The 20 Most Expensive Artworks Hitting the Auction Block This Season

The May 2026 New York auctions at Christie’s, Sotheby’s, and Phillips will feature 20 high-value lots priced at $30 million or more, including works by Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, Pablo Picasso, Piet Mondrian, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Cy Twombly, Gerhard Richter, and others. The sales are staggered around the Venice Biennale and Frieze New York, with Sotheby’s holding its contemporary evening auction on May 14 and Christie’s its 20th-century sale on May 18. Notable consignments come from the estates of S.I. Newhouse, former MoMA board president Agnes Gund, and dealer Marian Goodman.

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Art Basel Miami Beach opened its VIP preview on Wednesday with strong early sales, including multiple seven-figure deals. Major galleries like Hauser & Wirth, White Cube, Gladstone, and Pace reported significant sales, with a $3.9 million George Condo painting leading the pack. The fair introduced a new digital-art section called Zero 10, featuring works by Beeple, which drew large crowds. Collectors such as Craig Robins, Mera and Don Rubell, Norman Braman, and Beth Rudin DeWoody were among the early attendees, and the event featured high-profile works by Jeff Koons and Maurizio Cattelan.

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Artist Dan Colen and his nonprofit Sky High Farm are launching a new biennial exhibition titled “TREES NEVER END AND HOUSES NEVER END,” opening June 28 at a historic apple cold storage warehouse in Germantown, New York. The exhibition, curated by Colen, features over 50 artists including Alvaro Barrington, Nan Goldin, Roni Horn, and Rirkrit Tiravanija, and marks the farm’s relocation from its original 40-acre site in Ancramdale to a new 560-acre property in Ancram. The biennial serves as an alternative fundraising model for the organization, which grows nutritious food for communities lacking access to fresh produce and has never sold its harvest.

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Sotheby's Asia faces another leadership shake-up as Elaine Holt departs her role as chairman of modern and contemporary art in Asia after just one year. Jasmine Prasetio, Sotheby's managing director for Southeast Asia, will relocate to Hong Kong to serve as interim chair. Meanwhile, European galleries Meyer Riegger and Galerie Jocelyn Wolff are partnering to open a new space in Seoul called Meyer Riegger Wolff, led by Gala Musi, with an inaugural show during Frieze Seoul. Design Miami will make its Asian debut in Seoul, and London-based artist Firenze Lai has joined White Cube's roster. In Taiwan, the Taichung Green Museumbrary, designed by SANAA, is set to open in December, and the Gwangju Biennale Foundation has appointed Youn Bummo as its new president.

London galleries Edel Assanti and Emalin both announce expansions

London-based contemporary galleries Edel Assanti and Emalin have both announced significant expansions within the UK capital. Edel Assanti is opening a second, more intimate location in St. James’s to complement its larger Fitzrovia flagship, launching with a focused exhibition of works by Lonnie Holley. Simultaneously, Emalin is moving its primary operations from Shoreditch to a sprawling 5,000-square-foot space in Clerkenwell previously occupied by Modern Art, while maintaining its historic Shoreditch outpost.

Bringing back the salon: UK organisation aims to revive Brighton's contemporary art scene

The Adelaide Salon, a new arts organization founded in 2024 by Pascal Dowers and Paulina Anzorge, is staging a ticketed contemporary art event at Brighton's Royal Pavilion on 30 May, featuring live art and performance. This follows the organization's earlier exhibitions at their home in Adelaide Crescent and a current takeover of the Founders Room at Brighton Dome with the exhibition Act O (until 25 May), part of the Brighton Festival. The salon aims to revive Brighton's art scene after notable losses, including the 2023 closure of Brighton University's Centre for Contemporary Art (CCA) and the withdrawal of Arts Council funding at Fabrica gallery.

Beer With a Painter: Keith Mayerson

Hyperallergic interviews Los Angeles-based painter Keith Mayerson, who discusses his ongoing 'My American Dream' series—a cosmology of paintings blending American identity, activism, and popular culture. The conversation covers his early influences from comics, the Muppets, and Hunter S. Thompson, his transition from cartooning to painting, and his vibratory, swirling brushwork. Mayerson's work has been featured in the 2014 Whitney Biennial and is currently on view at the Aspen Art Museum and the Pollock-Krasner House.

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A deadly fire in Hong Kong's Tai Po district, which killed at least 159 people and left 31 missing, has sparked an online battle over the role of bamboo scaffolding in the blaze. Photographer Elaine Li and other artists, architects, and cultural historians are defending the centuries-old craft against early news reports that implicated it, fearing it may be unfairly blamed and regulated out of existence. Officials have ordered all scaffolding mesh removed and arrested 21 people on suspicion of manslaughter, but the conversation has grown into a broader fight to protect a cultural symbol of Hong Kong's identity.

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Rosalyn Drexler, a Pop artist known for her 1960s paintings exploring Hollywood, violence, and gender, died in New York at age 98. Her death was confirmed by Garth Greenan Gallery, which represents her. Drexler also wrote novels and briefly worked as a professional wrestler before turning to art.

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This week's art industry roundup covers major developments across art fairs, auction houses, galleries, and museums. At Expo Chicago, emerging artist Auudi Dorsey sold her painting *Rumble* (2025) for $14,000 on opening day at Palo Gallery, while the fair featured 170 exhibitors including 20 from South Korea amid tariff concerns. Vienna Contemporary appointed Abaseh Mirvali as artistic advisor for 2025-2026. Sotheby's was selected by Barbara Gladstone's estate trustees to sell her collection, starting with a May 15 single-owner sale of 12 works estimated at over $12 million. Nine artworks from the Anne and Sid Bass collection head to Christie's New York, and Sotheby's secured a $70 million Alberto Giacometti sculpture for its May 13 evening sale. Philipp Kaiser departed Marian Goodman Gallery after six years. Customs backlogs from President Trump's import policy changes are causing shipping headaches, with DHL halting business-to-consumer shipments over $800 to the U.S. Air de Paris withdrew from Art Basel. Mexico City gallery OMR hired Agustina Ferreyra as director. Angelica Jopling is expanding her London gallery Incubator to New York. Alexander Gray Associates now represents Donald Moffett. In museums, the National Endowment for the Humanities, following DOGE staff cuts, is offering grants up to $600,000 for statues for Trump's National Garden of American Heroes. CCS Bard appointed Lauren Cornell as artistic director and Mariano Lopez Seoane as graduate program director. The New York Academy of Art named Paul R. Provost president. The Artists' Legacy Foundation appointed Daisy Murray Holman executive director. The Speed Art Museum named Diallo Simon-Ponte assistant curator. The Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow appointed Daria Kotova director. The Nasher Sculpture Center named Carlos Basualdo director. The Cultural Infrastructure Index reported a 17% drop in completed cultural projects in 2024.

An Audacious $724 Million Building Reinvents LACMA

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) has unveiled the David Geffen Galleries, a $724 million architectural feat designed by Peter Zumthor. This massive, horizontal structure spans over Wilshire Boulevard, replacing several older buildings with a single, elevated concrete form. The new space abandons traditional chronological and geographical silos in favor of rotating, thematic displays that integrate the museum’s diverse encyclopedic collections.

10 Power Players in Paris

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The inaugural edition of Paris+ by Art Basel has opened in Paris, marking a significant shift in the city's art fair landscape. The article profiles ten key figures instrumental in shaping the French art market, including fair director Clément Delépine, dealer and committee president Marion Papillon, and institutional leaders like Suzanne Pagé of the Fondation Louis Vuitton and Rebecca Lamarche-Vadel of Lafayette Anticipations.

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Schoelkopf Gallery in New York has opened "Mary Abbott: To Draw Imagination," the first comprehensive survey exhibition dedicated to Abstract Expressionist painter Mary Abbott, who died in 2019. The show follows the gallery's announcement that it now represents Abbott's estate. Abbott, born in 1921 into a prominent New York family with presidential lineage, studied at the Art Students League and Subjects of the Artists, and showed alongside Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and others in the landmark 1951 Ninth Street Show, yet her legacy has remained largely overlooked.

Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s new David Geffen Galleries reframe 6,000 years of history

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) is preparing to open its new $720m David Geffen Galleries, a massive undulating concrete structure designed by Pritzker Prize-winning architect Peter Zumthor. Spanning Wilshire Boulevard, the new building adds 110,000 square feet of gallery space and 3.5 acres of public parkland, marking the completion of a two-decade capital project led by Director Michael Govan. The facility will house the museum’s permanent collection, which has been largely out of public view for seven years, and features innovative exhibition strategies such as hanging artworks directly onto concrete walls.

The Triumphant New LACMA Has the Potential to Rewrite Art History

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) is set to open its new $724 million David Geffen Galleries, designed by Swiss architect Peter Zumthor. The building features a radical, non-linear layout that eschews traditional chronological and geographical hierarchies, allowing artworks from 15 different curatorial departments to be displayed in conversation with one of another. Despite years of controversy regarding its concrete design and a 10 percent reduction in exhibition space, the museum is positioning the new structure as a flexible "laboratory" for global art history.

Art Movements: Dozens Laid Off at Artnet and Artsy

Digital art giants Artnet and Artsy have implemented significant layoffs following their recent merger under the investment firm Beowolff Capital. The cuts, which occurred on April 16, impacted dozens of employees across both organizations, including senior editorial staff such as Sarah Cascone and Eileen Kinsella. The restructuring follows a reported 12% revenue decline for Artnet in early 2025 and involves the shutdown of Artnet's German entity as the two companies consolidate into a single team led by CEO Jeffrey Yin.

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New York's November 2025 auction season is set to feature at least $1.67 billion in art across Sotheby's, Christie's, and Phillips, a 54% increase in estimates from the same period last year. The season is dominated by major estates, including Leonard Lauder's $400 million trove at Sotheby's with Klimt paintings and Matisse bronzes, Cindy Pritzker's collection featuring a Van Gogh, and anonymous Surrealist works. Christie's offers $736 million in low estimates from collections like Robert and Patricia Weis, Elaine Wynn, and Stefan Edlis. Phillips remains risk-averse, focusing on established names. The market shows a flight to quality, with emerging art reduced and delegated to day sales, while ultra-contemporary segments contract.

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Abstract Expressionist painter Mary Abbott has died at age 98 due to heart failure, as confirmed by McCormick Gallery in Chicago, which represented her for nearly 20 years. Known for her colorful canvases and sweeping brushstrokes, Abbott was praised by the New York Times in 2008 as one of the last great Abstract Expressionist painters of her generation. Despite her early modeling career on Vogue covers and her immersion in the downtown New York art scene alongside figures like Mark Rothko and Willem de Kooning, her work received little scholarly recognition until the 2016 Denver Art Museum exhibition "Women of Abstract Expressionism," which traveled to the Mint Museum and Palm Springs Art Museum.

The 14 Best Art Museum Exhibits in the World in 2026

PaperCity tapped Elaine de Kooning House founder Chris Byrne to curate a list of the 14 best art museum exhibitions worldwide in 2026. Highlights include a major Marcel Duchamp retrospective at MoMA—the first North American survey in over 50 years—featuring nearly 300 works, and Raphael's first comprehensive U.S. exhibition at The Met, titled 'Raphael: Sublime Poetry,' with 200 drawings, paintings, and tapestries. Other notable shows include 'The Shakers: A World in the Making' at ICA Philadelphia and a Guerrilla Girls exhibition at the Getty Center in Los Angeles.

‘Christmas came early’: Art Basel Miami Beach opens with avalanche of blue-chip sales

Art Basel Miami Beach opened its 23rd edition with a surge of blue-chip sales, signaling renewed market confidence. Major galleries reported strong early results: David Zwirner sold a Gerhard Richter painting for $5.5m and an Alice Neel for $3.3m; Hauser & Wirth saw sales 40% higher than last year, including a George Condo for nearly $4m and a Louise Bourgeois for $3.2m. Other notable sales included works by Alex Katz, Pablo Picasso, Sam Gilliam, and Robert Rauschenberg, with 283 galleries participating at the Miami Beach Convention Center.

National Portrait Gallery

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London's Southbank Centre to receive £10m government funding boost

The UK government has announced a £10 million funding boost for London’s Southbank Centre as part of a broader £128 million investment package for 130 cultural venues nationwide. Administered by Arts Council England, the grant is earmarked for urgent infrastructure repairs, including fixing leaking roofs and modernizing rigging systems, coinciding with the center's 75th anniversary. Other major beneficiaries of the Creative Foundations Fund include the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art and Firstsite gallery.

Walk the auction: your guide to Christie’s 20th and 21st Century Art sales in NY this November

Christie’s is holding its 20th and 21st Century Art auctions in New York this November, featuring masterpieces by David Hockney, Mark Rothko, Pablo Picasso, Lucian Freud, and Richard Diebenkorn. The sales include works from distinguished private collections such as The Collection of Robert F. and Patricia G. Ross Weis, Elaine: The Collection of Elaine Wynn, the Edlis | Neeson Collection, and the Arnold and Joan Saltzman Collection. A free public exhibition runs from 7–20 November at Christie’s Rockefeller Center galleries, with live auctions on 18 and 20 November, including an Impressionist & Modern Works on Paper Sale and a Post-War & Contemporary Art Day Sale. Highlights include Edgar Degas’ pastel *Danseuses sur la scène* (c. 1879), a Joan Miró from 1942, and a Frida Kahlo painting with a storied exhibition history.

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Michael Govan, director of LACMA, discusses the opening of the new $720 million David Geffen Galleries on April 19, designed by architect Peter Zumthor. The 110,000-square-foot space features concrete walls, natural light, and spans Wilshire Boulevard, replacing traditional white-cube galleries with a fluid, non-chronological layout organized around bodies of water. Govan, who has led the museum for two decades, describes the project as a once-in-a-century opportunity to rethink the encyclopedic museum model.

larry gagosian bookhampton summer reading

Larry Gagosian, the world-renowned art dealer, has purchased BookHampton, an independent bookstore in East Hampton, after its original owner put it up for sale last fall. In an interview for CULTURED's new column "Required Reading," Gagosian discusses his reading habits, his plans to maintain the store as a community hub while expanding its art and design offerings, and shares his personal summer reading list, which includes biographies of Douglas Cooper and Albert Barnes.

Artists Sell More Than $1 M. in Art at Sotheby’s in Support of a Debt-Free Yale MFA Program

A group of artists including Mickalene Thomas, Tammy Nguyen, and Richard Prince are donating works to a Sotheby’s contemporary art day sale next month, with proceeds expected to exceed $1 million. All funds will go toward making Yale University’s MFA art program tuition-free. The sale features works by Yale alumni both historical—Walker Evans, Josef Albers—and contemporary, such as Dominic Chambers and Do Ho Suh, whose $200,000–$300,000 piece is among the lots. The highest-estimated work is a Richard Prince photograph from his “Spiritual America” series, valued at $500,000–$700,000.

LACMA’s New Building Invites You to Chart Your Own Path

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) is set to open its long-awaited and highly debated new building, the David Geffen Galleries. Designed by Swiss architect Peter Zumthor, the $720 million concrete structure spans Wilshire Boulevard and replaces several older buildings with a single, elevated exhibition level. The opening marks the culmination of a decade-long project spearheaded by Director Michael Govan, featuring a non-linear layout that integrates the museum's encyclopedic collection into thematic displays rather than traditional chronological or regional divisions.

2026 Guggenheim Fellowships Go to Sonya Clark, John Miller, and American Artist

The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has announced its 101st class of fellows, awarding 223 scholars and artists across 55 disciplines for 2026. Selected from a pool of nearly 5,000 applicants, the new cohort includes prominent visual artists such as Sonya Clark, John Miller, American Artist, and Kota Ezawa. The fellowships provide significant financial grants to individuals who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts.

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The Denver Art Museum is hosting "Women of Abstract Expressionism," the first major museum exhibition dedicated exclusively to female painters of the movement. Curated by Gwen Chanzit, the show features over 50 works by artists including Helen Frankenthaler, Jay DeFeo, Elaine de Kooning, and Mary Abbott. The exhibition highlights how these women were integral to the first internationally influential American art movement but were historically sidelined in favor of male peers like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning.

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The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) has announced that its new building, the David Geffen Galleries, will open to members on April 19 and to the public on May 4. Designed by Swiss architect Peter Zumthor, the 900-foot-long structure spans Wilshire Boulevard and offers 110,000 square feet of exhibition space, displaying 2,500 to 3,000 objects from the permanent collection on a single level. The museum also revealed that Willow Bay has been elected co-chair of its board of trustees, succeeding the late Elaine Wynn.