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Global contemporary & fine art news observed from New York City.

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On Thursday, #TheArmoryShow opened with its invitation-only VIP Preview, opening doors to its 2026 edition at the Javits Center with more than 240 exhibitors and a noticeably expanded view of the Americas.

This year, the Caribbean and its diasporas run through the fair as more than a curatorial theme. The Focus and Platform sections bring questions of migration, memory, movement, and material culture to the foreground, while the fair’s reworked layout places galleries and artists from the region in direct conversation with established New York and international programs.

Elsewhere, an expanded group of Solo and Presents booths gives younger galleries and more focused artist presentations greater visibility, adding a sense of discovery to a fair that still brings together many of the established names of the contemporary market.

What emerged from the preview was a fair less interested in presenting one dominant vision of contemporary art than in tracing the movement of artists, histories, and ideas across regions and generations.

See the selection of the presentations and works that stood out during the fair’s opening preview:

1. Cover: @blumkacontemporary @bockhaus @kismithgallery Booth #227

2. @ninomiergallery - Andre Butzer

3. @lobster___club - Megan Koons

4. @redarrowgallery - Brianna Bass

5. @_reservoir_ - Anna van der Ploeg

6. @fredricsnitzergallery - Ema Ri

7. @galeriamaxestrella - Rafael Lozano-Hemmer

8. @rukaj.gallery - Miriam Schapiro

9. @mariangoodmangallery - Tavares Strachan

10. @perrotin - Kathia St. Hilaire

11. @victoriamirogallery - Celia Paul

12. @peterblumgallery - Alex Katz

13. @galerietemplon - David Smalling

14. @galerietemplon - George Segal

15. @galerietemplon - Chiharu Shiota

16. @sevensistershouston - Stan Dann

17. @vandeweghefineart - Frederic Anderson

18. @hollistaggart - Jean-Michel Basquiat

The Armory Show
Javits Center, 429 11th Ave, New York, NY 10001
@thearmoryshow
Thursday, 24th September 2026
#TheArmoryShow #TheArmoryShow2026
#ContemporaryArt by @artobserved

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14 days ago

#Independent20thCentury returned to The Breuer with presentations that offered a considered look at the artists and ideas that shaped the last century.

Across the fair, established names appeared alongside artists whose work has only more recently come under reassessment and received broader attention. Painting, sculpture, photography, and works on paper sat side by side, bringing together different generations, geographies, and approaches without forcing them into a single narrative.

The Breuer proved an especially strong setting for the fair. Its concrete walls, compressed stairways, and heavy architectural presence gave the works a very particular context, at times sharpening the contrast between the building and the art, and at others making the two feel unexpectedly aligned.

As a whole, The Independent offered a perspective on the 20th century that felt both historically grounded and open to reassessment.

See some of the works and presentations that caught our attention at this year’s edition.

1. Cover: @levygorvydayan Yves Klein, Booth #407

2. @michaelhoppengallery - Out of Chaos: Paper from the Floor of Francis Bacon’s Studio

3. @forumgallery - Raphael Soyer

4. @hollistaggart - Frank Diaz Escalet

5. @hauserwirth - Emma Kunz

6. @thaddaeusropac - Lee Ufan

7. @levygorvydayan - Yves Klein

8. @salon94 x @ryanleegallery - Emma Amos

9. @berrycampbell - Joan Mitchell

10. Atmosphere at @berrycampbell’s booth - Elaine de Kooning, Janice Biala

11. @olneygleason - Elaine de Kooning

12. @alisonjacquesgallery - Bona de Mandiargues

13. @richardsaltoungallery - MANINA

14. @antonkerngallery - David Byrd

Independent 20th Century Art Fair
Breuer Building, 945 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10021
Thursday, 24th September 2026
@independent_hq
#Independent20thCentury #Independent20thCentury2026
#20thCenturyArt by @artobserved

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15 days ago

In Copenhagen, Camille Henrot’s (@coelocanthe ) Paper Planes, at @copenhagen_contemporary looks at the tools we use to organise and make sense of everyday life.

At the centre of the exhibition, Henrot’s new film In the Veins moves between wildlife rehabilitation and the routines of caring for young children, looking at the repetition and dependency involved in both. Elsewhere, bronze abacuses are bent into strange, organic forms, while telephones and etiquette manuals turn tools of convenience into something more complicated.

Across the exhibition, order repeatedly gives way to mess, play and instinct, asking what happens when the rules we rely on stop being quite so useful.

On view from June 5th to December 31st, 2026. by @artobserved

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19 days ago

In London, Like Music in the Blood, presented at @thaddaeusropac , brings together eight contemporary artists exploring the body as a site of memory, identity, desire and power.

Across painting and sculpture, Benjamin Orlow, Emil Sands, Galli, Hannah Quinlan and Rosie Hastings, Kira Freije, Suleman Aqeel Khilji, Tanoa Sasraku and Tiona Nekkia McClodden move between figuration, fragmentation and abstraction. Bodies are scarred, reconstructed, obscured or transformed, reflecting the difficulty of translating inner experience into material form.

Throughout the exhibition, the body becomes something unfixed: shaped by memory, material and the act of looking.

On view from September 3rd to October 1st, 2026. by @artobserved

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a month ago

Food Art Fair @foodartfair opened yesterday at @_ladbrokehall in London. In its inaugural edition, the two-day fair brings together over 100 participants across many distinct mediums – edible, visual and experiential art, alongside performances, a series of workshops and a curated publications and objects market.

1. ‘Breakfast in Bed... (and other bad habits)’ by @mia__wilkinson in collaboration with @murder.cake , curated by @humakabakci
2. ‘Sugar padlocks, metal chains’ candy sculptures by Andrea Ferrero @andreaferrerop @copperfield_london
3. Tablescape installation by @gabbois
4. ‘Wet Paint’, an edible painting by @nuun.cakes and @berryfieldstudio
5. ‘Display this if you lose my ashes’ by @dohyun_baek_
6. ‘Bread Wardrobe’ by @shared.space.studio
7-8. Installation views of Food Art Fair’s main exhibition

On view from September 5th - 6th, with free tickets for entry. by @artobserved

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a month ago

At @waddingtoncustot in London, The Nabi Shock brings together paintings by leading figures of the Nabi movement with works by a new generation of artists who reflect its legacy, including Marcel Dzama, Ian Davenport, Anne Rothenstein and Fabienne Verdier.

The earlier works, by the movement’s founding generation—including Pierre Bonnard, Maurice Denis, Paul Sérusier and Édouard Vuillard—date largely from 1888 to 1900, when the Nabis worked closely together in Paris.

Many of the paintings focus on domestic life: interiors, gardens and familiar figures, particularly mothers, sisters and wives. They offer a sense of entry into the artists’ private worlds, where ordinary settings take on an intimate, psychological charge. This inward focus reflects a broader interest in inner life and the subconscious, then beginning to take shape in the emerging theories of Sigmund Freud.

Waddington Custot has played a pivotal role in the movement’s recent revival, exhibiting works by the Nabis at Frieze London in 2024 and at its Paris gallery in 2026.

Placed alongside contemporary works, the exhibition shows how the Nabis’ interest in colour and richly worked surfaces continue to shape painting today.

The exhibition now comes to London for the summer season, where it is on view from June 23rd to September 12th, 2026. by @artobserved

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3 months ago

At @strongroom.inc, in collaboration with Safe Harbors' @annstreetgallery, Millicent Young presents Holding Light Sutra inside the recently reopened Safe Harbors' Ritz Theater Stagehouse in Newburgh, NY.

Suspended at the center of the soaring space, a cube of white horsehair gathers and fragments projected light, transforming shifting images into a luminous, breathing form. Images of the non-built world and scenes of structural collapse move through the sculpture before dissolving onto a translucent scrim beyond, while an immersive soundtrack layers waves, birdsong, breath, the artist's voice, and field recordings captured along the Atlantic coast and inside the theater before it reopened to the public.

Set within a building reclaimed after decades of inaccessibility, Holding Light Sutra explores memory, displacement, and transformation through sculpture, sound, and projection. Young's installation turns the theater itself into part of the work, where material, light, and architecture merge into a meditation on fragmentation and the fragile connections between place, memory, and belonging.

On view weekends, 12–5pm, through July 12.

Courtesy STRONGROOM and the artist @millicent.young.
Photography by Pete Mauney. by @artobserved

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3 months ago

At @hayward.gallery in London, Anish Kapoor returns to the @southbankcentre 28 years after his first major UK survey was held there, with a new exhibition marking the Centre’s 75th anniversary.

Curated by Ralph Rugoff, the show brings together new and earlier works across the gallery and its terraces, including inflated PVC forms, suspended masses, mirrored steel sculptures, Vantablack surfaces and recent paintings made with silicone, resin and pigment.

Some of the strongest moments come from the dark works, which seem to open up inside the gallery rather than sit within it. Seen from certain angles, they read almost like holes in the room, making it difficult to judge where the object begins or ends.

Kapoor’s interest in voids, reflection and bodily material runs through the exhibition, giving the show a charge that is theatrical and unsettling.

On view from June 16th to October 18th, 2026. by @artobserved

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4 months ago

At @scenersgallery in Paris, Forms and Temptations, presented with @alminerech, brings Allen Jones into conversation with early twentieth-century design figures including Jacques-Émile Ruhlmann, Carlo Bugatti, Jean Dunand, Koloman Moser and Pierre Legrain.

Moving between Pop, Art Deco and Art Nouveau, the exhibition looks at objects caught between use and display. Jones tests the limits of glamour by binding the body to the machine, while works by Bugatti and Legrain appear as alternative symbols of taste and fantasy.

Across the exhibition, decadence becomes a way of imagining what modern life might look like after an era of change.

On view from April 12th to June 13th, 2026. by @artobserved

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4 months ago

#JulieMehretu's exhibition at @MarianGoodmanGallery 'Our Days, Like a Shadow (a non-abiding hauntology)' featured a series of live performances by choreographer #JohnJasperse, 'Wandering', inspired by her new paintings (2024-2026). Liberated from the picture wall, #Mehretu's 'TRANSpaintings / Upright Brackets' enable a dynamic phenomenology of movement, and engage the viewer into the three-dimensional space, with itinerant shadows and optical effects. The large-scale diptych on black ground evokes a grand cosmos and channels abstraction as a vehicle for liberatory imagination. Using techniques such as brush, screen print, tracing, erasure, and mark making, the artist explores black, as the saturation of all colors, one that absorbs and reflects light, rather than emitting it, with iridescent energy and motion. Shifting from black to hues of violet, white, silver, green, pink, or kaleidoscopic, they alternate and diverge as the light and angles of perception shift. The exhibition spanning three floors is on view through June 6 at the Gallery's headquarters in Tribeca.

#MarianGoodmanGallery #MGGNY taken in Marian Goodman Gallery by @artobserved

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4 months ago

On view at @whitecube Bermondsey from the 22 April – 31 May 2026, I Set Out, I Walked Fast brings together new works, archival paintings and an installation created specifically for the gallery by Katharina Grosse.

Grosse is defined in part by her way of working with colour as a material in its own right, applying paint across canvas, architecture, earth and sculpture. In the exhibition’s central installation, mounds of soil, a partially buried canvas and a bronze sculpture are positioned as a single work, with colour moving freely between each element.

Bringing together works made years apart, the exhibition creates connections across Grosse’s practice. Paint travels fluidly beyond surfaces, inviting viewers to think again about the relationship between colour, and the space that surrounds it.

@katharina_grosse by @artobserved

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4 months ago

On view at @whitecube Cube Mason’s Yard from 22 May–27 June 2026, “Refrain” marks Shao Fan’s first UK solo exhibition, presenting rabbits, mushrooms, cabbages and other mythological forms rendered through thousands upon thousands of delicate ink strokes. The muses settle slowly; time is unavoidable here.

Rooted in Daoist philosophy and traditional Chinese practices, the Beijing-based artist’s works resist the ephemeral through their connection to ancient forms of thought and image-making. Best known for his haunting rabbit portraits, Fan’s paintings draw from shan shui traditions while remaining firmly contemporary in scale and presence.

Across the exhibition, forms emerge gradually through immense accumulations of ink, revealing figures that feel distant, pensive and suspended.

Rabbit Portrait 1025, 2025
In the Name of the Rabbit 0322, 2022
Chinese Cabbage 1425, 2025
Fruit 1924, 2024
Water and Fire 1825, 2025
The Northern Sea 3, 2023
Ushnisha 1124, 2024 by @artobserved

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4 months ago