In 2007, storied German art fair Art Cologne launched a new event in Palma, Mallorca. It only lasted one edition. Nearly 20 years later and they’re back for round two, with a splashy new art fair entitled Art Cologne Palma Mallorca, which runs through April 12, 2026.
This time, everything is different. Most notably, the local art scene is much stronger: 14 of the 88 galleries participating have spaces on the island.
The fair also arrives at a time of growth in the Balearic Islands’ art scene. Mega-gallery Hauser & Wirth has a space on neighboring island Menorca, and Ibiza’s Contemporary Art Now fair is now entering its fifth year. Mallorca has undoubtedly the most mature scene of the islands, but until now, it had not attempted another fair since 2007.
Enter Art Cologne Palma Mallorca 2026. While there will be plenty of appeal for Spanish collectors, its German roots are unmistakable. On the fair’s VIP day April 9th, one gallerist said the audience was overwhelmingly German, many of them second-home owners on the island. That creates a focused audience with serious expectations. High-value works, including a €1.3 million ($1.53 million) Anselm Kiefer at the booth of Berlin- and Palma-based gallery Kewenig, showed that the Art Cologne pedigree was in attendance.
In an interview, the fair’s artistic director Daniel Hug emphasized the importance of Mallorca’s local scene, while noting the event’s “German complexion.” “The quality of the young galleries here is on a par with what’s happening in Barcelona and Berlin,” he said. “It doesn’t make sense to do a fair in a place that can’t support it. This year will be the test.”
In keeping with its location, the galleries seemed to have a more laid-back buyer in mind than one who might visit Art Cologne’s German fair. Some visitors are wearing linen suits; others show up in flip-flops. Yet this does not seem like a fair aimed at brand-new buyers, so much as keen collectors in holiday mode.
Whether you’re browsing in person or following from afar, here are the five best booths from the fair.
Bastian
Booth G131
With works by Pablo Picasso, André Villers, Georgette Chadourne, and Juan Gyenes
One plate shows a grumpy pair of black eyebrows, with a gestural splodge of a long red nose. Another, more minimal design, depicts a simple sunflower in olive and noir. They are part of a set of 20 ceramic “Visage” plates by Pablo Picasso, on offer at Bastian’s booth for a total of around €400,000 ($469,456).
The gallery is also showing other Picasso ceramics, from owl-like jugs to urns with smiling faces, priced from €6,200 to €68,000 ($7,276–$79,807). Displayed in a vitrine at the front of the booth, they include both editioned and one-of-a-kind works. Three had already sold on the fair’s preview day.
“The main idea was to create a kind of immersive experience,” said Dr. Aeneas Bastian, the gallery’s director and noted Picasso expert. “We have printed works, exhibition posters, photographs, and a lot of ceramics.”
Picasso à la plage [Picasso at the Beach], 1940
Georgette Chadourne
BASTIAN
Black and white photos line the back of the booth, including images by André Villers and Georgette Chadourne. Several show Picasso in his workshop; others capture his public persona, during his later life in the South of France.
Bastian said the fair offers a chance to rethink Picasso’s later years in a Spanish beachside location, rather than a French one: “Picasso didn’t return while the Franco regime was still in Spain during his lifetime. He probably would have liked to be here or in other places in Spain but he stayed in French exile.”
Tête [Head], 1956
Pablo Picasso
BASTIAN
Pichet au vase [Pitcher with Vase], 1954
Pablo Picasso
BASTIAN
On preview day, Bastian was finding the fair’s visitors mostly focused on purchasing for their homes on the island, rather than for shipment elsewhere: “people are looking for artworks to live with.”
This echoed what many gallerists pointed to at the fair: “Increasingly it’s not just a vacation spot, it’s about a certain cultural life, going to museums, going to galleries… The art fair fits in very well,” as Bastian noted.
Baró Galeria
Booth G136
With works by Vhils, Néstor García, Daniel Arsham, Joana Vasconcelos, assume vivid astro focus, Mie Olise Kjærgaard, Mamali Shafah, and Domenico Gutknecht.
Brazilian gallery Baró, which has a space in Palma, has built its booth around the theme of “Slow collapse.” The presentation brings together artists from its roster, including Daniel Arsham and Joana Vasconcelos, alongside others such as Vhils and Mie Olise Kjærgaard. Through their work, the gallery explores “the transformation of collapse” and “its relation to the passage of time,” said Esmeralda Gómez, curator at the gallery.
That idea comes through clearly in the works by street artist Vhils, the tag of Portuguese artist Alexandre Farto. He carves into layers of stuck-together billboard posters to depict delicate facial features that seem to recede from the viewer. Even the furniture extends the apocalyptic energy: the gallery staff sits on yellow and silver hunks of reclaimed construction materials, by local artist and designer Sara Regal Alonso.
Hidden behind a wall is one of the booth’s most striking paintings, by Venezuelan artist Néstor García. The piece explores the extractivism of colonialist systems in Latin America. His fantastical landscape, painted as if a TV screen on a hammock spread horizontally across the wall, contrasts a contemporary symbol of relaxation against the reality of environmental destruction in his country.
García’s work, like pieces by several artists in the booth, is also included in Baró’s current exhibition at its Palma gallery, “Tirar del Hilo” (or “pull the thread”), which gathers contemporary perspectives on textiles, which is also a wider focus of the gallery. “We decided to build a bridge between what is happening in the gallery and the fair,” Gómez said.
Galeria Reus
Booth P317
With works by Daniel Roibal, José Fiol, Miquel Ponce, Karolina Albricht
Galeria Reus was born and bred in Mallorca and has been a major voice in the local gallery scene throughout its different iterations. Indeed, its principal, Fran Reus, is also the president of the local gallery association Art Palma Contemporani.
For Art Cologne Palma Mallorca, the gallery embraced its local role with a presentation titled “It’s A Home Game.” It chose to highlight artists with ties to the island, said gallery director and owner Raquel Victoria. Among them are massive green-hued paintings by Mallorcan artist José Fiol that are based on close-up views of Arthur Ashe and Björn Borg during a legendary Wimbledon final and priced at €4,200 ($4,929) each. The paintings also take inspiration from the experimental movie The Green Fog, overloading his works with the titular color as well as its spirit of homage (the film is pieced together from multiple archival sources). Victoria also pointed to a delectable confetti-like abstraction by young painter Daniel Roibal (priced at €8,000 ($9,389)) as another example of local talent.
Björn Borg, 2024
José Fiol
Galeria Reus
We Run Like Sparks Through the Stubble, 2023
Karolina Albricht
Galeria Reus
By preview day, the booth had already made several sales and was bustling with both its visitors and artists, suggesting that the format is working for local galleries, at least.
“Everyone is trying to improve the art on the island,” said Victoria. “Institutions, public, private—I think we’re in a good moment on the island.”
She also highlighted the standout location of the fair’s venue, the seaside Palau de Congressos, which flooded nearly every gallery’s walls with sunshine. “It’s not a normal art fair,” she added.
Wetterling Gallery
Booth G126
With works by Ylva Ceder, Bernar Venet, Nathalia Edenmont, Emma Hartman, Astrid Kruse Jensen, Jason Martin, Anna Pajak
As Art Cologne Palma Mallorca kicked off its VIP day, the city also unveiled a new sculpture installation by well-known French sculptor Bernar Venet outside the venue’s rather beautiful walls. Its spiky steel form, set against the maritime horizon that follows you around in Palma, is typical of the sculptor’s imposing conceptual works.
Perhaps less well known are Venet’s paintings, one of which appears at Swedish gallery Wetterling’s booth. In a purple, circular frame is a complex mathematical formula that purposely evades the viewer’s understanding in a distorted serif font, meticulous but heady.
The booth also presents a wide range of works by Swedish-Ukrainian artist Nathalia Edenmont, including both analog photography and sculpture. In an earlier series, she created large-scale portrait photos of her subjects in voluminous dresses exploding with flowers. More recently, she’s begun taking photos of goose eggs, their shells gently cracked but their insides not visible to the viewer. According to a gallery representative, these delicate works are a response to Edelmond’s own experience with fertility: a theme she continues in her sculptures in marble, onyx, tiger’s-eye, and jasper stone, each priced between €32,000 ($37,556) and €37,000 ($43,424).
These more established artists are shown alongside a younger group of mostly Scandinavian painters and photographers. On the booth’s outer wall, Emma Hartman presents cerebral oil-on-panel landscapes rendered in great washes of liquid oranges and purple (priced between €13,000 ($15,257) and €17,000 ($19,951)). Similarly calming, surreal spaces feature in Ylva Ceder’s pastel-hued paintings that play with perspective. Atmospheric analog photographs by Astrid Kruse Jensen (priced between €8,000 ($9,389) and €8,800 ($10,328)) and bright, graphic paintings exploring mystical spirituality by Anna Pajak (€5,500 ($6,455) each ) round out the presentation.
Kornfeld Galerie Berlin
Booth G237
With works by Charlie Stein, Johanna Reich, Olasunkanmi Akomolehin, O Bastardo, Jay Gard
Virtually Yours (Kiss), 2025
Charlie Stein
KORNFELD Galerie Berlin
Subjects of distance and intimacy run throughout Berlin-based gallery Kornfeld’s booth. First to make an impression is Charlie Stein’s Virtually Yours (Kiss) (2025), a cloudy lavender canvas depicting two bodies, covered entirely in black and pink puffer jackets, embracing one another. Completely anonymous beneath their cushioned surfaces, the figures are unable to fully touch each other, a metaphor for the isolation brought about by technology: even when deeply communicating, we’re distanced.
It’s one of several works in the booth by Stein, who was in residence last year at the CCA Andratx art center in Palma. Her slick, unsettling works, priced between €3,000 ($3,520) and €25,000 ($29,341), are shown alongside work by other young artists from the gallery.
How do I look (III), 2026
Olasunkanmi Akomolehin
KORNFELD Galerie Berlin
Gedankensprung, 2025
Johanna Reich
KORNFELD Galerie Berlin
One of them is Johanna Reich, whose small drawing works are created using a generative process. Using a hand-programmed AI, she turns her personal experience of synesthesia—an association between letters and colors—into delicate symbols.
Elsewhere, several of Olasunkanmi Akomolehin’s oil paintings portray members of his Nigerian family and friends, both alone and together. Set against vivid, floral backgrounds, these characters exude a warm, if posed, conviviality.
