Inside Centre Pompidou Hanwha: What to Know About Seoul’s Newest Museum https://ift.tt/XfUCAIl

The Centre Pompidou is set to deepen its anchor in East Asia with the grand opening of the Centre Pompidou Hanwha in downtown Seoul on June 4th. The launch marks a pivotal moment in France’s ongoing cultural diplomacy strategy, which has seen the Paris-based institution expand its network across the region.

The Seoul opening follows a string of high-profile partnerships for the Pompidou. Last year, it renewed its five-year collaboration with Shanghai’s West Bund Museum. Earlier this month, it signed a five-year memorandum of understanding with Hong Kong’s M+ museum, where each will co-curate shows for their respective institutions.

Over the past decade, the Korean art scene has experienced explosive growth, underpinned by the country’s chaebols—the large, family-owned conglomerates that dominate the local economy. Corporate giants like Samsung and Amorepacific have long driven the ecosystem through their own world-class private institutions, most notably Samsung’s Leeum Museum of Art.

Still, the Centre Pompidou Hanwha represents the first time a major international museum brand has established a long-term, structural presence in South Korea. Its arrival signals a new chapter of global integration for Seoul’s rapidly ascending cultural capital.

Here’s what you need to know about the new institution.

What is the new Centre Pompidou Hanwha?

Situated on Yeouido Island, Seoul’s financial district, Centre Pompidou Hanwha will operate under a four-year partnership between the Hanwha Foundation of Culture—the philanthropic arm of Hanwha Group, the 7th largest conglomerate in South Korea—and the Centre Pompidou.

It occupies a former aquarium inside the landmark 63 Building, the tallest skyscraper in the city until 2003. The building was originally constructed as a landmark for the 1988 Summer Olympics.

The institution spans 11,000 square meters across four stories. The ground floor houses a large bookstore, while a café and an auditorium are located on the first floor. A rooftop garden crowns the building above, where a restaurant overlooking the Han River is planned for a later phase.

The museum’s core is split across two galleries on the second and third floors, each spanning roughly 1,600 square meters. Gallery 1, on the second floor, is a double-height space with seven-meter ceilings engineered to accommodate large-scale touring exhibitions drawn from the permanent collection of Paris’s Centre Pompidou. Gallery 2, on the floor above, is a split-level space with a mezzanine, reserved for contemporary exhibitions curated by the Hanwha Foundation of Culture.

Who designed the new Centre Pompidou Hanwha?

The building is the work of Jean-Michel Wilmotte, the French architect behind the Grand Palais Éphémère in Paris and the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing.

Wilmotte’s ties to Korea run deep: His Korean commissions include the Gana Art Gallery, completed in 1998, and the Seoul Auction Gangnam Center in 2019. A new museum on Jeju Island, also funded by the Gana Foundation, is expected to open this year.

Widely praised for his balanced forms, deft use of natural and artificial light, and ability to integrate contemporary design into existing urban fabric, Wilmotte conceived Centre Pompidou Hanwha as what he calls “a box of light.”

Wrapped in a translucent glass envelope, the building drinks in natural light during the day and glows as an urban lantern after dark. In a subtle gesture toward local tradition, the building’s curved exterior is designed to evoke the silhouettes of traditional Korean roof tiles.

What art will Centre Pompidou Hanwha show?

Centre Pompidou Hanwha will mount two major exhibitions per year over the next four years, drawing from its modern and contemporary collection. This program features a series of eight monographic and thematic exhibitions, which will focus on the artists and movements that defined the 20th century. Running alongside it, a dedicated contemporary program will spotlight Korean artists, weaving the country’s cultural context into the broader narratives of art history.

The inaugural show, “The Cubists: Inventing Modern Vision,” will bring together 112 works by 54 artists—91 works by 43 Cubist figures alongside 21 works by 11 modern and contemporary Korean artists—assembled by a joint French and Korean curatorial team. The exhibition traces Cubism from its emergence around 1907 through the 1920s, charting its evolution into an international artistic movement shaped by intersecting experiments across regions, media, and artistic groups.

Organized into nine sections, the show features key works including The Viaduct at L’Estaque (1908) by Georges Braque—which revisits a landscape in a manner that foreshadows Analytical Cubism—and Pablo Picasso’s The Guitarist (1910), a landmark of the same movement in which the human form and instrument are systematically dismantled into fragmented, overlapping geometric planes.

The exhibition also gives sustained attention to historical currents less familiar to Korean audiences, among them Orphic Cubism and Salon Cubism. A dedicated section, “Korean Focus,” installed in the mezzanine of Gallery 2, examines how Cubism and other Western avant-garde movements entered and transformed Korean modern art, with works by Lee Soo-auck, Ham Dae-jung, and Park Re-hyun.

When does Centre Pompidou Hanwha open?

The museum opens to the public on June 4th. Admission is 28,000 KRW (approximately US$18).

A program of public events accompanies the opening. On June 4th, Youngna Kim, professor emerita at Seoul National University, will deliver a special lecture on Cubism and Korean modern art, followed by a talk from Woo Jung-Ah, professor at POSTECH University, on the expanding legacy of Cubism.

Two curator talks are planned for July—one focused on Cubism within the Centre Pompidou collection, the other on its Korean dimension. The institution says further programming will be announced in the coming weeks.

What Centre Pompidou Hanwha means for Seoul’s cultural scene

From K-pop to contemporary art, South Korea has proven a formidable exporter of cultural influence. Centre Pompidou Hanwha’s emphasis on weaving Korean artistic identity into its curatorial framework could further raise the international profile of Korean artists, situating their work within the broader narratives of art history on a global stage.

The museum, however, arrives amid unresolved questions about its principal backer. Hanwha Group, South Korea’s seventh-largest conglomerate, has faced international scrutiny over its reported ties to the Israel Defense Forces through the arms manufacturer Elbit Systems. The Hanwha Foundation of Culture has previously stated that all of Hanwha’s exports comply with South Korean law and foreign policy and has emphasized that Centre Pompidou Hanwha operates independently of the broader conglomerate. “Hanwha has never been involved in the development of any inhumane weapons,” a statement from the Hanwha Foundation, reported by The Art Newspaper, read. Hanwha, it added, has “no record of exporting weapons to Israel.”

“The Cubists: Inventing Modern Vision” runs from June 4th to October 4th.

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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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