Frieze New York 2026: Erwin Wurm, Rothko Auctions, and Artist Survival

Frieze New York 2026 features a range of stories, including Austrian artist Erwin Wurm's fat sculptures that critique consumer culture, with works like a Fat Ferrari for a collector in Aspen. The fair also highlights artists finding fame in their 80s, such as a Vietnam war veteran turned ceramicist and a sci-fi-loving minimalist. Five Rothko works lead the May auction season in New York, peppered with postwar heavyweights. A separate piece examines the polycrisis threatening New York's creative class, featuring painters, curators, and mayor Mamdani's new culture tsar. Allison Katz presents paintings of cockerels and cabbages in a New York show. Filipino-Canadian artist Stephanie Comilang shows work at Frieze New York featuring pineapples, butterflies, and Elvis impersonators. Additional series articles discuss the necessity of solitude for great art, referencing Giorgio Vasari and Agnes Martin, and Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn, a Dutch abstractionist and friend of Jung who amassed 6,000 mythological images.