Carousel Fine Art at the Chicago Art Fair 2026
Carousel takes a 1,000 square foot booth into the inaugural Chicago Art Fair this fall, joining a select group of galleries inside The Mart for four days of contemporary art, October 7 through 10.
The Fair
October 7–10 at The Mart
The Chicago Art Fair is new to the city this year, bringing a select roster of galleries into The Mart, Chicago's design and commerce landmark, to connect collectors, advisors, designers, and architects with contemporary work worth traveling for.
VIP preview
Wednesday, October 7, 4 to 5 PM, ahead of the opening night preview from 5 to 8 PM.
Public hours
Thursday and Friday, 11 AM to 8 PM. Saturday, 11 AM to 6 PM.
The Booth: Seven Artists, One Thousand Square Feet
This curation spotlights how contemporary artists are pushing beyond traditional mediums: glass, thread, paint, paper, and collage, where each artist answers a different question through a different approach.
The Artists on View
Seven artists, seven countries of origin, and almost no overlap in medium. Together they demonstrate how wide contemporary art can stretch inside a single booth.
Isabelle Scheltjens
Belgium • Glass
A twenty-first-century neo-pointillist working in glass instead of paint. Each piece is built from thousands of hand-cut glass fragments, fused at roughly 800°C, reading as a precise portrait from across the booth and dissolving into mosaic up close.
Nemo Jantzen
Netherlands • Thread & Resin
Portraits built from stainless steel nails, continuous thread, and hand-polished resin, work that sits somewhere between painting and sculpture. His Thread series first debuted at Art Miami in 2018 and now lives in museum and private collections worldwide.
Taher Jaoui
Tunisia • Mixed Media on Canvas
Large-scale, raw-canvas paintings that fold Abstract Expressionism together with graffiti and mathematical notation, a former financial engineer and actor working canvas from every angle before a single mark feels final.
Gregory Watin
France • Mixed Media Collage
Weathered cityscapes rebuilt from plexiglass, wood, and cardboard into layered urban collage. Watin calls his own work "contemporary poetry from daily material," made fast, on instinct, before the first impulse fades.
Rodrigo Franzao
Brazil • Recyclable Paper
Sculptural compositions built from hundreds of hand-folded paper strips, drawing on textile art and eco-conscious materials.
Eric Alfaro
Cuba / United States • Oil & Acrylic
Classically trained in Cuba, now known for thick, palette-knife impasto that turns florals and aquatic life into sculptural texture on canvas, work that has earned him the name "the Modern-Day Monet."
Véronique Locci
France • Glass Sculpture · New to Carousel
Concave mirrors of hand-molded, tinted blown glass, mounted on engraved wood and crafted in a workshop outside Paris. Each piece behaves like a kaleidoscope, catching the room's light and movement in reflections that never sit still.
Plan Your Visit
Meet us at The Mart
Whether you are building a collection, sourcing for a client, or simply curious what a first-year fair looks like done well, Carousel's booth is worth the walk. Reach out for a VIP preview time or to arrange a private walkthrough during the fair's public hours.
Explore More From Carousel Fine Art
The fair is one week. The gallery is not. Here is where to go next, whether the booth was your first introduction to Carousel or your fifth.
