10 Must-See Shows During London Gallery Weekend 2026 https://ift.tt/sjOwDhM

London Gallery Weekend returns for its sixth edition from June 5th to 7th, bringing together more than 120 galleries across the city for a packed weekend of openings, performances, talks, and events. Since launching in 2021, the initiative has become a key moment in the international art calendar, offering a citywide snapshot of London’s gallery ecosystem: from blue-chip Mayfair spaces to younger programs in Fitzrovia and the East End.

What feels particularly striking this year is the atmosphere running through many of the strongest exhibitions. Across different media, artists are engaging with themes of instability, mythology, memory, and transformation. Visitors will encounter immersive environments and materially rich works that resist the speed and slickness of digital culture in favor of slower, more embodied forms of looking.

At Sprüth Magers, for example, Anne Imhof stages a theatrical realm of cinematic unease, crisscrossed by site-specific crowd-control barriers and populated with large-scale “Wave” paintings, a four-channel film, and intensely rendered drawings. At Lisson Gallery, meanwhile, Lubaina Himid and Magda Stawarska’s collaborative installation “Zanzibar” layers abstract paintings with an eight-channel sound composition that encourages simultaneous looking and listening. Elsewhere, Christo’s groundbreaking exhibition at Gagosian centers on the first-ever realization of Air Package on a Ceiling, a monumental suspended installation conceived in 1968 but never previously produced.

Below, Artsy selects the 10 can’t-miss shows of London Gallery Weekend.

Christo and Jeanne Claude

“Air”

Gagosian, Grosvenor Hill

Through Aug. 21

Together with Jeanne-Claude, Christo transformed the possibilities of public art through monumental temporary interventions that wrapped buildings, coastlines, bridges, and parks in fabric, rope, and industrial materials. From Wrapped Coast (1968–69) in Sydney to The Gates (2005) in New York and the posthumously realized L’Arc de Triomphe, Wrapped (2021) in Paris, the duo’s projects reimagined familiar environments as sites of collective wonder and perceptual disorientation. Yet “Air” at Gagosian turns away from spectacle and toward the conceptual origins of their practice, foregrounding intimate early works alongside the first-ever realization of Air Package on a Ceiling, conceived in 1968 but never previously produced.

Organized around the invisible yet essential presence of air, the exhibition centers on the vast suspended artwork, an internally illuminated polyethylene form that hovers just above visitors’ heads. Wrapped objects and archival materials trace the evolution of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s language of concealment, while Wrapped Automobile—Volvo, Model PV-544 (1981), shown publicly for the first time in three decades, transforms a sentimental everyday object into something theatrical, tender, and strangely unknowable.

Shao Fan

“Refrain / 复沓”

White Cube, Mason’s Yard

Through June 27

Rabbit Portrait 1025, 2025
Shao Fan
White Cube

Beijing-based artist Shao Fan has long occupied a singular position within contemporary Chinese art, creating meditative works that bridge centuries of visual culture. Though his work is held in major collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Centre Pompidou, and the Victoria and Albert Museum, “Refrain / 复沓” marks his first exhibition in the U.K.

The exhibition centers on meticulously rendered large- and small-scale ink-on-rice-paper paintings, each depicting a singular central subject such as a rabbit, apple, cabbage, or other organic form. Imbued with cultural memory and spiritual reflection, these highly detailed monochromatic depictions are informed by Song dynasty painting traditions. The subjects within appear ghostly, like apparitions, memories, or impressions rather than solid objects or beings.

Particularly striking are the recurring depictions of apples in works such as Fruit 2125 (2025), which subtly collapse Eastern and Western art histories, invoking Dutch still-life painting alongside the sensual organicism of Georgia O’Keeffe. Elsewhere, spectral rabbits recall Albrecht Dürer’s Young Hare (1502), while Chinese Cabbage 1425 (2025) transforms an everyday vegetable into an object of quiet contemplation.

Anne Imhof

“Citizen”

Sprüth Magers

June 5–Aug. 1

Over the past decade, Anne Imhof has become one of the defining artists of her generation, creating immersive works that collapse the boundaries between performance, painting, music, sculpture, and film. Since winning the Golden Lion at the 2017 Venice Biennale for Faust (2017), Imhof has become synonymous with performances that create atmospheres of alienation and desire. In her works, bodies drift through vast architectural environments, suspended between intimacy and detachment, exhaustion and spectacle. “Citizen,” her latest exhibition at Sprüth Magers, extends ideas explored in her recent projects “DOOM: House of Hope” and “Fun ist ein Stahlbad” at Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, Portugal (both 2025).

Anchored by monumental new “Wave” paintings, the exhibition combines sculpture, film, drawing, and installation in a meditation on embodiment and surveillance. Site-specific crowd-control barriers slice through the gallery space, while a four-channel film and weighty bronze reliefs heighten the atmosphere of disquiet. A monumental diptych depicting a human head pushes Imhof’s figurative language into new territory, filtering references to the medieval danse macabre through the visual language of contemporary subcultures and digital spectatorship.

“You’re only happy when you can see something die!”

NEVEN

Through July 18

Mine Fire, 2022
Oliver Elphick
NEVEN

East London gallery NEVEN has quickly established itself as one of the city’s most compelling young spaces, championing emerging and cult figures whose practices orbit subculture, performance, fashion, and queer histories. Curated by artist Leo Costelloe, “You’re only happy when you can see something die!” brings together works by Greer Lankton, J.C. McCormack, Ki Yoong, Oliver Elphick, and Tiina Vanhatupa in an exhibition steeped in theatricality, artifice, and decay. Taking its title from a line spoken by Marilyn Monroe in The Misfits (1961), the show creates a kind of melancholic fever dream populated by dolls, beauty queens, artificial flowers, and cinematic afterimages.

The exhibition evokes the unstable boundary between animate and inanimate objects. In particular, many of the works trace how identities and desires become staged, mythologized, and preserved through images and objects.

Particularly poignant are photographs by Greer Lankton, the legendary East Village artist whose handmade dolls navigated glamour, grotesquery, and transfeminine self-fashioning in 1980s New York. Nearby, J.C. McCormack’s uncanny installation of plastic-wrapped silk flowers and Venetian blinds transforms domestic decoration into something ghostly and emotionally sealed-off, while Finnish doll artist Tiina Vanhatupa’s meticulously customized Blythe dolls hover between fetish object and sculptural portrait. Elsewhere, Ki Yoong’s miniature portrait of Monroe condenses one of the most endlessly reproduced faces of the twentieth century into an image of startling intimacy, and Oliver Elphick’s drawing of beauty queens dancing in a burning Arctic coal mine collapses camp spectacle into ecological apocalypse. Across the exhibition, images and objects appear suspended in states of preservation and performance—beautiful, uncanny, and already half-dead.

Roni Horn

“Seizure of Hope”

Hauser & Wirth

Through Aug. 1

For nearly four decades, Roni Horn has produced work preoccupied with instability: of language, perception, identity, and form. “Seizure of Hope,” her first solo exhibition in London in a decade, brings together a new body of drawings alongside one of her luminous cast-glass sculptures.

At the center of the exhibition is a single repeated phrase: “I am paralyzed with hope.” Borrowed from a performance by comedian Maria Bamford, the words are obsessively handwritten and rewritten across more than 45 works on paper, accumulating into dense fields of text that feel simultaneously diaristic and universal. Rendered in wax crayon, the letters blur as though submerged underwater, echoing Horn’s longstanding fascination with water as both material and metaphor. Nearby, the cast-glass sculpture Untitled (“What happens to the hole when the cheese is gone?”) (2022) shifts subtly according to light and weather, hovering between solidity and dissolution.

Shaniqwa Jarvis

“Only Love Will Break Your Heart”

Public Gallery

Through June 7

again and again and again., 2026
Shaniqwa Jarvis
Public Gallery

only love can break your heart, 2026
Shaniqwa Jarvis
Public Gallery

Flowers bloom, bruise, wilt, and reappear throughout Shaniqwa Jarvis’s first U.K. solo exhibition. Here, the artist uses photography less as a tool for documentation than as a fragile container for memory and bodily presence. Across 15 new works at Public Gallery, Jarvis pushes against the slickness and instant legibility typically associated with photographic images, layering acrylic washes, mirrored surfaces, silk, and blurred textures that force viewers to look at them more closely.

Purple gerbera daisies drift in and out of focus behind net-like veils; ruby dahlias bleed into marguerites as though seasons are collapsing into one another. Elsewhere, mirrored surfaces produce shifting double exposures that fold viewers directly into the works themselves.

Downstairs, an installation reconstructing fragments of the artist’s childhood bedroom combines archival footage and voice recordings reflecting on ambition, labor, and artistic survival in New York. Jarvis’s photographs insist on creating a physical encounter, resisting our daily passive consumption of images.

Paola Pivi

“A girl loved pearls so much she left engineering, strung them off the wall, and made art”

MASSIMODECARLO

Through June 6

Untitled (pearls), 2008
Paola Pivi
MASSIMODECARLO

Senza titolo (perle), 2005
Paola Pivi
MASSIMODECARLO

Few artists working today embrace absurdity, transformation, and spectacle with as much conviction as Paola Pivi. Since the late 1990s, the Italian-born, Alaska-based artist has built an unmistakable practice out of impossible gestures and disorienting material encounters: upside-down fighter jets, rotating airplanes, polar bears covered in brightly colored feathers, and immersive sculptural environments that push familiar objects toward states of surreal excess. Her latest exhibition at MASSIMODECARLO, however, turns toward one of the most persistent threads running through her work: pearls.

The first exhibition dedicated entirely to Pivi’s pearl series, this presentation brings together works spanning nearly three decades. Constructed from thousands of individual plastic and plexiglass pearls suspended on strings and densely layered across canvas, the works hover somewhere between painting, sculpture, and textile. Some compositions recall the chromatic geometry of Josef Albers, while others appear almost biological or coral-like, shaped as much by gravity and chance as by control.

The exhibition also includes Stop By (2021), a large-scale carpet made from recycled ocean plastics featuring the image of a monumental ladder—an ongoing motif in Pivi’s practice.

Wang Pei

“Sertraline”

Workplace

Through July 4

A shoulder disappearing into darkness, the back of a neck above a crisp cotton collar, lips caught just before speech: throughout Wang Pei’s quietly unsettling paintings, emotion is registered through fragments, surfaces, and withheld gestures rather than direct expression.

Borrowing its title from the widely prescribed antidepressant, “Sertraline” considers what happens to feeling in a culture increasingly shaped by emotional management and psychological self-regulation.

Working between figuration and cinematic abstraction, Wang constructs his paintings through layered scraping, overpainting, and delicate modulation. In La chair (2026), an extreme close-up of a face appears doubled and unstable, as though caught across multiple moments simultaneously. Elsewhere, silk fabrics and carefully composed postures suggest attempts at containment that never fully succeed. The exhibition’s rhythm feels almost filmic, with recurring textures and bodily fragments operating like visual echoes across unstable spaces and interrupted timelines.

Lubaina Himid and Magda Stawarska

“Zanzibar”

Lisson Gallery, 67 Lisson Street

June 4–Aug. 22

Sound drifts through the space before the paintings fully come into view: fragments of Taraab music, snippets of opera, radio broadcasts, and remembered voices weave around a suite of suspended canvases by Lubaina Himid. Created in 1999 and revisited here through a new sonic collaboration with her partner Magda Stawarska, “Zanzibar” transforms Lisson Gallery into an immersive landscape of memory, displacement, and return.

Unlike the narrative figurative paintings for which Himid is best known (that are currently on view in the British Pavilion at the 2026 Venice Biennale), the nine diptychs that comprise “Zanzibar” are strikingly abstract. These are floating geometric forms, zigzagging patterns, translucent washes, and tessellated boxes that evoke fragments of architecture, textiles, fishing nets, and ocean crossings.

The works draw on Himid’s memories of Zanzibar, where she was born in 1954, alongside reflections on migration and familial loss. Stawarska’s layered eight-channel sound composition guides viewers through overlapping temporalities and geographies, creating an installation suspended between personal recollection and collective history.

Serena Korda

“The Golem Rises”

Cooke Latham Gallery

June 5–July 3

Am I a Monster, 2026
Serena Korda
Cooke Latham Gallery

Motherhood, folklore, and feminist world-building collide in Serena Korda’s new exhibition at Cooke Latham. Working primarily in clay, Korda has built a practice that embraces the decorative and domestic histories of ceramics while channeling darker undercurrents drawn from pagan ritual, medieval symbolism, and speculative fiction. “The Golem Rises” continues this mythology-heavy approach through a body of work that reframes motherhood not as passive nurture, but as something unruly, protective, and politically charged.

At the center of the exhibition is a sprawling ceramic frieze inspired by the legend of the Golem, the clay figure from Jewish folklore brought to life as both protector and potential threat. Korda entwines this story with the medieval figure of the woodwose—a wild humanoid traditionally cast as monstrous or uncivilized. Across the gallery, ceramic lamps shaped like primal maternal figures flash the word “Mother” in Morse code, oscillating between beacon, warning signal, and absurdist joke. The medium of clay fits with Korda’s themes: unstable, bodily, and alive with transformative possibility.

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Art Basel Paris announces more than 200 exhibitors for its 2026 edition. https://ift.tt/MItWbqa

Art Basel Paris has announced the initial details of its 2026 edition, its first under the leadership of director Karim Crippa.

The fair, now in its fifth year, will run from October 23rd through 25th, with preview days on October 21st and 22nd. Avant Première, its invitation-only preview for galleries and a select number of their “principal clients,” will return on October 20th after debuting last year.

Returning to the Grand Palais, Art Basel Paris will bring together more than 200 galleries from 41 countries and territories (the fair did not specify the exact number of exhibitors in its release). Nearly 30 galleries will be joining the fair for the first time. Crippa, who was previously head of communications for the fair, was named director in October 2025.

In a statement, Crippa described Art Basel Paris as “a genuine part of the cultural fabric” of the city, noting the growing momentum around the Paris fair week across museums, galleries, and cross-disciplinary programming. Other fairs during the week include Paris Internationale and Design Miami.Paris. Museum shows taking place during the fair include Gustave Fayet at Fondation Louis Vuitton, Yu Nishimura at Lafayette Anticipations, and Eva Gonzalès at Petit Palais.

France’s art market is also growing, reaching $4.5 billion in sales in 2025, representing a 9% year-over-year increase, according to a report by Art Basel and UBS. France is now positioned as the world’s fourth-largest art market.

More than 60 of this year's exhibitors have galleries in France. Paris galleries participating in the fair include Perrotin, Mennour, and Galerie Nathalie Obadia, among others. There are also notable newcomers to the fair this year, including ChertLüdde, Empty Gallery, Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, Luxembourg + Co., Pace Di Donna Schrader Galleries, and Reena Spaulings Fine Art.

This year’s edition will also feature a record 12 joint booth presentations, reflecting a shift toward experimentation and collaboration. Michael Rosenfeld Gallery and Jeffrey Deitch will be teaming up to present works by Beauford Delaney and Alteronce Gumby, while Tina Kim Gallery and Take Ninagawa are joining forces to present works by Pacita Abad, Kim Lim, and Ha Chong-Hyun.

The Emergence sector, dedicated to solo booths of emerging artists, features 16 presentations, including 12 first-time participants. Among the artists spotlighted are Drake Carr, Asma Belhamar, Anna Clegg, and Thảo Nguyên Phan. Meanwhile, the Premise sector will offer reconsiderations of historic artworks by Vera Molnár, Derek Jarman, Tarsila do Amaral, and Farid Belkahia.

“Oh La La!” Art Basel’s initiative, which encourages booths to rehang works midway through the fair, will also return, led by a “guest collaborator from outside the art world,” according to a statement. Public programming will be organized in partnership with Parisian institutions and supported by Miu Miu.

The week will once again follow Frieze Week in London. That fair has yet to announce details.

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The Record-Breaking $2.5 Billion Auction Week, Explained https://ift.tt/Kq7r9ZJ

Some $2.5 billion of art was sold last week at Christie’s, Phillips, and Sotheby’s.

That total is nearly double the $1.3 billion achieved in the same window last May (all prices listed include fees). And it was dramatic: Records were smashed. Rooms erupted. A Jackson Pollock painting sold for $181.2 million after seven minutes of furious bidding. A Constantin Brâncuși sculpture fetched $107.6 million. A Mark Rothko that cost $6.7 million in 2003 sold for $85.8 million.

For the art market, it’s a jolt of excitement. To put that in perspective, last week’s total alone represents roughly 4% of what the entire global art market generated in 2025. According to the 2026 Art Basel and UBS Global Art Market Report, global art sales reached $59.6 billion, the first year of growth after two years of decline. The three houses combined for around $14.1 billion in 2025. Last week’s sales delivered nearly a fifth of that annual total in a single week.

Christie’s CEO Bonnie Brennan called the week a “pivotal reset for the market.” “The art market is solid, and we look forward to what’s next,” she added.

But beyond the starry names and eye-watering prices, what do these blockbuster sales mean for the market as a whole? Here, we break it all down.

What sold at the May 2026 New York auctions

The short answer: mostly dead artists’ works with pedigreed provenance. The bulk of the week’s headline results came from the estates of three prominent collectors, and when property of that caliber comes to market, it tends to be in demand regardless of the broader economic mood.

“The super-rare works in the $70-million-plus category carry a genuine trophy quality—the appeal of owning something no one else can have,” said Philip Hoffman, head of the advisory firm Fine Art Group. “These are the best of the best, and realistically, only around 50 works of that caliber appear on the market in any given decade, if that. When rarity and provenance align, collectors respond decisively, and last week confirmed that dynamic is as powerful as ever.”

Also worth noting: more than half the lots in the evening sales were pre-sold before the auctioneer raised their hammer. These are called third-party guarantees, where a backer commits to buy a work in advance at a (lower) agreed price in exchange for a financing fee if they’re outbid.

It reduces risk for the auction house, and it means some of those dramatic bidding moments are less spontaneous than they appear. The Brâncuși record of $107.6 million, for instance, involved a guarantor who may have paid “a number very far below” that figure, according to a former Sotheby’s executive quoted in the New York Times.

Why these auctions matter

At the very top end, something has shifted. After four sluggish years, confidence among ultra-high-net-worth buyers has visibly returned. Auction sales above $10 million jumped 30% last year, thanks to strong sales last November, and last week was another example of that momentum.

The sales did not just produce high prices; they produced the kind of public spectacle the market had been missing, which matters for such a confidence-driven industry. “When blue-chip, top-tier works perform strongly, it tends to boost confidence across the market more broadly,” said Diane Abela, an art adviser. “It attracts back to the market collectors who have been less active, as well as new buyers, and this is very important. The main impact is psychological as much as financial.”

There were also encouraging signs below the trophy tier. Phillips’s evening sale—its top lot less than a tenth the price of the record Pollock—sold out and carried its highest presale estimate since 2022, while Sotheby’s day sales—350 lots, 93%of which found buyers—pointed to genuine appetite below nine-figure territory. “The day sales performed very well, with a relatively high proportion of works selling in excess of their high estimates compared to previous seasons,” said Martha Craig, a senior director and partner at advisory firm Beaumont Nathan. Indeed, works by less-familiar names like Joseph Yaeger and Varvara Stepanova drew competitive bidding from multiple parties, suggesting the demand wasn’t limited to major artists.

“Both the top- and middle-market are sharply focused on quality and fresh-to-market opportunities, and when the right work appears, buyers are moving quickly,” said Hoffman.

In the primary market—where works are sold for the first time, rather than at auction—conditions remain harder. “The confidence and momentum we are seeing at auction for most of the mid-market has not yet translated there in the same way,” he added.

Indeed, auction results are public, concentrated, and highly curated. The primary market is more diffuse and dependent on sustained collector confidence across many more artists and price points. Last year, the dealer sector grew just 2% globally, while public auction sales rose 9%, according to the Art Basel/UBS report, reflecting this divergence.

A week of blockbuster auctions can shift the mood, but it does not solve challenges facing galleries: longer buyer decision times, more price sensitivity, and a narrower pool of collectors willing to take a chance on new work.

What do the May 2026 auction results mean for art buyers?

A key thing to understand is that art can be a genuinely unpredictable asset, even in a triumphant week.

Four days before the blockbuster Pollock sale, another work by the artist sold at Phillips for $9.2 million, well below the $15.3 million it made in 2024. An Andy Warhol silkscreen of Elvis Presley, which changed hands for $37 million in 2018, sold last week for $27.1 million.

“The market has corrected in certain areas, and in other cases the bidding was simply less competitive than it would have been a few years ago, which created real opportunities for buyers,” said Abela.

This can be clarifying for buyers at all levels. The same principle applies whether someone is spending $5,000 or $50 million: Buy what you believe in and understand the risks.

The data is also broader than a $2.5 billion headline implies. Works under $50,000 accounted for 61% of all lots sold at auction last year, and the number of artists appearing at auction has grown from 2,717 in 2015 to 3,315 in 2025, according to Merrill Lynch.

“New collectors may find that they are entering a market of cautious growth,” said advisor David Shapiro. “They will be wise to learn lessons from recent burst speculative market bubbles, and instead, to prioritize, as much as possible, purchases of characteristic works by artists with proven standing and strong institutional support.”

Renewed confidence can change the mood of the market. Buyers become more engaged, sellers become more willing to consign, and high-quality works at more accessible price points can receive more attention. For new collectors, it’s a reminder of the fundamentals: the prices worth paying and works worth living with.

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NOMAD art fair to launch first U.S. edition in the Hamptons this summer. https://ift.tt/ftgXr5m

NOMAD, the travelling fair for art and design, will launch its first U.S. edition at the Watermill Center in the Hamptons from June 25th through 28th.

Under the direction of curator and NOMAD co-founder Nicolas Bellavance-Lecompte, the fair will showcase a signature mix of modern and contemporary art, design, and jewelry.

The Watermill Center, founded in 1992 as an experimental arts venue, offers a serene synthesis of indoor and outdoor spaces. It is the latest architecturally significant space to host NOMAD. Past editions of the fair have taken place in a St. Moritz clinic, a historic villa in Monaco, a 15th-century palazzo in Venice, and a decommissioned airport in Abu Dhabi.

“In each edition, NOMAD responds to a context with a strong identity,” says co-founder and director Nicolas Bellavance-Lecompte. “The Hamptons hold particular significance as a place historically shared by artistic experimentation.”

This year, NOMAD’s exhibitors will present installations designed in dialogue with Watermill’s unique campus. Participating galleries include The Future Perfect, Todd Merrill Studio, Gallery FUMI, Maison Gerard, Leila Heller Gallery, J. Lohmann Gallery, Jeff Lincoln Art + Design, and Tristan Hoare, among others.

In a statement, NOMAD described the fair’s approach as presenting collectible design “not as spectacle, but as an intimate, site-responsive conversation shaped by context and cultural intent.”

A series of special projects will anchor the fair, including the continuation of an ongoing collaboration between Giorgio Armani and NOMAD. Curated by Abby Bangser, “Giorgio Armani / Unveiled” will platform artists whose work prioritizes craftsmanship and material, including special commissions by artists Ariel Dearie and Jonathan Kline. Sisley Paris, meanwhile, will present a new project with Hamptons-based artist Sydney Albertini centered on her “Botanical Series.” Additional projects are planned by designer Mathieu Lehanneur, jeweler Silvia Furmanovich, and the New York–based platform Object & Thing.

Alongside the fair, NOMAD will organize talks, events, and a VIP program offering access to private collections and cultural sites across the region. The preview day will take place on June 25th, by invitation only. Public days will run from June 26th through 28th, with complimentary admission available to registered guests.

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5 Women Artists Who Shaped the Studio Glass Movement in the U.S. https://ift.tt/CRPlMcs

When curator Tami Landis began developing a show on women of the 1960s American Studio Glass Movement, she found countless early glass experiments by men. Many weren’t even that good—“ugly and floppy,” she recently recalled. But it was male artists who’d dominated the “hot shops” who became central to the mythology of the movement. Traces of the women who experimented with the medium were far harder to find. “It annoyed me that there’s not enough collected evidence of that in institutions,” she said.

Yet Landis persisted and has assembled a formidable trove of glassworks by women in “Tough Stuff: Women in the American Glass Studio,” on view at the Corning Museum of Glass in New York through January 10, 2027. The show offers a new history that foregrounds the pioneering female figures who worked in glass, despite incredible adversity. Much more than a historical revision, the arresting presentation features luminous and technically daring works that feel incredibly contemporary.

Landis spoke to many women artists who shared stories about being actively discouraged from working with glass. Some had professors and peers who intentionally broke their work, removed pieces from kilns early so they would crack, left notes on desks telling them to quit, or physically barred them from studios altogether. Women were routinely told they were not strong enough. They were simply unwelcome. Many ended up working alone, often at a smaller scale and outside of the studios that helped define the American Studio Glass Movement. Yet they made groundbreaking innovations in kiln-forming, stained glass, pâte de verre, and other techniques that broadened the possibilities of the medium for generations of future practitioners.

The exhibition includes rarely seen works by both well-known and lesser-known artists. Many capture moments of great invention, like the artists’ earliest encounters with glass. There are several works on view that Landis has catalogued, photographed, or properly mounted for the first time. The exhibition’s position within the museum is also significant; it occupies the museum’s prominent Heineman Gallery, which previously showcased works from the family who endowed the museum’s studio glass collection and offered a traditional, collector-driven narrative. For Landis, this project demanded a structural shift as much as a curatorial one. “We’re museums, we’re institutions,” she said. “We need to tell a different story than just what a collector says.”

Here are five artists in the exhibition to know:

Edith Franklin

B. 1922. D. 2012.

Vessels from the First Toledo Studio Glass Workshop (1962)

When Edith Franklin first tried to join the invitation-only Toledo Museum of Art Glass Workshop, she was told she couldn’t attend because she wasn’t a university professor. She asked again and was once again denied. She learned there was still space and finally paid a fee to participate. Franklin recalled: “I wasn’t invited. I invited myself.” The experimental glassblowing workshops, held in two sessions in 1962, are widely considered the birthplace of the American Studio Glass Movement, but very little work survived.

One of Franklin’s vessels greets visitors at the show’s entry. It’s one of the few works from the 1962 workshops that has endured. The three bulbous, translucent vessels, which are on loan from the Toledo Museum of Art, are small and humble but full of personality. Franklin went on to teach ceramics at the 577 Foundation in Ohio, where she served as director until 1997. She also co-founded the Toledo Potters’ Guild in 1951 and became a trustee of the Toledo Area Glass Guild in 1981.

Ruth Tamura

B. 1943.

Marbles from The Great Marble Tournament on Bay Fill (1969)

The exhibition title comes from artist Ruth Tamura, who once described the glassmaking process as “rather tough stuff.” Tamura was a pioneering figure in the American Studio Glass Movement and continues to create sculptural glass works that emphasize organic forms. She studied at the California College of Arts and Crafts (CCAC, now the California College of the Arts) in San Francisco and earned a BFA in 1966. In 1969, she received the first-ever MFA in glass from CCAC while simultaneously completing an MFA in ceramics at Mills College in Oakland, California. While still a student, Tamura helped develop the glass studios at both institutions.

The artist graduated and became acting head of the CCAC glass program, and was one of the first women to lead a university glass program in the United States. She worked closely with Dale Chihuly to write the grant that, in 1971, helped establish Pilchuck Glass School in Stanwood, Washington; it’s now one of the most important glassmaking institutions in the world.

The show features three black marbles from Tamura’s 1969 thesis performance at CCAC, The Great Marble Tournament on Bay Fill, in which the artist covered the gallery floor with sand and dozens of large-scale marbles and invited visitors to interact with the work.

Only three marbles survived, she later recalled, because visitors walked away with the rest. Tamura was deeply inspired by the performance art movement in 1960s California, and she believed that glassmaking itself was participatory and performative.

Mary Shaffer

B. 1947.

Nail Pillow (1972)

Mary Shaffer is best-known for using fused and slumped glass to expand the language of studio glass towards Minimalism and Conceptual art. She began working with the medium in 1970, both at the Rhode Island School of Design and at home with a small kiln. Shaffer quickly developed a technique that she called “mid-air slumping,” in which she used gravity to soften plate glass. She often integrated metal objects into the material. They created a sense of tension and left permanent marks, which the artist associated with the lasting imprint of trauma and memory.

For Shaffer, glassmaking carried symbolic meaning: Glass would warp and bend under heat, then settle back into flatness, which mirrored patterns of pressure and recovery. In her work, sheets of plate glass slump over wire grids into delicate, subtly distorted forms that are both fragile and rugged.

From 1979 to 1983, Shaffer chaired the Craft Department at New York University, where she also developed a public street workshop for glassblowing. Across her practice, including later works in metal, stone, and cast glass, Shaffer has remained engaged with environmental concerns and the use of recycled materials. Her first major solo exhibition devoted to glass, in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1974, featured installation-based works suspended by chains and meat hooks.

Cappy Thompson

B. 1952.

The Kingdom Within (2001)

Cappy Thompson populates her vessels with mythological and intensely personal symbols that reference memory, transformation, and spiritual reflection. The artist began her career in stained glass and is largely self-taught, with a strong commitment to experimentation.

Thompson began working with glass while studying painting and drawing at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. During the summer of 1975, she found a new creative home at Mansion Glass, a small studio where she decided to complete her degree. She taught herself glass painting and developed early technical fluency. She learned the grisaille technique in glass, which she used for commissioned portrait panels. Her work at the time also included multi-paneled screens inspired by Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock prints and ideas of harmony and pattern.

By the end of the 1970s, Thompson was renting a live-work studio equipped with a ceramic kiln and working part-time as a carpenter’s assistant. After moving to Seattle in 1984, she met the sculptor Flora Mace, who encouraged her to paint on vessels rather than flat surfaces. Since then, she has worked consistently with curved surfaces, which activate her painterly language. Thompson’s process begins with a blown glass vessel that she allows to cool completely. She then paints it and fires it again, often using enamel pigments that permanently fuse to the surface.

Toots Zynsky

B. 1951.

Clipped Grass (1982)

Toots Zynsky’s work is deeply connected to movement, rhythm, and sound. While the artist is often celebrated for her later works, she has received far less attention for her role in the experimental culture of the late 1960s. Zynsky initially trained as a dancer and was strongly influenced by music; she was drawn to the hot shop by both its sounds and the material itself. During her “spinning experiments,” fragments of colored glass would fall to the floor, which she imagined could become their own sculptural forms.

Among Zynsky’s earliest experiments were sound studies in which she dropped pieces of glass onto sheets of plate glass and recorded the resulting tones and vibrations. Although the works no longer survive, Zynsky documented these investigations, which treated glass as an instrument that could produce rhythm and resonance. They led her to pursue the filet de verre technique for which she became internationally recognized, in which fine threads of colored glass are layered and fused in the kiln, then shaped into undulating vessels.

Clipped Grass (1982), the first work Zynsky made entirely with hand-pulled threads of glass, reflects a memory central to her practice; after spending time at the renowned Pilchuck Glass School in the Pacific Northwest in the 1970s, which she helped build during its formative years, Zynsky returned to New York and longed for the sensation of walking barefoot outdoors.

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Wolfgang Tillmans wins 2026 Roswitha Haftmann Prize. https://ift.tt/Oy2zKDX

German artist Wolfgang Tillmans has won the 2026 Roswitha Haftmann Prize, Europe’s most financially significant arts prize, in recognition of his four-decade photography career and his longstanding social advocacy. The prize, administered by the Roswitha Haftmann Foundation, includes a no-strings-attached monetary award of 150,000 Swiss francs (about $190,000). The prize was established in 2001 and is named after the late Swiss dealer Roswitha Haftmann.

Tillmans, who is best known for his intimate photography of European subcultures, will receive the award in person during a ceremony at the Kunsthaus Zürich on September 17. Past winners of the prize include Cindy Sherman, Cecilia Vicuña, Sigmar Polke, Rosemarie Trockel, and Jeff Wall.

Tillmans was born in Remscheid, Germany and rose to prominence in the 1990s with his candid portraits of LGBTIQ+ youth and rave nightlife culture. Over the years, his practice expanded to include still lifes, astronomical imagery, camera-less photographic experiments, multi-media installations, sound works, and video. In a press statement, the foundation said the prize recognized Tillmans’s role in redefining photography through portraiture, abstraction, installation, publishing, and political engagement. Globally, the artist is co-represented by David Zwirner and London’s Maureen Paley. He is also represented by Regen Projects in Los Angeles, Galerie Chantal Crousel in Paris, and Galerie Buchholz in Berlin and Cologne.

“Wolfgang Tillmans is unquestionably one of the trailblazing artists of his generation in the field of photography internationally,” said Bernhart Schwenk, chief curator of contemporary art at the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich, who will present the award. “His artistic practice goes far beyond the purely aesthetic, harnessing public presence and language to foster a collective democratic consciousness founded on openness and solidarity.”

Tillmans is also a committed social activist. He has organized campaigns opposing Brexit and encouraging voter participation in German and European elections. In 2017, he established the nonprofit foundation, Between Bridges, to support democracy, LGBTQ+ advocacy, and anti-racism initiatives.

The artist’s recent exhibitions include the traveling survey “To Look Without Fear,” which opened at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2022 before traveling to Toronto and San Francisco, as well as the 2025 exhibitions “Weltraum” at the Albertinum in Dresden and “Nothing could have prepared us–Everything could have prepared us” at the Centre Pompidou in Paris.

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5 Artists Inspired by Moroccan Rugs and North African Weaving https://ift.tt/dI3xu4h

The loom has always been a form of thinking. For centuries in North Africa, weavers have articulated narratives and philosophies through colorful, patterned rugs. They use a grammar of signs, stitches, rhythm, color, and designs to communicate.

While these tapestries were once diminished by academia and the avant-garde as mere “womanly craft,” contemporary artists from the Maghreb region in Northwest Africa are transforming the medium in ways that both honor and update longstanding traditions. Many grew up around looms and recall their grandmothers’ hands on raw wool, their mothers’ crochet, or the cooperative workshops in their region. They attend to the labor, gestures, and knowledge that lived in the bodies of their women ancestors. Finally, biennales, fairs, and museums around the world are starting to catch on.

Here are five of the most exciting contemporary artists inspired by Moroccan rugs and North African weaving.

Amina Agueznay

B. 1963, Casablanca, Morocco. Lives and works in Marrakech, Morocco.

“Weaving is both sculpture and heritage, tactile and insulating,” Amina Agueznay told me days before the opening of her pavilion at the 61st Venice Biennale, where she is representing Morocco. “It’s an amazing medium for improvisation.”

The title of Agueznay’s monumental presentation, Asəṭṭa (2026), comes from the Amazigh (a Berber tribe) word for ritual weaving. Asəṭṭa, which was curated by Meriem Berrada and developed through workshops and on-site research with artisan communities across Morocco, centers on the concept of âatba: the threshold.

In the Arsenale, the artist has mounted more than 150 wool panels, woven on vertical looms and stitched with raffia, which cascade from the ceiling. From afar, they resemble Japanese scrolls. Up close, they reveal composite surfaces threaded with Murano glass, metallic filaments, and materials native to the North African craft tradition. Visitors settle into an expansive woven sofa, contemplate the fabric, and become part of the composition.

“Palm husk, wool, natural fibers…these materials have been used by artisans from different regions in their vocabulary, and together they form my lexicon,” Agueznay said.

The artist trained as an architect in Washington, D.C., before returning to Morocco in 1997. She presented her first monumental installation, titled Skin, in 2016 at the Museum Mohamed VI of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rabat, Morocco. The work emerged from a workshop the artist organized in Bouznika, a fishing town on Morocco’s Atlantic coast, where Agueznay collaborated with a group of craftswomen skilled in crochet, knitting, weaving, macramé, braiding, embroidery, and beading. The resulting sculpture, composed of recycled fishing nets interwoven with twine, wires, sequins, and paper, documented a social process and collective female knowledge.

Agueznay has now worked with artisans for almost two decades. She sees this process as a sacred act, requiring her to leave her ego at the door. “It’s about communicating with gestures, drawings, individual kindnesses, and encouragements, embracing flaws, understanding matter,” she said.

Ghizlane Sahli

B. 1973, Meknes, Morocco. Lives and works in Marrakech.

The Flows that Weave us 04, 2025
Ghizlane Sahli
Galerie le sud

A weaver once told Moroccan artist Ghizlane Sahli: “From the womb, a girl from a weaving tribe feels the rhythm of the loom. As a baby at her mother’s breast, she is surrounded by the scent of raw wool.”

Sahli, who initially trained as an architect in Paris, has similarly connected with textile practices via matriarchal traditions. Femininity and the body became central to her artistic language, which embraces softness, repetition, and time.

“My mother, who used to sew and knit, transmitted this early sensitivity and love for textiles through everyday gestures that were both simple and meaningful,” Sahli said. “These domestic practices formed an intimate environment in which threading became something natural and familiar.”

Et la sève fut... 8, 2023
Ghizlane Sahli
Christophe Person

La Mer, Origine du Monde (MOM 021), 2021
Ghizlane Sahli
Firetti Contemporary

Sahli spent years working alongside local artisans in embroidery ateliers in Morocco. “Our relationship is based on respect, trust, and love,” she said. “It creates a space of exchange where knowledge circulates horizontally rather than hierarchically.” Such collaboration connects and passes knowledge through different generations of women.

The artist is best known for her “Alveoles,” elements in her sculptural compositions made from recycled plastic bottle caps, which the artist wraps and assembles with silk thread. They resemble membranes, tissues, protective skins, sea anemones, or bulging coral as they evoke the fragility of the human body and the vulnerability of the natural world. Sahli first presented her “Alveoles” in Metamorphosis, a 2014 installation at Dar Bellarj in Marrakech.

L'Affranchie, 2023
Ghizlane Sahli
Galerie le sud

Histoires de tripes HT052, 2019
Ghizlane Sahli
Galerie le sud

In recent years, the artist has shifted from a near-monochromatic register to a palette that embraces color, warmth, and celebration. This is evident across her newest work, which she’ll exhibit in "Flowers also grow in Water, where Bodies are born…,” her upcoming December 2026 show at Atelier 21 in Casablanca. “Perhaps this is a response to the chaotic world we are living in today,” she said.

This year, the artist’s monumental piece Fields of Roses (2026) was also installed in the atrium of the new U.S. Consulate in Casablanca.

Mina Abouzahra

B. The Netherlands. Lives and works in Amsterdam and Morocco.

Brick Wall tapestry (One and a half Women), 2026
Mina Abouzahra
Rademakers Gallery

Mina Abouzahra’s motto is: A rug is never just a rug. “In the Amazigh tradition, it represents a document, a record of life, woven with symbols and colors that carry meaning across generations. To reduce it to a commodity is to erase the person who made it,” the Dutch-Moroccan artist said.

Abouzahra’s geometric, minimalist, and playful work unites elements of Dutch contemporary design with Moroccan forms. The artist recently discovered that both her grandmothers had been weavers. “I was stunned my mother had never mentioned it before,” she said. “When she said those words, everything fell into place.”

Roukia no.2, 2024
Mina Abouzahra
Rademakers Gallery

Ghada Samman Chair, 2026
Mina Abouzahra
Rademakers Gallery

In 2023, the artist participated in a year-long residency at a weaving cooperative in Taznakht, Morocco. Her work grew into “The Soul of a Rug,” an immersive exhibition that debuted at the 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair Marrakech in 2025. It consisted of a 360-degree virtual reality film that documented the full arc of rug production in Taznakht. The artist also included meaningful objects, including a woven letter, created in the Amazigh bridal tradition, which served as communication between a newly married young woman and her family of origin.

Abouzahra’s approach is political. She feels a deep tension between the intimacy of her handmade work and the brutality of the global market. To counteract those pressures, she collaborates directly with cooperatives and insists on fair compensation and shared authorship.

The artist is currently preparing for a solo exhibition at the Gouda Museum in the Netherlands, opening September 2026. She has started weaving on a Jacquard machine, which allows for both precision and intimacy.

Amira Lamti

B. 1996, Sousse, Tunisia. Lives and works in Sousse.

Amira Lamti’s practice excavates the ritual knowledge of North African women. “Weaving and traditional craft have mostly been transmitted orally; there are no traces to follow,” she said. “It’s a subject that allows you to go toward people and listen to stories, and sometimes it’s really the mystical that takes over.”

The artist trained in photography and video at the Institut Supérieur des Beaux-Arts de Sousse. While she started working primarily with photography, video, installation, and performance, textile has rapidly become one of her media of choice.

Lamti structured her exhibition “Bent el Machta”—or “Daughter of the Machta”—presented at the Yosr Ben Ammar Gallery in Tunis, Tunisia, as part of the 2024 Biennale Jaou, around a figure both intimate and mythic: the machta, or the woman who prepares a bride for the ritual Jelwa ceremony, in which the bride dances in circles while wearing a traditional, heavily embroidered golden garment.

Lamti often prints her own photographs onto traditional Tunisian sefseri, ivory veils woven from silk or fine wool. In her installations, she unites these pieces with archival footage from her family’s VHS cassettes, which documents Outia ceremonies (similar to bridal showers) across generations.

The artist is currently in residence at the Tassarout cultural association in Rabat, making a new body of work that similarly blends textile and photography. At its center are the female Sufi saints of Morocco who, in coastal mythology, protected sailors and fishermen from harm.

Work from “Bent el Machta” will be shown this summer at Les Rencontres d’Arles, the annual summer photography festival in Arles, France.

Amina Saoudi Aït Khay

B. 1955, Casablanca. Lives and works in Akouda, Tunisia.

A former physics and chemistry teacher in Casablanca, Amina Saoudi Aït Khay started making art in 1994. She began painting on silk, then transitioned into weaving: “I felt the need to reclaim the artisanal know-how I had acquired at a very young age behind my mother’s loom,” she said. “She was a great traditional weaver, and she initiated my brother and I to help her out.”

2026 has been a major year for the artist, whose work featured in the Diriyah Contemporary Art Bienniale and is now included in the 61st Venice Biennale.

Saoudi Aït Khay initially followed tradition, then decided to weave without a cartoon, or weaving blueprint. “I adopted an approach based on improvisation, which is quite unconventional,” she said.

The results are tapestries that often look like abstracted landscapes: They’re large, with warm tones, built from irregular forms, which the artist describes as “an organic living body.”

Saoudi Aït Khay was invisible to the larger cultural scene for many years. The Tunisian art world of the 1970s and ’80s viewed her tapestries as neither functional craft nor recognizable art. Over time, her works’ “in-betweenness” became their value, especially as the international art community took an interest in textile art and Tunisian contemporary art rooted in tradition. The artist’s work became part of the collections of the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, the Barjeel Art Foundation, and the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Tunisia.

Saoudi Aït Khay produces only two or three tapestries a year, and over 20 years, her oeuvre has grown to around 30 works.

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