Frieze New York 2026 opened its VIP day at The Shed on Wednesday, May 13, hard on the heels of the Venice Biennale’s opening week—the latest major stop on a packed run of international openings, events, and previews for the contemporary art world.
Now in its 15th edition, the fair anchors New York Art Week, the rolling tangle of fairs, gallery openings, auctions, and parties that takes over the city each May. When the art world arrives in New York, it arrives in numbers: Fellow fairs NADA New York and 1-54 New York opened nearby, and a wave of Chelsea gallery openings just south of Hudson Yards picked up where the fair left off into the evening.
With 68 galleries, Frieze New York is the smallest of Frieze’s editions—London remains its flagship—but it carries the megafair’s signature mix: works by some of contemporary art’s household names, booths from leading contemporary dealers, and a packed opening-day crowd of VIPs dressed to impress.
The Venice overlap was unmistakable. Alvaro Barrington and Carolina Caycedo, both included in the Biennale’s main exhibition “In Minor Keys,” can be found here at Emalin and Anton Kern, and at Instituto de Visión, respectively. Other names that caught Artsy’s eye: Adriana Varejão (Brazilian pavilion) at Gagosian; Nabil Nahas (Lebanese pavilion), in a shared booth between Lawrie Shabibi and P420; Sara Flores (Peruvian pavilion) at White Cube; and Precious Okoyomon (The Holy See pavilion) at Mendes Wood DM.
The mood on the fair’s VIP day was engaged and energetic. By lunchtime, The Shed’s aisles and escalators were at capacity, with a strong local turnout and a notable international contingent on the floor. Celebrities, too, were out in force throughout the day. Leonardo DiCaprio and Michael Stipe appeared during the fair’s opening hours, while later in the day, Julia Fox reportedly pulled up in her Dodge Challenger.
The enthusiasm swiftly began to translate to firm buying activity. White Cube reported an early sale of an El Anatsui work, LuwVor I (2025), for $2.2 million. Indeed, it was one of many significant transactions on the fair floors—a more positive opening day, perhaps, than initially expected. “You could feel a real sales energy moving through the aisles. In my art advisor circles, collectors were acquiring at a clip,” advisor Jessica Arb Danial told Artsy.
“Many of my collectors still want to see works in person, hence the number of holds I was encountering, yet dealers seemed optimistic, and there was an urgency that hasn’t been as present for recent fairs,” she added.
Check back on Monday after the fair for our full rundown of reported sales from The Shed. Here, we share our five best booths from Frieze New York 2026.
Victoria Miro
Booth A07
Works by Milton Avery, Ali Banisadr, Hernan Bas, María Berrío, Saskia Colwell, Stan Douglas, Elmgreen & Dragset, Kudzanai-Violet Hwami, Chantal Joffe, Isaac Julien, Alice Neel, Chris Ofili, Celia Paul, Paula Rego, Emil Sands, Khalif Tahir Thompson, and Barbara Walker.
Victoria Miro’s booth buzzed with ebullient energy during the opening hours of Frieze New York this year, with collectors congregating amid the London gallery’s presentation of works by artists including Alice Neel, Chantal Joffe, and Hernan Bas.
The showcase brought together a mix of historic and contemporary works that spanned painting, drawing, and photography. Many of the pieces in the booth explore figuration and its changing role across art history. Anchoring the booth is Paula Rego’s large-scale work on paper, The Death of the Blind Sister (2007), depicting a monumental, careening female body—emblematic of the Portuguese artist’s dynamic style. The work complements the exhibition “Paula Rego: Story Line,” the largest ever exhibition of her works on paper, now on view at the gallery in London.
Isaac Julien’s Black Apollo diptych (Once Again… Statues Never Die) (2022), a photographic work based on the artist’s film installation Once Again… (Statues Never Die) (2022), shows a young Black man posing in an artist’s studio, dressed as the god Apollo. The work is a poetic engagement with questions of the collection and restitution of African art. Also tucked in the booth, but not to be missed, are works on paper by artist Barbara Walker, who joined the gallery last year. These pieces from the artist’s ongoing “Vanishing Point” series focus on Black figures in the history of the Western canon, through a process of embossing and drawing.
—Katie White
Perrotin
Booth B3
With works by Genesis Belanger, Alma Allen, JR, Thilo Heinzmann, Jean-Marie Appriou, Daniel Arsham, Bernard Frize, Laurent Grasso, Todd Gray, Hans Hartung, Leslie Hewitt, Gregor Hildebrandt, Gabriel de la Mora, Jean-Michel Othoniel, Paul Pfeiffer, Josh Sperling, Pieter Vermeersch, and Emma Webster.
French powerhouse Perrotin hands over half its booth to sculptor Genesis Belanger. She pays homage to a more innocent age of incipient technology in her signature register of pastel-toned stoneware and porcelain.
“The work on our booth explores human relationships to nature, which is becoming more distant over time,” said senior gallery director Valentine Blondel. “As a society, we are progressing quickly in the direction of artificial intelligence, so there has become a prevailing nostalgia for these symbols of outdated technology.”
At the booth’s center is a tall fruit tree sprouting blush-pink roses and pomegranates from verdigris foliage, planted in a deep navy urn; alongside it, floral mosaic reliefs in dusty pinks, blues, and oranges nod to medieval tapestries.
Meanwhile, Dreams of the Luddite (2026) assembles a folding tabletop tableau around a ’90s flip phone. Reduction in Force (2026) hangs a hollow, beige cardigan over a slim green tie on a wall hook—a rejoinder, perhaps, to AI’s erosion of white-collar labor. Above it all presides Darkest Hour(s) (2026), a wall clock with its hands stopped mid-tick, time suspended in what the booth text ominously calls a “moment of uncertain future.” Belanger’s works are priced between $25,000–$175,000.
Indeed, the presentation lands at a timely moment for Belanger, whose Public Art Fund commission at City Hall Park opens in June. The other half of Perrotin’s booth doubles as the gallery’s institutional CV, with works by Alma Allen (artist of the U.S. pavilion at Venice), Hans Hartung (who has a show at Venice’s Querini Stampalia), Todd Gray (whose new commission greets visitors to LACMA’s Geffen Galleries), and JR (whose work will adorn Paris’s Pont Neuf in June).
—Arun Kakar
Southern Guild
Booth D07
Works by Kamyar Bineshtarigh, Patrick Bongoy, Sandra Brewster, Chloe Chiasson, Amine El Gotaibi, Jozua Gerrard, Lebohang Kganye, Manyaku Mashilo, Roméo Mivekannin, Zanele Muholi, Napoles Marty, Mmangaliso Nzuza, Wura-Natasha Ogunji, Zizipho Poswa, and Chidy Wayne
Southern Guild underscores its burgeoning presence in the New York art world with a power-packed Frieze presentation. The booth features works by Zanele Muholi, Wura-Natasha Ogunji, and Amine El Gotaibi. The Cape Town gallery, helmed by couple Trevyn and Julian McGowan, has built an international reputation as a leading platform for African art since opening in 2008. Earlier this spring, the gallery inaugurated an airy new space in Tribeca, New York’s hottest gallery neighborhood; exhibitions of work by Johannesburg-based conceptual artist Usha Seejarim and Cape Town painter Mmangaliso Nzuza are currently on view.
“Frieze New York this year feels like an important moment for Southern Guild as we participate for the first time as a New York-based gallery,” shared Trevyn McGowan. “The booth reflects the material ambition, emotional depth, and cultural dialogue that have long defined our program. To share these works in New York, just weeks after opening our Tribeca space, feels especially resonant.”
While the booth has plenty of photo-ready, large-scale works, don’t overlook Lebohang Kganye’s intimate and ghostly photographs from her 2013 series “Ke Lefa Laka: Her-Story,” where she double-exposes images of her late mother with her own image.
—K.W.
Karma
Booth B2
Works by Alan Saret, Peter Bradley, Matthew Wong, Jeremy Frey, Manoucher Yektai, Milton Avery, Randy Wray, Ann Craven, Dike Blair, Marley Freeman, Maja Ruznic, Tabboo!, Andrew Cranston, Jonas Wood, Xiao Jiang, Jane Dickson, William Turnbull, Mathew Cerletty, Woody De Othello, Richard Mayhew, Henni Alftan, Jacob Littlejohn, Keith Mayerson, Reggie Burrows Hodges, Will Boone, Gertrude Abercrombie, Hughie Lee-Smith, Nathaniel Oliver, Ryan Preciado, Mungo Thomson, Sanaa Gateja, Arthur Simms, Carole Vanderlinden, Norman Zammitt, Ulala Imai, Bill Bollinger
Karma manages to keep its refined edge—even at Frieze’s blockbuster platform. This year, the Chelsea gallery stages a best-in-class sampling of more than 30 artists across modern and contemporary.
"Our presentation brings together historic artists, including Milton Avery and Manoucher Yektai, alongside contemporary practitioners such as Ann Craven and Peter Bradley, whose practices reflect New York City's enduring artistic legacy," noted a representative of the gallery.
Showstoppers include a petite Gertrude Abercrombie from 1938 and a sunkissed and thickly impastoed Matthew Wong painting, as well as prints on paper by Jeremy Frey, an Indigenous artist from Maine. “Permanence,” his exhibition of masterful basket weavings, is on view at the gallery through July 10th.
—K.W.
A Gentil Carioca
Booth B17
With works by Agrade Camíz, Ana Silva, Arjan Martins, Denilson Baniwa, Jarbas Lopes, João Modé, Kelton Campos Fausto, Laura Lima, Marcela Cantuária, Maria Nepomuceno, Mariana Rocha, Miguel Afa, Pascale Marthine Tayou, Rose Afefé, Vinícius Gerheim, and Vivian Caccuri.
Love is in the air, on the floor, and across the walls of the booth by Brazilian gallery A Gentil Carioca, organized around the theme of “red.”
“We decided to do a booth connected with ‘red,’ connected with the idea of love, of passion, of good energy that I think we need in the world,” the gallery’s co-founder, Marcio Botner, told Artsy.
The theme manifests most immediately as a red carpet punctuated by a monochrome snake drawing by the Indigenous Brazilian artist Denilson Baniwa, whose graphic vocabulary draws from Indigenous Baniwa cosmology and Amazonian iconography (a related creature by the artist currently appears on a Times Square billboard).
From there, the crimson unfurls in many registers. Maria Nepomuceno contributes one of her signature coiled sculptures—rope, ceramic, and beads spiraling outward like a circulatory system in slow bloom. A tarot-inflected painting by Marcela Cantuária depicts female revolutionaries, environmental martyrs, and Latin American activists rendered in saturated, almost devotional reds; nearby, Vivian Caccuri’s embroidered mosquito-net works stitch fine threads into a speaker-like mesh that conjures insects and instruments at once.
A playfully thematic booth with bite, the presentation showcases a gallery not short on curatorial confidence—nor on artists to pull off its ambitious premise.
—A.K.
