The twelfth version of Expo Chicago opened to VIPs at midday on Thursday, following a vernissage brunch hosted by the truthful and the Museum of Modern Artwork Chicago’s Ladies’s Board.
The considerably late opening time by artwork truthful requirements (most worldwide festivals open at 10 or 11 a.m.) gave the impression to be a realistic alternative. Attendance was mild early on however picked up steadily by way of the afternoon, with opening day lasting till 8 p.m. Among the many guests have been a number of ARTnews High 200 Collectors, together with Anita Blanchard and Martin Nesbitt, Lisa Goodman and Josef Vascovitz, and Alec and Jennifer Litowitz.
Chatting with ARTnews just a few hours into the day, Expo Chicago president and director Tony Karman remained upbeat. “It’s gratifying to see that collectors appear obsessed with buying and inquiring about works, which supplies me nice optimism and hope not only for this second however for the longer term,” he stated. “The artwork world prevails.”
Forward of the truthful, issues loomed over the potential impression of Trump-era tariffs and visa restrictions. However in keeping with Karman, these worries largely didn’t materialize. (A couple of exhibitors listed on the ground plan finally withdrew, however for causes unrelated to commerce or journey obstacles, he stated.)
“We’re all on this collectively. As information sources have been writing about it, we have been studying about it,” Karman stated. “Expo Chicago and Frieze responded instantly to offer the knowledge and repair we may to reply each day [concerns from exhibitors and participants in the curatorial initiatives].”
Whereas the variety of exhibitors held regular round 170, there was a noticeable drop-off in blue-chip galleries. To inject some contemporary power, Expo partnered with the Galleries Affiliation of Korea to result in 20 South Korean galleries. Nonetheless, the aisles have been peppered with numerous galleries that sometimes don’t take part in festivals of this caliber—a mirrored image, maybe, of the broader market slowdown.
Earlier this month, the annual Artwork Basel and UBS International Artwork Market Report found that global art sales shrank by 12 p.c final yr. Whereas artwork truthful gross sales rose barely, sellers cited the “quickly escalating prices of artwork festivals” as a rising threat to participation, even when gross sales have been robust. Galleries, it appears, have gotten extra considered about which festivals they take part in.
The exhibitor combine finally labored to the benefit of the strongest works on view, which stood out extra sharply in opposition to their environment. Anecdotally, a number of galleries relayed opening-day gross sales to ARTnews, with many going to establishments. That’s a part of what distinguishes Expo Chicago from different artwork festivals: it flies in curators and museum administrators from throughout the nation for devoted arts skilled–associated programming.
It looks like a lot of these arts professionals put holds on works earmarked for his or her respective establishment’s everlasting collections. Los Angeles–based mostly Charlie James Gallery positioned three work from its solo presentation of Manuel López to establishments, priced between $6,500 and $22,000, alongside a number of gross sales to non-public collectors. London’s Pippy Houldsworth Gallery additionally had success with its solo sales space for Chicago-based artist Wangari Mathenge, securing two institutional holds and two gross sales to collectors for costs between $90,000 and $100,000.
Moreover, by way of the truthful’s Northern Belief Buy Prize program, three museums acquired works: The Dallas Museum of Artwork bought a Wallace Pato portray for $36,000 from Mitre; the Pennsylvania Academy of Superb Artwork purchased one sculpture for $10,000 and two works on paper for $3,000 every by Soo Shin from Patron; and the Birmingham Museum of Artwork chosen a portray by Lilian Martinez from Ochi for $14,000 and a mixed-media work by Winnie Truong from Patel Brown for $8,000.
Under, a take a look at the perfect cubicles on the 2025 version of Expo Chicago, which runs on the Navy Pier by way of Sunday.
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Jen Everett and Ryan Patrick Krueger at Rivalry Initiatives
Picture Credit score: Maximilíano Durón/ARTnews Within the Publicity part, Buffalo’s Rivalry Initiatives is presenting works by two artists who mine completely different picture sources to create compelling items.
Ryan Patrick Krueger maintains an ongoing correspondence with pictures curator Vince Aletti, who sends him queer-related photos, clippings, and mail artwork. Krueger collages these into dense visible narratives of homosexual males’s lives from earlier generations. In a single work, a studio portrait of two nude males, strategically lined by a draped towel, is barely obscured by an archival personals advert selling the “romantic secrets and techniques of Jeff Stryker,” the homosexual porn star—for $2 a minute.
In dialogue with Krueger’s items are works by Jen Everett, who collages photos of her mother and father with discovered pictures and photographic supplies like print sleeves and take a look at strips. On the middle of the sales space, Everett additionally presents sculptures of legacy applied sciences—radios, audio system, televisions, vinyl data, and cassette tape instances—that she sources for his or her private resonance. Some are in working situation, others aren’t. Everett sees it as a technique to memorialize each sound and silence.
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Edra Soto at Interact Initiatives
Picture Credit score: Maximilíano Durón/ARTnews Chicago’s Interact Initiatives has a solo presentation of native artist Edra Soto within the Profile part. Alongside the aspect partitions grasp a number of of her well-known sculptural pieces that draw on Puerto Rican architectural motifs and incorporate viewfinders displaying pictures from her household archive. On the sales space’s middle is an set up of a number of white plastic chairs outfitted with custom-made slipcovers, many constituted of blankets and shirts of Unhealthy Bunny. Interspersed amongst them are field followers, spray painted and affixed with cut-out shapes. Soto’s apply revolves round exploring varied on a regular basis objects and motifs—like outside porch chairs and ornamental steel fences—widespread in Puerto Rico and utilizing completely different strategies of inventive intervention to discover the meanings underlying their ubiquity.
However the sales space’s tour-de-force hangs on the again wall. Titled the place of abode (2025), the sculpture presents a brand new course for the artist. Developed throughout her current Arts/Business residency on the John Michael Kohler Arts Middle in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, the work embeds 4 ceramic shell vessels into considered one of her orange-painted steel architectural components. Soto’s mother and father collectively ran a number of enterprise out of her childhood residence, together with a ceramics workshop. It’s a shifting tribute to her familial historical past that provides a brand new depth to her apply.
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Nathan Vincent at Walter Maciel Gallery
Picture Credit score: Maximilíano Durón/ARTnews The sales space for LA-based Walter Maciel Gallery within the Profile part has been remodeled right into a locker room. There’s a charged eroticism to the set up, full with lockers, benches, communal showers, and even bathe drains. What’s particularly intriguing about Locker Room (2011) is that a lot of it’s crocheted, with some components draped over wood armatures constructed from supplies discovered at Residence Depot. Artist Nathan Vincent is all in favour of creating rigidity between areas and inventive endeavors which have been socially conditioned to be gendered (masculine and female, respectively).
For the Expo presentation, Vincent has added a timeline tracing main developments in LGBTQ+ rights from 2011, when Locker Room debuted, to the current. It opens on an optimistic observe with the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Inform.” Between 2012 and 2014, a number of athletes got here out publicly, and in 2015, the Supreme Courtroom’s Obergefell v. Hodges ruling legalized same-sex marriage nationwide. However by 2016, the trajectory shifts: North Carolina’s HB2 invoice restricted toilet entry for transgender individuals. In 2023, over 500 anti-LGBTQ+ payments have been launched in state legislatures throughout the nation, and in 2024, restrictions on gender-affirming look after minors unfold to no less than 27 states. 4 months into 2025, a slew of govt orders have additional restricted the rights of trans individuals.
On this context, Locker Room takes on an much more pointed resonance as trans and queer rights stay below assault.
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Vy Trịnh at Galerie Quynh
Picture Credit score: Maximilíano Durón/ARTnews Ho Chi Minh Metropolis–based mostly Galerie Quynh has on view a number of fascinating sculptures by Vy Trịnh. The artist makes use of supplies that she considers to be “Vietnamese objects” as a consequence of their ubiquity within the nation, particularly in open markets in Saigon, the place she is predicated. One sculpture makes use of the components of a Honda Dream motorbike, which might be seen zipping across the streets of the capital metropolis. To this she has affixed, in varied knotting strategies, items {of electrical} wire and strips of silk organza. The armature for her sculptures, which additionally contains standing followers and clothes racks, are objects that she says transfer between private and non-private areas as a method to consider the completely different economies and ecologies in modern Vietnam. Born in 1996, the yr Vietnam reopened to the world, Trịnh captures, in her apply, the fast transformation the nation has undergone over the previous three a long time.
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Nádia Taquary and Lita Cerqueira at Verve
Picture Credit score: Maximilíano Durón/ARTnews Within the Publicity part, São Paulo’s Verve has on view a two-person sales space for Nádia Taquary and Lita Cerqueira, two Afro-Brazilian artists from Bahia. Working because the late ’60s, Cerqueira is taken into account the primary Black girl photographer in Brazil. On view are her photos of on a regular basis life in Salvador, spanning the ’70s to the ’90s. In a single, taken in 1999, we see a smiling Black lady elaborately dressed for a Carnival celebration, thought of the most important on the earth. In one other, a portrait of a lady’s face, the underside half of the movie strip appears to have been uncovered to mild, giving it an eerie high quality.
Within the middle of the sales space is a big sculpture by Taquary, in addition to an set up on its exterior wall. The set up brings collectively varied items from her “Orikis – Salute to the Head” collection. These mixed-media works function a base of carved wooden to which she affixes completely different combos of lagdibá beads, cowrie shells, glass beads, copper, silver, and straw, amongst different supplies. Every bit is predicated on how an orisha (a non secular deity within the Yoruba faith) has appeared to her, relying on the completely different shapes and colours she sees. The collection title “Orikis” refers back to the artwork of reward poetry that Yoruba-speaking individuals make. They’re imbued with a sure power that rewards seeing the works up shut. Verve associate Ian Duarte stated he introduced her work to the truthful as a teaser for a fee the artist is planning for the upcoming Bienal de São Paulo, opening in September.
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Kristine Mandsberg at Galerie Robertson Arès
Picture Credit score: Maximilíano Durón/ARTnews An fascinating assortment of colourful sculptures by Copenhagen-based artist Kristine Mandsberg are on view within the sales space of Galerie Roberston Arès. Six of those sculptures present two items of PVC cardboard and foam that butt up in opposition to one another. The works resemble the abstractions of Hugette Caland, which themselves recall the crevices and folds of the physique. (Caland is the topic of a must-see solo present on the Arts Membership of Chicago proper now.) To those kinds, Mandsberg has utilized completely different hues of nylon flock fiber—yellows, greens, and blues—that give the items a tactile texture upon nearer inspection. Close by are a set of half spheres that additionally make use of the nylon flock fiber approach however through a special software approach that offers it a gradient.
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Cal Lane at C24
Picture Credit score: Maximilíano Durón/ARTnews Hudson Valley–based mostly artist Cal Lane has on view varied plasma-cut metal sculptures. Rising up on Vancouver Island, Lane spent a lot time in her mother’s hair salon and labored there for a while. She was fascinated by the expressions of femininity and wonder she witnessed there; on the identical time, she was equally all in favour of donning extra masculine clothes. That rigidity between the masculine and female is current in her sculptures of varied panties in metal, as she has translated the fragile lace into hard-wrought steel. It’s a captivating mixture. On a pedestal in a single nook of the sales space is Pantie Chain (2018), a sequence of weathered steel panties that cascade downward. Lane has additionally on view two items utilizing discovered ammunition packing containers to which she has added intricate floral components in addition to views of plush infants and birds. The harmful previous of those objects is now tempered by the idyllic scenes she has crafted onto them.