11 Contemporary Emirati Artists To Know https://ift.tt/cQtk1yS

It’s been quite a year for art in the Gulf area. In early February, the debut of Art Basel Qatar brought international art world attention to the region. A few weeks later, the U.S. attacks on Iran created turmoil across the Gulf and led airlines to cease operations to Qatar, the U.A.E., and nearby locales. The conflict has impacted plans for Art Dubai, which had to scale back its event to a smaller, more focused fair in mid-May.

Artists and galleries in the Gulf had to momentarily close their spaces and postpone exhibition openings. They are slowly resuming operations, with several participating in overseas events, including Frieze New York. Some might be wondering how the U.A.E., which has been described as a new center of the art world, will emerge from the crisis. Yet its achievements over the past couple of decades remain unchanged: Thanks in part to government support, creative activity has boomed across Dubai, Sharjah, and Abu Dhabi, with each emirate embracing its own cultural offering.

This boom is actually the result of decades of hard work. Since the 1980s, shortly after the country’s unification in 1971, the domestic art scene slowly developed thanks to the establishment of pioneering institutions such as Emirates Fine Arts Society in Sharjah and Abu Dhabi Cultural Foundation, which were established in 1980 and 1981, respectively. Such associations were crucial platforms for new ideas, arts education, and showcases for domestic talents.

My Garden's Details, 2021
Mohammed Ahmed Ibrahim
Lawrie Shabibi

Kisses, 2023
Mohammed Kazem
Baró Galeria

This was also an era when forward-thinking artists who were educated abroad, such as Hassan Sharif, Mohammed Ahmed Ibrahim, Abdullah Al Saadi, Hussain Sharif, and Mohammed Kazem—collectively known as “The Group of Five”—broke free from traditional art and the canvas. They embraced more experimental modes of self-expression, including performance art, land art, and Conceptual art.

Such figures paved the way for today’s young, driven, and internationally visible Emirati artists. They observe their country’s rapid social changes as well as world events and universal concepts, which shape both their lives and art.

From up-and-coming talents to established names, here are 11 Emirati artists to keep an eye on.

Alia Zaal

B. 1989, Dubai. Lives and works in Abu Dhabi.

Vétheuil, 2021
Alia Zaal
Hunna Art

Alia Zaal is an award-winning artist who has also curated exhibitions that generate dialogues among the U.A.E.’s multigenerational artists. She earned her MA degree in art history and museum studies at Sorbonne University Abu Dhabi and has exhibited her nature-inspired paintings in the United Arab Emirates, Germany, Spain, and other locations.

Zaal’s mesmerizing, verdant canvases reflect her homeland’s natural landscape and often focus on one subject—a tree or a mangrove, for example—during different times of day. The results are often lush and green. The desert-grown ghaf, the U.A.E.’s national tree, is a recurring, particularly personal motif.

In 2022, the artist completed a residency at Maison Oscar-Claude Monet, a house in the French village of Vétheuil formerly occupied by Impressionist master and water-lily enthusiast Claude Monet. At the residency, Zaal researched light, color, neurological perception, and eyesight.

Afra Al Dhaheri

B. 1988, Abu Dhabi. Lives and works in Abu Dhabi.

After Afra Al Dhaheri attended Rhode Island School of Design nearly a decade ago, she returned home to Abu Dhabi and has gradually earned international acclaim. Her work has appeared in the Aichi Triennale, Taipei Biennial, and Sharjah Art Foundation. Al Dhaheri recently participated in the third edition of the Diriyah Biennale in Riyadh, which closed in early May.

The artist takes inspiration from her own experiences of girlhood and womanhood in the U.A.E. The country has undergone rapid changes in infrastructure and social norms since her birth in the late 1980s. From delicate sculptures made of glass to large-scale, cotton rope installations, the artist’s meticulous, labor-intensive work quietly addresses time, repetition, fragility, and tension. Al Dhaheri is continually experimenting with new materials: Once, she even used her own hair in a piece.

Almaha Jaralla

B. 1996, Abu Dhabi. Lives and works in Abu Dhabi.

Almaha Jaralla often paints from old snapshots and her family’s archives in order to capture the intimacy of a slowly fading, close-knit community. Her compositions explore memory and belonging, pulling the viewer into hazy scenes of family beach outings and indoor gatherings. The subjects’ faces are mysteriously blurry, like fuzzy recollections. Jaralla’s preferred shades of sandy brown and cool blue evoke her youth in the Emirati capital. The urban landscape of Abu Dhabi, where she was born and raised, is another frequent motif. The artist creates quiet and isolated compositions of the city’s houses, some decades-old. Jaralla has exhibited her paintings at Abu Dhabi Art and Sotheby’s Dubai, as well as her representing gallery, Dubai’s Tabari Artspace.

Ammar Al Attar

B. 1981, Dubai. Lives and works in Abu Dhabi.

Untitled, 2025
Ammar Al Attar
IRIS PROJECTS

Ammar Al Attar is an Ajman-based photographer who captures images of daily life, Muslim prayer rooms, café culture, and various sites across the Gulf region. An element of experimentation is key to his recent photography: Al Attar manipulates predominantly black-and-white images marked by contrasting little spots of color that focus on repetition, routine, and the relationship between everyday objects and human action. One of his most recognizable images is Cycle of Circles (2025), in which he bicycles in circles. The artist aims to convey the importance of slowing down in a fast-paced world. Al Attar’s works have entered the collections of Sharjah Art Foundation, Barjeel Art Foundation, and the British Museum.

Hashel Al Lamki

B. 1986, Al Ain, U.A.E. Lives and works in Abu Dhabi.

Lobster , 2022
Hashel Al Lamki
Tabari Artspace

New York–educated Hashel Al Lamki implements loose brushwork and mesmerizing washes of color across his large-scale canvases. They explore personal memory, migration, and the deep relationships between humans and their habitats. The Al Ain–born painter often injects images of modern, everyday objects into his dreamlike compositions, commenting on the world’s changing times. “There is this constant motion that I try to capture, and I think it’s important to be able to look at that and examine what is happening,” he previously said in a video interview produced by Dubai’s Tabari Artspace. “That’s what my practice is all about—looking with a critical eye as an outsider, but also someone from there, to be able to tell a story of the current time.” An emerging talent with a growing presence on the international art circuit, Al Lamki has participated in Gwangju Biennale, Biennale de Lyon, the African Biennale of Photography, and the Noor Riyadh festival.

Maitha Abdalla

B. 1989, Khor Fakkan, U.A.E. Lives and works in Abu Dhabi.

The Silence in Carnivals, 2021
Maitha Abdalla
Baró Galeria

Abu Dhabi–based painter, sculptor, and performance artist Maitha Abdalla creates theatrical scenes and narratives throughout her work. Myths from the U.A.E. and the wider region are at the heart of her practice and include the stories the artist’s grandmother told her as a child. Abdalla paints distorted figures who often feature both human and animal parts and serve as vessels for emotions and metaphors for human nature. Her bold, passionate style infuses her characters and landscapes with a scribbly, smoky effect. Over the last decade, Abdalla has been included in over 15 group exhibitions at regional and international venues such as Palazzo Franchetti in Venice, Fine Arts Society in Sharjah, and the European Parliament in Brussels. She recently showed a number of her pieces, including photography, at the “Proximities” exhibition at the Seoul Museum of Art. The show brought together over 40 U.A.E.-based artists.

Mohammed Ahmed Ibrahim

B. 1962, Khor Fakkan, U.A.E. Lives and works in Khor Fakkan.

My Garden's Details, 2021
Mohammed Ahmed Ibrahim
Lawrie Shabibi

One Pink Flower in a Vase , 2018
Mohammed Ahmed Ibrahim
Lawrie Shabibi

Mohammed Ahmed Ibrahim has become one of the U.A.E.’s most established artists and has witnessed the remarkable rise of the country’s art scene. Ibrahim has been painting since the 1980s. He’s inspired by his mountainous hometown of Khor Fakkan, which informs his vibrant canvases, filled with symbols that derive from nature.

Ibrahim, who notably represented the U.A.E. at the Venice Biennale in 2022, is also known for his experimental papier-mâché sculptures that take on a variety of eclectic, playful, creature-like forms, such as One Pink Flower in a Vase (2018) and Dancer Contessa (2020). A landmark retrospective of Ibrahim’s career, entitled “Two Clouds in the Night Sky,” was on view at the Cultural Foundation in Abu Dhabi through last February. Curated by Noor AlMehairbi and Medyyah AlTamimi, it showcased a wide selection of the artist’s sculptures and paintings—including one of the very first artworks he made back in 1989, which featured his first experimentation with ciphers—an intriguing visual language that lives on in his canvases today.

Mohammed Kazem

B. 1969, Dubai. Lives and works in Dubai.

My Studio, 1994
Mohammed Kazem
Salwa Zeidan Gallery

Coordinates-N° DR 1 (Pink), 2021
Mohammed Kazem
Samuelis Baumgarte

Along with his contemporary Mohammed Ahmed Ibrahim, Mohammed Kazem was a prominent member of the so-called “Group of Five,” pioneering artists who shaped culture in the 1980s. Over the course of his career, Kazem has experimented with film, video, and performance, reflecting on personal experiences and his close surroundings.

One of Kazem’s most compelling, multi-year series is “Window,” which he began in 2023. These paintings thoughtfully depict snapshots of the U.A.E.’s migrant laborers, whether working outside in the heat or resting in their intimate quarters. Thanks to this delicate subject matter, Kazem’s series was once described by the Emirati art patron and founder of Barjeel Art Foundation, Sultan Sooud Al-Qassemi, as one of the most important works to come out of the country.

Mohamed Al Mazrouei

B. 1962, Tanta, Egypt. Lives and works in Abu Dhabi.

Born and raised in Egypt, Mohamed Al Mazrouei is a longtime writer, photographer, and painter. He was a student of ancient languages and philosophy at Al Azhar University in Cairo, which fed his poetry and short stories, as well as his visual work. His intense, expressionistic paintings of humans and animals feature thick lines, dark eyes, and unusual shades of color. His figures’ facial features are also inspired by art history, particularly Coptic and Fayum portraiture from ancient Egypt. Sometimes, there’s a captivating chaos in his smudged style and facial arrangements. Holy figures of Christianity are also recurring motifs; his late mother, who passed away young, owned an image of the Virgin Mary that still haunts him. In recent years, Al Mazrouei has exhibited at Aisha Al Abbar Gallery (Dubai), Iyad Qanazea Gallery (Abu Dhabi), and New York University Abu Dhabi.

Sarah Almehairi

B. 1998, Abu Dhabi. Lives and works in Abu Dhabi.

An arts graduate of New York University Abu Dhabi, the emerging artist Sarah Almehairi has worked in fiber art, sculpture, drawing, collage, and other media. Her mother’s craft shop in Abu Dhabi exposed her to creativity as a child. Almehairi is now inspired by Cubism and Abstract Expressionism; her clean-cut, geometric works combine painting and sculpture as they examine themes of materiality, systems, and correlations. Almehairi has hosted art workshops at Expo 2025 Osaka and displayed a public installation at Louvre Abu Dhabi as part of the Richard Mille Art Prize. In February 2026, she showcased her work in a solo presentation with Dubai-based gallery Carbon 12 at Art Basel Qatar.

Shaikha Al Mazrou

B. 1988, Sharjah, U.A.E. Lives and works in Dubai.

Expand, 2018
Shaikha Al Mazrou
Lawrie Shabibi

There is more than meets the eye in Shaikha Al Mazrou’s sculptures, which appear to be inflated plastic but are in fact made of metal. While they look simple in form, they make the viewer question what they know of the physical world. Educated in London, Al Mazrou is inspired by Minimalism, Conceptual art, and the Bauhaus movement. Through her signature pillow-shaped pieces, usually made of wet-coated steel, Al Mazrou explores color theory, materiality, and geometric abstraction. Al Mazrou has mounted public art installations at Expo 2020 Dubai, Frieze Sculpture London, and Desert X AlUla. Her most recent project, a calming, rippling light installation—“The Contingent Object”—was featured at Manar Abu Dhabi, an open-air light art festival that takes place in the Emirati capital.

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Interacting with art can slow ageing process, study shows. https://ift.tt/sv9FVPN

Trios, 2024
Elizabeth Tremante
Spinello Projects

A new study by the University College London published this week demonstrates that people who engage with art have a tendency to age at a slower pace, with benefits similar to those of physical activity. The research shows that both participating in art as well as observing it leads to people staying younger on a biological level. It is the first study to provide evidence of this kind. The findings were published by Oxford University Press in the journal Innovation in Aging on behalf of the Gerontological Society of America.

The study was led by professor Daisy Fancourt and members of the University’s department of behavior science and health as well as its division of psychiatry. They conducted their research by analyzing blood samples gathered from 3,556 adults in the United Kingdom, assessing their biological ages against their chronological ones. The accompanying survey evaluated participants’ level of engagement with the arts across four categories that include participating in art (activities like painting, singing, or dancing); receiving art (attending exhibitions or events); visiting heritage sites (historic buildings or monuments); or other cultural activities (visiting archives or a library). They also studied the frequency of these activities, as well as the diversity of activities, and found that the variety of ways in which people engaged with art was just as important.

In one of the tests, researchers found that the biological ages of those who engaged with art on a weekly basis had a biological age that was 1.02 years lower than those who only engaged with art once or twice a year. Those who engaged monthly had an age that was 0.8 years lower. However, the research cautions that it only examines the biological process of ageing, not whether engaging with art can lead people to live longer.

“Our study found that it’s not just about doing arts regularly, but also about doing a range of different arts activities,” said Fancourt in an interview with The Art Newspaper. “Each type of arts activity—reading, making music, going to cultural performances, visiting heritage sites etc—has different effects on us cognitively, emotionally and physiologically. So engaging in a diverse range of activities—just like having lots of different plants in our diets—is most beneficial for our health.”

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JR to cover Paris’s Pont Neuf in homage to Christo and Jeanne-Claude. https://ift.tt/jPyT8LR

Installation has begun on a new monumental trompe-l’oeil work from French artist JR, which will transform Paris’s Pont Neuf into an immersive cave this summer. La Caverne du Pont Neuf (2026) reimagines the city’s oldest bridge as a cave within a limestone quarry from which it and many of Paris’s buildings were constructed. The French photographer and street artist’s work pays homage to Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s seminal work, The Pont Neuf Wrapped (1985), and will be on view day and night from June 6–28.

Bulgarian-born installation artist, Christo, and his wife and collaborator, the Moroccan artist Jeanne-Claude, first wrapped the Pont Neuf and its streetlamps with 450,000 square feet of woven polyamide sand-colored fabric in 1985 as part of The Pont Neuf Wrapped. JR’s piece will similarly use printed fabrics as well as an inflatable structure that was inspired by projects both completed and unrealized by Christo and Jeanne-Claude such as Air Package on a Ceiling, which will be presented at Gagosian in London later this month.

“My vision for this project is rooted in both the past and present of this iconic bridge,” said JR in a press statement. “I admire the legacy of Christo and Jeanne-Claude, and I share their idea that the mission of art is to make us think, to question what is familiar to us. The debate that a public art project can provoke is of equal value to its realization. Art is a transformation, and a way of renewing the way we look at the world around us. Through the dream of La Caverne du Pont Neuf, this is what I hope to make possible in Paris.”

La Caverne du Pont Neuf marks the culmination of a period of exploration for the artist surrounding disconnection and social isolation, which began in 2020 with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2023, JR exhibited Retour à la Caverne (Return to the Cave) on the façade of the Palais Garnier in Paris, a similar cave invoking Plato’s allegory which was activated by a performance by over 150 dancers. The work served as a prelude to his piece, which encourages visitors to “abandon blindness and isolationism in favor of lucidity, togetherness, and concord among all” according to a press release. Other works in JR’s series on public buildings include La Ferita (2021) in Florence, Punto di Fuga (2021) in Rome, and La Nascita (2024) in Milan.

Inside the cavern, a sonic composition by Thomas Bangalter, formerly of Daft Punk, will imagine the sound of the monolithic space. Concurrent to this installation will be a presentation of new works by JR at Perrotin’s space in the Marais entitled “Les equisses de la Caverne,” which will run from June 5 through July 25. It will include preparatory sketches, photographs, and collages that set the foundation for the monumental installation. In addition, an hour-long documentary by Vincent Lorca will be broadcast on France TV in mid-June.

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5 Trends Shaping the 2026 Venice Biennale https://ift.tt/0p2tja6

The 2026 Venice Biennale opened to the public last weekend, weighted with politics and emotion. The main exhibition, “In Minor Keys,” was conceived by the late Cameroonian Swiss curator Koyo Kouoh—the first African woman appointed to lead the Biennale—who died unexpectedly in May 2025. Her curatorial team, including Rasha Salti, Marie Hélène Pereira, and Gabe Beckhurst Feijoo, carried forward her vision, which reflects Kouoh’s belief in art as a “shared and sustaining force.”

Throughout opening week, angry protestors filled the paths of the Giardini and Arsenale, distributing flyers that called for the exclusion of Russia and Israel from the national pavilions. The Golden Lion jury resigned, refusing to judge a contest among several countries whose leaders face charges at the International Criminal Court.

And yet, the art insisted on being seen. Across the main exhibition, the national pavilions, and the collateral exhibitions winding through Venice’s palazzos and churches, distinct aesthetic and material threads emerged. As artists engaged the defining pressures of our moment—ecological collapse, social division, the horror of war—several visual obsessions surfaced again and again. Here are the trends that define the 61st edition.

Birth and fertility

Wangechi Mutu’s gigantic sculpture of a pregnant belly emerged from the floor of the Giardini while her video, exploring a matriarchal creation myth, played nearby. Rising artist Buhlebezwe Siwani showed naturalistic sculptures of contemplative pregnant women made with green Sunlight soap, a comment on purity and gender.

Japan’s pavilion featured a more literal representation of child rearing. Visitors were handed a baby doll and asked to care for it. If they changed its diaper, these proud parents would be rewarded with a QR code leading to a poem (drawing a link between artistic and biological creation). The attention-grabbing pavilion is by queer artist Ei Arakawa-Nash, who became a parent of twins in 2024. Foisting these 11-pound babies (about the weight of a four-month-old) on the new “parents” is an undeniably humorous way to have them experience the burden and joy of new life.

Declining birthrates form a backdrop for this artwork, lending anxiety to Arakawa-Nash’s play-pretend. Society-wide fertility crises also inform Maja Malou Lyse’s work at the Danish pavilion, where a line of tombstone-like, cryogenic sperm containers comprise the work Stars in My Pocket (2026). They’re embedded with tiny video screens that show a new phenomenon: “sperm races.” On the other side of the pavilion, a “musical” of sorts plays out across a new, multichannel video work in which porn performers act as sexed-up sperm bank employees. As male fertility declines worldwide, the piece references research that watching sex on screens can increase sperm motility. Equal parts grotesque and salacious, it’s a crazed futuristic vision of where fertility science could take us.

—Josie Thaddeus-Johns

The unphotographable

Yes, there are naked women in harnesses spinning around a pole; but no, you can’t take a photo. Florentina Holzinger’s Austrian pavilion may have been one of the most-talked-about shows of the opening week, but staff asked visitors to put away their camera phones for the performances. It was one of many Biennale moments that rejected the “instagrammability” of contemporary art.

At Egypt’s pavilion, artist Armen Agop also asked for no photos (as well as silence) as a way to move away from “speed and spectacle.” At the Dutch pavilion, Dries Verhoeven similarly prohibited photography and asked all visitors to turn off their phones. His choreography was all the more powerful for it: A single performer in plain clothes enters the space as if a regular visitor. She half-retched, half-yelled a series of jarringly uplifting mantras, while the pavilion’s shutters slowly enclosed the space in pitch darkness (try taking a sneaky pic of that).

At the Holy See pavilion, some of the world’s foremost musicians—Patti Smith, FKA twigs, Brian Eno—have created a soundwalk through a monastery’s garden. Visitors put on special headphones and enter an interactive journey where each artist’s sound blends gently into one another, creating something quite beautiful, and completely unphotographable.

In the main show, too, sound was everywhere. Kamaal Malak created a synth-laden soundtrack to accompany Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons’s magnolia-influenced display. Even less capturable on phones: scent. A casual visitor could lose track of the number of signs reading “this artwork contains natural aromas and fragrances.” There was one at Cauleen Smith’s video installation work (which evoked an L.A. park), Carsten Höller’s scent based on his parents’ accoutrements, and another waft of patchouli and vetiver coming off Manuel Mathieu’s video installation Pendulum (2023). The latter was also available for purchase in the form of a candle, a quirky way to take home a small piece of the Biennale.

Meanwhile, at the acclaimed collateral event “Official. Unofficial. Belarus,” from Belarus Free Theatre, sensorial details remind visitors of the plight of political prisoners in Belarus. They can light candles, made in collaboration with Ukrainian studio ol.factory, that smell like a prison office, or taste a one-bite offering from Chef Rasmus Munk that incorporates tongue-numbing herbs and evokes the despair of incarceration. Social media managers everywhere, watch out. The next wave of art might be impossible to share on our phone screens.

—Josie Thaddeus-Johns

Water

Unsurprisingly, many artists exhibiting across the “floating city” incorporated water—literally and as a conceptual framework—in their presentations. In an area that bears the brunt of climate change, evidenced by the worsening acqua alta that submerges Venice annually, water is a useful metaphor for humans’ relationship with nature and the fragility of the environment.

On a street between the Giardini and the Arsenale, Melissa McGill’s installation “Marea” presents nearly 100 canvases painted like the waves of the lagoons. They flutter from clotheslines and raise awareness of the impact of rising sea levels on the locals.

In “Matriclysm: An Archeology of Connections Lost,” American singer-songwriter turned visual artist Jewel included a cocoon-like cast resin sculpture. The piece, Heart of the Ocean (2024), features a display of LED lights that change color based on live-streamed ocean warming data. Likewise, at Ocean Space, a group show called “Tide of Returns” explores how Indigenous groups have served as stewards of water.

Inside the Biennale, artists also explore the vicissitudes of water. Michael Joo’s Noospheres: Expanded (2026) video and sculptural installation includes weathered tubing and pylons used to support the Venetian waterways, while Alexa Kumiko Hatanaka’s patchwork prints and flags depict snowdrifts, fish, and tsunamis. “The linocut prints represent both snow and water,” the artist told Artsy. “Snow and ice are melting at alarming rates, [as I experienced firsthand]...water is what connects us.”

Water is itself a material at Canada’s pavilion, which artist Abbas Akhavan filled with a pool and glow lights. Giant water lilies will grow in Akhavan’s installation, a nod to a plant that fascinated Victorian-era Brits.

But the buzziest display is Florentina Holzinger’s flooded Austrian pavilion. In one water-filled room, a nude performer spins on a jet ski, splashing visitors. In the pavilion’s courtyard, another nude woman in scuba gear is submerged in a tank of purified urine filled by visitors relieving themselves in two porta potties. Holzinger hopes to convey the urgency of rising sea levels. It’s also hard not to think about ocean health and access to clean water. The disturbing presentation and purified-urine-filled tank may indeed offer a view into our resource-limited future.

—Annabel Keenan

Raw materials

Raw materials like earth, salt, and sand, which bear associations with national identity and the environment, play a major role for many Biennale artists. In the main exhibition, American artist Dawn DeDeaux’s Dirt Bowl Table (2021) features 64 wooden bowls of varying sizes filled with ash and earth. Nearby, Lebanese artists and filmmakers Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige’s sculptures contain geological samples from an archaeological site discovered at the war-torn Nahr el-Bared refugee camp in Lebanon. The work points to the endurance of waste, which will far outlast the societies that produce it.

Elsewhere, artist Matías Duville filled Argentina’s pavilion with white salt that contains a monumental drawing in charcoal, a nod to the fragility of the natural world and humanity’s role in altering it. In Oman’s pavilion, visitors find an expanse of sand brought in from the Omani desert under metal shapes hanging from the ceiling. The installation by Haitham Al Busafi draws inspiration from the traditional practice of al-zaanah—adorning horses with metal decoration as a sign of respect, as Omani culture reveres the animals for their utility and companionship.

Likewise, Uzbekistan’s “The Aural Sea” pavilion features sand underneath Zulfiya Spowart’s sculpture resembling a boat, and Zi Kakhramonova’s interactive work consists of a large pit of salt (the material now a pervasive remnant of the country’s dried-up Aral Lake). In a time of contested territories, ecological collapse, and nationalist spectacle, it’s no surprise that some artists bring a physical piece of their homelands to the Biennale.

—Annabel Keenan

Hair

Hair occupies a liminal space between self and object, and artist Marina Abramović uses it often in her work. She further explored this tension in “Transforming Energy,” her major show at the Galleria dell’Accademia di Venezia, where an installation of long ponytails extends along a wall. They’re made of fake hair, symbolizing horse hair and its rumored healing qualities. They swing when visitors stand before them, tickling their backs and creating a sensation that is unnerving for some and soothing for others.

In Finland’s pavilion, Jenna Sutela uses large gray wigs to give a physical form to the five Venetian winds, caused by the interactions between the warm Adriatic water and the cool Alpine air. Different hairstyles give the wigs distinct personalities, and they’re accompanied by a soundscape of wind moving the synthetic hair. “The fuzzy sculptures are also humorous and I hope will offer a sense of joy,” Stefanie Hessler, curator of the pavilion, said.

Hair also appears throughout “In Minor Keys,” including in an installation of drawings, paintings, and furniture by Nigerian artist Temitayo Ogunbiyi. The artist depicts plants in the style of colonial botanical illustrations, incorporating patterns and techniques of traditional African hairstyles. In these hybrid images, she explores how diasporic movement and tradition shape contemporary multiculturalism. Elsewhere, Alice Maher’s drawings depict mythical Sibyls in tangled coils of hair. And Kenyan artist Wangechi Mutu combines human hair and tree branches in her kinetic piece Sweeper (2023), a broom that spreads red earth and coffee grounds in circles on the floor, as if tending a garden.

Elsewhere in the Giardini, Marcia Kure turns synthetic braids into a series of imposing, sculpted jackets that hang from mannequins. Each shoulder and bust appears like a disembodied head. Nearby, Adebunmi Gbadebo’s fired ceramic sculptures include human hair, most notably Afro locs, within their multimedia surfaces. The artist mixes it with soil and rice to evoke her ancestors’ experience of forced labor under slavery. Here, the artist reclaims the history and politics of hair for the African diaspora for her own creative expression.

—Annabel Keenan

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South Korean ceramic artist Jongjin Park wins 2026 Loewe Foundation Craft Prize. https://ift.tt/lNnUB63

The Loewe Foundation has announced Korean ceramicist Jongjin Park as the winner of the 2026 edition of the Loewe Foundation Craft Prize. Park was selected for his piece Strata of Illusion (2025), a partially-collapsed seat-like form crafted from paper and coated in porcelain slip, for which he has received €50,000 ($58,700). His work, alongside the rest of those shortlisted, will be on view in an exhibition at the National Gallery Singapore that opens tomorrow and runs through June 14.

The artist was selected among 30 previously-announced finalists who hail from 20 different countries and regions and work across a wide range of disciplines including ceramics, woodworking, textiles, metal, jewelry, and bookbinding. The jury was made up of art historians, museum curators as well as designers and architects—including Frida Escobedo and Patricia Urquiola—in addition to Loewe’s creative directors, Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez.

The jury selected Park’s piece for its depth of craft and innovation. In this piece, the artist compresses thousands of layers of paper that are soaked in colored ceramic slip, and then fired at high temperatures. In the kiln, the paper burns away and what remains is a distorted object that rethinks the confines of the ceramic medium.

The jury also gave special mentions to Spanish designer Álvaro Catalán de Ocón’s work in collaboration with the Ghanaian artisanal collective Baba Tree Master Weavers, as well as Italian jewelry artist Graziano Visintin. Catalán de Ocón partnered with the collective of over 250 artisans to realize Frafra Tapestry (2024), a large-scale communally woven tapestry that uses traditional basketry techniques and elephant grass to fuse ancestral craft with contemporary technology. And Visintin was selected for Collier (2025), two necklaces that feature small cubes made of sheets of gold and adorned with niello, an ancient metalworking technique. They will each receive €5,000 ($5,870).

Previous winners of the Loewe Foundation Craft Prize include Japanese sculptor Kunimasa Aoki, who won in 2025; and Mexican ceramic artist Andrés Anza, who was awarded in 2024.

‘It has been a privilege to join the jury of the Loewe Foundation Craft Prize,” shared McCollough and Hernandez in a press statement. “Craft has been at the heart of LOEWE since the House was founded 180 years ago. Across each of the shortlisted works, we encountered an extraordinary sense of commitment, creativity, and innovation. Together, they stand as a powerful testament to the enduring possibilities of making.”

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11 Must-See Shows During New York Art Week 2026 https://ift.tt/I80atoA

This May leaves no time for jetlag as the art world comes in hot off the Venice Biennale and cruises straight into a stacked New York Art Week. Get your coffee to go, too, because for the second year in a row, all the fairs—headlined by Frieze, TEFAF, and Independent—are locked into a single week.

And more art is waiting to be discovered beyond the fair circuit. New York galleries are opening their major spring shows while curators and collectors are in town. This season, there’s a mix of discoveries and deep dives, from a primer on the state of contemporary glass with “Glass Class,” a group show downtown at The Hole, to a pitch-perfect pairing of David Hammons and Jannis Kounellis uptown at White Cube.

There are also some can’t-miss New York gallery debuts to check out, with Chicago artists Tony Lewis and Lindsay Adams marking their first New York solo shows at Olney Gleason and Sean Kelly Gallery, respectively. These days, galleries are scattered all over the city, so should art fair malaise take hold, simply find the nearest exit and head out to see some shows.

Here, Artsy highlights 11 of the most noteworthy gallery exhibitions taking place during New York Art Week 2026.

Kelly Akashi

“Heirloom”

Lisson Gallery

May 13–July 25

Artist Kelly Akashi lost her Los Angeles home and studio in the devastating Eaton fire that swept through the city in January 2025. The artist, who is a Los Angeles native, escaped with her cat and just a few keepsakes. Returning to the land where her home and studio once stood, only the chimney remained. In “Heirloom,” her New York debut with Lisson Gallery, Akashi debuts new sculptures in glass, bronze, carved stone, and Corten steel, which grapples with grief, inheritance, and loss. Flowers—roses, irises, and branches in bronze—are a recurring motif, a reference to her garden and the scorched earth she has tended since the wildfire. This outing coincides with Akashi’s inclusion in the 2026 Whitney Biennial. There, she has installed a Monument (Altadena) (2026), a ghostly 13-foot chimney and path made of clear glass bricks on the museum’s terrace.

Giuseppe Penone

“The Reflection of Bronze”

Gagosian

Through July 2

Arte Povera pioneer Giuseppe Penone has been fascinated by trees for decades. In the late 1960s, Penone began exploring natural structures of trees, rivers, and stones—as well as the processes that shape them. His works have spanned sculpture, performance, works on paper, and photography. Now, at 79, Penone turns to bronze, an ancient and lasting material, to create a series of massive new sculptural castings of trees, inspired by the forests near his home in Piedmont, Italy. Gagosian has gone all-in on the presentation, too. Nearly 700 sheets of cork line the walls of one room, absorbing ambient sound, so that the gallery space seems like a woodland oasis.

The show is notably curated by Adam D. Weinberg, former director of the Whitney Museum of American Art, who has said he hopes the exhibition introduces a new generation of American art lovers to Penone’s oeuvre.

Emma Webster

“Rues and Leaves Themselves Alone”

Petzel Gallery

Through June 6

Los Angeles artist Emma Webster brings a new series of her brooding landscapes to her New York solo show with Petzel Gallery. Known for creating paintings with apocalyptic undertones, here Webster presents works that meander through a nocturnal forest filled with animals—deer, horses, cows—that are haunting and strange, appearing like life-size figurines. Webster has a unique process for making these works, involving VR sketches, scanned handmade maquettes, and drawings. Here, she imbues the centuries-old landscape painting tradition with the unstable perception of our own times.

Lindsay Adams

“SOIL”

Sean Kelly Gallery

Through May 30

SOIL (Virginia Red Clay), 2026
Lindsay Adams
Sean Kelly Gallery

Chicago-based artist Lindsay Adams makes her New York solo debut at Sean Kelly Gallery with a new suite of abstract oil paintings. Adams describes her works as rooted in a sense of wonder. She uses Lamp Black pigment, an unusually intense noir, to create the background for her compositions. Instead of entirely obscuring this ground, she leaves the black only just perceptible. In this way, darkness seems a generative force beneath her sumptuous marks of pinks, blues, and greens.

Later this year, Adams will be among the 25 artists to have their work unveiled at the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago. Adams’s site-specific installation, Weary Blues, a reworking of a 2024 painting by the same name, will be made of silkscreen panels on fabric and on view in the public café.

Tony Lewis

“Abstract Slavery”

Olney Gleason

Through June 6

Food & Drink, 2025
Tony Lewis
Olney Gleason

Sugar, 2025
Tony Lewis
Olney Gleason

Over the past 15 years, Chicago artist Tony Lewis has honed a conceptually rigorous drawing practice, working primarily with graphite, colored pencil, and paper. In the past decade, his works have explored alphabets and other written forms of language as modes of abstraction.

Now, in “Abstract Slavery” at Olney Gleason, a long-overdue New York solo debut for the artist, Lewis investigates the history of the Atlantic slave trade through three interrelated series: “Word Search” drawings, “Gregg Shorthand” compositions, and “White Drawings.” Across these works, Lewis both draws and obscures words tied to the slave trade, through the use of puzzles, shorthand marks, and personal scribbles, probing the structure and limits of written language in the face of history’s brutalities.

Firelei Báez

“Feet squelching on wet grass, nourished by uncertainty.”

Hauser & Wirth

May 12–July 31

Firelei Báez is celebrated for her fantastical large-scale paintings that draw on Afro Caribbean histories and myths. This week, she makes her eagerly anticipated New York solo debut at Hauser & Wirth. At the center of the show is View of Nature (2026), an eight-panel painting where Báez depicts shifting climate and geography from the tropics near the equator to the icy climes of the Arctic Circle. The colossal work is Báez’s reimagination of an engraving that cartographer John Emslie made in 1852.

Here, Báez is also showing works in bronze, for the first time. Two monumental sculptures of ciguapas, chimerical female tricksters in Dominican folklore, loom over the exhibition, one of which Báez has adorned with plumes of real feathers.

Hyegyeong Choi

“Tethered, Untethered”

Harper’s

May 12–June 20

In her third solo exhibition with Harper’s, Brooklyn-based painter Hyegyeong Choi goes in for the kill—figuratively. Choi is known for her technicolor paintings of avatar-like humanoids, and here she brings these fanciful beings into dialogue with the history of hunting paintings. One new painting, for instance, reimagines Gustave Courbet’s Hunting Dogs with Dead Hare (1857), a scene of snarling dogs fighting over their lifeless prey, but with humanoids cast in the role of dogs. In the painting, Venery (2026), meanwhile, Choi depicts a Diana-like huntress who shoots a paintbrush from her bow rather than an arrow; it sails toward an abstract painting in the background, hinting at the element of pursuit that unites both painter and hunter in their quests.

Raven Chacon

“Score for Coming Storms”

Sikkema Malloy Jenkins

May 14–June 20

Pulitzer Prize–winning composer, performer, and artist Raven Chacon’s new exhibition, “Score for Coming Storms,” brings together a visual score for performance, a sound installation, textiles, and ink drawings.

Born in the Navajo Nation in 1977, Chacon has spent over two decades centering stories of Indigenous memory and resistance. In 2023, Chacon was awarded the MacArthur fellowship, and in 2024, the Swiss Institute organized “A Worm’s Eye View from a Bird’s Beak,” Chacon’s first major institutional solo exhibition.

Included in the exhibition is Storm Pattern (2021/2024), a sound installation composed of field recordings of flying drones captured at the Standing Rock Oceti Sakowin camp in 2016. The sounds of these drones, operated by both the police and private security, as well as those protecting the Missouri River from the pipeline build, create intertwined soundtracks of surveillance and countersurveillance.

Kim Dacres

“Lost on a Two-Way Street”

Charles Moffett

Through June 20

Until the ocean covers every mountain high (Blue Gears), 2026
Kim Dacres
Charles Moffett

Oval Medallion - Lady with Contained Crash out Braids, 2026
Kim Dacres
Charles Moffett

Living in Harlem and working in the Bronx, artist Kim Dacres salvages rubber tires, computer keyboards, and metal from the city streets around her. She transforms cast-off materials into abstract busts, a sculptural format historically reserved for people in power. Dacres, who is a first-generation American of Jamaican descent, first introduced her busts in her 2023 debut with Charles Moffett. Now, in “Lost on a Two-Way Street,” Dacres adds wall works, which she calls medallions, to her repertoire, a form that is reminiscent of Victorian cameos. In these new works, Dacres weaves tire treads into buns and braids, and uses found metal as jewelry, so that her busts resemble the Black women who live in the very uptown neighborhoods where she sources her materials.

“Glass Class”

The Hole

Through June 28

This group show is curated by glass artist and collector Eric Sullivan, and bills itself as a “crash course” in glass art—a medium that remains enigmatic to many even in the art world. The show is a mix of emerging, mid-career, and established artists. Notable artists featured include late German Australian glass artist and educator Klaus Moje, who innovated the influential kiln-formed glass technique, as well as contemporary artist Hannah Hansdotter, whose luminous vessels are rooted in Scandinavian craft traditions, but look deeply futuristic.

David Hammons and Jannis Kounellis

White Cube

Through June 13

Uptown at White Cube, the works of American artist David Hammons and the late Greek Italian artist Jannis Kounellis come together in an unusually fruitful pairing. The exhibition is curated loosely around the story of their friendship, which sparked in the early 1990s at the American Academy in Rome.

The earliest works in the show are Kounellis’s, from the late 1950s, part of his “Alfabeto” series of stenciled paintings based on signage in the urban environment. The earliest Hammons works on view are his influential body prints, made in Los Angeles in the 1960s using everyday materials like wallpaper and margarine grease. Over the years, both artists resisted the commercialization and aestheticization of the art world. To these ends, Kounellis began incorporating natural materials, like coal and stone, into his works, while Hammons repurposed materials he found on the streets of New York City. The wit and deceptive simplicity of their creations are both memorable and moving.

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