The 10 Best Booths at Frieze London and Frieze Masters 2026. https://ift.tt/A3hbU9R

Crisp autumn foliage and the sight of white tents peeking above the trees in Regent’s Park—it could only mean the return of Frieze London and Frieze Masters. The two fairs kicked off their VIP previews on October 14th, drawing a typically well-dressed and spirited crowd, with Helena Bonham Carter, Andrew Garfield, and Tilda Swinton among the famous faces in attendance. It was a colorful, exciting, and—dare we say—jubilant opening, a celebration of the continuing dynamism of London’s art scene, which continues to prove its doubters wrong. Keep calm and carry on? At Frieze, it’s stay suave and shimmy through.

With more than 300 booths between them (172 at Frieze London and 140 at Frieze Masters), the fairs are showcasing everything from Triceratops skulls to transgressive sculpture.

Frieze London, which is dedicated to contemporary art, has regained a sense of vitality in recent years, perhaps spurred by the arrival of competitor Art Basel Paris across the Channel four years ago (this year’s edition opens next week). Works by established artists are still commonplace here, but many galleries use the opportunity to introduce emerging names and experimental practices to a receptive crowd. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the fair’s Focus section, dedicated to younger galleries, where risk-taking is the order of the day. Visitors might not love everything they see, but the fair is betting they’ll leave with a few discoveries. This year, intriguing art can be found in just about every corner of Frieze, including the restrooms (courtesy of London artist Gray Wielebinski, who has transformed urinal cakes and toilet-rim blocks into scented sculptures).

And while Frieze Masters, dedicated to historical art, has a reputation for being more subdued than its contemporary sibling, it too offered plenty of surprises, from lesser-known chapters of established artists’ careers to the Spotlight section, where solo presentations champion pioneering and overlooked figures. The fair also retains its charming eclecticism, with armor, jewelry, and rare books rubbing shoulders with paintings and sculptures by some of art history’s storied names.

While both fairs comfortably passed the ambiance check, they are ultimately judged on the strength of their buying activity, which appeared tentatively strong during the opening hours. Sold-out booths on VIP day included Gagosian, Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel, Alice Amati, and a.SQUIRE, and reported sales were led by Jan Brueghel the Elder’s Still Life of Flowers in a Stoneware Vase (1607–08) for a price “in the region” of £5 million ($6.57 million) at Hauser & Wirth’s Frieze Masters stand. “I’ve been in London for every single Frieze Week since the fair’s inception, and I am here to say this city is as busy, energized, exciting, and excited as I ever have seen it,” enthused the gallery’s president Iwan Wirth.

“The fair felt much more manageable this year, with a positive energy throughout,” Federica Bonacasa, art advisor at Citi Wealth, told Artsy. “Many of the most in-demand works had been placed early on, and galleries seemed to feel a degree of buoyancy.”

The strong presence of international visitors also served as a reminder of London’s enduring status as a global art capital. This week, the city is buzzing with major museum exhibitions, an expanding constellation of satellite fairs, and standout gallery shows, offering plenty for art lovers of all stripes.“It really felt as though people had traveled to London as a destination,” added Bonacasa.

Here, we present our 10 best booths from Frieze London and Frieze Masters 2026.

White Cube

Frieze London, booth D21

With works by Ilana Savdie, John Banting, Hans Bellmer, Louise Bourgeois, Frank Bowling, Alexander Calder, Salvador Dalí, Willem de Kooning, Marlene Dumas, Leonor Fini, Nancy Grossman, Richard Hunt, Gustav Klimt, Maria Lassnig, Jackson Pollock, Egon Schiele, and Yves Tanguy

Painter Ilana Savdie, who grew up in Barranquilla, Colombia, returns to her home city’s carnival annually. Last year, one motif kept catching her eye: the alligator. It comes from the myth of the hombre caimán, or “alligator man,” who drinks a potion to spy on women bathing and gets stuck halfway between man and alligator. The motif made its way into the paintings at the heart of White Cube’s booth: huge canvases that undulate with fluorescent forms. “The idea of a hybrid being is a huge part of the work,” the artist said.

The alligator is most visible in Lip Lickers (2026), where reptilian mouths gape open. Savdie said the title evokes “someone salivating over a joke,” alluding to the Florida immigration detention center that was nicknamed “Alligator Alcatraz” by the far right.

Savdie worked on the paintings side by side over several months, layering them and setting them aside to dry. “I’m dealing with the quick-drying mark and the slow-drying mark, and the friction between the two,” she added. Alongside the new paintings are recent, more minimal ink works with simple, swooping lines, and several 2024 works on paper, including oil monotypes and pen-and-acrylic drawings.

This central display, all on standard white booth walls, is surrounded by a sturdy metal grid hung with incredible pieces by major 20th-century names:Egon Schiele, Marlene Dumas, Leonor Fini, Frank Bowling, all artists whose practices have inspired Savdie. Visual echoes emerge between these smaller historical works and Savdie’s paintings. The grasping hands in Salvador Dalí’s Scène hystérique d’une femme avec tiroir (ca. 1937), for instance, find a counterpoint also visible in Savdie’s The Harbingers (2026). Savdie called these links “incidental.” “It’s coming from such an instinctive place at this point,” she said.

The booth was packed on VIP day, making Savdie hard to pin down for an interview. The gallery declined to give prices for the historical works, but Savdie’s range from $15,000 to $325,000.

—Josie Thaddeus-Johns

Goodman Gallery

Frieze London, booth AA6

With works by Unathi Mkonto

In his simple curved wooden forms, Unathi Mkonto is exploring new languages for African architecture, drawing inspiration from the land. Mkonto is part of Working Title, Goodman Gallery’s incubator for emerging African artists, and was nominated by Yinka Shonibare for the gallery’s booth in Frieze’s Artist-to-Artist section. (The pair met in person for the first time at the fair.)

Here, the South African artist shows beechwood sculptures inspired by the umbrella tree, whose almost horizontal shape is common across African landscapes, bearing fruits and seeds. At the center of the booth is the largest work, Branching Umbrella (2026), a stacked pile of book-sized panels, from which arm-like extensions stretch more than 15 feet across. Small wooden spheres nestle between these branching rods, forming a minimalist gesture evoking a tree, its branches, and its seeds. For Mkonto, nature remains the best model for how to live. “All these shiny internet things are going to go away,” Mkonto said, “and we’re going to go back to that.”

Originally trained in architecture, Mkonto later taught himself woodworking. “I cut the wood into strips and bend it as far as it can go, and then I let it sit for a while, and it takes the shape,” he said. It took him years to understand the material, and he’s still learning. “Every day is something new,” he said. “I don’t get bored of it.” The resulting sculptures are deceptively simple, at once future-oriented and timeless.

By the end of the fair’s VIP day, the booth had sold out, with works priced between £8,000 and £15,000 ($10,605 and $19,885).

—J.T.-J.

Public Gallery

Frieze London, booth F25

With works by Steph Huang

If your stomach is rumbling after hours of marching around the fair, Steph Huang’s cheeky booth with Public Gallery will have you salivating. Titled “Lili Deli,” after her 2025 exhibition at Taipei Fine Arts Museum, her solo presentation of hand-blown glass and cast metal works in this year’s excellent Focus section offers “a critical audit of our consumer habits,” said Nicole Estilo Kaiser, the gallery’s director. Among the works are wall sconces made of tins of Perello olives and Lyle’s Golden Syrup, oversized shiny green glass olives, and a bar cart holding a bowl of pink high-fructose syrup (the syrup is real, and the gallery will have to keep flies away from it all week).

Born in Taiwan in 1990, Huang now works out of a studio at Studio Voltaire in London. Her practice revolves around two questions, Estilo Kaiser said: “What are we eating, and how is it getting to us?” Each work traces a link in the global supply chain. For instance, Golden Egg’s Matinee (2026) consists of a beautifully hand-hammered copper egg perched on bronze chicken feet inside a circular glass-and-powder-coated steel structure. Almost a furniture piece, it calls attention to industrial farms that “prioritize high yields and rapid growth over the basic welfare of animals,” Estilo Kaiser said. Elsewhere, tiny glass prawns point to shrimp farms in Indonesia, where forests have been cut down to make way for man-made ponds.

Other works explore the ingredients hidden in our food. Hold one of the glass slices of bread in Toasted (2026) up to the light and invisible ink reveals “E471,” an emulsifier found in most supermarket bread. Huang doesn’t exempt herself from this scrutiny. Much of what’s on view, including the glass olives, reflects what she eats and recycles. “We are, as consumers, seduced into buying the things that we do,” Estilo Kaiser said. Prices for works range from £7,000 ($9,200) to £12,000 ($15,800).

—J.T.-J.

Nature Morte

Frieze London, booth A12

With works by Aiza Ahmed, Tanya Goel, Subodh Gupta, Jitish Kallat, Bharti Kher, Pushpamala N., Ayesha Singh, and Kuldeep Singh

Every figure in Aiza Ahmed’s installation at Nature Morte has an exaggerated nose. The distinctive feature recurs across the Pakistan-born artist’s unframed paintings on paper and fabric that hang haphazardly from the wall. Repeating the motif of a South Asian man in military dress, Ahmed considers the social pressures to conform to colonial masculinity. “Just because you have a uniform or a costume doesn’t mean the nation can homogenize,” she said.

Ahmed is one of three artists making their Frieze London debuts in “The Restless Present.” The booth is curated by Habda Rashid, senior curator of modern and contemporary art at Cambridge’s Fitzwilliam Museum. Rashid brought together artists from India and the South Asian diaspora whose work broadens our understanding of “visual culture, vernacular forms, systems of knowledge beyond the Western canon.” The title, she said, poses a question: “Is our present really static?”

This theme is perhaps most explicit in the large inkjet print by photographer Pushpamala N., who restages Vasco da Gama’s arrival in India as depicted in a 19th-century painting, casting herself in the role of the Portuguese explorer. The editioned work, which is also held in Tate’s collection, is surrounded by an ornate golden frame that emphasizes the theatrical construction of this historical moment, now reimagined through a postcolonial perspective.

Another thread running through the booth is the urgency and speed of India’s 20th-century modernization. Reflecting the shift from traditional village life to fast-paced urban centers, Subodh Gupta paints the pots and pans of village cooking “almost into abstraction,” Rashid said. Against raw canvas, this silver cookware is engulfed in blurred, gestural brushstrokes, evoking what has been lost and what remains.

—J.T.J.

Casa Triângulo and Foundry Seoul

Frieze London, booth D6

With works by Fernanda Galvão

An alien landscape flourishes across the walls of Casa Triângulo and Foundry Seoul’s shared booth. In her richly colored paintings, Fernanda Galvão conjures fantastical scenes that could depict the bottom of the sea or a desert. In her early twenties, the Brazilian artist, born in 1994, survived cancer twice, said Rodrigo Editore, partner at Casa Triângulo. The experience led her to study her own cells and explore the relationship between the microscopic and the cosmic. “Everything exists in a single cell and also in the whole universe,” he said.

Working with charcoal, dry pastel, oil stick, and oil on linen, Galvão builds up hybrid forms that resemble sea anemones or strange plant life, rendered in a bruised palette of browns and blues, shot through with neon. These are “fictional landscapes,” Editore said, where “fictional human beings and nature…exist in different dimensions.” Titles like Acid Pearls, Night Ghosts, and Velvet-flower, Seed-eyes and the Black-hole-shells (all 2026) hint at the otherworldly environments she’s evoking. Her surroundings also seeps into the work. After a trip to Joshua Tree, she started including more dry, desert-like forms in her paintings, as seen in an untitled triptych on view in the booth.

Now based in France, Galvão is gaining international momentum. Last summer, she showed alongside David Hockney and Georgia O’Keeffe in “Alien Shores,” a group show of strange landscapes at White Cube Bermondsey. She is also one of four winners of the ArtReview x Casa Wabi prize and has recently joined the roster of Berlin gallery Barbara Thumm, where she will have a solo show in July 2027. More than half of the booth’s works had sold by the end of VIP day priced €7,500 to €30,500 ($7,838 to $34,185).

—J.T.-J.

Takato Kano Gallery

Frieze Masters, booth S30

With works by Shiko Munakata

Bold black lines, softly bleeding colors, and expressive figures define Takato Kano Gallery’s striking solo presentation of works by Japanese printmaker Shiko Munakata. Spanning works from the 1950s through the early ’70s, the booth offers a fascinating look at the artist’s experimentation with woodblock printing, a medium he helped push in radical new directions.

Munakata drew his subjects from a wide variety of sources, from religious figures to boats, blending spiritual symbolism with everyday subjects. Among the highlights is a series of 10 hanging scrolls each depicting a Buddhist disciple, which relate to works exhibited at the São Paulo Bienal in 1955 and the Venice Biennale in 1956, where Munakata gained international recognition.

As gallerist Kano explained, Munakata departed from traditional woodblock techniques by developing urazaishiki, or reverse coloring, applying pigment to the back of thin washi paper rather than its surface. “The black line is the most important, so color never dominates,” Kano said. The resulting soft, diffused hues allow the forceful outlines to remain at the forefront.

This interplay of forceful linework and delicate color lends the works an extraordinary vitality. Prices for works range from £9,000 ($11,871) to £650,000 ($857,398).

—Arun Kakar

David Zwirner and Victoria Miro

Frieze Masters, booth D9

With works by Alice Neel

As visitors approach David Zwirner and Victoria Miro’s joint booth, they are greeted by Alice Neel’s striking 1966 portrait of Beat poet Allen Ginsberg. With his mouth agape and eyes wide behind dark-rimmed glasses, Ginsberg appears mid-exclamation against a swirling backdrop of blues, grays, and whites. The arresting painting offers a fitting introduction to a presentation dedicated to Neel’s portraits of queer individuals and their wider circle.

The presentation draws on “At Home: Alice Neel in the Queer World,” an exhibition curated by Hilton Als that debuted at Zwirner Los Angeles in 2024 before traveling to Miro in London last year. Other highlights include Kris Kirsten (1971), whose subject meets the viewer with a direct, defiant gaze, and John Cheim (1979), a portrait of the New York art dealer. The works showcase Neel’s fascination with the people who shaped her world, each portrayed in all their individuality.

Few artists captured the complexities of human character through portraits quite like Neel. With her loose, expressive brushwork and unflinching psychological insight, the American painter turned portraiture into an intimate record of the communities around her, often depicting individuals overlooked by the mainstream.

The booth is part of the fair’s new “Queering Modernism” initiative, which explores the influence of gender and sexuality on 20th-century art. To this end, the presentation also includes archival materials that shed light on the lives of Neel’s sitters.

—A.K.

Vigo Gallery

Frieze Masters, booth C14

With works by Ibrahim El-Salahi

It’s not often that visitors get to see an entirely new side of an artist as celebrated as Ibrahim El-Salahi. Yet Vigo Gallery has brought together a remarkable selection of rarely seen early paintings by the Sudanese modernist, offering a glimpse into a pivotal chapter of his career. Dating from his student years at London’s Slade School of Fine Art between 1955 and 1957, the works show the artist’s experimentation, where he began to dismantle traditional forms of representation in pursuit of his own distinctive visual language.

Titled “Pre-Pixel,” the presentation brings together works from the artist’s family collection, most of which have never been publicly exhibited. “He starts breaking down the pictorial plane,” Vigo Gallery’s Sebastian Salisbury told Artsy, describing a crucial turning point in the artist’s development. The fragmented forms and geometric structures of his Untitled paintings from 1956 and 1957, for instance, demonstrate his growing interest in breaking images into smaller, interconnected parts. Their gridlike compositions give the impression of pixels, evoking the visual language of digital imagery decades before its emergence.

Often described as a pioneer of African modernism, El-Salahi became the first artist from the continent to receive a retrospective at Tate Modern in 2013. His celebrated practice would go on to fuse Arabic calligraphy, African visual traditions, and Western modernism. Here, visitors encounter the beginnings of that artistic language. Works are priced from £145,000 ($191,265) to £400,000 ($527,630).

—A.K.

MARUANI MERCIER GALLERY

Frieze Masters, booth F5

With works by George Rickey, Josef Albers, Georg Baselitz, Ross Bleckner, Sam Francis, Peter Halley, Alex Katz, Robert Mangold, Allan McCollum, Louise Nevelson, Hermann Nitsch, Georg Karl Pfahler, Ed Ruscha, Pierre Soulages and Andy Warhol.

There’s a mesmerizing sense of movement at MARUANI MERCIER’s booth, where George Rickey’s delicate kinetic sculptures hang overhead and punctuate the space, their slender metal elements gently shifting with the surroundings (and forcing a few visitors to get out of their way). More than 20 works spanning five decades of the American sculptor’s career take center stage in this elegant presentation, which makes a compelling case for an artist whose influence has arguably outpaced his recognition among collectors.

“He is really well known in the art world, in art history,” gallery founder Serge Maruani told Artsy, noting that Rickey’s work is held in more than 180 museums worldwide, yet remains comparatively unfamiliar to collectors. The gallery began representing the artist’s estate in Europe earlier this year, and the booth includes rarely exhibited works alongside pieces previously shown in museums. Prices for works by the artist range from £14,000 ($18,467) to £200,000 ($263,815).

The sculptures are shown alongside two early paintings from Josef Albers’s iconic “Homage to the Square” series. Rickey considered Albers a mentor, and their works offer contrasting yet complementary explorations of perception, through movement and color respectively.

Elsewhere, the booth brings together an impressive roll call of works by post-war heavyweights, including Georg Baselitz, Pierre Soulages, Alex Katz, Ed Ruscha, and Andy Warhol. It’s an emblematic Frieze Masters presentation: museum-caliber names, thoughtfully orchestrated dialogues, and an abundance of visual riches, all assembled with a touch of class.

—A.K.

Bowman Sculpture

Frieze Masters, booth C19

With works by Ossip Zadkine, Eduardo Paolozzi, William Turnbull, Paul Mount, Margaret Lovell, Auguste Rodin, and Helaine Blumenfield.

At Bowman Sculpture’s booth, a pair of hulking metal works by Scottish sculptor Eduardo Paolozzi are designed to be climbed on, crawled through, and played with. These unusual 1970s creations (priced at £120,000—$158,289—each), which sit at the intersection of sculpture, architecture, and playground equipment, offer a fascinating glimpse into a chapter of Paolozzi’s career when the artist was rethinking how art could inhabit public spaces.

Created during a period when Paolozzi was collaborating with designer Terence Conran, the sculptures were conceived with children in mind, combining bold, architectural forms with an unexpected sense of play. One features intricate handwoven elements and carefully softened edges, while the other adopts a more angular, architectural form. Both have previously been exhibited at Yorkshire Sculpture Park. “This was a completely different way of looking at sculpture,” gallery director Mica Bowman told Artsy, describing the artist’s ambition to create something “beautiful, architectural, but also that people can engage with.”

Elsewhere, the works on view explore the more expressive possibilities of sculpture through Ossip Zadkine’s Tête d’Orphée (Head of Orpheus) (1956), a Cubist-inspired interpretation of the mythological musician, alongside exemplary works by Auguste Rodin, William Turnbull, and Margaret Lovell. Together, the booth offers a compelling journey through the evolution of modern sculpture, from expressive treatments of the human form to fractured planes and playful architectural experiments. It’s a thoughtfully assembled presentation that invites visitors to consider sculpture as something to experience.

—A.K.

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$41.7 million Kandinsky painting leads Christie’s October London auctions. https://ift.tt/epOV8My

In total, Christie’s two evening sales achieved a sell-through rate of 91% by lot and 96% by value. The results marked a 103% increase from the equivalent sales last year, continuing the momentum of the auction house’s London sales in March.

“This has been an extraordinary year for London,” said Bonnie Brennan, CEO of Christie’s. “Across the market, we have seen some of the strongest sales the city has witnessed in years, demonstrating London’s enduring importance as a global center for art and collecting.”

The evening also included “Monsoon: The Peter Simon Collection,” which generated £107.51 million ($142.34 million), becoming the highest-value single-owner collection ever sold at Christie’s London. The auction, which will be followed up by a day sale and online auction from the same collection, achieved a sell-through rate of 98% by lot, with 43% of lots exceeding their high estimates.

Among the collection’s standout results was Liubov Popova’s Painterly Architectonic (1918), which sold for £7.64 million ($10.12 million), more than four times its £1.8 million ($2.38 million) low estimate. The painting attracted nearly eight minutes of bidding and set a new auction record for the artist.

Across the two evening sales, seven notable auction records were established. These included Bridget Riley’s Streak 2 (1979), which achieved £5.21 million ($6.9 million), and David Bomberg’s San Miguel, Toledo, Afternoon (1929), which sold for £3.26 million ($4.32 million). Other records were set for Portia Zvavahera, Barbara Hepworth (for a painting), Igshaan Adams, and Gerhard Richter (for a tapestry).

Igshaan Adams’s The certainty of being a rose (ii) (2026), offered to benefit Artists for Climate Action, achieved £96,000 ($127,104), also a new record for the artist. The fundraising initiative brings together the environmental organizations Gallery Climate Coalition and ClientEarth.

Following the Kandinsky, Mondrian, and Bacon works, the most expensive lots across Christie’s two evening sales were:

• Piet Mondrian’s Composition A, with Double Line and Yellow (1935), which sold for £9.71 million ($12.86 million).
• Joan Miró’s Peinture (Les amants - Adam et Eve) (1925), which sold for £8.56 million ($11.33 million).

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$6 million Jan Brueghel the Elder painting leads sales at Frieze London and Frieze Masters 2026. https://ift.tt/7BTeUSo

A painting by Flemish master Jan Brueghel the Elder led reported sales during the opening day of Frieze London and Frieze Masters 2026, as both fairs welcomed VIPs to Regent’s Park on Wednesday, October 14th. Early transactions shared by galleries pointed to demand across historical and contemporary art, with several reporting sold-out presentations.

The top reported sale came from Hauser & Wirth, which placed Brueghel’s Still Life of Flowers in a Stoneware Vase (ca. 1607–08) for around £5 million ($6.64 million) at Frieze Masters. The painting has a remarkable provenance, having previously belonged to the Rothschild collection before being seized by the Nazis and subsequently restituted.

“We’ve been selling historical masters alongside contemporary art since the inception of the gallery, but this is an undisputed milestone,” said gallery president Iwan Wirth. “It’s one of the most important works we’ve ever been involved with.”

The sale surpassed the leading transaction from last year’s opening day, when Hauser & Wirth sold a painting by Gabriele Münter for $3.01 million.

At Frieze London, meanwhile, galleries reported brisk activity across price points, with Alice Amati, Goodman Gallery, Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel, a.SQUIRE, and Gagosian among those reporting sold-out booths.

“London is always an exciting place to be during Frieze Week, and this year is no exception,” art advisor Courtney Petit told Artsy. “The quality of the institutional presentations is exceptional, complemented by museum-worthy exhibitions across the city’s galleries. The main fair got off to a lively start, with bustling aisles and collectors showing strong engagement and enthusiasm.”

Here is a selection of leading sales reported during the fairs’ opening day. Check back on Monday for our full sales report once the fair closes.

Top sales at Frieze London and Frieze Masters 2026

• Hauser & Wirth also sold Francis Picabia’s Untitled (ca. 1941–43) for €1.1 million ($1.23 million) and Pablo Picasso’s Violon (Violin) (1943) for €850,000 ($951,000) at Frieze Masters. At Frieze London, the gallery placed Avery Singer’s Solver (v.3) (2026) for $800,000 and George Condo’s Figure Composition (2026) for $600,000.
• David Zwirner reported a string of seven-figure and six-figure transactions, led by a new painting by Michaël Borremans for $1.5 million. Other highlights included works by Dana Schutz for $900,000, Lisa Yuskavage for $450,000, and Portia Zvavahera for $300,000. A new painting by Sasha Gordon sold to a European museum for $400,000.
• Thaddaeus Ropac sold Antony Gormley’s Aside (2025) for £500,000 ($664,000) and Martha Jungwirth’s Untitled (Berggasse 19) (2026) for €560,000 ($627,000). The gallery also placed two paintings by Denzil Forrester for £175,000 ($232,000) apiece, ahead of his first solo exhibition with the gallery in June 2027, and a sculpture by Leoncillo Leonardi for €300,000 ($336,000).
• Xavier Hufkens reported sales led by a historic Richard Serra work on paper for $750,000, a suite of Louise Bourgeois works on paper for $400,000, and a painting by McArthur Binion for $150,000.
• White Cube sold five new paintings by Ilana Savdie, ranging from $110,000 to $175,000, alongside Gabriel Orozco’s Lion Fish (2024) for $300,000 and Shara Hughes’s Secret Secret (2026) for $175,000.
• Karma reported a nearly sold-out presentation of works by Scottish artist Jacob Littlejohn, marking his London market debut, with 16 paintings placed, including one with an institutional collection; prices reached $65,000. Other sales included works by Gertrude Abercrombie for $350,000 and William Turnbull for $250,000.
• Perrotin reported strong demand for its solo presentation of Izumi Kato, selling paintings and sculptures for up to $250,000 each.
• Lehmann Maupin sold more than 10 works, including a painting by McArthur Binion for $150,000 and a work by Liza Lou for $140,000.
• Pace Gallery reported brisk sales for its solo presentation of new paintings by Marina Perez Simão, with “nearly every work” in the booth selling within the first few hours of the VIP preview. Prices reached $250,000.
• Nara Roesler reported opening-day sales at Frieze London, including a painting by André Griffo for $56,000 and a painting by Maria Klabin for $55,000.

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8 Roy Lichtenstein Works that Explain Why the Pop Artist Is So Influential https://ift.tt/r9NKGs7

When Roy Lichtenstein’s paintings of comic-book characters and glamorous women first appeared in New York galleries in the early 1960s, they challenged some of the most basic assumptions about what painting should be. Instead of the era’s popular gestural abstraction associated with artists like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, Lichtenstein offered crisp outlines, primary colors, speech bubbles, and enlarged dots that mimicked the printing processes of comics and advertisements (known as benday dots). His images looked mechanical, but they were painstakingly made by hand.

Lichtenstein was born in New York in 1923 and began drawing and painting as a teenager, later studying at Ohio State University after taking classes with the artist Reginald Marsh at the Art Students League. After serving in the army during World War II, he returned to the U.S. to teach. His early work bore little resemblance to the Pop paintings that would make him famous: his first New York exhibition, in 1951, was rooted in the Abstract Expressionist idiom then dominating the city’s art scene.

By the late 1950s, however, Lichtenstein was experimenting with imagery drawn from popular culture. In 1961, he began making the comic- and advertisement-based paintings that established his signature style. The shift marked the beginning of a sustained investigation into how images are made, reproduced, and understood.

Today, Lichtenstein is regarded as one of the defining figures of Pop art, known for questioning what happens to an image when it is copied and transformed into something new—raising questions of authorship and perception.

These questions are at the center of “Roy Lichtenstein: Like New,” the Whitney Museum of American Art’s retrospective, the first in New York devoted to the artist since 1993. On view through May 10, 2027, the exhibition features roughly 130 works from the early 1940s through the 1990s, including painting, drawing, sculpture, and film. The exhibition is organized by Meg Onli, curator at the Whitney, as well as artist Alex Da Corte, and finds connections between one of the early masters of reproduction and today’s digital world. Here are eight works that reveal why Lichtenstein’s deceptively simple images remain so influential.

Girl with Ball, 1961

A quintessential image of carefree American leisure in which a young woman in a bathing suit holds a beach ball against a bright sky, Girl with Ball is based on an advertisement for the Mount Airy Lodge in Pennsylvania’s Pocono Mountains. The work illustrates Lichtenstein’s early interest in transforming subjects from advertisements into paintings.

The act of transformation is crucial. Lichtenstein was not copying an advertisement; he was turning a commercially produced image into a painting while making the mechanics of its reproduction conspicuous. He flattened colors, exaggerated outlines, eliminated details, and began using his signature benday dots.

The painting also marks a major turning point in Lichtenstein’s career. In 1961, he moved away from the Abstract Expressionist vocabulary that had shaped his earlier work and toward the commercial imagery that would make him famous. The transition gave him a new way to investigate painting: by making images that appeared impersonal or mass-produced while requiring considerable control and labor to create.

Look Mickey, 1961

Look Mickey, 1961
Roy Lichtenstein
Philadelphia Museum of Art

In addition to reimagining advertisements, Lichtenstein’s early foray into Pop art was defined by his interest in comic imagery. One of his best-known pieces, Look Mickey, features Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck fishing from a dock, with Donald declaring, “Look Mickey, I’ve hooked a big one!!” The joke is that Donald has actually hooked his own jacket.

Lichtenstein based the painting on an illustration from the 1960 children’s book Donald Duck: Lost and Found, simplifying the original composition and reducing its colors to a limited palette of primary hues and white. What made the painting startling in 1961 was not simply its subject. Lichtenstein treated cartoon imagery with the scale, seriousness, and materiality traditionally associated with fine-art painting. The characters were instantly familiar, but the context was entirely different.

Leo Castelli Gallery Handshake Poster, 1962

Hanging outside a freestanding gallery built within the museum is a poster from Lichtenstein’s first ever exhibition with Leo Castelli, the influential dealer who helped launch the careers of some of the most famous names in American Pop and Minimalist art. Featuring a handshake, the poster marks one of the most significant moments in the artist’s career. The show, which took place in early 1962, helped to establish the commercial legitimacy of his works despite their unconventional subjects and style.

In a standout moment in the show, the museum has recreated this pivotal exhibition, complete with a parquet floor.

Bringing the pieces from this show together again, the room in “Like New” offers viewers the chance to step back in time and imagine what it was like to see Lichtenstein’s works when they were first presented. Included in the display are images based on war comics, household products like a washing machine, and advertisements, subjects the artist would quickly become known for. Likewise, the historic hanging offers insight into Lichtenstein’s early adoption of the visual language he would soon master.

Drowning Girl, 1963

Lichtenstein’s Drowning Girl has become widely recognizable as one of the artist’s most famous works. The piece features a woman floating in turbulent water, her eyes closed and her face set in an expression of melodramatic distress. A thought bubble reads, “I don’t care!”

Lichtenstein based the work on an image by comic-book illustrator Tony Abruzzo that appeared in DC Comics’ Secret Hearts in 1962, cropping the original composition and removing the woman’s boyfriend to concentrate attention on her isolated figure.

That process of cropping and editing is central to understanding the painting. Lichtenstein took an already manufactured image and manufactured it again. By enlarging the comic-book panel and transferring its visual language onto canvas, he transformed something designed for mass circulation into something that would hang in a museum.

By this point, Lichtenstein was one of the most visible young artists associated with Pop art. It was clear Pop art was growing, but it was seen as radical, even offensive. Lichtenstein and other Pop artists pushed forward despite negative criticism, continuing to depict popular culture and the consumerist tendencies of American life at a time when the U.S. was beginning to define itself as in opposition to Communism.

Hot Dog, 1964

In Hot Dog, Lichtenstein took an ordinary object of American life and transformed it into an unmistakably Pop image. He would come to depict an image of a hot dog often, including in color form, while the one on view in “Like New” is a black-and-white work on paper.

Lichtenstein’s interest in everyday objects was part of a larger Pop-art challenge to the idea that serious art should deal with elevated subjects. By giving the hot dog the scale and visual authority of a traditional, museum-worthy painting, Lichtenstein challenged the distinction between “high” and “low” culture.

The subject has acquired another layer of significance at the Whitney. Artist and exhibition co-curator Alex Da Corte has installed Hot Dog with Ketchup (2026), a billboard across from the museum, based on Lichtenstein’s painting. The intervention turns Lichtenstein’s Pop image back into something public-facing and commercial-looking, while also referencing the actual NYC food vendors outside the museum.

Little Big Painting, 1965

With Little Big Painting, Lichtenstein turned his attention from comic-book imagery to painting itself. The work depicts large, carefully rendered brushstrokes in red, yellow, white, and black, a motif he revisited often in his practice.

The target of the brushstroke pieces was the heroic gestural language of Abstract Expressionism, the dominant American art movement of the preceding generation. Artists like Pollock had made the physical act of painting central to their work, with drips, splashes, and sweeping marks serving as evidence of the artist’s individual presence. Lichtenstein took that supposedly spontaneous gesture and turned it into a reproducible graphic symbol.

Behind the large strokes in the work is a field of benday dots, associating the supposedly unique, expressive brushstroke with mass production.

Rouen Cathedral, Set III, 1968–69

Lichtenstein’s Rouen Cathedral, Set III reimagines one of the canonical achievements of 19th-century painting: Claude Monet’s series of paintings of Rouen Cathedral. Monet famously painted the cathedral repeatedly under changing conditions of light, producing some 30 versions in the 1890s. Lichtenstein turned their serial structure into his own Pop-art experiment.

While Monet used subtle shifts of color and brushwork to capture fleeting changes in atmosphere, Lichtenstein translated the cathedral into stark contrasts and enlarged benday dots across five canvases. This is one of the clearest instances of Lichtenstein borrowing from other artists—seen in several artworks on view at the Whitney that reference recognizable pieces from artists like Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso.

Comparing each of the five canvases, the Rouen Cathedral set also offers a remarkable case study in how Lichtenstein used dots and color. At close range, the dots look like discrete painted circles; from farther away, they merge into tones and colors, particularly noticeable on the canvases with dark-blue and light-yellow backgrounds. In this respect, Lichtenstein’s paintings form an interesting counterpoint to Monet’s. Both depend on the viewer’s perception to capture the same object, but using radically different means.

Mirror #1 (Oval 60” x 48”), 1969

In Lichtenstein’s famous “Mirror” series (1969–72), he portrayed a familiar object—a reflective surface—as something that isn’t reflective at all. The exhibition contains eight of these iconic works. In each, the mirror is represented through a circular or oval composition of colored bands and halftone dots. Seen well in Mirror #1, instead of giving viewers a literal reflection, Lichtenstein offers the graphic signs that tell us what a mirror is supposed to look like. Rendered in black-and-white dots, the composition contains depictions of a glare, as if reflecting light. Removing the mirror’s function, the object becomes an image of itself.

The work also complicates the assumption that Lichtenstein’s art was simply about copying mass media. Mirrors became another way for him to explore perception and illusion. His treatment of the reflective surface makes this simple object conspicuously artificial. Here, the viewer can see Lichtenstein not simply as the artist who turned comics into paintings, but as an artist preoccupied with what happens when images move from one context into another. These mirror works promise to show us reality while giving us only another constructed surface.

And that may be the key to seeing Lichtenstein “Like New,” as the exhibition title frames the works. His paintings are instantly recognizable because they look like things we have seen before. But the longer we look, the more complicated that recognition becomes.

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Digital art gallery and platform TAEX to open new Monaco space. https://ift.tt/yOsxb1Z

TAEX, a contemporary art gallery and curated digital art platform founded in London in 2020, has opened its first permanent gallery in Monaco. The gallery, located in the Mareterra, a new waterfront district, is inaugurating the space with “Testing Ground,” a solo exhibition by Paris-based conceptual artist Kevin Abosch, on view through November 30th. The gallery occupies Le Renzo, a landmark building developed by Pritzker Prize–winning architect Renzo Piano.

Since its founding, TAEX has built an international program with presences at Art Basel, Paris Photo, ART SG, and Tokyo Gendai, alongside collaborations with major artists including Marina Abramović. The gallery has previously had presentations during the 2025 Monaco Grand Prix and a special integration featuring Abramović at that year's artmonte-carlo fair. “Having supported arts and culture in Monaco for many years, I am especially proud to open TAEX Gallery here,” said the gallery’s founder Inna Bazhenova. “Monaco has long been a place where cultural ambition and international perspectives meet, and our permanent space in Mareterra marks a new chapter in our commitment to the cultural life of the ”

For “Testing Ground,” TAEX presents new, previously unseen works from Abosch's latest body of synthetic photography, created specifically for the Monaco space, alongside pieces from his series “Ethical Work,” first shown by TAEX at Paris Photo in 2025, and the rare 2010 work Potato #345. This exhibition centers on Abosch's synthetic photography, a genre he originated in which computational processes generate images that retain photography's visual language while depicting places that do not exist.

For more than three decades, Abosch has explored what makes an image matter, working across photography, installation, moving image, and generative technologies. His work has been presented at the State Hermitage Museum, the National Museum of China, Fotografiska, the Jeu de Paume, and the Irish Museum of Modern Art.

“Our ambition is to make TAEX Monaco a vibrant cultural destination, a place for discovery, exchange and creative dialogue,” said Stefanie De Regel, director of TAEX Monaco. “Against the exceptional backdrop of Mareterra, we want to bring together art and culture in their many expressions, fostering new encounters, collaborations and ideas within Monaco's cultural landscape.”

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Painter Robin F. Williams Channels Botticelli into Glossy Takes on Contemporary Technology https://ift.tt/Wgx83cy

Brooklyn-based painter Robin F. Williams has been thinking about how rapid technological advancement collides with religion. Add internet-fueled psychosis into the mix, and the painter believes we’re entering a moment of rapturous, New Age spirituality. This perspective is apparent in Williams’s new canvas I Am Not a Robot (all works 2026), in which a figure with an infinity-sign-shaped halo stares into a smartphone.

“She’s tarot, but she’s also a Catholic angel, but she’s also a New Age light being, or an alien,” Williams recently told me in their Brooklyn studio. “Most of all, she’s confused about her role amid tech’s present reign, confounded by the constant digital overload, which I think is creating this sort of weird, ecstatic, loosening of a grip.”

I Am Not a Robot, 2026
Robin F. Williams
P.P.O.W

Spooky Action at a Distance, 2026
Robin F. Williams
P.P.O.W

I Am Not a Robot is among eight paintings by Williams that are christening New York gallery P.P.O.W’s first-ever international pop-up in London and on view through October 24th. The solo show, titled “Act Natural,” encapsulates our absurd, tech-happy times.

Williams made this series over the last year and a half, uniting references from art history and current events in planes of superflat paint. Throughout the works, transparent, glossy acrylic fields combine with waves of metallic oils that simulate holograms. Altogether, they convey the Technicolor cacophony of the information age.

Robin F. Williams’s early style

Williams started working with oil paint in grade school. In 2014, eight years after graduating from the Rhode Island School of Design, they joined Instagram and abandoned the academically charged medium. They began experimenting with more craft-based methods like airbrush and paint marbling, largely picked up from Instagram’s ascendant DIY arts community.

Williams, in turn, started posting their own tutorials. “I didn’t want to just extract,” they said. They recently launched a Substack to offer more in-depth instruction, on a less fraught platform. The artist also remains materially driven—“Act Natural” marks their first time painting on oil-primed linen and using Stuart Semple’s vantablack replica.

Medium Mermaid, 2026
Robin F. Williams
P.P.O.W

Since the pandemic, Williams has mostly made paintings inspired by horror films, which they consider a vehicle for collective catharsis. “I think all art does that,” they said. “Some forms do it at broader scales. But I’m interested in tapping into whatever those feelings are, and making places for collective processing around it.” Such works anchored Williams’s latest exhibitions, including “Undying” at Perrotin Tokyo and “Good Mourning” at P.P.O.W., both in 2024.

New work for P.P.O.W.’s London pop-up

“Act Natural,” on the other hand, is more of a psychological thriller, tinged with elements of science fiction. While Williams suspects the hype and fear surrounding AI has conjured an egregore, an esoteric entity that arises from the collective consciousness, they also remain open-minded about AI. “I am just not interested in the way it’s turning into every other financial instrument, and recreating every other folly, every other bubble,” they said. “I think it has so much more potential to do wonderful things for our consciousness, but we’re choosing to enslave it and repeat history.”

Williams’s equal embrace of the academic and vernacular was especially apparent on the mood board they created to inspire the show. Near a window overlooking Manhattan, Williams had affixed dozens of printed photographs of artworks by abstractionist Paul Klee and pioneering realist Éduoard Manet, pages from Sports Illustrated, and outputs from DALL-E, the bygone AI image generator. “When I was painting about horror, I was taking a lot of screenshots and photos of my TV,” Williams said. “This body of work felt like the references were coming from everywhere.”

Language Model, 2026
Robin F. Williams
P.P.O.W

Sleight of Hand, 2026
Robin F. Williams
P.P.O.W

Williams’s art historical inspirations were similarly invested in moments of transition: “the modernists or the Cubists that weren’t quite Cubists, or the Renaissance painters that were on the cusp,” they said. They cite Botticelli, whose blend of pagan and Catholic deities inspired this show’s working title, “Lesser Gods.”

FLAG Art Foundation teased this new chapter in Williams’s practice this past May, when they exhibited Language Model as part of its recurring Spotlight program. The painting, which reappears in “Act Natural,” depicts a voluptuous, Technicolor nude who poses on a beach at sunset. Devoid of specific natural details, the figure reads as an archetype. The title suggests the affinities between AI and dysmorphia-inducing fashion photography, which feels quaint today when compared with “Instagram face.” Here, Williams references the “body positivity” many magazines toyed with in the 2010s. “It just reeks of insincerity now, especially when you look at what they thought a plus-size model was,” Williams said. They’re curious if today’s “models” will rebel like the language they’re based on—itself a flawed technology that eschews consensual meanings.

Tempering Better Angels, 2026
Robin F. Williams
P.P.O.W

Holy Thirst Trap, 2026
Robin F. Williams
P.P.O.W

Williams’s new tech bro paintings

While Williams’s female figures appear as mythic chimeras, their male counterparts are ethereal, shortsighted tech bros lifted straight from Botticelli’s Madonna of the Pomegranate (ca. 1487). In Holy Thirst Trap, they contemplate a glass of water, which AI needs to survive. In Tempering Better Angels, they wade recklessly into wet depths. Williams imagines they’re hyping each other up to get rich off the AI boom. Both paintings evoke the phrase “the tip of the iceberg” by depicting, respectively, a straw and two phalluses beneath the water’s surface.

“It’s been interesting to watch the millennial arc of tech bros who started in this very idealistic place,” Williams said. Today, those utopists are organizing disaster bunkers in New Zealand: “It’s just a race for them to escape accountability. How quickly that happened.”

The overwhelming beauty of the artist’s new work combats pervasive accelerationism by making viewers stop, agog. Contrary to popular belief, there’s still time to slow this AI race, put the egregore back in its box. “Being in a heightened state makes you much more easily influenced,” Williams said. “That’s the other reason I think painting is still so important.”

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