Frieze New York 2025 closed with a familiar blend of glamour, market zeal, and curatorial earnestness, staged this year once again at The Shed. The fair’s fifth edition at the Hudson Yards venue proved that, despite an art world often weighed down by economic caution, commerce is alive and well—especially when it arrives wrapped in the language of cultural uplift. With more than 65 galleries and 25,000 attendees over five days, the fair delivered a cross-section of contemporary art’s global ambitions and market mechanics.
Sales were brisk, if unsurprisingly centered around blue-chip names. Hauser & Wirth moved over two dozen works on opening day, including pieces by Lorna Simpson and Amy Sherald. White Cube placed a Tracey Emin painting for £1.2 million. Gagosian, not one to whisper, led with a trio of Jeff Koons sculptures—including Hulk (Tubas)—that reportedly stirred the opening day crowd into collector frenzy. But some of the more revelatory moments came from the Focus section curated by Lumi Tan, where Luana Vitra’s solo booth with Mitre Galeria—dense with soot, iron, and symbolic grit—won the 2025 Focus Stand Prize and injected much-needed conceptual rigor into a fair often dominated by photogenic aesthetics.
The fair’s atmosphere was buoyant, and its programming pointed toward a renewed investment in live and public art. Pilvi Takala’s The Pin, co-commissioned with High Line Art, and Asad Raza’s contemplative Immortal Coil, offered a kind of durational counterpoint to the transactional energy inside The Shed. A sound installation by Carlos Reyes, embedded within the fair, provided a subtle sensory drift amid the hum of negotiations and name-dropping.
The return of the Artist Plate Project underscored Frieze’s charitable impulses, raising over $500,000 for Coalition for the Homeless with editions by Basquiat, Jasper Johns, and Faith Ringgold, among others—a reminder that even in an art economy obsessed with rarity, there’s still room for generosity by design. Institutional presence remained strong, with acquisitions made by major U.S. museums and curators flocking from across the globe. The Shed’s CEO, Max Hodges, called it a “vibrant hub,” but perhaps it’s better described as a pressure chamber—where high-stakes collecting meets high-concept ambition.
Frieze New York 2025 didn’t so much surprise as reaffirm its position: a polished, unapologetically commercial fair that knows how to deliver big names, bold sales, and just enough experimentation to maintain credibility. Beneath the surface-level flash, there were pockets of depth—like the haunting works of, and the introspective portraits by Claire Tabouret at Perrotin—that reminded us why fairs like this still matter: not for what they sell, but for what occasionally slips through and stays with you.
