Frieze New York Kicks Off with Seven-Figure Sales and High Energy: ‘It’s a Fiesta’

Editor’s Note: This story originally appeared in On Balance, the ARTnews newsletter about the art market and beyond. Sign up here to receive it every Wednesday.

A high level of energy was palpable at the preview day of the Frieze New York art fair on Wednesday. Many attendees at the Shed, on Manhattan’s West Side, were fresh off a return trip from Italy, where the Venice Biennale opened to the public on Saturday, and many were still comparing notes on best national pavilions and most heated protests. 

But the order of the day was art sales, and for some of the 65 or so international galleries exhibiting, they were in full swing before the paintings were even hung on the walls and the doors opened to VIPs at 11 a.m. Tif Sigfrids, of New York’s Canada gallery, told ARTnews that presales had already been good the week leading up to the fair. Over coffee and pastries at the 10 a.m. breakfast event, advisor Lowell Pettit said that he had already placed a Stephen Shore photograph from New York’s 303 Gallery, and had heard—correctly as it turned out—that New York’s James Cohan Gallery had just about sold out of its booth of paintings by Kelly Sinnapah Mary. 

“Not long ago, there was understandable consternation” about the state of the art market, said Pettit, but in a week when Freize, TEFAF, Independent, NADA, and Esther are all kicking off, he said, “it’s amazing that the appetite is where it is.”

“We’re selling a bunch of things,” said New York dealer Andrew Kreps later in the day. “The energy feels good.”

After two rocky years, the art market’s energy appears to have changed. Frieze director for Americas Christine Messineo, in a video chat ahead of the fair, pointed out the successful recent editions of Frieze Los Angeles and Expo Chicago, now under the Frieze umbrella. Sotheby’s and Christie’s both posted increases in sales in 2025, and consignors are confident enough to bring to the block no fewer than three artworks estimated around $100 million at the marquee sales this week and next. 

The appetite Pettit alluded to showed up in spades all over the fair. By 4 p.m., globe-spanning blue-chip gallery White Cube had placed two El Anatsui sculptures, LuwVor I and  MivEvi III (both 2025) for $2.2 million and $1.9 million respectively, as well as Antony Gormley’s sculpture SET VII (2024) for £450,000 ($608,555), and Howardena Pindell’s mixed-medium painting Deep Space #4 (2025) for $275,000, along with pieces at more modest levels by Julie Curtiss, Sara Flores, Louise Giovanelli, Marguerite Humeau, and others.

A-list celebrities were in attendance, such as newsman Anderson Cooper and bushy-bearded REM frontman Michael Stipe—looking, one attendee joked, “a bit like David Letterman”—as well as collectors Beth Rudin DeWoody and Miami’s Rubell family. Megacollector Leonardo DiCaprio was spotted by mid-afternoon, in a black baseball cap and a black facemask, on the arm of advisor Ralph DeLuca. Actor Sharon Stone also made the scene.

Collectors Rob and Eric Thomas-Suwall, known to their social media followers as the Icy Gays, recently moved house from North Dakota to Virginia, and are collecting again after a pause. They talked to ARTnews while admiring sexy, kinetic sculptures incorporating massage machines and flowers by Korean-American artist Rachel Youn at G Gallery, in town from Seoul. They are priced between $6,500 and $8,000. “She’s a discovery for us,” Rob said, adding that they had placed one piece on hold. “It feels like everything is coming back online,” he added, alluding to the upbeat atmosphere. 

“We’re making sales,” said G Gallery’s Jane Lee, adding, of Youn, “There’s a surprising level of interest for a young artist making kinetic sculptures.”

Institutions were also making purchases. In the inaugural year of the Sherman Family Foundation Acquisition Fund, the Brooklyn Museum acquired two works from New York gallery Ulrik by Bettina, who lived for decades in the Chelsea Hotel and died in 2021; the award is presented posthumously to support the documentation and preservation of her work. The Baltimore Museum of Art acquired works by Reika Takebayashi from Public Gallery, Seba Calfuqueo from W-galería, and by Joanne Burke from Soft Opening. Each artist receives an unrestricted $5,000 award.

Globe-spanning Swiss megagallery Hauser & Wirth leaned into an all-women presentation that paired historical heavyweights with fresh material from major contemporary artists. The booth mixed subdued works by Lorna Simpson, who currently has a solo presentation at the Pinault Collection’s Venice outpost, Punta della Dogana, and Louise Bourgeois with a suite of brightly colored new photographs by Cindy Sherman, each priced between $175,000 and $195,000 in editions of six. 

Christopher Canizares, a senior director at the gallery who will soon be opening a boutique artist agency called Artist Legacy Bureau, told ARTnews that the Sherman works grew out of a recent commission for The Face magazine and saw the artist revisiting some of the character types and personas that have defined her career for decades. “She effectively mined her own history of character creation,” he said, pointing to references that evoked Sherman’s society portraits and earlier staged identities. At 1 p.m., gallery president Marc Payot said it was still too early in the day to draw firm conclusions about sales, but described the fair’s opening hours as highly encouraging. “The level and quality of collectors, curators, and museum directors is at least as high, if not higher, than in previous years,” he said. 

Just down the corridor at Thaddaeus Ropac, early sales spanned both postwar blue-chip names and newer work fresh from artists’ studios. The gallery sold Georg Baselitz’s Stunde der Nachtigall (2012) for €1.4 million ($1.6 million), alongside Robert Rauschenberg’s Bog Song (Salvage) (1984) for $825,000 and a new floral painting by Alex Katz, Black Roses 3 (2025), for $600,000. Additional placements included two works by Martha Jungwirth at €320,000 ($375,000) and €75,000 ($87,800) respectively, as well as Joan Snyder’s Buds & Blossoms (2025), which sold for $150,000.

Nearby, London-based Victoria Miro opted for a tightly curated booth built entirely around figurative paintings shown in pairs and “couples.” The presentation brought together works by artists including Ali Banisadr, María Berrío, Saskia Colwell, Paula Rego, and Emil Sands, that echoed and played off one another formally and emotionally. One pairing, on the left hand corner of the booth, juxtaposed a painting by Alice Neel with a work by Chantal Joffe, an admirer of Neel’s. The conversation there, with both the Neel and the Joffe featuring couples, and the fact that the two artists can be seen as a couple, was a highlight of the fair. 

Other pairings were subtler, more playful, and even sometimes erotic. One picture by Saskia Colwell showed overlapping limbs and shadows creating the illusion of a woman masturbating but in fact was a painting of intertwined bodies, one leg gracefully draped over the lap of a woman in stockings. “We realized we had certain things that would work very well together,” said the gallery’s president, Glenn Scott Wright, adding that he thought of the booth less as a conventional fair offering than as a tightly hung group exhibition focused on contemporary figuration and visual dialogue between artists. While the gallery is among those who prefers not to share prices, one source familiar with the booth said multiple works had sold by the late afternoon for between $30,000 to $300,000.

Gagosian, which has a reputation for not sharing prices, said it had sold works by Derrick Adams, Richard Diebenkorn, Helen Frankenthaler, Cy Gavin, Rick Lowe, Tyler Mitchell, Sabine Moritz, Gerhard Richter, Adriana Varejão, Stanley Whitney, and Francesca Woodman. According to one source, a large Sarah Sze work was on hold towards the end of the day.

Among the younger galleries drawing steady traffic was a shared booth by Chapter NY and Carlos/Ishikawa, partners at Frieze since 2021 who first shared a booth back in 2017 at Independent. Chapter NY’s presentation brought together new and recent works by Erin Jane Nelson, Antonia Kuo, Alix Vernet, and Mary Stephenson, tying the booth closely to the broader institutional energy across New York this month. Nelson is currently included in the Whitney Biennial, while Stephenson’s solo exhibition at the gallery recently sold out. 

The presentation ranged from Kuo’s layered photochemical works and Vernet’s fragmented urban sculptures to Nelson’s ceramic cameras and Stephenson’s psychologically charged interiors. Nicole Russo of Chapter NY said the gallery approached the fair strategically, thinking not only about sales but about “longevity” and building momentum around artists already gaining institutional attention. Prices ranged from $3,500 to $30,000, with the gallery reporting seven sales by early afternoon. “It’s not 2021,” Russo said. “No one feels like they need to buy something right that second.” Still, she added, collectors were circling back after leaving the booth, a sign that buyers remained engaged even if the pace had become more measured. 

Throughout the morning and early afternoon the pace was steadier and more deliberate than even a few years ago, when speculative frenzy defined the market and collectors tripped over each other to make it to a booth first. “People have the luxury of taking their time,” adviser Meredith Darrow, who has built a formidable reputation building collections for a few of the collectors involved with the Aspen Art Museum, told ARTnews. Both this season and last, she said, the market was filled with active buyers who are moving “at a more normal and less frantic pace than in the past.” Darrow pointed to strong material across the fair, ranging from blue-chip names like James Turrell at Almine Rech to younger artists like Haley Barker, whose solo presentation at Night Gallery had become an early talking point. “It’s important that there is such high quality at both the high and the low end of the market,” she said. 

By day’s end, Almine Rech reported that the Turrell, valued at $900,000 to $1 million, had been sold. Managing partner Paul de Froment reported “an exceptional response” on day one, including multiple other early sales.

Night Gallery’s Haley Barker solo booth was, as it happens, one of the fair’s early breakout successes. By midday the solo booth of atmospheric Southwestern landscapes priced sold out, with the works ranging from $24,000 to $175,000. The booth drew inspiration from Barker’s recent trip through New Mexico, including visits to sites associated with Georgia O’Keeffe, and transformed at least one sliver of the Shed into something closer to a desert retreat, complete with glowing sunlit trees, porches, and mountain views rendered in hazy, sensual layers of paint. “By midday, everything was gone,” gallery founder Davida Nemeroff said, adding that demand had built steadily ahead of the fair given the time-intensive nature of Barker’s paintings. 

Additional sales continued to roll in throughout the afternoon. At Tina Kim Gallery, the gallery reported placing works across a wide range of price points, led by a painting by Ha Chong-Hyun for $180,000 and a painting by Kim Tschang-Yeul priced between $120,000 and $140,000. Other sales included works by Maia Ruth Lee, Lee ShinJa, Suki Seokyeong Kang, Davide Balliano, Pio Abad, Jane Yang D’Haene, and Livien Yin, with prices ranging from roughly $20,000 to $80,000.

The rough global news, of military conflict and economic upheaval, wasn’t completely absent from everyone’s mind. Two galleries are at the Shed straight out of the broad conflict zone in the Middle East, namely Dastan, from Tehran, and Lawrie Shabibi, from Dubai.

Jose Kuri of Kurimanzutto gallery (New York and Mexico City) reported that the fair was going very well, with works by a range of artists on offer, including Leonor Antunes, Nairy Baghramian, Gabriel Kuri, and Haegue Yang. “We’re very happy to have placed all of Wangshui’s work,” he said. Nearby was an old-fashioned telephone hooked up to John Giorno’s Dial-a-Poem, where listeners can hear poetry from an array of writers. “That’s on hold for a couple of institutions,” he said. The piece resonates in Giorno’s home town, he said, especially since attention to the artist and his legacy has been so well stewarded at GPS, his former home in New York, now an art space run by Anthony Huberman. 

On a more challenging note, artist Jerónimo López, aka Dr Lakra, would have been at the fair, said Kuri, but his visa didn’t come through.

“The general mood day-to-day is that it’s the apocalypse,” said 303 founder Lisa Spellman, who is offering works by artists including Doug Aitken, Sam Falls, Mary Heilmann, Alicja Kwade, and Sue Williams, priced from $90,000 to $350,000. “And then you come to a fair and it’s a fiesta,” she said. “It’s hard to reconcile. But I’ll take it.”