5 Artists to Follow at Foundations 2026 https://ift.tt/z42gR1G

Vegetable Venus, 2026
Xanthe Burdett
Wilder Gallery

This month on Artsy, Foundations 2026 has launched: a curated showcase highlighting artists at the beginning of their careers. With over 240 artists from around the world, this edition of Foundations is the perfect chance to discover emerging talents and buy fine art at an accessible price.

At Artsy, we’ve spent the last week poring over the showcase to find our favorites. We’ve handpicked five artists whose works are worth a second look, from abstractions made of seashells and tapioca beads to cake-laden paintings of consumption.

Charlene Tan

B. 1982, Houston. Lives and works in San Francisco.

Works available at: re.riddle

Homage to Kappi (Crab), 2025
Charlene Tan
re.riddle

Homage to Kappi (Crab) Abalone and Rhinestones, 2025
Charlene Tan
re.riddle

Artist Charlene Tan was born in Houston, but she spent three years of her childhood living with her grandmother in the Philippines. There, the artist remembers visiting an indoor market in Manila and seeing stalls full of freshwater pearls, beads, and rhinestones.

Now based in San Francisco, Tan’s artworks are in many ways inspired by that experience, as well as her grandmother, who was a seamstress and embroiderer. Tan creates abstract works that are inspired by tribal weaving traditions of the Philippines. Tan digitally scans found images of traditional weavings, edits them down to the essential pattern, and then retraces them by hand. The artist then adorns these patterns with pearls, iridescent shells, and Filipino food staples like ube powder or thousands of tiny pink tapioca balls.

Tan has described interpreting traditional Filipino weavings as decolonizing her mindset. Tan holds a BA in history and theory of contemporary art from the San Francisco Art Institute. Her work has been shown across the U.S., including solo shows “Warp/Weft” at re.riddle in 2024 and “Remembering” at Sarah Shepard in 2023. She has also been a visiting artist at Minnesota Street Project Studios in San Francisco.

Xanthe Burdett

B. 1995, Devon, England. Lives and works in London.

Works available at: Wilder Gallery

They came upon a clearing, 2026
Xanthe Burdett
Wilder Gallery

Like bees, I feel them brush softly against me, 2026
Xanthe Burdett
Wilder Gallery

British artist Xanthe Burdett paints strange, spectral female figures that appear at once human and botanical. Painted in thin veils of green hue, these women appear translucent, even ghostly, with vines and flowers twisting through their bodies.

In her painting Vegetable Venus (2026), a phantom woman reclines like an odalisque, greenery running through her body like a circulatory system. She seems to emerge from the foggy green landscape behind her. This imagery draws both from her personal memories and art historical inspirations, such as the medieval “Devonshire Hunting Tapestries” in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Burdett has described the works as concerned with “this idea of memory and history being caught in the ground and the earth beneath us—this space of the mythological animal world, but also this really fertile place that we can’t look into as humans.”

Burdett graduated with an MA in painting from the Royal College of Art in 2024, after studying education, English, and drama at Cambridge. She opened a solo exhibition “Psychopomp" at Palo Gallery in New York last fall. Her work was recently on view with Wilder Gallery at Echo Soho in London.

Kriss Munsya

B. 1986, Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo. Lives and works in Vancouver.

Works available at: Galerie Robertson Arès

Syracuse, 2022
Kriss Munsya
Galerie Robertson Arès

Even - Washed Out. Genetic Bomb (framed | avec encadrement), 2022
Kriss Munsya
Galerie Robertson Arès

Photographer and filmmaker Kriss Munsya creates vibrant, staged photographs inspired by his experiences and dreams as a Black man navigating the world. Born in Kinshasa, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Munsya moved to Belgium as a child. He was raised in Brussels and later relocated to Vancouver, where he lives and works today.

As a young man, Munsya embarked on an influential hitchhiking trip from New York to Rio de Janeiro, a sojourn that became the basis of his 2014 debut feature film, Us and Them. His experiences on the road reshaped his understanding of the world, including its normalized, sometimes violent racism, and his sense of self.

A self-taught artist, Munsya turned his focus to photography nearly a , coinciding with his increased involvement in social and ecological activism. His richly saturated color photographs picture Black people in gestures of intimacy and affection. He obscures his models’ faces with flowers, sequins, and fabric, anonymizing and universalizing them at once.

Munsya’s work is included in the collections of Canada Council Art Bank. He was a 2021 Hopper Prize finalist and one of ArtConnect’s Artists to Watch in 2023, with work featured in The New Yorker, The Guardian, and The Nation, among others.

Olivia Sterling

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

Works available at: Nibelungen Gallery

Cartoon Logic, 2025
Olivia Sterling
Nibelungen Gallery

Are we about to Kiss?, 2024
Olivia Sterling
Nibelungen Gallery

British artist Olivia Sterling paints the language of consumption—one slice of cake at a time. In her paintings, hands dig into frosted, sugary cakes, devouring the confections with a frenzied intensity. Her style is informed by children’s comic books as well as satirical illustrations, and her work often hints at the politics of race and class.

Sterling received her BA in fine art from the University of Derby in 2018 and her MA in painting from the Royal College of Art in 2020. That year she presented her solo show “It Clings Like a Leech” at Guts Gallery, London, and had a solo presentation, “White Bread,” at Cob in 2021. Her work has appeared in more than 50 group exhibitions in the U.K. and internationally, including at White Cube and the Saatchi Gallery.

Julia Policastro

B. 1992, Buffalo, New York. Lives and works in Philadelphia.

Works available at: Blah Blah Gallery

Lydia, 2025
Julia Policastro
Blah Blah Gallery

Cecily, 2025
Julia Policastro
Blah Blah Gallery

Artist Julia Policastro makes three-dimensional artworks that could be defined as both sculpture and painting. In these plaster, foam board, canvas, and oil works, hands emerge from pillow-like forms, holding flowers or grasping a letter between fingertips. Using a technique inspired by the 14th-century Italian quilting technique of trapunto, each of these works bears a woman’s name: Gina, Cecily, Janet.

The gestures they depict are seemingly mundane, but otherworldly, reminiscent of Robert Gober’s haunting handmade sculptures. Policastro has painted these works pale hues of whites, pinks, and yellows, giving them a faded, ghostly appearance. Her inspirations range from late medieval and early Renaissance Sienese artists to the works of Ken Price and David Hockney. Policastro received her BFA from Tyler School of Art. She has been included in group shows at Blah Blah Gallery, Deep Space Gallery, and Fleisher/Ollman, among others.

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Daniel Arsham to create whiskey-inspired performances during Frieze Seoul 2026. https://ift.tt/IihWsSY

Artist Daniel Arsham has collaborated with Scottish distillery The Balvenie on a new whiskey collection entitled “Dawn of Our Spirit,” which will be unveiled on September 1st in partnership with Frieze Seoul. The collection will be introduced through an immersive, sensorial performance directed by Arsham.

The performance draws on the meditative process of turning barley grain on a malting floor, an important step in the preparation of whiskey. Arsham visited the distillery’s own malting floor in Speyside, Scotland, which opened around 1931 and remains unchanged. “The distillery itself is so materially rich: the barley grain, the copper stills, the wooden casks crafted in the cooperage, combined with an array of evocative time-infused scents and ambient sounds,” Arsham said. “I’m looking forward to expressing this through our performances during Frieze Seoul.”

The Balvenie’s malt master Kelsey McKechnie, who conceived the collection, called it “a true celebration of master craftmanship and the creative power of time,” adding that Arsham’s “artistic storytelling will bring the treasured and fundamental aspect of The Balvenie’s Home Malting Floor to a world stage.”

The project extends Arsham’s long list of brand collaborations, which include Dior, Adidas, and Rimowa, as well as an ongoing partnership with Tiffany & Co. dating to 2021. Arsham also serves as creative director for the NBA team Cleveland Cavaliers, for whom he redesigned the team’s logo.

His gallery artistic practice has continued alongside this commercial work. His most recent exhibition “Various Thoughts” closed at Perrotin New York in April, coinciding with the release of his autobiography, Future Relic.

The Balvenie x Arsham unveiling arrives during a packed week for the Korean capital. Frieze Seoul returns to COEX in Gangnam for its fifth edition from September 2nd to 5th, hosting more than 125 galleries from 30 countries. The fair will run concurrently with Kiaf Seoul, the country’s longest-running international art fair, which will welcome 175 galleries for its 25th edition, also at the COEX.

Following its Seoul debut, “Dawn of Our Spirit” will travel to New York, Shanghai, and Taipei.

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Taryn Simon to become first photography and film artist to have Guggenheim solo show. https://ift.tt/FmlC8ND

The Guggenheim Museum in New York will dedicate its entire rotunda to a single artist working in photography and video for the first time when it opens “Taryn Simon: Father Country I Do Love You” on September 18, 2026. Running through March 14, 2027, the exhibition will mark the first monographic rotunda presentation by a photography-based artist in the museum’s history as well as the largest debut of new work ever presented at the Guggenheim.

Nearly a decade in the making, “Father Country I Do Love You” (2026) is Simon’s most expansive and personal project to date. Spread across 42 individual artworks combining photography, text, video, and sculpture, it traces the real life of an unnamed federal agent whose work as a middleman involved witnessing events and collecting evidence for others to piece together. But his work rippled outward into the lives of people and nations he never knew.

The exhibition is dedicated to Simon’s father, who worked for the U.S. government in Thailand and traveled to Russia, Iran, Israel, China, Afghanistan, and Korea before embarking on a second career manufacturing and selling arcade games. Simon never learned his full story, and when he was diagnosed with Alzheimer's, it became impossible.

Simon has spent two decades mining bureaucratic and institutional archives in her practice. These have ranged from the CIA’s art collection to the visa paperwork behind her 2016 Park Avenue Armory performance piece “An Occupation of Loss,” which grappled with loss in a spectacular set designed by OMA. Her 2024 sculpture Kleroterion at Storm King Art Center, meanwhile, modeled on an ancient Athenian voting device, grew in part from a childhood spent around her family’s arcade machines. “Games were like oxygen—always there,” said the artist, who has described her research process as inseparable from her medium.

The works in “Father Country I Do Love You” will enter the Guggenheim’s permanent collection, which already holds three other pieces by Simon. The museum will also co-publish an accompanying artist book with Hatje Cantz. The exhibition is organized by curator Nat Trotman and was initiated by former artistic director Nancy Spector. Simon is represented by Gagosian and Almine Rech.

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5 Standout Shows to See at Small Galleries This August https://ift.tt/aquSwde

First Sun and Green Curtain, 2026
Shawn Huckins
K Contemporary

In this monthly roundup, we spotlight five stellar exhibitions at small and rising galleries.

Alejandro Javaloyas

“Un cuchillo que no corta”

Galeria Reus, Palma, Spain

Through Aug. 31

Tal vez los años luz son todos iguales, 2025
Alejandro Javaloyas
Galeria Reus

La pesanteur et la grâce, 2025
Alejandro Javaloyas
Galeria Reus

Spanish artist Alejandro Javaloyas presents new small and uncanny works based on his own recurring nightmares in this new exhibition, the title of which translates to “the knife that doesn’t cut.” For years, Javaloyas has diligently kept a record of his dreams in a notebook by his bedside. The artist takes these notes and works with artificial intelligence models to create visualizations of his scribblings.

Pulling from hundreds of variations, Javaloyas selects a handful of images, which he then reworks digitally. These pictures are then printed as giclée prints on cotton paper, which the artist then layers with wax-based colored pencil that creates a kind of glaze.

Picturing burning houses, crashed cars, and baby teeth, the works possess an ambiguous blur that gives the fleeting sensation of a dream. In one work, Tal vez los años luz son todos iguales (2025), a snail inches across the nape of the neck, to a surreal and visceral effect. The artist holds a master’s degree in film and the influence of filmmakers such as Andrei Tarkovsky, Chris Marker, and David Lynch is evident in his works’ atmospheric weight.

Shawn Huckins

“Slow Burn”

K Contemporary, Denver

Through Aug. 22

War Cloud and Floral Blue Curtain, 2026
Shawn Huckins
K Contemporary

Wildfire Sunrise Behind Floral Lace Curtain, 2026
Shawn Huckins
K Contemporary

Beyond the elegantly parted drapes, disaster awaits. Artist Shawn Huckins is known for his paintings which reimagine scenes from American art history, from the vast vistas painted by Albert Bierstadt (of the Hudson River School) to the portraits of John Singleton Copley. These works delve into American national mythology and how it is remembered and rewritten.

In his new show on view at Denver's K Contemporary, each painting is formatted like a window, with curtains painted parted to each side. While the curtains, which range from lace to a rich green satin, suggest well-appointed interiors, the world beyond the window is filled with war clouds and wildfires. These apocalyptic scenes are a new addition to Huckins’s precisely painted tableaux.

The artist works from a studio in New Hampshire, and the recent series was partly inspired by the vibrant but hazy sunrises in the area caused by ongoing Canadian wildfire smoke. The hyperreal curtains suggest a kind of psychological distance from the unfolding disasters. The artist highlights the environmental effects of war and greater climate change on such majestic landscapes.

Jordi Clotet Saló

“Primera pedra”

Alzueta Gallery, Barcelona

Through Sep. 2

Accident, 2026
Jordi Clotet Saló
Alzueta Gallery

Jeroglífic, 2026
Jordi Clotet Saló
Alzueta Gallery

In this show, Catalan artist Jordi Clotet Saló presents a new series of oil-on-linen paintings with simplified forms. Painted in a limited palette of oxidized earth tones, these works range from geometric, almost architectural patterns, such as repeating circles broken into quadrants, and childlike depictions of cars and houses.

The exhibition title “Primera pedra” translates as “first stone” and reflects his paradoxical feeling of always being at the beginning, starting from scratch. In Clotet’s case, this feeling is heightened when creating a new work, even as his imagery draws from a sense of nostalgia and memory. Clotet’s interest in origins factors into his material choices as well. The artist's pigments are extracted from a quarry in Zaragoza, Spain, and processed locally, giving these works a raw, natural feeling.

“Ripples of Light”

LA BIBI Gallery, online

Through Oct. 31

Mallorca Shutter, 2025
Paul Riedmüller
LA BIBI GALLERY

Butterfly Sword Warrior, 2024
Fatima de Juan
LA BIBI GALLERY

What does summer feel like? “Ripples of Light,” an online presentation from LA BIBI Gallery, puts a spin on the traditional summer group show. Rather than actual depictions of the season (think beach scenes and bikinis), here, you’ll find works that embrace the sensory intensity of the hottest months.

Across painting, sculpture, and mixed media, the works on view are marked by chromatic saturation, lush gesturalism, and a breezy, waterfront feel. Paul Riedmüller’s Mallorca Shutter (2025), is a trompe l’oeil painting of closed bright green shutters, with stark shadowing under the slots. The painting calls to mind a blazing hot day, when the only respite is blocking out the sunlight. Elsewhere, abstractions evoke the sensations of the season through intensity of color. In Srger’s acrylic, oil stick, and charcoal-on-wood composition BM_4 (2025), for example, a sweeping block of royal blue pigment dotted with bright white squiggles brings to mind a summer sky with crossing clouds.

“Summer Vibes - 2026”

Daguet-Bresson, Ramatuelle, France

Through Sept. 13

#2631, 2026
Morten Løbner Espersen
Daguet Bresson

Palengrotte, 2026
Superpoly
Daguet Bresson

Paris gallery Daguet-Bresson Gallery returns to the Saint-Tropez peninsula this summer with an exhibition at the Fondugues-Pradugues estate in Ramatuelle. The show, which brings together dozens of ceramic vessels, is full of whimsy and wonder, ranging from kaleidoscopic glazes to animalian tureens. Danish ceramist Morten Løbner Espersen's vases are a standout of the show, as the seemingly simple vessels are transformed by thick layers of glazes. Also delightful are the quirky ceramics of French artist duo Superpoly (Antoine Grulier and Thomas Defour), including functional stoneware plates adorned with big-eyed fish and startled crabs.

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Works by Goya, Caravaggio, and van Gogh appear in new trailer for “The Thomas Crown Affair,” starring Michael B. Jordan. https://ift.tt/0V8fqbP

The trailer for Amazon MGM Studios’s forthcoming remake of The Thomas Crown Affair was released this week—and a few art historical masterpieces make cameos.

Directed by and starring Michael B. Jordan, the film, which is due in theaters March 5, 2027, tells the story of a high-end art thief. About 12 seconds into the trailer, Thomas Crown, played by Jordan, opens a hidden room behind sliding bookshelves to reveal a private stash of stolen paintings on a museum-style storage rack.

ARTnews identified the four visible works, from left to right, as Francisco Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son (ca. 1820–23), which belongs to the Museo del Prado in Madrid; Henry Ossawa Tanner’s The Banjo Lesson (1893), from the Hampton University Museum; Kerry James Marshall’s Silence Is Golden (1986), from the Studio Museum in Harlem; and Caravaggio’s The Fortune Teller (ca. 1594), from Rome’s Capitoline Museums. Crown is shown holding a fifth canvas to add to the collection, and a little later in the trailer, he is seen attempting to steal a Vincent van Gogh “Sunflower” painting.

The film also stars Adria Arjona as an insurance investigator tasked with catching Crown, and Kenneth Branagh as a rival he targets. Speaking to Variety, Jordan distanced the new film from its predecessors: “I didn’t want a reboot. I wanted a reimagination. The first two films were about rich white guys stealing for fun. That doesn’t land today. Ours is more personal. The stakes are higher. Still got the fashion, romance.”

The original 1968 Thomas Crown Affair, starring American actor Steve McQueen, centered on a bank heist rather than art theft. The 1999 remake, with Pierce Brosnan in the lead, introduced the art-crime premise, with Crown stealing a Claude Monet painting of Venice’s San Giorgio Maggiore from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. As Artnet has reported, the film took liberties with the facts: the Met does not own that Monet, which exists in two versions housed in Wales and Japan, and the climactic “museum” scene was actually filmed at the New York Public Library rather than the Met itself.

Jordan is no stranger to art-adjacent scenes on-screen. In Black Panther (2018), his character, Killmonger, confronts a curator inside a fictionalized British Museum stand-in before stealing a Wakandan artifact from a display case. Film heists involving real or invented artworks have a long pop-culture history. The 1962 James Bond film Dr. No, for instance, featured a reproduction of Goya’s Portrait of the Duke of Wellington—a painting that had, in fact, been stolen from the National Gallery, London, the year before and remained missing until 1965.

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5 Young London Collectors Pushing the Scene Forward https://ift.tt/q0GpeoV

What does it mean to collect art in London today? Perhaps the first problem with the question is the idea that there is a single London art world. Across the city, overlapping scenes operate at vastly different scales: artist-run spaces and young galleries sit alongside blue-chip dealers, auction houses, centuries-old collections, and some of the world’s most influential art schools.

From Mayfair to Deptford, Fitzrovia to Bethnal Green, art is embedded across London, and there are as many ways into its art world as there are ways to participate in it.

For collectors, this vastness creates an unusual proximity to artists and the communities around them. Someone might discover an artist at a graduate show or in a small gallery, follow their work across the city, and support their practice long before institutional or market recognition arrives. Artists, collectors, gallerists, students, curators, and dealers continually move between London’s different art worlds, creating relationships that connect its grassroots scenes to its established institutions and markets.

London, 2011
Gilbert & George
White Cube

This also makes collecting in London amorphous. It can mean buying emerging artists from small galleries, pursuing historic objects through Mayfair dealerships and auction rooms, or simply purchasing a first work to live with at home. While the art market at large still contains its barriers, the sheer breadth of London’s scene offers multiple points of entry, across tastes, generations, communities, and budgets.

Perhaps that plurality is what makes collecting in the Big Smoke so distinctive. There is no single route in, no single taste to follow, and no single definition of a collector. Artsy spoke to five collectors about how they navigate London’s overlapping art worlds, what drives them to buy, and the artists, galleries, and institutions that keep them excited about the city.

Selim Bouafsoun collects with an international eye

For Selim Bouafsoun, collecting is as much about relationships as it is about art. Though his relationship with art began from a young age, it was Alighiero Boetti’s 2012 retrospective at Tate Modern that proved formative, opening up new ways of thinking about time, collaboration, and systems.

Bouafsoun had always wanted to buy art, but initially found the prospect intimidating. Galleries, mentors, and friends eventually gave him the confidence to begin. “Collecting, I’ve come to realise, is never a solitary act,” he told Artsy.

His first acquisition was a painting by Bernhard Buhmann, bought from Dubai gallery Carbon12 in November 2015. Today, his collection spans more than 100 artists, with recent acquisitions including Álvaro Barrington, Monia Ben Hamouda, Sebastián Espejo, and Tomasz Kowalski. One work remains particularly close to him: Hommage à Bonnard (1972) by the late Tunisian painter Hédi Turki.

In London, Bouafsoun gravitates towards galleries willing to take risks, including Sadie Coles HQ, Carlos/Ishikawa, Emalin, and LBF Contemporary. But he sees some of the city’s greatest energy beyond its established art infrastructure, among artists and spaces operating with limited resources and ambitious ideas. He is particularly excited by an emerging generation shaped by international lives and communities. Their internationalism, he said, “isn’t performed; it’s lived.”

Adelle Cohen believes collecting should be for everyone

As a new collector, Adelle Cohen’s path into art began, unusually, with being told not to make any. At school, her art teacher would send her into town to buy supplies for the class rather than letting her participate. Her entry into collecting came years later at British artist Shauna Cribbin’s solo show at the Bomb Factory Art Foundation, where an iridescent screenprint on metal caught her attention. “I instantly fell in love and had to buy it,” Cohen recalled. “That’s how I became a collector.”

Cohen’s London is centered on galleries in the city’s east, including Maureen Paley, Rose Easton, and Herald St, as well as Harlesden High Street in northwest London. She is drawn to programs that she sees as challenging without becoming exclusionary.

That accessibility is central to how Cohen thinks about collecting. Rather than an activity reserved for an established collector class, she believes buying art should be an ordinary way of participating in London’s art scene. “Everyone should be encouraged to buy art,” she said. “We all deserve to own it.”

Her taste isn’t entirely bound by seriousness either. The work she currently covets is by Dutch artist Diederik van Apple: an image of Nicolas Cage in the iconic film Leaving Las Vegas printed onto real dollar bills and submerged in glossy resin. “I shouldn’t love it,” Cohen admitted. “But I do.”

Fabian Kluth collects through curiosity

Fabian Kluth is reluctant to call himself a collector. “I see myself more as a project maker and entrepreneur,” he told Artsy. For him, art is an extension of a broader curiosity about people and what they choose to make.

Kluth’s interest in contemporary art intensified during the COVID-19 lockdowns. While galleries and museums were closed, he was struck by how active the art world remained online. Social media became his way into a community he had previously observed from the outside.

His first acquisition was a work on paper by German artist Rosa Loy. Since then, Kluth has gravitated towards artists with strong ideas who resist bending their practices to expectations. His collection includes Brett Charles Seiler, Pol Taburet, and Konrad Weichs. He is also drawn to women artists from older generations, including Nan Goldin and the late Swiss painter Irène Zurkinden.

In London, Kluth is less interested in the set calendar of fairs and gallery weekends than in accidental discovery. He prefers wandering through the city and entering galleries without a plan, and points to Düsseldorf- and Berlin-based SETAREH’s Mayfair space as a welcome recent addition.

For Kluth, London’s strength lies in its mix of generations and international perspectives. Its art schools are central to that, with Central Saint Martins and the Slade School of Fine Art among the places he looks to for what might come next.

Ultimately, his approach starts with people. “Whenever I meet someone,” Kluth said, “one of the first questions I ask is, ‘What are you currently working on?’”

Daria Borisova backs artists early

For London-based curator and art advisor Daria Borisova, collecting, curating, and community are closely connected. Her work has long centered on emerging artists, and that instinct for discovery carries into her collection: encountering an artist early, for her, is less about predicting the market than supporting a practice as it develops.

One of Borisova’s earliest acquisitions was a painting by the late British artist Sarah Cunningham, whom she remembers for the sensitivity and personality of both her work and their interactions. Today, Borisova is drawn to artists developing distinctive ways of working.

She points to The Artsy Vanguard alum Emily Kraus, who pulls canvases around constructed rooms to spread and smear paint across their surfaces; KV Duong, whose paintings on latex explore Vietnamese diasporic queer experience; and Antonio Társis, who transforms discarded matchboxes, cardboard, and paint tins into art. “These artists aren’t just making beautiful things,” Borisova said. “They’re making arguments.”

Her collection also reflects an appetite for discovering artists early. George Rouy, Eva Helene Pade, Joseph Yaeger, Flora Yukhnovich, and Jadé Fadojutimi are among the artists she encountered before their wider recognition.

For Borisova, this process of discovery is central to London’s appeal. Hayward Gallery and the Barbican Centre are favorite institutional haunts, but she sees the city’s real strength in the community around them: collectors, artists, and galleries invested in one another. “The energy starts here,” she said. “We find them first.”

Linton Wang looks to the past for inspiration

While many young collectors look for the next emerging artist, Linton Wang is more likely to be found pursuing an object several centuries old. His collecting began as a teenager with fountain pens, particularly examples from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Their precious-metal decoration led him towards silver and decorative arts. Studies in history of art, followed by a master’s at the Courtauld Institute, expanded his interests across European art and material culture, with a particular focus on the Age of Enlightenment.

For Wang, materiality is non-negotiable. Beauty of form, technical excellence, and fine materials take precedence over concept alone. He is fascinated by objects that have survived for centuries and the lives they have accumulated along the way. “Given one’s own brief existence, to imagine the lives of such works is itself an exercise of the mind,” he said. “Old works have the remarkable ability to grant access to people and ages that had long ceased to exist.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, his favorite London institution is the Wallace Collection, whose French Régence and Louis XV holdings align closely with his own tastes. “I have told myself that should I die without an heir, all my earthly possessions will go to that august institution,” he said.

Wang also sees London’s historic art market as very much alive. He values the city’s auction houses for their breadth and accessibility, while its network of specialist dealers maintains a depth of expertise even as traditional dealerships become more private.

One of his favorite acquisitions captures the thrill of that market. Wang first encountered an English Chinoiserie silver tea caddy from 1758 at an American auction in 2015, but lost it to another bidder. When it resurfaced a decade later, he bought it.

The unknown collector who owned it in between had kept it in pristine condition. The two have never met, but for Wang, their connection through the object reflects the “unspoken camaraderie surrounding a thing of beauty” that makes collecting so compelling.

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Kiaf SEOUL 2026 announces 175 exhibitors for its 25th edition. https://ift.tt/x6E9gGD

Kiaf SEOUL 2026, Korea’s largest contemporary art fair, has announced 175 exhibitors from 18 countries. Korea’s largest international art fair will return to COEX in Seoul from September 2–6, the same dates and location as Frieze Seoul. Organized by the Galleries Association of Korea, the fair marks its 25th anniversary and, for the first time, has appointed an external creative director: acclaimed designer Kuho Jung, known for his work across fashion, performance, and exhibition design. Jung who will lead the fair’s branding, spatial design, and special exhibition curation.

The fair is a central pillar of Seoul Art Week, which connects exhibitions and programs across the city through major institutions including Leeum Museum of Art, Art Sonje Center and Space K. The week also includes district-based evening programs in the city’s gallery districts of Samcheong, Hannam, and Cheongdam.

Kiaf SEOUL’s exhibitor list spans established and emerging galleries from Korea and internationally, including first-time participants Nino Mier Gallery and JD Malat Gallery. Returning exhibitors include Korean stalwarts such as Kukje Gallery, Gana Art, and Arario Gallery as well as major international names including Whitestone Gallery and Opera Gallery.

The fair will present a mix of historically significant and contemporary works. Korean modern art is well represented, with pieces from Lee Ufan’s “Wind” series, for example, shown across multiple galleries. Other Korean art highlights include mixed-media works by Dansaekhwa artist Seobo Park at Wellside Gallery, Nam June Paik’s Internet Dweller wol.five.ydpb (1994) at CMay Gallery, and abstract works by Seund Ja Rhee at Galerie Vazieux. Other major 20th century works on view include a 1982 tempera by Marc Chagall at Art of the World Gallery, Sol LeWitt’s Irregular Grid (1999) at Obscura Gallery, as well as works by Keith Haring at SH Gallery and David Hockney at Gallery Pici.

Kiaf PLUS, the fair’s section for emerging and experimental practices, features eight Korean galleries alongside 11 international participants from Bangkok, Tokyo, New York, Moscow, Taipei, Madrid and Osaka. Kiaf HIGHLIGHTS, an initiative launched in 2023 to support participating artists, returns in an expanded format with dedicated in-booth exhibition spaces, with the aim of offering visitors a more focused viewing experience. Ten artists will be shown at the fair following a jury process led by a panel of art professionals.

This year’s edition is themed “Coexistence,” which explores the “evolving relationship between humanity and technology.” Two special exhibitions at the fair expand this. One is entitled “HUMAL”—a portmanteau of “human” and “animal”—and brings together seven interdisciplinary artists examining instinct and embodied perception in an era of artificial intelligence. A second, titled “Invisible,” extends those themes into augmented reality, with AR artworks accessible via QR codes throughout the fair exhibition space.

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