Photo London Moves to Olympia as Sotheby’s South Asian Sale Hits $22.1 Million
A fair changes its address, an auction category posts a near-flawless result, and a major American museum commits new space to a long-underhoused collection — together, the developments sketch an art world recalibrating in real time.
Photo London will stage its 11th edition at Olympia in Kensington, marking a new chapter for the U.K.’s leading photography fair. The event runs May 14–17, and the relocation is being met with a renewed showing from galleries that have been absent in recent years. Among those returning are London’s HackelBury Fine Art, Tokyo’s Akio Nagasawa, and Paris’s FishEye.
The move to Olympia, a landmark exhibition venue, signals an effort to sharpen the fair’s profile and visitor experience as photography continues to expand across collecting categories — from vintage modernist prints to contemporary lens-based work that increasingly overlaps with installation and new media.
On the corporate side of the fair ecosystem, Art Basel’s parent company, MCH Group, reported CHF 429.5 million ($539 million) in revenue for 2025, down 1.2 percent year over year. The company attributed the decline largely to negative foreign exchange rates. Net profit, however, reached CHF 18.6 million ($23.5 million), underscoring how global art events now operate within the same currency pressures and cost structures shaping other international businesses.
In New York, the market’s appetite for South Asian Modernism was on clear display at Sotheby’s. The auction house’s Modern and Contemporary South Asian sale brought in $22.1 million on Thursday, achieving a 100 percent sell-through rate. Sotheby’s described the total as the department’s second-highest on record — a data point that suggests sustained depth of bidding, not just a single headline lot.
The top price of the evening went to Indian artist Maqbool Fida Husain (1915–2011). His painting “Second Act” (1958) sold for $5.1 million, anchoring the sale’s narrative around canonical figures whose work has increasingly been positioned within broader histories of postwar modernism.
Institutional news added a longer-term perspective. The Brooklyn Museum announced plans for a $13 million, 6,400-square-foot home for its African art holdings — a collection of roughly 4,500 works. The new “Arts of Africa” gallery is scheduled to open in fall 2027.
Taken together, the week’s headlines point to a familiar tension in the art world: short-term momentum — a fair’s strategic relocation, a sale’s perfect sell-through — set against the slower, consequential work of building infrastructure for collections and audiences. The next year will show whether these investments translate into lasting shifts in how art is presented, collected, and contextualized.
