooth by surf and wind. The response was immediate: one work sold on the spot, another was placed on hold, with Sharp telling Observer he had only one left by evening.

A reflection on matter’s relentless movement beyond human control appears in VIN VIN’s booth with the magmatic wood paintings and carvings of Rose Ras, a Haitian-born, Paris-raised artist whose practice turns wood into a living material ecosystem. Working through its layers, resistance and capacity to hold light, Ras draws on volcanic eruptions, explosions and the transformative force of nature to think through rupture, environmental fragility and human impact. Her carved surfaces seem to generate light from within the material itself, as if the work were caught between geological pressure and atmospheric release. Priced between $5,000 and $17,000, the large work sold on day one, with several others on hold. As gallery founder Vincenzo Della Corte confirmed, it is not a feverish market, but the response has been solid. “Liste has been very lively, as always, with very high-quality conversations that have already brought a couple of important opportunities,” he added.

Another compelling reflection on the tension between the anthropological and the natural is offered by the sculptures of Belgian artist Vincent Scheers, presented by Munich gallery Paulina Caspari. Working through hybridity, human-nature entanglement and the slow takeover of manmade systems by natural cycles, Scheers combines discarded film stock, decaying metals, vintage amplifiers and military sound-measuring tools with fragile natural specimens to stage encounters between technologies designed for permanence and forces of organic transformation. Tracing feedback loops of production, obsolescence, decay and renewal, technology here rejoins nature, turning into a mutating landscape itself, as bacteria, fungi, oxidation and erosion become collaborators in a symbiotic process that exposes the fragility of human systems of control, preservation and categorization. Works are priced between $4,000 and $9,000.

Similarly engaging with the potential of materials to carry meaning, the presentation of Barcelona-based gallery Sorondo stages a site-specific dialogue between Russian artist Nikolay Morgunov and Venezuelan artist María Elena Pombo, both exploring material migration, geological displacement and procedural erosion as metaphors for the human condition within world dynamics and time. With works currently on view in “Greater New York” at MoMA PS1, María Elena Pombo’s fossil rubbings crystallize geological and natural time through imprint, asking what the land leaves behind and how ancient tropical fossils can be carried into the present. That question of trace and migration extends into her video, which follows South American women encountering snow for the first time and reflects on the body’s own archive of experience. Meanwhile, Russian-born, Barcelona-based Nikolay Morgunov approaches material through tension, control and release. His work plays with the balance between empty and full, precision and collapse, using grids, coal gestures and resin surfaces to soften the friction between structure and abandonment. One of the most striking pieces was made from 42,000 nails embedded in a punching ball, turning an object of impact and aggression into a dense sculptural field of conflict, pressure and suspended force. Both artists’ works are priced under $15,000, with most under $5,000, despite the conceptual and poetic weight they carry.

The fragility and precarity of daily existence amid social and familial constraints are central to the work of Lithuanian artist Vytautas Kumža, whose glass sculptures and staged objects examine fragility as both a material and psychological condition. Growing up queer in a strict family where emotions could shift without warning, Kumža learned to read the smallest details of behavior and environment as survival cues: a door left open, a gas hob still burning, a frightened dog. He now transforms that hyper-attunement into highly aestheticized, surreal semiotic arrangements that draw on anthropology and psychological studies of human behavior, creating works with immediate visual allure and a deep undercurrent of instability. Priced between €2,500 and €28,000, the works drew strong attention early in the fair, with an edition of four already sold out by noon and several other pieces placed by evening.

Copperfield is part of a strong and growing cohort of more experimental galleries and new voices from London’s expanding art scene at Liste this year, proving both the scene’s vibrancy and its potential. Among them, Gathering presents a philosophically dense solo booth of works by Emanuel de Carvalho, secluded and almost compressed by an imposing five-meter-long metal structure at its entrance. Titled lack archē, the monolithic steel barrier finished with a slate-black patina emerged from the artist’s ongoing collaboration with French philosopher Catherine Malabou and reflects on the concept of anarchy while drawing on Jacques Derrida’s philosophy of inaccessibility. Its imposing presence, at first, nearly obscures the only other work in the booth—a large, dark, gray-toned painting—prompting a reflection on how perception shapes thought and asking how what we see, or fail to see, structures consciousness itself. Referencing the visual architecture of Portugal’s postwar authoritarian regime, the booth turns obstruction into method: the more one looks, the less one understands. Walls disorient, barriers become watchtowers and ambiguity becomes a catalyst for reflection in an age of information control and obscurity.

Also from London, Indigo + Madder brings to the fair the symbolically dense, dreamlike and fluid painterly surfaces of Indian artist Noorain Inam. Developed over the past year, this new body of work began with a hillside fall that briefly overturned perception: sky inverted, a branch appearing like a hand, lights flickering at the edges of vision. From that suspended moment, Inam builds an exploration of gravity, memory and imagination, creating uncanny, destabilizing phantasmagorical worlds in which identity, belonging, personal experience and symbolic storytelling allow both the personal and collective subconscious to surface.

The now one-year-old Soho gallery TINA is at the fair for the first time, extending its current London solo presentation of Scottish artist Katie Shannon. Through sculptures and two-dimensional works shaped by Glasgow’s psychological atmosphere, Shannon addresses social oppression, gentrification and the politics of labor, exposing exhausted civic infrastructures, social collapse and cultural detritus while tracing the compression and depression produced by urban displacement.

Strong as always at Liste is the presence of galleries and artists from Eastern Europe. Among them, Bucharest’s Catinca Tabacaru Gallery presents a solo booth by Somaliland artist Najaax Harun, whose expansive storytelling examines women’s oppression, patriarchal structures and the erasure of identity in postwar Somaliland. Across 10 paintings staged dramatically within a precarious wooden structure and priced at up to $10,000, Harun’s storytelling unfolds as a space suspended between history and narrative. Reworking Herbert Bayer’s idea of “expanded vision,” painting here recovers stories submerged within collective memory, confronting contested notions of belonging, social memory and gendered visibility while also reflecting on masculinity as a performative construction.

At first glance, the more playful booth is Megan Dominescu’s presentation of cartoonish, hallucinatory textiles at Anca Poterasu Gallery, but these works carry a sharper social bite. Working in tapestry, Dominescu turns human behavior into satirical, self-contained narratives that swing between absurdity and alarm, using irony to address feminist politics, climate anxiety, gentrification, consumerism and the performative rituals of online culture. The unstable, electric psychological voltage of her eccentric textile worlds speaks clearly from the perspective of a generation that inherited a collapsing economy and learned to process it through the frantic, distorting pulse of social media.

Based in New York but with a sharp eye on the Eastern European scene, Margot Samel presents a solo booth by Estonian painter Mariann Metsis, whose work explores the unstable, fragile ground between perception, memory and performance. Through a process of wiping, reworking and returning to an image, Metsis brings each painting to a state that feels at once familiar and unsettled, hovering in a blurred zone of indecipherability and potential—like a hallucination just beginning to form or an intuition already slipping away. Staged in a horizontal sequence at the same height, the works create a single line through the booth that reads like a fragmented Greek theater: episodic, unresolved and cut into scenes that suggest connection without ever settling into narrative. Priced from $5,000 to $9,500, the paintings attracted strong interest on the fair’s first day.

The nightmares of contemporary life return with greater force in the works of Ukrainian artist Alina Kleytman and Polish painter Jędrzej Bieńko, presented by Warsaw’s Gunia Nowik Gallery. The booth brings sculpture and painting into an immersive, uncanny confrontation around corporeality, trauma and transformation. Kleytman, born in Kharkiv in 1991, defines her practice as “hysterical realism,” transforming everyday and war-derived materials into grotesque, seductive sculptural forms that balance dark irony, mourning, violence and power. Opposite them, Bieńko’s blurry, ghostly faces and atmospheric paintings on raw linen operate like membranes or stages, turning the booth into a psychologically charged space where traumatic memories appear to flicker in and out of focus. Prices in the booth ranged from $7,000 to $25,000.

Overall, Liste’s presentations revealed a global generation openly confronting many of the anxieties and ruptures of the present moment. Early sales across price points and media suggested that collectors are willing to engage with the questions these works pose, even as a new buying confidence appears to be accompanied by greater selectivity. The strongest response could be seen in booths showcasing informed, materially engaged practices that felt urgent given the current social conditions rather than merely aligned with market trends.

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On the heels of the $96 million, all-time record-setting Collection of Jean & Terry de Gunzburg – Design Masters sale led by Claude Lalanne’s $33.5 million mirrors, Sotheby’s June Design Week generated a combined $27,568,552 across a three-day series of auctions. The summer auction round kicked off on June 9 with the $8.8 million Art & Design from the Collection of Barbara Gladstone sale, followed by the $10.5 million Of Form and Color: Art and Design from the Emmanuel de Bayser Collection sale on June 10, with the $17.07 million Important Design sale on June 11, which presented pieces from the defining aesthetic movements of the 20th and 21st Centuries. Meanwhile, Phillips’ Design sale on June 12 realized $2.9 million, with an 89.5 percent sell-through across its 76 lots, with most meeting or exceeding their high estimates.

Barbara Gladstone’s eye for design

Opening the June design round, the highly anticipated trove of 140 lots from legendary dealer Barbara Gladstone squarely met its presale estimate of $6.9-10 million with a solid group of design, prints and photographs that proved how her eye for fine and pioneering practices extended well beyond her ability to pick and champion artistic talent. Most of the design pieces in the sale exceeded estimates, led by one of Jean Prouvé’s most desirable sideboards, the BA-12, dated circa 1948, which fetched $294,400 against a $120,000-180,000 estimate. Emile-Jacques Ruhlmann’s pair of “Rendezvous Pêcheurs de Truite” armchairs more than quadrupled their high estimate, selling for $140,800 (est. $20,000-30,000), while Greta Magnusson-Grossman’s low table climbed to $20,480 from a $5,000-7,000 estimate. Other top lots included Jean Royère’s occasional table, which, after several seasons of strong results, easily exceeded its estimate to sell for $40,960 (est. $25,000-35,000), while a table lamp by Mathieu Matégot doubled its high estimate, achieving $20,480, as did the Alexandre Noll lamp, which sold for $38,400 (est. $10,000-15,000). A fantastical Otto Schulz “Paradise” cabinet sold for $44,800, well above its $20,000-30,000 estimate. A pair of “Tre Pezzi” armchairs by Italian designers Franco Albini and Franca Helg sold for $24,320, surpassing a $12,000-18,000 estimate.

The top lot by value, however, was on the art side: Richard Prince’s Medusa from his Hood series, which landed within estimate at $1,024,000 with fees. But the other highly anticipated lot, Alex Katz’s portrait Halsey 9 (2022), was withdrawn after failing to find a buyer within its $400,000-600,000 estimate.

The artworks in the sale, which outnumbered the design pieces, tended to blur the line between categories. One was the set of six unique “Elliptoeder” chairs by artist Franz West, which sold for $70,400 against a $30,000-50,000 estimate, followed by a table that sold for $24,320. Two “Bunter Stuhls” by West also sold at around the high estimate for $16,640.

Opening the sale, a fresh-to-auction minimal black-and-white graphite-on-paper composition by American abstract painter Myron Stout, dated 1976, fetched $128,000 against a modest $5,000-7,000 estimate, while a pair of ceramic vases by Italian artist Fausto Melotti nearly doubled their high estimate to sell for $23,200. Carroll Dunham’s oil on linen, which Gladstone had acquired directly from the artist in 2015 after showing it at the gallery in 2012, met its high estimate, selling for $358,400, as did Alpha, which sold for $294,500 with fees, and Amy Sillman’s painting sold for $230,400 with fees. An additional Prince painting sold for $166,400, and another, Which Side Are You On?, achieved $256,000, while an ink-on-paper work by Polish artist Alina Szapocznikow—acquired by Gladstone from Parisian Galerie Loevenbruck, which is currently staging a show of the artist—flew to $61,440, doubling a $30,000 high estimate.

Lygia Clark’s seminal 1964 Estrutura de caixas de fósforos met its high estimate at $121,600, and the Daniel Buren, with an estimate on request, sold for $134,400. Gladstone also had iconic Yayoi Kusama pumpkins in her collection, with a larger signed and dated 1983 example selling at $153,600 with fees, and a group of three selling for $230,400 against a $60,000-80,000 estimate. Several ceramic pieces in the selection performed well amid the current market enthusiasm for the medium. Among them, a group by William J. O’Brien, who has also shown at the gallery, all met or exceeded estimates, with an untitled piece fetching $16,640 against a $2,500-3,500 estimate. Also selling for well above estimate were two elaborately magmatic ceramic works by Japanese artist Takuro Kuwata, which landed at $17,920 (est. $4,000-6,000) and $24,320 (est. $2,000-3,000), while a ceramic work by Simone Leigh sold within estimate for $51,200.

A colorful ceramic group piece by Thomas Schütte, which Gladstone included in a 2021 show staging a dialogue between the German artist, Alighiero Boetti and Richard Long, eventually achieved $307,200, but the golden one, Eierkopf, halb, was unsold. Also failing to find buyers were the 1.5-meter circular mirror surface by Anish Kapoor, estimated at $350,000-450,000, a Liz Larner sculpture and another Amy Sillman, estimated at $15,000-20,000. George Condo’s 1984 Madonna of Grapes also failed to sell at its $150,000-200,000 estimate, despite the fact that a few lots earlier, the gold-framed drawing Clown went well beyond its estimate, selling for $166,400. Overall, the sale brought the total value of the Gladstone collection to roughly $27.3 million, combining with the $18.5 million already achieved by a 12-lot selection Sotheby’s closed white-glove in May 2025, above its $11.9-17.2 million estimate.

Emmanuel de Bayser’s collection of a lifetime

Sotheby’s proceeded with its design round the next day with the collection of design connoisseur Emmanuel de Bayser, a series of masterpieces once housed in his Paris and Berlin residences. De Bayser has said he started collecting design at only 20 years old, beginning with American designers such as Charles and Ray Eames, as well as contemporary pieces and historic postwar works, later adding pieces by Jean Prouvé. Most of the lots performed beyond expectations, starting with the group of three Line Vautrin mirrors, which sold above estimates for $61,440, $82,200 and $96,000, respectively. Among the top lots were some of the most sought-after names in French design: two of François-Xavier Lalanne’s iconic moutons sold for $576,000 and $384,500, well above their $250,000-350,000 estimate. Designs by Alberto Giacometti performed equally well, with a pair of “Étoile” table lamps selling for $294,400 (est. $220,000-280,000) and the “Étoile” floor lamp for $243,200 (est. $175,000-225,000).

The sale included a full group of diverse design and sculptural objects by Georges Jouve, representing the heart of de Bayser’s collection—one of the most exceptional private holdings of the master ceramist. Leading the 70-lot group was a large ceramic sculpture, dated 1958, that fully demonstrated Jouve’s ability to engage with contemporaries such as Henry Moore and Hans Arp through his use of organic forms inspired by nature and an emphatic attunement to his surroundings. Estimated at $70,000-100,000, it sold for $256,000.

Results for other items, from vases to lamps to sculptural seating, were in the five- to six-digit range, generally at or above estimate, with one table lamp selling for $74,240. The sale also included icons of French postwar design, among them seven Standard chairs by Jean Prouvé, considered one of the clearest expressions of his design philosophy. Estimated at $8,000-12,000, they doubled or exceeded estimates, selling for prices ranging from $23,040 to $35,840 for blue versions, with another group of four sold together for $70,000. The colored versions generally perform much better, tending to feel more immediately tied to postwar optimism and institutional modernism than their black or gray counterparts. Other iconic pieces from Prouvé’s multilevel universe, such as the “Visiteur” armchairs, also went above estimate, achieving $166,400 and $230,400 against a $120,000-180,000 estimate.

Pierre Jeanneret’s three-piece “Easy” suite sold for $153,600, more than doubling its $40,000-60,000 estimate. All his other pieces sold above estimate as well, including his file rack ($35,840), the white public bench ($19,200) and two committee armchairs, with the green example going for $32,000 and the red for $40,960, each against a much more modest $7,000-10,000 estimate. On the contemporary side, the two pieces by Rick Owens also exceeded estimates, with a “Brazier” table selling for $10,240 (est. $3,000-5,000) and the pair of “Stag T” stools selling for $35,840 (est. $12,000-18,000). As in the Gladstone sale, figures moved fluidly between categories, with Alexandre Noll’s wood sculptures selling for $83,200 and $32,000, respectively, following strong results for the artist-designer in the recent de Gunzburg sale. More prominent contemporary names, however, failed to find buyers among what seemed to be a predominantly design-oriented audience, with both Daniel Buren’s Cercle coloré vert and a Günther Förg going unsold despite being elegantly paired with French masters in de Bayser’s home. The Jannis Kounellis was withdrawn before the sale, and only the blue Anish Kapoor found a buyer, close to its high estimate at $32,000.

Giacometti, Royère and the blue-chip design chase

Sotheby’s Important Design auction brought more of the most sought-after names from both the 20th and 21st Centuries, as confirmed by recent results. Leading the evening was Diego Giacometti’s “Promenade des Amis” console, which surpassed its high estimate to sell for $5.3 million, eclipsing the previous record set at Christie’s by another variant, dated 1976, from the Edlis Neeson collection, which sold in November for $3.98 million. Another example had just been withdrawn from Sotheby’s evening sale in May with an estimate of $2.5 million.

Several works by Jean Royère, who also performed well in the Jean and Terry de Gunzburg sale in December, were offered and all surpassed their estimates: the rare low table at lot 2 sold for $320,000 against a $200,000 high estimate, a rare “Chevron” three-piece sofa suite sold above high estimate for $640,000 and a “Flaque” low table sold for $448,000. Well above estimate, the sofa and green “Oeuf” armchair fetched $716,800 (est. $300,000-500,000) and $217,600 (est. $100,000-150,000), respectively, while the “Trèfle” floor lamp achieved $435,200 and the pair of armchairs sold for $192,000.

At Phillips, craft, ceramics and contemporary names

Closing the week, Phillips’ Design sale brought the auction house $2,925,333, with 89.5 percent sell-through across its much smaller 76-lot sale. “We saw a very focused and confident sale, with the strongest competition centering on designers like Georges Jouve, Jean Prouvé, and Paavo Tynell, where rarity and sculptural presence really drove interest,” Beth Vilinsky, Phillips’ Senior International Specialist, Design and Senior Vice President, told Observer. “What felt particularly significant was the strength of fresh-to-market works with strong provenance—from important private collections and longstanding holdings—which is always a privilege to bring forward and clearly resonated with collectors,” she added, noting how ultimately it was a sale where the best works didn’t just perform but commanded real attention, with collectors competing for exceptional, often extremely rare pieces.

Leading the evening was Harry Bertoia’s Untitled (Sonambient), dated circa 1975, which fetched $251,550 from an initial estimate of $100,000-150,000. The piece is not only a sculpture but a sounding instrument, part of Bertoia’s late-career body of work in which metal becomes structure, atmosphere and music at once: combining visual, sonic and kinetic properties, Bertoia arranged vertical metal rods on a base so that, when touched, brushed, struck or moved by air, they vibrate against one another and produce resonant tones. Four other works by Bertoia that followed also exceeded estimates, selling for $67,080, $24,510, $25,800 and $77,400, respectively. Strong in this sale as well were ceramics and design attentive to craftsmanship, with a selection of sculptural ceramics by Georges Jouve opening the sale, all surpassing expectations, led by a large mirror that sold for $245,000, more than quadrupling the low estimate.

Strong demand was confirmed once again for the work of British ceramic artist Lucie Rie, with a footed bowl selling for $58,050 against a $10,000 estimate, alongside ceramic works by Hans Coper and Jennifer Lee, which found buyers for $23,220 and $16,770, respectively. Speaking post-sale, Vilinsky attributed this to a broader shift toward more expressive, art-led approaches. Rie’s cumulative auction sales over the past 26 years reached $12.23 million, with her current record at €406,800, set by Bonhams Cornette de Saint Cyr in Paris in December 2023 for a footed bowl circa 1980, surpassing the previous benchmark of £330,200 set just a month earlier at Phillips London in November 2023, when another Rie footed bowl from 1981 sold far above its £50,000-£80,000 estimate.

Momentum continued for French postwar design at Phillips as well, with Jean Prouvé’s “Flavigny” table selling for $193,500 against an estimate of $80,000. Also performing extremely well were all the pieces by Elizabeth Garouste and Mattia Bonetti, key figures in late 20th-century French collectible design who helped pull design away from polite modernist restraint and back toward fantasy, theatricality, craft and historical eclecticism: their “Rodéo” desk and armchair from 1990 went well above its modest estimate of $30,000-50,000, selling for $167,500, alongside a “La Nôtre” cabinet and a pair of library table lamps, both landing above estimate for $41,280 and $30,960, respectively.

Better results, with 100 percent sold, were also reached at Phillips for both generations of Nakashima design and organic elegance, led by a rare and early “Conoid” bench with a single free-form arm, dated 1961, by George Nakashima, which hit its high estimate to sell within its $120,000-180,000 range.

Italian design also found better results, despite still offering clear space for true bargains. One was a unique brutalist yet elegant marble table designed by Carlo Scarpa in collaboration with Marcel Breuer, the “Delfi” table from the “Ultrarazionale” series, selling at its high estimate for an accessible $6,192. A few lots later, the “Cornaro” sofa, also from the “Ultrarazionale” series by Scarpa, fetched $20,640 from a much more modest estimate of $6,000-8,000, and his Mirror, model no. 77 achieved $47,730, more than doubling its $15,000-20,000 estimate. By contrast, an early version of the Mendini “Poltrona di Proust” armchair barely met its low estimate, selling for $28,000.

Turning to American modernism, both T.H. Robsjohn-Gibbings pieces also surpassed estimates, with a set of eight “Klismos” chairs, model no. 3, achieving $64,500 and two “Diphros” stools, model nos. 1 and 20, reaching $23,220 against their $5,000-7,000 estimate. Another notable result came from Finnish master Paavo Tynell, with a rare floor lamp, model no. 9620, soaring to nearly seven times its estimated selling price at $103,200.

Contemporary design is also rising, as the Phillips sale confirmed, with superstar Vincenzo De Cotiis hitting a new high—helped by his position in the ecosystem of design powerhouse Carpenters Workshop Gallery and by the growing appetite for contemporary collectible design that looks unique, materially intense and interior-ready. His low table, model no. DC1716, from the “Baroquisme” series (2017), achieved $70,950 against a $20,000-30,000 estimate, eclipsing the previous auction record of $51,200 set earlier this year. Another contemporary studio also found a new auction record, with Studio Diurne’s carpet from the “Géométrie” 2022 series achieving $10,965 against a $4,000-6,000 estimate. Both Rick Owens design pieces surpassed estimates as well, with a “Plug” coffee table selling for $20,640 (est. $10,000-15,000) and his “Half Box” chair reaching $38,700 (est. $10,000-15,000).

Overall, this summer design session in New York confirmed both the strength of the category and the breadth of the market, with active and dynamic demand from connoisseurs and newcomers alike pursuing works from both historical and new creators, demonstrating the potential of a market that has seen growing appreciation and valuations in less than a decade.

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Asian Americans account for only 1 percent of reported cultural engagement, making them the least supported community in New York. Civil Art—an organization that supports API artists, art writers, and cultural professionals—was founded on a desire to change that. Behind it is Korean American artist Ho Jae Kim, who founded Civil Art in the aftermath of the pandemic while pursuing his career as a painter. Since then, he has grown the organization into one with an impact that extends beyond the art world. Between Civil Art’s founding in 2022 and 2025, the organization has raised $755,832 without a development fund, solely through community support. It has created more than 140 opportunities for API creatives and welcomed more than 2,000 visitors to its exhibitions and events. (Of the total funds raised, more than $150,000 was granted to local community organizations working directly with Asian Americans.) And its Community Platform has produced more than 30 online articles, 14 educational events, six exhibitions, four major community activation events and two print publications, creating new spaces for expression, sharing and visibility.

Civil Art grew out of Kim’s conviction that art is not simply visual culture but an extension of humanity, philosophy and communal life. “The way I learned to love art was not just through the visuals, but also through the history of how people really bleed into something, to the point where they build communities, share ideas, and ultimately change how people see the world,” Kim tells Observer as we walk through his Brooklyn studio. “I have always been interested in how art can contribute to society, to the way we feel and the way we think.” This way of thinking about creation informs his own studio practice, which he sees as a contemporary way of revisiting humanism. “Artists do not always have the ability to bridge that encounter with the public.”

From June 18 to 30, Civil Art is hosting “Luminous Path,” a curated selling exhibition at Christie’s, part of an ongoing partnership that began in 2022. Curated by Aleesa Pitchamarn Alexander, Kathy Huang, Peter Kahng, Ho Jae Kim and Carla Shen, the show features artwork by promising and established names from Asia and its diaspora, with pieces that consider the exhibition’s theme in both material and concept.

Kim’s experience as an immigrant has shaped the organization’s mission. While studying at RISD, art history made the world feel limitless, but in the wider world, he encountered a harsher reality: “You almost believed you could do it, that you could change people, but outside of the classroom, it was very different—especially for someone who grew up with financial and family circumstances like mine.” He saw firsthand how difficult it was to access the resources, opportunities and networks needed to build a creative career. “The path to becoming an artist, or pursuing anything in the creative field, is already very difficult. On top of that, for minorities whose histories have been invisible for a long time, there is also a lack of resources and opportunities.”

During COVID, amid hardship for artists and the surge of racism targeting the Asian American community, Kim cold-pitched Christie’s about organizing a fundraising exhibition for Asian American artists and community organizations. Civil Art did not yet exist; he just wanted to find a way to sell art, raise awareness of Asian artists and direct support back to the community. “I knew a few people at Christie’s at the time, so I wrote to them and said, ‘I think this is the time when we can do something for my community through some of the resources and facilities that you have.’ Luckily, that idea was accepted,” he recounts.

The resulting exhibition, “At the Table,” featured around 40 works by Asian American artists and raised more than $200,000, with part of the proceeds going to the artists and part donated to Heart of Dinner, a nonprofit supporting elderly Asian Americans living in poverty. “With this fundraising exhibition format, I realized we could actually give back directly to people in my community who needed support,” says Kim, adding that putting together that first exhibition helped him see that what he had previously understood as his own lack of access was, in fact, a shared experience. The missing piece was not desire or talent, but a platform.

After “At the Table,” he formalized that platform in Civil Art, which he launched with three co-founders: Sarah Han, Matthew Capasso and Rachel Ng. Han brought gallery experience, while Capasso and Ng were working at Christie’s and helped co-produce the first initiative. Today, Kim serves as CEO while maintaining his studio practice. His early co-founders are now part of the board.

The organization is still focused on supporting Asian and Asian American artists but recognizes Asia as a broad, diverse category rather than a single cultural designation. “One of our long-term efforts is to feature the full, diverse spectrum of our community,” Kim is quick to say. “The most important things are visibility, awareness and a community platform, through exhibitions, book publishing, educational and exhibition walkthroughs.”

Rather than operating as a traditional nonprofit that raises and distributes funds, Civil Art is a multilevel community-building ecosystem. “It came from the necessity of sustainability,” he explains. “I literally started this when I had $40 in my pocket.” Through collaborations not just with artists and Christie’s but also other businesses and organizations such as East West Bank, ELOREA, Ace Hotel, Le Mieux, the Yang Won Sun Foundation and the YS Kim Foundation, among others, Civil Art was able to strategize and build collectively, even when the organization was essentially still an abstract idea. “By myself, I did not have the ability, but in this way, we became a community, an ecosystem, almost an epicenter where many different interdisciplinary fields could come together, share networks, resources, ideas and awareness and grow together.”

In 2026, Civil Art is projected to reach a million-dollar milestone, raised through a combination of individual donations, corporate sponsorships, ticket sales and other initiatives. Corporate sponsors that provide financial or in-kind support can write off contributions, which Kim says is a strong incentive.

Over time, the Civil Art community has expanded, and Kim credits its success in part to the leadership of Han, Capasso, and Ng, along with Robert Dunn, Anne-Laure Lemaitre, Daniel Liu, Soo Lee, Kat Huang, Megan Noh, Ho Joon Kim, Steve Juh and Sam Hyun. Finding mentors has been crucial—one of the best questions someone asked Kim early on was: “Who suffers if Civil Art does not exist?” and his answer “became a pillar, the background for why we wanted to create programming that actually makes a life-changing impact on people’s lives.

Civil Art continues to serve as a community platform that supports public exhibitions, publishing, events and programs that build awareness and allow audiences to encounter Asian Pacific Islander artists. It has also branched out into professional pipeline programs, which offer potentially life-changing support for artists and arts workers in the early stages of their careers. “We wanted to go beyond featuring and awareness, and create something that could be a key moment in someone’s journey,” says Kim.

The organization’s first pipeline program is Art House, an emerging artist leadership program for API artists who recently graduated from college. “We tried to be the bridge that helps them assimilate into New York City, while also receiving educational materials, opportunities and community-building that they may not readily have coming out of school,” Kim explains. Workshops are among the most important components of the program; these cover legal issues such as consignment agreements, taxes, budgeting, LLC formation, grant writing, professional email setup, archiving, packing and shipping. “I personally taught some artist toolkits, such as how to start a professional email linked to your website, how to archive work and how to package work so that you can self-ship when necessary. From my personal experience, there are a lot of elements outside of just painting that schools do not teach.” Participants also connect directly with galleries about studio visits and professional opportunities. “They hear from the gallery perspective what they look for when they visit studios and how artists can leverage those studio visits so that they can turn into opportunities.”

The Art House program guarantees participants at least one group exhibition and is now developing an alumni component in which former participants curate exhibitions for other artists, moving from receiving support to creating opportunities for others. Artists are selected through open calls, recommendations and outreach. “We cannot help everyone, so we want to make sure that the people who really want to make it have the resources,” Kim explains.

Civil Art also runs an internship program for emerging writers, curators and arts professionals, with opportunities in programming, development, design, video editing and writing. Because the organization partners with major cultural and corporate entities, interns gain direct experience working on projects with organizations such as Christie’s and Rockefeller Center. Several past participants have gone on to significant roles or further study, including positions at Hauser & Wirth and MASSIMODECARLO.

What has remained constant since Civil Art’s founding is Kim’s desire to create space for Asian Pacific Islander artists and to archive their work, while resisting trend-based visibility. Only the structure has evolved, with Civil Art growing to create systems of support capable of changing the course of an artist’s or arts worker’s life. “In the beginning, I hoped Civil Art could be one way for people to access and become aware of the living talents who are really shaping the world,” explains Kim. “What we have learned and grown into is creating a structure that generates real impact, changing people’s lives.”

He sees Civil Art as providing the kind of infrastructure he wishes he had earlier in his own career. Many talented people, he argues, do not leave the field because they lack ambition or ability but because they lack the network, resources or professional support to survive difficult moments. Civil Art aims to intervene before life circumstances place “an expiration date on a person’s dream.”

Looking ahead, Kim hasn’t ruled out Civil Art expanding into other cities, especially those with large Asian Pacific Islander communities, such as Los Angeles. “I think we have the formula,” he says. “Art House is replicable in different cities, as long as there are the right leaders who want to support it. That is the long-term vision.” But for now, however, the priority remains sustainability: building enough funding to support a small staff and reduce the operational burden currently carried by Kim and others.

Civil Art’s partnership with Christie’s continues this month with another fundraising exhibition structured as a private sale. It’s the third iteration of the partnership, and this edition will be intergenerational for the first time, with work by artists including Dabin Ahn, Gahee Park, Amanda Phingbodhipakkiya, Maia Cruz Palileo, Melissa Joseph, Hiba Schahbaz and Sung Hwa Kim, many of whom donated their work directly. Kim reached out to many of the artists and worked with a curatorial committee that included Peter Kahng, Carla Shen, Aleesa Pitchamarn Alexander and Kathy Huang to build the roster. Christie’s also helped identify artists through its own network. “It will be a very diverse show,” Kim says. “My hope is to show the expansion and legacy of art history through the lens of living Asian American artists who are really at the forefront of the art market and their careers. We wanted to show that space.”

Because Civil Art is not large enough to organize galas, these exhibitions are key to gathering and activating corporate, philanthropic and community support, following the same model it launched with: a significant portion of the proceeds are returned to the artists, and part is donated to a local Asian American nonprofit. Proceeds from this exhibition will be shared with Apex for Youth, a move Kim says is about bridging art and humanity. “That is why the name Civil Art makes sense. I really believe that art is an extension of humanity. We have all the right pieces of the puzzle to do something meaningful. We just need to connect them.”

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Francesca Mollett swiftly captured the attention of curators and collectors with her magmatic abstractions, which evoke and embrace the pure alchemical magic of painting to mimic the perpetual flow of matter and energy—the origins of everything. Her canvases create sensory and poetic, almost whimsical spaces, exploring how purely abstract landscapes and mindscapes can still evoke and provoke subtle sensations, hallucinations and visions tied to our relationship with the physical world.

We met as she was finishing the installation of her latest show at GRIMM in New York, where Mollett described her process as beginning with structure but remaining open to accident, sensation and revision. Her first decisions are often formal: areas of density and the dynamic between different spatial fronts. From there, works develop through layering, interruptions and adjustments, as she moves in and out of the work mentally as much as physically. Light becomes an important indicator in establishing the composition. “There might be an idea of light, then a shift and then a very deep darkness. That becomes the starting structure,” she explained. “I’m quite interested in the relation to space, and in how the body is involved.”

Although abstract, her paintings, through their almost architectural accumulation of layers, eventually suggest natural or urban landscapes in which the body is implied and invited. Mollett’s physical involvement, particularly in the larger formats, is a vital part of the process. Large canvases may begin on the wall but are often leaned or repositioned so that she can reach them differently, building them up layer by layer, their dense surfaces retaining traces that feel almost fossilized. “I quite like this idea of entanglement with painting,” she said. “With a palette knife, you can take parts off and smooth them, so the material is always changing.”

She intentionally treats paint as active matter, exploring how colors emerge as pigments blend, are removed and pulled across the surface, alternating between excavation and addition: “Colors emerge through sensation. One color suggests another, or I try to introduce something unexpected.”

Mollett’s lines and charcoal marks are often still visible because they preserve a provisional quality, bringing “lightness into contrast with the density of the painted surface.” Hers is an almost collage-like technique, a continuous problem-solving during which she breaks open the space, introducing pauses within fields of gestural, tactile color.

While some of her works suggest interiors, landscapes or figures, she does not begin with a literal image in mind. On the contrary, the paintings themselves seem to generate images after the fact—forms that surface from the subconscious. Each painting is a series of thresholds, moments and places that exist to give matter to form: transitory sensations that find shape only within the space of mental elaboration and identification. In this way, Mollett’s work is a continuous interrogation of how to move between what is perceived and imagined, which then resolves into a symbolic form or concept or world.

She admits this might be related to memory and the subconscious. “When you are painting, you can remember different versions of the painting before it changed. You are aware of the past painting and how it might still be present,” she reflected. “I find the composition in the process. I might have a strong idea for some parts, but then the painting changes.”

One work in the GRIMM show, Arrow to Arrow (2026), is connected to a real place near her house: a bridge over a buried canal. Yet through light, the surrounding structure has disappeared. “There is a kind of tension in erasing everything and restarting,” explained Mollett. “I like to let things emerge. Sometimes I keep something because it has appeared almost accidentally, like a sample or fragment that opens onto something else.”

In her smaller paintings, changes in register occur more dramatically, as she often works in intervals, adding a layer and then leaving the painting alone for a long time. In larger works, the space can expand into something more atmospheric or architectural. Growing up in the countryside outside London, nature also is an important undercurrent in Mollett’s work—an image and atmosphere she has simply internalized and tries to find through the process. Yet she clarified that her paintings do not depict nature literally, but instead find a kind of radiance in the light, shadow, atmosphere and a sense of spatial pressure.

For the exhibition at GRIMM, she wanted each painting to feel distinct, which made the installation especially challenging. The works can certainly be taken in individually, but they also form a path or sequence when placed together. There is a continuous tension between light and shadow, the abstract and the recognizable, between the indecipherability of more undefined layered surfaces and images that offer stronger hints of landscape, interior or figure. Light, Mollett pointed out, is the only connective element and the most important one.

Throughout our conversation, she emphasized that she approaches painting as a record of perception, mimicking the way we encounter the world. It is an exercise of embodied sensation through painting that connects with French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology: perception as a fluid negotiation between the eye, the body and the world. In Mollett’s work, vision is never stable or purely optical; instead, she depicts the world as it comes into our senses, before it hardens into knowledge. The painting surface becomes a threshold where matter and consciousness meet and where color, memory, body, sensation and the mind’s impulse to make meaning out of unstable forms and transitory sensations converge: magmatic mindscapes of how we navigate the world.

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This year, June Art Fair appears absent from that orbit, with no 2026 updates posted as of publication. Liste, meanwhile, returns as the essential satellite for emerging galleries, younger artists and discoveries, while Basel Social Club, now in its fifth edition, offers an even more casual counterpoint, with its no-booth, social gathering format staged inside a vacant multi-story office building. It also has the advantage of being the week’s de facto after-hours headquarters, open until 3 a.m. with parties, drinks and DJ sets.

Still, Basel is worth returning to year over year in part because of the city’s first-rate institutions and museums—37 of them, which is an absurdly high number for a city of its size. This year, you’ll find exhibitions of artists working in speculative, experimental realms and engaging with technology to imagine alternative futures at the center of Basel’s institutional programming. (The emphasis on tech and the digital world aligns neatly with Art Basel’s digital sector, Zero 10, which makes its Basel debut next week after headline-generating editions in Miami and Hong Kong, curated by Eli Shein with art/tech pioneer Trevor Paglen.) Here are our picks for the shows to add to your Basel itinerary: 

Cao Fei’s “Testimonies to the Near Future”

• Kunstmuseum Basel; through October 11, 2026

The largest European survey of pioneering Chinese digital artist Cao Fei, “Testimonies to the Near Future” transforms the museum’s Gegenwart building into an alternative virtual city that brings together three decades of the artist’s expansive worldbuilding across installations, films, virtual worlds and game-based works. Spread over four floors, the labyrinthine exhibition translates Fei’s immersive parallel reality into a highly theatrical setting, where interactive elements from everyday city life become part of a speculative fiction and role play that encourages a more critical reading of the rapid technological, urbanistic and semiotic changes that, in just a few decades, have completely overturned the rhythms and habits of daily existence. Her videos and partly game-based environments are situated in factories, dreamscapes and visions of the future, inviting audiences to explore labor, transformation and the peculiar beauty of a globalized world while addressing questions of identity, embodiment and memory raised by these new dynamics. Since the 1990s, Cao Fei has pursued a relentless exploration of today’s “liquid society,” questioning modes of production, communication and experience in the new global media and technological age. While Fei’s work has long focused on the accelerated modernization of China, which she experienced firsthand growing up, her commentary now extends to a reality shared by society. This show follows her largest survey in China, hosted in 2024 at the Pudong Art Museum in Shanghai, and runs in parallel with Fei’s current show at Fondazione Prada in Milan.

“Pierre Huyghe”

• Fondation Beyeler; through September 13, 2026

This highly anticipated exhibition brings together new works, recent films and select earlier pieces by one of the most innovative artists of his generation. Huyghe’s first museum exhibition in Switzerland, it unfolds as a site-specific “soulscape” conceived for the museum’s architecture, where each work and the spaces between them form ambiguous thresholds—a polyphony composed of multiple temporalities, voices and states without hierarchy between fiction and reality, the living and the artificial, the human and the nonhuman. Through the interplay of shifting works that combine moving images, sound, objects, living organisms and machine learning, Huyghe continues his exploration of possible continuities between life forms, technology and biological and inert matter. For the artist, “fictions are vehicles that give us access to other possible worlds, to a counterfactual imagination. Such fictions, separated from the known, unconstrained by the here and now, are open to speculation, to other roads not taken. They make it possible to experience ourselves from the outside.” Building speculative, symbiotic ecosystems that constantly learn, modify and evolve, Huyghe has pioneered a possible integration and synchronization of the human and the nonhuman, nature and technology, while embracing uncertainty and instability as conditions for continuous exchange, transformation and evolution, opening onto alternative dimensions of reality. The exhibition follows the widely acclaimed, similarly immersive solo show at Pinault’s Punta della Dogana in 2024.

“New Rituals [for the End of the World]”

• HEK (House of Electronic Arts); through August 9, 2026

Well ahead of other European cities, Basel launched its own museum dedicated to digital and new media art in 2011. HEK (House of Electronic Arts) is the key institution in Switzerland for contemporary media art and digital cultures, exploring how art can interact with emerging technologies while preserving these digital creations and building a corresponding collection of software- and web-based art. On view during Art Basel is another speculative, future-forward show, “New Rituals [for the End of the World],” which gathers an international group of artists looking at newly emerging social strategies and rituals for confronting today’s difficult global situation, reconnecting with our core and finding in creativity the force to resist an impending sense of doom and catastrophe. At the center of this group show is an attempt to build, partly through the imaginative and speculative power of new technologies, new mythologies that can help survive—and transform—the end of the world into new beginnings. Artists in the exhibition include Zach Blas, Sofia Braga, Stefanie Egedy, Sian Fan, Teresa Fernández-Pello, Anan Fries, Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė, Auriea Harvey, Maya Hottarek, Etsuko Ichihara, Christiane Peschek, Skawennati and Robin Meier Wiratunga.

Monira Al Qadiri’s “BENZENE FLOAT”

• Kunsthaus Baselland; through January 24, 2027

Operating in the speculative realm allows artists to use humor and a more playful approach to make some of today’s most complex issues feel closer and more accessible. That is the case with Monira Al Qadiri’s brilliant installation “BENZENE FLOAT” at Kunsthaus Baselland, comprising five larger-than-life inflatable sculptures depicting petrochemical compounds. The work helps visualize the influence and power the petrochemical industry exerts over modern life, especially as these chemicals have become so deeply integrated into our daily routines that they remain largely invisible to us. Hovering at the edge of our field of vision, they fuel our movements while also negatively impacting us and our environments.

Shuang Li’s “Alliance”

• Kunsthalle Basel; through September 13, 2026

After debuting at Kim Association during Singapore Art Week earlier this year, Shuang Li’s “Alliance” opens at Kunsthalle Basel, the city’s most avant-garde space for contemporary art. Investigating today’s “contemporary digital landscape,” the young Berlin- and Wuyi-based artist’s work draws attention to the interaction between media, users and the systems that regulate bodies and desire. With installation, video and other mediums, the exhibition begins with Li’s research into extreme weather phenomena and storm chasing, the targeted tracking and observation of severe storms, especially hurricanes and tornadoes. Embedded in global networks where climate volatility, algorithmic systems and capitalist extraction have cross-border consequences, Li sees storm chasing as an expressive metaphor for orienting oneself amid the invasive forces that shape, influence and control the course of human and nonhuman life alike in the digital age. The show is the artist’s first solo exhibition in Europe, but, despite being only in her thirties, Li has already been included in the 2024 Whitney Biennial, the 59th Venice Biennale in 2022 and the Shanghai Biennale in 2023. She also staged a well-received 2024 solo exhibition, “Distance of the Moon,” at Prada Rong Zhai in Shanghai.

“Laboring Bodies” and Nicolas Darrot’s “Fuzzy Logic”

• Museum Tinguely; through November 8, 2026 and March 7, 2027

As a pioneer of multimedia and multidisciplinary approaches, Tinguely, in his artistic career as much as in his life, was one of these disruptive creatives, able to look deep inside and beyond his own time. “He constantly tried to reach beyond it—to connect with people, to expand his audience and to make his work relevant to everyday life,” director Roland Wetzel told Observer in an interview on the occasion of the museum’s 100th anniversary. This season, the museum is doubling down on exhibitions dedicated to our evolving relationship with technology. The first, “Laboring Bodies,” explores the interdependence of body and machine from a feminist perspective, examining how the human body, especially the feminized and marginalized body, has been shaped and controlled by machines since the dawn of the modern age while also remaining a site of resistance. Tracing the close connection between humans and machines in the industrial era, the show brings together historical and contemporary works by 36 artists that make visible the mechanization of the body across contexts of labor, exploitation, resistance and care. A concurrent show of works by Nicolas Darrot explores the notion of fuzzy logic, a form of artificial intelligence that enables computers to process concepts that cannot be reduced to the strictly binary terms of 1 or 0, yes or no, true or false. Mimicking human meaning-making, fuzzy logic embraces gradations and describes states and elements linguistically rather than strictly mathematically. Darrot has transformed Basel’s smallest exhibition space, a former telephone booth at the museum, into a stage for automated figures that come to life when visitors scan the barcode on a custom-designed playing card.

What is the next generation of collectors and patrons looking for? This is probably the most important question the art world is facing today, and on multiple levels. As a major wealth transfer unfolds in the U.S. and Europe and a generation of legendary collectors passes away, an entire industry is trying to understand who its next target will be. This is especially urgent as the art world continues to be led by legacy participants within hierarchical structures that follow a template set many decades ago. Those old ways may not hold up in the face of a rising buyer base that brings with it an entirely different set of behaviors, priorities and value systems.

A coming book by seasoned art writer Georgina Adam, NextGen Collectors and the Art Market, confronts hard truths about this generational handover. Millennial and Gen Z collectors are younger, often self-made, more globally dispersed, digitally native and less bound to old codes of collecting than previous generations. Their rise could reshape not only what art is bought but also how it is bought, where it is bought and what forms of cultural value matter. The key theme of the book is that traditional art-market institutions risk losing this cohort if they cannot adapt to younger collectors’ expectations around transparency, immediacy, access, identity, sustainability and new modes of ownership. As Adam points out, these new collectors are not simply inheriting the old market; they are actively disrupting the status quo, with novel sources of wealth, motivations, tastes and buying habits.

“A Changing of the Guard,” Avant Arte’s annual survey of the collecting and cultural habits of collectors under 45 years old, makes this picture even clearer. (Worth noting is that Avant Arte is one of these next-generation art world ventures, led by Millennial founders Christian Luiten, Curtis Penning and Mazdak Sanii and closely attuned to the needs of the generation it aims to serve through its mission of making art collecting and patronage more accessible.) It found that next-gen art entrepreneurs are increasingly carving their own paths, creating models shaped by their peers’ preferences and behaviors rather than politely adapting to the market’s existing norms and rituals.

Conceived in 2015 as a curated marketplace to help younger art enthusiasts discover and collect art across a range of budgets, Avant Arte evolved into a global platform connecting contemporary artists with a worldwide audience. It then shifted its focus to the intersection of collecting and patronage. The platform has actively partnered with institutions and raised more than $10 million for major international museums and cultural organizations, including LACMA, the Guggenheim and Dia Art Foundation, through the sale of limited-edition artworks by high-profile artists.

Surveying more than 2,000 collectors, enthusiasts and art professionals in 62 countries, the report offers a clear picture of a generation more engaged and invested in the future of museums and institutions than many would assume. But it also reveals a cohort of collectors actively pushing for drastic changes in a market that’s traditionally been slow to change. Put another way, they are willing, even eager, to engage with and support the arts, but on their own terms. What follows are the key takeaways from Avant Arte’s research.

London Gallery Weekend (LGW) kicked off early on June 4 with a salon-style conversation among three dealers (with moderator Melanie Gerlis) at very different levels of the market: Thaddaeus Ropac, Kate MacGarry and Emma Hodgson, co-founder of Pale Horse, the youngest gallery participating in this year’s edition of LGW. London is still second only to New York as an art market hub, the panel emphasized, with the U.K. accounting for 18 percent of the global art market, according to the Art Basel & UBS report. But its strength is not only commercial: it is also defined by its concentration of institutions, and even more importantly, of international artists. As Ropac put it, “An artworld can be successful only with its artists.”

Touching on the usual post-Brexit argument, Ropac, who maintains spaces in both London and Paris, noted that the latter city is becoming stronger without London losing ground, and that “this competition is healthy and good.” London, he added, had perhaps been too sure of itself for too long, while Paris is still missing the number of international artists London has. Veteran London dealer Kate MacGarry, who has been based in East London since the 2000s, similarly emphasized how much of the city’s growth has been tied to the presence of artists’ studios and local creative ecosystems.

Pale Horse, which opened last year with a contemporary program focused on emerging and outsider artists not often shown in London, is part of a fresh wave of younger galleries opening in the city. It is also among the nine first-time LGW participants, a group that includes DES BAINS, which launched in 2022 and relocated from East London to Fitzrovia in 2023; General Assembly, which opened in 2023 on Saint George Street in Mayfair; Matt Carey-Williams, opened in 2024 on Porchester Place near Lisson Grove by a former senior director at Victoria Miro, Gagosian, White Cube and Haunch of Venison; NORITO, which has been in Beak Street, Soho, since 2024; piloto pardo, which launched near the Barbican in 2021; and TINA, a curator-led space that opened in 2024 on Wardour Street in Soho. Hodgson said that one of the biggest challenges for galleries like hers remains the city’s high overhead, particularly shipping and logistics, which have become more expensive after Brexit.

The exodus of wealth has also been a major issue. Ropac acknowledged that in recent years, and especially in the last few months, collectors and wealthy residents have been moving elsewhere, with Milan now a major destination alongside Dubai and Australia. But many remain connected to London as a place to see art.

While all the gallerists agreed that physical spaces remain necessary to build trust with artists, they also admitted to reconsidering the role of art fairs as of late. Toward the end of the conversation, Ropac shared his thoughts about how fairs have, in some ways, overtaken the gallery’s role in recent years. Instead, he suggested, art fairs should be places to get informed and connect, but the ultimate goal should be bringing people back into the gallery, getting them to follow the program and deepening their engagement with artists. Initiatives like London Gallery Weekend are helping more dealers work toward that goal, while also creating an important space for dialogue and community across galleries, where participants can advise one another rather than simply compete.

The wide variety across cultures, narratives, media and price tiers at this year’s LGW certainly reaffirmed the centrality of the London scene, even as it exposed a persistent lack of coordination between the commercial and institutional sectors. An alignment that, as discussed during the panel, could do much more to build momentum around the city’s art calendar. Ropac pointed to the success of Berlin Gallery Weekend’s collector dinners and broader social infrastructure, while noting that London Gallery Weekend remains more U.K.-centric. Paris, which held its own gallery weekend just the week before, demonstrates a similar dynamic. These events are essential for galvanizing local art scenes, but they are not yet in dialogue with one another and still mostly have a localized reach, which isn’t ideal for scenes attempting to compete for the already hard-to-reach attention of the Old Continent’s collectors and art professionals.

More art market insights

• Galerie Gmurzynska’s Old-School Slow Art Model Is Newly Radical

• From Midnight Casts to Authorized Editions: Understanding the Market for Posthumously Produced Art

• How Sweden Built One of Europe’s Most Stable Art Markets

• Sotheby’s Evelyn Lin On Asia’s Maturing Market, Young Collectors and the New Rules of the Hong Kong Sale

October and June are probably the two best moments to assess the state of the London art market. Frieze holds the prime October slot, but the rapidly expanding London Gallery Weekend (LGW), alongside this year’s major June auction season—headlined by major consignments such as the $200+ million Lewis Collection at Sotheby’s and the £15 million Zabludowicz Collection at Christie’s—offers more than enough ground for a meaningful test.

Held just as the art world began its seasonal descent toward Basel, LGW offered a free city-wide program of tours, talks, performances, parties and events, creating new ways for audiences to discover exhibitions across the U.K. capital while helping map and navigate its increasingly spread-out gallery geography. Its 2026 edition brought together more than 120 galleries, including several exhibitors with new or expanded spaces, reflecting the city’s rapidly evolving gallery landscape. “What we have done is create a unifying date where more than half of the galleries are opening specifically to align with it. They are starting to see it very much as a moment in which they face not just the market but also the institutional world,” Jeremy Epstein, LGW co-director and co-founder of Edel Assanti, told Observer.

The weekend unfolded against the backdrop of Pace’s announcement that it would shrink both its staff and artist roster. Recent closures, including Tiwani Contemporary just a few weeks earlier and Stephen Friedman Gallery some months before that, were also still quite visible on Cork Street, where real estate fills up more slowly than in New York, a much easier landscape from which to disappear without much noise. Pace was still opening its show of Kanjiro Okazaki, though it remains unclear whether the Japanese artist will enter a roster now reduced to 50 artists.

Yet there is also a counter-narrative of expansion, particularly with established London galleries strategically investing in and focusing on their own such as Sadie Coles opening a new space last year (its highly anticipated show of rising star Yu Nishimura was postponed to the following week), as well as newcomers arriving in the city, including Singapore gallery Sundaram Tagore, which opened a space in Pall Mall in May.

The lineup of shows opening or activating with special events and performances during LGW was remarkably strong and, for the most part, more ambitious than commercially safe. Across galleries and price tiers, there was generous space given to sculpture, installation and multilayered, multimedia presentations.

Mayfair, Fitzrovia and Cork Street at full volume

During this LGW, there were plenty of shows, special events and activations drawing people into galleries. It might have been the sunny weather, but from the openings across Mayfair and Fitzrovia on Thursday through to the weekend events, London was buzzing with energy. Anne Imhof’s barricades and subversive, elegiac bas-relief iconography attracted a steady flow of visitors across Sprüth Magers’ four-floor building, culminating in a climax on the top floor featuring a multichannel video of her memorable performance at the Armory.

Also very busy were the openings of Steven Shearer’s dreamy portraits at David Zwirner and the two expansive shows by Oliver Beer and Mandy El-Sayegh at Thaddaeus Ropac. Further down, Modern Art opened a show of Terry Winters’ psychedelic abstractions of micro and macrocosmic systems, connecting cellular structures, cosmic systems and abstract networks. The crowds also filled Duke Street, gathering in mass in front of both Thomas Dane Gallery and GRIMM’s new space —a renovated former antiques shop, described as a “natural progression,” consolidating its position in London, where it has been active since 2022. While the show, “The Fountain Overflows,” reflected the gallery’s painting-heavy program, it also featured already institutionalized artists, such as Benjamin Orlow, who is currently representing the Nordic countries in Venice. At the opening, we learned from its director, Sebastiaan Bradsen, that the gallery is now also preparing to open a new space in Amsterdam, while maintaining its solid position in the U.S. with its Tribeca gallery serving as a bridge between European artists and the American market.

Thomas Dane Gallery’s opening of Caragh Thuring was highly attended. Her works in the £20,000-60,000 range are in high demand, particularly among British collectors, the gallery confirmed, with several discussions in progress as they prioritize different institutional possibilities before finalizing acquisitions. Edel Assanti, another pillar of the London gallery scene, recently expanded with a more intimate second space in St. James’s, where it opened a show by Dale Lewis. His raw, richly layered works unfold in a graffiti-like stream of consciousness, moving between life and death, assimilation and the claiming of individual expression, war and joy, creation and destruction, gardens of Eden and visions of hell.

Close by, Josh Lilley opened “The Enchantment of Reason,” an installation-heavy, whimsical yet sharply revealing show by Scottish artist Rachel Maclean. Leaping across art history, from Rococo excess to the high Victorian fairy mania that accompanied the first Industrial Revolution, Maclean draws a pointed parallel with A.I., another technological threshold producing its own forms of collective hallucination. Here, the fairy becomes both a naïve and unstable figure: charming, sloppy, seductive and increasingly manufactured, shaped through image-to-image generation, video and the idiosyncrasies of technology. The video is a full collaboration with A.I., embracing the medium precisely while its bugs, distortions and uncanny failures allow creative experimentation and reimagination.

Not far away, Alice Amati, one of the sharper young voices in London’s gallery scene, was opening Rafael Topowski’s “Dust,” a solo show by the Lisbon-based Polish artist that proved once again the gallery’s commitment to championing emerging and early-career voices, often at decisive early moments. Topowski’s works carry the residue of memory, architecture and erosion, holding the image somewhere between apparition and accumulation. Like vestiges of blurred visions or memories, the works seem to turn the atmosphere itself into sensorial material.

Still on Cork Street, Goodman Gallery presented Ravelle Pillay’s London debut, “Revisitation,” following the South African artist’s recent relocation to the city. In these haunting, ghostly presences, Pillay bridges geographical timelines and archival fragments, revisiting histories of identity, colonialism, displacement and erasure. Close by, Waddington Custot was revisiting its longstanding relationship with Jean Dubuffet through a focused presentation of the artist’s more electrically colorful works from the final decade. Having hosted the artist’s original U.K. debut and staged around 40 exhibitions dedicated to his work, the gallery included several pieces that had first been shown in London decades ago. Prices ranged from £300,000 to £2.5 million, reflecting the artist’s remarkable market growth over the past few years.

Meanwhile, Alison Jacques is presenting the work of British Surrealist Eileen Agar, highlighting her unique style and vision within the movement. Born in Argentina, Agar’s work retains a distinctly tropical sensibility, visible in her vivid palette and organic forms. Like other women surrealists, Agar is receiving new critical attention, having also been included in the extensive show for the movement’s 100th anniversary at the Centre Pompidou just before its closure. The exhibition marked the gallery’s first show since it announced its representation of the estate. Next door, Helly Nahmad Gallery | Nahmad Projects offered a concise but elegant dialogue between Pablo Picasso and Joan Miró. Though their visual languages were markedly different, the two artists were close friends, each pursuing distinct approaches to modernism.

Still in Mayfair, an absolute highlight this season is also Lévy Gorvy Dayan’s ambitious Thomas Houseago exhibition, “Death’s Secret Mirror,” a cabinet of curiosities spanning thousands of years of sculptural history. Cycladic figures, rare Celtic artifacts, medieval alchemical vessels and works by modernist artists ranging from Henry Moore and Jacob Epstein to Postwar names such as Louise Bourgeois and Lucio Fontana enter into conversation with Houseago’s own sculptures. Conceived as a personal archaeology of influences, the exhibition reflects the artist’s belief that contemporary violence stems in part from historical amnesia, he said. We were lucky to visit just as he was taking installation shots, then to embark on a long, inspiring conversation about the show, the approach and its timely broader relevance at this moment of civilization. Most of the works, his own as well as those of ancestors from different places and times, ultimately present archetypal and totemic forms as vehicles for processing collective trauma and universal human emotions.

A similar dialogue with the atemporal and universal dimension of our experience within a longer history and broader universe opened on the ground floor of Thaddaeus Ropac’s London gallery, where Oliver Beer’s exhibition translates sound and frequency into painting through a body of works inspired by the acoustics of the Lascaux caves. Long interested in the intersections of music and visual art, Beer uses speakers concealed beneath canvases to direct vibrations through liquid pigments, producing abstract compositions physically shaped by sound. The entire show emerged from research into the caves’ resonant chambers, where concentrations of prehistoric paintings often coincide with unusual acoustic and echo phenomena that reveal the ritualistic and more spiritual origins of art, as well as its primordial energetic and emotional connection to the natural surroundings and its forces. Incorporating pigments directly from the earth, as in cave art, the resulting works progress from more abyssal to more ethereal abstractions, becoming portals in time and space that suggest a shared imaginative origin for image-making, language and music while exploring the possibility of painting as a repository for inherited sounds.

Upstairs, a new, similarly ambitious exhibition by Palestinian-born and London-based artist Mandy El-Sayegh examines the conceptual and cultural clash between the visual languages of luxury, consumer culture and political memory through layered canvases that accumulate found dissonances between contemporary news and advertising. Tiffany-blue surfaces, perfume references and newspaper images of war and political debates are paired with reconstructed displays that evoke the seductive mechanisms of branding while exposing the power structures embedded within it. Throughout the exhibition, El-Sayegh stitches together fragments from both conflict and luxury pleasure; the artist embraces painting as a medium capable of resisting collective dissociation and preserving what dominant contemporary narratives attempt to obscure or sedate.

Not far away, Robilant’s first show in the newly reconfigured gallery had just opened the previous week. Expanding from old masters to contemporary art following the separation from Voena, its partner for the past 22 years, the newly independent gallery is now led by Edmondo di Robilant, who brings decades of relationships, wisdom and expertise, alongside his son Michele, who brings what he hopes will be a fresh perspective. The gallery aims to be uniquely positioned to identify artists who can withstand the test of time. Its inaugural show, “Nor here, Nor there,” already sets the tone and the level for a more globally minded and hybrid program.

Here, a good artsy lunch break can be found at Hauser & Wirth’s Farm Shop, which brings the quality of its Somerset countryside farms to Mayfair in its soil-to-table bistro.

To the north is the new collaboration between the young Palmer Gallery and the established Lisson Gallery, with live events over the weekend, aimed to bring people to the unsung Lisson Grove art district. Opened just two years ago, Palmer is already advancing an ambitious program from within its beautifully redesigned former industrial building. The warm, organic feel of its wood stairs and interior structures resonated almost like an echo chamber with the practice of Carolina Aguirre, the promising London-based Chilean artist born in 1990. Her paintings and video works are defined by an elegiac sensibility, exploring cycles of decay and regeneration through imagery of dead trees, insects and geological transformation. Her process embraces those natural cycles almost symbiotically, using crushed shells, shellac and sumi ink to create fragments while also bringing her own body into the making of landscapes that oscillate between abstraction and ritual, mortality and renewal. That existential reflection becomes the center of her attention-grabbing video, where Aguirre imagines a spontaneous, poetic dialogue with death that evokes near-death experiences: “I am here / I am matter, my past present and future must pass,” she repeats, before moving through a mantra-like insistence on the present, and being present in that moment.

Close by, Lisson Gallery is showing for the first time works by ceramic pioneer Ken Price in London, while a parallel presentation by British Pavilion artist Lubaina Himid reintroduces her body of work inspired by visits to Zanzibar, combining painting, suspended elements and a sound composition by Magda Stawarska: an immersive environment that explores storytelling, oral traditions and everyday life.

While walking between these galleries, don’t miss Mandy El-Sayegh’s mural, This is a Sign: Notes on Assembly, commissioned by The Showroom, an organization that has been a pioneer of socially-engaged contemporary art, which, for over four decades, has been commissioning and producing new work.

Not far away, on Porchester Place, another of the newest additions to London’s gallery landscape, Matt Carey-Williams, is presenting “Pity This Busy Monster,” a group show that examines the mutable figure of the “creature” as a metaphor for unstable identities, inner worlds and shifting forms of selfhood. Works move fluidly between abstraction and figuration, mythology and psychology, suggesting contemporary subjectivity as perpetually in flux, demonstrating the gallery’s mission to promote young talent from the many respected graduate programs in the U.K.

Returning to the central area before the night’s openings, another must-see is Gagosian’s tribute to Christo and Jeanne-Claude, presenting one of their most ambitious unrealized projects. Conceived in 1968 for the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia but never executed due to technical limitations, Air Package on a Ceiling was finally realized according to the artists’ original plans. Suspended dramatically within the gallery, the monumental illuminated form transforms the space into an immersive environment, while archival materials trace the evolution of the project and the artists’ broader investigations into wrapping, containment and the visualization of invisible forces.

A few streets down, Hauser & Wirth’s double power show this June spans centuries. One gallery is dedicated to Francis Picabia’s relentless stylistic reinventions between 1902 and 1951, tracing his movement through Impressionism, abstraction, Dada and figuration. Nearby, in the other gallery, Roni Horn presents a series of works on paper built around the phrase “I am paralyzed with hope,” gradually dissolving language into abstraction and living poetry. Sensitive to shifts in light and environment and completed with one of her high-demand pools, the installation extends Horn’s longstanding interest in perception, presence, and the idea of sculpture as a living encounter.

Just around the corner, Pilar Corrias had just opened a new show of Hayv Kahraman on Wednesday night, in which she continues her exploration of embodied memory and diasporic identity through a new body of both symbolically and psychologically charged works that employ fluid imagery as a metaphor for transformation, inheritance and interior states of being. Similarly spiritually attuned is the elegant dialogue staged by Luxembourg + Co. with works by Paul Klee, Piet Mondrian and Brice Marden, illuminating unexpected affinities across generations of abstraction and revealing shared formal concerns around line, rhythm and spatial organization.

On the more experimental side, Gathering is also worth checking out this June, a solo presentation by already institutionalized artist, DJ and producer Christelle Oyiri, who recently showed at Tate Modern, and whose work fluidly moves through music, underground and mainstream culture, the subconscious and technology as mutually distorting forces. As the exhibition text puts it, “Bodies and technology each diffracting through the other, their own frantic symbols. In her distinctive remix practice and language, body abstractions and extractions meet the hardcore environment of clubs, as music and vibration become tools for a more spontaneous journey exploring both physical and psychological experience, turning sound into a way of tracing how bodies absorb, process and transform cultural pressure. Oyiri asks: ‘In a hyperconnected society, where the image is perpetually staged and corrected, how do the virtual and the material come together in the quest for the ideal body?'”

For refreshments, a safe choice for art lovers remained, as always, Sketch. Across its three-Michelin-starred Lecture Room & Library, the Gallery gastro-brasserie, the enchanted-forest Glade, the neo-90s Parlor and the East Bar, restaurateur Mourad Mazouz has turned the venue into a sequence of immersive art-and-design rooms. The Gallery space remains its most famous art-world calling card, perhaps most well-known for the pink room that launched in 2014 with 239 original David Shrigley drawings, as well as hosting works by artists including Chris Levine, Ron Arad, Carsten Nicolai, Jonas Mekas, Tracey Emin, Martin Creed and Yinka Shonibare over the past almost 25 years.

East and South London’s younger pulse

In East and South London, younger, emerging spaces mounted some of the city’s most daring presentations. One of them, not far from Tate Modern on the South Bank, is Copperfield, which presented Ecuadorian artist Oscar Santillán, who is also representing his country in this year’s inaugural Venice pavilion. The show draws inspiration from Stanisław Lem’s Solaris, attempting to give visible presence to untamable and ungraspable phenomena beyond human perception. Through photographs, sculptures and installations, Santillán explores the agency of landscapes, technologies and materials, challenging conventional distinctions between nature and machine. Particularly striking were sculptural works derived from electronic waste and mining processes, which transform industrial remnants into evocative aerial landscapes while reflecting on geological time and scales of existence beyond human comprehension. In another work, he applies a time accelerator, further compressing the already unstable relationship between material, perception and duration.

Another program worth following in London’s East End is the one at Public Gallery, one of the most interesting emerging voices in London, which has already come a long way since launching in 2020, directed by Alex Harrison, Harry Dougall, and Nicole Estilo Kaiser. This June, the gallery is showcasing the work of L.A.-based photographer Shaniqwa Jarvis, whose practice explores the relationship between physical and digital images, reflections and remediation. Upstairs, a video unfolds like a stream of consciousness on our relationship with society and reality, between constriction, imagination and hallucination. In the gallery’s second space just next door, Russell Perkins presents a huge LED screen work exploring forms of American patriotism through footage of political celebrations from the 1970s to today, counterpointed by audio of wind moving through a tree outside his house. The exhibition moves across different registers of sensoriality as one proceeds through the gallery space: a perfume lingers in the corridor before leading upstairs to a sound piece linked to coded scripts and compositions, abstract in its language, as in the optimization and maximization of human production.

Just around the corner, Union Pacific was showing Georgia May Travers Cooks’s nostalgic paintings, contextualized by a rural, fairy-tale-like narrative, emphasized by a country-home framework built by the gallery director himself, turning the entrance into a porch overlooking whimsical but unsettling picnic scenes. Cute and sentimental at first glance, all her images carry something sinister and spectral beneath their sweetness, making them all the more intriguing, both psychologically and semiotically, culminating downstairs in swans floating through blood-colored water.

Also worth visiting is Pareidolia, a new foundation launched around the idea of seeing through chaos and collecting as a collective practice. Founded in Belgrade by a hybrid mix of dealers, curators and collectors, the foundation focuses on minimal Baltic and Eastern European practices. Titled “INCORPOREUS VOL.1,” the show was centered around the notion of immateriality, something explored by more conceptual practices in the Postwar period but returning as a particularly timely theme in an age when everything seems to be becoming immaterial. Functioning as a historical anchor is a seminal conceptual work by Joseph Kosuth, “Any Five and a Half Foot Square Sheet of Glass to Lean Against Any Wall,” shown alongside works by contemporary artists, including the touching farewell letter by Danh Vō, written in French by his father, a calligrapher, without knowing French, from the original of a French monk. Also on view is a photograph by Steve McQueen paired with a very minimal yet poetic work by Tomo Campbell. The show was hosted by ZÉRUÌ, another experimental, curatorially oriented new London-based space worth checking, which, over the past five years, has built a name for its highly curated, rigorous program, focused on artists based in Europe but with an international outlook toward ephemeral aesthetics.

Back in Central London, TINA is a worthwhile new gallery near Oxford Circus, located on the first floor, with a program led by three curators and focused on the intersection of language and art. Opening on Friday was a show by Glasgow-based artist Katie Shannon, who explores screenprint not as a simple reappropriation but through its longer political history as a medium of distribution, community-building and circulation. Her practice is shaped by Glasgow’s psychological atmosphere and the accumulated pressures of her labor in the night economy: the entire show moves between inertia and containment, exploring the compression and depression driven by gentrification. In the other room, restricted bodies appear through wrapped and banded beds, evoking people slammed into impossible living conditions and the profit structures that make those conditions possible. The result is a sharp recognition of the contemporary condition. “London Gallery Weekend has been fantastic for fostering connections with UK regional museums, international institutions, and press, with a couple of sales also in the pipeline as a result,” wrote Hana Noorali in an email, following up on our encounter after the weekend.

Yet most of the younger spaces in central London are forced onto first floors, given the budget-conscious strategies they still need to apply: DES BAINS had a very minimal installation on language and storytelling by Neapolitan artist Carmela de Falco, while another new entry in the gallery weekend, Pale Horse, presented the work of Marijn van Kreij, whose appropriated materials and dry irony seem to predate the meme logic of contemporary culture while probing broader social and behavioral uncertainties.

Opening that night before the highly anticipated Serpentine gathering was Sundaram Tagore Gallery’s first show since opening its London space in an Edwardian-style landmark building designed in 1902 at 27 Pall Mall in St. James’s. With locations in New York and Singapore, the gallery’s founder has longstanding ties to London, where he spent countless hours in the British Museum Library as a graduate student at Oxford in the 1990s, and where his Indian-born father, Subho Tagore (1912-1985), an important painter and founder of the Calcutta Group, honed his craft at what was then St. Martin’s School of Art in the 1930s. Sundaram Tagore still believes London is the perfect international center to promote Southeast Asian art, given the variety of its communities, he told Observer. “London felt like the right place and the right moment for us because the city continues to function as one of the world’s great cultural crossroads. Few places bring together such an international mix of artists, collectors, curators, academics, and entrepreneurs, all engaged in a constant exchange of ideas. For a gallery whose mission has always centered on cross-cultural dialogue, London was a very natural evolution.” Opening now was also deliberate: even amid political and economic uncertainty, Tagore believes culture matters most during periods of fragmentation and instability. “Art creates conversation, empathy, and connection across borders in ways few other things can. I hope it reminds us that more unites us than divides us. London felt uniquely positioned to bring those worlds together in a single space.”

This is also the reason for the India focus at Cork Street no. 9, where Mumbai gallery Project 88 and New Delhi powerhouse Vadehra Gallery are hosting pop-up shows this month. As Jeremy Epstein noted, London remains one of the few cities where such specialized gallery projects can be commercially meaningful. “London’s diversity allows galleries with specific focuses to find both community and opportunity.”

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The Korean Pavilion at the 2026 edition of the Venice Biennale unfolds as a meaningful exercise in both physical and metaphorical deconstruction and reconstruction, using architecture to mirror the openness of the nation-building process. Titled “Liberation Space,” the pavilion is an exercise in collective thinking, as Seoul-based Goen Choi and New York-based Hyeree Ro bring their divergent sculptural practices into a shared choreography that transforms the pavilion into a “living, breathing monument,” as curator Binna Choi describes it. The pavilion is dynamic, a contemporary monument to national identity and nation-building as shared, continuous efforts shaped through negotiation and compromise and as a necessarily “unfinished project,” since liberation is always still being realized and exercised.

Referencing the fraught three-year period between Korea’s liberation from Japanese colonial rule in 1945 and the country’s division in 1948, the exhibition approaches nationhood not as a fixed historical achievement but as a continuous and unfinished process of negotiation, rupture, compromise and renewal. It is a process South Korea is still undergoing, and the pavilion’s question of “nation” arrives at a particularly timely moment, following the events of winter 2024-2025, when a sudden declaration of martial law by an incumbent president was swiftly countered by citizens and lawmakers alike, as well as by soldiers resisting mobilization orders. Add to this the ongoing tensions with North Korea, the country’s colonial past—still not fully reckoned with—and its present relationship with neighboring Japan, as the two countries are drawn into a strategic rapprochement amid a precarious geopolitical situation and China’s expanding regional influence.

It was the first time the two countries, whose shared history carries both light and shadow, collaborated to organize and promote both pavilions, embracing on an organizational level an understanding of liberatory movement as an ongoing practice. Yet despite presenting their projects together at a conference in Hong Kong during opening week, very little of this alliance was visible on the ground in Venice beyond the co-hosting of their opening reception, both inside the Giardini and at an evening party—a sign that many questions and tensions remain alive in the diplomatic relations between the two countries.

“I think colonial baggage is there, but this country has been developing rapidly, economically and politically. That has been a major theme,” Choi, the curator, explains, noting how in Korea, as elsewhere, the art field has developed a growing allergy to the nation-state, despite the fact that for many it remains an open and unresolved question. “We do not represent a nation, but we are shaped and influenced by the nation we are affiliated with, and we also have the power to shape it,” she says. “That is what we like to express with ‘Liberation Space,’ because that is a historical time. But in a way, it never stops.”

This was also the first time the two artists had worked together, the curator clarifies. “I thought that was a relevant experiment for the subject we are dealing with. It is not like friends working together to make a new nation. It is people with completely different ideas coming together to build a shared space.”

Rather than simply staging works within the pavilion, the exhibition transforms the building into a dynamic choreography oscillating between the opposing yet complementary conditions suggested by the subtitle “Fortress/Nest.”

Material practice becomes the way the artists enter that conversation. The curator chose these two artists because both work powerfully through craft, material, shaping and placement, rather than through language and concepts alone. The politics here are already embedded in both the materiality and phenomenology of their interventions in the space. The pavilion’s dialogue is built through paper, clay, pipes, movement, infrastructure and bodily encounters. The viewer has to move through the exhibition intentionally, crouching, looking up, following circular pathas and registering how the artists have changed the building itself.

Goen Choi extends her long-standing engagement with infrastructural materials, intervening in the architecture with copper pipes in an acupuncture-like operation performed directly on the pavilion’s body. Thin metal structures pierce, traverse and rupture the architecture with the ambiguity of needles, spears, branches or beams of light, exposing the building itself as an ideological apparatus in continual flux. From the idea of a “fortress”—a structure of defense—Choi’s intervention introduces a space of revelation, openings and dynamic movement that unfolds from within. “The Korean Pavilion is not a fixed symbol but a constellation of forces that continually shake, shift, and reorganize. In engaging with the context of the space, I focused not on creating or adding anything new, but on uncovering, reconsidering, and restoring what is already there,” Choi explains.

That infrastructure, usually invisible, becomes visible through the artist’s work, allowed to penetrate the building and reveal its power. The intervention also reactivates part of the pavilion’s architectural history. When the Korean Pavilion was built in 1995, it included a staircase leading to the second floor and the roof, creating a sense of upward and downward movement. A year later, that passage was walled off and turned into storage. By removing the wall and allowing the pipes to pass through, the artist makes not a conventional architectural intervention so much as a sculptural gesture that liberates the pavilion’s suppressed movement.

Choi describes this intervention through the analogy of a body. “Both of us are approaching the pavilion as a body. What I’m doing is like acupuncture, and is revealing the central nervous system of the building,” she says. “You don’t see the nerves and bloodlines in the human body. These are essential building infrastructure, but they are usually not exposed. I wanted to showcase that kind of essential framework.” The act means liberating the construction, dismantling the architecture as an ideological and political device to expose its mechanisms; Choi reveals nation-building as a condition of permanent tension and reorientation.

Meanwhile, Hyeree Ro has constructed an intimate counter-space of care, endurance and collectivism. Her installation, Bearing, forms what the artist describes as a “pavilion within the pavilion,” a womb-like enveloping environment composed of roughly 4,000 translucent organza circles coated in wax, layered like fish scales or lotus leaves. The material has a delicate, almost membrane-like quality, yet acquires resilience through accumulation into a collective body. “I wanted to build some kind of layer that embraces the space,” Ro explains, “‘To bear’ means to endure and support weight, to change direction, to bear fruit and to give birth.”

As she reconsidered the time and space of holding, enduring and supporting, the mechanical component known as a bearing also came to mind: a device that restricts certain movements and reduces friction in order to enable a desired motion. To her, this “liberation space” is first of all a “field of movement.”

Ro has staged a constellation of eight wood structures inhabited by biomorphic clay parts. She calls them “Stations”—a sequence of eight moments, each devoted to mourning, remembering, waiting, sharing and repair. As sanctuaries and infrastructures for meditation and healing, they suggest how liberation is sustained not through singular heroic acts but through mutual support and continuous adjustment. “We think about what liberation is. Liberation does not happen once. You have to keep practicing it. My project has eight different stations to traverse,” Ro explains.

Those stations do not have fixed functions, but they “function” through use, attention and ritual. Each is meant to be activated by the audience, while a performer’s practice indicates how. It is about daily routines, psychosomatic exercises of embodiment and disembodiment. “I think it is a daily routine and a continuous navigation and negotiation of living and building. Things break. Things do not work. You have to fix them. Just because you swept the floor yesterday does not mean it will be clean today.”

One of the stations, titled Mourning Station, invites viewers to sit on two stools and lean forward toward components installed on the floor. Ro was interested in the posture of mourning, respect and contemplation, and in how the body bends itself toward memory. The work extends beyond individual experience into collective remembrance, connecting physical posture to historical reflection that is both personal and political. Within it, a contribution by artist Christian Nyampeta presents 72 drawings from Gwangju Citizens’ School—a city whose 1980 uprising played a defining role in South Korea’s struggle for democracy and liberation from dictatorship, and whose legacy continues to shape the country’s political consciousness. The drawings are carved onto ceramic plates and piled like vinyl records, suggesting revisitation and listening as necessary acts: ways of returning to recent history, reconciling with it and beginning to heal its trauma.

The strong emphasis on craft also becomes a way of thinking through national identity without reducing the work to nationalism. Clay, paper-making and other crafted materials suggest that, in a national pavilion, such traditional practices—surviving from ancestral time and knowledge—inevitably contributed to the formation of, as much as the reattunement with, any notion of “national” or “Indigenous” identity, even after colonial erasure. “I think it is probably in the DNA,” Ro acknowledges, while noting that paper and clay are also universal materials, present wherever there is earth and human making. Clay, wood and paper connect the work to nature and organic matter, while aluminum and other elements bring in infrastructure and the built environment. The pavilion becomes a negotiation between the organic and the constructed, between human ecology and land, the personal and the collective, as all converge in the fragile, ongoing work of shaping a notion of nation.

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Revenue reports from both major auction houses have confirmed that luxury collectibles are no longer a side category but a significant part of the business. At Sotheby’s, the luxury sector generated $2.7 billion in revenue, up 22 percent year-over-year. At Christie’s, luxury sales reached $795 million, up 17 percent from 2024, plus $234 million in automotive sales following Christie’s acquisition of Gooding—an increase of 14 percent year-over-year. Luxury collectibles also provide an accessible entry point, attracting new buyers, many of them younger and from emerging markets, with the benefit of broadening the house’s overall reach. “Luxury has become one of Christie’s most important drivers of strategic and sustainable growth in the post-COVID years, consistently acting as a key entry point for new client engagement,” Kimberly Miller, global managing director of luxury, told Observer earlier this year. Forty-one percent of all new bidders and buyers entered Christie’s through luxury auctions, and 44 percent of participants in 2025 were Millennials and Gen Z. That likely reflects both age and price accessibility; these cohorts are also more flexible and casual in their purchasing behavior, with 85 percent of bids placed online.

Handbags, in particular, are one of the strongest entry points for first-time buyers, with a breadth of pricing that ranges from a few hundred dollars to six- and seven-figure sales,  like last year’s record-breaking $10.1 million Hermès Birkin. As the viewing opened at Rockefeller Center for the upcoming online auction Handbags Online: The New York Edit, running from May 28 to June 11, we spoke with Christie’s specialist Rachel Koffsky Parker to understand the dynamics and trends shaping this fast-growing global market.

The highly anticipated sale features nearly 300 pieces, ranging from holy-grail Hermès handbags to iconic vintage Chanel runway finds and several tightly curated collections. Leading the sale is a Matte White Himalaya Niloticus Crocodile Birkin 30 with Palladium Hardware and an estimate of $90,000-120,000. Additional top lots include a Shiny Rose Tyrien Niloticus Crocodile Birkin 30 with Palladium Hardware (estimate: $35,000-45,000), a Shiny Vert Emeraude Niloticus Crocodile Birkin 30 with Gold Hardware and a Shiny Black Niloticus Crocodile Birkin 25 with Gold Hardware (each estimated at $50,000-60,000).

The auction also includes jewelry from heritage brands such as Dior and Chanel, as well as lifestyle items such as a Piaggio x Dior Vespa ($10,000-15,000) and niche nostalgia-tied pieces such as a Chrome Hearts large Harris Teeter necklace by Joe Foti, dated 1998 (estimate: $3,000-4,000) and a suede laser-cut bikini (estimate: $4,000-7,000). Designed to be “timeless,” as Karl Lagerfeld once recognized, Chrome Hearts’ rapid ascent took the brand from L.A. and New York to Tokyo, with Comme des Garçons founder Rei Kawakubo among its earliest devotees. A more overtly art-world addition to the sale is a readymade by Jeff Koons incorporating a Kelly bag displayed on a shelf, Kelly Bag Ivory (Shelf) (2014), which has a $30,000-50,000 estimate.

The sale was assembled much like a contemporary art or jewelry auction: specialists spent the year advising clients on when to sell, where the market is moving and which categories are generating demand, Koffsky Parker explained. What distinguishes the category is that it is intentionally more accessible and less overwhelming. “The art market may feel intimidating and very academic; you may feel you have to be a student of art history and assume there is a very expensive entry price. Handbags are a much more approachable opportunity for collectors to come through our doors.” Last year, Christie’s handbags department brought in about 12 percent of all new clients, and frequently 50 percent of bidders in its sales are new to the auction house.

U.S. handbag auctions are conducted online over roughly two weeks, allowing clients to bid from different time zones. “We also take pieces to other Christie’s locations to connect with clients in those regions, whether that is Greenwich, Connecticut, Los Angeles or Palm Beach,” Koffsky Parker added, emphasizing the importance of these touchpoints throughout the year and across the country.

While most bidders and buyers in U.S. sales are based in the U.S., Koffsky Parker describes the category as highly international, noting that Christie’s handbag sales drew participation from more than 70 countries last year. The department also holds sales in Hong Kong and Paris, with demand rising across regions. “It is very international. The pieces are attractive to clients all around the world, so we see bidding from many different regions,” she acknowledges.

Hermès remains the dominant brand in collectible handbags. Yet while the Birkin and Kelly remain the core icons, serious Hermès collectors are increasingly focused on highly specific details: limited editions, custom Mini Kellys, special color combinations, rare leathers such as Volynka and colors such as Rose Azalée. “The language of Hermès is a very specific language that collectors speak, whether it is a special color or a rare leather,” Koffsky Parker explained. “There is a way collectors talk about Hermès that is extremely specific.”

Faubourg Birkin variations, particularly the “Snow” and “Rainy Days” editions, are achieving some of the highest prices. The Rainy Days Faubourg Birkin 20 with Permabrass hardware sold for $215,900 as the top lot of Christie’s Handbags Online: The New York Edit auction in September 2025, which totaled $3.6 million, where a Rare Nuit Faubourg Birkin 20 also realized $165,100.

Chanel is the second most popular brand, but demand is no longer concentrated on the classic flap bag alone. Koffsky Parker pointed to growing interest in archival Chanel, especially rare runway pieces, Karl Lagerfeld-era lucite minaudières and limited catwalk editions, a trend that has gained further momentum following Matthieu Blazy’s arrival at the house. Among the notable examples is the record-breaking Chanel Rare Runway Silver & Black Lambskin Leather Shopping Basket Bag from 2014, which fetched $152,400—more than 10 times its low estimate of $15,000—in Christie’s September sale.

“There is now an appreciation for a specific runway show or a specific season,” Koffsky Parker adds, attributing this to a growing sense of nostalgia, particularly among Millennials.

Christie’s is also offering the Elizabeth Taylor Fendi Baguette Selection this season: a curated group of 20 Fendi Baguette bags formerly owned by the legendary Hollywood star, showcasing the house’s craftsmanship across decades, from early 2000s embellished designs to rare 1990s sequined and fur variations.

Highlights include a Red, White & Black Embellished Canvas Floral Print Baguette (estimate: $3,000-5,000), circa 2000s, previously owned by Elizabeth Taylor and offered with its original style ID and care card. Also featured is a Brown Cuoio Romano Leather Selleria Baguette (estimate: $3,000-5,000) with sterling silver hardware, accompanied by care cards and tags from Christie’s 2011 Collection of Elizabeth Taylor auction.

Bidding on many of these starts at $100, with estimates ranging from $3,000 to $5,000. “The Fendi Baguette really speaks to early millennial nostalgia from the origins of the It bag,” Koffsky Parker noted. “The Fendi Baguette was designed in 1997, so next year marks a major anniversary for the bag.”

Some pieces in the auction were originally included in the Elizabeth Taylor collection sale in 2011: “They have come back again 15 years later, which shows how collectors have embraced handbags as these special, wonderful objects that are worthy not only of appreciation but of coming back to the market again and again.”

Another model generating renewed demand is the Hermès JPG Shoulder Birkin from the Jean Paul Gaultier era. Gaultier served as Hermès’s creative director from 2003 until 2010, during which he reimagined many classic models as limited-edition pieces. Like the Birkin, the JPG Shoulder Birkin features a belt-style closure, a turn lock, a lock and a clochette, but the shape is elongated into a large east-west format measuring 42 centimeters across, with two shoulder straps. “When I picture this bag, I picture early 2000s celebrities with this big Shoulder Birkin slouched over their arm,” Koffsky Parker said.

For many years, the style fell out of favor, considered a less desirable model, but interest has now surged remarkably. The Shiny Rose Tyrien Porosus Crocodile JPG Shoulder Birkin 42 offered at Christie’s Hong Kong on May 25, 2026, sold for HKD 1,905,000—about $243,000—12.5 times its pre-sale estimate of HKD 150,000-220,000. Christie’s is now offering a 2009 Curry leather example in New York with an estimate of $7,000-9,000.

Fashion jewelry appears in handbag sales rather than jewelry sales because Christie’s jewelry sales focus on precious materials and stones, while fashion jewelry—such as Chanel costume jewelry made with glass beads or imitation pearls—is valued more for its design, creativity and fashion history. “It has a lot to do with the difference in materials and also the difference in makers and markets,” Koffsky Parker clarified. The current sale features examples ranging from the 1930s to today, with prices starting at $100. “What is really exciting about the fashion jewelry is that the prices are very reasonable and attractive. We have costume jewelry from the 1930s all the way up to today, and there are some really special pieces of both signed and unsigned Chanel jewelry in particular that are remarkable, very colorful, ornate, fashionable and hard to find on the market.”

When asked how trend cycles in the secondary market are shaped, Koffsky Parker acknowledged that it works much like everything today: a combination of celebrity influence, runway activity, Instagram, Substack, influencers, auction records and a newly accessible culture of fashion education. Social media, she said, has significantly lowered traditional barriers to information, allowing collectors to learn about niche vintage models without access to archives or formal fashion-history training. “Once you had to have access to libraries where they had Vogue archives or auction archives, or had to study fashion history.”

All those traditional barriers have come down. Koffsky Parker recalled being a high school student visiting costume exhibitions at the Met and wanting to buy the exhibition catalogs, but they were often too expensive. “Today, the information is really at your fingertips. If you have a genuine interest, you can learn about a niche piece of fashion history. There is an incredible audience and a real insatiable interest in learning, which is wonderful.”

The boundaries between fashion and art have also collapsed. “Fashion is rightfully considered an art, and fashion designers are artists,” Koffsky Parker argued. “They are telling stories, crafting narratives and fantasies, and are true experts in their field. I would say that has been embraced by society.” One need only look to the Met and the growing number of fashion exhibitions at museums around the world to see how fashion has been embraced as an integral part of contemporary culture.

For new handbag buyers approaching the market, Koffsky Parker explained that key valuation factors are brand, model, material, condition and rarity—not identical to the factors used in jewelry or art, but with many similar characteristics. “If you are starting your journey as a collector, and you may not even consider yourself a collector yet, I would really think about what you are going to use and love the most. These are functional objects. They should be enjoyed and loved. If you take very good care of your handbags, purchase something you have done the research on and feel that it will fit within your life, hopefully you will have it for many, many years.”

She also encouraged buyers to research carefully, seek additional images or videos, buy from trusted sources and treat anything that seems too good to be true as a warning sign. The transparency offered by the auction market is a key advantage over the many resale platforms now available for secondhand fashion, according to Koffsky Parker. Additionally, auctions are public, bidding can be viewed as it happens online or in a saleroom, and results remain published online so buyers can see what a piece sold for years later.

Auction records, essays, videos and specialist content have also helped build awareness around rarity, materials, colors and models, effectively writing and archiving the recent history of fashion in real time. “We take our role as specialists very seriously,” Koffsky Parker added. “We are passionate experts. We love telling the stories behind bags, showing them the inside and looking at details like the color of the lining. It is the same as when an Impressionist specialist takes a painting off the wall and shows you the back. At the end of the day, we are deep, true lovers and fans of these pieces, and we love sharing any information we have.”

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Most people go to Rome for its ancient history, but the city offers many possible journeys through different eras, from the Roman Empire and earlier periods to the Baroque, the modern and the contemporary. When it comes to the interaction between contemporary art and the layers of the past embedded in the city’s terrain, the art space FOROF is probably the finest example—both for its founding history and its programming. It brings contemporary art into the heart of ancient Rome, creating opportunities for fertile dialogue not only between different eras and aesthetics but around themes that recur throughout the history of human civilization.

When excavations begin for a new development project in Rome, it is almost certain that ruins will be found. So it was hardly a surprise that when Alda Fendi acquired Palazzo Roccagiovine, directly in front of Trajan’s Column, the past resurfaced as soon as renovation began. The building housed a printing workshop for years, but once excavation started to transform the space into the future home of Alda Fendi Esperimenti, ancient marble flooring began to emerge. Fendi’s foundation eventually found its home elsewhere, in the Velabro neighborhood, in a complex of historic buildings restored by Jean Nouvel and now transformed into the luxury aparthotel and cultural complex Rhinocheros.

This delicate site next to Trajan’s Column was taken over by her daughter, Giovanna Caruso Fendi, who launched FOROF in the remains of what had once been an important part of the Basilica Ulpia inside Trajan’s Forum—one of the symbolic centers of Roman imperial power, designed by Apollodorus of Damascus. Its underground spaces preserve an extraordinary portion of the eastern apse with the original polychrome marble floors—”giallo antico,” “pavonazzetto” and “verde africano”—and, most importantly, the place where the manumissio took place, the public act through which enslaved people regained their freedom.

“What struck me from the beginning was not only the archaeological value of the site, but its capacity to still speak to the present,” Caruso Fendi tells Observer during a walkthrough of the space. “Descending into the foundations of the Basilica Ulpia means immersing oneself in the depths of ancient Rome, but also entering a short circuit between past, present and future.”

After the discovery, Caruso Fendi felt almost a calling to reclaim that singular place, which had remained inactive for more than 15 years. Launched in 2022 as a benefit society, FOROF was conceived as a uniquely hybrid cultural space where contemporary artists are invited into a face-to-face encounter with the city’s presence and history. Renovated by IT’S Studio, FOROF’s underground space today hosts context-specific contemporary art exhibitions featuring both newly commissioned works and recontextualized pieces in dialogue with the archaeological remains. “The ancient is not a backdrop; it is an active presence that conditions and transforms whatever encounters it,” Caruso Fendi emphasizes. “The result is a space of resonance between different temporalities—archaeological, human and geological—that overlap without canceling one another out.” Each of the space’s site-specific exhibitions lasts about nine months and is activated through a series of monthly events called Episodes: multidisciplinary performative interventions that involve and invite other artists.

By now, there are numerous case studies demonstrating how contemporary practices can reactivate, valorize and even help preserve ancient heritage. Yet despite these practices becoming increasingly widespread, and despite the biennial model having encouraged symbiotic intrusions between past and contemporary heritage, there is still considerable resistance in Italy and in Rome. Caruso Fendi attributes this to Italy’s layered, identity-tied heritage, which is often perceived as something to be frozen in time rather than activated. With FOROF, the challenge was to show that activating does not mean altering, but understanding more deeply. “It is not about imposing oneself on history, but about creating new possibilities for interpretation,” she argues. “Contemporary art has the ability to ask questions, to create temporal short circuits and to make visible again what we often stop seeing out of habit.”

Working on an archaeological site such as the Basilica Ulpia requires absolute respect but also the willingness to accept that history is never silent, she argues. Every site-specific intervention is born from a continuous dialogue with the place and its memory.

A compelling example is the current show by Alicja Kwade, “INFRASUPRA.” In it, the internationally acclaimed Polish, Berlin-based artist engages in a carefully calibrated dialogue with both the history and the essence of the space, staging a confrontation between temporal and spatial dimensions in a theatrically stratified field of archaeological, geological and cosmic time. Kwade operates sculpturally across different scales, materials and temporalities, treating the site as both matter and metaphor.

It feels like the perfect site for an artist like Kwade, who has long explored and questioned the structure of reality—the frameworks humans have built to govern, shape and attempt to contain the unruly, entropic nature of all phenomena that underpins the dissolution of everyday life in time. Constructing sculptures and installations that propose new modes of coexistence between the anthropic and the natural, Kwade reveals how architecture, engineering, mathematics, history and even our sense of time are human-centered: conceptual structures invented to contain a universe in continuous motion, shaped by the restless circulation of matter and energy, indifferent to our desire for permanence and inclined instead toward instability, decay and chance.

The main installation encapsulates the dynamic encounter between human time, archaeological time, geological time and cosmic time. Set within the archaeological area, the intervention amplifies the dramatic stratification of matter and perception. Black felt emphasizes the gaps in the original marble flooring, making these ancient fragments appear like islands floating in a dark pond, or celestial bodies suspended in the universe. The archaeological suddenly becomes something cosmic: another world, held in unusual silence, suspended between time and space. In the former atrium libertatis, where manumission once took place, The Heavy Light assumes an almost astral charge: the suspended stones read like a constellation, a galaxy or a thought given weight, held in impossible equilibrium between different forces. Kwade turns mass and gravity into both philosophical and spiritual problems in a work that seems to ask whether human history can still be understood from a human perspective alone, or whether it must be rethought within a broader cosmos in which every structure, body and civilization is only a temporary arrangement of matter. Even the shadows projected by the stones feel like ghosts—residues of the vanished systems of belief, power and labor that once passed through the site.

At the center of the show is a question of perception and time. Caruso Fendi describes it as an invitation to rethink our relationship with history and the present—and this is what she wants FOROF to be: a place where the past continues to generate the future through the vision of contemporary artists, and where heritage is not crystallized but continuously put back into circulation through new forms of experience, sensitivity and thought.

Previous seasons of FOROF programming have brought other international artists into dialogue with the dense, stratified history of the site, including irreverent Austrian collective Gelitin, Augustas Serapinas, Alex Cecchetti and Thomas Doxiadis. The project also creates new opportunities for engagement, knowledge-building and appreciation of heritage among the local community, particularly with younger audiences. This desire to educate and raise awareness is evident in the visitor path itself, which invites people to delve into the site’s history before encountering the contemporary work.

From the outset, Caruso Fendi imagined FOROF as a place to be experienced, not simply visited. “I was interested in creating a space for gathering, exchange and active participation, inspired by the spirit of the historic cafés of the 20th-century avant-gardes, from Cabaret Voltaire to Giacomo Balla’s Bal Tic Tac, and the postwar Roman Art Club,” she says. “These were places where artists, intellectuals and the public shared ideas, experiences and visions. For this reason, FOROF’s public is never merely a spectator.”

FOROF was also conceived not as a private foundation but as a project structured through a relatively new legal form available in Italy for cultural organizations, the SRL Società Benefit. For Caruso Fendi, this choice reflects the desire to generate positive social impact and shared value through cultural activity: “I chose to reinvest all revenue produced back into the artistic and cultural project, so that FOROF can continue to be an accessible place, open to dialogue and capable of creating lasting connections with the territory and the community.” This legal and business structure also makes the audience a stakeholder, encouraging new forms of micro-patronage and fundraising built around community participation.

The public response, Caruso Fendi says, has been remarkable. A cross-sectional community has formed around FOROF, made up of residents, scholars, tourists, occasional visitors and young people looking for new experiences. “This shift is perhaps the most significant result: the passage from visit to relationship. I want FOROF to have an impact above all on the way people see. To free, through art and culture, the gaze of those who enter here: this is perhaps the most important goal. To teach people to observe heritage not as something distant or immobile, but as living matter, still capable of speaking to the present.”

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For the past decade or so, the rhetoric of art as an asset has progressively encouraged collectors to consider it as part of a broader financial portfolio, and they are increasingly looking to play a longer game, tracking the dynamics that elevate the value of individual artworks and entire collections over time, and maximize returns when it comes to selling—often with the help of savvy advisors. Enter La Finca Collection Strategies, seasoned art advisor Dane Jensen’s latest venture designed to address the needs of Baby Boomer collectors and their families as they divest their collections. In brief, the company leverages market data and expertise to identify the best approach for selling art and collectibles ranging from silver to modern and classic design.

Jensen’s key service involves evaluating and filtering available options—reviewing multiple competitive proposals from auction houses, galleries and private sales, then building a comprehensive strategy around the best channel for selling a specific object and maximizing its value. His expertise comes from stints as a top-selling director and art advisor at Gurr Johns, director of contemporary art at Bonhams and director at design gallery Moss and Earl McGrath Gallery in Los Angeles.

What the recent May auctions made abundantly clear is that the market rebound, particularly at the very top end, is largely being led by major consignments from legendary estates and collections as the $120 trillion generational wealth transfer unfolds. “If you really look at what the big story is from the auctions, besides individual records, it’s that the biggest things were actually estates. You can see where this is headed,” Jensen tells Observer.

Over the years, Jensen realized that he was seeing two distinct kinds of clients: “One is buying and building a collection. They’re paying attention to what’s happening at fairs, they’re involved in contemporary art and inevitably involved in the market right now. Then you have another completely different client. They care about different things, they have different priorities and they’re at a different place within the market.” The latter, he says, is a segment that’s expanding quickly, tied to the wealth and value a family accumulates over time. Hence the company name, La Finca, which in Spanish refers to a house or estate, often a country house or luxury rural property. “I think of a home as a container for all of these wonderful things that can be in a collection,” Jensen explains. “The logo is a key, and the key unlocks the value of all of these treasures that are contained within someone’s home.”

Because estate sales can involve many categories beyond modern and contemporary art, Jensen relies on a trusted network of specialists across fields such as watches, jewelry, rugs, design and decorative arts. He gives the example of selling an Indigenous rug collection, for which he consulted a specialist, compared valuations and then determined the best sales venue. The goal, he says, is to give clients a clear sense of value and strategy. “I think there is immense value in understanding how deals are constructed, and in having someone on the inside who takes care of things for you,” Jensen argues.

Trust, he says, is central. Clients who first ask him to sell their modern or contemporary art often return to ask whether he can also handle watches or other property, because they trust his judgment. His process is designed to give sellers multiple options, including auction and private sale possibilities, while helping them understand how deals are structured.

Strategic partnerships can also shape outcomes. Jensen is behind the consignment of four important and rare paintings by Paul Thek—works that have not been shown publicly since the early 1960s and are now featured in Pace Gallery’s exhibition “The Dream of Vanishing,” on through August 14. Selling through Pace, he says, made sense because there is no significant auction market for the artist. “There’s no real private market that is established, but the prices at Pace are very high. They sold a Paul Thek painting last year for $2.8 million, so it became clear that was the place for them, both in terms of scholarship, returns and the length of time they would be offered for sale,” Jensen points out.

Estates especially benefit from an advisor when the collector is no longer present and decisions fall to executors, attorneys or financial advisers who may not know the market. A trust and estates lawyer, for example, may not understand the difference between a single Elvis and a double Elvis by Warhol, how condition affects an estimate, which season is best or where a work should be sold. Auction houses and galleries can be valuable partners, he says, but someone also needs to represent the client’s interest. Auction specialists may have their own institutional needs—they might want a piece to anchor a mid-season sale when the object could perform better two months later. His role is to determine whether a good-looking offer, in both numbers and timing, is actually in the seller’s best interest.

Jensen’s client base today is divided between institutional relationships, such as banks, trusts and estates, and private referrals from older collectors who are downsizing. “I think there are at least two wills where, when they pass, I will be the one to sell their collection because they know they’re going to be taken care of and the best decisions are going to be made for their beneficiaries and their family. That’s a really powerful thing when it happens.”

When asked whether the market can absorb the material emerging from this generational wealth transfer, Jensen answers that the market is now global and that he no longer thinks strictly in regional terms. Asia represents roughly a third of the market, and younger Asian collectors will inevitably acquire some of these works. “The market absorbed all of those major estates that are coming up at auction very well, and it has for some years. Go back to Paul Allen and now with the Newhouse: it has shown that it can absorb these things at the very, very elite end.”

Even in this season’s day sales, things were selling strongly. “Everybody wrote about the evening sales, but I think the day sales were also interesting to analyze: they are often a good barometer, and are really fun,” he says. “There are things in the day sales that are $5 million, and it’s a little more fun to be in the room because people move around, you can see the real action and the real market.” Recently, Jensen facilitated the sale of Ernie Barnes’s Study of The Sugar Shack (4th Point of View) (1976-81), which sold in Christie’s Post-War and Contemporary Day Sale for $482,600, more than doubling its estimate of $100,000-$150,000.

The major evening sales, Jensen argues, show only the edited version of a collection. Inside a house, there may also be silver, glass, classic design and lower-value works that matter deeply to the client. While the highest-value pieces drive most of the return, the lower-value material still requires care, energy and strategy. Most often the right solution for sellers involves international auction houses or galleries, but sometimes it involves local ones.

Valuation and proper appraisals come first. Families often attach value to objects because their parents valued them, but emotional or historical value does not always align with market value. “Sometimes you really need a very good 360-degree view of the market to tell them, ‘I know that your parents paid X for this. This is the market now,'” he says. “‘There are going to be some big wins, and there are going to be things you have to sell for a loss.'” Certain markets, such as silver, he points out, are much smaller than they were 20 or 30 years ago.

Jensen identifies logistics as one of the biggest challenges in estate planning and sales today. “The reason is that when you deal with estates, inevitably you have to control costs, and the cost and complexity of shipping and insurance today are enormous compared to what they used to be. When you’re dealing with artworks that have a certain value, you have to understand what the costs are and embed that into your strategy.” At the high end, decisions come down to risk versus reward. Selling at auction or through a gallery can produce very different outcomes. “If you make the wrong move and something undersells at auction, it could be one or two million, maybe more. You really have to understand not only the estimate but the potential return. You have to look forward in this market.”

When it comes to how new technologies and A.I. are helping make predictions more accurate and facilitate data analysis, Jensen says people have long tried to “Moneyball” the art market, but that data alone cannot determine value. “The reason is that one has to understand the artwork, its condition and the strength of the image. There are things within the valuation of an artwork that data will not tell you,” he says, noting that A.I. cannot determine the elasticity of value or interpret anomalies. He points to The Sugar Shack, which sold for $15 million and lifted the market for Ernie Barnes, while the next-highest sale remained around $2.3 million. That kind of transcendent result, he says, does not necessarily map onto the rest of the market.

“Somebody who is really good at looking at data, but doesn’t understand the art market, is not going to be able to read that data correctly,” he adds, explaining that while he uses data heavily when developing bidding and selling strategies, he hand-selects comparables and removes results that are not relevant.

Another major challenge is that art datasets are often small. For certain artists or movements, there may be only two or three comparable works—or none at all—and even those may not be directly comparable. This is the case with one of the most important collections of Fauve and Die Brücke paintings in the U.S., which Jensen is currently handling and which is valued at around $60 million. Three important paintings by Georges Braque, Maurice de Vlaminck and Alexej von Jawlensky were already consigned and shown at TEFAF New York, all with asking prices in the region of $4,000,000-$7,000,000. Four additional significant paintings by German Expressionist artists Emil Nolde, Gabriele Münter and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, in the region of $1,000,000-$2,000,000 each, are also currently in Christie’s New York private sale galleries. In both cases, Jensen first identified the best channel and then facilitated the negotiation.

All these options and variables are often difficult for clients to understand. They may own the right artist but not necessarily the right work. Jensen brings up the Warhol market as an example. “The market is very difficult to predict right now. It’s choppy waters. If you’re looking at a risk-reward scenario, if you’re trying to sell a Warhol that has a value of over $2 million, you probably want to go a safer route than a more risk-heavy strategy, but you would only know that if you were in the market.”

Beyond estate-driven sales, Jensen identifies prints and contemporary design as strong market areas. “The print market is very strong right now. It’s an excellent time to bring prints to market.” Design is also gaining traction after a difficult 15-to-20-year stretch, he says, pointing to consistently strong results—most recently Maarten Baas’s Sweeper’s Clock performing well at Christie’s—while postwar design continues to reach remarkable heights. “I think now is a really good time when people are paying much more attention to collectible contemporary design as well,” Jensen says.

This renewed strength in postwar design and prints also reflects a broader acceptance of editions among younger collectors. “Younger collectors are really comfortable with editions. It’s not something where they would rather have a painting, for example.” The market for David Hockney’s iPad drawings is another case in point. “Those are editions, and they sell very well. There are two series, one on Yosemite and another on the English countryside, that are moving very fast,” he points out, noting that some of that momentum reflects Hockney’s market more broadly, but that it also signals a younger audience becoming comfortable with editions and with new methods of making—ones that are not dismissed simply for departing from traditional media. “They’re open to the idea that an iPad drawing is interesting,” he argues. “And I love the fact that Hockney is an artist in his 80s who is still pushing forward.”

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It may be the fluid nature of Venice—the way the city itself makes visible the cyclical rhythm of all things, suspended as it is between decay and regeneration—but alchemy seems to permeate this year’s Biennale and its collateral exhibitions. In one of the most scenographic exhibitions in the city, Chinese artist Su Xiaobai has installed his lacquered three-dimensional works in energetic constellations throughout the magnificent Palazzo Soranzo Van Axel, a 15th-century palace defined by its Gothic style, unusually atmospheric frescoed interiors and a porous, articulated architecture. The exhibition brings together 35 paintings that trace the 77-year-old artist’s three-decade relationship with natural lacquer, from a 2003 work to new paintings made specifically for Venice.

Through a meditative practice anchored in ancient traditions and deep spirituality, Su transforms the ancient medium of lacquer into a radiant sculptural language. The resulting layered surfaces are animated by a subtle interplay of light and shadow, as luminescences emerge from within the material itself, inviting the eye into a kind of geological excavation that mirrors the alchemical transformations he enacts.

An official collateral event of the 2026 Venice Biennale, “Su Xiaobai’s Alchemical Universe” is presented by the Su Xiaobai Foundation in collaboration with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Speaking ahead of the highly attended opening, Su agreed that there is a form of alchemy in his process. Painting, for him, is about matter and energy. “It’s like the change and improvement of lacquer through mixing it with other materials,” he tells Observer. “I’m always trying to find a new way to utilize this traditional material, lacquer, in a new way.”

Trained at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing and the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, Su bridges Chinese literati traditions and postwar European painting, having gradually shifted away from oil paint and Socialist Realist figuration toward a material practice that exists between painting and object. His master first introduced him to lacquer and taught him traditional techniques, but Su progressively transformed and reinvented those methods, bridging Chinese artistic traditions and European modernism.

There is always a dialogue with the material, he explains. “Lacquer is very strong, but I’m always resisting that strength,” he says, noting that his studio resembles a laboratory more than a traditional atelier.

The process is slow by necessity, proceeding through a patient process that involves laying down over 20 layers per painting. That embodied knowledge of lacquer techniques manifests in the layering and stratification, giving the works both chromatic complexity and temporal depth. To further enrich the temporal stratification of their surfaces, Su also folded Fujian’s ruins into the work: roof tiles salvaged from homes demolished to make way for skyscrapers are coated in black or red lacquer, pierced with fine holes at each corner and hung one by one in a suspended installation that appears to float in midair, a testament to a bygone era being rapidly erased by the country’s modernization.

The traces and grids traversing the monochromatic surfaces evoke traditional Chinese painting while suggesting a vital tension between order and disorder, turning these painterly congregations and pigment sedimentations into embodiments of entropy. “The grid creates order and disorder,” Su explains. “I’m trying to conquer disorder and bring order back again with every layer of the painting.” This is also why he refuses to wait for the lacquer to dry completely. He intervenes before it solidifies, disrupting any stable crystallization of gesture into form.

Central to the exhibition is Su’s newest series, Niao Niao, a Chinese poetic phrase embodying sensations of transience and evanescence. Destruction and regeneration are embraced as essential parts of each painting’s transformative cycle. In the alchemy of painting, the solid surface appears to liquefy in the translucency of a crystal, a reflecting water surface or the abysses of the cosmos.

At times the works appear almost magmatic, matter momentarily at rest before shifting again. Every cycle of transformation must pass through destruction to regenerate, and these lacquer paintings evoke matter in perpetual motion across different alchemical states. They seem alive within the space, almost transforming alongside it—living entities evolving through and with their environments, as Su himself acknowledges.

When asked whether the work relates to Daoism or spirituality, Su emphasizes that such meanings are not intentionally imposed but remain deliberately open, allowing viewers to perceive them through their own interpretations and responses. The overall choreography of these quiet, meditative works, floating through the space in constellations, creates a suspension in time that invites contemplation—slowing the viewer down to investigate, appreciate and understand the process and the temporal layers each work embodies.

Through the experimental reinvention of a traditional material—developed through a process of listening to and negotiating with the material itself rather than attempting to control it—Su’s works reveal how painting can become a form of alchemy: an interaction between matter, energy and transformation that evokes, within the very act of creation, the mysteries of the universe.

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Belgian artist Mark Manders is arguably primarily a sculptor. His best-known works are iconic, monumental half-busts, evoking classical art and the entire tradition of anatomically correct academic sculpture in their perfect proportions and idealized, serene expression, yet always presented as still in process. Many of his pieces look like raw clay, soft and malleable, but are actually cast in bronze or other materials. These works are  frozen in the moment of becoming, turning matter into icon, while leaving it intentionally anti-monumental, as something that could collapse at any moment.

Yet the presence of newspapers and books in many of Manders’s works, particularly the most recent ones, offers a hint of the importance of words in his practice. Meeting the artist ahead of the opening of his show at Tanya Bonakdar in New York, one begins to understand how, at the very heart of his relentless exercise of worldbuilding, there is a profound devotion to the role of words in creating and shaping those worlds—as the very anchors of our civilization and a culture that elevates humans as imaginative and creative beings, able to see beyond the present and its physical needs.

“When I was 18, I wanted to write a three-dimensional book. I was thinking: what if you could write something, you could enter, step into different rooms, where everything is frozen, where you can see somebody thinking? So I thought it was better to start writing with objects,” Manders says as we walk through the ground-floor exhibition space. Dominating the room is Bonewhite Clay Head with Vertical-Cloud, a large-scale female head that appears to emerge from just-dried, cracked white clay. Monument, another giant female head, stands nearby, its neck covered by a kind of binding, as if it had broken before even being completed. Both are silent presences, their eyes emptied, frozen in time, and both are made of bronze, painted with a dusty white patina that makes them appear like relics from an ancient past or otherworldly, even alien presences.

This second piece is like a monument to loss and hidden grief, we learn. “My wife is a psychotherapist, and she works with hidden grief, where people carry something no one else sees,” Manders says, adding that he made this piece thinking about his mother, who lost a child before having him but was not allowed to talk about it at the time, forced to suppress her feelings into silence. “I wanted to make a monument for her, and for all people who carry hidden grief.”

Around these two enigmatic sculptural presences hang two unusually stretched canvases, their surfaces erased with whiteout painterly marks. Held by elastic bands, they take on a physical presence evoking a classical torso, while compressing newspapers at their extremities, which function as both frames and extensions.

All his exhibitions function as systems, Manders explains: works are conceived in relation to one another, with meaning emerging through spatial and formal dialogue rather than isolation, shaping how the viewer physically and psychologically engages with the work. “All my figures are frozen in time. Movement has to come from somewhere else, so I place things next to each other to create that movement,” he explains. “For me, it’s really like a system. Thinking about a show is something really interesting and also very helpful to create works,” he says, describing how sometimes in his studio he makes a work and then moves around it, trying to find what might speak to it. “This empty space creates a kind of desire to have something that speaks to another piece.”

In many of his past shows, Manders has tried to recreate this studio space around his work—part of an evolving project he calls “Self-Portrait as a Building,” intended not as a literal self-portrait but as a conceptual framework in which every sculpture, installation or object becomes a “room” or fragment of a larger, imagined structure.

Scale and size are central concerns for Manders, despite acknowledging that this is perhaps the most underestimated aspect of sculpture. “I think a lot about size,” he explains. “How big something is and how it relates to your body, it’s the main thing. You always see that it’s made on my scale. You feel that physically. It’s on a human scale, but the images can be another scale, so you have two scales at one time.”

On another wall, two canvases are completely covered with newspapers that turn out to be entirely fictional, manufactured by Manders himself, the product of many years of research and labor. Titled All Existing Words, the newspapers are a printed series containing all existing English words, each used only once and placed in random order. He pointed out how the work contains images that refer to many things without pointing to any one. “I made it like a cannibal. I took things from different cultures and put them together until it touches many worlds but not one in particular,” he says. “It took me 14 years. It’s like a dream for a writer—to have all existing words. I’m interested in how we create words, and how we create images, and how they travel from my head to your head. And also that we cannot control images, because images want to spread into as many heads as possible.”

According to Manders, he feels enormously rich because he can draw on all existing cultures. “I can use everything. I feel privileged to be an artist now.” Throughout his work, Manders engages with the rich symbolic and visual heritage accumulated over centuries of art and culture, belonging to the collective unconscious. His works deliberately inhabit a chronological ambiguity, finding even in contemporary expression the timelessness of a relic or cultural artifact that transcends time and space. “When people see the show, they sometimes don’t know if they are in the Met, or the Louvre, or MoMA, or Dia. You know it’s made by me, but it feels like it comes from many moments at once.”

Upstairs, Manders’ work is more minimal and conceptual while remaining poetically evocative. One room is entirely dedicated to landscapes, with cerulean light blue for the sky and earthy tones for the ground, reminiscent at once of Magritte’s and Nicolas de Staël’s palettes as well as the dominant chromatic atmospheres of the Belgian countryside for much of the year. His Landscape Study is raw and seductive in the tactile presence of its painted sand and wood surface, yet also dry and minimal, with only a few elements that, like verses in a cryptic poem, evoke an entire sensorial and emotional space. In Landscape with All Existing Words, compressed fragments of newspapers are contained within a purely light-blue scenography, anchored by an earthy brown base. “It’s also a landscape with all existing words,” he explains. “There are two groups of words—together they are all existing words, but I cut them in half. These two groups talk to each other and together form a landscape.”

The climax of this radically poverista exercise in visual poetry is probably Landscape with Two Vertical Cloisters, which reads at once as a homage to Mondrian’s abstract, theosophical synthesis and to the surreal, suspended atmospheres of Magritte. Tiny tiles are attached to a small metal rod that hovers like a horizon line over a bed of sand, each painted in different shades of blue to represent the sky at different moments. The amount of paint used on each side is carefully balanced so that the line of blue hangs in equilibrium. The result is an extremely poetic image that feels reminiscent of the Dutch landscape tradition while simultaneously gesturing toward the growing tension between culture and nature, gravity and human balance—and toward the fragile, symbiotic equilibrium that requires a conscious effort of the cultural human mind to restore.

Manders’ interest in language and worldbuilding finds an unexpected parallel in the thinking of Daniel Dennett, the American philosopher of mind, whom he cites as a key influence. Dennett’s work dismantles the idea of a unified, stable consciousness, proposing instead that meaning and perception emerge through layered, competing “drafts” assembled over time. Manders’ installations operate in a strikingly similar way: not as fixed narratives but as systems of fragments that acquire meaning only in relation, through accumulation and interpretation. His use of words, objects and invented mythologies suggests that language is not simply a tool for describing the world but a structure through which the world itself is continuously constructed—unstable, open and perpetually in the process of becoming.

While Manders’ works appear imbued with a distinctive melancholic character, they invite an embrace of melancholia’s contemplative dimension—as an opportunity to dwell on past events, examine the nature of existence and acknowledge the creativity inherent in our ability to shape reality. The layered textures of his sculptures and paintings, the accumulation of words in fragments of newspapers and literary materials, gesture toward a temporal density, an awareness of time layered onto itself, and toward the patience required for culture to develop and endure.

Ultimately, Manders’ work expresses a deep optimism about what the human mind can create—imagining and building new worlds that come to life through the combination of imagination and creativity, expressed in images and symbolic structures. He holds a cautious view of contemporary society, particularly as a father, yet maintains a strong belief in the capacity of the human mind to evolve, learn and change. “As a father today, I also look at the world in a more complex way. I don’t always think civilization is going in the right direction, but I really believe in the strength of the human mind. Still, I want to believe that people who make wrong decisions can learn from them and change,” he says.

His work can ultimately be read as a celebration of the endless capacity for worldbuilding that mind and hands together allow us to access, through all the different forms of mythic imagination that can light the way even in the darkness. That exercise of mythopoiesis reaches toward the outer space of the not-yet-possible and turns it into symbolic form—into words and images, narratives that function as installments of eternity, interrupting the passage of time and breaking the spell of the ordinary world to resituate our existence within a broader universal order, where the presence of an enduring world persists just behind the everyday.

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Operating at the intersections of African diasporic history, spirituality, mythology and popular culture, artist Sanford Biggers has long applied strategies of appropriation and transformation to engage creatively and semiotically with systems of power, race and historical narration. For his latest exhibition at Marianne Boesky, Biggers went all in, staging an immersive, psychedelic choreography articulated through quilt-based two-dimensional works, layered canvases and eclectic sculptural assemblages drawing from multiple iconographies and cultures. In an early walkthrough, just as he was finishing installing the show, Biggers described the exhibition as both a return to immersive installation-making and an expansion of concerns that have shaped his practice for years: “I wanted to create an atmosphere here that felt less like walking into a white cube with artwork and more like entering a full enveloping environment— a world where things change scale and have their own context.” He conceived the gallery space as a stage, where the exhibition unfolds fluidly like a play in three or four acts. “As you walk in, it sets the stage for a journey. The viewer becomes part of the unfolding story,” he adds.

The gallery has become an intricate theatrical labyrinth and Gesamtkunstwerk of strategically placed curtains and false walls, where new works from his Codex, Chimera and Shimmer series emerge like fragmented vignettes, inviting visitors to move through a tangled web of historical assumptions and slippery symbols—a patchwork of mutable archetypes that remains perpetually open to reinterpretation. Here, Biggers operates through a deliberately hybrid practice that combines painting, sculpture, textiles, video, performance, sound and archival material, creating collisions between materials, histories and symbolic systems that layer African diasporic traditions with American popular culture, Buddhism, jazz improvisation and postminimalist abstraction.

“The Gift of Tongues” is a fluid, idiosyncratic and multimedia crossing of histories and creative symbolic expressions, all seemingly converging in a simultaneously imaginative and spiritual pull toward transcendence beyond earthly, time-bound reality. Symbols and signifiers from different cultures slip fluidly into the space, embracing multiple meanings and readings, enriched at each passage and altered again through the cultural transmission and exchange that have built our global symbolic vocabulary.

“Each work relies on the history embedded in these materials, especially the quilts, but the titles also suggest narratives,” he notes, pointing to the large quilts that serve as both diaphragm and enveloping narrative structure in the show. “I’m interested in how quilts can function almost like scenery or backdrops,” he says.

The quilt, that quintessential vernacular object, has long proven to be rich ground for what Biggers calls “material storytelling.” His quilting work sheds new light on his long-standing concerns—racial experience, American violence, Buddhism and art history—and reveals inner dimensions of his personal journey. Biggers made his first two quilted works in 2009, installing them at the Mother Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia. On each, he transposed the locations of the Underground Railroad’s churches and safe houses from a historical map, marked them as stars in a constellation and connected them with charcoal and oil stick. The central reference is to a theory holding that people along the Underground Railroad shared crucial information in code through quilts hanging from safe houses and other passageways. Scholars have found little proof of this, but for Biggers the very fact of popular knowledge, even when apocryphal, has value in itself: “It is more important that history endure.”

This is, however, the first time Biggers has stretched some of these works like paintings. “They’re all comprised of actual ancient quilts that I combine and paint on,” he explains, noting how he has lately been blurring the colors of the quilts so the geometric structures become softer and less hard-edged. “Over the years, my relationship to quilts has gone through different phases: first creating depth within the patterns, then a more graphic phase, and now I’m interested in narrative and pictorial space—objects existing within settings that remain open-ended.” This can be clearly seen in works like We Build Our Temples for Tomorrow (2026).

From this process, he also began hand-marbling paper as a nod to painting traditions, then painting directly onto fabric and drawing with oil stick. The resulting two-dimensional works, such as The Wind Whispers Mary (2026), are mixed-media, collage-like compositions dense with both materiality and symbolism. “A lot of this came out of the pandemic, when I was working without a team and spending more time on individual pieces,” Biggers says, addressing the rich experimentation in both techniques and materials involved in these new works. “The process became much more instinctive and physical.”

His art-making process begins with one intention, but the work evolves over several days. He is less interested in fixed symbolism than in the creative exploration of symbologies that can emerge through sourcing, assembling and dialectically combining different elements and cultural references. “I’m constantly absorbing influences: The Tibetan Book of the Dead, tarot cards, concert posters from the 1960s. There’s definitely a psychedelic quality there,” he acknowledges, noting how meanings emerge through accumulation. Most decisions are ultimately guided by the material itself, with fabrics, colors and marks added in response to what each composition seems to require spatially or emotionally.

In one of the most richly stratified unstretched quilts, Lodestar (2026), Biggers incorporates Japanese woodblock prints, gold leaf and ukiyo-e traditions. “The gold entered the work as a way of flattening the embroidery and stitching. I think about these pieces in increasingly pictorial terms: horizon lines, spatial relationships, atmosphere.”

Biggers arely throws anything away: “I accumulate materials over years, until they suggest what they want to become.” His process is shaped by this long-term accumulation, with fabrics, textures and colors gradually revealing their potential over time until they find their perfect moment to be reactivated. He approaches each quilt as an individual, responding to its geometry, texture and color structure to determine which forms, interventions or narratives might emerge from it.

Questions of camouflage, visibility and disappearance also play a central role in this latest show. “I realized I could make the figure disappear into it. That idea of fluidity, culturally and visually, became important,” he says. Exploring tensions between legibility and illegibility, black totemic figures emerge from the fabric itself or, at times, dissolve into the backdrop through the accumulation of material additions and painterly gestures, as in Hush Harbor (Hillside Desolate), where two mysterious black silhouettes are embraced and enveloped within an abstract vortex, suspended in an idyllic landscape assembled from different quilts, each with its own motifs, colors and stories.

In this continuous exercise of collaging and stitching together fragments of different visual and symbolic narratives, it is the labor itself—the act of making and its temporal dimension—that truly matters to Biggers. “The repetitive process becomes meditative; eventually you stop consciously thinking, and your hands continue through muscle memory while your mind drifts elsewhere. That relationship between labor, repetition, and imagination feels very powerful.”

His Chimera sculptures work in a similar spirit, combining seemingly paradoxical, eclectic assemblages of fragments of white archetypal classical art—statements of Western canons of beauty—with elements drawn from the equally rich cultural traditions of African and Black communities. In To Repair or Repeat (2026), Biggers combines classical drapery and a distinct contrapposto stance with the bust of a Ghanaian Obaapa figure. In Once Upon a Second Thought (2026), he recreates in New York a site-specific installation first developed during a 2018 fellowship at the American Academy in Rome, wrapping a copy of a fragmented Roman marble from the Academy’s collection in the patchworked hallmark of Americana. By hacking the fixed monumentality of the classical tradition and hybridizing these forms with quilts and mask elements long dismissed as merely vernacular or ethnographic artifacts, Biggers challenges long-sustained power dynamics between cultures and their embedded aesthetic assumptions. In this continuous exercise of appropriation and remediation, he acknowledges the complex origins of the forms he reinterprets while envisioning a future ethnography that questions historical narratives and embraces the natural fluidity, multiplicity and pluriperspectivism that define so much of today’s global culture.

Moving through the environmentally expansive theatrical structure, almost concealed within walls and curtains, one encounters a sculpture that sits atop a pedestal—as if on an altar—before a psychedelic stretched quilt. Draped in textiles and with its face painted in colorful geometric patterns identical to the quilt hanging behind it, Narcissus (2026) both appears and disappears within this kaleidoscopic, almost hypnotic mise en abyme, becoming an auratic presence: a powerful, energetic and spiritual nucleus of the show.

Nearby, one of Biggers’s clouds appears—made of sequins applied entirely by hand in another exercise of meditation through making, one that allows the mind to drift free of the physical act. “The mind just starts wandering,” Biggers says, describing the process. “The labor is meditation, losing consciousness. It’s so repetitive that, at some point, you’re no longer even thinking about it. Your hands are working from muscle memory while your mind is able to monitor, create and imagine.” He first used clouds in graffiti work in Los Angeles in the 1990s; here, these nebulous forms are shaped and reshaped by air currents as they move across the sky, slippery and open to multiple meanings, their atmospheric significance shifting with each subsequent invocation.

In a separate room, Biggers stages three smaller black-masked sculptures, totemic figures that stand against the alluring black shadows of two Black men behind them. Titled Stand (2026), the work suggests a historical continuum—the endurance of these symbols and the spirituality and ancestral wisdom they represent, all of which remain at the heart of vibrant Black culture. Biggers describes them as “power objects,” emphasizing the importance of the interplay between scale, perspective and positioning as something that evokes our relation to the ethereal, as much as to our ancestral path, as it casts shadows or light into our futures.

The entire show is an initiatic journey and a temple celebrating the different spiritual and symbolic expressions of a shared human desire for transcendence—a quest for something beyond our earthly experience of time, given form through a shared polyglot vocabulary of enduring archetypal elements that have hybridized across centuries.

That search, in fact, returned throughout our conversation. “Spiritually, I’m thinking about antiquity, ritual, and synchronicity,” he explains. “Some people are surprised when futurism comes up in relation to my work, but even my earliest works in New York involved mandala forms.” Within this hybrid, synchronic spiritual imagery, different references coexist in a single multilayered lexicon, producing what Biggers describes as simultaneous relationships between past and future, between individual and universal. His patchwork of symbols remains open to endless possibilities and interpretations, hinting at something universal that unites humanity beyond race, gender and time.

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