Highlights from Frieze New York 2026

A German sculptor and installation artist living and working in Vienna, Liesl Raff creates tactile, process-oriented sculptures and immersive environments from semi-translucent sheets of natural rubber. She pigments the latex sheets, hand-casts them over clay frames in her studio, and finishes them with talcum powder before displaying the new forms using steel rods, aluminum castings, sandbags, and heavy metal clamps. Her sublime wall sculpture, Mirage 1, part of a new series on view in her solo show at the gallery’s Vienna space, creates the illusion of baroque grandeur through ruffled muslin and draped latex set against a steel, mirror-like oval—metaphorically reflecting an imagined realm with minimal and industrial precision.

Image: Liesl Raff, Mirage 1, 2026. Steel sheet, latex, fabric, talcum. 106 x 65,5 x 25 cm / 41 3/4 x 25 3/4 x 9 7/8 in. 

Gillian Wearing is a prominent English conceptual artist linked to the Young British Artists (YBAs). The 1997 Turner Prize winner, Wearing’s art investigates the tension between public personas and private lives, focusing on how ordinary individuals perform identity, share secrets, and interact with media culture. Her witty photographic self-portrait, Me as Madame and Monsieur Duchamp, depicts the artist as Marcel Duchamp’s famous alter ego, Rrose Sélavy, and as the revered French conceptualist himself. The two figures mirror each other in a hinged, oval diptych. Aptly presented at the fair during the Museum of Modern Art’s Duchamp retrospective, it also aligns with Wearing’s participation in Persona: Photography and the Re-Imagined Self at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston.

Image: Gillian Wearing, Me as Madame and Monsieur Duchamp, 2018. Bromide prints, diptych, 44.02" x 64.25" x 1.26" (111.8 cm x 163.2 cm x 3.2 cm), Edition of 6, 2APs. 

A Mexican multidisciplinary artist best known for large-scale textile installations, ceramics, and interactive projects, Pia Camil is celebrated for work that emphasizes collectivity and often involves partnerships with local artisans or the general public. At Frieze New York in 2015, she challenged the commercial nature of the elite art market by distributing 800 free, wearable ponchos made from factory scraps, turning fairgoers into mobile artworks. Back at the fair again this year, Camil presented an evocative series of new paintings exploring the relationship between wilderness and sexual desire. Currently living in the forest, she draws inspiration for her Into the Wild paintings from her surroundings where her figures harmoniously coexist with their environment, and desire is shrewdly expressed through gesture, immediacy, and rhythm.

Image: Pia Camil, Into the wild (Sunrise), 2026. Oil on canvas, 66.14" x 47.24" x 1.38" (168 cm x 120 cm x 3.5 cm). 

Marcelo Silveira is a celebrated Brazilian artist whose multidisciplinary work pushes the limits of traditional art. He draws largely on the culture, lived experiences, and regional materials of the Brazilian Northeast, stripping discarded everyday materials of their original purpose and systematically reworking them into deeply human, conceptual narratives. Blurring the line between folk craftsmanship and high-concept minimalism, he works with an incredibly wide palette of media, primarily building assemblages from found objects. His wall sculpture, Pele XXXI, is made by shaping dead cajacatinga wood—a water-resistant material known for its stout, often misshapen, gnarled form. Silveira employs its unique leather-like texture and warm grain in detailed sculptures and carvings, showcasing the tree's natural beauty while highlighting issues of environmental degradation in Brazil.

Image: Marcelo Silveira, Pele XXXI, 2023. Wood (cajacatinga), beeswax, and metallic pin, 73.23" x 59.06" x 23.62" (186 cm x 150 cm x 60 cm). 

An internationally acclaimed Pakistani artist, Hamra Abbas is known for her versatile, multidisciplinary practice spanning sculpture, stone inlay, miniature painting, photography, and large-scale installations. Her work frequently deconstructs traditional iconography, cultural history, and faith, engaging playfully with the delicate qualities of paper and the enduring, weighty nature of marble and lapis lazuli. After returning to Pakistan in 2015, she began experimenting with stone inlay—a South Asian adaptation of the historic Italian pietra dura technique. Her painterly piece, Tree Studies 13, is a stone inlay made with lapis lazuli on marble. She uses stone to depict gardens and forests, key motifs for the Garden of Paradise (Jannah) in Islamic tradition. She collaborates with local artisans to cut tough materials into thin strips, creating the illusion of delicate, paper-thin drawings embedded in marble.

Image: Hamra Abbas, Tree Studies 13, 2025. Lapis lazuli on marble, 11 × 9 1/10 in | 28 × 23 cm. 

Abraham González Pacheco is an emerging Mexican artist, set designer, and draftsman. His work explores archaeological fictions, constructing alternative historical narratives, imagined relics, and installations that fill gaps in official history. Inspired by the lack of recorded history in his rural hometown, he investigates themes of identity, history, and the link between ancient traditions and contemporary upheaval. Spanning painting, sculpture, and large-scale public installations, his work is distinguished by its unique media and underlying conceptual framework. His fresco-like wall work, Cabeza de proyectil (Projectile head), was created with graphite on pigmented concrete set within a metal fan grill. The set concrete takes on textures and lines from the formwork, endowing the final piece with a raw, weathered look reminiscent of an excavated ruin or architectural fragment.

Image: Abraham González Pacheco, Cabeza de proyectil, 2026. Setting of concrete, pigments, and graphite on metal structure, 31.5" x 31.5" x 3.15" (80 cm x 80 cm x 8 cm). 

A pioneering Brazilian artist, Laura Lima is renowned for her radical, long-duration installations that incorporate living bodies—including humans, animals, and plants—as literal sculptural elements. Rather than calling her work performance art, she describes it as living images or three-dimensional drawings that challenge social hierarchies, explore human behavior under physical constraints, and blur the lines between natural and technological realms. Her work often adopts a philosophical stance, transforming everyday items such as hair, food, textiles, and ropes to challenge societal norms. Her cloud-like suspended sculpture, Disco Voador #42, 2026 (Flying Saucer #42, 2026), is a lively assemblage of found objects that catch the eye with shiny, colorful elements that whimsically bounce up and down when pulled.

Image: Laura Lima, Disco Voador #42, 2026, 2026. Glass, opalescent glass, aluminum, galvanized steel, stainless steel, mirror and stone, 39.37" x 11.81" x 19.69" (100 cm x 30 cm x 50 cm).