Christie’s reported a 20 percent decline in its total sales, plummeting from $8.4 billion in 2022 to $6.2 billion in 2023. Meanwhile, Sotheby’s projected in December that its 2023 sales would total $8 billion, less than the equivalent figure from the previous year.

The downturn follows a financial peak in 2022, precipitated by a surge in collecting during the pandemic. Advisors, gallerists, and auction house specialists have told ARTnews recently that, over the last six months, they’ve seen first-hand the significant slowdown in art sales.

Other analyses of the art market show an even starker drop-off. In a recent report by industry analyst Art Tactic, which tracks art sales data globally, the combined auction sales across Phillips, Sotheby’s, and Christie’s amounted to $11.2 billion in 2023, a 19 percent decrease from 2022. (This figure excludes sums generated through private sales.)

Meanwhile, the cumulative sales for the top ten artworks at the three auction houses exhibited a significant drop, totaling $660 million in 2023 compared to $1.1 billion in 2022—a nearly 50 percent decrease. In 2021 and 2022, the prices for top artworks consistently increased, with few works in the top ten selling for less than $50 million. Last year, however, four of the top ten artworks sold for under $50 million—far more than in previous years.

A full view of the economic situation is not yet available, as Phillips has yet to disclose its 2023 results. In 2022, the three auction houses collectively generated $17.7 million in sales and Phillips saw a 10 percent increase from 2021, reaching $1.3 billion in 2022. (Phillips declined to respond to inquiries about its 2023 figures.)

Beyond the auction circuit, where prices are transparent, contemporary art galleries featuring earlier and mid-career artists told ARTnews last month that they had experienced significant pullback in buying, particularly from U.S.-based collectors, starting early last year. Multiple gallerists said that their sales were down as much as 25 percent in 2023 compared to the previous year.

The slower sales environment persisted through Art Basel Miami beach, which has become an important venue for young dealers aiming to boost their year-end sales totals. By the fair’s end, ARTnews found that nearly 50 small-scale galleries participating in ABMB’s specialist sections reported making only $1.6 million combined. This figure represents a minuscule portion of the $41.5 million generated through the sales of just three works disclosed by mega-dealers David Zwirner, Pace, and Gagosian during the fair’s initial days.

According to New York law firm Kaye Spiegler, which facilitated the painting’s return, museum officials raised flags internally over the painting’s ownership record after uncovering a label with Goudstikker’s surname on the painting’s back frame. Provenance researchers concluded that the work was one of more than a thousand paintings illicitly taken from Goudstikker’s art holdings, according to a statement.

The painting’s donors, whom the firm declined to name citing confidentiality, were unaware of the work’s suspect ownership record. After conducting internal research, officials of the French museum, which is host to a collection ranging from archaeological artifacts to 20th-century paintings, contacted Goudstikker’s sole heir, Marei von Saher, to notify her that the painting had resurfaced from a private collection.

The date of the museum’s message to Von Saher has not been disclosed. A representative for Kaye Spiegler declined to provide details about the insurance value for the Van Haarlem work.

The latest case is one of only a few returns that Goudstikker’s surviving relatives have secured. Last year, officials of the German city of Trier restituted a 17th-century Dutch painting by Adam van Breen titled Ice Skating to Von Saher, following a legal claim. The painting had circulated at auction in the late 1980s. In 2019, Von Saher attempted to appeal to the United States Supreme Court a lower court ruling that allowed the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, California, to keep two paintings by Lucas Cranach the Elder once owned by Goudstikker that were illegally taken by Nazis. The appeal came after a long legal battle with the museum for their return, but the Supreme Court declined to take up the case.

The Goudstikker Art Research Project, which oversees restitution claims related to Goudstikker’s property, is currently seeking the return of 800 remaining works illegally exported from Amsterdam to Germany by Nazi officials.

Around 1,100 works looted from Goudstikker’s holdings were taken in Amsterdam by Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, a high-ranking Nazi official. A portion of the stolen works were eventually returned to the Dutch government, which facilitated the restitution of 200 paintings to the family in 2006, eight years after the family’s initial claim seeking their legal return was denied.

In the filing, the Phillips board of directors, including executive chairman Ed Dolman—who served as CEO from 2014 to 2021—recommended against paying a dividend to investors, after a report from UK auditing firm Buzzacott described its position as in a “current net liability,” meaning that financial liabilities outweigh assets.

Generally, a board’s decision not to issue a dividend can signal financial strain or a lack of confidence, even for a private company, as the Wall Street Journal explained last year amid a spate of major companies failing to pay out to investors.

Owned by Leonid Fridlyand and Leonid Strunin, the founders of Russian luxury retailer Mercury Group, Phillips remains reliant on financing from Mercury, according to the March and October disclosures, which the auditor’s report said put the house’s financial position in a state of “uncertainty.” It echoes similar findings noted in a report from this past March that appeared in the Guardian, when Buzzacott stated that the ability of Mercury Group’s individual owners to provide support could not be guaranteed, leaving “significant doubt” around the auction house’s ability to continue.

The October report makes clear that, amid the downturn, the auction house is currently unsure how much financial support it can rely on from Mercury. In it, the directors pointed to “continued access to funding” and a lack of a “binding commitment” for funding from Mercury as an ongoing risk to the auction house’s financial stability. It also cited a “general reluctance” among art sellers in a “volatile” marketplace as an additional challenge faced by Phillips last year. In the same financial documents, Phillips directors noted that Mercury Group’s owners “as individuals” had confirmed they would not, in the next year, seek repayment of financial support they had already put toward developing Phillips.

Not even a surge in revenue could make up for the hurdles Phillips faced in a more difficult sale environment in 2022. Last year, Phillips generated £208.6 million ($262 million) in revenue in the UK from auction and private sales combined, a figure that accounts for 20 percent of its reported overall sales figure of $1.3 billion. While revenue increased by $38.3 million from 2021 to 2022, or 8.5 percent, the report cited that “inflationary pressure” in transportation and shipping forced a surge in costs of 25.7 percent. The resulting loss for its UK operation more than doubled from £5.6 million ($7 million) in 2021 to £13 million ($16 million) in 2022. Those rising costs saw the company’s profit margin in the UK drop by 4 percent, from 57 percent to 53 percent between 2021 and 2022.

In October, Phillips directors said in a report included in the filing, they’re aiming in the future to “keep costs stable.” When Phillips reported it made $1.3 billion in sales in 2022 last December, it withheld any indication of decreased profitability. Instead, the house suggested publicly that the sales growth was a sign of the company’s health, allowing it to expand its operations in Asia. (The big three auction houses project their year-end sales annually around mid-December; Sotheby’s did so last week, and Christie’s says it plans to report theirs on Monday. A company representative said Phillips does not plan to publish its 2023 sales results at this time.)

In a statement to ARTnews, a Phillips spokesperson said “filings made in the UK in October 2023 contain information that is now more than a year old. They only take into account Phillips’ operations in the UK, excluding any operations outside of the UK. They do not represent an accurate view of Phillips’ global financial status.”

Phillips, as well as its competitors, Sotheby’s and Christie’s, do not typically publish their overall financial performances from year to year, particularly if they underperform or the market is weak. Sotheby’s CEO Charles Stewart recently disclosed that the house’s 2023 sales reached a collective $8 billion, the same figure reported in 2022. While such sales figures are often reported, revenue or profit margins are not usually published annually, which are more accurate measures of financial health.

A Phillips spokesperson told the Guardian this past March that after Mercury Group acquired the company in 2012, the new owners made “significant investments” in developing the house, and that its objective was to “repay the investment in due course.” (A representative for Phillips did not respond to an ARTnews inquiry on whether the October 3 directors’ decision signified a stall in achieving the stated goal.)

By the end of 2022, according to the October report, there were signs of a “gradual slowdown” in sales across the art trade, a shift that many New York galleries recently told ARTnews they experienced during the first half of 2023. Gallerists specializing in early-career artists told ARTnews that over the past six months collectors held off on completing acquisitions, even after long-running inquiries into the practices of artists.

Further indicators of strain came during the important contemporary evening sales this past November in New York, in which Phillips, for the first time in years, debuted no artists. Recent years had seen Phillips emphasize a strategy of introducing early-career artists through its sales, pointing to records set for younger talent as a key metric of its success and growing influence in the trade. In 2023, Phillips debuted 123 artists across other sales.

Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the media and US and UK governments have more closely scrutinized the financial maneuvering of high-profile figures in the luxury and art sectors, many of whom are Russian. That scrutiny has only increased since Israel began airstrikes and a ground invasion in Gaza, raising tensions across the Middle East.

While it went unmentioned in the October report, UK public records show that in April 2022 Mercury Group owners Fridlyand and Strunin officially changed their nationality from Russian to Israeli.

“The company’s shareholders have been steadfastly committed to the company and continue to invest in Phillips’ future,” a spokesperson for the auction house said.

The Financial Times report, which was based on two anonymous sources, said that high net worth investors based in Europe were approached. So was the Qatar Investment Authority (QIA), a wealth management fund worth established in 2005 that oversees the assets of the state of Qatar.

The QIA reportedly held discussions with the auction house’s owner a year ago about the purchase of a stake in Sotheby’s via a potential capital increase, a maneuver meant to finance a new investment. Drahi did formally not pursue plans to offload stake in Sotheby’s, the report said. Those discussions are no longer active.

Drahi purchased the auction house in 2019 through his family office for $3.7 billion. The private proposals for the sale of a minority stake in Sotheby’s followed the owner’s announcement in August of a plan to leverage the Altice assets to deal with a $60 billion debt accumulated through acquisitions in France, the US, Portugal, and Israel.

In a recent interview with Bloomberg, Stewart, the Sotheby’s CEO, denied that Drahi was considering a public offering for Sotheby’s. He also said that the business was not in need of capital raising to fund its operations.

Private investors are commonly pitched for partial sales of companies leading up to IPO offers. In the interview, Stewart said that it is common to occasionally assess investor interest. He said Sotheby’s had exhibited “strength” recently, noting that the house is projected to bring in $8 billion in 2023 sales, around the same amount as last year.

Representatives for Sotheby’s and the QIA declined to comment on the reasons why the discussions ended.

The news comes as the Israel-Hamas war causes tensions for wealth managers and their affiliates. Auction houses have generally not commented publicly on the conflict, and their CEOs have largely kept silent on how the war might impact their businesses.

Qatari officials have been active brokers of negotiations between Hamas and Israel. Historically, Qatar has supported Palestine.

Drahi, who maintains citizenship with Israel, is a prominent philanthropic figure within the country. He oversees his telecommunications company there, and he has a family foundation that funds Israeli cultural initiatives.

Members of Qatar’s royal family are high-profile clients for auction houses and patrons for major museums. In 2021, Qatar gave $5 million to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York to fund its Islamic art wing as part of a loan partnership. In mid-October, shortly after Israel began leading air strikes on Gaza following the Hamas attack that killed 1,200 Israelis, the Qatar Museums called off a planned opening ceremony around a joint exhibition planned with LACMA and expressed support for Palestine.  

Qatar has in the past demonstrated business interests in investing in the luxury sector, attempting to take a more active role in auction houses in the process. In 2010, Qatari officials expressed interest in bidding for Christie’s, owned by the French billionaire François Pinault. Qatar has also diversified its interests in trophy assets like real estate, acquiring Harrods in London and engaging in discussions about buying a stake in historic hotels in Egypt.

Chosen by analysts and design authorities associated with Pantone’s Color Institute, a group that surveys trends across fashion, design, and advertising, Peach Fuzz makes its debut in the Color of the Year spotlight on the program’s 25th iteration.

Peach Fuzz brings a subtlety that contrasts with the louder tones of its predecessors, such as the vibrant ‘Viva Magenta’ selected in 2022, a pink-red shade that the company produced last year using AI. Beyond its appeal for “comfort” noted in the company’s news release, this year’s hue has a range of associations.

Its marketing potential extends to plastic and cosmetics, where its neutrality allows for discreet usage—think vapes and contour sticks—often packaged in candy-colored allure and toy-like shapes, a trend that Callie Holtermann in The New York Times pointed out noticeably rose this year as retailers targeted a younger demographic. On runways in 2023, varying neutral tones trended also with the rise of sheer looks.

Artists like Ilana Harris-Babou have tapped into the recent prevalence of non-confrontational peach tones, to critique a ubiquitous aesthetic that saturates influencer culture. In a review of a 2021 exhibition at a Tennessee museum, one critic noted that her use of beige hues were reminiscent of Crayola peach—a shade once titled “flesh” until 1962; it bears a close resemblance to Pantone’s Peach Fuzz.

The company’s annual color announcement, meant to forecast trends for the coming year, arrives at a dark time amid a tumultuous war and a tense election year. In a statement, Pantone’s executive director, Leatrice Eiseman, echoes a call that feels to invoke the wellness industry’s manifestos around self-care: describing the peach-toned hue as one audiences and consumers could draw “peace” from and suggesting its potential to impact “our wellbeing.”

New York authorities will facilitate the respective return of the objects to government officials of their origin countries, the museum said in a statement. The works include a bronze statue of an Etruscan warrior dated from the 5th century BCE, a terra-cotta Italian wine flask from 330 BCE and an ancient Egyptian cosmetics vessel.

VMFA director and CEO Alex Nyerges emphasized that the museum’s leadership “fully supports” the repatriation decision. In a statement, a museum representative said that no evidence linked current employees to unlawful activity related to the initial acquisition of the 44 returned objects, which it stated had entered the museum’s collection between the 1970s and 1990s.

In May, officials of the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office and the Department of Homeland Security began an inquiry into 28 objects in the Virginia museum’s 50,000-item collection suspected of having been looted or improperly removed from their countries of origin, requesting documentation related to their ownership records.

In a statement, the museum said that following the May inquiry it provided federal and state officials “extensive” records related to the objects’ provenance histories and acquisitions. In June, officials expanded the initial inquiry to include a total of 61 works. The investigation extended into mid-October, when authorities presented “irrefutable” evidence that more than half the objects had been looted, stolen, or displaced, the museum stated.

The move follows a widening push for Western museums to fill provenance gaps for objects sold and donated in previous decades, a period when standards around the sales of antiquities housed in private collections were far laxer.

The Virginia museum has repatriated only six works of art since 2004, including three with links to the Indigenous North American Tlingit tribe that were returned under the federal Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act.

In conversations with over half a dozen New York-based galleries ahead of this week’s edition of Art Basel Miami Beach, gallerists, overseeing programs of less than 20 artists, estimated that this year’s sales are down as much as 25 percent from 2022. The downturn has forced them to tighten budgets, pull back resources from artists, and have seen private collectors pull back from making new acquisitions since the spring. This year’s UBS Art Basel Report, published last month, echoed that finding, suggesting quietly that buyers weren’t planning to acquire new work in 2023 at the same rate they had last year.

“We knew that sales were slowing here [in the US],” Sara Maria Salamone, the founder of a Queens-based gallery Mrs., told ARTnews. “We wanted to make sure that we also had our feet in another territory,”

While Mrs. opened in 2017, Salamone is participating in ABMB for the first time this year. She said she first noticed a slowdown in US sales this past spring, prompting her to present at Kiaf Seoul in September in an effort to find new collectors. Meanwhile, this year she received five requests from clients looking to privately resell work they’d purchased from her less than five years prior, after only receiving one such request in 2022.

Five other downtown New York gallerists, who asked to remain anonymous so they could speak about their businesses candidly, told ARTnews that they have seen once-regular collectors’ drawing back their acquisitions over the past year. One dealer, who opened a permanent space in 2016, characterized the drawback as a noticeable “drying up” of funding within the downtown scene. Some expressed uncertainty over whether or when collector-philanthropists might see financially supporting emerging practices as fashionable as they did during the pandemic.

When the world went into pandemic lockdown in March 2020, many gallerists feared how the resulting economic slowdown might impact their businesses. But as that year progressed, the pessimism appeared unfounded. Galleries closed deals at rapid rates, newly wealthy investors entered the gallery scene, and collectors rushed to buy up work by young and emerging artists. As a result, small galleries were able to expand their spaces and add staff. By last year, art sales were at $67 billion, up six percent from the pre-Covid year of 2019.

One dealer, who founded a New York-based gallery focusing on emerging artists in 2017, said that flush profits during the pandemic years had allowed her to expand her program to three spaces. Like Salamone, her business began to shift in April, she said, especially with American collectors: they have continued to privately inquire about artists on her roster, but have pulled back on buying despite advanced internal conversations. The dynamic has burdened her staff and left her program of eleven artists in a precarious position.  “The U.S. has been abysmal compared to some of our other regions,” she said.

A Tribeca-based dealer, who started her gallery in 2013 and represents primarily multimedia artists, echoed others’ observation about a gradual decline in sales since the heady early days of the pandemic, describing it as “a balloon slowly losing its air.”

Three dealers interviewed by ARTnews, who established their galleries between six and eight years ago — two of which are participating in ABMB for the first time this year—said that they are taking a more cautious approach due to the subdued sales environment. During the pandemic, they expanded their operations, one opened a second location, and added staff to support the growing ambitions of their artists, all of which increased their overhead and the pressure on sales. With revenue plateaued, the dealers said they’ve had to make cold calculations about providing funds to their artists for studio support or covering higher production costs for complex exhibitions. The slowdown, they said, is increasingly affecting their artists’ practices.

One told ARTnews that since opening, the gallery had grown its operations every year for the past six years. “This is the first year the gallery hasn’t grown,” they said.

“It’s not an entirely new dynamic,” Renaud Proch, the director of Independent Curators International, told ARTnews, suggesting such pressures are cyclical. “Galleries adapt and artists adapt. But it points to the fragility of the support structure for artists.”

With weaker sales, the benefits of participating in a premier fair appear more elusive for small and mid-size galleries. At this week’s Art Basel Miami Beach fair, individual booths in the prestigious Nova, Positions, and Survey sections cost $11,000, $23,500 and $45,000, respectively, multiple participating galleries told ARTnews. Those figures, they said, amount to roughly half the total cost to execute their presentations. That total, according to two dealers, was still less expensive than participating in NADA Miami, the competing satellite fair that focuses on less-established galleries.

Dealers who spoke with ARTnews noted an imbalance at the fair: participants in Art Basel’s special sections typically feature work that is challenging conceptually and less commercial, making it harder to sell in a fair setting and requiring a heavier lift in educating collectors on the practice behind it. Some dealers went so far as to describe the dynamic with the large fairs as extractive: the fair needs emerging galleries to provide artworks with a critical edge to balance out the painting-heavy aisles and create an experience for its high-end clientele that feels less like retail. But some figures in the trade have said that the cost structure, which is higher for regular booths, makes it difficult to present newer artists with less established markets and disincentivizes some from proposing challenging work to selection committees at all.

“Smaller galleries are the ones on the ground identifying talent. From Basel’s perspective, they need the younger galleries,” Natasha Degen, chair of art market studies at the Fashion Institute of Technology, told ARTnews of the tension between emerging galleries and the fairs. “They need there to be discoveries.”

That dynamic has been noted by the biggest galleries. In a recent ARTnews interview announcing Hauser & Wirth’s “collective impact” partnership with Nicola Vassell, President Marc Payot described the current haves and have-nots ecosystem. “I came to the realization that the art world is in a state where the few very large successful galleries are becoming more and more successful and larger, and for the rest of the ecosystem, things are very tough,” he said. Meanwhile, in 2018, Art Basel implemented sliding-scale booth pricing to make the payscale between megas and small galleries more equitable; additional changes were introduced in 2021.

Some dealers are less weary of the costs. Nick Lawrence, who runs Freight+Volume in New York, told ARTnews that as a newcomer to ABMB’s Survey sector, he’s re-staging a censored 1990s performance by poet Karen Finley, a proposal that secured him a place at the fair after many years on the waitlist. Lawrence says he’s navigated two decades of “guerilla-financing” during other downturns to keep the gallery going. He estimated the total spend to attend the fair will cost $100,000.

Salamone, of Mrs., said that her decision to not expand last year has now put her in a more advantageous financial position to take risks. “I feel more comfortable bringing an artist that makes challenging work when I don’t have a huge overhead hanging over me,” said Salamone.

For younger gallerists, mostly in their thirties, they spend the first decade in business building their reputation. Participating in a major fair for the first time is part of that maturation: both a mark of approval and an access point to compete for a new clientele of major collectors and curators. Participating in the fair this week then, a few gallerists said, is important for the future of their programs, even if its sometimes difficult to measure how that investment translates into profits or institutional attention for their artists.

Throughout the rest of the year, certain dealers expressed the challenge of reaching what seems like a retracting audience. Some emphasized that gaining exposure for the artists they represent is non-negotiable, especially as their studio practices grow more complex. Isaac Lyles, founder of Lyles & King, who is participating in the fair’s Miami edition for the first time, told ARTnews that he decided to bring works by Aneta Grzeszykowska, 49, and Catalina Ouyang, 30, whose practices span morbid and animalistic themes, because he wanted to create an “institutional level” presentation that ventures into uncomfortable territory. “It warrants a bigger audience in the U.S.,” he said.

After the fair concludes, some dealers expect the challenging landscape to continue. Even more established gallerists told ARTnews that prolonged negotiations and a slower sales environment in New York over the past six months have grown arduous.

“This can’t be sustainable,” Wendy Osloff, the founder of longtime downtown gallery PPOW, told ARTnews of the pandemic-era buying rush. That period, Osloff explained, saw more competition among collectors, creating long-waiting periods for them to privately acquire new work by a single artist. Osloff, who founded PPOW in 1983, sees the current environment as a normal, but painful part of galleries’ lifecycles.

Retaining patrons, she said in a bit of advice to her younger peers, is a difficult long game. “You do not educate people in five days, which is the length of an art fair and you do not educate people in 45 days, which is the length of a show,” she said. “It takes decades.”

Established names like Cecilia Vicuña, Tania Bruguera, Laure Prouvost and Pedro Reyes will be among the participants.

The 72 artists will participate in the main exhibition of the Biennale, which is curated by Sofia Baldi Pighi, an independent Italian curator, who is temporarily based in Malta. The show centers around issues related to the Mediterranean more broadly, as detailed in her curatorial statement titled “Insulaphilia.” The concept refers to an obsession with islands and, Baldi Pighi told ARTnews, serves as a prompt for artists to reflect on Malta’s unique position at the crossroads of major surrounding regions and their histories. She has organized the main exhibition into four sections, each stemming from the themes laid out in “Insulaphilia”: regional issues, facets of decolonization, the political dimensions of the Mediterranean, and various forms of resistance.

Like many major art events in their first runs, the Malta Biennale has faced challenges associated with its location and timing. The organization of the debut edition, which has been two years in the making, takes place as geopolitics have become increasingly grim amid an ongoing war in the Middle East. Baldi Pighi said that the Biennale seeks to be a “safe place” for artists uprooted from conflict-torn regions to interrogate sensitive topics. The ethos extends not only to the artists participating in the show’s main thematic exhibition, but also to the eleven national pavilions flanking it—representing Austria, China, Franco-Germany, Italy, Malta, Palestine, Poland, Serbia, Spain, Turkey, and Ukraine.

Two artists, one Palestinian and another Ukrainian, will present solo exhibitions to represent their respective national pavilions (their names have not yet been disclosed, though Baldi Pighi confirmed the artists are currently located in Poland and Malta, respectively.) Organizers extended the invitation to host a pavilion recognizing Palestine in June, a move that Pighi notes preceded the Venice Biennale’s rejection of a Palestinian-affiliated museum’s proposal to mount a collateral event in association with the biennale’s 2024 edition. “It was very important to have Palestine among us,” the curator said.

In an email to ARTnews, Mario Cutajar, the chairman of Heritage Malta, a government agency overseeing culture that is co-organizing the biennale, emphasized the representation of those pavilions. “The biennale would not be relevant if it failed to discuss our present,” Cutajar said, adding that resolution-seeking “must be in itself an international endeavor.”

Baldi Pighi is explicit in her intent not to curate an exhibition replicating other biennales or importing displays that seem detached from the historical sites that will serve as backdrops and hosts to artworks. Throughout the show, particularly in the main exhibition, there will be a focus on artworks addressing current issues and capable of navigating a conservative climate in Malta, where a migrant crisis and strong restrictions on abortion rights have become top concerns for younger residents of the island. She emphasized the “soft power of culture involved in a biennale project,” as a consideration in organizing the event. Malta, she added, has only a few contemporary art spaces.

Co-organizing the debut biennale alongside Baldi Pighi are Emma Mattei and Elisa Carollo.

The biennale will also be host to artist collectives active in Europe. Among them is the Italian collective Post Disaster, a group that uses urban rooftops in Taranto, Southern Italy, as performative spaces to stage discussions about industrial-induced crises. For the biennale, the group’s members will mount a new site-specific installation at Fort Saint Elmo, a 16th century military site in the capital city of Valletta. That work will respond to Malta’s militarized architecture.

Some of the works set to be shown by higher-profile figures, among them Vicuña, Bruguera, Prouvost and Reyes, are already well-known in the U.S. and Europe. A 2018 work by Bruguera will be restaged on the façade of the 16th century Armoury building in Birgu, a town in Southeastern Malta that is walking distance from the biennale’s other locations. Reyes, who is Mexican, will exhibit work associated with his 2022 project “Artists Against the Bomb,” which combines artists’ calls against nuclear threats, on the nearby island of Gozo. Elsewhere, El Salvador–born, New York–based artist Guadalupe Maravilla will exhibit work inside of Valleta’s 17th century Ta-Pilar Church.

Pighi emphasized the strategic inclusion of internationally prominent voices like Bruguera, saying that her practice, rooted in research in migration, provides a protective layer for the exhibition’s discourse and mitigates the risk of censorship. In turn, she sees Bruguera and the recognition for some of her peers, as a safeguard for younger or lesser-known Maltese artists participating in the biennale.

Below is the full artist list for the 2023 Malta Biennale’s main pavilion.

Suez Canal Republic

Alan Abd El Monim, Italian/Egyptian

Camilla Alberti, Italian

Anna Anderegg, Swiss

Teresa Antignani, Italian

Jean-Marie Appriou, French

Rosa Barba, Italian-German

Simon Benjamin, Jamaican

Laura Besançon, Maltese

Aaron Bezzina, Maltese

Rebecca Bonaci, Maltese

Josian Bonello, Maltese

Isabelle Borg, Maltese

Claude Borg, Maria Borg, Sumaya Ben Saad, Rebecca Mifsud, Maltese

Amy Bravo, American (USA)

Tania Bruguera, Cuban

Siwani Buhlebezwe, South African

Teresa Busuttil, Australian

Anna Calleja, Maltese

Austin Camilleri, Maltese

Edson Chagas, Angolan/Portuguese

Mel Chin, Chinese-American

Leo Chircop, Maltese

Dolphin Club, Maltese, French

Joseph Cochran II, American (USA)

Andrea Conte (Andreco), Italian

Gaia De Megni, Italian

Mònica de Miranda, Portuguese/ Angolan

Adama Delphine Fawundu, American (USA)

Zehra Doğan, Kurdish

 Dolphin Club, Maltese, French

Madeleine Fenwick, British

Andrea Ferrero, Peruvian

Martina Georgina, Romeo Roxman Gatt, Maltese

Nina Gerada, Maltese

Sara Goldschmied, Eleonora Chiari, Italian

Bettina Hutschek, German

Anne Immelé, French

Daniel Jablonski, Brazilian

Barbara Kapusta, Austrian

Dew Kim, South Korea

Konstantina Krikzoni, Greek

Wioletta Kulewska Akyel, Polish

Sara Leghissa, Italian

Ji Yeon Yaloo Lim, Pia Borg, Korean, Maltese-Australian

Luz Lizarazo, Colombian

Edson Luli, Albanian

Basim Magdy, Swiss/Egyptian

Guadalupe Maravilla, El Salvadorian

Jermay Michael Gabriel, Italian

Karyn Olivier , American

Zazzaro Otto , Italian

Adrian Paci, Albanian

Post Disaster (Collective), Grazia Mappa, Gabriele Leo, Gabriella Mastrangelo, Peppe Frisino, Italian

Dijana Protić, Croatian

Laure Prouvost, French

Keit Bonnici, Florinda Camilleri, Neils Plotard, Maltese, Maltese, French

Agnes Questionmark, Italian

Anna Raimondo, Italian

Pedro Reyes, Mexican

Cemile Sahin, German

Paul Sammut, British

Zineb Sedira, French/Algerian

Ana Shametaj, Giuditta Vendrame, Italian/ Albanian, Italian

Anthony Spagnol, Maltese

Tom Van Malderen, Belgian

Fabrizio Vatieri, Italian

Raphael Vella, Maltese

Matteo Vettorello, Italian 

Franziska Von Stenglin, German

Cecilia Vicuña, Chilean

Sandra Zaffraese, Maltese

Franziska Von Stenglin
Cecilia Vicuna
Sandra Zaffarese

Sotheby’s said that the Isabel de Borbon portrait could be related to a famed Velázquez painting of her husband Philip IV held by the Prado in Madrid, and that this painting has been in the past displayed in prominent locations such as the Buen Retiro palace in Madrid and the Louvre in Paris.

In February, it will be offered with a financial guarantee. It is being sold from a private family trust, according to the Financial Times, and has been in the same family collection since 1978.

It left Spain during Napoleon’s 1808 invasion and later appeared in a French noble collection, according to Sotheby’s. It eventually passed through the hands of Henry Huth, a British banker and book collector. His relatives were the last to possess it until 1950.

High-quality works by Velázquez are seldom sold in public auctions, so the work’s appearance at the Sotheby’s sale is a rarity.

Generally, Velázquez’s paintings have sold for nowhere the estimate for this painting. At Sotheby’s London in 2007, his painting Saint Rufina achieved £8.4 million, just barely surpassing its £8 million high estimate; that painting continues to hold Velázquez’s record. In 1999, at Christie’s New York, that same painting had sold for $8.9 million, at the time minting a record for a Spanish Old Master. Meanwhile, in 2011, during a Bonhams London sale, the painting Portrait of a gentleman in a black tunic and white golilla collar fetched £2.95 million.

Fink gained wide exposure in the late 1970s after publishing his series “Social Graces.” In these images, Fink pitted two worlds against one another, picturing both the Sabatines, a family in the rural town of Martin’s Creek in eastern Pennsylvania, where he was based, and the social elite who populated different cities. Works from the series were exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in a 1979 solo exhibition; Aperture published a monograph that featured them several years later.

Born in Brooklyn in 1941, Fink was raised by his Bernard Fink, a lawyer, and Sylvia Caplan Fink, a left-leaning activist. He took up image-making in his early adolescence, eventually becoming a mentee of Lisette Model, the Austrian-born American street photographer, while he was studying at the New School in New York.

During his six-decade long career, he repeatedly out Model’s mark on his work while also crediting as the views of his Marxist mother with influencing his art. In 2011, Fink told the New York Times, “That set of contradictions embellished my politics and aesthetics. The work was meant to be political, not polemical. It turned out to be not necessarily kind, but certainly honest. And not cruel.”

By 1958, when he was 18, Fink had quit school and found a job photographing a group of artists and writers associated with the Beat movement, traveling from New York, to Texas, Ohio and Mexico to record their adventures in each state. Fink later returning to New York and, during the mid-’60s, captured Andy Warhol’s inner circle during candid moments.

By 1976, Fink had developed his signature style, shooting high-contrast black and white images with a flash that caused his subjects to appear alienated. The experiences earned him recognition, gaining him a Guggenheim Fellowship. Two years later, he met and befriended Robert Mann, a New York photography dealer, who started representing Fink officially in 2021.

By 1988, Fink had joined the faculty at Bard College as a professor of photography.

In the late 1990s and mid-2000s, Fink delved into the worlds of sports and entertainment, capturing violence and luxury through commissioned projects for magazines like Vanity Fair and the New Yorker. Between 2000 and 2009, he produced two collections, “Runway” and “The Vanities: Hollywood Parties 2000–2009,” both chronicling niche social scenes, from stag parties to private soirees attended by luminaries in American entertainment.

In 2018, when images from the 1999 series “The Boxing Photographs” were displayed at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Fink shared a class-conscious perspective derived from his close observation of the sport and its victors. In a Times interview, he remarked, “It’s American exceptionalism; the exceptional body and mind.”

Fink shifted to a more contemplative phase with age, photographing the landscape around his Martin’s Creek home. One of his final projects was a commission for the Economist: a photograph of another Larry Fink, the BlackRock mogul who has ranked on the ARTnews Top 200 Collectors list. A monograph devoted to the photographer Larry Fink is set to be published by powerHouse Books and will feature some of his early images.

Reflecting on Fink’s distinctive approach, Mann outlined how the photographer was unapologetically assertive in his pursuit of images. According to the gallerist, Fink had a unique tact for capturing unstaged scenes. “The energy and style he brought to the photography medium are unparalleled. I’ve never seen someone else execute it quite like that,” Mann said. “He operated as a free agent in every respect.”

Fink is survived by his partner, Martha Posner, and his daughter Molly Snyder-Fink from his first marriage to painter Joan Snyder.