ROOM FOR DREAMS becomes a living manifesto for utopian optimism, creative courage, and the power of imagination through a multilayered approach where large scale installations, cinematic storytelling, live conversations, and ritual-driven encounters converge.
Kamrooz Aram is everywhere this year, from Mumbai Art Week to the Whitney Biennial, and critic Aruna D'Souza is grateful. She pens a beautiful meditation on his work, reading his abstract paintings as not simply a denunciation of Western modernism nor a reassertion of Islamic visual motifs, but something else entirely - something gestural, exuberant, riotous, and incomparably his own.
Hong Kong's particular and seductive Metabolist city planning is an ode to consumption as a great totalizer of culture, and to contemporary art as merely a niche commodity form among many others.
The record price in the category, $13.8m- paid last year at Christies' in New York for a painting by the Mumbai-based Modernist M.F. Husain-is more than three times what it was 20 years ago.
Stephen Friedman was overdue filing when he went into liquidation on 2 February, closing his London gallery immediately (his New York venue shuttered around the same date). At the time of writing, invoices remain unpaid and artists unable to retrieve works from storage companies. In a statement, Friedman says 'all matters are now subject to the administrator's consideration'.
We're still the new kids on the block. But it feels like we're more on the map, more anticipated this year. This year at Post-Fair, his gallery is showing small works by Edgar Ramirez, who won the Frieze Impact Prize in 2023.
The Doha debut of the venerable Swiss fair offers a stress test for the Art Basel brand, art fairs writ large, and the Gulf's collector base. One looming question: Can a market-oriented model take root within a state-led, institutionally focused cultural ecosystem? Sales on day one were limited, but sales are perhaps not the focus of this debut, which was aided by ample state support.
