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

Playground, 2026
Khalif Tahir Thompson
Victoria Miro

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

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

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

Two Brothers, 2026
Khalif Tahir Thompson
Victoria Miro

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

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

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

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

The Rain, 2026
Khalif Tahir Thompson
Victoria Miro

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

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

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

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

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

Arch Diner, 2026
Khalif Tahir Thompson
Victoria Miro

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Building a gallery—and an audience

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

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

Untitled, 2002
Farid Belkahia
Loft Art Gallery

Sans titre, 2003
Farid Belkahia
Loft Art Gallery

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

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

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

Bringing Moroccan modernism to the world

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

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

Untitled, 1967
Mohamed Melehi
Loft Art Gallery

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

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

Untitled, 1960
Mohamed Melehi
Loft Art Gallery

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

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

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

Untitled, 2021
Saâd Hassani
Loft Art Gallery

Untitled, 2026, 2026
Abdelkrim Ghattas
Loft Art Gallery

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

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

Staying rooted in Morocco

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

11pm, 2026
Cece Philips
Public Gallery

Mountain dog, 2026
Joana Galego
Soho Revue

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

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

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

William Kentridge

“A Nicely Built City”

Goodman Gallery

Through Nov.7

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

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

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

Lucy Dodd

“The good, the true and the beautiful”

Sprüth Magers

Through Oct.24

Moss moon, 2026
Lucy Dodd
Sprüth Magers

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

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

Khalif Tahir Thompson

“Send in the Clowns”

Victoria Miro

Through Nov.7

Arch Diner, 2026
Khalif Tahir Thompson
Victoria Miro

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

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

Nicola Turner

“I Tear Secrets From Your Yielding Flesh”

Annely Juda Fine Art

Through Nov.7

Transitional Object, 2026
Nicola Turner
Annely Juda Fine Art

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

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

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

William Crozier

“Dance of the Living 1961-1974”

Flowers

Oct.14–Nov.14

Untitled (Figure), 1961
William Crozier
Flowers

Portumna, 1962
William Crozier
Flowers

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

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

Edmond Brooks-Beckman

“Persistent Undoing”

Cob

Oct.10–Nov.14

Estranged Passions, 2026
Edmond Brooks-Beckman
Cob

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

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

Joana Galego

“Different Ways of Saying”

Soho Revue

Through Oct.31

They could have thorns, 2026
Joana Galego
Soho Revue

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

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

Jim Amaral

“A Study of Five Decades”

LAMB

Through Nov. 28

Per-se Nº 014, 2001
Jim Amaral
LAMB

Kaleidoscope: Bottom-up Dream, 2015
Jim Amaral
LAMB

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

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

Adam Lewis Jacob

“Short Vamps for Long Wear”

NEVEN

Through Oct. 24

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

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

Cece Philips

“All the corners that are left”

Public Gallery

Through Oct. 18

Three women, 2026
Cece Philips
Public Gallery

Lacquered Landscape, 2026
Cece Philips
Public Gallery

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

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

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Gen Z spends more than twice as much on art as other generations, Art Basel and UBS report finds. https://ift.tt/EVoDcYA

Gen Z collectors are outspending every other generation in the art market by a significant margin, according to the Art Basel and UBS Survey of Global Collecting 2026. Surveying some 3,100 high-net-worth (HNW) collectors across 10 markets, the annual report, authored by Dr. Clare McAndrew, finds Gen Z averaging $347,460 in fine art expenditure in 2025, up 19% on the previous year and more than double the average of any older generation. Average fine art expenditure across all respondents rose to $124,265 in 2025, up 13% on 2024.

The findings challenge prevailing assumptions about younger collectors as cautious market participants. Gen Z accounted for nearly half of all purchases priced over $1 million in 2025 and the first half of 2026, and had by far the largest share of collectors spending over $1 million in total on fine art in H1 2026—13% versus 3% overall. Paul Donovan, chief economist at UBS Global Wealth Management, attributed part of the trend to generational wealth transfer, noting that 40% of Gen Z respondents entered collecting through family influence and nearly 90% retained inherited works. “At the same time, younger collectors continue to favor traditional media such as painting and sculpture, suggesting that while collecting habits are evolving, aesthetic preferences remain more consistent across generations than is often assumed,” Donovan said in a statement.

Contrary to assumptions about a generation raised on social media, Gen Z collectors were the most private of any group surveyed: 39% restricted in-person access to their collections to close family, friends, and household, almost twice the share of any other generation. Online, they favored invitation-only or restricted group sharing over public disclosure, with privacy described in the report as central to their personal and cultural identity. Across all generations, 64% of HNW collectors preferred to keep their art ownership within their household or a closed circle, and among those who lent works to museums, just 17% sought full public credit.

The report also identifies a striking shift in how collectors—particularly younger generations—research and discover art. Use of AI and digital tools for collecting advice rose to 22% of respondents in 2026, up from just 4% in 2024, while 72% of all collectors now conduct moderate or significant independent research before buying, up 10 percentage points from 2025. Around two-thirds of respondents viewed AI positively for artist and artwork discoverability, provenance verification, and pricing analysis.

In a new study of how collectors begin building their collections, painting emerged as the primary entry point, cited as one of the first three purchases by 43% of respondents, followed by sculpture (25%), photography (17%), and works on paper and digital art (15% each). Family influence was the single most common route into collecting overall, cited by 28% of respondents and rising to 40% among Gen Z.

Collector outlook remains broadly optimistic. Some 57% of respondents expected the fine art market to grow over the remainder of 2026, rising to 60% over a 10-year horizon. Price transparency and data security were cited as the leading concerns.

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Esphyr Slobodkina, Forgotten Star of Modern Art, Finally Gets Her Comeback https://ift.tt/im4Y7tF

Women stars of abstraction were rare in New York in the 1940s, but one of the few names to stand out among the many men who saw success was Esphyr Slobodkina. The Russian-born artist pioneered a language of dynamic abstraction in New York long before it was commonplace. Yet today, she is most widely remembered for her 1940 children's book Caps for Sale, which she wrote and illustrated. The book has sold millions of copies to date. While the wide-ranging impact of her wider artistic practice has largely been overlooked, today, Slobodkina seems to finally be making her comeback.

This week, New York’s Rosenberg & Co. opens “An Unbound Creativity,” an exhibition of Slobodkina’s works, on view through November 14th. The exhibition marks the largest gallery show of the artist’s work in New York since she passed away in 2002. The exhibition builds on the gallery’s recent presentation of her works at Independent 20th Century in September. Slobodkina’s works are also currently on view alongside those of Louise Nevelson in the traveling museum exhibition “Architects of Being” on view at the New Britain Museum of American Art.

Copper Interests (Copper Treasures), 1948
Esphyr Slobodkina
Rosenberg & Co.

Nocturne No. 1, 1958
Esphyr Slobodkina
Rosenberg & Co.

During her own time, Slobodkina received plenty of acclaim. Legendary dealer Peggy Guggenheim included her in the pivotal “Exhibition by 31 Women” at Art of This Century gallery in 1943, alongside works by Frida Kahlo and Leonora Carrington. Her work had been recommended to the Guggenheim by Alfred Barr, the first director of the Museum of Modern Art. A year before that, the influential collector and artist A.E. Gallatin gave her a solo exhibition at the Museum of Living Art, the first modern art museum in America.

“An Unbound Creativity” at Rosenberg & Co. is a condensed survey of Slobodkina’s life and her seven-decade artistic career, showcasing, as gallery director Kadie Ross put it, “from early academic studies, her persistent devotion to abstraction, and her exploration of multi-media works in two and three dimensions.”

The earliest work in the exhibition is a 1929 sketch titled Dianna, made soon after the artist’s arrival in New York City. Born in Chelyabinsk, Russia, in 1908, Slobodkina and her family relocated to Harbin, Manchuria, around 1919 to 1921, fleeing the Russian Revolution. By 1928, she had moved to New York and enrolled at the National Academy of Design. The latest work in the show is Flying Objects Immobilized (1998), an oil, pen, and ink work of intersecting geometric forms, some resembling paper airplanes. It’s an energetic work, made just four years before her death in 2002 at the age of 93.

Untitled (Oval #4), 1991
Esphyr Slobodkina
Rosenberg & Co.

As the dozen and a half works on view in the exhibition make clear, throughout her career, Slobodkina embraced a dazzling range of materials, including drawing and painting, collage and assemblage, textiles and clothing design. She supported herself as a seamstress during the Great Depression, following the failure of her first marriage to artist Ilya Bolotowsky. Slobodkina was also a prolific author and illustrator, publishing between 22 and 24 children’s books in her lifetime, and illustrating several books by famed children’s author Margaret Wise Brown.

Slobodkina remained a lifelong proponent of “non-objective art,” non-figurative work which embraces pure colors, shapes, and lines, no matter where life brought her. She was a founding member of the American Abstract Artists Group, an artist-run organization established in 1936 to promote and support abstract and non-objective art. She later served as its president from 1963 to 1966.

While her paintings can feel playful and immediate, the works were the result of a complex system of composition. Her paintings began with small sketches, traced from photographs or diagrams. She overlaid images until a composition satisfied her, then scaled it up and transferred it onto a gessoed board. “This [process] allowed the artist a degree of control over the finished work but also encouraged the free play of shapes to assert their own logic,” Ross said. Though her work is often contrasted with the spontaneous approach of the Abstract Expressionists, Ross notes that “Slobodkina’s process similarly drew from notions of impulse, discovery, and intuition.”

Flying Objects Immobilized, 1998
Esphyr Slobodkina
Rosenberg & Co.

Nails, 1978
Esphyr Slobodkina
Rosenberg & Co.

Slobodkina stayed an influential force in the arts late into her life. In the 1970s, she experienced a creative renaissance, creating assemblages and paintings often with a wry edge. Ross pointed to Offshore Installation (1974), an assemblage inspired by magazine images of oil rigs that reflects Slobodkina’s fascination with machinery. Collages such as South American Love (1970) and Celebration No. 2 (1970) use her own polychrome silk fabric designs from the 1930s as their foundation. How then did such a figure fade from view? “For a long time, I think the art world—and the art market—wanted to place an artist within a defining style or movement” said Ross, “Slobodkina resisted that kind of classification.” Ross added that “her highly constructed visual language did not fit comfortably within the narrative” of Abstract Expressionism that came to dominate the memory of postwar American art.

Gallery founder Marianne Rosenberg describes Slobodkina as someone who “defied any particular descriptive art label and was a free spirit focused on her work and not on the expectations of others.”

The recent resurgence of interest, Ross says, ties into a wider reevaluation of women artists’ practices. “Contemporary audiences seem more receptive to artists whose careers do not resolve into a single movement, medium, or signature style,” she said. “The very multiplicity that may once have made Slobodkina difficult to categorize makes her feel remarkably current.”

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Zaha Hadid Foundation to open refurbished London building as public arts space. https://ift.tt/iayIvOu

In the 10th anniversary year of Zaha Hadid's death, the Zaha Hadid Foundation is reopening its former headquarters at 10 Bowling Green Lane in London as a public cultural space for architecture, design, and related arts. A press and private view is scheduled for October 29th ahead of a public opening on November 3rd.

The Victorian schoolhouse, built in the early 1870s, served as Hadid's practice for more than 30 years. The foundation’s refurbishment, led by Katherine Nolan and Alex Butterworth of London-based Studio KA, restores original features including a fireplace and doorways while preserving details Hadid herself introduced, such as Z-shaped door pulls and shard-like flooring insets. The reconfigured ground floor will house galleries, a learning space, a lecture hall, and collection displays, alongside Zaha Hadid Design, which features furniture and objects by Hadid and her studio.

The building’s debut exhibition, “Zaha Hadid: Architecture of Performance,” curated by Catherine Howe and Libby Sellers, is the Foundation's first collection-based show, tracing how Hadid’s architectural language extended into stage and set design for dance, opera, and pop music, with projects spanning her 1989 collaboration with choreographer Rosemary Butcher to her 2014 staging of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Così fan tutte. A second gallery will debut “The Rebar Beneath,” an 11-minute video commission by multidisciplinary artist LionHeart developed through research in Hadid's archive, while illustrator Mona Chalabi has created a timeline visualization of Hadid’s life and work for the Foundation’s foyer. That will be projected onto a textile referencing an Issey Miyake coat from Hadid’s own wardrobe, now held in the collection.

The reopening will be marked by “89° of Zaha Hadid,” a two-day symposium on October 30th and 31st—the latter being Hadid's birthday—organized with the Architectural Association and the Serpentine, which built her first completed structure, a temporary pavilion, in 2000.

“It was Zaha's wish for the Foundation to preserve her legacy while carrying her ideas forward,” said Rana Hadid, chair of the Foundation's trustees, in a statement, calling the archive “a profound record of her work, imagination and intellectual life.”

The relaunch follows a June court ruling that ended the Foundation's royalty agreement with Hadid's former practice, now operating simply as ZHA, and comes under Foundation director Aric Chen, who since 2025 has pushed to open Hadid's archive, once described by her AA tutor Rem Koolhaas as belonging to “a planet in her own orbit,” to wider public view.

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