Past, present, and future uncertainty is the default setting for the art world. Economic turbulence, pandemics, climate crises, politics, and every global tremor reverberate through the art market. And yet, the show goes on. Frieze Week 2025 in New York was a vibrant, full steam affirmation of the art world’s stubborn vitality.
Despite looming clouds, high interest rates, global unrest, and election-year jitters, this year’s fairs had a palpable charge. Art lovers, collectors, and curators emerged, proving New York remains a gravitational center for contemporary art. Frieze New York returned to The Shed at the controversial Hudson yards, for its 13th edition, with over 65 galleries from 25 countries. The vibe was eclectic and ambitious, mixing major players and fresh voices. The fair counted on its signature mix of blue-chip anchors and experimental newcomers who are always my favorites booth to visit. But Freeze was just one of several fairs all over Manhattan and Brooklyn, including: TEFAF, Independent, NADA, and Future Fair, which rounded out a week-long immersion into the full spectrum of the art market.
The mood? Optimistic. Focused. Intentional. Collectors weren’t just browsing; they were buying. And I witnessed some sales on the spot. Works in the $50k $500k range moved briskly, suggesting resilience in the mid-market, even as the top end (over $10 million) continues to cool. While talking to some buyers I noticed that many of them gravitated toward pieces with conceptual and emotional weight rather than just big names or flashy price tags.
Notable highlights at Freeze to me included Sarah Sze, presented by Tanya Bonakdar Gallery. Sze, a New England native with deep ties to Boston, stunned visitors with “Time is Slowed by the Earth,” 2025, a monumental and immersive installation that blurred the boundaries between painting, sculpture, architecture, and digital media. Known for her intricate constellations of everyday materials, Sze continues exploring how we construct meaning in a world oversaturated with images, information, and fleeting impressions.
In “Time is Slowed by the Earth,” Sze built a universe of fragments, light projections, painted gestures, sculptural assemblages, and moments of stillness woven together into a complex choreography of time and space. The work enveloped viewers, drawing them into a meditative atmosphere where emotion, memory, and media coexist in a delicate tension. Sze’s practice often interrogates the pace and density of modern life, and this piece was no exception. It felt especially timely in 2025 when technological acceleration outpaces human perception. Yet rather than offering critique alone, the piece provided something far rarer: pause. It invited viewers to slow down, to trace meaning through disarray, and to experience time as elastic, contemplative, and deeply human.
Presented by Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel, Brazilian artist Antonio Tarsis, native of Bahia, offered a haunting and poetic counterpoint to the fair’s spectacle. His assemblages, composed of discarded matchboxes, charcoal, burnt gunpowder, and other ephemeral materials, resonate with fragility and resilience. Tarsis elevates the overlooked and the cast-off, transforming debris into powerful visual archives of personal history and social neglect.
His work, “Among the Ruins, Silence (Olive II)” is a poignant culmination of a lifelong practice that began in his youth when he started collecting matchboxes, cardboard scraps, paint tins, and other found materials from the streets of Salvador. These objects, modest, worn, and often ignored, became tools for self-reflection and understanding his environment. What emerges is a record of lived experience, a tactile language of survival and resistance, evoking layers of individual memory and collective erasure. Tarsis’s work invites viewers to consider what society discards and what stories remain embedded in those remnants.
Tina Kim Gallery featured Tuan Andrew Nguyen’s in a solo booth including the piece “Outburst,” 2025. This massive mobile, constructed from bomb metal and artillery shells, shimmers with kinetic grace and emotional gravity. His practice reclaims violence into healing forms, turning remnants of war into vibrational instruments of peace. In a booth tuned for literal resonance, his works don’t just sit; they sing, and visitors were invited to engage and produce sound.
Tina Kim Gallery also featured Lee Sinja, bringing a long-overdue spotlight to modern Korean fiber art, an often overlooked but deeply resonant practice. A pioneering first-generation fiber artist, Sinja began her career in the 1950s and ’60s, when working with thread, fabric, and dye was still dismissed mainly as domestic labor. She challenged and ultimately transcended these boundaries, reimagining fiber as a material and a language of resistance, memory, and transformation. Her 1997 work, “Spirit of Mountain,” was a standout at Frieze, a subtle yet powerful meditation on the relationship between nature, tradition, and contemporary form. The piece employed traditional Korean techniques, dyed threads, handwoven textures, but disrupted expectations through abstraction and conceptual rigor. In Sinja’s hands, fabric becomes topography, stitch becomes rhythm, and fiber holds history and future potential.
By recontextualizing a medium long associated with the private, feminine sphere, Lee Shinja asserts fiber as a critical tool for artistic expression and cultural commentary. Her practice spans generations, blending inherited knowledge with experimental techniques to elevate craft into concept. A work of quiet power, it underscored how the most progressive artistic voices frequently arise from overlooked or marginalized spaces.
Sam Falls first caught my attention at Art Basel in 2024 with his monumental mural, “Spring to Fall,” 2023–2024, co-presented by 303 Gallery, Galleria Franco Noero, and Galerie Eva Presenhuber at Art Basel Unlimited (its large scale artwork section).
Created outdoors in the Hudson Valley over multiple seasons, the work was a poetic collaboration between the artist and the natural world, an interplay of weather, time, plant life, and human gesture. Falls laid flora directly onto canvas and applied water-reactive pigments, allowing the elements to leave their mark over time. The result was an image and a co-authored record of decay, growth, and seasonal change.
Rejecting the traditional studio model, Falls embraces a practice rooted in presence and patience. By living alongside his materials and working outdoors, he aligns more with early photographic experimentation than contemporary image capture. His process draws on the principles of cyanotype and other pre-digital photographic techniques, exposing his compositions to light, chance, and environmental variables.
But unlike photography’s impulse to freeze time, Falls’ work expands it, incorporating the slow rhythms of painting, sculpture, and installation. His latest piece, featured at Freeze, “West,” 2025, continues this trajectory. At 78 x 88 inches, the pigment-on-canvas work resonates with the same meditative weight. Presented again by 303 Gallery, West is quiet and expansive, a landscape that is not depicted but lived through.
The latest 2025 UBS Art Basel Report painted a sobering backdrop, global sales were down 12 percent, and high-value transactions dipped dramatically. But beneath the contraction, something more hopeful is happening. The total artworks sold rose, especially in the under-$50K range. Small galleries are growing. Women artists now make up 41 percent of rosters. Digital sales are holding steady. The market structure is slowly democratizing, even if the financial terrain is still challenging.
Most notably, there was a stronger philanthropic and community tone this year. Artist-led initiatives, nonprofit partnerships, and socially conscious programming hinted at an art world increasingly aware of its responsibility beyond the market. Projects like the Artist Plate Project with the Coalition for the Homeless offered a needed reminder: art’s real power lies in connection, not just commerce.
Frieze Week 2025 didn’t pretend that all was well, but it showed us that all is not lost. The art world is adapting, searching, and, most importantly, creating. If you’re considering going next year, put it on your calendar. Something is thrilling about being in a room where the future is being imagined in real-time, one brushstroke, sculpture, or soundwave at a time.
And for us from New England? Know that our artists and some galleries were out there, making waves.\
(For news on the next Frieze New York as well as other Frieze-presented shows around the world, visit frieze.com).