Frieze New York Kicks Off with Seven-Figure Sales and High Energy: ‘It’s a Fiesta’

Frieze New York kicked off its preview day at the Shed in Manhattan with strong sales and high energy, as many attendees arrived fresh from the Venice Biennale. Galleries reported brisk presales and early placements, with White Cube selling major works by El Anatsui and Antony Gormley for seven-figure sums, and other dealers like James Cohan Gallery nearly selling out their booths. Collectors, advisors, and celebrities including Anderson Cooper, Michael Stipe, and Leonardo DiCaprio were spotted, while the Brooklyn Museum made acquisitions through the new Sherman Family Foundation Acquisition Fund.

Georg Baselitz obituary

Georg Baselitz, the German painter and sculptor known for his provocative, expressionistic works and his iconic upside-down paintings, has died at the age of 88. The article traces his life from his childhood in war-torn Germany, through his early career as a rebellious artist in divided Berlin, to his rise as an international art star. It highlights his 1961 manifesto poster "Pandemonium I," his rejection of American abstraction, and his controversial 1963 exhibition that was raided by police for its explicit content.

Cai Guo-Qiang joins White Cube

White Cube now represents Cai Guo-Qiang, making the British gallery the first to represent the Chinese-born, New York-based artist known for his gunpowder paintings. The announcement coincides with White Cube’s solo presentation of Cai’s ongoing gunpowder painting series featuring birds at Tefaf New York (14-19 May). Cai had a solo show at White Cube’s Bermondsey space last autumn, titled *Gunpowder and Abstraction 2015-2016*, his first London presentation since his large-scale project at Tate Modern in 2003.

East Africa meets Western Europe as Michael Armitage takes on Venice's Palazzo Grassi

The artist Michael Armitage opens a monographic exhibition titled 'The Promise of Change' at Venice's Palazzo Grassi, featuring 46 large paintings and nearly 100 sketches that survey his past decade of work. At 42, Armitage is the youngest artist to receive a solo show at the palazzo, which is owned by François Pinault and has previously hosted Albert Oehlen, Luc Tuymans, and Marlene Dumas. The exhibition highlights Armitage's fusion of East African and Western European artistic influences, drawing on his upbringing in Kenya and his training at London's Byam Shaw School of Art, the Slade, and the Royal Academy.

Artists v fascists, Khmer Rouge horrors, fab flowers and an eye-popping nude – the week in art

This week's art roundup from The Guardian features a major exhibition at Towner Eastbourne titled 'Comrades in Art: Artists Against Fascism,' which examines how artists, poets, and intellectuals used their work to resist the rise of extremism in 1930s Europe, drawing on the history of the Artists International Association (AIA). Other highlights include 'Hidden: Photography and Displacement Under the Khmer Rouge' at The Wiener Holocaust Library in London, a show of early Netherlandish drawings at the British Museum, Katharina Grosse's colorful installations at White Cube, and a flower-themed survey at Kettle's Yard. The image of the week is Sylvia Sleigh's 1963 portrait 'The Bridge (Johanna Lawrenson),' part of a new exhibition of the Welsh artist's work. The article also covers news items such as Lydia Ourahmane's Venice Biennale installation, a Holbein portrait mystery, a restored stained-glass window by Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris, and Anish Kapoor's call to exclude the US from the Venice Biennale due to 'politics of hate.'

From Lee Cronin’s The Mummy to Zayn: your complete entertainment guide to the week ahead

From Lee Cronin’s The Mummy to Zayn: your complete entertainment guide to the week ahead

British artist Michaela Yearwood-Dan is launching her first UK institutional solo exhibition at The Whitworth in Manchester. The immersive installation blends painting, ceramics, sound, and poetry to explore complex themes of colonial history, religious institutions, and the journey toward personal and collective liberation.

Petal passion, super-surreal Polaroids and Billy Childish’s California – the week in art

This week’s art roundup highlights several major exhibitions across the UK, including a floral-themed survey at Kettle’s Yard featuring artists from Henri Rousseau to Lubaina Himid. Other notable openings include Billy Childish’s expressionistic California desert paintings at Carl Freedman Gallery, Katharina Grosse’s site-specific installations at White Cube, and Steve McQueen’s new photography book, 'Bounty', which explores the colonial history of Grenada through its flora.

$2.2 million El Anatsui work leads Frieze New York 2026 sales.

Frieze New York 2026 opened its 15th edition at The Shed in Manhattan on May 13th with a VIP preview, drawing collectors, museum directors, artists, and celebrities like Leonardo DiCaprio, Julia Fox, and Sharon Stone. The fair features 68 galleries from 25 countries and runs through May 17th, with a $2.2 million work by El Anatsui leading reported sales.

Our Guide to New York Art Week 2026

New York Art Week 2026 brings a major convergence of art events across the city, including several prominent art fairs such as Frieze New York, Independent New York, TEFAF New York, and NADA New York. The week also features gallery openings spanning from Tribeca to the Upper East Side, as well as auction previews ahead of key sales at Sotheby’s, Christie’s, and Phillips.

The 5 Best Booths at Frieze New York 2026

Frieze New York 2026 opened its VIP day at The Shed on May 13, following the Venice Biennale's opening week. Now in its 15th edition, the fair anchors New York Art Week, a series of concurrent fairs, gallery openings, auctions, and parties that take over the city each May. The article highlights the five best booths at the fair, curated by Artsy Editorial.

Frieze New York Is an Assembly-Line Salad

At Frieze New York, curator Lucien Zayan searches for artworks exploring the relationship between food and art, finding a piece by Aki Goto at Europa gallery that reflects on sugar, colonization, and cavities. The fair features works like David Lamelas's "To Pour Milk into a Glass" (1972) from Dia Art Foundation and Mungo Thomson's "Snowman" (2023) at Karma, while a performance by Kite (Oglála Lakȟóta) at the Counterpublic triennial booth offers a reprieve from the monotonous fair experience.

The exhibitions to see in New York during Art Week 2026

Le mostre da vedere a New York durante l’Art Week 2026

The article highlights a selection of must-see exhibitions in New York during the 2026 Art Week, spanning major museums and galleries. At MoMA, three shows explore memory, identity, and artistic experimentation: Elizabeth Murray's retrospective on fragmented painting, Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa's works addressing Guatemala's civil war, and Arthur Jafa's curated connections across the museum's collection. The Whitney Museum presents the 82nd Whitney Biennial, featuring 56 artists questioning what it means to be 'American,' alongside an Andy Warhol exhibition of rarely seen polaroids from 1972-73. Hauser & Wirth debuts its first Carol Rama show, highlighting six decades of her experimental, anticonformist art.

11 Must-See Shows During New York Art Week 2026

New York Art Week 2026 is set to be a packed event, with major art fairs including Frieze, TEFAF, and Independent all scheduled within a single week this May. The art world will arrive directly from the Venice Biennale, and New York galleries are opening their major spring exhibitions to coincide with the influx of curators and collectors.

Art Fair Report: Stress Test

Art Basel Hong Kong 2026 drew 91,500 visitors and featured 240 galleries at the Convention and Exhibition Centre, alongside over 100 galleries at Art Central, three new boutique fairs, four new art spaces, multiple auction previews, and dozens of institutional shows and gallery openings. Despite a challenging 2025 that saw mega-galleries Pace and Perrotin close their Hong Kong spaces and auction results hit an eight-year low, blue-chip galleries reported strong sales, including David Zwirner’s USD 3.8 million sale of Liu Ye’s "Snow White" (2006) and Hauser & Wirth’s USD 2.95 million sale of a Louise Bourgeois work. The prevailing sentiment among collectors and gallerists was cautious optimism, with the phrase "Are you surviving?" overheard frequently.

New York Is About to Sell $3 Billion in Art. Who’s Buying?

Vanity Fair's Nate Freeman reports on New York's spring art season, where auction houses are poised to sell at least $2.6 billion in art alongside major museum exhibitions (Raphael at the Met, Duchamp at MoMA, Matisse at Acquavella) and the opening of Frieze New York at The Shed. The article follows the social and commercial frenzy, highlighting a David Shrigley gong installation at Anton Kern Gallery's booth and the enduring dominance of New York, where nearly 90% of U.S. art sales occur.

5 very different art fairs throughout two days in New York City

The article reports on five distinct art fairs—Frieze, NADA, Independent, 1-54, and Esther III—visited during New York Art Fair Week. It highlights key artists and works, including Kelly Tapia-Chuning's deconstructed serapes at NADA, Esaí Alfredo's queer nighttime paintings, Alex Burke's textile dolls at 1-54, and Laetitia KY's photographic self-sculpture. The fairs collectively emphasized themes of environmentalism, globalism, decolonization, and a growing textiles sector, with curation varying widely from commercial to conceptually driven.

Inside TEFAF New York’s Annual Wealth Pageant

The 12th annual TEFAF New York fair took place at the Park Avenue Armory from May 15 to 19, attracting wealthy collectors with a mix of blue-chip art, design objects, and jewelry. Highlights included Kathleen Ryan's bejeweled 'Bad Fruit' sculptures at Gagosian, Cai Guo-Qiang's gunpowder paintings at White Cube (which sold 11 of 12 works), Sheila Hicks's textiles at Demisch Danant, and a new David Hockney painting at Annely Juda Fine Art. The fair featured 88 galleries from 14 countries, with VIP previews drawing art advisors and high-net-worth clients.

Georg Baselitz – a life in pictures

Georg Baselitz, the German painter known for his raw, expressive works and inverted imagery, has died at age 88. Born in 1938 in Deutschbaselitz, he lived through Nazi Germany and East German communist rule, experiences that deeply shaped his art. The Guardian's obituary traces his life through photographs, from his early years to major exhibitions at Thaddaeus Ropac, White Cube, and the Serpentine, highlighting key works such as 'Das Grosse Pathos' (1966) and his 2024 series 'A Confession of My Sins'.

Ibrahim Mahama awarded 2026 Arnold Bode Prize

Ghanaian visual artist Ibrahim Mahama has been awarded the 2026 Arnold Bode Prize by the city of Kassel. The prize, announced by his gallery White Cube, includes a €10,000 award in recognition of his artistic practice.

On Paranoid Time

Film Notes has published Qingyuan Deng's essay exploring the intersection of Lacan's concept of retroactive meaning and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's distinction between paranoid and reparative reading, as applied to recent artists' films and moving-image installations. The essay examines how works like Alison Nguyen's installation "Perforation, Ellipse" at New York's Storefront for Art and Architecture use cinematic techniques—such as perforations, splices, and missing scenes—to hold the temporal gap between an event and its belated political comprehension, focusing on the censorship of Vietnamese bolero songs after the American War.

New York Galleries: Openings and Closings (04/27-05/03)

Can Digital Art Ever Truly Replicate the Gallery Experience?

The article explores whether digital art platforms can replicate the experience of visiting a physical gallery. It acknowledges the impressive progress of virtual exhibitions—global accessibility, VR tours, AR overlays, and high-resolution zoom—and notes that 35% of UK adults digitally engaged with the arts in 2024/25, up from 27% in 2021/22. However, it argues that something essential is lost without physical presence: the tactile encounter with a painting's texture and scale, the serendipity of in-person discovery, and the spatial awe of standing before a Rothko in a white cube.

A Time of Transition

During the preview week of the 61st Venice Biennale, escalating protests targeted the national pavilions of Israel and Russia, with demonstrations by Pussy Riot, ANGA (Art Not Genocide Alliance), and Baltic pavilions. A major protest on May 8 drew over 3,000 people in solidarity with Palestine, and 27 national pavilions—including Austria, the Netherlands, France, and Japan—staged a strike, the first at the Biennale since 1968. The Golden Lion jury resigned after declaring they would not consider countries under ICC investigation (Israel and Russia), and the Biennale administration replaced the prize with a visitors' award, from which half the artists in the main exhibition have withdrawn.

Hube Guide: What to Do in New York During Frieze

Frieze Art Fair returns to New York from May 13th to 17th, 2026, at The Shed for its 15th edition, featuring over 65 galleries from 26 countries. The fair emphasizes Latin American practices and includes a Focus section curated by Lumi Tan highlighting younger galleries and experimental works. Notable presentations include Reika Takebayashi’s ecological dreamscapes, Bruno Cançado’s meditations on Brazilian vernacular architecture, and Abraham González Pacheco’s graphite works. Beyond the fair, performances and installations extend to institutions like the Whitney Museum of American Art and Dia Art Foundation. The article also previews concurrent exhibitions: "Costume Art" at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (May 2026–January 2027), a David Hammons and Jannis Kounellis show at White Cube (May 1–June 13, 2026), and Carol Bove’s exhibition at the Guggenheim (March 5–August 2, 2026).

6 Rising Artists to Watch at This Year’s Venice Biennale

The article profiles six rising artists at the 2026 Venice Biennale, focusing on Sung Tieu and Gala Porras-Kim. Tieu transforms the German Pavilion with a tile shell recreating a former housing complex for Vietnamese contract workers, while inside she scatters chocolate ladybugs as a symbol of occupation. Porras-Kim presents work in the Arsenale examining 'institutionally defined damage' and how decay can realign objects with their natural state.

The 61st Venice Biennale: 'artists who confront difficult realities in unusual ways' at Palazzo Grassi and the Punta della Dogana

Curators Emma Lavigne and Jean-Marie Gallais have organized exhibitions for the Pinault Collection at Palazzo Grassi and Punta della Dogana during the 61st Venice Biennale, featuring artists Lorna Simpson, Paulo Nazareth, Michael Armitage, and Amar Kanwar. The shows respond to global tensions, with Nazareth using salt to trace a ghost ship referencing the slave trade, and Simpson creating nocturnal paintings and collages from Ebony and Jet magazines that explore identity and history. The exhibitions are part of the Biennale's broader global outlook, engaging with Venice's mercantile past and contemporary migration routes.

The Art Diary May 2026 – Revd Jonathan Evens

The article titled "The Art Diary May 2026 – Revd Jonathan Evens" appears to be a diary or column by Revd Jonathan Evens, published on Artlyst, covering art-related events, reflections, or commentary for May 2026. The specific content is not provided in the snippet, but the format suggests a curated overview of exhibitions, cultural happenings, or personal observations from the author's perspective.

Tracey Emin | Even Saying Nothing Is a Lie (2021) | For Sale

Tracey Emin's 2021 lithograph "Even Saying Nothing Is a Lie" is being offered for sale by Hang-Up Gallery in London for £8,500. The limited-edition print, hand-signed and numbered by the artist, measures 37 × 29 1/10 inches and comes framed. Emin, a leading Young British Artist known for her confessional works such as "My Bed" (1998), has exhibited globally at institutions including the Mori Art Museum, Whitney Museum, and Stedelijk Museum, and her work is held by major collections like Tate and MoMA.

Antony Gormley: ‘Put a sculpture on the moon? No, that would be a bad idea’

Renowned British sculptor Antony Gormley is preparing for a major creative season, marked by two upcoming exhibitions at the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp and Galleria Continua in San Gimignano, alongside the release of a new book dedicated to his drawings. Speaking from his David Chipperfield-designed studio in London, the artist reflects on his rigorous daily practice and his background in art history, contrasting his own ascetic, industrial aesthetic with the fleshy opulence of Flemish masters like Rubens.

Venice Biennale 2026: What are the major trends that will mark the 99 national pavilions?

Biennale de Venise 2026 : quelles sont les grandes tendances qui vont marquer les 99 pavillons nationaux ?

The article previews the 2026 Venice Biennale, highlighting key trends across its 99 national pavilions. Major themes include the hybridization of theater, dance, and performance, particularly in pavilions from Austria, Luxembourg, Belgium, and Lithuania, where artists like Florentina Holzinger, Aline Bouvy, Miet Warlop, and Eglė Budvytytė use radical, body-centric works. Geopolitical engagement is also central, with the Ukrainian pavilion featuring Zhanna Kadyrova's work on resistance and the British pavilion exploring themes of exile and migration. Other notable pavilions include Spain's focus on imagery, a sound installation for the Vatican, a polyphonic piece for Romania, and a film on sign language song for Poland.