India’s Kiran Nadar Museum to stage major South Asian art exhibition at Christie’s London. https://ift.tt/nqFstZG

The Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA) will present a major exhibition from its collection at Christie’s London this summer, marking the first time the auction house’s annual exhibition series has been dedicated to a South Asian institution.

Titled “The Meeting Ground: Scenes from the KNMA Collection,” the exhibition will run from July 16th through August 21st at Christie’s King Street headquarters. Organized in collaboration with the auction house, the exhibition will feature works from the New Delhi–based museum’s collection spanning modern and contemporary art, alongside folk and Indigenous artistic traditions from South Asia. Works by artists including M.F. Husain, Sayed Haider Raza, F.N. Souza, and Jangarh Singh Shyam will be featured.

KNMA was founded in New Delhi in 2010 by Kiran Nadar, one of India’s most prominent collectors and a key figure in shaping the country’s institutional art landscape. KNMA was the first private museum of its kind in India and offers free public access to its collection.

The presentation comes as the institution undergoes a major expansion. It is currently developing a new standalone complex in New Delhi that will span more than one million square feet and serve as a multidisciplinary cultural space for visual and performing arts.

“Since its founding, KNMA has been committed to situating South Asian artistic practices within broader international conversations,” Kiran Nadar, chairperson of KNMA, said in a statement. “International engagement is a pillar of our vision, opening up new frameworks for dialogue and scholarship.”

Akansha Rastogi will curate the exhibition along with Preeti Bahadur, Avijna Bhattacharya, Premjish Achari, and Srinivas Aditya Mopidevi. The show will be organized into a series of narrative vignettes that explore the diversity of artistic production in South Asia from the 1950s to the present.

Anthea Peers, president of Christie’s EMEA, described the exhibition as “a landmark exhibition for Christie’s London and for our summer programme at King Street.”

Damian Vesey, Christie’s international specialist for South Asian modern and contemporary art, said the exhibition reflects the growing global interest in South Asian art. “This exhibition marks the first time Christie’s London has dedicated its summer exhibition to South Asia, as well as to a single institution,” he noted.

A three-day course, organized by Christie’s Education and KNMA, focused on South Asian art and the themes explored in the exhibition will accompany, running from July 28th through July 30th.

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Maddy Inez’s Mystic Ceramics Tell the Hidden Stories of Ancestral Plants https://ift.tt/uPbcfIl

Root Worker, 2026
Maddy Inez Leeser
Megan Mulrooney

For ceramist Maddy Inez, the art-making instinct might be hereditary.

Inez is the daughter of the American artist Alison Saar and the granddaughter of assemblage pioneer Betye Saar. “We always say art is in the blood,” she said during a recent phone call. “Art is how I was taught how to process the world.”

The Los Angeles native makes hand-built biomorphic ceramic sculptures rooted in mysticism and ancestral knowledge. Over the past few years, these works have shifted into larger scales, catching the attention of the art world. Last week, Inez opened “Nascence,” her first solo exhibition with Megan Mulrooney in Los Angeles, on view through June 20th. The show features 20 ceramic vessels and wall works, all made in the past year, and each dedicated to a distinct plant variety.

Benne Blessing, 2026
Maddy Inez Leeser
Megan Mulrooney

Za' atar Pistil, 2026
Maddy Inez Leeser
Megan Mulrooney

Inez’s use of clay originated, in part, from her grandfather, the late ceramist Richard Saar. “My grandfather is one of the reasons I’m attached to it,” she said.

While her creative lineage runs deep, Inez says the biggest familial influence on her work might actually be gardening. “Gardening has always been a major part of family life. It was part of daily life,” she shared. “My grandma still has a garden, and I help her in it every week.”

For Inez, gardening and growing food are among the most ancient forms of familial caregiving. In “Nascence,” she has created near-humanoid sculptures inspired by plants, including okra, black-eyed peas, and hibiscus. Her forms are sturdier and more earthbound than in the past, and seem almost alien. In Benne Blessing (2026), a sculpture inspired by the West African sesame plant benne, for instance, two pods resemble armor-clad legs on a botanical warrior.

Sibyl Seedlings, 2026
Maddy Inez Leeser
Megan Mulrooney

Beholder, 2026
Maddy Inez Leeser
Megan Mulrooney

Inez devotes a great deal of time to researching these plants and their histories before she ever sets her hands on clay. She keeps notebooks filled with watercolor studies of blooms, alongside notes and scribbles about their histories, folklore, and medical and culinary uses.

She started making these intensive investigations into plant life in her earlier series “Fire Followers,” which she made in the aftermath of the 2025 L.A. wildfires. (Fire followers are plants that germinate in heat.) During that time, the artist, her brother, her mother, and her grandmother were all forced to evacuate their homes, along with their menagerie of pets.

“We had six dogs, two bunnies, two tortoises, and my cat. At that point, I had my grandma’s tortoise in a bucket,” she recalled.

Through the experience, Inez witnessed both systemic failures and community support. At the time, Inez’s studio was her mother’s garden. Over time, plants emerged as a language for expressing both grief and hope. “I started really thinking about soil and how we’ve lost the language of how to care for it. Fire follower plants heal soil,” she said. “They became my little vision of hope for the future.”

Heart Healer, 2026
Maddy Inez Leeser
Megan Mulrooney

Al 'Ouna, 2026
Maddy Inez Leeser
Megan Mulrooney

Now, this interest in native ecology has expanded outward into questions of displacement, colonization, and survival. In this show, Inez dives deep into the stories of plants associated with the slave trade, referencing her family’s own connections to plant histories along the way.

In the aftermath of the fires, Inez was archiving documents belonging to her grandmother, Betye Saar, kept at the artist’s Laurel Canyon home. While sifting through photographs and papers, she discovered a certificate of midwifery belonging to her great-great–great-grandmother, Hannah Mays, a native of Louisiana.

During slavery, Black midwives were sought-after practitioners who melded Western and African medical knowledge with indigenous herbalism. After Emancipation, some of these women became officially certified and remained highly sought-after healers.

“I began to wonder what kind of plants my great-great-grandmother would have used in her practice,” Inez said. “From there, my interest expanded all over the world, as I realized in real time how agriculture was being weaponized during colonization that lasts until today.”

The stories can be strikingly powerful. “Enslaved people braided okra seeds in their hair to make sure that wherever they went, they would have the control and ability to care for each other,” Inez shared.

Crimson Kin, 2026
Maddy Inez Leeser
Megan Mulrooney

Wanderer, 2026
Maddy Inez Leeser
Megan Mulrooney

The sculpture Heart Healer (2026), meanwhile, is inspired by the hibiscus flower, popular in North Africa (particularly Sudan) and used to make karkadé, a tea, and healing remedies. In folklore, the flower is tied to the tale of two separated lovers. When one dies in battle, his beloved cries tears of blood, and wherever the tears hit the ground, a hibiscus blooms.

Inez’s own family life is a testament to the resilience of native plant knowledge even in diaspora. “Black-eyed peas symbolize luck. That tradition goes all the way back to Africa,” Inez noted. “On New Year’s Day, my family has soul food—black-eyed peas, greens, sweet potato. Every pea left on the plate is a tear you’ll shed the next year. Don’t leave any behind.”

Inez acknowledges that the exhaustive research into these histories may not be obvious to someone looking at them in a gallery setting—and she’s okay with that.

“This is all my little meditative healing practice,” she said. “I love seeing people come in and react to them.”

In botanical terms, the exhibition title “Nascence” refers to the moment right before a bud blooms. “It’s the signs of potential beauty, of a potential future,” said Inez. “Right now, I think we’re in the nascence of a revolution and, as an artist, I believe there is room for beauty in revolution.”

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Keith Haring and Louis Vuitton collaboration launches at the Frick Collection. https://ift.tt/toJkUqv

The Louis Vuitton Cruise 2027 collection sailed down the runway at the Frick Collection in New York on Wednesday, making major nods to Pop Art legend Keith Haring and the gritty spunk of New York City’s 1980s downtown art scene.

French designer Nicolas Ghesquière was inspired by a leather Louis Vuitton suitcase that Haring embellished in 1984. The house acquired the suitcase in 2020, and it became a jumping-off point for the collection.

Haring’s iconic imagery appeared throughout the collection: His famed barking dogs, radiant babies, and graphic linework were emblazoned on many pieces. Several garments and accessories featured hand-painted details, honoring the spontaneity of Haring’s street art.

Haring, who died in 1990 at age 31, became an art world sensation in the 1980s through his artistic interventions in public spaces. His subway drawings, murals, and activist projects have remained recurring reference points in fashion and popular culture. Wednesday’s show, which was attended by celebrities including actors Anne Hathaway, Emma Stone, and Zendaya, underscored Haring’s enduring relevance.

The show follows the recent announcement of a three-year cultural partnership between the Frick and Louis Vuitton, further establishing the French fashion house’s ongoing dialogue with the art world. Under former creative director Marc Jacobs, the house collaborated with artists including Stephen Sprouse, Takashi Murakami, and Richard Prince in projects that helped shape luxury fashion’s relationship to the contemporary art world in the early 2000s.

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Art Basel appoints Wassan Al-Khudhairi artistic director of 2027 Qatar fair. https://ift.tt/eN69o8Q

Art Basel has appointed Iraqi curator Wassan Al-Khudhairi as artistic director of the 2027 edition of Art Basel Qatar, the fair announced on Wednesday.

Al-Khudhairi will lead the curatorial direction of the fair’s second edition, working alongside Vincenzo de Bellis, Art Basel’s chief artistic officer and global director of fairs. Al-Khudhairi succeeds Egyptian artist Wael Shawky, who led the artistic vision for the fair’s inaugural edition, which debuted this past February. That edition featured some 87 galleries and was composed entirely of solo artist presentations under the theme “Becoming.”

Art Basel Qatar’s 2027 edition will take place from January 28th to 30th, with preview days on January 26th and 27th. Along with the appointment, the fair announced that its 2027 curatorial theme will be “between / بين” and will explore experiences of exchange, fluidity, and open-ended dialogue rather than fixed definitions.

Al-Khudhairi has deep ties to the region and previously served as the founding director of Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art in Doha, where she oversaw the institution’s opening in 2010. During her tenure, she organized exhibitions including “Sajjil: A Century of Modern Art” and “Cai Guo-Qiang: Saraab.” Al-Khudhairi was also a member of the curatorial team for the 2025 Hawaii Triennial and served as the co-curator of the 6th Asian Art Biennial in Taiwan as well as the co-artistic director of the 9th Gwangju Biennale in South Korea.

In a statement, de Bellis said Al-Khudhairi’s regional expertise, coupled with her global networks, made her “exceptionally well” positioned to lead the fair into the next phase. “Her curatorial ambition is matched by a deep understanding of how art ecosystems develop — how institutions are built, how markets are nurtured, and how education and public engagement create the conditions for long-term growth,” he said.

Al-Khudhairi described Art Basel Qatar as “an exciting new model for what a curated fair can be.” The 2027 theme, she added, stemmed from “a curiosity about what becomes possible when a space is allowed to stay open.”

The second edition of Art Basel Qatar will continue the curated format introduced at the inaugural fair and will again take place across Doha Design District and M7 in Msheireb Downtown Doha. It will also expand its Special Projects sector with larger-scale immersive presentations, with details to be announced soon.

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10 Artists to Follow if You Like Iris van Herpen https://ift.tt/6HnbE9Q

The celebrated fashion designer Iris van Herpen combines centuries-old craftsmanship with cutting-edge technology to create awe-inspiring couture. In 2011, at just 27 years old, the Dutch designer received an invitation to join the Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture, the French regulating commission that determines if a fashion house is eligible to be a Haute Couture “maison.”

In the 15 years since, van Herpen has consistently pushed the bounds of what wearable art can be. She has experimented with 3D-printed garments and produced a “living” dress that, thanks to 125 million bioluminescent algae, emits light when it moves.

Van Herpen’s pieces are so inventive, in fact, that art and design museums have clamored to show them. In 2023, the couturier opened the first dedicated exhibition of her work at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. Titled “Iris van Herpen: Sculpting the Senses,” the show offered a glimpse into the designer’s inspirations, which range from architecture to the deep sea and the cosmos.

The exhibition was a veritable cabinet of curiosities, chock full of natural specimens and works by contemporary artists and makers. These pieces, alongside van Herpen’s own avant-garde designs, conveyed her reverence for science, experimentation, and innovation. After traveling the globe, “Sculpting the Senses” has made its American debut. It opened earlier this month at the Brooklyn Museum in New York City, which is staging the largest iteration of the show thus far.

Channeling van Herpen’s interdisciplinary vision, we’ve selected 10 artists who evoke various aspects of her distinctive point of view. Some share her interest in cultivating symbiotic relationships between living and non-living forms. Others similarly focus on the intricate structures and movements of the natural world. Working in painting, sculpture, and installation, certain artists count themselves among van Herpen’s inspiring trove of collaborators, while others poetically reflect the couturier’s signature play with perception and light.

Anicka Yi

B. 1971, Seoul. Lives and works in New York City.

Vinegar Fissure, 2024
Anicka Yi
Esther Schipper

Post Classical V, 2025
Anicka Yi
Esther Schipper

Scientific research is at the core of Anicka Yi’s practice. Like van Herpen, the artist grapples with the boundaries between nature and the synthetic. Yi has said: “I seek to expand the possibilities of how we perceive ourselves and our place within the broader ecological framework….Through this lens, my art becomes a space for contemplating not only what was, but what could be, in the ongoing narrative of life on Earth.”

Yi treats her studio like a laboratory, collaborating with scientists and other specialists to bring her unorthodox visions to life. She has worked with volatile materials including yeast, fungi, bacteria, ants, and snails to make her installations, sculptures, and paintings.

This May at Storm King Art Center in New York’s Hudson Valley, Yi opened her first large-scale outdoor project, “Anicka Yi: Message from the Mud.” It offers a microbiological portrait of the landscape, with diverse colonies of algae, cyanobacteria, and microbes responding to sunlight and time.

Tara Donovan

B. 1969, New York City. Lives and works in New York City.

Untitled, 2017
Tara Donovan
Krakow Witkin Gallery

Stratagem IX, 2024
Tara Donovan
Pace Gallery

Tara Donovan is known for large-scale, often site-specific installations that transform accumulations of everyday objects (toothpicks, straws, CDs, etc.) into formidable sculptures. Like van Herpen, she privileges optical effects and intriguing surfaces, as well as forms that seem to have grown organically.

Given the clear visual parallels, it’s no surprise van Herpen selected Untitled (2009), a mylar and hot-glue sculpture by Donovan for the Brooklyn Museum exhibition. The sculpture, which evokes crystalline structures and unfamiliar vegetal forms, appears alongside van Herpen’s 2017 Aeriform dress: a gravity-defying, waterjet-cut, stainless-steel-and-tulle design, made with her longtime collaborator, the artist Philip Beesley.

Tomás Saraceno

B. 1973, Tucuman, Argentina. Lives and works in Berlin.

Stratus nebulosus niveus/M+I,, 2024
Tomás Saraceno
Galería RGR

Central to Tomás Saraceno’s practice is an abiding fascination with spiders. The artist’s floating sculptures and interactive installations harness impressive technological developments—for example, the first 3D-mapping technology for spider webs—as well as web sonification and signaling devices that reveal how spiders communicate through vibrational signals.

Saraceno shares a technological approach and reverence for the environment, as well as a love of spiders, with van Herpen. Her Brooklyn Museum exhibition includes a work by ECOLOGICSTUDIO (an architecture and design firm specializing in biotechnology for the built environment) that demonstrates how tarantulas’ webs change when responding to different 3D-printed environments.

Cindy Ji Hye Kim

B. 1990, Incheon, South Korea. Lives and works in New York City.

Days of Heaven, 2024
Cindy Ji Hye Kim
Casey Kaplan

The Sower and the Plough, Midnight, 2025
Cindy Ji Hye Kim
Casey Kaplan

Cindy Ji Hye Kim’s uncanny paintings feature unusual supports and a unique mélange of influences: scaffolding, medieval torture, and Korean folk arts, to name a few. The artist paints on translucent silk, which reveals the silhouettes of her intricately carved stretchers beneath. The layered effect creates a spectral quality reminiscent of van Herpen’s garments, which emit movement even when off the body. Both creators also use skeleton imagery, explore the passage of time, and incorporate architectural structures into their work. These elements enhance a sense of both literal and psychological depth.

Eva Jospin

B. 1975, Paris. Lives and works in Paris.

Niche colonnes, 2025
Eva Jospin
Suzanne Tarasieve

Bois Noir, 2025
Eva Jospin
GALLERIA CONTINUA

Eva Jospin and van Herpen both engage elements of architecture as they convey the magic of what the human hand can craft. Jospin works across media, though she’s perhaps best known for her meticulous sculptures: She carves into numerous layers of cardboard, transforming the utilitarian material into something fantastical. The artist further adorns these forms with threads, shells, and rocks, making them as charming as they are bewildering. Jospin often collaborates with the artisans of the Chanakya workshop and the Chanakya School of Craft in Mumbai, who use hundreds of shades of threads to turn Jospin’s drawings into enchanting embroideries.

Rogan Brown

B. 1966, London. Lives and works in Nîmes, France.

Ghost Coral Colour Variation, 2022
Rogan Brown
C Fine Art

Magic Circle, 2016
Rogan Brown
C Fine Art

Rogan Brown is among the van Herpen collaborators featured in “Sculpting the Senses.” The British sculptor takes inspiration from microscopic imagery, hand- and laser-cutting paper into mesmerizing works. Like van Herpen, Brown is awed by all that’s hidden from the human eye. As he describes on his website: “The act of cutting becomes a metaphor for revelation: a dissection of perception itself. A recurring theme in my work is the inherent tension between science’s drive to categorize and contain, and nature’s overwhelming complexity.”

For van Herpen’s 2021 “Earthrise” collection, the couturier partnered with Brown on a series of dresses constructed from layers of laser-cut Parley Ocean Plastic, which is upcycled from plastic found on beaches and in the ocean. The material evokes the intricacies of lace, in line with Brown’s kaleidoscopic paper-sculpture creations.

Keysook Geum

B. 1955, South Korea. Lives and works in Seoul.

Red Durumage , 2025
Keysook Geum
Callan Contemporary

Artist, designer, and educator Keysook Geum is the daughter of two ballet dancers. Like van Herpen, who also trained in classical ballet, her work is permeated by a sense of choreography and movement. Geum herself trained in textiles and fashion design. She now constructs twisted-wire and crystal sculptures that appear like weightless garments that are constantly in motion. The silhouettes pay homage to both haute couture and traditional Korean clothing. Additionally, they refer back to the threaded flower arrangements that Geum made as a child. The interaction of light and shadow in her pieces recalls van Herpen’s own ethereal gowns.

Gala Porras-Kim

B. 1984, Bogotá. Lives and works in Los Angeles and London.

1 Vitrine with 70 Religious Figures and Artefacts at Pitt Rivers Museum, 2025
Gala Porras-Kim
Sprüth Magers

Gala Porras-Kim is an interdisciplinary artist whose research-based practice focuses on the relationship between cultural artifacts and the conventions that govern their collection, conservation, display, and taxonomy. She is interested in how objects shape our understanding of history and has produced a long-running series of drawings of art and objects displayed on shelves.

On the surface, these detailed drawings resemble diverse cabinets of curiosities, conjuring the many disciplines that inspire van Herpen (a section in the exhibition is deliberately staged as a cabinet of curiosities). However, Porras-Kim and van Herpen share deeper connections in the way they engage the natural world. In the 2024 exhibition “A Hand in Nature” at the MCA Denver, Porras-Kim imagined how artworks would evolve if natural forces were granted creative agency.

Anne von Freyburg

B. 1979, Velp, Netherlands. Lives and works in London.

In Flight Mode (After Fragonard, The Swing), 2026
Anne von Freyburg
K Contemporary

Bubblelicious, 2020
Anne von Freyburg
K Contemporary

Like van Herpen, Anne von Freyburg studied fashion design at ArtEZ University of the Arts in the Netherlands. Despite her professional turn to fine art, a strong sense of dress remains in her practice. The artist paints with textiles, creating complex and dynamic images in patchworks of colorful fabrics.

Also like van Herpen, von Freyburg’s process combines technology with hand-stitching — she uses Photoshop to digitally manipulate images of Old Master paintings, abstracting them into dreamlike and psychedelic compositions that alter everything except what makes the original painting iconic: a subject’s facial expression, for example, or a work’s distinctive color palette. The creations of von Freyburg and van Herpen benefit from slow looking, which allows viewers to unpack their endless details.

Studio DRIFT

Established 2007. Based in Amsterdam.

Fragile Future FFC 3.8 Small Diamond, 2012
DRIFT
Carpenters Workshop Gallery

Fragile Future FF 3.17, 2021
DRIFT
Carpenters Workshop Gallery

Dutch artists Lonneke Gordijn and Ralph Nauta founded Studio DRIFT in 2007. The pair are known for their experiential sculptures, kinetic installations, and performances. Whether it’s their mechanized, “dancing” “Shylight” sculptures, which gracefully open and close as they move up and down, or their “Fragile Future” sculptures that combine dandelion seeds with LED lights into various geometric structures, Studio DRIFT bridges nature and technology in spellbinding ways.

Van Herpen collaborated with Studio DRIFT for her “Syntopia” fall/winter 2018 collection scenography, for which Studio DRIFT produced a large kinetic installation suspended above the runway. As models graced the catwalk, 20 glass wings, representing various steps of flying, hypnotically echoed their movements.

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Tina Kim Gallery announces representation of the estate of Kim Lim. https://ift.tt/iE6cajI

Tina Kim Gallery has announced U.S. representation of the estate of Kim Lim, the British Singaporean sculptor and printmaker. This June, the gallery will make its debut presentation of Lim’s work at Art Basel. A solo exhibition at Tina Kim Gallery will follow in New York, in spring 2027, marking the first solo presentation of Lim’s work in the United States. Axel Vervoordt Gallery will continue to represent the artist’s estate.

Born in Singapore in 1935 to Chinese parents, Lim spent much of her childhood in Malaysia. She moved to London in 1954, enrolling at Saint Martin’s School of Art, where she studied under the artist Anthony Caro. Later, she transferred to the Slade School of Fine Art, where she pursued both sculpture and printmaking, developing a multidisciplinary practice that would span four decades.

Untitled (wood ladder), 1973
Kim Lim
Tina Kim Gallery

Working in stone, wood, metal, and printmaking, Lim rooted her works in abstraction, seriality, and materiality. Her spare and elegant works are often associated with Minimalism. However they also explore the experience of rhythm, touch, and history. Lim’s extensive travels throughout Europe, East Asia, Southeast Asia, North Africa, and the Americas were also important cultural experiences, with Cycladic sculpture and ancient Chinese bronzes influencing her works.

In 1960, Lim married the sculptor William Turnbull, whom she’d met during her studies at the Slade. The couple were admirers of the Romanian sculptor and painter Constantin Brâncuși, whose emphasis on essential form had a lasting impact on Lim’s work. Her public debut came with the landmark 1961 exhibition “26 Young Sculptors” at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts.

Ronin, 1963
Kim Lim
Tina Kim Gallery

Though she exhibited frequently, Lim never reached the stardom of some of her peers. In recent years, several significant museum exhibitions have brought new attention and deepened scholarship to her work. Major exhibitions have included “Kim Lim: The Space Between. A Retrospective” at the National Gallery Singapore in 2024, “Kim Lim: Space, Rhythm & Light” at the Hepworth Wakefield in 2023, and “Kim Lim: Water Rests, Stone Speaks” at UCCA Dune in China earlier this year.

“Kim Lim was doing something that the art world didn’t yet have the framework to fully absorb at the time: working from a genuinely global sensibility, across sculpture and printmaking, with a formal and conceptual rigor that stands up to anyone in her generation,” dealer Tina Kim said in a statement. “Lim is a crucial figure in that reassessment.”

Centaur I, 1963
Kim Lim
Tina Kim Gallery

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Jackson Pollock breaks auction record with $181 million painting. https://ift.tt/DFZPL2n

A Jackson Pollock painting sold for $181.2 million at Christie’s in New York on Monday night, smashing the previous auction record for the Abstract Expressionist artist by nearly three times. The evening sales, which also included new auction records for Mark Rothko and Constantin Brâncuși, realized more than $1 billion in a single evening for only the second time in auction history. All prices include fees.

The Pollock work, Number 7A (1948), came from the collection of the late Condé Nast chairman S.I. Newhouse and is now the fourth most expensive work ever sold at auction. More than three meters in length, the painting of black drips punctuated by flecks of red marks the moment where Pollock “frees himself from the shackles of conventional easel painting and produces one of the first truly abstract paintings in the history of art,” according to a statement from Christie’s.

The auction for the work took seven minutes of bidding in the room and by telephone in what observers described as a three-way contest. The previous auction record for Pollock was set in 2021 for Number 17 (1951), which sold for $62.1 million at Sotheby’s. Several of his works have changed hands privately at higher levels, reportedly up to around $200 million.

Number 7A was the most expensive work to sell in Masterpieces: The Private Collection of S.I. Newhouse, which brought in $631 million. Combined with Christie’s 20th-century evening sale, which followed and made $490.3 million, the night realized $1.12 billion across 97% of lots.

A second nine-figure result came from Brâncuși’s bronze Danaïde (ca. 1913), which sold for $107.6 million. This set a new record for the artist and is the second-highest price ever paid at auction for a sculpture (the highest price is the $141.3 paid for Alberto Giacometti’s L’Homme au doigt (1960) in 2010). Brâncuși’s previous auction record was $71.2 million, set in 2018.

The 20th-century evening sale was led by Rothko’s No.15 (Two Greens and Red Stripe) (1964), which sold to a phone bidder for $98.4 million. That price marks a new auction record for Rothko. Other records set included for Joan Miró, whose Portrait of Madame K (1924) sold for $53.5 million, and Alice Neel, whose Mother and Child (Nancy and Olivia) (1982) sold for $5.7 million.

The results were greeted by market professionals as a strong signal at the top end of the market. “Three works breaking the $100 million barrier at a single house in a single evening—the Rothko approaching $100 million, the Brâncuși at $107 million, and a fierce three-way bidding battle driving the Pollock towards the $200 million mark—is something we haven’t witnessed in years,” Philip Hoffman, founder of advisory firm The Fine Art Group, told Artsy. “This is a clear signal that serious capital remains deeply committed to the very finest works of art.”

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