Aspen succeeds each summer in attracting art lovers and collectors from across the country through a near-perfect synergy: a cooler, more relaxed mountain escape, a boutique, easy-to-navigate fair that grows more international with each edition and a smart, ambitious museum that has prioritized bringing leading artists to town through site-specific programming and commissions. Under Nicola Lees, the Aspen Art Museum orchestrated ArtCrush, an artist-first charity gala and auction that attracts top collectors from across the country to this remote mountain town. Aspen also has excellent restaurants and bars that stay open late, giving it the feel of a European summer resort.
Unlike other boutique hotel fairs such as Felix in L.A. and the Dallas Invitational, the Aspen Art Fair does not confine itself to the Hotel Jerome’s poolside rooms but also has a broader, fluid booth setup in the ballroom. This year, 38 international dealers, up from 21 at the inaugural edition three years ago, were distributed equally between the two formats. Behind this fair is Bob Chase, a longtime Aspen resident and owner of Hexton Gallery. “We want to keep it contained and navigable,” he told Observer during the preview on July 29.
Asked whether this atmosphere comes from Aspen itself, the hotel setting or the contained fair formula, he responded that it is a combination of all three: “This place naturally makes people relax. It’s different from the Hamptons, where you’re only a couple of hours from New York, and you bring the city with you. Aspen is remote. It’s not easy to get here, and once you’re surrounded by the mountains, the fresh air, the outdoor lifestyle, the whole experience changes your mindset.”
At the fair, there were plenty of landscapes, abstract works dealing with materiality and light, something people accustomed to Aspen’s geological and meteorological tempo can certainly appreciate, and art that carries forward the legacy of the Light and Space movement, itself fundamentally concerned with the environment and the relationship between human presence and its surroundings. “People here are clearly inspired by the natural world, so artists engaging with those ideas often connect with collectors,” Chase said. “That doesn’t mean literal landscape paintings; it’s more about artists thinking deeply about our relationship with nature.”
The highlights
Near the entrance, London gallery Cadogan, participating for the second time, brought metaphysical compositions by Ramon Enrich, a 60-year-old artist from Cava, Spain, deeply inspired by Giorgio De Chirico. In his works, architecture and geometric forms appear suspended within a Mediterranean atmosphere. Against a stark contrast between nature and the built environment, the layering of acrylic becomes highly textural, reflecting a meticulous study of the airy qualities of light and space. Prices ranged from $9,000 to $40,000.
Facing Enrich was a series of seemingly abstract, lyrical and intuitive reconstructions of landscape from memory by one of the gallery’s core artists, British painter Deborah Tarr. Made during her time in Aspen, the works translate the atmosphere of its rapidly changing landscape into notes of color and frequencies of light. Prices ranged from $22,000 to 60,000.
Also betting on nature was New York based Palo Gallery, which successfully presented a group of promising young artists from its roster, resulting in early sales for Danny Sobor’s cinematic, painterly frames. Also hanging in the booth was an energetically charged painting by Xanthe Burdett, in which silhouettes of precisely rendered bodies become animistic, spiritual presences as the human form blurs into the landscape and the two become a single organism. Emerging from the highly respected Royal Academy Schools graduate program, Burdett draws on Celtic myths and deeper ancestral wisdom that resurface through her gestural painterly passages. The work was priced at around $10,000. Equally spiritually charged was an imagined landscape reconstructed from memory by New York-based artist Allegra Toran. Again blurring the line between a factual moment and its recollection, Toran releases the landscape from its photographic reference and turns it into a sublime field of energies, suspended between elemental forces and the sensations of awe and terror they can provoke. By the end of the first day, the gallery had made around $40,000 from seven paintings, including three by Leda Tsoutreli and one by Allegra Toran, sold to East Coast and local Aspen collectors whom the gallery met at the fair. On day two, after a partial rehanging, Palo also sold a painting by Chad Murray priced at $12,000.
Hexton Gallery had already rehung almost its entire booth before the official VIP opening. Collectors wanted to see and acquire the works directly from the gallery during what amounted to a pre-pre-preview, because the list of featured artists overlapped with those of Hexton’s concurrent gallery exhibition.
The presentation staged a dialogue around color and materiality, pairing historical figures such as Larry Poons and Christo with younger names, including Ernesto Burgos. The gallery also featured vibrant, symbolic landscapes by Sabrina Piersol, an artist originally from San Diego who recently moved to Aspen, alongside more domestically scaled sculptures by Phillip K. Smith III, who carries forward the legacy of the Light and Space movement in his otherwise monumental site-specific works. His wall sculpture Light Round captures universal moments within the phenomenology of light and its endless changes, a sensitivity he developed while living in the desert near Palm Springs.
By the end of the day, Hexton reported more than $400,000 in sales, with six works sold to private collectors, including two paintings by Larry Poons, two by Ernesto Burgos and two by Andy Millner. Prices ranged from $18,000 to $175,000 for Poons’s extremely tactile 2024 painting Powers and Spells #4.
Mexico City gallery Proyectos Monclova debuted at the fair this year in a joint presentation with Havana-based El Apartamento, which has participated since the fair’s launch. The booth staged a compelling dialogue between artists whose histories and aesthetics move across the two countries. Following El Apartamento’s sellout presentation of her work at Frieze London, Ariamna Contino also sold quickly during the fair’s first hours. The galleries sold a totem-like sculpture by José Bedia, an established Cuban artist who had also been represented in Mexico for many years and whom the two galleries now aim to bring back into wider attention. The sculpture created an unexpected dialogue with Edgar Orlaineta’s playful wooden work, presented by Monclova alongside other leading names from its roster, including Gabriel de la Mora and Hilda Palafox. By the end of the day, the two galleries had sold several works in the $18,000-35,000 range.
Among the most expensive works at the fair, SECCI presented a $900,000 bronze by Fernando Botero, originally acquired directly from the artist by a Florence collector and now benefiting from the new market momentum for the artist. The gallery balanced it with younger, more affordable but in-demand names, including Korean American artist Hyegyeong Choi, as well as works on paper by Maja Ruznic and an $85,000 painting by Daniel Crews-Chubb.
Some of the most expensive pieces in the room, however, were at Galerie Gmurzynska, with prices ranging from $6,000 to $4 million. These included a study for Wifredo Lam’s The Jungle, recently featured in the artist’s major retrospective at MoMA, which the gallery helped organize and supported with loans. The gallery subsequently expanded the exhibition in its own space with another museum-grade show that included the work, staging the first dedicated dialogue between Lam and Picasso to reveal the singularity of their respective practices. Director Mathias Rastorfer confirmed that Aspen is consistently productive for the gallery, particularly because it provides an opportunity to reconnect with longtime collectors.
Another now-local Aspen presence, Marianne Boesky Gallery, also had a strong first day, reporting sales of more than 12 works for a total surpassing $350,000. These included Sanford Biggers’s now-iconic glittering cloud Unsui (Duet), 2026, sold for $135,000, alongside four works by Tianyue Zhong, two by Gina Beavers and one by Jennifer Bartlett. Beavers also has a work in this week’s ArtCrush auction. “Our Aspen community is bar none when it comes to curiosity and engagement, not to mention we have a lot of fun,” Kelly Woods, partner at Boesky Gallery, told Observer. The gallery also sold four new, playful animal creatures in glass and bronze by the Haas Brothers ahead of a major solo exhibition opening at the gallery in September. Three more sculptures sold on the second day, with prices ranging from $15,000 to $85,000.
Perrotin also reported early sales of a new work by Danielle Orchard and a summery acrylic on paper by Claire Tabouret, both in the $80,000-100,000 range. It also sold, in the $45,000-60,000 range, a wall assemblage made from cassette tapes by Gregor Hildebrandt and one of Nick Doyle’s signature denim collages. (Doyle recently had a closely watched exhibition at the gallery.)
Directly opposite, Monique Meloche sold three works by Luke Agada and a work by Cheryl Pope within a few hours, at prices reaching $50,000. Southern Guild, the South African gallery that recently opened a space in Tribeca, was equally enthusiastic about its third appearance: three artists it represents received recognition during the fair. Tschabalala Self was awarded the Anderson Ranch Arts Center Visiting Artist Prize, while Jozua Gerrard was one of two recipients of the new Mack Art Foundation award. Fresh from her recent major exhibition at Tate, Zanele Muholi was also awarded the 2026 Buckhorn Public Art Prize, resulting in a public installation of her acclaimed Faces and Phases series at Aspen’s Red Brick Center for the Arts. “What makes Aspen so special is the people. Collectors here are as passionate about the outdoors as they are about art,” Southern Guild founder Trevyn McGowan told Observer.
McGowan described the fair as elegant, thoughtful and considered, creating the much-needed space for visitors to spend real time with both the work and the artists. By the second day, the gallery had sold six works by Lebohang Kganye at $8,500 each, two by Usha Seejarim at $18,000 each and four Zanele Muholi photographic prints for between $25,000 and $28,000 each.
Participating in Aspen for the first time with a joint booth combining art and design, Friedman Benda and Albertz Benda sold several ceramic works by Tony Marsh in the $18,000-24,000 range. These were shown alongside Thaddeus Wolfe’s fascinating contorted vessels, which resemble archaeological findings. The Brooklyn-based artist has developed an entirely original approach to sculpting glass, combining glassblowing and casting techniques to achieve effects that would not otherwise be possible in the material.
Third-time participant Ronchini also knew what might appeal to the local audience. The gallery once again brought energetic abstractions by pioneering Ab-Ex artist Paul Jenkins, who remains in demand despite not being widely exhibited in the United States today. Representing the estate since 2018 and preparing a major solo opening with Frieze in October, the gallery sold one painting for $75,000, along with a work by Rebecca Ward priced at $30,000 and a painting by Tanya Ling for $22,000. The star of the booth was a rare Frank Stella work from Paul Jenkins’s collection. Priced in the six figures, it was still in discussion with a major collection.
Meanwhile, RYAN LEE reported multiple early sales of fantastical compositions by Japanese artist Masako Miki, whose work draws on folklore and mythology, as well as a painting by Tim Braden.
Nonetheless, it was probably in the hotel rooms that dealers were able to stage some of the strongest dialogues. One of the first and most successful was Jacob Arthur Gallery, which paired Dan Life’s glittering creations with the hotel’s vintage furniture. With six works sold in the $4,000-9,500 range within the opening hours, the gallery was already reporting $45,000 in sales by the middle of the second day. Among the presentation’s highlights were Life’s new works made from 100 percent silk Persian Qum rugs, embellished with approximately 35,000 individually applied Swarovski crystals that accentuated their intricate floral and medallion motifs. Each work took around three months to complete.
Next door, Charlie James Gallery from L.A., participating in Aspen for the second time but for the first with an entire dedicated room, reported a successful opening day. The gallery placed several new mixed-media works by New York-based Salvadoran artist John Rivas with local collectors. “This year feels like a big step forward for the fair, and we had a fantastic opening day in our room at the Jerome. We look forward to coming back next year,” the founder told Observer.
Among the presentation’s highlights was a series of smaller canvases by Jim Thompson paying timely homage to the New York Knicks by replicating the 1992 posters he grew up with. Hovering between nostalgia and contemporary cultural document, the works were priced at $9,000 and paired with more charged canvases by Alina Echeverría and Manuel López. Also worth stopping for was a work by Erika Rothenberg, one of the founding artists of the Guerrilla Girls: an American palimpsest titled A Shining Beacon to the World, offering commentary on the country today through the visual format of something resembling a church program. Produced in an edition of 10, only the artist’s proof remained.
A primarily nomadic gallery and a regular presence at more curated boutique fairs, The Spaceless Gallery focused its presentation on a series of new, vintage-looking photographic works by L.A.-based artist Lara Porzak, whose work also hangs at the fashionable Casa Tua restaurant. Staged in elegant dialogue with the room’s interior, the photographs are pure chemistry and an alchemy of memory, suspended intriguingly between abstraction and figuration, time and space, while carrying the temporal texture of a past age. Another highlight was Antoine Wagner’s hand-painted Steingraeber piano, which finally arrived on Friday. The gallery was satisfied by the second day but was hoping to reach six-figure total sales by the weekend.
In a nearby room, Ippodo Gallery staged a thoughtful dialogue between contemporary and traditional Japanese art centered on the theme “Transforming Nature.” The 20 artists on view similarly translated the splendor of the organic world into the realm of the decorated interior through regional Japanese clays, forged iron, glass, naturally dyed textiles, washi paper and other forms of craft excellence distilled from nature’s metamorphic beauty.
Ceramics were particularly prominent at this edition of the fair. Tribeca-based Bienvenu Steinberg & J showcased artful pieces by Korean artist Jane Yang-D’Haene in dialogue with Marco Maggi’s intricate paper cosmologies and Liliana Porter’s poetic interplay between micro and macro worlds. Hanging above the bed was also a symbolically powerful work by Indigenous Brazilian artist Chico da Silva.
Meanwhile, New York-based IRL Gallery easily placed Juan Miguel Quiñones’s playful ice cream sculptures made from marble dust and stone, alongside Quirin Krumbholz’s kinetic sculptures, Michael Dickey’s trompe-l’œil glazed earthenware and Ulla Scheinemann’s dreamy landscapes. Prices ranged from $1,600 to $34,000.
Making its Aspen debut, Toronto-based Patel Brown also staged a playful dialogue with the hotel space through books and excerpts from the writings of Michael Dumontier and Neil Farber, founders of the Canadian art and poetry collective Royal Art Lodge. The composite thought-landscapes revealed dialogues and entanglements between words and images. The gallery sold several during the opening hours, at prices ranging from $12,000 to $23,000.
Among the most interesting discoveries of the fair were the delicately lyrical yet psychologically charged silk paintings and works on paper by Mia Sandhu, a Canadian Punjabi artist who uses silk to explore the duality of identity and her experience of a double life suspended between taboo and tradition, and between freedom and hidden social constructs. The works were accessibly priced from $2,000 to $7,000.
Aspen as an arts destination and where the fair fits
Given the small scale of the booths and the high level of early activity, many exhibitors were already rehanging by the second day, with the fair continuing through Saturday. Ronchini director Ruben Tanzi told Observer that activity usually winds down slightly after the opening, but another significant group of collectors tends to arrive on the day of ArtCrush. Aspen attracts an extraordinarily international audience: people who travel widely and own homes in several of the world’s most desirable destinations. “They’re culturally curious and interested in discovery. That’s one of the defining qualities of this fair,” according to Cornell. “They enter a whole other mindset, but they’re still really curious. They’re still culture-forward. They’re still very involved in all the art happening here and at the institutions.”
Ultimately, Aspen offers that perfect escape from the frenzy and heat of cities like New York and L.A., becoming a lush prairie for art dealers looking to cash in on the otherwise slower summer months.
According to data gathered by Aspen Journalism and Aspen Sojourner, 80 known billionaires hold property interests in Pitkin County. Downtown Aspen—where both the Aspen Art Fair and the historic Aspen Intersect Art and Design (now a far less exclusive and more accessible event) take place—is home to one of the most expensive real estate markets in the United States, with median home prices reaching $10–15 million this year. During fair week, hotel rooms rarely start below $1,500 a night, making Aspen a natural playground for a rarefied crowd that knows it will find, for the most part, its own peers only gathering there.
The VIP program offered a sense of the scale and reach of Aspen’s elite art audience, with visits to Jorge M. Pérez’s 200-acre sculpture park, Anderson Ranch Arts Center’s experimental campus and a soirée at Redstone Ranch sponsored by private aviation company Falcon.
Newly appointed director Kelly Cornell, who also led the growth of the Dallas Art Fair, drew a parallel between the two cities. Like Dallas, she said, Aspen has a deeply engaged local audience willing to invest not only in the fair but in the institutions, programming and cultural infrastructure around it. “The more involved the community becomes, and the more opportunities there are, the stronger and more resilient the ecosystem becomes,” she explained. “As more people invest in the community, that naturally supports growth.” In Dallas, a committed collector base helped expand the city’s wider art ecosystem. She now sees similar potential in Aspen, as more residents are contributing to the town’s cultural life rather than simply passing through.
Chase and Cornell agreed that one of the greatest strengths of the Aspen Art Fair is its concentration of highly engaged collectors. Because the event remains relatively intimate, visitors have time to return, build relationships with dealers, meet artists and discuss acquisitions with fellow collectors. Those conversations can lead to further business and new projects well after the fair closes, once dealers have planted their seeds in Aspen’s wealthy, flourishing valley.
Asked whether, as the first person in the art world to lead two fairs at once, she now envisions greater synergies between them through VIP programming or collector engagement —especially given how many Texas-based collectors already spend time in Colorado — Cornell was confident that those connections would develop naturally as both fairs continue to grow. “One reason this has worked so well is that the audiences already overlap significantly. We don’t have formal plans to coordinate collectors, but it’s happening organically,” Chase also confirmed, noting that his work with Cornell had been underway for some time before the announcement. He recalled that the first time Cornell came to Aspen to scout the fair, they immediately ran into collectors they both knew. “There was already a natural crossover.”
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