How Brâncuși’s “Bird in Space” Redefined Sculpture https://ift.tt/4Vpg7F0

“Simplicity is complexity resolved,” Romanian artist Constantin Brâncuși once remarked. The sculptor, painter, and photographer brought that ethos of refinement to his art. He is regarded as one of the most influential sculptors of the 20th century and a pioneer of modernism, known for sleek works in plaster, limestone, marble, polished bronze, and carved wood that emphasized elegant purity of form over detail.

His Paris studio was on the famed Impasse Ronsin, a dead-end street home to a buzzing artists’ colony. The studio was the center of his creative universe: where he worked, entertained friends and clients, and displayed his groundbreaking works, whose forms challenged conventional artistic boundaries. A new exhibition, “Brâncuși: The Artist and His Studio,” at the Museum of Modern Art, traces the provocative artist’s creative life through dozens of artworks and objects from his studio.

Among the most famous of these works were “Bird in Space” (L’Oiseau dans l’espace), a series of at least 16 sculptures the artist made between 1923 and 1940. Created in bronze and marble, each Bird in Space depicts a streamlined, vertical form that suggests flight rather than a bird itself.

Three bronze versions of Brâncuși’s iconic work are included in the exhibition. In the work, Brâncuși eliminated the bird’s wings and feathers, instead elongating the swell of the body. The bird’s head and beak are reduced to a small oval plane. A radical departure from sculptural precedents that emphasized the artist’s hand and detail, the deceptively simple Bird in Space courted controversy and misunderstanding. Here’s a closer look at three surprising aspects of the work and its history.

In a pivotal court case, it redefined sculpture.

The Kiss, 1916
Constantin Brâncuși
Philadelphia Museum of Art

Brummer Gallery Exhibition Catalog, 1926
Constantin Brâncuși
Grob Gallery

In legal terms, “Bird in Space” rewrote the definition of sculpture. In 1926, Brâncuși shipped a version of the work from Paris to New York City for an exhibition at the Brummer Gallery, organized by Marcel Duchamp, his close friend and advocate. U.S. law allowed artworks, including sculpture, to enter the country free of import taxes. But when Bird in Space arrived, officials refused to admit it as art. At the time, sculptures were defined as reproductions, in carving or casting, of natural objects such as the human form. Finding no such recognizable form, officials classified the work as a utilitarian object, “Kitchen Utensils and Hospital Supplies” to be specific, and imposed a duty of 40 percent of its value.

The sculpture, today in the collection of the Seattle Art Museum, ended up at the center of a landmark 1928 court case, Constantin Brâncuși v. United States, in which Brâncuși defended his work as art. The case began as a question of how closely the work imitated a bird, which would clear it of the import tax, but evolved into a debate over who decides what counts as sculpture, and why. A number of art world heavyweights testified, including photographer Edward Steichen, British sculptor Jacob Epstein, and William Henry Fox, director of the Brooklyn Museum. Art critic Frank Crowninshield testified that the work did suggest a bird: “It has the suggestion of flight, it suggests grace, aspiration, vigor, coupled with speed in the spirit of strength, potency, beauty, just as a bird does. But just the name, the title, of this work, why, really, it does not mean much.” Ultimately, the court ruled in Brâncuși’s favor.

The judge’s opinion in the case referenced the rise of abstraction: “a so-called new school of art, whose exponents attempt to portray abstract ideas rather than imitate natural objects.” He added, “While some difficulty might be encountered in associating it with a bird, it is nevertheless pleasing to look at and highly ornamental.” Ultimately, he decided the sculpture is a work of art, allowing it tax-free entry to the U.S.

Critics see “Bird in Space” as a representation of the artist himself

Self-Portrait, 1935
Constantin Brâncuși
Osborne Samuel

Bird in Space (white marble), 1925
Constantin Brâncuși
Bruce Silverstein Gallery

Brâncuși did not indulge in deep readings of his sculptures, preferring their often gleaming, highly polished surfaces to speak for themselves. “Don’t look for obscure formulas or mystery in my work. It is pure joy that I offer you,” he once proclaimed. That gave critics a tricky task when it came to interpreting Brâncuși’s work, as noted by American artist Sidney Geist in his 1984 essay “Brâncuși’s ‘Bird in Space’: A Psychological Reading.”

“We see a finished, perfect product; we are in the presence of exquisite drawing and an exquisite sensibility,” Geist wrote. “Brâncuși doesn’t show his hand. He carefully gives his work titles, which seem to conceal rather more than they reveal.”

In the essay, Geist avoids purely formalist interpretations of Brâncuși's work, looking instead to repeated themes and motifs as evidence of their significance. “Bird in Space,” he argues offers an oblique portrait of the artist himself, who was born in Romania but fled a difficult childhood home and traveled extensively throughout his life.

“Brâncuși’s elusiveness is linked, then, to traveling, to escape, to going beyond. Bird in Space will be symbolic of his craving for, and of his flight to, the absolute.” Geist argues that the work may show no bird at all, but can instead be seen as the upright form of a man with a swelling chest, or as a phallic symbol, or even a flame.

“It is symbolic of the urge for transcendence, for escape from the earthly and the contingent,” he continues. As the artist himself once declared, “All my life I have sought the essence of flight. Flight—what bliss!”

Several “Bird in Space” sculptures were intended for a never-completed temple of love.

Not every “Bird in Space” was meant for a gallery. After meeting Brâncuși in Paris in 1933, Yeshwant Rao Holkar, the maharaja of Indore, India, ordered three: one in bronze, one in black marble, and one in white. When his young wife died in 1937, he invited the sculptor to India to design a temple of love and peace to hold her ashes.

Brâncuși’s plan was uncompromising. The structure would have no doors or windows and would be entered through an underground passage. Inside an apple-shaped chamber, a small square pool would be flanked by the three birds, at the pool’s sides. The bronze would be placed so that the midday sun lit it just once a year. Henri-Pierre Roché, the dealer who introduced the maharaja to Brâncuși, described the bronze as “struck full by the midday sun, through the circular hole in the ceiling on a particular holy day of the year.”

When Brâncuși reached Indore at the end of 1937, his patron was away on a tiger hunt and beginning a new romance. After a frustrating month, Brâncuși went home. The temple was never built.

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Sculptor Ursula von Rydingsvard dies at 84. https://ift.tt/kcyouR2

Ursula von Rydingsvard, the artist known for her towering sculptures built from hundreds of hand-distressed cedar beams, died Tuesday, October 27th, at her home in Manhattan. She was 84. Courtney Childress, her studio manager, confirmed the death and said the cause was Alzheimer's disease.

Working chiefly with standard four-by-four cedar beams, von Rydingsvard and a team of assistants marked, cut, and distressed the wood with circular saws before stacking it like bricks into enormous structures that often widened as they rose, their surfaces sometimes stained with powdered graphite. The resulting forms seemed to undulate and shift, evoking cave walls, frozen waves, and fossils. She later expanded her materials to include resin, bronze, silk, hair, and cow intestines, but the cedar works remained her signature medium.

Von Rydingsvard came of age as an artist when Minimalism dominated the New York scene. She found it lacking. “There was no sexiness, and there wasn't even any humanity,” she told the artist and curator Mark Rosenthal, who organized a 2018 survey of her work at the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia. Her work had different aims. "Her sculptural process has a great deal to do with release," the critic Michael Brenson wrote in the New York Times in 1988. “Release is one of the effects she is after.”

The artist trained in welding at Columbia University, describing the process as "more frustrating than imaginable" in an interview with critic Jason Farago for Even magazine. Her classmate, the painter Michael Mulhern, introduced her to cedar, buying her a supply of four-by-four beams.

von Rydingsvard took the wood to a metalworking studio and began slicing through it, looking for "forms that felt like the earth, or felt fleshy." Critics read her repeated, modular components as being in conversation with Minimalism even as her carved, organic shapes pushed back against it, and her sculptures' folds and physicality drew comparisons to the biomorphic work of Louise Bourgeois and Eva Hesse.

She was born Urszula Karoliszyn in Deensen, Germany, on July 26, 1942, to Polish and Ukrainian farmers. Her father had been conscripted for labor by the Nazis, and after the war the family was held in a displaced-persons camp in Germany before emigrating to the United States in 1950 and settling in Plainville, Connecticut. There, her mother worked at a restaurant and her father worked a nearby farm and a factory job. It was, she later said, a place with “no such thing as an artist.” She helped raise her siblings and eventually worked at her mother's restaurant herself.

Von Rydingsvard studied at the University of New Hampshire and the University of Miami, Coral Gables, earning a bachelor's and master's degree. She then moved to Oakland, California, with her first husband, Milton von Rydingsvard, with whom she had a daughter, Ursula Anne. She divorced him in 1973 and moved with her daughter to New York, enrolling at Columbia University, where she studied with Max Kozloff, Meyer Schapiro, and George Sugarman, earning an MFA in 1975. She supported herself and her daughter on food stamps in a Harlem apartment.

Some critics saw autobiography in the work—Zakopane (1987), with its sacs of wood beneath spiky protrusions, takes its title from the Polish town where von Rydingsvard's mother was born—though she described the connection as only implicit. “I have this feeling that I have this strong link to a past that I never experienced, the peasant farmer past,” she told Farago. “Not that I want to experience it; I never asked for it. But it sort of runs through my blood, whether I want it or not.”

After Columbia, she purchased a loft in SoHo, and in 1981 moved her studio to Brooklyn, where it remained for the rest of her career. She married the Nobel Prize–winning neuroscientist Paul Greengard in 1985. He died in 2019. In 2013, her 19-foot, 12,000-pound sculpture Ona—Polish for "she"—was installed beneath the oculus at Barclays Center, where it remains. “I would actually love people to touch it," she told the New York Times at its unveiling. “The acid from fingers polishes it, like the Buddhas getting their bellies rubbed.”

Her sculptures were shown widely, including at Storm King Art Center and Yorkshire Sculpture Park, and entered the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the National Gallery of Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Detroit Institute of Arts, and Storm King. She was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, had been an artist in residence at the American Academy in Rome, and received a Guggenheim Fellowship, grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, and the 1997 Joan Mitchell Award. She taught at Yale, the School of Visual Arts, Fordham University, and the Pratt Institute, and has been represented for decades by Galerie Lelong.

Earlier this year, the artist’s work was on view in "Ursula von Rydingsvard: States of Becoming," a 20-year retrospective at the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, Connecticut, which ran through January 2026 and traced her evolving use of wood alongside a decade-long investigation into handmade paper that began with a 2009 Dieu Donné residency.

Her final gallery exhibition ran at Galerie Lelong in New York from February 19th through March 28th of this year. The exhibition included an arched, nearly 11-foot cedar sculpture introducing a new motif of upward-reaching, finger-like protrusions, first developed for a 2024 wall work on which she had traced the outline of her own hands.

Reviewing the show for the Brooklyn Rail, critic Susan Harris pointed to other recent works on view, including All the Children I Never Had (2018–24), Miracle (2024), and Untitled (1995–2025), a gridded wall piece begun three decades before its completion, calling the exhibition evidence of “an unceasing fluidity and openness” in the artist's late work.

Von Rydingsvard's daughter, Ursula Anne von Rydingsvard, died in 2022. She is survived by her siblings, Christine Brooks and Stash Karoliszyn, along with three grandchildren and three step-grandchildren. “They say when you get older, life gets easier,” she told Art21 in 2013. "…It does not. You know, my biggest hope is that I get more courage, I get more trust in myself, I get more faith, that I'm able to do things that I wasn't able to do before.”

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Art Basel Qatar announces 82 exhibitors for 2027 edition. https://ift.tt/cyM3E2u

Art Basel Qatar will return to Msheireb Downtown Doha for its second edition, running January 28–30, 2027. Invitation-only preview days will take place on January 26th and 27th. The fair has announced 82 participating galleries from 37 countries and territories, each presenting a solo artist presentation under the curatorial theme “between / بين,” conceived by Iraqi curator Wassan Al-Khudhairi in collaboration with Vincenzo de Bellis, Art Basel's chief artistic officer and global director of fairs. Roughly half of the artists on view hail from the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia (MENASA) region and more than a third of participating galleries operate spaces there. Over 30 galleries are taking part in Art Basel Qatar for the first time. The fair unfolds across the M7 and Doha Design District venues, plus public sites across Msheireb Downtown Doha.

“For me, the theme between / بين is a liminal space of possibility, where different perspectives, histories and ideas meet and new ways of seeing emerge,” Al-Khudhairi said in a statement. “The show explores the dynamic relationship between the MENASA [Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia] region and the wider world: how global currents have shaped the region, and, equally, how the region's artistic practices, ideas and cultural histories have shaped, and continue to shape, the world.”

Regional galleries confirmed for the 2027 edition include Athr (Jeddah, Saudi Arabia), Lawrie Shabibi (Dubai), Tabari (Dubai), Hafez Gallery (Jeddah, Riyadh), al markhiya gallery (Doha), and The Third Line (Dubai), alongside first-time regional exhibitors including Efie Gallery (Dubai). International participants include Galerie Krinzinger, Matthew Marks Gallery, Mendes Wood DM, Sprüth Magers, White Cube, David Zwirner, Paula Cooper Gallery, and Gagosian. Notable solo presentations will include Gagosian showing Maurizio Cattelan, David Zwirner showing Oscar Murillo, Acquavella showing Andy Warhol, and White Cube showing Park Seo-Bo.

Alongside the exhibitor announcement, Art Basel unveiled a new year-round market development initiative in Qatar. Called the “Collectors Majlis,” the invite-only pilot program is for roughly 30 to 40 new, emerging, and art-adjacent collectors. It will launch this October ahead of the fair. The program combines pre-fair masterclasses, on-site engagement during the fair, and a post-fair salon, with sessions led by Art Basel leadership and regional figures including Her Excellency Sheikha Mayassa bint Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, chairperson of Qatar Museums. “Our ambition extends well beyond the fair week: through our new year-round program, we aim to deepen collector engagement between editions and contribute to the sustained growth of the regional art market,” Noah Horowitz, CEO of Art Basel, said in a statement.

Art Basel Qatar’s fair week will also anchor a broader slate of institutional programming in Doha, including the second edition of Design Doha (November 5, 2026–January 31, 2027) and the inaugural edition of the contemporary art quadrennial Rubaiya Qatar, opening November 21st. Also on view will be a survey of Giuseppe Penone at the National Museum of Qatar and an exhibition on the Baghdad Modern Art Group at Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art.

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Rembrandt House Museum opens temporary tattoo studio in Amsterdam. https://ift.tt/HTfeO31

The Rembrandt House Museum in Amsterdam is hosting a working tattoo studio on its premises through November 7th. “The Poor Man's Rembrandt Project,” a collaboration with tattoo artist Henk Schiffmacher and his studio Schiffmacher & Veldhoen, returns for a second run following its debut in 2023. From October 26th through November 7th, visitors can book a tattoo based on Rembrandt van Rijn’s etchings and drawings, with prices ranging from €100 to €350 ($110 to $390) and a €50 deposit ($56) required at booking. Some walk-in slots are reserved each day.

“Worldwide, more tattoos are sold than works of art to hang on your wall,” Schiffmacher said in a statement. “An old tattoo artist once called tattoos ‘the poor man's Rembrandt’: a work of art that is more affordable than a painting by one of the old masters, but no less carefully executed and selected…For us, it is an incredible honor to work in the place where Rembrandt's soul can still be felt, and to work with his etchings and drawings. Grand and small art coming together.”

The museum frames the project as a dialogue between two printmaking traditions. Both etchings and tattoos begin as a drawing before being transferred with ink and needle, in Rembrandt's case onto a copper plate and sheet of paper, and in the tattoo artists’ case onto skin. Schiffmacher’s team is setting up in the museum’s modern wing, on the Jodenbreestraat site where Rembrandt and his own assistants and pupils once worked collaboratively on their art. “This is all about content,” museum director Milou Halbesma told the Art Newspaper. “We are a museum of craftsmanship, and we are trying to throw open the craft of Rembrandt and his students as widely as possible. If you translate that to today, we have a number of world-famous Amsterdam creators… And this is a chance to get a tattoo from one of these masters.”

The museum also organized the giveaway of a free, full Rembrandt–based back piece, executed by a team of artists from Schiffmacher & Veldhoen in Amsterdam and St. Catharina in Antwerp. The winner, Bo Kwakernaak, a 28-year-old from Amersfoort, volunteered his back after Schiffmacher's studio put out a call on Instagram. The team of tattoo artists has spent over 20 hours in sessions, recreating Rembrandt's The Descent from the Cross (1633) across his back.

The final session takes place at the museum during Museumnacht on November 7th. “I have always felt a connection with Rembrandt paintings,” Kwakernaak told the Art Newspaper. “I'm not religious, but I've always been drawn to religious imagery. Here, it is the emotion in the faces, the feeling of grief. There is a whole story in one image.”

Schiffmacher says he sees the tattoo as echoing Rembrandt’s time as well. “There were so many different people in Amsterdam at the time; there would have been tattooed sailors." The finished tattoo needs roughly a year for its pigment to settle into the skin.

The resident tattoo team for the two-week studio includes Schiffmacher, longtime partner Tycho Veldhoen, Morrison Cheyenne Schiffmacher, Rupa van Teylingen, Antwerp-based Frederik Moens, and Swedish artist Olof Arrevik.

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What Sold at Art Basel Paris 2026 https://ift.tt/Uy1c9rZ

Art Basel Paris 2026 wrapped up its fifth edition on Friday, October 23rd, two days earlier than planned, as concerns over further protests in the French capital brought an abrupt end to an otherwise buoyant week of art and dealmaking. The fair, which welcomed 211 galleries from 41 countries to the Grand Palais, announced the early closure on Thursday amid fears that demonstrations over the weekend could jeopardize visitor safety. “We deeply regret that we will not be able to welcome visitors this weekend,” Art Basel said in a statement.

The decision followed widespread protests over living costs and public services, some of which had escalated into clashes and property damage the previous weekend. It left the general public with just one day to visit the fair, rather than the three originally planned. With the bulk of high-value transactions typically concentrated in the three VIP preview days, much of the week’s major business was likely already done. Still, the loss of the weekend may have been felt more acutely by smaller galleries; public days offer valuable opportunities to build relationships and introduce their program to a wider audience.

“The fair started strong. Collectors showed up, sales happened, and everyone survived the questionable temperatures,” advisor Arushi Kapoor told Artsy. “Ironically, the VIPs got their art fix while students, academics, and the broader public missed out.”

Indeed, while the Grand Palais was open, the mood had been markedly upbeat. The Avant Première VVIP day, now in its second year, drew a busy international crowd, with collectors appearing ready to make decisions. As Artsy reported earlier in the week, the fair got off to a flying start, with Hauser & Wirth selling works by Gerhard Richter and Georg Baselitz for around $10 million each, while other galleries including David Zwirner and White Cube also reported multimillion-dollar transactions.

The caliber of works showed Paris’s growing stature as one of the art market’s most important annual fixtures. Among the most eye-catching was Amedeo Modigliani’s Nu étendu (Lolotte) (1917), presented by Pace Di Donna Schrader Galleries with an asking price exceeding $100 million—a striking vote of confidence in the fair’s ability to attract the world’s biggest collectors—that the gallery said received strong interest. The city’s auction house sales also had a banner week, with Claude Monet’s Iris (1924–25) fetching €50 million ($56.2 million) at Sotheby’s, setting a new auction record for a work sold in France.

There was plenty to admire beyond the big-ticket sales, too. Under new director Karim Crippa, the fair featured 32 newcomers, an expanded Premise section dedicated to overlooked historical practices, and an ambitious array of presentations, several of which featured in Artsy’s selection of the best booths. Beyond the Grand Palais, there were also plenty of other fairs at Paris Art Week to peruse, such as Paris Internationale, Asia NOW, Post-Fair, and other satellite events. As our roundup of favorite works under $10,000 at the fairs showed, Paris had something for collectors across the price spectrum.

There had been high expectations going into Art Basel Paris 2026, and the fair’s premature ending was an unusual conclusion. The disruption may have curtailed its public reach, but the reported sales suggest that serious buyers had already made their presence felt. Here, we round up the key transactions reported by galleries at Art Basel Paris 2026.

Leading sales at Art Basel Paris 2026

In addition to the Richter and Baselitz works, Hauser & Wirth’s other sales included:

• A work by Mark Bradford for $4 million.
• George Condo’s Woman with Designer Shirt (2026) for $2.95 million.
• Lucio Fontana’s Concetto spaziale (Spatial Concept) (1961) for €1.7 million ($1.9 million).
• Henry Taylor’s WTF’s my 40 acres & my mule, you lying... (2023–26) for $1 million.
• Alexander Calder’s Four Dots and Brass Tail (ca. 1953) for just under $1 million.
• Pat Steir’s Untitled (1992) for $900,000.
• Cristina Iglesias’s Untitled (Eucalyptus Corner) (1994–97) for €500,000 ($560,000).
• Jenny Holzer’s Providing (2024) and William Kentridge’s Now Practice Heart-Work (2026) for $400,000 each.
• Lee Bul’s Perdu—Silhouette VI (2026) for $290,000.
• Roni Horn’s Just XX (1993) for $200,000.
• George Rouy’s Unknown Lovers (2026) for £195,000 ($261,000).
• Five editions of Camille Henrot’s Tristan (2026), including two for €160,000 ($179,000) each and three for €130,000 ($146,000) each.

Untitled #35, 1963
Robert Ryman
David Zwirner

David Zwirner’s reported sales were led by a painting by Richter for $8.5 million. Other transactions included:

• Five paintings by Robert Ryman for $4 million, $1.25 million, $850,000, $650,000, and $850,000.
• A painting by Joan Mitchell for $3.8 million.
• A painting by Marlene Dumas for $3 million.
• Four paintings by Josef Albers for $3 million, $900,000, $880,000, and $600,000.
• A painting by Luc Tuymans for $2.4 million.
• A painting by On Kawara for $2 million.
• A sculpture by Ruth Asawa for $1.2 million.
• Two paintings by Elizabeth Peyton for 900,000 (currency not specified) and $850,000.
• A painting by Yu Nishimura for $500,000.
• A painting by Bridget Riley for £450,000 ($602,000).
• An overpainted photograph by Richter for $110,000, alongside several editions priced between $75,000 and $350,000.

White Cube reported two major sales by Julie Mehretu, with Rise of the New Suprematists (2001) and Mumbaphilia (J.E.) (2018) each selling for $7.85 million. Other reported sales included:

• El Anatsui’s MivEvi I (2025) for $2 million.
• Tracey Emin’s You Were Part of me (2022) for £990,000 ($1.32 million).
• Cai Guo-Qiang’s Bald Eagle (2023) for $700,000.
• Antony Gormley’s OPEN DOUBT II (2026) for £500,000 ($668,000), and SMALL ADEPT (2025) for £250,000 ($334,000).
• Shao Fan’s Giant Lingzhi 0225 (2025) for $360,000.
• Francis Picabia’s Concour hippique (ca. 1932–34) for €185,000 ($207,000) and Untitled (ca. 1930) for €75,000 ($84,000).
• Pablo Picasso’s Seated woman (recto); standing woman (verso) (1924) for €150,000 ($168,000).
• Emmi Whitehorse’s Fish Pond (1998) for $150,000.
• Two works by Enrico David, Aurora (2025) and Assumption of We (2026), for £120,000 ($160,000) and £80,000 ($107,000), respectively.
• Marguerite Humeau’s Venus of Planina, A 37-year-old female human has ingested an olm’s brain (2024) for £115,000 ($154,000).
• Four works by Ibrahim Mahama, including Measure the Valleys and Down to the corner (both 2025–26) for €120,000 ($134,000) each, and Nyamuthia and Nyankwabe (both 2025–26) for €100,000 ($112,000) each.
• Louise Giovanelli’s Eleusis (2025) for £90,000 ($120,000).
• Fernand Léger’s Masque (projet pour la Création du Monde) (ca. 1923) for €65,000 ($73,000).
• Shigeo Otake’s Eye Gnats (2026) for $16,000.

Pace Gallery’s reported sales were led by Jean Dubuffet’s La chaise (1964), which sold for “more than” $5 million. Other sales included:

• Lee Ufan’s From Line No. 79061 (1979) for $2 million.
• Beatriz Milhazes’s Onde Nascem os Girassóis I (2026) for $1.2 million.
• Richard Pousette-Dart’s Eye of Autumn Snows (1992) for $650,000.
• Robert Longo’s Untitled (Peony) (2026) for $600,000.
• Dubuffet’s Site avec 3 personnages (1981) for $300,000.
• Adam Pendleton’s Black Dada (B) (2026) for $275,000.
• Robert Nava’s Bat with Lightning Cloud Clown with Several Ghosts (2024) for $185,000.
• Alicja Kwade’s Strange Attractor (2026) for €175,000 ($196,000).
• Michal Rovner’s Following (2026) for $175,000.
• Two sculptures by Arlene Shechet, Black Beauty and Pulse (both 2025), for $150,000 each.
• Julian Schnabel’s Portrait of Italy Through Its Trees Painting on Map (7:30 PM) (2026) for $125,000.
• Leo Villareal’s Golden Game (Medium) 6 (2025) for $125,000.
• Two paintings by Nigel Cooke, The Discovery of Fire and I was the Ghost (both 2026), for $100,000 each.
• Pam Evelyn’s Côte d’Azur (2026) for $80,000.
• Two works on paper by Loie Hollowell, Inverse Red Mandorla and Teal Mandorla (both 2026), for $50,000 each.

Sprüth Magers’s reported sales were led by two paintings by Condo, The Mechanical Man and Coney Island (both 2026), which sold for $2.2 million each. Other transactions included:

• Holzer and Lady Pink’s IF YOU ARE CONSIDERED USELESS... (1983) for $450,000.
• Rosemarie Trockel’s Princeton (2016) for €220,000 ($246,000).
• Anne Imhof’s Untitled (2026) for €180,000 ($202,000).
• Louise Lawler’s Formica (2011–12) for $65,000.
• Otto Piene’s Untitled (2014) for €20,000 ($22,000).

Thaddaeus Ropac reported sales led by Fontana’s Concetto spaziale (1953) for €1.8 million ($2.02 million). Other transactions included:

• Baselitz’s Per mano - an der Hand (2019) for €800,000 ($896,000).
• Marcel Duchamp’s L.H.O.O.Q (1919–64) for €650,000 ($728,000).
• Three works by Martha Jungwirth, Der Wal (2024) for €520,000 ($582,000), Untitled (2026) for €460,000 ($515,000), and two further works titled Untitled (2026) for €180,000 ($202,000) and €170,000 ($190,000).
• Yan Pei-Ming’s Oscar Wilde (2026) for €300,000 ($336,000).
• Two sculptures by Tony Cragg, Ivy (2024) and Integers (2023), for €280,000 ($313,000) and €275,000 ($308,000), respectively.
• Louise Bourgeois’s The Puritan Study #17 (1990–97) for €280,000 ($313,000).
• Baselitz’s Strawinskys Fuß (2026) for €275,000 ($308,000).
• Lisa Brice’s Untitled (2026) for $275,000.
• Joan Snyder’s Deep in Me (2025) for $195,000.
• Hans Josephsohn’s Untitled (1952) for CHF 175,000 ($212,000).
• Baselitz’s Ohne Titel (2012) for €110,000 ($123,000).
• Longo’s Study of Ascending F16 Jet (2026) for $90,000.
• Jordan Casteel’s Midnight Nasturtium (2026) for $45,000.

Other reported seven-figure sales included:

• Mennour—one of Artsy’s best booths from the fair—sold Fontana’s Concetto spaziale (1964) for €1.75 million ($1.96 million), Ufan’s Response (2026) for $1.05 million, and two sculptures by Ugo Rondinone for $850,000 each.
• P.P.O.W sold Martin Wong’s La Iglesia de Dios (1986) for $1.75 million to an American institution.
• Yares Art sold Kenneth Noland’s Purkinje Effect (1964) for $2.8 million and Robert Motherwell’s Open #79 (1969) for $750,000.
• Galerie Georges-Philippe & Nathalie Vallois sold Niki de Saint Phalle’s Cat Head Totem (2000) for a price in the $800,000–$1.2 million range.

More sales confirmed by Hauser & Wirth at Frieze Masters 2026

Following Art Basel Paris, Hauser & Wirth also confirmed several additional sales from the previous week’s Frieze Masters in London, including a work by Modigliani for $15 million, eclipsing the previously reported top sale of Jan Brueghel the Elder’s Still Life of Flowers in a Stoneware Vase (ca. 1607–08), which sold for “around” £5 million ($6.64 million).

Other newly confirmed Frieze Masters transactions included Paul Gauguin’s La Maison du Pan-du (The House of Pan-du) (1890) for “around” $4.2 million, Fontana’s Concetto spaziale, Attese (Spatial Concept, Expectations) (1963) for “around” €2.5 million ($2.8 million), and Giorgio Morandi’s Natura morta (Still Life) (1963) for “around” CHF 1.6 million ($1.94 million).

Notable blue-chip sales at Art Basel Paris 2026

Several established galleries reported strong sales across the upper six-figure and mid-market price ranges. Highlights from these exhibitors included the following.

Lisson Gallery’s reported sales were led by Anish Kapoor’s Clear to Dark Brandy (2026) for £750,000 ($1 million) and Ufan’s With Winds (1991) for $900,000. Other sales included:

• Kapoor’s Oriental Blue to Clear satin (2026) for £700,000 ($936,000).
• Carmen Herrera’s Pavan #37 (1948) for $650,000.
• Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Ligurian Sea, Saviore (1993) and Sea of Japan, Oki (1987), for $400,000 each. It also sold Sugimoto’s Opticks 661 (2025) for $250,000.
• Ha Chong-Hyun’s Conjunction 25-39 (2025) for $250,000.
• Yu Hong’s Unbound (2025) for $220,000.
• Leiko Ikemura’s magic girl yellow (2025) for €140,000 ($157,000).
• Pedro Reyes’s Concordia (2026) for $120,000.

Karma’s reported sales were led by Reggie Burrows Hodges’s Hutton Modesty Club: Son Runner (2025), which sold for $650,000. Other transactions included:

• Richard Mayhew’s Southern Border (1999) for $450,000.
• Manoucher Yektai’s Untitled (1960) for $250,000.
• Kathleen Ryan’s Bad Strawberry (Blossom) (2026) for $200,000.
• Jeremy Frey’s Vapor (2026) for $140,000 and Aquamarine (yellow) (2026) for $40,000.
• William Turnbull’s Small Sculpture (Idol) (1955) for $70,000.
• Marley Freeman’s reversing engine (2026) for $60,000.
• Nathaniel Oliver’s Down by the River (2025) for $55,000.
• Two works by Henni Alftan, Spaghetti Straps and Matchbox (both 2026), for $50,000 and $40,000, respectively.
• Calvin Marcus’s Untitled (2026) for $30,000.
• Shota Nakamura’s Untitled (2026) for $20,000.
• Ryan Preciado’s Color Theory (Test for Burbank) (2026) for $18,000.

Xavier Hufkens—another of Artsy’s best booths from the fair—reported sales were led by a painting by Charline von Heyl for $475,000. Other sales included:

• A bronze sculpture by Sherrie Levine for $300,000.
• A bench by Tatiana Trouvé for €275,000 ($308,000).
• A mid-size sculpture by Gormley for $250,000.
• A painting by Qiu Xiaofei for $125,000.
• A painting by Richard Aldrich and a plaster mask by Thomas Houseago for $120,000 each.
• Two ceramic works by Sterling Ruby for $50,000–$90,000 each, and a bronze sculpture for $32,000.
• A painting by Lesley Vance for $80,000.
• A small bronze by Emin for £50,000 ($67,000).
• A painting by Nathanaëlle Herbelin for €20,000 ($22,000).

Kukje Gallery’s reported sales were led by Ha Chong-Hyun’s Conjunction 25-40 (2025) for a “sum in the” $390,000–$468,000 range. Other transactions included:

• Ha’s Conjunction 23-47 (2023) and Conjunction 91-50 (1991) for $230,000–$276,000 and $210,000–$252,000, respectively.
• Holzer’s evaluating (2025) for $185,000–$222,000.
• Kyungah Ham’s Needling Whisper, Needle Country / SMS Series in Camouflage / Big Smile C 02-01-02 (2014–15) for $150,000–$180,000.
• Rondinone’s neunundzwanzigsterseptemberzweitausendundvierundzwanzig (2024) for $120,000–$144,000.
• Two paintings by Kibong Rhee, Windward and Road to none (both 2026), for $110,000–$132,000 and $100,000–$120,000 each.
• Julian Opie’s Callie I. (2025) for £45,000–£54,000 ($60,000–$72,000).
• Two works by Jean-Michel Othoniel, both titled Wall Figure (2026), for €32,000–€38,400 ($36,000–$43,000) each.
• Two works by Haegue Yang, Grafting Order and Beau Order (both 2026), for €26,000–€31,200 ($29,000–$35,000) each.
• Two works by Lotus L. Kang for $18,000–$21,600 and $12,000–$14,400.
• Two works by Lee Kwang-Ho for $14,000–$16,800 and $8,000–$9,600.
• Koo Bohnchang’s Vessel (RH 03 BW) (2014) for KRW 15 million–KRW 18 million ($11,300–$13,600).
• Two photographs by Han Youngsoo for $10,300–$12,360 and $3,800–$4,560 each.

Jessica Silverman’s reported sales were led by Hollowell’s Yellow Brain on soft pink shoulders (2026) for $450,000. Other sales included:

• Two historic works on paper by Judy Chicago, The Butterfly Begins Again 4 (1973) and Isabella d’Este as a Majolica Plate (1976), for $125,000 and $85,000.
• Rebecca Manson’s Arctia for $85,000.
• Hollowell’s Pressure in flesh tones for $80,000.
• Matthew Angelo Harrison’s Voices Return (2026) for $65,000.
• Three paintings by Clare Rojas and two by Rupy C. Tut for prices ranging from $20,000 to $65,000 each.
• A wall sculpture by Beverly Fishman for $60,000.
• Marilou Schultz’s Horizon (2026) for $50,000.
• Paintings by Hayal Pozanti and Guimi You for $45,000 each.
• Oliver Osborne’s Portrait of the Artist’s Sons (2026) for $35,000.
• Two glass bells by Davina Semo for $28,000 each.
• Seven works by Koak for $18,000 each, alongside five paintings by Laeh Glenn in the $15,000–$18,000 range.

More six-figure sales at Art Basel Paris 2026

Tina Kim Gallery reported sales led by a painting by Ha Chong-Hyun for $250,000 and a multimedia painting by Ghada Amer for $225,000. The gallery also sold a textile work by Lee ShinJa for $50,000 and a wall sculpture by Suki Seokyeong Kang for $40,000.

Galerie Lelong’s sales were led by Etel Adnan’s Untitled (2020) for €170,000 ($190,000). Other transactions included:

• Pierre Alechinsky’s New Delhi surplombée (1981) for €150,000 ($168,000).
• Juan Uslé’s Horizonte y memoria (2026) for €90,000–€100,000 ($101,000–$112,000).
• Shechet’s Together (2026) for €75,000 ($84,000).
• Kiki Smith’s Blue witness (2024) for €25,000 ($28,000).

Unsui (Duet), 2026
Sanford Biggers
MASSIMODECARLO

MASSIMODECARLO—another of Artsy’s best booths—reported sales led by Sanford Biggers’s Unsui (Duet) (2026) and Alvaro Barrington’s Composition 10.6 (2026), each for prices between $120,000 and $140,000. Other transactions included:

• McArthur Binion’s Circle/Square (2026) for $50,000.
• Skyler Chen’s happy valley? (2026) for €30,000–€40,000 ($34,000–$45,000).
• Daniel Crews-Chubb’s Mask XXIV (2026) for £20,000–£30,000 ($27,000–$40,000).

Casey Kaplan’s sales were led by a work by Casteel for $300,000. Other sales included:

• A work by Amanda Williams for $110,000.
• A work by Hannah Levy for $60,000.
• A work by Kevin Beasley for $35,000.
• A work by Sydney Cain for $22,000.
• Three works by Johanna Unzueta for $16,000 each.

Vaso di fiori, 1943
Filippo De Pisis
P420

Quiet friend who has come so far, 2026
Rodrigo Hernández
P420

Templon reported sales led by “several” works by Gérard Garouste, with “prices reaching” €250,000 ($280,000). Other transactions included:

• A work by Chiharu Shiota for “around” €120,000 ($134,000).
• A work by Omar Ba for “around” €110,000 ($123,000).
• A work by Martial Raysse for “around” €90,000 ($101,000).
• A work by Bilal Hamdad for “around” €65,000 ($73,000).
• “Several” works by Jeanne Vicerial for €25,000–€40,000 ($28,000–$45,000).

P420’s reported sales were led by Irma Blank’s Radical Writings, Schriftzug-Atemzug, 9-11-87 (1987) for “an asking price” of €140,000 ($157,000). Other sales, also reported at “asking prices,” included:

• Filippo de Pisis’s Vaso di fiori (1943) for €70,000 ($78,000) and Natura morta (late 1940s) for €30,000 ($34,000).
• Blank’s Radical Writings (1989) for €40,000 ($45,000) as well as two further works by Blank for €33,000 ($37,000) and €30,000 ($34,000).
• Two editions of Davide Rivalta’s Scimpanzè-Chimpanzee (2025) for €35,000 ($39,000) each.
• Rodrigo Hernández’s Quiet friend who has come so far (2026) for €10,000 ($11,000).

Other notable sales at Art Basel Paris 2026

Embroidered quilt with striped shield bugs, earthworms, dandelions, wild mallows, clover, cockchafer larvae, ladybirds, green stink bugs…, 2026
Daniel Dewar & Grégory Gicquel
Loevenbruck

Cardi Gallery sold Jannis Kounellis’s Untitled (2010) for €350,000 ($392,000) and Bourgeois’s House (1995) for $350,000, as well as two works by Agostino Bonalumi for €140,000 ($157,000) each.

Loevenbruck sold Daniel Dewar & Grégory Gicquel’s Embroidered quilt with striped shield bugs, earthworms, dandelions… (2026) for €65,000 ($73,000).

Magnin-A sold JP Mika’s Bilele, Bilele (Les habits, Les habits) (2026) for €6,000 ($6,700).

Sales reported from the fair’s Premise section—dedicated to historical artist surveys—included:

• Galeria Raquel Arnaud sold four works by Arthur Luiz Piza, including 16 (1948) for €22,000 ($25,000), Sem título crd-149 (1955) for €15,000 ($17,000), and two works titled Untitled (1949) for €7,000 ($7,800) each.
• Blue Velvet sold Sibylle Ruppert’s Curval (1976) for €350,000 ($392,000) to a Polish private collection, and two drawings titled Rencontre sur la lune (1973 and 1974) for €25,000 ($28,000) each.
• Olney Gleason reported sales led by Robert Indiana’s Source I (1959) for $375,000. Other transactions included two works by Ellsworth Kelly, both titled Untitled (Portrait of Robert Indiana) (1957), for $110,000 each; three works by Indiana titled Untitled (1959) for $100,000 each; and two further drawings by Kelly for $65,000 each.

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Ibrahim Mahama’s Vast Installations Harvest a New Future from a Colonial Past https://ift.tt/VirHNfL

If we are lucky, we will experience several great loves in a lifetime. For Ibrahim Mahama, art has always been number one. “I always loved art,” he said. “It’s my first love. I would do anything for it.” And when he says “anything,” he means it. His work has seen him envelop entire buildings with swathes of hand-stitched sacks, and build monumental installations out of hollowed-out aircraft, colonial-era bridges, and decommissioned railway carriages.

And yet, Mahama told me: “I never thought that I was going to become a contemporary artist. I only thought I was going to make art.” This changed in 2013, when Saatchi Gallery took an interest in his work, including him in the show “Pangaea: New Art from Africa to Latin America” in 2014. “Before this, I was just experimenting in the studio, doing guerrilla exhibitions around the city and sharing my work with local communities. When the international aspect came, I realized that there was more to do.”

Since then, the Ghanaian artist has exhibited all over the world and founded three art centers in his hometown of Tamale in Ghana. In 2025, he was named top of ArtReview’s Power 100. Utilizing archives, reclaimed materials, and everyday objects, his practice confronts history, global trade, and the enduring legacies of colonialism in Africa head on. His latest exhibition, “The Harvest Season,” is opening to coincide with Art Basel Paris this week at the Fondation Cartier. It’s an ambitious, collaborative undertaking which brings together nine artists and collectives, including James Barnor, Zohra Opuku, Gideon Appah, and Fera Wardak.

Throughout Mahama’s practice, he transforms discarded materials into repositories of memory, recognizing how objects are marked by the economic, social, and political systems through which they have passed. “Humanity has a way of cleaning its history and its image, but material forms come to embody the histories that they live through. I like using old materials because they contain a lot of truth within them.”

The exhibition features the original jute sacks that Mahama began working with in 2012, that were once used to transport cocoa beans, alongside rubber from a decommissioned rubber company, terra-cotta pots made by women in northern Ghana, and charcoal drawings on historical receipts. Together, these materials trace the entanglement of labor, commerce, and colonial history, revealing how ordinary objects can bear witness to much larger systems of exploitation and exchange.

“I believe that audiences are really going to connect with this exhibition, both materially and architecturally,” Mahama said. The artist has worked closely with the architecture of Cartier’s new space, which opened in October 2025. Defined by glass and steel, with long bay windows and expansive skylights, the building offers a sense of openness that has informed the exhibition’s design. “We built the exhibition so that nothing is blocked, and at any point in time, you are able to see through it from one end to the other.” As in much of his work, scale is equally important. Several monumental installations occupy the vast spaces, commanding attention while drawing the viewer into a shared, physical experience. “It becomes so magnificent that people cannot deny it. It becomes part of their reality.”

The exhibition opens with Mahama’s iconic Parliament of Ghosts (2025–26), an assembly of traditional wooden Asante stools, arranged to resemble a life-size parliamentary chamber, a space for gathering and discussion. “The stools were carved in the southern part of Ghana in the 19th and 20th centuries, and they hold a history of craftsmanship. A lot of them were broken, and we had to repair them before bringing them to Paris.” The act of repair is central to Mahama’s approach; these objects are not simply preserved as relics of the past, but also open new conversations. “Through these objects, we can ask new questions.”

Historically, stools of this kind were taken from Ghana as colonial loot, subsequently entering Western museum collections and presented as ethnographic objects. Here, they reclaim a different kind of agency, inviting audiences to reconsider whose voices are historically remembered.

For Season of Migration to the North (2025–26), Mahama was inspired by the Aboso Glass Factory in western Ghana. Founded in 1966, it was once the largest glass factory in sub-Saharan Africa, before being decommissioned and demolished despite community protests in 2025. Reflecting on a visit to the abandoned site, which he called a “living archive,” Mahama recalled: “There are plants, animals, and trees growing in between spaces. I thought that was important to pay attention to.”

Using funds from the Fondation Cartier commission, Mahama acquired materials from the defunct factory and partly reconstructed it at the Fondation Cartier. Here, Mahama has filled a red-brick swimming pool with emerald-green bottles, produced during Ghana’s post-independence era, topped with an assortment of terra-cotta pots that evoke the region’s rich craft traditions. The artwork invites audiences to consider the fate of collective infrastructure and the possibilities of rebuilding from remnants of the past.

Throughout his practice, Mahama has consistently embraced working collectively. For the artist, this approach enables collaborators to pool their intellectual resources and aspirations in order to build something that otherwise could not be achieved. Accordingly, “The Harvest Season” includes nine artists with whom Mahama has previously worked, including the radical Congolese collective CATPC (Cercle d’Art des Travailleurs de Plantation Congolaise) whom the artist visited in 2018. Its members approach art as a means of economic and political emancipation, using capital generated from art sales to buy back contaminated land to repair and restore it. Here, their surreal sculptures of animalesque figures are cast primarily from plantation-harvested cacao, critiquing the exploitative structures of the global commodity chain.

For CATPC, as for Mahama, art is inseparable from the social and political realities it inhabits. “One of the most important things that an artist can exercise is a sense of responsibility. And I think it is the responsibility of the artist to find a way to redistribute art and whatever sensibilities that come along with it. Because what point is there in making art when many people cannot access it?”

In this show, as in Mahama’s previous works, harvesting is not simply an act of gathering what history has left behind, but a way of reckoning with the past. “We are harvesting the decay of history, colonial memory, and our present human condition,” as Mahama put it. “At the same time, we are harvesting promises for the future. We are harvesting how we want to see the world going forward.”

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