This Ski-Resort-Turned-Sculpture-Park Carries the Spirit of Land Art into a New Era https://ift.tt/Db4t7Ex

Pioneering land artist Nancy Holt felt connected to the desert of the American West from her very first visit in 1968. A few years later, she discovered a stretch of “flat desert ringed by low mountains” in northwestern Utah, where she would create her best-known work, Sun Tunnels (1973–76): a quartet of 18-foot-long concrete cylinders positioned to capture the sunrise and sunset during the solstices. “I wanted to bring the vast space of the desert back to human scale,” Holt wrote in 1977.

In the 1960s and ’70s, while land artists like Holt, Robert Smithson, and Michael Heizer headed into remote landscapes, away from cities and galleries, another outdoor model was gaining ground. Founded in 1960, Storm King Art Center in New York’s Hudson Valley helped popularize the modern sculpture park. In the decades since, destinations like Naoshima Island in Japan and Inhotim in Brazil have drawn droves of art lovers into nature.

Established in 2024, Powder Art Foundation (PAF) has been taking its own novel approach to the sculpture park, installing ambitious outdoor artworks across 8,000 acres of Powder Mountain, a sprawling ski resort in northern Utah. In winter, you can ski past a Jenny Holzer boulder, pause to ring a bronze bell by Davina Semo hanging from the trees, or glide beneath a string of chandeliers by Kayode Ojo. In summer and fall, the same works can be explored for free, along hiking trails that wind through the mountain.

Powder Art Foundation’s vision

Powder is home to 16 artworks and counting, with new additions added each year and a forthcoming pavilion that will house a work by James Turrell. Led by chief creative officer Alex Zhang, PAF is transforming the ski resort, which is owned by Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings. The pair bonded over their shared love of Naoshima, known for its incredible art and architecture, though Hastings had a more practical pitch for Powder: “How about like Storm King on a mountain?”

Zhang sought to find out: “Could you essentially retrofit a ski resort into a sculpture park, but still keep the soul and the character of the resort intact?” He envisioned the art program as a “whole new cultural layer” extending across the mountain. There’s no target number of works, and no set criteria for the type of art or artist—each piece must feel right for the place.

Utah’s history of land art and its ancient Indigenous petroglyphs were also important to the vision. Holt’s Sun Tunnels and Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970) are both within driving distance of Powder Mountain. And PAF partners with Dia Art Foundation, which owns those two works and collaborates with the Holt-Smithson Foundation to preserve them. Holt is represented at Powder, too: Her Starfire (1986), comprising eight fire pits arranged to mirror the Big Dipper and North Star, has found a permanent home on top of the mountain, facing the sunset.

For his part, Hastings said he doesn’t collect art for himself; rather, “the collection is here,” shared on the mountain.

Hiking along the Powder art trail

One October morning, I joined a guided hike along the art trail, which you can start at the top of the mountain. The first three sculptures we encountered, all new for the 2026 season, sit nestled among tall evergreens and the flickering yellow leaves of aspen trees.

The first work is Rose Wylie’s Pale-Pink Pineapple/Bomb (2025), a glossy, candy-colored painted bronze that stands more than 10 feet tall and resembles the titular fruit, with a cheeky fleshiness. It’s a rare work for Wylie, who is primarily known for her paintings, and marks her first public sculpture in the U.S.

Just minutes away sits Holzer’s THE EYE (2026), a 300-million-year-old quartzite boulder engraved with a line by Utah-born poet May Swenson’s work The Promontory Moment (1956): “The eye also a sun wanders and all that it sees it owns.” After a painstaking search for the right rock, Holzer had the text inscribed on-site to preserve the surrounding landscape. The piece reflects humanity’s long history of leaving marks on the land and is the first of a body of work Holzer will create on the mountain.

Farther along is Shanghai-based artist Xu Zhen’s Hello (2021–22), a twisting, snakelike Corinthian column that exemplifies his practice of colliding East and West. The work is perfectly perched on a mound, encircled by an aspen grove, and, like several works, can be seen from above on the ski lift.

One of the art trail’s most striking works is Nobuo Sekine’s Phase of Nothingness – Stone Stack (1970/2025). The Japanese Mono-ha artist, who died in 2019, conceived the work in 1970 but never saw it realized. More than five decades later, his estate helped bring it to life. Rising about 19 feet, the sculpture is a pile of smooth stones gently leaning into the sky, set against a majestic view of the surrounding slopes and trees.

Perhaps the most unexpected work is Ojo’s “…and that they hadn’t heard us calling, still do not hear us, up here in the tree house…” (2025), 21 crystal chandeliers suspended among the trees. Bought from Amazon and reinforced to withstand the mountain’s extreme weather, the ordinary fixtures take on an otherworldly presence.

Skiing with art

Come ski season, the experience transforms. Ojo’s chandeliers sparkle above the snow, and Sekine’s stones rise from a blanket of white. The resort has a team of “terrain specialists,” effectively art handlers on snowboards, who maintain the works through winter.

Semo’s three patinated bronze bells, Mother (2020–24), Listener (2020–24), and Reflector (2025), hang from trees near the tops of challenging runs, inviting skiers to ring them before descending.

“I was thinking about skiing as an activity that’s both exhilarating and where you’re in your own head,” Semo told me. “This moment of interiority where you’re skiing and being able to have a moment of reflection before you go down a run.”

Semo first visited Powder Mountain before much of the art had been installed. “It was kind of mind-boggling to imagine getting to put the work here,” she said. “The landscape is so vast and natural.”

It’s similar to the overwhelming scale Holt faced in the desert, and an idea that inspired Zhang early on: “that relationship from the body to the art to the landscape.”

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Tribeca loft featuring original Keith Haring mural listed for $25 million. https://ift.tt/CY5pHnX

A triplex loft in Tribeca, featuring a 1979 Keith Haring mural painted directly onto the structure, has come to market for $25 million. The 8,000-square-foot unit, located at 260 West Broadway in the landmarked American Thread Building, is listed with Compass real estate.

Haring made the work while a student at the School of Visual Arts (SVA). The school kept a student gallery space on the lower floor of the building at the time—now the first level of the triplex. He made the energetic monochrome mural with a mix of shoe polish and alcohol, atypical materials that make the artwork’s survival over the past 50 years ever more remarkable. Haring painted directly onto an iron column, a structural beam, and the ceiling, meaning it cannot be removed or relocated. The black-and-white mural features interlocking forms typical of the street artist’s iconic line work. When SVA vacated the space in the early 1980s and it became a restaurant, the mural was covered over with wallboard, inadvertently protecting it for decades. It remained hidden until the building's previous owners uncovered it in 2007 and found it largely intact.

The current owner, Adam Zoia, chief executive of Glocap Tech, recognized the work immediately when he encountered it. “It was so obviously a Keith Haring. His style is so distinct,” he told the New York Times, noting that the unsigned piece has since been authenticated by the Keith Haring Foundation. Zoia purchased the loft in 2021 and undertook a two-year, floor-to-ceiling renovation around the mural, ultimately building a bar in front of it as a physical buffer to prevent visitors from touching or splashing it. “What kind of a bar in New York City has an original Keith Haring painting on the wall behind it, and painted on the ceiling of the bar, too?” he said.

For Zoia, parting with the artwork is harder than parting with the apartment itself. “This kid made something spectacular,“ he said of Haring, who was in his early 20s and years from international fame when he painted it. He estimated that the mural alone, if it could somehow be extracted, would likely be worth more than the loft surrounding it.

Art dealer Jenn Singer, founder of a namesake Manhattan gallery, called the mural’s integration into the architecture central to its significance and to the challenge of pricing it. “The site-specific dimension is the real complexity,” she explained to the Times. “Works made for a particular space and physically integrated into it exist in a different market category altogether.” The new owner will effectively become a steward for the work. “Each owner of this loft is its caretaker for their time with it. Every future owner of this space becomes its guardian,” added Singer.

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All the Art You Need to See During Frieze London 2026 https://ift.tt/M0FwNnU

Nothing feels quite like fall in the art world more than venturing into the bright white tents of Frieze London and Frieze Masters nestled among the changing foliage of Regent’s Park. Every October, the art fairs bring with them a citywide feast of exhibitions, satellite fairs, and happenings around town. It may be the best time to experience London’s robust gallery scene—from big names in Mayfair to rising talents at the city’s younger galleries—not to mention its world-class museums.

And this year promises not to disappoint. Here’s our 10-stop guide to making the most of Frieze Week 2026.

All of the stops below are also featured in City Guide, a new feature in the Artsy app that helps you discover art nearby, save the shows, galleries, and fairs you want to see, and build your own art itineraries. Check it out here.

1. Frieze London, Frieze Masters, and Frieze Sculpture

Oct. 14–18 | Regent’s Park

Let’s start with the main event. This year, Frieze London and Frieze Masters bring together almost 300 galleries from 48 countries across two tents in Regent’s Park. Frieze London is focused squarely on contemporary art, while Frieze Masters spans thousands of years of art history—from antiquities through the 20th century. Both fairs open with their VIP days on the 14th, with public admission from the afternoon of October 15.

At Frieze London, I tend to head first to Focus, the section devoted to younger galleries and emerging artists—and reliably one of the best places to make a discovery. Another favorite is Artist-to-Artist, which invites established artists to select emerging voices for solo presentations. New this year, The Code Universe section looks at art through the lens of popular culture, from the late 1970s to today.

Frieze Masters is across the park, but on the way there—it can be a good 20-minute walk—stop by Frieze Sculpture, the fair’s public art program. This year’s edition features works by 11 artists, including Angel Otero, Conrad Shawcross, and Ivana Bašić.

Frieze Masters tends to feel a little calmer in atmosphere, with historical works, rediscoveries, unexpected pairings of old and new, and plenty of gems from both familiar and lesser-known names. This year, six presentations take their cues from two remarkable homes: Luis Barragán’s Casa Barragán in Mexico City and Charles and Maggie Jencks’s Cosmic House in Holland Park.

2. Minor Attractions and Fitzrovia galleries

Oct. 13–17 | The Newman, 50 Newman St. | Fitzrovia

this heat is making my pores leak, 2023
Madeline Brice
Blah Blah Gallery

A short walk from Regent’s Park, you’ll find Minor Attractions and a strong cluster of galleries across Fitzrovia and Soho.

Now in its fourth edition, the alternative fair—traditionally staged in hotel rooms—has a new home at The Newman in Fitzrovia. More than 75 galleries and nonprofit spaces are taking part this year, filling the hotel with art alongside programming that spans music, performance, and nightlife. Entry is free, and the whole thing promises a freewheeling alternative to the main fairs.

While you’re in the area, make time for a few nearby gallery shows too:

• Timur Si-Qin at Albion Jeune: Si-Qin drew inspiration from the Peruvian Amazon, turning tree trunks, roots, leaves, and other vegetation into stainless steel sculptures that draw attention to the wilderness that still exists.
• Sophie Birch at Alice Amati: For her first London solo show, Birch presents new paintings shaped by memory, atmosphere, and a recent residency in Rome. Books, houses, bodies, and mosaic floors recur throughout.
• “Backstage machinations” at Night Café: This two-artist show of Isabella Amram and Juliet Dodson brings together painting and sculpture around the figure of the trickster, exploring concealment, illusion, and the ways our perception can be manipulated.

3. Mayfair galleries, London Invitational, and PAD London

Various locations | Mayfair

You could easily devote several days to Mayfair—London’s densest gallery district—alone this week.

Start with the fairs: PAD London (October 13th–18th; public admission from the 15th) in Berkeley Square is known for its lush mix of modern and contemporary design and art.

Then walk over to the debut edition of London Invitational (October 15th–18th; public admission from the 16th) at the Chancery Rosewood hotel in Grosvenor Square. The wonderfully small fair brings together roughly a dozen galleries into the rarefied venue—formerly the U.S. Embassy, designed by Eero Saarinen. It’s a fitting setting for this new offshoot of the American fair Dallas Invitational.

Then, hit the galleries. Three shows worth prioritizing:

• Louis Fratino at David Zwirner: Fratino’s first London solo show brings together new paintings of intimate domestic scenes and everyday life.
• Lucy Dodd at Sprüth Magers: New paintings made with peat, local herbs, copper ink, cochineal, and powdered meteorite draw on Artemis, the moon, and Dodd’s new surroundings in Scotland.
• Kylie Manning at Pace: For her first London solo show, Manning mixes London and Hampshire clay and Thames silt into her pigments, drawing on the city’s tradition of mudlarking—searching the riverbank for lost or rare objects.

4. Fair Play

Oct. 15–18 | One Marylebone, 1 Marylebone Rd. | Marylebone

One of the more intriguing newcomers to Frieze Week this year is Fair Play, a new artist-led fair in Marylebone. The model is what makes it especially interesting: Rather than galleries presenting booths, 70 artists selected by an independent committee will show and present their work directly, without paying to participate. It’s a chance to discover work beyond the traditional gallery system.

It’s just south of Regent’s Park, making it an easy stop before or after Frieze. The fair’s invitation-only VIP day is on October 15th, and public admission opens the following day.

5. Somerset House

Somerset House, Strand | Covent Garden

There are several very good reasons to spend a half day, or maybe even the better part of a day, at Somerset House during Frieze Week.

At the Courtauld, “Salman Toor: Someone Like You” marks the artist’s first solo museum exhibition in Europe. The show brings together 19 paintings made since 2019, centered on love, friendship, and belonging. These tender, often emerald-hued worlds have made Toor one of the most beloved painters working today.

Elsewhere in the complex, 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair (October 15th–18th; public admission from the 16th) returns with galleries focused on contemporary art from Africa and its diaspora. This year’s edition places particular emphasis on African modernism.

6. Tate Modern

Bankside, London SE1 9TG | Bankside

A lot is happening at Tate Modern this week, but the newest attraction is in the Turbine Hall. Opening October 13th, the latest Hyundai Commission is by French-Lebanese artist Tarek Atoui, who works with sound and is known for inventing his own instruments. This new work builds on his long-running “I/E (Infinite Ears)” project, which explores how we experience sound.

If you go on Friday or Saturday evening, from 7:00 to 8:30 p.m., Atoui will activate the installation through live performances with collaborators including Emptyset, mazen kerbaj, Kenichi Iwasa, and Aya Metwalli.

Upstairs, the museum has multiple blockbuster exhibitions on view, which won’t be new to locals but may be to out-of-towners, including major shows of Ana Mendieta and Frida Kahlo.

7. Serpentine Galleries

Kensington Gardens | Kensington

I rarely need an excuse to wander through Hyde Park, but two compelling exhibitions at Serpentine make the trip especially worthwhile.

At Serpentine South, Justin Caguiat presents “Change Ringing,” his first institutional exhibition in the U.K. Heat-responsive paintings shift with their environment, while bells sound throughout the galleries. Across the lake at Serpentine North, Amar Kanwar presents “The Charcoal Man,” a new seven-screen installation that brings together documentary, poetry, politics, and questions of violence and resistance.

8. National Portrait Gallery

St. Martin’s Place | Westminster

One of the exhibitions I’m most curious about this week is also one of the smallest. British painter Issy Wood inaugurates the National Portrait Gallery’s new Artist Focus series with 12 self-portraits, shown together for the first time. Begun in 2020, the paintings offer a personal contrast to Wood’s better-known works, which typically feature uncanny objects, personalities, and interiors. It’s also free to see.

Also recently opened is Tim Walker’s exhibition “Fairyland: Love and Legends,” featuring some 250 portraits by the British photographer known for his fantastical approach to fashion photography.

9. The Barbican

Barbican Centre, Silk St. | Barbican

After several days of art fairs, if you’re ready to slow down and spend some time with serene Minimalism, this Robert Ryman show may be just what you need. “The Real Thing” brings together 60 works and marks the first major U.K. exhibition of Ryman’s paintings in more than 30 years.

Ryman is best known for his white paintings, but the point was never simply the color. His work trains the eye on subtleties of surface, material, brushwork, scale, and even the way a painting touches the wall. The result is a calm, inquisitive show—and a welcome change of pace.

10. The National Gallery

Trafalgar Square | Westminster

For something completely different, head to the National Gallery for “Renoir and Love,” the first major U.K. survey of Pierre-Auguste Renoir since 2007.

The show looks beyond romantic love to friendship and social life, bringing together major loans from collections around the world, including Bal du Moulin de la Galette (1876) from the Musée d’Orsay and Les grandes baigneuses (1884–87) from the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

After a week navigating crowds looking at contemporary art, it might be nice to end among the lively crowds of 19th-century Paris. And if, like me, you’re heading to Paris next, consider it the perfect segue.

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Rising Artist Khalif Tahir Thompson Paints the Vanishing Brooklyn of His Childhood https://ift.tt/wrc8f5e

Playground, 2026
Khalif Tahir Thompson
Victoria Miro

A young Black man pushes a stroller down a sidewalk. The baby's bare feet kick out from the stroller and into the open air. A black wrought-iron fence appears behind them, and behind that a brightly colored playground and a towering set of brick buildings. It’s a setting typical of New York public housing. But this seemingly quotidian scene is inflected with a sense of the fantastical. The sidewalk appears a bright, glowing orange, a tree branch deep purple. Large numbers and letters, in vibrant hues, hover over the scene’s buildings and jungle gym, imbuing the scene with a sense of childhood imagination.

The painting, Playground (2026), is typical of Brooklyn artist Khalif Tahir Thompson, one of the hottest talents of the moment. Thompson has all the telltale markers of the next big thing. He earned his MFA from Yale in 2024 and was selected for Kehinde Wiley’s Black Rock Senegal residency in 2022. His colorful, tender portraits, inspired by family photos, as well as his imagination, are held in the collections of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, the Rubell Museum, Pérez Art Museum Miami, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

This week, the buzzy artist opened his major London solo debut at Victoria Miro, just ahead of Frieze London (the gallery announced the representation of Thompson in April).

Two Brothers, 2026
Khalif Tahir Thompson
Victoria Miro

For an artist with so much momentum and success, it might seem surprising that the 31-year-old’s transatlantic solo debut is inspired, in part, by a 1970s ballad about loss, regret, and mistimed love. Titled “Send in the Clowns,” the exhibition, on view through November 7th, nods to Stephen Sondheim’s song of the same name, written for the 1973 musical A Little Night Music. The wry song, most famously performed by singer Sarah Vaughan, brings a theatrical humor to the singer’s tale of disappointments.

“The reference reflects the layered facets of my life and experiences, the ways we deploy humor to mask vulnerability,” said Thompson during a visit to his Bushwick studio this past August, “And it speaks to how I respond to tragedy.” When we spoke, the painter was putting the final touches on the 10 paintings that make up the show.

These new works come from a place of self-reflection. In the year since turning 30, he said, he’s been in a contemplative place. “I’m in a phase of looking at my upbringing, my artistic upbringing, my motivations and ambitions as an artist, and my personal story: what stories I find interesting, and the things that come together to represent me,” he said.

Thompson has earned his growing reputation with his textured, patterned, and colorful portraits rooted in his own family history. While he’s painted the figure since high school, he only turned to painting personal subjects during the pandemic. Inspired by Alice Neel’s portraits of her friends and peers, which he saw during the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibition of her work in 2021, he decided to seek out his late grandmother Betty’s family photo albums.

The Rain, 2026
Khalif Tahir Thompson
Victoria Miro

Betty had won the lottery in 1989, and in a bit of family lore, moved from Brooklyn to Orlando, Florida. “She was a huge archivist, like a lot of grandmothers, just a bit of a hoarder. She had a collection of Jet magazines, videotapes upon videotapes, albums upon albums,” said Thompson. Those photographs served as the basis for a pivotal series of work rooted in family history and unspoken legacies. “I started thinking about history, about the Great Migration,” said Thompson, of the albums’ effect on his worldview. “If you’re in the city, you don’t think about it. I’m from Brooklyn, and I wondered how I got here. My grandparents were from North Carolina. That’s what the albums provided.”

While these vintage family photographs have shaped Thompson’s practice for the past five years, in his newest works he turns to more recent family history—his own childhood. “A lot of the imagery I’ve worked with before is from before I was alive, the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s.…I wanted to continue with that language and do something personal, but more current,” he said. In these paintings, Thompson’s three older siblings become the main protagonists.

Two Brothers (2026), for instance, is based on an early-2000s family photo of his older brothers at ages 16 and 17. The brothers appear styled and serious, one donning a faux hawk and colored contacts. The image is a time capsule, not only of fashion, but of affection. “This is how I remembered them then, from the perspective of me as a child and how I saw them,” he said of the painting. Pearl (2026), meanwhile, takes inspiration from a photograph of his sister. In the painting, she is shown standing in front of a bedroom dresser and mirror, wearing an ethereal white ensemble. The painting is Thompson’s reimagining of Whistler’s Symphony in White, No. 1: The White Girl (1862). “When the art historical comes in, I play into it,” said Thompson of the reference. “I thought there was something very Whistler about [Pearl]. I got out a Whistler book, and I saw that it looked almost the same, before I’d even finished mine.”

Such nods crop up throughout the show, with references to Toulouse-Lautrec, Stuart Davis, and Kees van Dongen, along with stylistic allusions to Kerry James Marshall, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Barkley Hendricks, and, in collage-like passages, Jasper Johns.

Here, Thompson also pushes beyond the richly patterned interiors he is known for and depicts the outdoor life of the city with new dynamism. Playgrounds, hair salons, and apartment buildings all appear as key subject matter.

Arch Diner, 2026
Khalif Tahir Thompson
Victoria Miro

“Being from Canarsie, growing up in Brooklyn, I was excited to do something very New York,” he said.

While the paintings are full of color and character, they also act as a love letter to a New York that is now lost. A sense of mourning tinges the works. Thompson made a conscious effort to paint places that no longer exist for this exhibition, among them, the now-closed 24-hour Arch Diner in Canarsie.

“I’ve wanted to paint the diner for a while, [as well as other] intimate spaces like that, where I spent time growing up,” he said. “The painting is about the passage of time and things that are no longer there.”

Thompson’s contemplation of absence goes beyond places to people, too. “There are relationships that are no longer there, too.…brothers that don’t speak…things that happen,” he said. It’s bittersweet, with a slightly melancholy undertone. “Send in the Clowns” is about missed opportunity, a kind of silver lining.”

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Yasmin Berrada’s Surprising Journey to Running One of Morocco's Most Important Art Galleries https://ift.tt/copiWu8

Orange Moon, replica after the 1984 original, 1984
Mohamed Melehi
Loft Art Gallery

Yasmine Berrada never set out to run a gallery. Born and raised in Casablanca, Morocco, she studied at Université Paris Dauphine and built a career in asset management before stepping away when her first daughter was born. “I was unwell at the time, and I wanted to explore something new,” she recalled to Artsy. “When I look back now, I think the art found me, more than the other way around.”

Art has always been part of her life. Her father was an avid collector of Moroccan painting, and Berrada spent her first paycheck on an artwork. In 2009, she opened Loft Art Gallery with her sister Myriem in Casablanca’s Triangle d’Or district. Neither had formal art training, but both had inherited their father’s passion.

“We were driven above all by passion, and by the desire to create a space that reflected who we were,” she said. “Somewhere lively and accessible, where people could discover artists but also meet them, exchange with them and better understand their work.”

Some 17 years later, Loft has become a prominent champion of Moroccan modernism, helping bring the country’s artists to international audiences. In 2024, it became the first Moroccan gallery to exhibit at Art Basel.

This October in London, it will make its Frieze Masters debut with a solo presentation of works by Mohamed Melehi, a defining figure of the Casablanca Art School. The milestone comes just weeks after Loft opened a new space in its hometown.

Building a gallery—and an audience

When the sisters founded the gallery, Casablanca’s art scene was “much more intimate than it is today,” Berrada recalled. There were few institutions or galleries where audiences could encounter contemporary art, despite the city’s rich artistic history.

In the 1960s, artists Farid Belkahia, Mohamed Chabâa, and Melehi had transformed the local École des Beaux-Arts into a center for a radical new Moroccan modernism. Following independence from France in 1956, they rejected European academic conventions and colonial-era Orientalist imagery, instead drawing on local visual traditions, including Amazigh carpets, jewelry, and architecture. Their work helped forge a new artistic identity for Morocco.

Untitled, 2002
Farid Belkahia
Loft Art Gallery

Sans titre, 2003
Farid Belkahia
Loft Art Gallery

For Berrada, championing this history became central to Loft’s mission. The sisters built close relationships with the Casablanca Art School’s pioneers, organizing exhibitions and publishing research on their work. But establishing a gallery also meant cultivating an audience from scratch.

“We couldn’t simply exhibit work and wait for people to walk through the door,” she said. “We had to create curiosity.”

Many buyers were accustomed to purchasing directly from artists, often without considering how individual works might form a collection. The sisters sought to build “a real culture of collecting,” while fostering long-term relationships with artists. “It required a lot of energy,” Berrada said, “but it also gave us tremendous freedom.”

Bringing Moroccan modernism to the world

That commitment extended beyond Morocco. As Loft’s roster grew to include artists from across Africa and Europe, Berrada began introducing their work to international audiences. Over the years, the gallery has participated in fairs including Art Basel Qatar, Art Basel Paris, Paris Photo, The Armory Show, and Art Dubai, while maintaining a decade-long presence at 1-54 London. In 2024, its international endeavors made it one of Artsy’s breakout galleries of the year.

The Moroccan market has matured considerably, Berrada said; “10 or 15 years ago, we had to explain everything.” Yet she believes there is still work to do, particularly in securing international recognition for Moroccan artists and establishing the gallery’s role in sustaining their careers.

Untitled, 1967
Mohamed Melehi
Loft Art Gallery

That mission takes center stage at Frieze Masters, where Loft will present “Wave Forms,” a solo exhibition tracing Melehi’s signature wave motif from 1960 to 1980. Known for his vibrant, undulating abstractions, often painted in industrial cellulose paint on wood panels, Melehi developed a visual language that connected Moroccan traditions with international modernist movements.

The presentation begins with Untitled (1960), made during his years in Rome, when the wave was still emerging within his abstract compositions. Minneapolis (1962), created shortly after his move to the United States, marks another stage in his development. In 1963, Melehi exhibited alongside hard-edge painters at New York’s Museum of Modern Art.

Untitled, 1960
Mohamed Melehi
Loft Art Gallery

Loft has championed Melehi since its earliest days, when, Berrada recalled, “it wasn’t easy to sell his work or to position it in context, even in Morocco.” Today, his work belongs to collections including Tate, the Centre Pompidou, Mathaf, and the Institut du Monde Arabe. Yet Berrada believes his wider contribution remains underappreciated.

“There has been a huge evolution between how Melehi was seen when we started the gallery and how he’s seen now,” she said. “But internationally, and within art history, his work still needs to be fully established.”

For her, Frieze Masters offers an opportunity to place Melehi within a more expansive narrative. “His work goes far beyond the history of Moroccan art,” she said. “It belongs to a much broader history of modernism, and we want to show that.”

Untitled, 2021
Saâd Hassani
Loft Art Gallery

Untitled, 2026, 2026
Abdelkrim Ghattas
Loft Art Gallery

The fair debut follows the opening of Loft’s new Casablanca space with “Hamasāt al-Fajr,” a cross-generational exhibition bringing Moroccan modernists into dialogue with younger artists. The same week as Frieze Masters, Loft will also return to 1-54 London with works by Moroccan painter Amina Rezki and Ghanaian painter James Mishio.

“Exhibiting at Frieze and 1-54 at the same time is a challenge for a small team,” Berrada admitted, “but it was very important for us to keep presenting our artists at 1-54.”

Staying rooted in Morocco

Despite Loft’s growing international profile, Berrada remains deeply committed to Casablanca and Marrakech. Asked whether she would consider opening another gallery abroad, she was resolute. “First we need to be truly well rooted in Morocco,” she said. “I’m not going to open in a city because I have to, because it’s a trend, or because I hear it’s the place to be.”

Perhaps it is that rootedness that makes the international encounters so meaningful. Berrada describes the emotion of watching collectors in New York, Abu Dhabi, or London connect with a Moroccan artist’s work without knowing the artist or their country.

“A work can come from a very personal or local story and still speak to someone on the other side of the world,” she said. “At that moment, borders somehow disappear.”

Her ambition is for Loft to become “more and more of an essential international gallery while remaining true to who we are.” Yet her measure of success remains personal.

“I always say the greatest compliment someone in the art world can give me is to say they trust my eye.”

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Gap and Whitney Museum collaborate on Roy Lichtenstein collection. https://ift.tt/kirOCnQ

Clothing retailer Gap has teamed up with the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Estate of Roy Lichtenstein on an 18-piece apparel collection timed to the museum's forthcoming exhibition “Roy Lichtenstein: Like New,” which opens October 11th. In the “Gap–Lichtenstein–Whitney” collection, the artist's Pop-era imagery, including Crying Girl (1963), Standing Explosion (Black) (1965), and Cathedral #2 (1969), appears across hoodies, button-downs, graphic T-shirts, a varsity jacket, and accessories like a baseball cap, scarf, and knitted throw.

The retail partnership coincides with the opening of “Like New,” a survey of more than 130 works spanning six decades of Lichtenstein’s career, co-curated by Meg Onli, the Whitney's Nancy and Fred Poses curator, and artist Alex Da Corte. The exhibition examines Lichtenstein’s recurring interest in duplication, mass media, and the circulation of images, a theme the museum’s retail team said made the artist a natural fit for a mass-market collaboration. “This artist's practice is deeply connected to popular culture and the process of reproduction,” said Jack Sachs, the Whitney’s director of retail and licensing, in a statement. “We wanted to pose the question: what does Roy's work mean to consumer culture today?”

Prices range from $28 for a pair of socks modeled on Lichtenstein’s Sock (1962) to $138 for a Standing Explosion varsity jacket. Three styles, including a Cathedral #2 sweatshirt, will be sold exclusively at the Whitney’s museum store. The collection launched October 7th at select Gap stores, on Gap.com, and at shop.whitney.org.

Frank Avila-Goldman, executive director of arts and intellectual property at the Estate of Roy Lichtenstein, called the collection a way of “crystallizing the brilliance, joy and wit of Roy Lichtenstein into a wearable collection” through a pairing of “three American classics.”

The Whitney has teamed up with retail brands before. Last fall, the museum partnered with the New York label Bode on an eight-piece capsule collection inspired by Alexander Calder's work Calder's Circus (1926–31), tied to the centennial exhibition “High Wire: Calder's Circus at 100.” The Museum has also maintained a long-running relationship with Max Mara, which has produced its architecturally inspired Whitney Bag since the museum's 2015 move to its Renzo Piano–designed downtown building, including a 2020 edition that was inspired by Florine Stettheimer's Sun (1931).

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10 Must-See Shows uring Frieze London 2026 https://ift.tt/VT06XsL

11pm, 2026
Cece Philips
Public Gallery

Mountain dog, 2026
Joana Galego
Soho Revue

October is when London’s art world turns the volume all the way up. While Frieze London and Frieze Masters take over Regent’s Park, PAD London draws the more design-inclined to Berkeley Square, and suddenly there are more exhibitions, openings, and events than anyone could hope to get around. London’s galleries know they have an audience and plan their calendars accordingly, opening some of their biggest exhibitions of the year while everyone is in town.

This year, there is plenty to pull you away from the fair tents. Goodman Gallery hosts the global premiere of a new stop-motion film by William Kentridge, one of South Africa’s most celebrated living artists, while Nicola Turner sends a mass of wool and horsehair up the Georgian façade of Annely Juda Fine Art. Soho Revue welcomes Portuguese painter Joana Galego back to Greek Street. And across town in East London, NEVEN presents sculptures made from discarded shoes by Adam Lewis Jacob.

There’s a lot going on. So here, Artsy highlights 10 gallery exhibitions to catch across London during Frieze week 2026.

William Kentridge

“A Nicely Built City”

Goodman Gallery

Through Nov.7

A Nicely Built City (Never Resists Destruction), 2026
William Kentridge
Goodman Gallery

William Kentridge could just be South Africa’s greatest living artist. Back in 1993, Goodman Gallery gave his debut stop-motion animation a platform in his first exhibition with the Johannesburg-based gallery. That film became the first in Drawings for Projection (1989–present), his series of stop-motion films. More than 30 years on, Kentridge is now on film number 12, with A Nicely Built City (Never Resists Destruction) (2026), premiering at Goodman’s London space. Across the series, Kentridge has traced the changing face of Johannesburg, and South Africa more broadly, from the final years of apartheid through the decades that followed.

Made over nine months in Kentridge’s Johannesburg studio, the new film begins with the 2023 methane explosion beneath Bree Street, which tore open a section of the city center. Kentridge’s stop-motion process sees charcoal drawings repeatedly photographed, erased, and redrawn, leaving ghostly traces of earlier images as Johannesburg shifts before our eyes. The film is joined by new sculptures, and editioned works on paper, alongside workshop footage from Kentridge’s debut at opera house Glyndebourne earlier this year, where he directed a production of Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo.

Lucy Dodd

“The good, the true and the beautiful”

Sprüth Magers

Through Oct.24

Moss moon, 2026
Lucy Dodd
Sprüth Magers

New York–born artist Lucy Dodd makes large abstract paintings built from loose washes, stains, splashes, and pools of color, often using unconventional pigments in place of traditional paint. Her latest body of work was born out of her recent move from upstate New York to Scotland’s Moray Coast, where she began drawing the materials of her new surroundings directly into the paintings. For her exhibition at Sprüth Magers, for example, she’s used burnt peat washed down the Findhorn River after the 2025 Dava Moor wildfires. Other materials include local herbs, spirulina algae, cochineal made from crushed insects, copper ink, and powdered meteorite.

Artemis, the Greek goddess of the hunt, wilderness and moon, provides a starting point for these new paintings, with Dodd connecting her to both her grandmother Diana and Diana, Princess of Wales. The goddess’s associations with the moon and the hunt carry into the works themselves: Dodd presents paintings in rounded and teardrop forms, which variously recall a lunar disc, a huntress’s target, an eye or a breast.

Khalif Tahir Thompson

“Send in the Clowns”

Victoria Miro

Through Nov.7

Arch Diner, 2026
Khalif Tahir Thompson
Victoria Miro

Brooklyn-born Khalif Tahir Thompson graduated from Yale with an MFA in painting and printmaking in 2024. Two years later, he makes his London solo debut with “Send in the Clowns” at Victoria Miro. Thompson’s large, densely worked paintings place figures in domestic and neighborhood scenes, layering earthy ochers, greens, and burgundies with patterned clothing and interiors, handmade paper and fabric, letters, and numbers.

The new works look back to the Black American aesthetics of the early 2000s and Thompson’s own Brooklyn childhood. Many begin with photographs from albums belonging to his grandmother Betty, which spent 16 years in storage after her death. Siblings and relatives appear alongside people Thompson cannot identify, though he doesn’t attempt to recreate the photographs exactly. He borrows people, poses, and details, then builds his own scenes around them. The characters that we see form what Thompson calls an “imagined experience.”

Nicola Turner

“I Tear Secrets From Your Yielding Flesh”

Annely Juda Fine Art

Through Nov.7

Transitional Object, 2026
Nicola Turner
Annely Juda Fine Art

Echo in the Memory, 2026
Nicola Turner
Annely Juda Fine Art

If you’ve been around Hanover Square recently, you may have noticed something dark and hairy crawling up and around the entrance of Annely Juda Fine Art. It belongs to U.K.-based artist Nicola Turner, whose first solo exhibition with the gallery spills from ground floor, through the entrance, and onto its Georgian façade in a mass of wool and horsehair.

Turner’s installations often respond to the histories of their surroundings, and here she has plenty to work with. The building once housed the Royal College of Chemistry, where William Henry Perkin discovered the first synthetic purple dye, and later the couturier Reville & Rossiter, which made royal gowns and writer Vita Sackville-West’s wedding dress. Turner picks up these histories by including dressmaking scissors, scientific instruments, and salvaged furniture, tangled among hand-sewn forms made from wool and horsehair reclaimed from old mattresses. Moving through the building like a wedding or funeral procession, the installation references secrecy, female shame, and the inherent memory of materials.

William Crozier

“Dance of the Living 1961-1974”

Flowers

Oct.14–Nov.14

Untitled (Figure), 1961
William Crozier
Flowers

Portumna, 1962
William Crozier
Flowers

Glasgow-born artist William Crozier emerged in London in the late 1950s with dark, unsettling landscapes, but by the following decade the human figure had taken over. Influenced by the existentialist ideas he encountered in Paris and his memories of World War II newsreels, Crozier began painting isolated figures and skeletons in landscapes that seem to share their anxiety.

This exhibition focuses on that pivotal period, bringing together paintings from the 1960s and early 1970s, including three early skeletal portraits and two large-scale drawings never previously exhibited. Crozier drew on medieval danses macabres and the prints of Mexican artist José Guadalupe Posada, while refusing to locate his landscapes in any particular place. Figures appear engulfed by streaks of vivid color, their surroundings as agitated as they are. By 1975, Crozier felt he had exhausted the subject and abandoned the figure altogether, returning to landscapes in which the viewer supplied the human presence.

Edmond Brooks-Beckman

“Persistent Undoing”

Cob

Oct.10–Nov.14

Estranged Passions, 2026
Edmond Brooks-Beckman
Cob

Edmond Brooks-Beckman’s paintings look as though they have been through a lot. Thick passages of oil paint are scored, gouged, and partially stripped back, revealing glimpses of what was there before. Born in London in 1987, Brooks-Beckman completed his MA in painting at the Royal College of Art in 2023 and has developed a practice in which revising and reworking a painting is central to how it is made.

For “Persistent Undoing” at Cob, on Bloomsbury’s Lamb’s Conduit Street, Brooks-Beckman uses this process to explore how family histories and cultural memories are passed down, altered, or lost over time. Earlier layers remain buried within the paintings, while fragments of letters and symbols resurface without necessarily being legible. Brooks-Beckman describes himself as interested in “manipulation after the first event,” piling marks on top of one another before scooping sections away or cutting around them. Scratches, half-covered words, and patches of earlier color remain visible across the finished paintings.

Joana Galego

“Different Ways of Saying”

Soho Revue

Through Oct.31

They could have thorns, 2026
Joana Galego
Soho Revue

Joana Galego’s first solo show at Soho Revue in 2023 caught Artsy’s attention, landing the Portuguese painter on our “Artists on Our Radar” that same year. Now she returns to the Greek Street gallery, known for championing emerging artists, with “Different Ways of Saying.” Born in Cascais, Portugal, in 1994, Galego studied painting at the University of Lisbon before moving to London, where she studied at the Royal Drawing School in 2017. She now lives and works in South London.

Galego’s paintings begin with a mixture of observation, photographs, imagination and her own experiences. Figures emerge through loose drawing, washes of color, and layered compositions, with some passages carefully described and others barely there. A child peers from behind a bunch of flowers; hands reach towards golden leaves; elsewhere, a couple cradles a newborn. These intimate scenes are typical of Galego’s recurring interests in memory, isolation, connection and the difficulties of communicating with one another.

Jim Amaral

“A Study of Five Decades”

LAMB

Through Nov. 28

Per-se Nº 014, 2001
Jim Amaral
LAMB

Kaleidoscope: Bottom-up Dream, 2015
Jim Amaral
LAMB

California-born artist Jim Amaral has lived in Bogotá since 1957, developing a surrealist practice spanning drawing, sculpture, collage and, for a period, painting. “A Study of Five Decades” at LAMB’s Mayfair gallery brings together works on paper from the 1960s to the 2010s, tracing his fascination with the body, dreams, desire, and the subconscious.

Hands sprout from ears, lips appear in palms, and human anatomy merges with plants in Amaral’s strange, precisely drawn world. Among the earliest works on show are black-and-white drawings from the 1960s, made as Amaral became immersed in Jungian psychoanalysis and began looking to dreams and the subconscious for imagery. His 1970s works “Love Letters,” meanwhile, have roots in early correspondence exchanged with artist Olga de Amaral, now his wife of nearly 70 years (wonderfully, their romance began while dancing the tango as students in Michigan). Alongside the exhibition, LAMB makes its Frieze Masters debut with a Spotlight devoted to Amaral’s “Invisible Flowers” (1979–80), a series of botanical drawings in which flowers bloom with human reproductive organs.

Adam Lewis Jacob

“Short Vamps for Long Wear”

NEVEN

Through Oct. 24

If you’re looking for an East London option during Frieze Week, head to NEVEN, a young gallery focused on emerging artists whose practices engage with contemporary culture and urban life. There, Glasgow-based artist and filmmaker Adam Lewis Jacob is showing “Short Vamps for Long Wear,” a new body of sculptures made from worn and discarded shoes. A Glasgow School of Art MFA graduate, Jacob works across sculpture, moving image, and publishing, often cutting up and repurposing found material.

Most of the shoes for this show were picked up cheaply in markets and charity shops. Jacob rips, twists, and turns them inside out, bringing linings, labels, and other hidden parts to the surface. Storage and transit boxes from the Scottish-Italian restaurant beneath his Glasgow studio are repurposed as displays for the sculptures. The show fits into a wider concern in Jacob’s practice with transformation, circulation, and repair, and with how objects can be altered and put to use again.

Cece Philips

“All the corners that are left”

Public Gallery

Through Oct. 18

Three women, 2026
Cece Philips
Public Gallery

Lacquered Landscape, 2026
Cece Philips
Public Gallery

London-based painter Cece Philips is interested in what a home can reveal about the person who lives there. For her first exhibition with Public Gallery, she treats the house as a kind of portrait, placing women, particularly women of color, at the center of its private spaces. Across 12 paintings, interiors shift between deep shadow and pools of artificial light, following the changing light of a day and often lingering in the twilight hours.

Philips graduated from the Royal College of Art in 2023, by which point she had already had solo exhibitions with Peres Projects in Berlin and Post Gallery in Zürich. She has since participated in group exhibitions at Hauser & Wirth and GRIMM. Philips has long been interested in who gets to occupy and move through different spaces, as Artsy noted of her work in 2023: “The social dynamics that shroud the very real dangers faced by women of color walking alone at night cease to exist in her fantastical narratives.”

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