Toronto-based Patel Brown showcases the smart and humorous work of collaborative duo Michael Dumontier and Neil Farber, which explores language, classification, and knowledge. The gallery sold multiple works on the first day, including a painting priced between $20,000 and $25,000, a sculpture priced at $8,000 and several smaller works.
Equally successful in focus was Superposition’s presentation of Helena Mitvaria’s recent work. The pavilion featured hand-cut mixed media collages, a carved brass crown with inscription, a wood and brass ceremonial staff, and a single-channel video documenting a live performance, all situated within the artist’s ongoing search for diasporic identity and ancestral heritage at the intersection of archival research, embodied ritual, and political memory. One of the institutions receives one of the new brass sculptures, Crown (Makeda)priced at $20,500, while there is another sculpture, Staff (Al-Butairi)priced at $18,500, has been placed in a private collection.
Constant demand on the main floor
Multiple sales were also reported by merchants who were present in the main section throughout the day. Karma, based in New York and Los Angeles, captured the public’s attention with Kathleen Ryan’s jewel-like “Badfruit” sculptures, in which preciousness, like contemporary vanitas, hovers in tension with decay. The show is sold out Bad Lemon (Adrift) and Bad orange (dark blue) (2026) for $150,000 and $135,000 respectively, with all works by Jeremy Fry listed, including three flat weaves priced between $30,000 and $55,000 and five basket-relief prints priced between $18,000 and $30,000.
Directly opposite, the Los Angeles Titan Night Gallery showcased one of its leading artists, Robert Nava, presenting an entire pavilion of electric new works in which the East Chicago native continues his intuitive practice of myth-making through fictional characters. The gallery placed many works on the first day, with prices ranging from $40,000 to $200,000. “Our presentation is very much a homecoming for Robert. He grew up outside of Chicago, and visits to the Art Institute (which now houses many of his drawings in its collection) and the Field Museum were formative. These institutions offered his first exposure to ‘art,'” Brian Fawcett, the gallery’s senior director, told the Observer, noting a deep connection between Nava’s work and the larger pictorial tradition in Chicago. “Robert’s epic mutations.”
Among the most prominent galleries in the Brazilian ecosystem, Nara Rösler doubled its simultaneous participation in EXPO and SP-Arte, a move the New York gallery director described as “always worth” the effort. The gallery sold three acrylic and oil works on canvas by Brazilian painter Eliane Almeida for $22,000, $22,000 and $18,000. Almeida’s instinctive, gestural approach builds dense ambiguity through accumulation while seeking to appropriate and rewrite colonial narratives. The gallery also placed a work by Monica Ventura—made of porcelain, copper, wood, and gold leaf, priced at $7,000—whose lively ceramics explore femininity through ancestral techniques and embodied knowledge.
Making its gallery debut after remarkable growth in just one year of operations, Miami-based Oba Gallery showcased a body of new work by Cameroonian-born, Geneva-based, self-taught artist Maurice Mbwa, who, through his engraved metal paintings, has developed a rich visual world infused with his own kind of spirituality. Priced between $50,000 and $60,000, the works immediately attracted strong interest, following a nearly sold-out showing at the gallery earlier in the year. The exhibition also features paintings on linen by French artist Tess Dumont, whose multi-layered installations convey a cognitive shift shaped by her experience as a mother of an autistic child. Priced at about $25,000, these poetic landscapes feel both intimate and expansive, with a cosmic feel that connects the personal and the universal.
This edition also marks the first official joint gallery presentation between Marc Strauss and Swivel Gallery, following their recent merger. The collaboration materialized in a large central booth in the main section, where the two arrangers staged a carefully choreographed intergenerational dialogue on materiality, bringing together artists from both programs with new works by Aimee Bravo, Kia Celeste, Alejandro García Contreras, Lucía Hierro, Otis Jones, Marton Nimes, Edgar Orlineta, Anne Samat, Antonio Santin, Renee Stout, and Mary Watt. The gallery placed several small works on the first day and remained hopeful of concluding negotiations on a few more ambitious sculptural works in the coming days. Local establishments anchored in the Chicago scene year-round also performed well, reporting several sales during the VIP preview. Patron has offered one of Chicago-based artist Lindsay Adams’s new poetic abstractions for $32,000, ahead of her solo opening the following week at Sean Kelly in New York, which follows a sold-out show in Los Angeles last year.
The gallery also sold a painting by Carolyn Kent for $15,000-$45,000 and several physically dense monochromatic abstractions by Miao Wang for $9,000-$15,000. Also featured are abstract and figurative works by Alice Tippett — which the artist describes as “visual poetry” — that draw on the subconscious language of her current curatorial exhibition at the DePaul Art Museum before its closing, with prices ranging from $8,500 to $15,000.
Chicago energy dealer Monikemilosh also had a strong first day, placing important new works by Yvette Mayorga, paired with a bright yellow ground, along with two photographs by David Schropp in shared dialogue with traditional painting and art history. By the evening, the gallery had confirmed the sale of several Sheri Hovsepian works and several Luc Agada paintings. “We enjoyed meeting so many curators and museum directors at our booth, and it was a very active first day at the gallery,” Milosz told the Observer, also noting the strong traffic in the gallery’s physical space in recent days, as curators and museum groups from out of town visited the current display of Cheryl Pope’s vibrant landscapes.
DOCUMENT was now a regular presence at major fairs including Art Basel and Frieze, and was equally satisfied with the gallery’s new institutional direction under Sierzputowski’s leadership. “Our first day at EXPO was a success,” said Sybille Frisch, Exhibition Partner. “We are impressed with Kate’s leadership and the energy she brought to the expo. It is a busy week for the city, and we are very proud to be part of this edition.” The gallery sold new work based on the photography of Paul Mbaji Sibuya, Negative (P1400105) (2024), and one of Dabin Ahn’s suspenseful night scenes, The Four Seasons: Spring (Seoul, Chicago) (2026), part of the same series that the South Korean-born, Chicago-based artist is currently presenting in a solo show at the gallery.
Good Weather is another rapidly growing gallery that has gained a reputation for experimental programming within the Chicago ecosystem and beyond. In the focus section alongside Detroit-based What Pipeline, the gallery presented an ambitious solo show by Dylan Spacey, in which he girls (2026) – a large sculptural installation of basket-woven bamboo in the form of a life-size portrait – with a private collector for $40,000. Moving seamlessly between high and low culture, Spacesky offers a witty yet unsettling commentary on the choices of adornment, consumption, and accumulation through which we construct our identities.
