The Best Booths at Frieze New York 2026

Booths by mega-gallery are typically forgettable, but Hauser & Wirth’s at this fair is unmissable, since it marks the debut of new works by the photographer Cindy Sherman, of “Untitled Film Stills” fame. As with that series from the late ’70s, Sherman once again poses for her camera, this time in extravagant get-ups that hover between elegance and gaudiness. In one, Sherman sits on a stool while donning a crown, her eyebrows hidden in makeup. This character’s headwear is made of paper, and the starry background behind her is clearly a backdrop—this is merely a game of dress-up in which an average citizen pretends to be a monarch. Yet in striking these poses, Sherman creates the impression of someone who matters, or at least believes she does. These pictures prove that Sherman is still the reigning queen of her medium.

Dealers, a word of advice: If you must present a multi-artist booth, at least bind the works by a theme. (Do not simply clear inventory.) Take notes from Andrew Edlin Gallery, whose smart Frieze booth convenes four artists who contend with extraterrestrial beings and worlds beyond our own. Paulina Peavy, who claimed to have communicated with spirits during the 20th century, is represented by an array of glorious abstractions, including one in which a moth-like being with a pearl for a head navigates a forest of billowy forms. Esther Pearl Watson and Karla Knight, meanwhile, have paintings that engage with a continued fascination with aliens—a timely topic, given the Pentagon’s recent release of the so-called UFO files. But the quiet star of the booth is a Melvin Way drawing that appears to map a chemical compound that doesn’t exist. One wonders what Way knew that the rest of us did not.

Showing in booth shared with New York’s Chapter NY, the London-based Carlos/Ishikawa gallery has brought an array of artists from its roster, the best of which is Evelyn Taocheng Wang, whose paintings meditate on how value is perceived in art. Wang has two wonderful works, both painted at a monumental scale, that extend her longstanding interest in Agnes Martin, a postwar painter known for pale canvases featuring hand-drawn grids. In one painting, Wang appropriates a blue and pink composition by Martin, overlaying it with a ram’s head and a flower drawn from a Georgia O’Keeffe work. One interpretation might suggest that Wang’s painting traces a queer lineage—Martin had female romantic partners, while O’Keeffe’s sexuality has long been the subject of debate. Another might argue it addresses how nothing can remain singular when styles are endlessly copied. Wang has addressed those interpreters with a small note at the painting’s side: “Don’t take it seriously!”

Hot off a terrific retrospective that recently completed a US tour, Virginia Jaramillo is still producing remarkable abstractions that experiment with a line can do. It can divide up space, as her thin arcs of pink and blue do in one mostly black canvas, or it can help outline a previously unseen shape, as twists of black and green do in a purple painting, creating what appears to be a champagne coupe.

These small, recent works are installed around the booth’s main attraction: a long 2021 canvas titled Quanta, in which a web of multicolored lines connects yellow emanations at either end. Speaking of a similar work produced the same year, Jaramillo once said that these are “lines of communication.” Their message is decidedly opaque.

Ahead of an Akinsanya Kambon retrospective opening in New York at SculptureCenter and the Center for Art, Research and Alliances later this month, both of the artist’s galleries have teamed up for an unforgettable sampler of his art. A leader of the Sacramento chapter of the Black Panther Party during the 1960s, Kambon now produces ceramics that revive African traditions. Djembe #2 (2024), for example, is a three-headed vessel that alludes to djembe drums, which enslaved West Africans were banned from playing after being brought to the United States in the 18th century. The work was fired using the Raku technique, in which ceramics are removed from the kiln while they still hot, and like many of Kambon’s works in this booth, it bears small cracks. And yet, despite what it has endured during its making, the piece endures.

Alongside first-class works by Stephanie Comilang and June Clark, this booth features two tapestries by Shannon Bool, both depicting sculptures by 20th-century German artists Fritz Klimsch and Georg Kolbe. Both artists were known for sculpting the female form as a means of obtaining the aesthetic simplicity held in such high regard by European modernists. Bool, however, deconstructs those figures in her weavings, revealing tangles of cyborg-like gadgetry beneath their elegant legs. Fittingly, these works are machine-made: Bool makes them using a Jacquard loom, a type of device that the 19th century mathematician Ada Lovelace once compared to an analog computer, before finishing the surfaces with hand embroidery.

Culpas (2026), the largest work in this stylish booth, features a ceramic mouth that expels a stream of synthetic hair arranged to spell out that titular word, which translates from the Spanish as “blame.” Who is being blamed, and for what? The work does not tell us, though Seba Calfuqueo has previously said that hair “has a specific significance in Mapuche cosmovision” and that it has enabled her “to elude binary systems.”

Calfuqueo, a young Mapuche artist based in Santiago, Chile, and has taken the biennial circuit by storm, seems to suggest that a violated body is not necessarily a defeated one. It’s a theme she returns, albeit obliquely, in a set of silver-coated ceramics based on Mapuche objects held in Berlin’s Ethnological Museum. In remaking them, Calfuqueo lays claim to objects taken from her people and displayed in Europe for others’ viewing. This booth won the top honors in Frieze’s Focus section for solo presentations, and for good reason.

Deondre Davis has a habit of scavenging found objects and then attaching fake eyelashes to them. It’s a sculptural conceit that’s both odd and oddly engrossing: a lash-lined sculpture consists of golden hinges installed in one of the booth’s corners. What makes that work so hypnotic? I’m not sure I could entirely tell you, but perhaps it’s something to do with Davis’s way of making cold, industrial objects seem corporeal, even a little alien. At the very least, he seems interested in subverting rules, which may owe to his unusual route into the art world—he didn’t attend art school. Indeed, Untitled (Brick Dust) #2, a new work on paper on view near the hinges, features a grid whose orderly logic Davis upends by spraying brick all over the place.