The Best Booths at Frieze New York 2026

Big gallery booths are often forgotten, but Hauser & Wirth’s stand at this show is not to be missed, as it marks the debut of new work by photographer Cindy Sherman, best known for her “Untitled Film Stills.” As in that series from the late 1970s, Sherman once again posed for the camera, this time in lavish outfits that walked the line between elegance and flamboyance. In one of the photos, Sherman is seen sitting on a stool, wearing a crown and her eyebrows hidden in makeup. The character’s headdress is made of paper, and the starry sky behind him is clearly a backdrop – it’s just a dress-up game involving an ordinary citizen pretending to be a monarch. However, by striking these poses, Sherman creates the impression of an important person, or at least the belief that she is. These photos prove Sherman is still the media queen she is.

Some advice for dealers: If you must display multiple artists’ booths, at least tie the works to a theme. (Don’t simply clear out inventory.) Take a note from the Andrew Edlin Gallery, whose Smart Frieze booth brings together four artists grappling with alien creatures and a world beyond our own. Paulina Peavy claimed to be able to communicate with spirits in the 20th century, represented by a series of brilliant abstract works that included a pearl-headed moth creature moving through a choppy forest. Meanwhile, paintings by Esther Pearl Watson and Karla Knight express an ongoing fascination with extraterrestrials—a timely topic in light of the Pentagon’s recent release of so-called UFO documents. But the quietest star of the booth was a Melvin Way drawing that seemed to depict a non-existent compound. People want to know what Wei knows that the rest of us don’t.

London-based Carlos/Ishikawa Gallery, which shared a booth with its New York chapter, brought a number of artists, the standout of which was Evelyn Tao Cheng Wang, whose paintings consider the value of art. Wang has two wonderful works, both painted on a monumental scale, that continue her long-standing interest in Agnes Martin, a postwar painter known for her light canvases with hand-painted grids. In one painting, Wang took Martin’s blue and pink composition and overlaid it with a ram’s head and flowers from a Georgia O’Keeffe work. One explanation might suggest that Wang’s painting traces a queer lineage—Martin had female romantic partners, while O’Keeffe’s sexuality has long been a subject of debate. Another might argue that it solves the problem that when styles are endlessly copied, nothing can remain single. Wang posted a small note next to the painting, telling those who would interpret it: “Don’t take it seriously!”

After recently completing an exciting US tour, Virginia Jaramillo is still creating extraordinary abstract works that experiment with line. It can divide space, like the thin arcs of pink and blue she painted on a mostly black canvas, or it can help outline previously unseen shapes, like the twists of black and green in a purple painting, creating what looks like a champagne coupe.

These recent, small-scale works are installed around the stand’s main attraction: a long canvas titled 2021 Quantain which a network of colorful lines connects yellow emanations at both ends. Talking about similar works created in the same year, Jaramillo once said that these were “channels of communication.” Their information is clearly opaque.

Ahead of the opening of an Akinsanya Kambon retrospective later this month at New York’s Sculpture Center and the Center for Art, Research, and Alliances, two of the artist’s galleries have joined forces to create an unforgettable sampling of art. Kambon was a leader of the Sacramento chapter of the Black Panther Party in the 1960s and now produces ceramics that revive African traditions. African Drum #2 For example, (2024) is a three-headed container, implying African drum The drums used by enslaved West Africans were banned from being played after they were brought to the United States in the 18th century. The piece was fired using the Raku technique, where the ceramic is removed from the kiln while still hot, and like many of the Kambon pieces on the stand, it had tiny cracks. Yet despite the hardships it went through during its production, the piece has endured.

In addition to superb works by Stephanie Comilang and June Clark, the booth also 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 way to achieve the minimalist aesthetic highly prized by European modernists. Yet Bull deconstructs these figures in her weaving, revealing a tangle of robot-like gadgets beneath their elegant legs. Fittingly, the pieces are machine-made: Boole made them using a jacquard loom, a device that the 19th-century mathematician Ada Lovelace compared to an analog computer, and then finished the surface with hand embroidery.

sin (2026), the largest work in the fashion booth, features a ceramic mouth that sprays a stream of synthetic hair arranged to spell out the eponymous word, which translates to “blame” in Spanish. Who is blamed, and for what? This work does not tell us, although Seba Calfuqueo has previously said that hair “had a special significance in Mapuche cosmology” and allowed her to “escape the binary system.”

Calf Cuo, a young Mapuche artist based in Santiago, Chile, who is stirring up a storm on his biennial tour, seems to suggest that a violated body is not necessarily a defeated body. She returns to this theme, albeit indirectly, in a set of silver-coated ceramics based on Mapuche objects from the collection of the Museum of Ethnology in Berlin. In recreating them, Calfquio claimed ownership of objects taken from her people and displayed in Europe for others to see. The stand took top honors in the individual presentations in the Frieze Focus section, and for good reason.

Deondre Davis has a habit of picking up found items and applying false eyelashes to them. It’s a sculptural piece that’s both strange and mesmerizing: a lash-lined sculpture made of gold hinges mounted in the corner of the booth. What makes this work so hypnotic? I’m not sure I can tell you entirely, but perhaps it has something to do with the way Davis makes cold, industrial objects seem tangible, even slightly alien. At the very least, he seems interested in subverting the rules, which may be attributed to his unusual entry into the art world—he didn’t go to art school. indeed, Untitled (Brick Dust) #2is a new work on paper on display near Hinge that is characterized by the ordered logic of the grid, which Davis subverts by spraying bricks all over the place.