7 Must-See Shows at Madrid Gallery Weekend 2026 https://ift.tt/aQLShPi

Sin titulo (De la serie: Marrón Barroco), 2026
La Chola Poblete
Travesia Cuatro

In early September, Madrid’s gallerists and collectors come back to life after a scorching summer lull. Apertura (September 10th to 13th), the city’s gallery weekend, marks the start of the new season as approximately 60 participants collectively launch their autumn shows.

Apertura opens during a time of transition for Madrid’s gallery scene. Long-standing players like Juana de Aizpuru, Helga de Alvear, and Marlborough recently closed, while a new generation including Río y Meñaka, Bowman Hal, Enhorabuena, and Gaby Vera Fine Arts have arrived.

Descending Soaring Infinite Bliss Soul Glyph - Mesmerizing Mesh #170, 2023
Haegue Yang
Prats Nogueras Blanchard

Mini Monumento del Heredero, 2026
Simon Vega
Albarrán Bourdais

“Madrid has been receiving new types of inhabitants, which has also made galleries grow,” says Pablo Flórez, president of the gallery association Arte Madrid and director of Galería Ehrhardt Flórez. Most significantly, Latin American collectors from countries like Venezuela and Mexico have brought “a high level of acquisition” and generated “a new kind of collecting.”

Madrid galleries have also confronted significant challenges: This year, many protested and took strike action over Spain’s 21 percent VAT on art sales (introduced under the conservative Partido Popular in 2012), which puts them at a disadvantage against counterparts in EU countries with lower art taxes. In a current political climate that Flórez describes as “polarized and tense,” Spanish gallerists may hope that whoever wins next year’s election will also offer additional support for the arts.

After all, galleries are critical to Madrid’s cultural growth. “Audiences have realized that galleries are no longer just places to buy art,” says Flórez, “but are part of the cultural fabric of the city.”

Here are the seven must-see shows of Apertura Madrid Gallery Weekend:

José Bedia

“Diálogos en el desierto”

El Apartamento

Through Oct.31

Havana-born José Bedia emerged among a revolutionary generation of Cuban artists whose 1981 exhibition “Volumen Uno” at the Centro de Arte Internacional de La Habana broke the mold by showing politically charged work. Since then, anthropological research has driven Bedia, whose practice involves fieldwork into artistic and spiritual traditions of Indigenous cultures in the Caribbean, Latin America, and Africa. El Apartamento’s Madrid space is showing Bedia’s latest series, which explores the violence, mysticism, love, heritage, and nature which gallerist Luis Sicre says can be read as “representative” of Latin America.

Bedia is exhibiting over 30 paintings of mythic, richly colored landscapes with black silhouettes. Manifestación de Olokúm (2026) depicts a Yoruba deity of the ocean, while in Quema de Teocalis (2026), figures on horseback are dwarfed by giant Mesoamerican pyramids engulfed in flames. In Diálogos en el desierto (2026), a man and lion appear in dialogue.

Bedia created another series of paintings on blue cloth and jute from Mali, exemplifying the artist’s exploration of Afro-Cuban traditions: Aquella señal (2026) and Pide un deseo (2026) show mermaid-like beings emerging from water, while Toda esperanza (2026) depicts a human figure following a bird in flight.

Joël Andrianomearisoa

“I Have No Regret For The Past And This Is Not The End Of The World”

Sabrina Amrani

Through Nov. 7

Joël Andrianomearisoa, one of the leading artistic voices of Madagascar, explores language and the collective memories embedded in craft traditions. He represented his native island at the 2019 Venice Biennale and co-founded Hakanto Contemporary in Antananarivo, Madagascar, the following year.

This extensive survey traces three decades of the multidisciplinary artist’s practice, which earned him a place on this year’s Prix Marcel Duchamp shortlist (the award is for an artist working in France; Andrianomearisoa divides his time between there and Madagascar). The earliest, untitled pieces from 1996, as well as the most recent, are ink works on paper showing either the Latin-script alphabet or abstract patterns.

The color black pervades Andrianomearisoa’s work in all media. The wall piece La Guerre des Boutons I (2009) features black buttons sewn onto black fabric, After Time Desires (2017) comprises strips of torn black cloth, and the Labyrinth of Passions sculptures (2013)—inspired by Oscar Wilde’s 1902 prison letter De Profundis—is made of black silk paper and resembles pages of a book. Striking exceptions include Les Horizons Complexes (de l’Amour et d’une romance) II (2018), a wall piece made of dyed fabric that resembles a sunset. Gallerist Sabrina Amrani says a trip to India, where the artist viewed vibrant textiles, inspired him to work with color and to contemplate Madagascar’s complex historic links with South Asia.

Miguel Benlloch

“Todavía”

The Ryder

Through Oct. 31

The late Granada, Spain-born artist and activist Miguel Benlloch has earned late-breaking appreciation following a recent retrospective at the Andalusian Centre for Contemporary Art (CAAC) in Seville, Spain; his work questions the gender binary and other hegemonic social structures in a way that feels strikingly contemporary. From his involvement in the Andalusian Homosexual Liberation Front to his opposition to Spain’s NATO membership, Benlloch—who died in 2018—addressed the pressing issues of his time through performance, text-based work, and conceptual art.

The Ryder is displaying video and photography that captured some of Benlloch’s most striking performance pieces. They include Tengo Tiempo (1994), in which the artist sheds clothing to symbolically slip away from the precarious identities that culture inscribes on us, and DERERUMNATURA (2017), which links bodily illness with capitalism, neoliberalism, and globalization.

Text-based works that further attest to Benlloch’s politically dissident voice. They include Canario (1993), a poem protesting the imminent U.S. invasion of Haiti (which took place the following year), and the pink-and-blue fabric flag Bandera Transexual (2010). Piedra Palestina (1993) is a silkscreen and wallpaper piece inspired by Palestine’s first Intifada (Uprising) against Israeli military occupation in 1987 to 1993.

Simón Vega

“Tiempos Cíclicos / Futuros Pasados”

Albarrán Bourdais

Through Oct. 17

Pre-Hispanic monoliths meet contemporary forms of power and propaganda in the work of Salvadoran artist Simón Vega. The artist uses junkyard debris in his new sculptures and installations, which reinterpret ancient monuments as they interrogate imperialism, corporate greed, digital surveillance, and other present-day phenomena in Central America.

Works like Estela del Gobernante S (2026) and Mini Monumento del Heredero (2026) consist of disused household and industrial materials—including kitchen utensils and fragments from washing and ventilation machines—piled into phallic structures that reimagine stelae from ancient Mayan civilizations. Zoomorfo (2026) is an immersive installation made of stacks of wooden pallets. Its structure is inspired by zoomorphs, massive granite sculptures found primarily in present-day Guatemala, which combine human and animal features. Another textile sculpture references the Mayan serpent deity Kukulkán with its long, fabric body and a head made of discarded rubber from shoes and slippers. The artist also draws from the ceremonial combat and ball games of ancient Mesoamerican civilizations with works like Altar Solar (2026) and Marcador de pelota (2026), through which he considers wider notions of spectacle, rivalry, and hierarchy.

Iman Issa

“A Game, or So You May Think”

carlier | gebauer

Through Nov. 14

Animal Masks for Tribunal Scene, 2022
Iman Issa
carlier | gebauer

Berlin-born carlier | gebauer, which has represented Iman Issa for over a decade, now presents the artist’s first Madrid show. It features key pieces from ongoing bodies of work that manipulate viewers’ relationship to history and meaning.

Self Portrait (Self as Hannah Arendt) (2020) and Self Portrait (Self as Georges Henein) (2021) are wall-mounted sculptures that resemble faceless heads. Their titles and wall texts (which form part of the artwork) blur the artist’s own identity with those of historical figures. These clinical-looking, white oblongs contrast with the bold colors of Animal Masks for Tribunal Scene (2022), an installation of 3D-printed masks that might evoke various beasts with their suggestions of horns and ears but are otherwise abstract and minimalistic.

Other works are inspired by historical artifacts. Heritage Studies #49 (2025), for example, is a long, pointed copper pin on a slanting white plinth, which the artist made for a solo show that ran at Lenbachhaus in Munich until April. The accompanying text for Heritage Studies #46 (2023)—which appeared in Issa’s Art Institute of Chicago exhibition last year—says the lacquered aluminum structure is inspired by a shrine in the Palestinian village of Deir Ghassaneh.

Agnieszka Kurant, Hito Steyerl, Haegue Yang

“Feral Agency”

Prats Nogueras Blanchard

Through Nov. 14

Nonorganic Life 6, 2025
Agnieszka Kurant
Prats Nogueras Blanchard

A new group show in Prats Nogueras Blanchard’s Madrid space explores how humans’ sense of agency is subject to wider systems of knowledge and control. German filmmaker Hito Steyerl explores how digital environments impact our future; her video installation Power Plants (2019)—originally created for a 2019 solo exhibition at London’s Serpentine Galleries—features images of flora generated by an AI model often used to forecast future trends and behavior. New York–based Agnieszka Kurant, who often collaborates with scientists to produce speculative works about non-human intelligence, presents her recent piece Unthoughtforms (2026), a crystalline sculpture crafted by passing electric currents and sound waves through copper sulfate solution. Also on view is her colorful painting Nonorganic Life 6 (2025), made of metal salt crystals on aluminum plates. Haegue Yang, living between Seoul and Berlin, imbues industrially manufactured objects with sensory life: Her futuristic, wood-and-stainless-steel chandelier Mesmerizing Pagoda Lantern - Carbonous Convulsion Ultramundane Flowers (2024) is animated by an arrangement of flowers made of hanji paper, a frequent material in Korean Buddhist rituals.

La Chola Poblete

“Marrón Barroco”

Travesía Cuatro

Through Nov. 7

Sin título, 2026
La Chola Poblete
Travesia Cuatro

Sin título, 2026
La Chola Poblete
Travesia Cuatro

La Chola Poblete, who received special mention from the Venice Biennale’s awards jury in 2024, is known for vivid paintings, photographs, and drawings. Her work critiques contemporary culture, identity, and political discourse through a queer, decolonial lens. The trans Argentine artist often deliberately overcrowds her compositions, which feature busy arrangements of Andean iconography and pop culture references.

Poblete’s latest paintings partly draw from the Latin American baroque, in which European colonial aesthetics blended with Indigenous and African traditions in the 17th and 18th centuries. Figures with braided hair also often appear in Poblete’s work to denounce the stereotyping and exoticization of Indigenous people: one such figure lies naked in Sin título (2026) surrounded by Che Guevara’s face, the Palestinian flag, and the Grindr logo, among other faces, figures, and patterns. Two new, untitled paintings depict a pair of collage-like figures in confrontation: one is a spectral, gender-ambiguous creature while the other is part of Poblete’s ongoing study of “cholas” (women of mixed European and Indigenous heritage). The gallery show coincides with Poblete’s exhibition at Madrid’s La Casa Encendida, “Continentes como semillas,” which she shares with flamenco artist Niño de Elche and Pedro G. Romero to explore ideas of appropriation and erasure across continents.

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Tschabalala Self unveils “Lady in Blue” sculpture on London’s Trafalgar Square Fourth Plinth. https://ift.tt/E8FtQKp

American artist Tschabalala Self has unveiled Lady in Blue (2026) on the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square, Central London, the 16th commission in the programme’s history. The bronze sculpture, patinated with lapis lazuli blue—a rare ultramarine pigment historically favoured by Renaissance masters including Titian—will remain on the plinth for two years.

Lady in Blue depicts a young Black woman caught in full stride, her body leaning forward with momentum. The figure rises to a monumental scale above the plinth’s stone base, her silhouette bold against the classical architecture of Trafalgar Square.

“She is not an idol to venerate or a historic figurehead to commemorate,” the artist said in an interview with the Press Association. “She is a woman striding forward into our collective future with ambition and purpose. She is a Londoner, who represents the city’s spirit.”

Three of Trafalgar Square’s four plinths hold permanent statues of 19th-century British figures; the fourth has been dedicated since 1998 to temporary commissions selected by The Fourth Plinth Commissioning Group, making it one of the most significant platforms for public sculpture in the world. The commission was welcomed by Justine Simons OBE, London's deputy mayor for culture, who described the work as “a bold contemporary sculpture of a confident young woman striding out with purpose.”

The commission carries particular weight given what happened to Self’s previous public sculpture in Britain. In 2022, she unveiled Seated at Coal Drops Yard in King’s Cross, London, before the work travelled to the De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill-on-Sea, South East England. There, it was targeted by vandals who spraypainted the sculpture white, but only on the skin of the figure. “That was a completely racist act,” Self said in an interview with The Guardian ahead of the Fourth Plinth unveiling. “The first feeling I had was just pain that my sculpture had been harmed. That someone had enacted violence on an object I had imbued with love and affection.”

Rather than organize a protest, Self pushed for a community cleanup day. Hundreds queued to take part, and by the end all the paint had been removed. Asked by The Guardian whether she is anxious about the far larger public stage of Trafalgar Square, she was direct. “I’m not nervous—I think everyone is entitled to their own opinion of the sculpture. Each will shed light onto some facet of the reality we're all currently living.”

Born in Harlem in 1990, Self has built a practice centred on the Black female figure, working across canvas, fabric and found materials to construct bodies of striking physical presence. Her work is held in the collections of MoMA, the Guggenheim Museum and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and the Albertina Museum in Vienna, and she has had institutional exhibitions at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and the ICA Boston. London has played a significant role in Self’s career: her first major institutional show was mounted at the Whitechapel Gallery in 2020, and the city also hosted the debut presentation of her first major series of paintings. “The central message of my work,” she has said, “is that all people should feel embodied—confident and comfortable, empowered in their body.”

Lady in Blue replaces Mil Veces un Instante (A Thousand Times in an Instant) (2024) by Teresa Margolles. Previous Fourth Plinth commissions include Antelope (2022) by Samson Kambalu, THE END (2020) by Heather Phillipson, and Really Good (2016) by David Shrigley. The first commission, in 1999 was Mark Wallinger’s Ecce Homo.

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Late Painter Yvonne Jacquette’s Aerial Paintings of New York Are Finally Getting Their Due https://ift.tt/IV65PU2

In mid-century Manhattan, painter Yvonne Jacquette set out to capture the city from above.

A 1969 commercial flight to San Diego sparked the idea; looking out the window on that flight, Jacquette marveled at the clouds and shifting landscapes below.

By the mid-1970s, Jacquette, who had previously painted still lifes and domestic interiors from odd, tilted, oblique vantage points, was chartering private planes out of Teterboro Airport in New Jersey so she could sketch and photograph the city from thousands of feet above ground. She maintained the process for close to a quarter century and supplemented the journeys with helicopter rides over Manhattan and drawing sessions on the upper floors of the World Trade Center. The artist, who was deeply embedded in the downtown New York art scene, found clarity and inspiration seeing the sprawling metropolis from above.

In her studio, Jacquette transformed these bird’s-eye view impressions into detailed visions of the city, painted in delineated patterns and colors that hovered between hard-edge realism and rhythmic abstraction.

The artist died in 2023 at the age of 88, leaving behind aerial perspectives of Maine’s rugged coastline, cities ranging from Hong Kong to New Orleans, and Manhattan at night.

A selection of Jacquette’s paintings are now on view in “From the Air” at Karma in New York, the gallery’s first solo show of the late artist. The exhibition, on view through October 31st, reintroduces the singular practice of an overlooked downtown figure. “From the Air” brings together paintings and works on paper made between 1971 and 2016, depicting clouds, cities, and fields as interlocking, rhythmic patterns of line and color. They range from the intimately scaled Untitled (1971), a watercolor of clouds billowing from a plane window, to the colossal N.Y. Aerial View from Helicopter (Looking East from Hudson Yards Area) II (2011–12), a panoramic view of Manhattan in the morning light.

While Jacquette may not be a familiar name today, the exhibition underscores her central role in the New York art world. “If you were an artist working in New York in the 1970s, you knew Yvonne Jacquette,” said Brendan Dugan, founder of Karma, on a phone call.

Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1934 and raised in Connecticut, Jacquette studied at the Rhode Island School of Design before moving to New York City in 1955. In 1961, she met the Swiss-born photographer and filmmaker Rudy Burckhardt, whom she married in 1964. The painter Mira Schor recalled meeting the couple a few years later, at a night of film screenings at Red Grooms and Mimi Gross’s loft on the corner of Mulberry and Grand. “I still remember the first moment I laid eyes on Yvonne, Rudy, Edwin, and Jacob, standing in a row as they entered the room. They were all so distinctively interesting looking,” said Schor in an email (Edwin being the poet Edwin Denby, part of the same circle.)

Through Burckhardt, Jacquette grew close with poets including John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara, and with artists Larry Rivers and Jane Freilicher. Her own circle included Alex Katz, Grooms, Gross, Sylvia Plimack Mangold, Janet Fish, and Rackstraw Downes, among others; she and Burckhardt kept lofts on East 29th and later 14th Street that doubled as an informal salon for this whole crowd. Burckhardt and Jacquette also purchased a house in Searsmont, Maine, which became a studio base for Jacquette, and there she grew close to Fairfield Porter and Lois Dodd through the regional painting community.

Jacquette belonged to a generation of New York realist painters who turned toward directly observed, everyday subject matter just as Abstract Expressionism was fading from the New York art world. She and her peers shared an interest in making the ordinary—a windowsill, a radiator, the city grid—as worthy of the same rigor and attention as any traditional subject.

As Tom Burckhardt, the artist’s son and himself a painter, described in an email, artists of his mother’s generation were looking for “new ways of reviving depiction…with lessons from the earlier generation such as scale and attitude folded in.” Through the scale and shifted perspective of Jacquette’s aerial paintings, he sees her engaging with landscape “mostly with a radical point of view, first looking up, then looking down from the very modern vantage of planes and skyscrapers. There’s only occasionally a horizon line in her work.”

Jacquette’s works were never meant to be literal reproductions of her aerial views, it’s worth noting, and in the studio she freely adapted from her in-flight sketches and photographs. When she was in the air, her process was fast and physical: She made quick pastel studies on paper, often combining several passes as she circled a site. She only used photographs for structural details, “never as primary references,” according to her son, who recalled “stewardesses scolding her over pulling out her pastels just after takeoff.”

Sylvia Plimack Mangold, who became a close friend during these years, said Jacquette’s studio process allowed the artist “the freedom to invent rather than simply reproduce what she had seen.” That freedom showed up in her brushwork, too: She applied paint in small dabs and dashes rather than continuous strokes, which Tom Burckhardt calls “a refurbished impressionist flickering stroke to make light and color vibrant and even a bit un-solid.” Up close, the compositions look almost abstract.

Beyond painting, Jacquette also worked in woodcuts. She hand-cut the blocks herself and printed them in dense, dark ink on absorbent Japanese Okawara paper. She often spent a year or more on these prints, which featured nocturnal subjects like lit windows, neon, and headlight trails as sharp points of light against black.

Jacquette’s style, however, didn’t fit neatly into the movements of her day, an ambiguity that may have contributed to her semi-obscurity. “When I think of artists working with a similar language,” Dugan said, “I mainly see Jacquette in relation to contemporary artists,” drawing comparisons to artists such as Avery Singer.

Still, her works have maintained a continuous level of interest over the decades. DC Moore Gallery mounted a survey of “Paintings 1981–2016” and, following her death, revisited her earliest, pre-aerial interiors in the 2023 show “Looking Up/Down/Inside/Out, 1962–1976.” “From the Air” now continues.

It’s worth underscoring that Jacquette was never obscure in her own lifetime, even if she never reached the wider fame of some peers. She taught at Parsons School of Design from 1975 to 1978 and at the University of Pennsylvania from 1979 to 1984, was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2003, and saw a full-career retrospective, “Aerial Muse,” travel from Stanford’s Cantor Arts Center to Colby College, the Utah Museum of Fine Arts, and the Hudson River Museum in 2002. Today, her work sits in more than 40 museum collections, including those of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney, and the Brooklyn Museum. That recognition never quite translated into the market visibility and household-name status afforded contemporaries like Katz—a gap the current show is angling to close.

Tom Burckhardt sees his mother’s large paintings of horizons with slivers of airplane wings at the edge as the work of an artist at her peak. “There’s a kind of fourth wall breaking [as Jacquette places] you inside the plane with the consistent technology framing the various natural or human places below,” he said. “I think they’re very unique paintings for the time, and groundbreaking.”

The exhibition also positions Jacquette as a steady supporter of other artists. Mangold, known for her own transcendent depictions of trees, found inspiration in their relationship. “We were competitive, but in a productive way,” she said in an email. “We encouraged one another, fed off each other’s work, and shared a confidence in each other.”

That same spirit of validation ran through Jacquette’s friendships with younger women artists—Schor recalled Jacquette lending her a book on Rajput painting early in her career, “offering me her validation and a larger arena of cultural influence and support” at a moment when women’s domestic and everyday subject matter was only beginning to be taken seriously as art.

Jacquette’s circle ran beyond the visual arts, too. In 1981, Jacquette and Edwin Denby published the literary journal Aerial, featuring artwork by Jacquette alongside writing by John Ashbery, Ted Berrigan, Joe Brainard, Eileen Myles, Frank O’Hara, Ron Padgett, and Peter Schjeldahl, among others. While preparing “From the Air,” the gallery turned up a previously unknown maquette for Aerial’s second volume. Coinciding with the exhibition, a facsimile of Aerial (vol. II) will be published by Karma Books in collaboration with the Estate of Yvonne Jacquette.

For the gallery, the exhibition is only a start. “This is just the introduction,” Dugan said. “She has a much longer story.”

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9 Artists Having a Breakout Moment in Fall 2026 https://ift.tt/mYvLGnN

Fall is the art world’s most important season. Major museums and galleries across the globe open shows and commissions by artists whose visions (and markets) they believe in. It’s a great time to spot exciting new directions in both creative practices and the commercial side of things.

This fall, art history and contemporary practice collide as the season’s breakout artists quote some of the world’s most famous canvases. In new shows opening this fall, there are artists giving a queer spin to Picasso, inserting Black figures into compositions by Winslow Homer and John Singer Sargent, and reenvisioning Old Masters scenes in Compton.

Art history has always progressed via a series of artists reacting to and against their predecessors. Here, they’re challenging the canon’s omissions of different types of bodies and love stories—and its strict approach to medium. One artist unites basket weaving and ceramics. Others rethink the boundaries between the body and its adornments.

Altogether, this season’s breakout artists allow us to see ourselves anew, and to reframe the stories we’ve told about art and belonging. Here are nine to watch out for.

Louis Fratino

B. 1993, Annapolis, Maryland. Lives and works in New York.

Few artists in their early thirties get a two-person show with a modernist master; this past summer, painter Louis Fratino shared exhibition billing with Henri Matisse. The presentation, “Fratino and Matisse: To See This Light Again,” at the Baltimore Museum of Art, generated momentum for Fratino’s first show with David Zwirner, which opens at the gallery’s London outpost on September 18th. Zwirner announced representation of Fratino last year, and this will be his first solo show since.

Fratino has earned acclaim for his soulful paintings of male figures and queer spaces. The artist synthesizes art historical styles (Picasso, Matisse, the unsung British painter Christopher Wood) as he creates lush, intimate scenes of men in domestic, communal, and outdoor settings—and in bed.

Reggie Burrows Hodges

B. 1965, Compton, California. Lives and works in the Bay Area.

Reggie Burrows Hodges has lived an itinerant life, making homes for himself in New York, Malta, Angola, Canada, Vermont, the Bay Area, and Maine. Now, the Compton-born painter gets a grand homecoming with three presentations across Los Angeles. On October 20th, the J. Paul Getty Museum opens “A Theater of Passions,” the California African American Museum debuts “A Theater of Miracles,” and Art + Practice (painter Mark Bradford’s nonprofit space) inaugurates “A Theater of Dreams.” The museum shows are also Hodges’s local institutional debut.

For the roving artist, Blackness is a literal foundation, the ground to which he returns: He starts each piece by coating canvas or linen with a layer of black paint, then working over the surface with acrylic and pastel. His figures remain dark and solid, outlined or otherwise contained by the artist’s fields of color. Hodges’s scenes span landscapes, portraits, and interiors, while art historical references from Jacob Lawrence to Caravaggio lend his work erudition and breadth.

At the Getty, Hodges will respond directly to the museum’s collection of Old Master paintings by Artemisia Gentileschi and her father Orazio, which will hang alongside the artist’s contemporary interpretations.

Anina Major

B. 1981, Nassau, the Bahamas. Lives and works in Los Angeles.

Earlier this year, Anina Major won a coveted, unrestricted $50,000 grant from United States Artists for her work in craft. Her sculptures unite elements of two vernacular forms: ceramics and basket weaving. The artist treats clay like rattan and other fibers as she hand-weaves their strips into sturdy vessels. Her process draws on her own experience of migration; she and her work reject hard boundaries (art vs. craft, one medium vs. another, this country vs. that) in favor of fluidity and creation.

Given her archipelago origins, it’s no surprise that Major’s sculptures often bring in aquatic elements—she’s previously incorporated sea sponge, glass, and salt into her work. For her inaugural U.S. solo show, “The Sacred Mangrove,” opening October 1st at the Pérez Art Museum Miami, the artist will create an installation featuring a crushed conch shell path that leads through her work and brings viewers into a reimagining of the Caribbean landscape she once called home.

Roméo Mivekannin

B. 1986, Bouaké, Ivory Coast. Lives and works between Toulouse, France, and Cotonou, Benin.

Painter Roméo Mivekannin descends from Benin royalty and confronts the esteemed and sorrowful history of this lineage throughout his work. His great-great-grandfather, King Behanzin, was on the throne in West Africa at the end of the 19th century when the French invaded and looted his Kingdom of Dahomey (not to be confused with the Kingdom of Benin, which the British invaded and looted around the same time). The country’s treasures have only gradually been restored.

Mivekannin found his own subject matter after a visit to a 2019 show on Black models in French painting at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. He began painting his ancestors on bedsheets dipped in voodoo potions and stitched together. Sometimes, he inserted them into art historical scenes, which has become a trademark of his work. Over the past decade, he’s mounted over a dozen solo shows throughout Europe, remaking compositions by Edward Hopper, Gustave Caillebotte, and Francisco de Zurbarán while inserting Black figures in place of their white subjects.

On September 9th, Mivekannin opens “Porteurs de feu (Bearers of Fire),” his U.S. debut solo at Southern Guild. The artist is reworking compositions with a special connection to the city: a seafaring scene by Winslow Homer, a society portrait by John Singer Sargent, and Charles C. Ebbets’s famous photograph of construction workers eating on a skyscraper’s steel beam. These works ask viewers to consider how legacies of slavery and subjugation sit in relation to histories of art, architecture, and the city at large.

Bea Scaccia

B. 1978, Veroli, Italy. Lives and works in New York.

Bea Scaccia’s paintings abound with curling tendrils, beaded strands, gold chains, red high heels, and other markers of feminine adornment. These subjects appear woven together into faceless, sculptural forms that evoke fairytale creatures, as if a tornado hit a costume closet.

On September 22nd, Gagosian will open “Groomed,” its debut show of Scaccia’s work, curated by famed Italian art curator Francesco Bonami. A new diptych, Heels over Head—or Pillow Talk (2026), parodies the odalisque from Édouard Manet’s Olympia (1863), while another reconsiders a frequent Rococo subject: girls reading in their boudoirs.

Firenze Lai

B. 1984, Hong Kong. Lives and works in London.

While most of the artists on this list metabolize specific art historical styles and even discrete compositions, Firenze Lai turns her gaze inward. The Hong Kong–based artist, who lives and works in London, creates oil paintings featuring haunting figures who sit on urban benches and melt into psychedelic landscapes. Esoteric themes evoking the unconscious guide her work.

On October 13th, during Frieze London 2026, Lai will open “North and True North,” her inaugural show with White Cube and her first in the U.K. since the gallery announced its representation in July 2025. The presentation follows solo outings across Hong Kong, China, and France.

Ella Walker

B. 1993, Manchester, United Kingdom. Lives and works in London.

British painter Ella Walker adores illustrated manuscripts as well as the exuberant cinema of Federico Fellini: Both influences are obvious in her paintings. These theatrical works depict women in a flattened manner reminiscent of frescoes from European medieval and Renaissance traditions. Her figures wear flowing gowns and pasties, harlequin patterns, and what appear to be yoga pants. They are, in other words, a unique mix of mythical and contemporary themes, a blend of femininity that’s both out of a storybook and making its own rules.

On September 3rd, the artist opened two site-specific commissions at the Courtauld. They take the form of monumental paintings on linen, coated with acrylic dispersion, pigment, chalk, and pencil. One features an artist’s studio with a few off-kilter elements: a dangling fish, women with differing proportions, and figures in various states of dress. Another depicts a group of women gathered around a ladder. Walker’s engagement with Renaissance art continues, and she looks toward the institution’s own holdings for inspiration: a Sandro Botticelli altarpiece, in particular.

The Courtauld presentation marks a major institutional debut for Walker, followed by Casey Kaplan’s third solo show with the artist, slated to open November 5th in New York.

Emma Prempeh

B. 1996, London. Lives and works in London.

Gold leaf adorns Emma Prempeh’s canvases, glimmering across scenes that honor her Ghanaian and Vincentian heritage along with her upbringing in London.

This mélange of identities finds its counterpart in hazy compositions that embrace the in-between. In One world for another (2026), a new work for Prempeh’s September Paris debut at Perrotin, layers of finely rendered trees, a brushy blue sky, and architectural elements appear drawn from different styles and sites. The brown and green ground, full of drips, appears fluid. Prempeh’s exhibition title, “The Domain of the Stranger,” comes from Lose Your Mother, writer Saidiya Hartman’s 2007 exploration of slavery and the African diaspora, and Prempeh contends with a related sense of place and placelessness.

Blackness and transformation are integral to Prempeh’s scenes, and she’s been celebrated in the U.K., the country she calls home, and abroad. The artist has had solo shows at Tiwani Contemporary in London and Lagos. In 2025, both the Hepworth Wakefield and the Tate acquired her work.

Krzysztof Grzybacz

B. 1993, Poland. Lives and works in Krakow, Poland.

Painter Krzysztof Grzybacz made his London solo debut at Pace on September 3rd with “Haruspex.” The exhibition title references ancient Roman diviners who looked at animal guts to predict the future. The secrets of the body are similarly at issue in Grzybacz’s finely rendered compositions.

In Torso (2026), for example, a recumbent figure wears a white top with a zipper that could double as a rib cage, and the zipped and sutured material beneath simultaneously evokes skin, cloth, and paper. Floral patterns throughout the new works evoke the artist’s past series, and his palette derives from studies of plants and human perception. The Pace debut follows solo exhibitions at Mendes Wood DM in Brussels and Dawid Radziszewski Gallery in Warsaw.

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American artist Lucien Smith dies at 37. https://ift.tt/RHsJUAO

Lucien Smith, a mainstay of the downtown New York art scene, has died at 37. The artist’s meteoric early success made him a defining, divisive figure of New York’s early-2010s art boom. He passed away on Monday, September 7th, in New York.

A cause of death has not been made public. Half Gallery, which represents the artist, confirmed the news. “When we met Lucien right after he graduated, in 2011, he was the hub and heart of a burgeoning downtown culture,” dealer Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn, who gave Smith his start at her gallery, Salon 94, told Artnet. “Bright, tender, filled with ideas and experimentation, a rare artist with charisma, talent, and the ability to build community.”

Smith was born on April 15, 1989, in Los Angeles, to a fashion-designer mother and an artist-musician father, according to Artforum. He spent a peripatetic childhood attending more than a dozen schools before graduating from Santa Monica High in 2007 and enrolling at Cooper Union. “I felt like I had gotten the golden ticket,” he later told The East Hampton Star. His 2011 thesis show, “Imagined Nostalgia,” included a large painting of the tree from Winnie the Pooh and other, in his words, “objects from a childhood that I never experienced firsthand.” The show caught Greenberg Rohatyn’s eye, and she exhibited him almost immediately.

That same year, while staying at film director James Ivory’s upstate compound, Smith began his Rain Paintings, spraying thinned paint across unprimed canvas from a fire extinguisher, a technique he said he adapted from watching graffiti artists. The series debuted that October at the solo show “Needle in the Hay” at Ritter/Zamet in London, followed in 2012 by “Seven Rain Paintings” at OHWOW in Los Angeles. His New York solo debut, “Good Vibrations” at Bill Powers’s Half Gallery, showcased guitar bodies adorned with bottle caps and glitter. “Think John Armleder meets junkyard Duchamp,” Powers said to Artnet. The works sold to collectors including Richard Prince, Rashid Johnson, and Vito Schnabel.

The Rain Paintings made Smith a well-known name. He completed the series’final 10 canvases, later called the Southampton Suite, in the summer of 2013, working in a studio he built in Greenberg Rohatyn’s backyard. That November, a painting from his thesis show that had sold for $10,000 resold at Phillips for $389,000, a new auction record set when Smith was just 24. Solo shows at Salon 94 and Skarstedt Gallery followed, and his work sold for more than $4 million at auction in 2014 alone, per the Artnet Price Database.

That fame carried a cost. In 2014, critic Walter Robinson grouped Smith with Oscar Murillo and Jacob Kassay under the label “Zombie Formalism,” describing young abstractionists whose paintings collectors bought to flip rather than keep. Smith had a sense of humor about it. But the pressure to create was real. “I’d sell out of work before I could sign it,” he said.

By 2015, the market had turned. Smith’s resale values fell sharply from their six-figure peaks, and he stepped back from galleries and moved to Montauk. “Art was about money everywhere I looked. It was scary,” he told Hypebeast. He was candid about longtime struggles with substances, too: “I’m a chronic relapser,” he told Kenny Schachter in 2021. “I shouldn’t drink or do drugs.” That year he founded Serving the People, a nonprofit registry for unsigned artists, aiming, as he put it, “to help bring awareness to the unrefined, uncommercial” work overlooked by the market.

Smith’s first solo museum show, “Southampton Suite,” opened at the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill in 2020, built around the final Rain Paintings; he called the experience “therapeutic” in Interview magazine. In 2021, he moved into NFTs as director of the Cultural Innovation Lab at the asset platform Lobus, releasing a collection called “Seeds.” In 2024, he reopened FOOD, the artist-run restaurant Gordon Matta-Clark, Carol Goodden, and Tina Girouard had founded in SoHo in 1971, working with Matta-Clark’s estate and designer Max Lamb on its banquettes.

This year, Smith returned decisively to painting. In June, he opened “Burn Down the House” at Kearsey & Gold in London. The show featured airbrushed paintings of Dorothy’s house from The Wizard of Oz falling from the sky. Gallery director Lucas Kearsey wrote that Smith was too often “mistakenly spoken about as if he is a figment of recent memory.” Last month, he made four new Rain Paintings on an abandoned baseball field at Camp Hero in Montauk, with Julian Schnabel among those looking on, ahead of a Tripoli Gallery show in Wainscott, New York. It was slated to open this week. “I let the market and outside criticism dictate my practice, and that was a mistake,” Smith said in the release announcing the work. “Life has taken me full circle.”

A childlike streak ran through Smith’s subjects, from the Pooh tree to pie fights to Dorothy’s falling house. His art world references were specific, including Schnabel, Andy Warhol, Claude Monet, and Hokusai. “Whatever that generation is after Dash Snow, Lucien will forever be the face of it,” Powers said. On X, artist Andrew Kuo called his death “a loss for our community,” while artist Joel Mesler wrote that he was “happy knowing he found some serenity later in life.”

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Issy Wood selected as first artist in National Portrait Gallery’s new Focus program. https://ift.tt/p3GJ5C9

Issy Wood has been selected as the inaugural artist for Artist Focus, a new contemporary program launched by London’s National Portrait Gallery (NPG) dedicated to artists who push the boundaries of portraiture. The program will present three solo displays each year, supported by the Gallery’s newly established Contemporary Council.

“Issy Wood: Self-Portraits,” on view October 9, 2026, through February 28, 2027, in the Gallery’s Weston Wing, will bring together 12 self-portraits by the artist, the first and largest presentation devoted to this side of her practice. The exhibition will be free to enter.

A standout of the show promises to be Self Portrait 2 (2021), one of three works already in the NPG's collection—the only national institution to hold a Wood self-portrait. The exhibition will also include 11 paintings drawn from the artist’s own collection, seven of which have never been publicly exhibited. Begun in 2020, Wood’s self-portrait series is marked by tight cropping and framing that alternately reveals and obscures the self. The artist has described the paintings as functioning as substitutes for photographs of herself, with the painted image standing in for the real one.

“The Gallery’s history has always been one of innovation. We were the first portrait gallery in the world when we were founded in 1856 and remain the global centre for the study and appreciation of portraiture today,” said Dr. Flavia Frigeri, the NPG's chief curator, in a statement. “As the home of portraiture, the NPG is best placed to be a venue and a platform for continued experimentation, as we work to inspire future generations by showcasing the work of trailblazing artists.”

Born in North Carolina in 1993, Wood studied at Goldsmiths and the Royal Academy Schools in London and has become known for psychologically charged paintings that draw on personal archives, social media, auction catalogues, and advertising. Her work probes intimacy, desire, and consumer culture, often blurring the line between portraiture, still life, and psychological narrative. Her work is held in the collections of the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris, the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and Britain’s Tate, among others.

Self-portraiture has featured prominently in Wood’s recent institutional exhibitions, including “Fish, Fish, Duck” at Norway’s Kistefos Museum, now on view through October 11, 2026—her first major presentation in the Nordic region. This exhibition pairs large- and small-format self-portraits with her signature paintings of animals and household objects on velvet-stretched canvas. Other recent high-profile projects for Wood include her portrait of Charli XCX for the cover of Vanity Fair’s November 2025 art issue and “Magic Bullet,” a recent solo show at Berlin's Schinkel Pavillon.

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