Chicago Art Fair 2026

Caroline Dechamby

Netherlands / Switzerland

Adam Umbach 

Taher Jaoui 

Jaoui trained as a financial engineer, then as an actor, before either discipline fully let him go, and both still show up in the work: the control of someone who used to balance equations, the instinct of someone who used to hold a stage. His large canvases fold Abstract Expressionism together with calligraphic notation and raw graffiti marks, built by circling the canvas on the floor and working it from every side before a single gesture is allowed to feel finished. The paintings read as fast, but they are not; each one is the result of someone refusing to stop circling it. His 2025 solo show, Raw Figures, opened at Guy Hepner in Chelsea, and his work has moved into private and public collections on three continents. Chicago gets the newest version of a practice that is still actively changing shape.

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Gregory Watin

Rodrigo Franzao

Eric Alfaro

Alfaro trained classically in Cuba before he ever touched the palette knife that made him famous for it. He starts every painting from his own photograph, then pushes the color somewhere the camera never actually saw, building up impasto texture until the petals read as sculpture from a few feet back. Collectors call him the Modern-Day Monet, and his work has reached collections in more than twenty-five countries, including the Lincoln Center Orchestra's own. 

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Isabelle Scheltjens

Véronique Locci

Locci works in a material almost nobody else reaches for at this scale: glass, finished in high-gloss chrome, saturated in a color so deep it reads less like a surface than a held breath. The piece on view, KLEIN NEON BLUE, borrows its name and its exact pigment from Yves Klein's own trademarked blue, a color Klein patented and never once worked in glass himself. It is a single disc, nearly three feet across, built to be walked past slowly: the chrome catches and bends whatever is in the room around it, so the piece is never quite the same work twice. 

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Nemo Jantzen

Jantzen used to paint billboards in Antwerp before he found the technique that made him: thousands of stainless steel nails and one continuous thread, wound by hand until the empty space between the lines resolves into a face, then sealed under a dome of hand-polished resin. The Thread series debuted at Art Miami in 2018 and moved fast from there, into museum collections at GEM in the Netherlands and POPA in Switzerland, and into permanent installations at the Mandarin Oriental New York and the Presidential Suite at Mandalay Bay. Claudia Schiffer owns one.

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Hunt Slonem 

Slonem has painted the same handful of subjects for five decades now, butterflies, bunnies, tropical birds, and in that time built one of the most widely collected bodies of work in contemporary American painting. Over fifty museums hold his pieces, the Met, the Whitney, the Guggenheim, the Smithsonian American Art Museum among them. The critic Roberta Smith once called his approach a witty Formalism, the creatures folded directly into the picture plane instead of sitting on top of it, and that is exactly what the cross-hatched brushwork does: it will not let the eye separate the subject from the surface. The butterflies on view in Chicago sit on a field of gold leaf, built one wing at a time until the whole canvas reads as motion instead of a grid of individual insects. Brooke Shields and Jennifer Lopez both collect him. It is the kind of recognizability that makes a serious collection feel unfinished without one.

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BYĆ

BYĆ trained in graphic design and advertising before he walked away from both to live rough for a year and teach himself graffiti properly. The name is Polish, borrowed from his grandfather, and it means to be, which tracks: his stencil and spray paint compositions are built fast, with no room to fix a mistake, and they pull from pop culture to say something that has nothing to do with it on the surface. Chickens in red-soled heels. Raccoons mid-heist. A kiss breaking up a line of riot police. He relocated to Taos, New Mexico, where recycled materials and desert light started showing up in the work, and his pieces have hung alongside Banksy's at Geneva's Summer Street Art Festival, and at Scope Miami, Art Wynwood, and Frame Basel. His own description of the work is the best one anyone has offered: a good work grows with you.

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lis sam

Lis Sam was born in Tunisia in 1989 and moved to France at eleven, a self-taught artist who came up through street art before a trip to a butterfly conservatory in the south of France changed what he made entirely. His Blossoming Girls series builds female portraits from thousands of preserved butterflies, set alongside pressed florals inside glass-framed boxes, each wing placed by hand until color and texture read as a face before they read as insects. He's represented by Momentum Art Gallery on the French Riviera and in Belgium, and by Galerie Mensing, with work already in private collections across several countries. Chicago is his first time showing with Carousel.

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Gil Bruvel

Gil Bruvel was born in Australia in 1959 to French parents, raised in the south of France, and learned precision before he ever touched sculpture: his father ran a cabinetmaking shop, and that workshop was Bruvel's first classroom. He apprenticed in art restoration as a teenager, had his first solo show in France at seventeen, and moved to the United States in 1990 after his first American exhibition in Laguna Beach two years earlier. His sculptural practice spans bronze, stainless steel, and wood, most recognizably in the Flow series, cast steel ribbons bent into impossible, liquid curves, shown everywhere from the Venice Art Biennale to Art Basel Miami. The piece on view in Chicago, Feeling the Light, works in a different register: a face built from hundreds of stacked wooden sticks, color bleeding from deep blue at the crown to gold across the features, eyes closed in something between rest and revelation.

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