Why Prune Nourry is Sculpting These Forgotten Women Artists https://ift.tt/c4w5VyX

In 2012, New York–based French artist Prune Nourry began spending long stretches in China. There, she started working with artisans on “Terracotta Daughters” (2012–2030), a response to gender selection in the country: 108 life-size clay sculptures modeled on eight orphan girls. The series was exhibited worldwide before being buried in 2015 at a secret Chinese location, awaiting its excavation in 2030.

It’s typical of Nourry’s work, which is rooted in clay but also includes large installations and collaborative international projects. Her subject is women’s fates in an age of fast-moving science, from sex selection to genetic engineering, and the women history forgets or mistreats. To explore these ideas, she turns to multiple disciplines, enlisting ethnologists, geneticists, archaeologists, and artisans.

She learned the value of building creative relationships in her own flesh 10 years ago, when breast cancer sent her from specialist to specialist in search of the “whole picture, not only of the whole body but also of the soul,” she told Artsy. Inspired by the figure 8 for its symbolism across many cultures, she often echoes that number in her series. This fall, the artist is bringing these themes together, considering a chapter of sculpture’s history that was left out with a new commission at the Petit Palais during Paris Art Week 2026.

For “Visionaries,” Nourry spent time in the museum’s collections with the exhibition’s curator, Sixtine de Saint-Léger, then began 18 months’ research with four art historians. It turned out that only 4 percent of the works had been made by women, and among those, only four were sculptors. A statistic in stark contrast with the many representations of women as models, especially nudes, throughout the museum. “I asked myself if women artists really didn’t exist or if it was a matter of the way they were considered, and what would happen if we changed our perspective?”

Across her career, Nourry has focused on sculpting female figures to draw attention to their plight. And she likes to think for the long term. “We live in times where everything is accelerated, with this impression of sprinting constantly. But sculpting takes time,” she said. Next year she will unveil Les Vénus dionysiennes (2024–present), a public commission at Saint-Denis Pleyel station in Paris, in collaboration with architect Kengo Kuma: 108 sculptures of women evoking Paleolithic representations. “The project started three years ago, but it’s meant for longer than that,” she said, adding that duration also applies to relationships, since she values trust and the search for meaning. Every project, she said, “has to make sense not only for me, but for the people who are experiencing it.”

In 2024, Nourry co-founded the Catharsis Arts Foundation with Claude Grunitzky. Its founding project, “Statues Also Breathe,” is a series of 108 terra-cotta portraits of the girls kidnapped by Boko Haram in 2014 made in collaboration with 108 Nigerian students. Like all her projects, it relies on collaboration, combined disciplines, and duration. “Artists are to society what dreams are to the brain,” she said. “They keep society sane, translating messages through symbols, keys to the collective unconscious and the mysteries of life.”

Her homage at the Petit Palais is 18 busts in plaster and marble, of women sculptors who lived in Paris between the late 19th and early 20th centuries. “It was a lot of pressure, especially in terms of interpretation,” she said. She had very few archival images to work from, mostly official portraits where expressions and poses are stern. Together with the historians, she looked at the women’s life stories and choices, thinking through three themes: motherhood, social engagement, and healing. Some are barely known. Others, like Sarah Bernhardt and Camille Claudel, are already famous. All of them aren’t talked about enough. Here are a few of them.

Hélène Bertaux

(1825–1909)

An encounter with a sculpture by Bertaux in the collections of the Petit Palais is probably what birthed the whole project, Nourry explained. Bertaux advocated for women’s right to public education and founded the Union of Women Painters and Sculptors in 1881. “It was at once surprising and splendid, realizing that I had never heard of her and had never studied her in school, yet it was thanks to her that I was able to attend school at all.”

Jane Poupelet

(1874–1932)

A fervent feminist and antiestablishment figure, Poupelet began her career under the male pseudonym Simon de la Vergne. She is best known for her bronze female nudes, which celebrated bodies free of the corset. She is also known for making prosthetics for disfigured World War I veterans, as noted by Nourry who mentioned that Poupelet: “created masks for Les Gueules Cassées [broken faces].”

Selma Hortense Burke

(1900–1995)

“I made an exception to our [mostly 19th century] time bracket by adding a portrait of Selma Hortense Burke,” said Nourry. “I love her work, and I thought it was fascinating that an African American woman was making sculptures at the time, and was recognized for it.” Burke is known for her portraits of Martin Luther King Jr. and Franklin Roosevelt. “She was also making sculptures of babies, there is this extraordinary photo of her where she’s seen in her studio making a sculpture of an infant, and the likeness is so surprising it’s hard to tell which is which,” added Nourry.

Jingyuan Wang

(1884 or 1893–ca. 1970)

Nourry was taken with the work of Jingyuan Wang, a pioneering Chinese sculptor celebrated for her nudes of both men and women, a groundbreaking and controversial choice for a woman artist in 1920s China. “Her work is remarkable! When I look at it I see flesh. Her technique is extraordinary, and beyond technique, her sculptures exude life. It’s crazy that there is so little information about her, even though she was quite recognized at the time. She studied in Lyon then got a scholarship and went to Paris. Back in China she was a professor in Beijing,” said Nourry.

Sarah Bernhardt

(1844–1923)

A famous actress, Sarah Bernhardt was also a painter and, as is even less well known, practiced sculpture for 20 years. She successfully exhibited accomplished marble works at the Paris Salon and even in London. Nourry and the researchers were most interested in her relationship to motherhood—one of the lenses used to study these biographies along the themes of “care/healing” and “social engagement”: “Despite having a son whom she loved deeply, she managed to have a great career, leaving him for months with family while on tours,” said Nourry, adding that it proved mothers at that time could also have careers.

Camille Claudel

(1864–1943)

Although well known for her work today, Camille Claudel struggled to keep her career afloat while in a relationship with Auguste Rodin, whom she also worked for as a studio assistant. Despite showing great promise since her teens, letters found by Nourry’s team show that she was regularly asking her gallerists and her brother for financial help.

Berthe Girardet

(1861–1948)

Born in Marseille, France, into the city’s grande bourgeoisie, Berthe Girardet severed ties with her family’s tradition in the trading business to become a sculptor and trained academically in Marseille and Paris. She was recognized for her portraits of common people and of her loved ones. “She lost her son at war, which deeply influenced her work: she made many sculptures on the theme of motherhood,” said Nourry.

Cléopâtre Bourdelle Sévastos

(1882–1972)

The exhibition includes three hollow, concave portraits. These are allegorical references to groups of women from this period, like the art students, women committed to mental institutions that Nourry tried to imagine, and those Nourry calls the “legacy women,” who dedicated their lives to their husbands’ careers. For this last group, Nourry chose to represent Cléopâtre Bourdelle Sévastos, a promising sculptor who gave up her craft to run her husband’s studio instead, and did so “with a master’s hand,” said Nourry.

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Meet the Contemporary Women Artists Reimagining Pennsylvania Dutch Folk Art https://ift.tt/sjFLzuE

A couple appears making love on an appliquéd patchwork quilt that takes up half a painting’s surface. At the center of the quilt is a tulip, a symbol of faith rebirth that’s popular in Pennsylvania Dutch folk art. Towards the bottom of the panel, one figure’s bare back appears, emblazoned with winged tattoos. Two hands grasp the shoulders, and a bare leg wraps around its waist. On the wall behind the headboard hang two framed folk art pieces—a geometric sampler and a pastoral scene.

This Anne Buckwalter painting, titled Angels (2026), exemplifies the artist’s characteristic juxtaposition of contemporary sexuality and regional folk art traditions. Now based in Maine, Buckwalter was raised in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. Her family’s Swiss German roots go back to the late 1700s or 1800s. “In my work, the blending of these Pennsylvania Dutch aesthetics with elements of sexuality and kink and queerness feels very personal to me,” the artist said during a recent conversation. “I think about the home as a psychological space, a place where these very intimate dramas can play out and also where contradictory elements can live together in harmony.”

The term “Pennsylvania Dutch” alone can breed a sense of confusion, conjuring visions of Mennonites, the Amish, and rural life, austerity, and mythology at once.“There’s a lot of muddied knowledge about this particular regional culture,” acknowledged Buckwalter.

Night House (Kitchen), 2026
Becky Suss
Jack Shainman Gallery

The term itself is a misnomer. It derives from “Pennsylvania Deutsch,” meaning Pennsylvania German, a description that came to encompass waves of German and Swiss German immigrants who arrived in the region from the 17th to 19th centuries. This culture spans more traditional Amish and Mennonite communities as well as Lutheran and German Reformed congregations. The group is centered in Lancaster County, which became famous for its highly decorated folk art, painted furniture, embroidery samplers, hex signs—geometric and circular folk art painted on barns and buildings—and Fraktur, a kind of illuminated manuscript.

While Pennsylvania Dutch aesthetics have deep historical roots, Buckwalter is among many contemporary women artists finding inspiration in its culture. Becky Suss, Rebecca Morgan, and Sarah McEneaney have all adopted formal qualities and imagery from the region. Meanwhile, rising painter Samantha Joy Groff takes a more direct, even anthropological approach by painting the contemporary women of Pennsylvania Dutch culture in her nocturnal, rural tableaux.

These artists share geographic and cultural ties to the region. They use its visual language to explore domesticity, sexuality, women’s work, and the nuances of cultural pride and shame.

Pennsylvania Dutch interiors

For Buckwalter and Suss, Pennsylvania Dutch aesthetics are intrinsically tied to the home and childhood memory. Both artists paint interior domestic scenes with a flattened, warped perspective. In these spaces, they depict folk objects or family heirlooms that suggest memory, lineage, and loss.

“I pull a lot of things directly from my childhood home,” said Buckwalter, who will open “Heirloom,” a major institutional solo show at the Allentown Art Museum, on November 21st. An in-progress painting features a chair from her childhood home.

Suss, whose solo exhibition “Night House” is on view at Jack Shainman, New York, through October 31st, grew up just north of Philadelphia. She began painting interiors after her paternal grandfather died in 2011. Both grandparents had played a major role in her life, and she felt strange among their furniture after they were gone. Their Long Island ranch house was eventually sold and demolished, and Suss inherited its contents. Her earliest paintings offered remembrances of this space and functioned as “part set painting, like a stage backdrop, and part archive of these items.”

Night House (Kitchen), 2026
Becky Suss
Jack Shainman Gallery

Quilt Study (Lone Star), 2025
Anne Buckwalter
Uffner & Liu

Eventually, Suss began exploring the other side of her family tree. She imagined spaces and objects linked to her mother’s relatives, Irish American on one side and Pennsylvania German on the other. Most of them had died before she was born. “My great-aunt, one of the remaining people in my mother’s family by the time I was alive, had a beautiful chest that was painted. It always seemed like this amazing magical item in her house,” she said. She also recalls childhood visits to the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA) and the Barnes Foundation with her mother, a docent. She was drawn to the work of self-taught artists including Henri Rousseau, Horace Pippin, and the Pennsylvania Dutch. In one of her paintings currently on view, titled Living Room (2026), three Pennsylvania Dutch plates from the PMA’s collection are displayed over a bookshelf.

McEneaney has lived in Philadelphia since moving there for college in 1973. She paints with a similarly flattened perspective, shaped by Philadelphia museum collections and artists with regional ties. “I feel affinity with vernacular artists like Horace Pippin in terms of subject matter and flatness,” she said.

For Suss, however, painting domestic interiors pushes her beyond memory and into a space of desire and imagination. “There’s the idea of coveting things that I can never afford, which is always an element of my work,” she said. “The Pennsylvania Dutch have always been a part of that. There are things that I always just really, really loved.”

Samantha Joy Groff’s Mennonite influences

Samantha Joy Groff was raised in a Mennonite community in rural Pennsylvania. She paints moody, night-lit scenes of young women in satin negligees who commune with animals in the woods. Her models are often women she knows, and she sometimes depicts them wearing the traditional head coverings common to more conservative Pennsylvania Dutch communities.

Groff, who still lives and teaches in the region, says the culture was embedded in her childhood and her design sense. “I grew up going to quilt circles with my Grams and seeing the ornate textiles made by many women in the community; there is a great reverence for what’s called traditional folk arts like quilting, Fraktur, embroidery, and furniture making,” she said.

She no longer relies on overt references in her paintings, but she sees the culture in her process: “The staging, working with many women with similar upbringings, drawing, making studies, and then finally painting harkens to the hand-stitched 10-foot quilts my family made,” she said.

The patterns, too, carry meaning. “Interlocking circles for weddings, hex signs on barns for luck and prosperity. At first glance, it could be just a design, but like flowers in Victorian paintings, it holds more meaning,” she said. Stars symbolize good luck. Stylized birds, called distelfinks, symbolize happiness. Oaks and acorns bring strength. She’s also a fan of Buckwalter’s work, which makes her feel like she’s “sneaking around my Grams’s house.”

Women’s stories and an overlooked heritage

Buckwalter describes herself as a homebody who’s very sensitive to space. “I take a lot of pride and joy in making a space feel like home, and nesting, and tidying things,” she said. Part of her interest in Pennsylvania Dutch culture is rooted in the idea of elevating the everyday: Women decorated mundane objects, like chairs and pitchers and bread boxes, with such intricate, frilly designs that they became, in Buckwalter’s words “almost holy.” “There’s something worshipful about domestic space that I really love and that I carry through my work.”

Her forthcoming museum show draws directly on that tradition. Working with the museum’s curator, she selected pieces from the Allentown collection, including show towels, embroidered samplers that Pennsylvania Dutch girls, usually 12 or 13 years old, made to prove their readiness for marriage. “It’s basically an embroidered sampler saying, ‘Look, I can sew, I’ll be a good wife,’” she explained.

Suss, meanwhile, sees her relationship to the home as part of a multigenerational tradition of housekeeping. Her 2017 solo show “Homemaker” at Jack Shainman included paintings of inherited needlepoints. “My real legacy is homemaking,” she said. “Yet we have five generations of homemakers, and nobody talks about it.” She hopes her paintings in some way elevate this devalued legacy. “Craft is in most cases devalued in comparison to art, because it has utility, which devalues something,” she said.

Groff, whose family settled in Pennsylvania in 1696, sees women as the keepers of that tradition. “Women are the great artists in the culture, and rather than just making homes, they are in charge of passing down over 200 years of traditional making that makes their craft so recognizable,” she said. Like Suss, she thinks the word “homemaking” undersells it. “I think ‘homemaking’ dampens the importance of the work. Reframing it as tradition, history, and generational knowledge honors the difficulty and hard work that’s embedded in each piece.”

Groff also pushes back on a romantic view of the work. “In our current cultural climate, homemaking is often seen as staying home and making bread as a kind of class fantasy, but in these spaces, my grandma and cousins still have to milk cows on the farm alongside the men,” she said. Like Buckwalter, she sees self-determination at the center of the culture. “I think they are turning ordinary spaces into places of beauty through their individual creative expression.” Groff has carried some of that making into new work, including the garments, from headdresses to props, she created for her show “Huntress.”

Artist Rebecca Morgan, who is best known for hyper-detailed, humorous paintings and ceramics about rural Appalachian life and stereotypes, has also embraced Pennsylvania Dutch aesthetics as an emblem of local pride. Growing up in rural Pennsylvania, she often saw hex signs decorating local houses, barns, and sheds. “I always knew them as a ‘Pennsylvania Charm’ to give good luck, or to protect,” she said. “As a child, seeing a hex sign felt specific to my region of Pennsylvania. You didn’t see them in any other scenario other than the Pennsylvania radius, so it was a symbolic emblem of home.” A decade ago, the artist created a series of paintings with the motif. One work, a self-portrait she calls Pennsylvania Princess (year), features the artist wearing a mountain-laurel crown (Pennsylvania’s state flower) and a chest plate featuring a family hex sign that suggests a crest or superhero emblem. “I have always kept this unfinished painting with me because of its sincerity,” she said. A new body of her work is currently on view in “Painting in the Apocalypse” at Asya Geisberg.

Contemporary ambiguity meets Pennsylvania Dutch styles

While the culture of the Pennsylvania Dutch, with its emphasis on family, faith, and homemaking, offers a traditional, even conservative framework for living, contemporary artists are using the style to create more nuanced, ambiguous spaces.

Groff, for her part, says the eroticism in her work runs counter to her upbringing. “When you grow up in a community like this, although known for its warm and friendly people, there is very little emotional excess,” she said. “‘Rural stoicism’ comes into play. But the emotional restraint I felt and continue to feel made everything bubbling inside of me that was messy want to seep out.”

The artist places her figures in remote settings, “away from the metaphorical community spaces where the emotional excess spills out through the figuration—a more psychological space, where danger lurks just outside the picture plane.” Her works have also been heavily influenced by her research into braucherei, a Pennsylvania Dutch religious folk healing practice. “I wanted to make paintings that evoke the divine in a way that may only make sense to a few,” she said. “Even the [Pennsylvania] Dutch tradition of hex signs on barns, which is debated as decorative or symbolic, informs how I make paintings that connect to a religious experience.” The scenes teeter between a kind of ecstatic spirituality and heightened sexuality, where no truth is discernibly clear.

Counter View, 2025
Sarah McEneaney
Taymour Grahne Projects

Still Life with Ankle Cuffs, 2026
Anne Buckwalter
New Discretions

Buckwalter acknowledges that Pennsylvania Dutch culture “very much amplifies heteronormative values” and explains that she was raised in a strict Christian household where there was a “moral panic” over sexuality and the possibility of premarital sex. She describes herself as a bisexual, queer woman who is “happily and intentionally childless.” But she says she maintains “a lot of affection and warmth for my upbringing, even the strict religious parts.” In her paintings, sexuality and kink live comfortably within these idyllic, old-fashioned worlds.

“I think one way that my work functions is as a way of reconciling or marrying these disparate parts of myself, and I’m kind of making the statement that all these things can live together even though they seem like they conflict with each other,” she said.

For Suss, tension and ambiguity function more subtly. The artist leaves figures out of her spaces entirely. The interiors lack any markers of a particular time. Such distortions enhance her storytelling. “I wanted to leave the paintings open to be the backdrop to your life or my life or whoever’s life,” she said. “When you depart from a memory, the departures from truth tell the story.”

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The Met selects Danh Vo and Sandra Mujinga for 2027 facade and Great Hall commissions. https://ift.tt/2jNLP8o

The Metropolitan Museum of Art has announced its 2027 commissions for the Museum’s Fifth Avenue facade and Great Hall.

Danh Vo, who lives and works in Berlin and Mexico City, will create new work for the four niches of the Beaux-Arts facade as the Genesis Facade Commission. These works will be on view September 16, 2027, through June 13, 2028. Inside the museum, artist Sandra Mujinga, who lives and works in Oslo, will present a site-specific installation for the Great Hall, on view November 4, 2027, through April 4, 2028.

Vo’s practice draws on found and historical objects, from religious relics and photographs to fragments of antiquity, to examine how power and meaning accrue to things over time. His commission is the eighth in the facade series, following works by Wangechi Mutu, Carol Bove, Hew Locke, Nairy Baghramian, Lee Bul, Jeffrey Gibson, and, this year, Liu Wei. Vo’s commission will be the fourth under the museum’s multiyear partnership with Genesis Art Initiatives.

Mujinga works across sculpture, video, sound, and performance, often creating spectral figures that resist fixed identities. Her Great Hall installation—the fourth in that series after Kent Monkman, Jacolby Satterwhite, and Tong Yang-Tze—will consider the politics of being seen and the traces bodies leave behind.

“Danh Vo and Sandra Mujinga both treat history as something alive and unsettled and are deeply attuned to the ways objects and bodies carry meaning across time,” said Max Hollein, director of the museum. “Visitors will meet Vo's project on Fifth Avenue and be greeted by Mujinga's as they enter the Great Hall, so that together these commissions frame the very experience of arriving at the museum.” David Breslin, curator of modern and contemporary art, called the pair “two of the most inventive and essential artists of our time.”

Vo, born in 1975 in Bà Rịa, Vietnam, represented Denmark at the 2015 Venice Biennale and was the subject of a 2018 survey, “Danh Vo: Take My Breath Away,” at the Guggenheim. Mujinga, born in 1989 in Goma, Democratic Republic of the Congo, has had recent solo shows at Belvedere 21 in Vienna and the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, and was included in the 2022 Venice Biennale main exhibition “The Milk of Dreams.”

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All the Art You Need to See during Paris Art Week 2026 https://ift.tt/m97Mr5X

Like many, I don’t think you ever need an excuse to go to Paris. But with Art Basel Paris returning to the Grand Palais from October 23rd to 25th, there’s an especially good reason to plan a fall escape to the City of Light.

Beyond the fair, Paris will be buzzing with satellite fairs, gallery openings, and museum exhibitions that span centuries of art history and the best of contemporary art. It’s an especially exciting time to explore the city’s gallery hubs—namely Matignon Saint-Honoré and the Marais—as well as its institutions, from the storied Musée d’Orsay to the cutting-edge Bourse de Commerce. Here’s our 10-stop guide to making the most of Paris Art Week 2026.

All 10 stops 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.

1. Art Basel Paris

Oct. 21–25 | Grand Palais | 8th arrondissement

The centerpiece of Paris Art Week returns to the majestic Grand Palais for its fifth edition, bringing together more than 200 galleries from 41 countries. In addition to booths from local Parisian heavyweights like Perrotin, Chantal Crousel, and Almine Rech, I’d make a point of exploring Emergence, the sector dedicated to solo presentations by rising artists on the balcony that overlooks the main fair floor.

For a more art historical perspective, head to the Premise sector, which features curated presentations like Robert Indiana and Ellsworth Kelly from Olney Gleason and El Anatsui, Uche Okeke, and Obiora Udechukwu from kó. The fair begins with VIP previews on October 21st and 22nd, followed by a ticketed vernissage on the afternoon of the 22nd. Public admission runs October 23rd through 25th.

2. Paris Internationale

Oct. 20–24 | 187–189 Quai de Valmy | Canal Saint-Martin

One of my favorite counterparts to Art Basel Paris is Paris Internationale, now in its 12th edition. This year the fair moves to a new venue along the Canal Saint-Martin. Known for its independent spirit and lively atmosphere, it’s a great place to discover new artists and galleries. The fair holds an invite-only preview on October 19th, with the main fair running October 20th through 24th.

3. Marais galleries and Post-Fair

Various locations | Marais

In the Marais, make time for the galleries clustered along rue de Turenne, rue Debelleyme, and the surrounding streets. Four shows that are high on my list:

• Jordan Casteel at Thaddaeus Ropac: Opening October 19th, “Winter Sun” marks the American artist’s first solo exhibition in France. The show brings together paintings of people, botanicals, and landscapes in a palette drawn from the cool light of winter.
• Alma Allen at Perrotin: An exhibition of new, large-scale bronzes marks Allen’s first solo exhibition in Paris, and his first with Perrotin, which began representing him earlier this year. It comes ahead of his presentation at the U.S. pavilion at the Venice Biennale.
• Rosana Paulino at Mendes Wood DM: For her first solo show in Paris, opening October 19th, the Brazilian artist presents new large-scale paintings of female figures in natural settings that explore Black womanhood.
• Oscar Murillo at David Zwirner: “Unfinished Thinking: Paintings and Social Maps” brings together paintings layered with color and gesture that explore shared experiences, labor, and migration.

While in the area, don’t miss Chris Sharp’s Los Angeles–born fair, Post-Fair, which crosses the Atlantic for its first international edition, taking over two buildings at 74 and 79 rue du Temple. More than 30 galleries will present solo and two-artist presentations throughout the open rooms, creating the feel of a sprawling group exhibition rather than a conventional booth fair. Running October 19th to 24th, the fair is free to attend with advance registration.

4. Design Miami Paris

Oct. 20–24 | Hôtel de Maisons, 51 rue de l’Université | 7th arrondissement

Design Miami Paris returns to the magnificent 18th-century Hôtel de Maisons, once home to Karl Lagerfeld. Expect a striking mix of rare historic and contemporary design, from furniture to sculptural objects. The setting is part of the appeal, including the Design at Large program, which brings larger installations into the courtyard and idyllic gardens. An invitation-only preview takes place on October 20th, followed by public days from October 21st through 24th.

5. Galleries in Matignon Saint-Honoré and the 8th

Various locations | 8th arrondissement

The Matignon Saint-Honoré Nocturne on October 19th offers a festive kickoff to Paris Art Week. Some 38 galleries in the 8th arrondissement will stay open until 9 p.m., while the main streets are closed to traffic, turning the neighborhood into a lively gallery stroll. It’s an ideal time to explore one of the city’s major gallery districts, with everything from modern masters to contemporary art and design.

Three shows worth prioritizing:

• Alexander Calder at Hauser & Wirth: “François Premier” revisits Calder’s time in France in the 1950s, with mobiles, sculptures, and works on paper. The centerpiece is Les Granettes (1953), a monumental standing mobile which has not been exhibited publicly in 72 years.
• Lee Krasner at Gagosian: Presented by Gagosian, Olney Gleason, and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, “Works from the 1960s” marks the first solo presentation in France devoted to the pioneering Abstract Expressionist. The show spotlights a pivotal decade in her career and coincides with the major “Krasner Pollock” exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
• Tracey Emin at White Cube: The artist’s first solo exhibition at the gallery’s Paris space features new paintings and bronze sculptures, following her acclaimed Tate Modern show.

6. Musée d’Orsay: Jenny Holzer, “J’ai vu” and Mary Cassatt

1 rue de la Légion d’Honneur | 7th arrondissement

Jenny Holzer’s exhibition of text-based work was conceived specifically for and in collaboration with the storied museum. Holzer found inspiration in the museum’s archive, drawing on artists’ letters as well as literature from the period of its holdings, 1848 to 1914.

The show features an LED sign stretching through four galleries, along with engraved stone benches and columns. Perhaps most exciting are the light projections on the museum’s iconic exterior facing the Seine, which you can witness from October 18th to 22nd, from dusk to 11 p.m.

While you’re there, don’t miss Mary Cassatt’s retrospective, which brings together nearly 80 paintings, pastels, and prints, tracing the American Impressionist’s remarkable trajectory and output.

7. Art Basel Paris Public Program

Oct. 21–25 | Various locations

Some of the week’s most exciting art is temporarily popping up across the city thanks to Art Basel’s public program of installations. A highlight is Kutluğ Ataman’s celebrated video environment Küba (2005), on view at the Beaux-Arts de Paris and curated by Nathan Ladd. The expansive piece features 40 monitors, each one showing a resident of a since-demolished settlement on the outskirts of Istanbul. Together, their stories form a portrait of community.

Elsewhere, look for three monumental bronzes by Tracey Emin at the Parvis des Droits-de-l’Homme, Alice Diop’s Geste de Consolation (presented by Miu Miu) at the Palais d’Iéna, and a herd of plush animals by Cosima von Bonin at the Petit Palais. Monumental sculptures will also line the Avenue Winston Churchill.

8. Fondation Cartier: Ibrahim Mahama, “The Harvest Season”

Oct. 22–Feb. 28 | 2 Place du Palais-Royal | 1st arrondissement

Ghanaian artist Ibrahim Mahama takes over the Fondation Cartier’s entire exhibition space, housed in the institution’s new building, which opened last year. The show features site-specific works and previously unseen versions of some of Mahama’s best-known installations. He has also invited nine artists and collectives to show with him, including photographer James Barnor and painter Gideon Appah.

Known for transforming discarded materials and archival objects into monumental installations, Mahama explores Ghana’s history of colonization and the global passage of goods.

9. Bourse de Commerce: “Remember Me”

Through Jan. 18 | 2 rue de Viarmes | 1st arrondissement

The Bourse de Commerce is known for its ambitious exhibitions. This time, photography takes center stage in “Remember Me,” bringing together some 700 works by more than 70 artists from the Pinault Collection, all exploring memory in different ways.

Barbara Kruger, whose work gives the exhibition its title, takes over the spectacular rotunda with an installation of text, film, and voices. Meanwhile, Irving Penn gets a gallery of his own, filled with some 450 photographs.

10. The Louvre: Kader Attia and Elizabeth Peyton

Through Dec. 14 | Musée du Louvre, rue de Rivoli | 1st arrondissement

For the past two years, contemporary artists Kader Attia and Elizabeth Peyton have had studios at the Louvre and made new work while exploring its collections. The results are on view in “Hosts at the Louvre.”

Attia presents a film and installation exploring history and the act of looking, while Peyton presents a series of her signature portraits alongside paintings that reinterpret the museum’s masterpieces. While the Louvre is synonymous with art history, it’s an exciting opportunity to see leading contemporary artists connecting the age-old collection with the present.

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Our 8 Favorite Artworks under $10,000 from the 2026 London Art Fairs https://ift.tt/gOhpCkJ

London is in full swing. The streets are buzzing, the galleries are packed, and a small army of art-world insiders is weaving through traffic on Lime bikes, racing between openings, fair booths, and late-night parties. It can only mean one thing: Frieze Week has returned. And this year, the British capital feels particularly alive, with an infectious energy that suggests London is back on form.

At the center of the action are Frieze London and Frieze Masters, bringing nearly 300 galleries from around the world to Regent’s Park. But the excitement stretches far beyond the big white tents. Minor Attractions has taken over a Fitzrovia hotel, 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair has returned to Somerset House, and PAD London is bringing collectible design back to Berkeley Square. Meanwhile, newcomers London Invitational, Paraíso, and Fair Play are adding fresh perspectives to the week’s packed calendar. From Mayfair’s polished galleries to the more experimental corners of the city, everyone’s talking about what they’ve discovered.

Amid the blockbuster presentations, seven-figure price tags, and champagne-fueled soirées, however, some of the week’s most compelling artworks come at considerably more approachable prices. Artsy’s editors have been pounding the pavements (and occasionally hopping on a Lime bike themselves) to find the standout works priced under $10,000. Here are our favorites.

Frieze London and Frieze Masters

Through October 18

Regent’s Park, NW1 4NR

The main events of the week. Frieze London and Frieze Masters have once again taken over Regent’s Park, bringing together the biggest names in contemporary art alongside centuries of art history.

Josefine Reisch, Tank Louis, 2026

Presented by Galerie Noah Klink at Frieze

Price: €3,500 ($3,926)

Tank Louis, 2026
Josefine Reisch
Galerie Noah Klink

The Cartier Tank watch has been worn by everyone from Andy Warhol to Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis—but this design icon has an unlikely military history. Louis Cartier designed it around 1917, reportedly inspired by the Renault tanks of World War I, with its parallel sidebars echoing the vehicles’ treads. More than a century later, it has become a byword for understated luxury.

Berlin-based painter Josefine Reisch takes this object as the starting point for her small painting Tank Louis (2026), in her solo booth in the Focus section. There, Galerie Noah Klink has wrapped the walls in industrial silver foil, matching the painting’s background and frame.

Reisch breaks the watch down into its constituent parts—face, strap, and underside—each depicted in meticulous detail using oil, acrylics, wax, and metal leaf. The painting is one of several works exploring how military technology meets luxury branding. The booth’s centerpiece is her diptych of a Rolls-Royce aircraft engine from London’s Imperial War Museum. As European governments ramp up defense spending, these intertwined histories of commerce, desire, and violence feel newly urgent.

—Josie Thaddeus-Johns, associate director of content

Corinna Gosmaro, Piccolo Paesaggio (Lava), 2026

Presented by Carvalho at Frieze London

Price: $7,000

Piccolo Paesaggio (Lava), 2026
Corinna Gosmaro
Carvalho

Who knew air filters could make for such compelling paintings? Italian artist Corinna Gosmaro paints on sheets of polyester fiber, transforming this everyday, often unseen material into something almost ethereal. Working with spray paint, oil, and graphite, she coaxes color into the stubborn fibers, sometimes using her fingers to work it in. The result is a fascinating play of depth and lightness, as colors appear to sink into the material in some places and hover above it in others.

At first glance, her works look entirely abstract, but titles like Piccolo Paesaggio (Lava) (2026) give a gentle nudge to the mind and the eye. I see a thrilling volcanic scene, with flickering flames and inky rock against a pastel-colored sky. It’s an exciting taste of what’s to come from Gosmaro, who will have her first solo show with Carvalho in 2027.

—Casey Lesser, director of editorial and content

João Artur da Silva, Untitled, 1953

Presented by Perve Galeria at Frieze Masters

Price: £6,500 ($8,614)

Untitled, 1953
João Artur da Silva
Perve Galeria

A crumbling brick wall, a shattered egg, a pair of mysterious spheres: there’s plenty to puzzle over in this wonderfully strange little drawing by Portuguese Surrealist João Artur da Silva.

The work is presented by Lisbon’s Perve Galeria in the Spotlight section of Frieze Masters dedicated to overlooked figures from the 20th century. Born in 1928, da Silva was a founding member of the Portuguese Surrealist Group in the 1940s, before he moved to Britain in the late 1950s. His experimental practice has spanned painting, drawing, sculpture, and photography, though he is always fascinated by the unexpected possibilities of images. This small, intricate composition captures that spirit beautifully: architectural fragments and everyday objects are thrown together in a strange landscape, composed monochromatically in black ballpoint pen with meticulous precision but little regard for conventional logic. At 98, the artist remains a fascinating and still underappreciated figure in post-war art. More than seven decades after it was made, this curious drawing maintains a capacity to confuse.

—Arun Kakar, senior art market editor

Minor Attractions

Through October 17

50 Newman St, London W1T 3EB

The scrappy satellite fair is back for another year, this time across the first-floor rooms of the brand-new Art Deco–inspired hotel The Newman in Fitzrovia. Expect to find artworks everywhere, from the beds and showers to the bathroom sinks.

Hannah Tilson, Still Here, 2026

Presented by Cedric Bardawil

Price: £2,500 ($3,340)

Scottish artist Hannah Tilson creates what she calls “patternscapes.” In this work, layers of fabric in primary colors swirl into a kinetic scene, where a lightly depicted face peeks through the translucent forms. Tilson’s thoughtfully chaotic technique gives the impression of school uniforms, buttons, and shirt collars, without directly depicting any of them. Measuring just 30.5 by 40.5 centimeters, the painting manages to create a tight universe that challenges our perception. While Tilson usually works on paper, this one is one of her latest works on panel. According to gallerist Cedric Bardawil, who has worked with the artist for several years, she also mixes her own paint, designed to ensure its longevity.

—J.T.J.

PAD London

Through October 18

Berkeley Square, Mayfair, W1J 6EN

The dazzling design fair returns to Berkeley Square with a thrilling array of objects, from pristine 20th-century furniture by the likes of Finn Juhl and Jean Prouvé to cutting-edge contemporary works by Samuel Ross and Misha Kahn.

Diederik Schneemann, Matchbox Mini Clock, 2026

Presented by Rademakers Gallery

Price: €5,000 ($5,628)

Matchbox Mini Clock, 2026
Diederik Schneemann
Rademakers Gallery

The Dutch designer Diederik Schneemann has a way with transforming familiar objects. Tucked inside an inventive cabinet made from thrift shop paintings, I discovered his Matchbox Mini Clock (2026), constructed from hundreds of matchbooks collected from restaurants, bars, cafés, and hotels during his travels.

There’s something wonderfully nostalgic about the piece, which is fully functional. Matchbooks are hardly a necessity these days, but rather little souvenirs to pocket after dinner or drinks at a favorite spot, and bring home to live alongside your fancy candles. Here, arranged in neat stacks and rows, they become keepsakes of nights out, celebrations, and places visited. What better way to mark the passage of time than with these little repositories of memories?

—C.L.

1-54 London

Through October 18th

Somerset House, Strand, WC2R 1LA

Across three wings of Somerset House, this is the best way to experience contemporary art from Africa and its diaspora. The 14th London edition of this international art fair has a particular focus on African modernist artists, responding to increased international attention.

Cinthia Sifa Mulanga, As She Abides in a New Plane, 2026

Presented by Gillian Jason Gallery

Price: £2,500 ($3,340)

As She Abides in a New Plane, 2026
Cinthia Sifa Mulanga
Gillian Jason Gallery

Almost impossible to capture in still photographs, this sculptural wall work by Cinthia Sifa Mulanga will boggle your mind.

Mulanga, who was featured in The Artsy Vanguard 2023–24, is known for dreamy paintings of Black women in lavish interiors, often playing with perspective through collage and oils. In this small red-toned work, her obsession with corridors, doorways, and architectural spaces becomes even more pointed, quite literally. Made from collage, charcoal, and oil pastel, the work is a fully three-dimensional pyramid depicting a stately hallway that leads to a window overlooking greenery. The vanishing point rises from the canvas and plays a satisfying trick on the eye. Even in this small scale, Mulanga presents a fantastical escape for her subjects, a complex but luxurious vision of Black leisure.

—J.T. J.

London Invitational

Through October 18

30 Grosvenor Square, W1K 9AN

A strong contender for the most stylish fair of the week, London Invitational’s debut takes place at the newly opened Chancery Rosewood hotel in Mayfair. With its majestic interiors, hushed luxury, and impeccably presented artworks, the fair feels a world away from the frenzy of Regent’s Park.

Dan Attoe, Dak falls With Lodge, 2026

Presented by Andrew Reed Gallery

Price: $6,000

Dark Falls with Lodge, 2026
Dan Attoe
Andrew Reed Gallery

Paraíso

Through October 18

35 Marylebone Road, NW1 5LS

The surprise hit of the week might just be Paraíso, the new fair dedicated to Latin American art. Bringing together contemporary talent and modern masters from across the region and its diaspora, it brings an adventurous mix of galleries, independent artists, and performances.

Nelson Hernández, Argos the Dog, 2026

Presented by Isabel Croxatto Galería

Price: $3,800

Argos the Dog, 2026
Nelson Hernández
Isabel Croxatto Galería

D’oh! Is that Homer Simpson? At Paraíso, Chilean artist Nelson Hernández gives Springfield’s most famous resident an unexpected makeover. Painted in ghostly shades of blue, gray, and white, in a style reminiscent of Gerhard Richter, the familiar cartoon character is turned eerie, his gaping mouth and bulging eyes emerging through a blurred surface. And yes, his head is attached to a dog’s body.

Born in Patagonia and now based in London, Hernández has a clever knack for plucking familiar images from popular culture and art history and making them feel wonderfully strange. His practice explores how globalization has flattened cultural identities, mixing high and low references with an irreverent disregard for their original context. Here, the world’s most recognizable cartoon dad becomes something altogether more enigmatic.

—A.K.

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