Frieze New York 2026

Artistic Practices and Perspectives

Amine El Gotaibi presents monumental installations that probe the political and poetic tensions shaping contemporary African societies. Working in Corten steel and wool, his practice draws from the landscapes of North Africa – its deserts, mountains, and histories of migration – reimagining these as symbols of dignity, resistance, and survival.

Patrick Bongoy transforms discarded rubber inner tubes into intricately woven sculptural forms and reliefs that confront histories of extraction, displacement, and endurance. Bongoy was selected to represent the Democratic Republic of Congo’s first-ever pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2026, further affirming his standing as one of the most significant sculptors working in Africa today.

Zizipho Poswa’s large-scale ceramic sculptures translate forms drawn from isiXhosa adornment and matriarchal tradition into works that collapse distinctions between the intimate and the monumental.

Napoles Marty, recipient of the 2026 Frieze Los Angeles Impact Prize awarded in partnership with NXTHVN, presents figures carved from charred wooden logs – elemental forms that blur the threshold between the human and the mythic, drawing on his Cuban heritage, personal narrative, and ritual traditions of protection.

Manyaku Mashilo’s paintings draw on photographic archives to construct symbolic scenes in which imagined figures move through liminal, often celestial spaces. Rooted in personal and collective histories, her work weaves together memory, lineage, and spirituality to reimagine Black identity across time and place.

Mmangaliso Nzuza presents large-scale figurative canvases that combine angular, stylised forms with a sensuous painterly approach to explore identity, subjectivity, and belonging.

Roméo Mivekannin’s paintings interrogate the Western art canon through acts of substitution, inserting his own likeness into historically exclusionary compositions and challenging entrenched hierarchies of representation.

Jozua Gerrard’s enamel-on-glass paintings draw on popular culture to stage uncanny, cinematic scenes that explore interiority and psychological tension. Working through layered processes of construction and erasure, his figures emerge within ambiguous narratives that hover between the familiar and the surreal.

Kamyar Bineshtarigh explores language, translation, and the expressive potential of mark-making, drawing on Arabic script and calligraphic form to create layered compositions on canvas that move between legibility and abstraction.

Chidy Wayne’s paintings explore the human figure through a considered, process-driven approach to mark-making, where gesture is built through layers of careful construction. His compositions distil moments of stillness and introspection, with figures emerging through a restrained visual language that emphasises presence, balance, and control.

Wura-Natasha Ogunji’s hand-stitched drawings translate the rhythms of daily life in Lagos into intimate, tactile works that explore the presence of women in public space, engaging questions of labour, leisure, and freedom.

Sandra Brewster explores identity, movement, and place in layered photographic works that fragment and reassemble the figure, holding it between presence and dissolution as a reflection on urban movement and diasporic experience.

Lebohang Kganye engages personal and familial history through the reconstruction of archival imagery, restaging and inhabiting family photographs to reflect on grief, inheritance, and maternal legacy, collapsing past and present into layered, autobiographical narratives.

Zanele Muholi presents work from their ongoing Somnyama Ngonyama (Hail, the Dark Lioness) series. Grounded in activism and visual testimony, Muholi’s images function as both archive and assertion, insisting on visibility, dignity, and self-representation. In 2026, Muholi was awarded the prestigious Hasselblad Award, recognizing their profound contribution to contemporary photography.