A new exhibition dedicated to the work of an iconic Cincinnati artist is scheduled to open next month. The show will feature a significant collection of the artist's work, celebrating their legacy and contribution to the local and broader art scene.
The article explores the concept of 'aging well' through the lens of art and creativity, examining how artists and cultural figures approach their later years. It discusses various perspectives on maintaining vitality, purpose, and artistic practice as one ages.
TEFAF Maastricht is reinforcing its position as a premier destination for high-end collectors by increasingly integrating 20th-century secondary market material alongside its traditional Old Masters and antiquities. Despite a period of leadership instability—marked by the recent departure of managing director Dominique Savelkoul after less than a year—the fair remains a critical fixture for 276 exhibitors. This year's edition highlights a diverse range of objects spanning 7,000 years, from Neolithic pottery to contemporary photography and high jewelry worn by celebrities like Helen Mirren.
Despite a wave of high-profile gallery closures and economic pressure from the shrinking entertainment industry, a new generation of Los Angeles art dealers is finding resilience through local community ties. While major outposts like Michael Werner and Sean Kelly have shuttered, local mainstays argue that the market is not failing but rather correcting itself against unrealistic expectations. Success in the current climate requires a physical presence and deep-rooted relationships that satellite galleries often struggle to maintain.
The 71st edition of BRAFA art fair in Brussels opened with strong sales, signaling a promising start to the 2026 art market. During the first three invitation-only days, major works were sold by galleries including Greta Meert, which placed a €500,000 Enrico Castellani, and Mulier Mulier Gallery, which sold a Tom Wesselmann for €80,000. Other notable sales include a Kim Tschang Yeul work at Boon Gallery, a Renoir painting at Stern Pissarro, and a James Ensor piece at Patrick Derom Gallery. The fair features 147 exhibitors and has attracted loyal collectors, with many galleries reporting multiple red dots and strong interest from younger buyers.
Master Drawings New York (MDNY) marks its 20th edition this month, founded in 2006 by London dealers Crispian Riley-Smith and Margot Gordon and acquired in 2023 by dealer Christopher Bishop. The fair focuses on works on paper from the 15th century to today, also including painting, sculpture, and photography. This year features 36 dealers across two dozen Upper East Side gallery spaces, with ten new exhibitors from Europe, making it the most geographically diverse edition yet. Programming includes a highlights catalogue of 20 important works sold during previous editions that ended up in major collections such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Getty.
Rapper Kid Cudi, born Scott Roman Mescudi, has announced his debut art exhibition in Paris at the Ruttkowski;68 gallery, titled "Echoes of the Past," running from January 31 through March 1. The show features 10 original works centered on a visual alter ego named Max, exploring themes of darkness, fear, and mental health through a childlike, cartoonish style. Cudi, who completed his first painting last year, has also created an original score for the exhibition and adopted the new moniker "Scotty Roman" for this venture. Separately, he revealed he recently performed stand-up comedy for the first time at West Side Comedy Theater in Santa Monica, describing the experience as electrifying.
The 14th edition of Mumbai Gallery Weekend (MGW) is underway, running until January 12, and for the first time appoints co-leads from galleries outside the city's historic art district of Colaba and Fort. Ayesha Parikh of Art and Charlie (Bandra) and Sanjana Shah of Tao Art Gallery (Worli) helm the event, reflecting the geographic expansion of Mumbai's art scene into western suburbs and financial districts. The weekend features ambitious exhibitions, including a solo show of terracotta works by Chippa Sudhakar at Tao and a group show curated by Zeenat Nagree at Art & Charlie. MGW, co-founded in 2012 by Shireen Gandhy and other South Mumbai galleries, has grown from nine to 33 participating galleries, and now includes the Midtown Arts Collective, which represents galleries from Worli, Lower Parel, and Bandra.
Yasmil Raymond returns for her second year as curator of Art Basel Miami Beach’s Meridians sector, focusing on showcasing a more diverse group of artists and providing opportunities for newcomers. She highlights several works, including Huang Yong Ping’s political sculpture referencing a US spy plane incident, Stephanie Syjuco’s critique of Western culture through a photography-studio installation, Ward Shelley’s post-truth library, Jesús Rafael Soto’s immersive Pénétrable, Luisa Rabbia’s feminist reimagining of a labor strike painting, and Anne Samat’s woven family portrait made from thrift-store objects.
Untitled Art fair opened its 14th edition on Miami's South Beach, featuring 160 exhibitors and a strong focus on emerging talent through its Nest sector and new solo and non-profit booth sections. Notable works include Márton Nemes's multisensory Stereo Paintings 11b (2025), Siebren Versteeg's media-critique piece History (2003), and Tanya Aguiñiga's socially engaged cotton-rope sculpture. The fair saw institutional visitors like collectors Don and Mera Rubell and curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, with sales reported for works by Élise Peroi and Samuel Nnorom.
At Art Basel Miami Beach, the art collective MSCHF invites fairgoers to touch their bronze sculpture *Touch Me Sculpture One More Time* (2024) on Perrotin’s stand, featuring a counter that tracks each pat. The Institute of Contemporary Art Miami hosted a VIP opening night with figures like director Alex Gartenfeld and artist Andreas Schulze, while the Thom Browne club stood out in matching attire. Other highlights include kinetic sculptures by Breakfast (Andrew Zolty) at 1 Hotel South Beach, a tarot-reading grotto by Julie Schenkelberg at Nada fair, and Robbie Williams’s furniture debut with Moooi at Design Miami.
Stephen Friedman, the Canadian-born, London-based dealer, will close his New York gallery in Tribeca at the end of February 2026, less than three years after opening the space in October 2023. The decision is described as a strategic evolution to consolidate operations in London, where several new directors have been hired. The gallery's artist roster will remain unchanged, and Friedman plans to stay active in the US art scene through major fairs. The closure follows a challenging period marked by a £1.7m loss in 2023 due to renovation costs and a downturn in the art market, with cash flow currently tight after slow exhibition sales.
Contemporary artists from Sri Lanka are gaining visibility across South Asia through gallery exhibitions, institutional shows, and art fairs. At Experimenter in Colaba, Pushpakanthan Pakkiyarajah's solo show 'No Race, No Colour' features installations like 'Charred Hyphal Mat' that explore organic communication and wounded ecologies rooted in the country's three-decade civil war. At the Art Mumbai fair, Hema Shironi uses fabric and green mesh to address post-war reconciliation, while earlier in Delhi, the twin exhibitions 'Homes Wrapped in Cloth, Borders Raised in Flags' and 'After Aphantasias' by Shrine Empire showcased similar themes. Artists such as Anoli Perera, Kingsley Gunatillake, Pala Pothupitye, and others are collectively presenting nuanced perspectives on memory, ecology, and joy beyond the conflict.
Paris Photo returns to the Grand Palais for its 28th edition, featuring 220 exhibitors from 33 countries, including 178 galleries and 42 publishers. The fair opens amid a risk-averse market where dealers report slower acquisitions, increased production costs, and reduced collector risk-taking, yet attendance reached 81,000 in 2024. Notable trends include a resurgence of Japanese galleries after a five-year absence, strong Latin American presentations from Buenos Aires, São Paulo, Santiago, and Mexico City, and a rise in women artists to 39% of practitioners, up from 20% in 2018. Highlights include MEM's exhibition of the August 6 Hiroshima Day student photography project and Claudia Andujar's Yanomami works shown by Galeria Vermelho.
The exhibition "Monuments" opens this week at the Museum of Contemporary Art (Moca) and the Brick in Los Angeles, featuring decommissioned Confederate statues alongside contemporary artworks. The show includes a double monument of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson on loan from Baltimore, which required road closures and careful logistics to install, as well as works by Kara Walker, Hank Willis Thomas, and Karon Davis that recontextualize these symbols of white supremacy. Curators Hamza Walker, Bennett Simpson, and Kara Walker collaborated on the exhibition, which runs from October 23 through May 3, 2026.
A series of regional auctions across the United States and the UK saw figural artworks and antique furniture achieve top prices. Highlights include Demétre Chiparus's bronze "Shimmer" selling for $33,275 at Ahlers & Ogletree, Andy Warhol's "Marilyn" screenprint reaching $425,000 at Heritage Auctions, and a Mission oak stand attributed to Gustave Stickley surprising at $87,600 at Kaminski Auctions. Other notable sales include a Ken Howard painting at Sworders, a Donald Roller Wilson chimpanzee painting pair at Brunk Auctions, and a Sorel Etrog bronze at Clarke Auction Gallery.
Frieze London and Frieze Masters have announced 15 solo shows featured across both fairs, highlighting emerging and established contemporary artists. The presentations span painting, sculpture, and installation, with participating galleries including major international dealers.
Altman Siegel, a prominent San Francisco gallery, will close on 22 November after 16 years in business. Founder Claudia Altman-Siegel announced the decision on 15 October, citing the difficulty for a gallery of its size to scale in the current climate. The gallery, which opened in 2009 at 49 Geary, expanded to a 5,000-square-foot space in the Minnesota Street Project complex and an outpost in Presidio Heights. Over its history, it staged 213 exhibitions and art fairs, representing artists such as Lynn Hershman Leeson, Trevor Paglen, Richard Mosse, Simon Denny, and Kiyan Williams. Its final exhibition will be an eighth solo show with Japanese painter Shinpei Kusanagi.
The article discusses how galleries are increasingly turning to merchandise and playful, low-cost art items to maintain public engagement during a downturn in the art market. It cites the example of Lucy Sparrow's hand-stitched felt fish and chip shop at Lyndsey Ingram gallery in London, which drew large crowds and media attention but generated far less revenue than traditional fine art sales. The piece notes that while the global art market fell 12% to $57.5bn in the past year, according to the Art Basel and UBS Art Market Report, galleries like Unit and Palmer are offering items such as Gavin Turk T-shirts and Andy Holden records to attract visitors.
Palestinian artist Samia Halaby is presenting a solo stand at Frieze Masters in London, hosted by Sfeir-Semler Gallery. This follows the abrupt cancellation of her retrospective at Indiana University Bloomington's Eskenazi Museum of Art last year, after staff raised concerns about her social media posts expressing support for Palestinian causes during the Israel-Gaza war. A petition launched by her grandniece garnered over 15,000 signatures, and the gallery reports sustained interest in her work from both private collectors and museums.
During Frieze London week, Thaddaeus Ropac gallery hosts Tom Sachs’s "A Good Shelf" exhibition featuring a working coffee and mezcal bar alongside 30 ceramic works inspired by Japanese tea bowls. At the satellite fair Minor Attractions, performance artist Mark McGowan (aka Artist Taxi Driver) displays subverted Daily Mail headlines. Ryan Gander’s solo show at Camden Arts Projects introduces a fourth animatronic mouse that critiques the state of contemporary art. Meanwhile, the Gallery of Everything presents "Ectoplasmix," a show of works depicting ectoplasm, including pieces by František Jaroslav Pecka, Mathew Weir, and Susan Hiller.
On 25 August, the Slovak National Gallery (SNG) removed a large permanent installation by artist Denisa Lehocká, allegedly without her permission and in violation of contract terms. The removal, which Lehocká calls a "gross violation," occurred amid a broader crisis at the institution, which has seen multiple directors fired and mass employee resignations under the country's populist government. The incident is part of a pattern of government intervention in the arts, including the firing of museum directors by Culture Minister Martina Šimkovičová, who has targeted "progressive art." In response, Slovak artists and organizations like Otvorená Kultúra! have issued the Bratislava Declaration for Artistic Freedom, calling on the EU to adopt a European Artistic Freedom Act to protect creative expression.
Art Basel Paris returns to the Grand Palais in 2025 with 206 exhibitors from 41 countries, including 29 first-time participants. The article highlights nine new galleries in the main sector, such as Stevenson (Cape Town), Lodovico Corsini (Brussels), Crèvecœur (Paris), Jan Kaps (Cologne), The Approach (London), and 47 Canal (New York), each presenting distinctive artists and works that reflect global contemporary art trends.
Sydney Contemporary, Australia's largest contemporary art fair, reported A$16m (US$10.5m) in sales for its 2025 edition, marking a fourth consecutive year of decline. The fair, held from 11 to 14 September at Carriageworks, featured 116 exhibitors and nearly 500 artists, making it the largest edition to date. Despite the drop from last year's A$17.5m and A$23m in 2022, founder Tim Etchells remains committed, citing record visitor numbers of 26,440 and a shift in buyer behavior where sales often close weeks after the fair. Notable sales included a A$1.5m painting by Emily Kam Kngwarray, still under consideration by a collector. A new photography section, Photo Sydney, debuted and will return next year.
Christie's and Sotheby's reported nearly flat first-half 2025 sales of $2.1bn and $2.2bn respectively, with Christie's 20th/21st-century art sales down 2% but luxury up 29%. The Mei Moses Art Index shows over 50% of auction lots sold at negative compound annual returns, which analyst Michael Moses calls 'the worst overall financial performance in the 21st century.' Meanwhile, Bitcoin, gold, and stocks have significantly outperformed art, with BlackRock's Bitcoin ETF alone attracting $84bn—far exceeding the global art market's total value. A record $43.9m Canaletto sale to a Bezos-linked buyer underscores that top-tier works still command attention, but the broader trend suggests wealthy investors are prioritizing financial returns over art as a status symbol.
Hayv Kahraman's latest solo show, "Ghost Fires," at Jack Shainman Gallery in New York City features paintings of women with smoke rising from their fingertips and pupil-less eyes, using scorched textures and marbled pigments. The body of work is her first since the January wildfires in Los Angeles displaced her and her family from their Altadena home, and it explores trauma, memory, and healing without directly depicting flames.
This article highlights five standout exhibitions at small and rising galleries for September 2025. Featured shows include Ali Tahayori's "Archive of Longing" at THIS IS NO FANTASY in Melbourne, where family photographs are transformed into fragile glass sculptures exploring memory; Michael Batty's "Ladders and Tone Poems" at Mark Moore Fine Art, an online exhibition of abstract, geometrically arranged paintings; and "William S. Burroughs: REDUX 1995–2025" at Robert Berman Gallery in Santa Monica, a survey of the Beat writer's gestural abstract paintings and mixed-media works.
California State University, Northridge's Art Galleries presents two new exhibitions exploring Los Angeles, place, and people. The Main Gallery hosts "The Journey is the Destination: Recording Los Angeles," featuring photography, mixed-media, site-specific installations, and sculptures by artists including Marisela Norte, Debra Scacco, Fía Benitez, Aaron Douglas Estrada, Vincent Enrique Hernandez, Erick Medel, and Pamela Smith Hudson. Curated by Holly Jerger, the show challenges colonial mapping conventions and highlights gentrification, environmental depletion, and stereotypes affecting historically neglected parts of the city. In the West Gallery, "The Warmth of the Sun: A Recent Survey of Tierra Del Sol Artists" runs through October 15, the first of a three-part series spotlighting local San Fernando Valley art organizations, with subsequent exhibitions featuring Tia Chucha’s Centro Cultural and 11:11 Projects.
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The third annual Space to Breathe summer art exhibition, titled 'Making Waves – Breaking Ground,' is on view at Bowhouse in St Monans, Fife, Scotland, from 19 July to 4 August 2025 and 16-31 August 2025. Organized by Sophie Camu Lindsay and Alexander Lindsay in collaboration with Purdy Hicks Gallery, the show features 11 artists and over 100 works—paintings, drawings, and photographs—that explore the natural world, particularly land and sea. The installation uses a unique hanging system in the 900-square-meter barn space, allowing visitors to create their own journey through the works. Artists push boundaries in technique, with many using innovative photographic processes that blur the line between photography and painting, such as Anaïs Tondeur's rayograms of radioactive plants from Chernobyl.
The article reports on the decline of the traditional contemporary art gallery model, driven by rising rents, changing collector behavior, and the rise of new artist categories. Tim Blum closed his Blum & Poe galleries in Los Angeles and Tokyo, citing systemic issues rather than market conditions. Art Basel and UBS data show the art market shrank overall but the number of sales increased, indicating a shift toward mid-priced works. Collectors are moving away from "blue-chip" artists toward "red-chip" artists who gain value through viral hype and cultural relevance, exemplified by Olaolu Slawn's accessible solo show at Saatchi Yates. Celebrities like actor Adrien Brody are also entering the market, though his work has been criticized as derivative. Meanwhile, smaller galleries like Tiwa Gallery, Landdd, and Marta are thriving by focusing on genuine connection, and retail spaces like Gentle Monster and Dover Street Market are blending art with commerce.