Fraenkel Gallery has partnered with New York's Metrograph theater to present a film series curated by six of its represented artists. The series, titled "Fraenkel Gallery Presents," runs from May 8–17, with each artist selecting a film and several introducing their screenings. The collaboration includes an opening event featuring artist Carrie Mae Weems and director Joel Coen.
Aipad: The Photography Show is taking place at the Park Avenue Armory in New York from April 22-26, 2026, featuring works from over 70 galleries. The exhibition highlights include Bill Brandt's 1952 nude, Rania Matar's portrait of a young woman in Lebanon, and Zanele Muholi's 2009 portrait of a lesbian pageant queen, alongside works by Tania Franco Klein, Ruth Thorne-Thomsen, and others that explore themes of identity, anxiety, and alternative realities.
Sculptor Barbara Chase-Riboud has revealed she declined an offer to represent the United States at the 2025 Venice Biennale, stating that for her, "this was not the moment." The offer was made by the American Arts Conservancy, the nonprofit organization commissioning the US Pavilion. The revelation comes amid ongoing scrutiny of the selection process that ultimately led to artist Alma Allen being chosen, following reports that the Trump administration removed diversity language from application materials.
Victoria Miro is hosting the largest exhibition of Paula Rego’s drawings to date, curated by the artist’s son, Nick Willing. Spanning from the 1950s until her death in 2022, the show features intimate pencil sketches, pastels, and ink drawings that reveal the foundational narratives of her career, including her early childhood sketches, her fierce opposition to the Salazar dictatorship, and her advocacy for women's rights.
Art Dubai has announced a streamlined "special edition" for its 2026 iteration, featuring a reduced roster of approximately 75 exhibitors. Scheduled for May 15–17 at Madinat Jumeirah, the fair is pivoting toward a regional core, with 60 percent of participants hailing from the Gulf and Southwest Asia. To address economic pressures and regional instability, the fair is implementing a novel risk-sharing financial model where booth costs are partially tied to sales performance.
Alserkal Avenue in Dubai is expanding its traditional Art Week into a five-week "Art Month" running from April 18 to May 18. This strategic extension includes 16 gallery exhibitions, over 100 public events, and a new commercially focused group show featuring 12 UAE-based galleries. The initiative aims to provide a more sustainable platform for the local art ecosystem, especially as the Art Dubai fair has been rescheduled to mid-May and adapted in response to regional instability.
American artist Liza Lou discusses her recent shift in practice, moving from her famous large-scale bead installations to a new body of work that fuses oil painting with glass beads. After years of collaborative work in South Africa and focusing on monochrome tones, Lou has returned to a solitary studio practice in a windowless warehouse in the San Fernando Valley. This new phase is defined by a "headlong love affair with colour," inspired by the hallucinatory palette of the Mojave Desert and a transition from logical drawing to a more intuitive, freestyle process.
Nonagenarian painter Joan Semmel is preparing for a major career moment with a retrospective at the Jewish Museum and a dual-city exhibition, 'Continuities', at Alexander Gray Associates in New York and Brussels. At 93, Semmel continues to produce large-scale, vibrant works from her SoHo studio that focus on the aging female nude, using her own body as a primary reference. The new works, including 'Here I Am' (2025), maintain her lifelong commitment to depicting the female form through a non-idealized, authentic lens that rejects the traditional male gaze.
The 13th edition of Expo Chicago has opened at Navy Pier with a streamlined selection of 130 international exhibitors. This year’s fair features a more curated and manageable scale, drawing a significant crowd of museum directors, curators, and collectors to the Windy City. Notable presentations range from contemporary Canadian artist duos to rare historical artifacts, reflecting a high bar for quality across diverse media.
Steven Soderbergh’s new film, The Christophers, explores the complexities of artistic legacy and authenticity through the story of Julian Sklar, a fictional washed-up artist played by Ian McKellen. The plot follows Sklar’s children as they hire an art restorer, played by Michaela Coel, to secretly finish their father’s legendary unfinished series to capitalize on his market value. To ground the film in reality, screenwriter Ed Solomon consulted with art world figures like dealer George Barker and artists Jann Haworth and Derek Boshier, while production designer Antonia Lowe and painter Barnaby Gorton created the physical artworks seen on screen.
Jackson Fine Art in Atlanta is hosting "Gordon Parks: The South in Colour," a major exhibition curated by photographer Dawoud Bey. The show features over 30 works from Parks’ seminal 1956 "Segregation Story" series, including several previously unshown images of the Thornton, Causey, and Tanner families in Alabama. The exhibition coincides with the 70th anniversary of the series' original publication in Life magazine and the 20th anniversary of The Gordon Parks Foundation.
The Chicago art space Wrightwood 659 is hosting a major survey titled "Dispossessions in the Americas: The Extraction of Bodies, Land, and Heritage from La Conquista to the Present." Featuring over 35 contemporary Latin American artists, including Regina José Galindo and the late Ana Mendieta, the exhibition is the culmination of a multi-year research project funded by the Mellon Foundation. The show explores the historical and ongoing impacts of colonial dispossession on Indigenous, Afro-descendant, and LGBTQ+ communities through diverse media ranging from performance art to installation.
The Hole, a prominent gallery with locations in New York and Los Angeles, is facing significant financial distress characterized by shuttered spaces and mounting legal disputes. Following a period of rapid expansion fueled by the 2021–2023 art market boom, the gallery has permanently closed its West Hollywood location and is currently facing multiple lawsuits from Manhattan landlords alleging over $180,000 in unpaid rent and taxes. Founder Kathy Grayson attributes the crisis to a sharp decline in sales starting in late 2023, which has left the gallery struggling to pay artists, staff, and creditors.
Ariana Papademetropoulos has debuted a new solo exhibition titled "Glass Slipper" at Thaddaeus Ropac’s gallery in Paris. The show features a diverse range of works, including hyper-realistic paintings of dry-cleaned dresses, surrealist landscapes featuring floating chairs, and a central immersive installation. This centerpiece consists of a mattress and a fish tank filled with 150 kissing fish, accompanied by a commissioned ambient soundtrack by Nicolas Godin of the band Air, designed to evoke a meditative, ritualistic experience.
Several galleries announced new artist representations and expansions. Patron Gallery added painter Miao Wang, who will appear at Expo Chicago; Jessica Silverman added Neo-Pop painter Koak; Anat Ebgi added painter Veronica Fernandez; and Sundaram Tagore Gallery opened a new London space. Additionally, Open Restitution Africa launched an AI-powered database to assist with restitution processes.
The article is a table of contents for the February 2026 issue of Contemporary Art Review LA, listing numerous features, interviews, and reviews. It highlights an interview with artist Eddie Kang at Gana Art Los Angeles, alongside other content covering topics like olfactory art, tarot, video art, and reviews of exhibitions across Los Angeles galleries and museums.
The global art market returned to growth in 2025, reaching $59.6 billion in sales according to the latest Art Basel and UBS Art Market Report. This 4 percent increase ended a two-year decline, driven primarily by a 9 percent surge in public auction sales and a significant revival in high-value transactions for works priced over $10 million. While the United States maintained its dominant 44 percent market share, the recovery was uneven, with the Impressionist and Old Masters sectors seeing major gains while Postwar and Contemporary art continued to cool.
hong kong art week art basel preview
Hong Kong’s art market is signaling a cautious recovery in 2026 as the city prepares for its marquee Art Week. Despite macroeconomic improvements in real estate and equities, the sector is grappling with significant logistical hurdles caused by the US–Israel–Iran War. Shipping costs between Europe and China have surged by 30%, leading to the cancellation of the International Antiques Fair and the withdrawal of high-profile delegations like the Sharjah Art Foundation.
The article is a table of contents for the February 2026 issue of the Contemporary Art Review LA, listing its featured articles, interviews, dealer profiles, and exhibition reviews. The content covers a wide range of subjects including olfactory art, tarot art, the Made in L.A. 2025 biennial, video art, and reviews of shows at various Los Angeles galleries and museums like MOCA, the Orange County Museum of Art, and Château Shatto.
Stephen Friedman Gallery, a fixture of London’s Mayfair district since 1995, has abruptly entered administration and closed its doors to the public. The gallery confirmed the insolvency process following its last-minute withdrawal from the inaugural Art Basel Qatar. Approximately 25 employees are expected to be laid off, and represented artists have been advised to retrieve their works immediately as the firm undergoes a financial review by FRP Advisory.
The Felix Art Fair kicked off LA Art Week at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, drawing significant crowds despite logistical hurdles. While long lines for elevators slowed the initial flow of visitors to the upper floors, exhibitors reported steady interest and early sales. New York-based dealers faced particular challenges arriving for the opening due to a major Nor’easter that disrupted flights across the East Coast, forcing many to finalize their booths just hours before the VIP preview.
María Berrío’s mixed-media masterpiece "La Cena" (2012) is returning to the auction block at Christie’s post-war and contemporary day sale on May 17. The work, which draws inspiration from Da Vinci’s "The Last Supper" and features Berrío’s signature intricate collage style, is being sold by New York collector Dow Kim. Kim acquired the piece just two years ago for $1.56 million, significantly exceeding its initial estimate.
Artist Mia Westerlund Roosen is currently presenting a solo exhibition titled "Then and Now" at Nunu Fine Art in New York, on view through February 21. The show spans her work from the 1970s to the present, featuring sculptures and drawings that explore materiality and the human body, including her notable 1981 phallic forms *Heat* and *Conical*.
Artist Ai Weiwei has claimed in a new interview that he faced censorship in the West, citing a specific incident with London's Royal Academy. In late 2023, an exhibition of his new works at the Lisson Gallery was canceled after he posted a controversial tweet about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Subsequently, the Royal Academy held a vote on whether to revoke his honorary membership over accusations of antisemitism, which he won. Ai also claims the Academy then declined to publish an article he wrote on free speech for its magazine.
Galerie Michael Haas in Berlin is presenting "André Thomkins: Lackskins," a focused exhibition on the Swiss artist's experimental technique developed in the 1950s. Thomkins (1930–1985) created these works by dripping varnish onto water and transferring the floating pigment to paper, a process blending controlled manipulation with chance. The show, running through March 6, 2026, highlights a body of work rediscovered only in the last 15 years, including pieces like "Astronauten" (1962).
New York’s Jeffrey Deitch gallery apologized to artist Miles Greenberg after rapper Lexa Gates staged a performance inside a giant wheel at the gallery on January 14 to promote her album. Greenberg noted striking similarities to his own endurance piece Oysterknife, in which he walked on a conveyor belt for nearly a full day, first performed at the Marina Abramović Institute in 2020 and restaged at Jeffrey Deitch in 2021. Gates responded that she had never seen Greenberg’s work, but the gallery later acknowledged an “unauthorized derivative” of Greenberg’s work had taken place without his consent.
Artnet News reports on the rediscovery of Colombian artist Luis Fernando Zapata (1951–1994), whose solo booth at Art Basel Miami Beach features works from 1988 to 1994 that resemble ancient artifacts. The booth, titled “The Immemorial: The Transcendence of Luis Fernando Zapata,” is presented by Bogotá’s Galería Elvira Moreno in the fair’s Survey sector, which highlights historically significant art made before 2000. Zapata’s pieces—including totemic shields, a mud-brown sarcophagus with cuneiform-like glyphs, barques, steles, and his “excavaciones”—are mostly hand-sculpted papier-mâché, evoking ritual and imagined cosmologies. Diagnosed HIV+ in the mid-1980s, Zapata died in 1994, leaving a body of work that has remained largely absent from the queer canon and art-world consciousness until now.
Artist Gabrielle Goliath was dropped by her South African representative, Goodman Gallery, before the cancellation of her proposed Venice Biennale pavilion, according to a report by Daily Maverick. Goliath was one of around a dozen artists who exited the gallery between last fall and the present. The gallery clarified that it did not end representation because of her pavilion, citing a structural business review and market contraction. Goliath had been with the gallery for over a decade and will continue to be represented by Galleria Raffaella Cortese. After her representation ended, South African culture minister Gayton McKenzie canceled her pavilion, which was to address killings of women and queer people in South Africa, a genocide in Namibia, and Israel’s war in Gaza. McKenzie denied censorship, claiming interference by an unnamed foreign country, later reported by Ynetnews to be Qatar.
The 12th edition of Uruguay's Este Arte fair took place last week in José Ignacio, featuring 14 exhibitors and attracting 5,000 visitors over four days. Notable works included Vanderlei Lopes's aluminum installation resembling a silver leak, Germán Tagle's liquid landscapes paired with altered New York Times front pages, and Diego Bianchi's chimeric sculptures. The fair favored abstraction, with strong sales reported across galleries such as Almeida & Dale, Aninat Galeria, Galerie Jocelyn Wolff, Piero Atchugarry Gallery, and Black Gallery.
Art Palm Beach returns for its fourth edition from January 28 to February 1, 2026, at the Palm Beach County Convention Center. The fair features a mix of returning and first-time galleries from the U.S. and abroad, including Gefen Gallery (San Francisco), Onessimo Fine Art (Palm Beach), Oliver Sears Gallery (Dublin), and John Martin Gallery (London). Highlights include Hollis Taggart’s presentation of John Knuth’s fly paintings, Pontone Gallery’s showcase of Matteo Massagrande, and Provident Fine Art’s retrospective ‘Sylvester Stallone: Evolution.’ For the first time, the DIVERSEartPB program presents a large-scale, biennial-style installation curated by Marisa Caichiolo, featuring Chilean artist Eugenia Vargas-Pereira’s participatory work AGUAS (1991).