Frieze New York 2026 Finds a Venice Thread Running Through the Fair
At Frieze New York 2026, one of the clearest patterns is not a single style or market trend, but a shared connection to Venice. Across the fair, galleries are presenting artists whose work has recently appeared in the Venice Biennale, the 2026 Whitney Biennial, or MoMA PS1’s Greater New York quinquennial, giving the fair an unusually coherent undercurrent.
At Mendes Wood DM, Precious Okoyomon is represented by four works on paper in custom wood frames. The presentation is comparatively restrained for an artist whose work has been widely visible this season. Matthew Wood, one of the gallery’s co-founders, says the works on paper reveal “a more daily and intimate aspect of the mind behind the sculpture, behind the installations.” He adds that the frames bring “an element of menace and suspense” and suggest “a sort of historicity.” The gallery declined to disclose prices.
Perrotin is showing Alma Allen’s Not Yet Titled (2024), a bronze wall-mounted sculpture that recalls a cliff face, tree bark, or the exterior of an ancient temple. The work is priced between $30,000 and $50,000. A spokesperson for the gallery described the piece as “both very natural-looking and very unnatural,” noting that Allen often works through that tension.
At Lawrie Shabibi and P420, Nabil Nahas’s Untitled (2025) is available for $45,000. Though it reads at first like a wall sculpture, it is in fact acrylic on canvas. Nahas refers to the natural forms in the work as “fractals,” and his broader practice often pushes painting toward the edge of sculpture.
Frith Street Gallery is presenting three works by Dayanita Singh, including a column of 20 photographs from her Venice project at the Archivio di Stato di Venezia. The works are priced between $25,000 and $150,000. Jane Hamlyn, the gallery’s founder, called Singh’s work “thoughtful and generous,” especially in contrast to the more bombastic work often associated with Venice.
Other booths extend the same conversation in different directions. Alvaro Barrington’s On de Road TEF series consists of three burlap paintings priced at $100,000 to $200,000 each; they were previously shown on the side of the London-based artist’s carnival truck for Notting Hill Carnival. Paulo Nazareth’s Ginga, priced at $20,000, embeds contemporary food items inside a resin-gamela, while Carolina Caycedo’s two cosmo-nets at Instituto de Visión are priced at $30,000 each and continue her long focus on communities affected by dam-building.
Taken together, the presentations suggest a fair less interested in novelty for its own sake than in how artists translate place, labor, and political memory into form. In that sense, Venice is not just a backdrop to Frieze New York this year. It is part of the conversation.
