Artists to Watch: Future Fair and 1-54’s Best Discoveries

Colette Levette at Gillian Jason

A solo booth dedicated to Levette by London gallery Gillian Jason was extremely well received and sold out almost entirely by the weekend, with prices ranging from $2,000 to $7,000. Levette’s feathery brushstrokes immediately recall the Rococo, with its lightness, delicate chromatic palette and ornamental excess, but the sense of vertigo and the dynamic sinuosity of the swirling figures moving through the sky are also in dialogue with Art Nouveau. Both movements sought to reconnect art to nature, drawing from organic forms or projecting scenes of pleasure into idealized bucolic environments. In Levette’s scenes, however, a more mystical realm unfolds, where utopia and dystopia intertwine, and the human figure returns to a more primordial state, before social constraint fully separates body from instinct, nature and desire. Amid vortices of wind, fire, leaves, petals and fabric, figures dissolve between the earthly and the celestial, while drapery behaves like smoke, clouds or waves. Nature courses through the work, merging human and environmental forms in an eternal dance between the wild and the manufactured, staging a resonant desire for reconnection as a visceral, harmonious, energetic symbiosis.

Diane Briones Williams at Official Welcome 

There are multiple sides to history, and perspectives are always erased, manipulated or suppressed from the official narrative. In her delicate, Victorian-looking embroideries, Briones Williams traces the hauntings of post-colonial and diasporic Philippine life. The base works are beautiful tapestries, once made from imported European needlepoint kits, popular in the postwar era and meant to emulate the tapestries found in the estates of European nobility. In “Specters,” Briones Williams completes this detailed wool work, weaving in her counter-narrative by including images of Indigenous people, animals and plants that had been excluded from those idealized representations. The layers of memory in the work are many: shifts in taste, class-based values, the complexity of influence across borders and cultures and the impact of the Indigenous on the colonizer and vice versa all echo through works that are beautiful but also conceptually dense, embedded with the complexities of colonial history. The gallery placed the majority of the presentation ahead of her solo show opening in L.A. on June 11, with works priced between $3,000 and $7,500.

Paul Anagnostopoulos at Feia

Because of a historically anchored bias, we tend to imagine Ancient Greece as a realm of pristine whiteness and harmony. In reality, its temples were vividly painted, and life unfolded amid war and peace, ecstatic symposiums and Dionysian excess rather than Apollonian order. Reviving this unruly spirit—and the queerness that has always characterized it—Greek Brooklyn-based artist Paul Anagnostopoulos constructs a vibrant counter-mythology across painting, sculpture and ceramics. Presented by the new gallery Feia, his booth centered on catasterism: the ancient process through which mortals, heroes and lovers were transformed into stars and constellations after death. For Anagnostopoulos, that celestial transformation becomes a potent metaphor for queer resilience, allowing bodies, desires and stories to survive disappearance through continual reinvention. Drawing from Nonnus’s Dionysiaca and Ovid’s Metamorphoses, he reimagines the mythic love between Dionysus and Ampelos through a contemporary queer lens, expanding the narrative from saturated paintings and shaped panels to terracotta vessels crafted with Greek artisans and reinterpreted through pop and queer aesthetics. With works priced from $1,500 to $8,000, the gallery placed a few works during the fair but, more importantly, created visibility, meaningful connections and exposure as it prepares to open its first physical space in L.A. at the end of the month. “Through sales, conversations, new connections, tears, family stories, reviews, and more, the week has shown that this audience is ready for true vulnerability in art, alongside bold work that proudly stands on its own conceptual and formal merit,” co-founder Thomas Martinez Pilnik told Observer.

EXONEMO at NowHere

Chloe Galasso at Pali Galeria

Surrealism has often been driven by an erotic and libidinal pulse that activates the subconscious, historically positioning the female figure as both heroine and muse, though frequently through a male gaze. Connecting to the legacy of female Surrealists while reclaiming space from within, Argentinian artist Cloe Galasso finds in Surrealist freedom a language through which to stage feminine energy and psychic transformation. Her ethereal female figures and fragmented bodies unfold across moody, suspended landscapes, threaded with glowing lines of energy that evoke both spiritual circuitry and emotional rupture. Blending classical figurative depictions with mystical and metaphysical imagery, Galasso constructs in her work (all priced under $5,000) cinematic, introspective compositions in which earthy palettes are punctuated by luminous highlights, suggesting processes of healing, regeneration and spiritual connection. Her sinuous forms appear simultaneously vulnerable and transcendent, channeling an energetically charged vision of femininity that moves beyond Surrealism’s historic objectification toward a more interior, self-authored mythology.

Wallace Dibble at Stump Gallery

Many might not be ready to see the cacophonous, paradoxical visual overload that dominates digital space translated into the “high” historical language of oil paint, as Wallace Dibble does in her visual mash-ups presented by the dynamic new DUMBO-based Stump Gallery and priced between $5,100 and $6,900. Yet if we think about how Andy Warhol and Pop art once did the same with the mass-media culture of their age, Dibble is extending that logic into the visual imaginary of our own time—one shaped by scrolling, where images are continuously reassembled through a performative mixing of the personal and the social, the aspirational and the emotional. Embracing estrangement, Dibble mines photographic digital archives of strangers to construct scenes that hover between documentation and invention—a brilliant study of the collective imagination that already reveals much about how we build storytelling today. The gallery placed four works by the end of the fair, with more on hold.

Garo Hakimian at PMT Advisory

Something one looks for in emerging talent is the urgency of art-making: art as a necessary extension of self-expression, something that emerges as naturally as breathing. Yet it is rare to find the kind of raw spontaneity of gesture present in the work of Montreal-based artist Garo Hakimian. Navigating the canvas instinctively, he accumulates painterly gestures as an emotional and expressive flood, then finds figures within rhythm and space. Moving between the tactile, mechanical rhythm of the printing press that has shaped him since his youth, Hakimian embodies a unique intersection of “speed” that is psychological rather than technological. Describing his practice as a “dangerous sport” where the only certainty is mutation, he rejects the polished immediacy of the digital age in favor of visceral, physical persistence. Setting prices at $250 for drawings to $22,000 for paintings, advisor Maria Yoon, who presented him, sold out the drawings and saw strong interest throughout.

1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair

1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair was founded in 2012 by Touria El Glaoui as the first fair entirely dedicated to contemporary art from Africa and the African diaspora. Its New York edition returned to the Starrett-Lehigh Building in Chelsea from May 13-17, with a tightly curated but resonant map of contemporary art from Africa and its diaspora. The 2026 edition brought together more than 20 exhibitors from 12 countries, extending from Lagos, London and São Paulo to Nassau, and several listings describe the fair as presenting more than 80 artists across Africa and its diaspora. A special curated section, “1-54 Presents: Brazil Beyond Brazil,” expanded its transatlantic lens, focusing on the rich expression of Afro-Brazilian art and its deeper historical, aesthetic and spiritual ties to the African Atlantic.

Candice Tavares at Tanya Weddemire Gallery

Biomorphic forms of carved wood combine with translucent stained glass in a sensorial and metaphorically charged dialogue between softness and resistance. Priced between $7,000 and $9,800, several of Candice Tavares’s works sold during the preview, with the entire presentation placed by Sunday. Born outside Philadelphia and originally trained in engineering and pharmacy, Tavares draws on woodworking skills learned in her father’s woodshop, bringing together carved wood, found stained glass and bodily forms in works that celebrate Black beauty, femininity and resilience. Her practice foregrounds the diversity of Black hair textures and complexions while challenging the racialized narratives she sees perpetuated through healthcare and the media. Though woodworking was historically coded as masculine, Tavares uses the medium to evoke tenderness, intimacy and spiritual affirmation, transforming material resistance into a language of care.

Aaron Kudi at Adegbola Gallery

Drawing on the Garden of Gethsemane as a site of fear, struggle and anticipation, Nigerian-born, London-based painter Aaron Kudi uses abstraction to consider how pain is carried and left unresolved. Working with liquid metal, enamel, ink, acrylic and an Igbale—a traditional Nigerian broom made from dried palm fronds—he builds turbulent surfaces that move between spiritual imagery, Nigerian modernism and contemporary abstraction. Trained initially in psychology and later in tailoring and garment construction, Kudi approaches painting through layering, repetition, cracking and erosion. Influenced by the legacy of the Zaria Rebels and Black British abstraction, from Frank Bowling to Winston Branch, his practice reflects his movement between Nigeria and Britain, faith, psychology and material experimentation. Set within gold frames, the works challenge European institutional conventions while refusing any separation between ancestral visual knowledge and international abstraction. Currently completing his MFA in Painting at the Slade School of Fine Art, Kudi has recently undertaken residencies at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation in Senegal and the British School at Rome. With prices ranging up to $7,000, three works had already presold ahead of the opening, with several on hold; on the first day, two paintings sold at $7,000 each and a smaller work sold for $2,000.

Dana Robinson at Kates-Ferri Projects