The Best New Discoveries of Milan Art Week 2026
Milan is arguably one of Europe’s fastest-growing cities—particularly in real estate, where the house-price-to-income ratio now hovers around 12.5, surpassing London, according to the Financial Times. Its status as an arts destination is also growing, with an annual art week that now boasts a small constellation of fairs that, alongside a growing network of galleries and art spaces, animate the city. The city’s main fair, miart, still feels relatively regional in both its offerings and its reach: 60 percent of participating galleries were from Italy and 40 percent international, with very few from the U.S. or Asia (some withdrew at the last minute). Independent platform MEGA Art Fair, inspired by Basel Social Club, and the newly launched Milan edition of Paris Internationale, extended the art week offerings, even as that week felt curiously muted thanks to the arrival of the city’s globally dominant design week immediately after. Moving rapidly from fair to fair—facilitated by longer hours and, in the case of MEGA, more flexible, extended formats—Observer identified the strongest presentations and the artists collectors should be following.
The best of miart
Despite more room to breathe, miart’s main section ultimately felt overwhelming—lacking a curatorial thread that might have encouraged visitors to pause rather than drift aimlessly through its loosely arranged presentations. The random sequencing of exhibitors could, generously, be read as a nod to this edition’s theme, “Jazz,” but the strongest work was in the two curated sections split across separate floors. Modern and historical works were placed in dialogue with contemporary names in “Established Anthology” upstairs, while the ground-floor “Emergent” section yielded some of the week’s most compelling discoveries.
Eni Mizukami with Ehrlich Steinberg
Among the few American galleries in the main fair, L.A.-based Ehrlich Steinberg presented a solo booth of materially articulated yet poetically fluid, dreamlike paintings by Japanese artist Eni Mizukami. The works translate a stream of symbolic language from the subconscious into flows of color and delicate gesture, operating at once on a personal and collective level. A range of symbols, motifs and references surfaces: mythological imagery (snakes, swords, angels) intertwines with more physical and sensorial suggestions, such as disembodied and enlarged hands and feet, alongside elements drawn from contemporary daily experience and references to pop and urban culture. Any sense of linearity or consequence is suspended: layer upon layer, this subconscious material accumulates across the painting’s surface through liquefied brushstrokes alternating with paste-thickened paint and recurring forms. The result is a temporal, almost mnemonic dimension, as the work absorbs and reconfigures this symbolic language through imaginative epiphanies that emerge and recede.
Although Mizukami may be a new name for many, her work has already entered important collections, including the taste-shaping Rubell Family Collection in Miami. Priced between $2,500 and $9,000, several works were placed ahead of the fair and continued sales during the opening days. The presentation as a whole attracted a mix of collectors, from an existing U.S. client who already owns a large painting by Mizukami to new European collectors encountering the work for the first time.
Theresa Büchner with MATTA
Young, experimental gallery MATTA, a recent and interesting addition to the Milanese ecosystem, presented a solo booth at miart featuring works by Theresa Büchner. Black-and-white prints depict fragmented, dissected bodies in uncanny framings and contorted positions, conveying the discomfort and anxiety of individual existence given the pressures of contemporary urban life. What Büchner offers is a disenchanted observation of the contemporary existential condition, suspended between flesh and psyche and life and death.
Büchner’s practice is less concerned with producing stable forms than with tracing how meaning is constructed, performed and quietly unsettled. Working across film, photography, text and installation, often assembled into sequences that feel fragmentary and almost provisional, she transforms photographs of people captured in public transport—suspended in motion, en route—through a distinctly cinematic sensibility reminiscent of the 1980s German television program Monaco Franze, which inspired the series. These images become an open confrontation with the body’s finite and transitory nature and its vulnerability within systems of containment and control. (“Posture is nothing against the body’s final shrug,” reads the text.) The presentation was awarded the Massimo Giorgetti Prize, and one of the works was acquired by the Fiera Milano Fund.
Valentina Cameranesi Sgroi with Satine
Imagine a Venetian crystal chandelier transforming into an elegant yet fragile, feminine body: that is what sculpture by Italian artist and designer Valentina Cameranesi Sgroi evokes. Presented by Satine, a newly opened Venice gallery, her works formed a constellation of poetic, delicate three-dimensional forms at miart. Moving across materials, techniques and processes, Sgroi turns them into embodiments of different notions of glamour and the rituals of femininity. Yet beneath their beauty and elegance, a fragility carries unsettling undertones, suggesting corporeal transformation, vulnerability, illness and even decay. There is a distinctly decadent presence to these works, one that contributes to their charm. Often appearing as allegorical nature mortes, they stage entire psychological states, hinting at the effort to conceal the fragility that underpins beauty. Sharing a refined material sensibility and each imbued with its own narrative, these works combine antique and contemporary aesthetic idioms in a quietly unsettling, evocative exchange.
Ania Bąk, Natália Trejbalová and Eliška Konečná with eastcontemporary
This Milan-based art gallery has established its reputation by championing some of the most promising talents emerging from Eastern Europe. At miart, it staged a resonant dialogue between the material explorations of Polish artist Ania Bąk and the multimedia practice of Slovak artist Natália Trejbalová, both engaging with the natural world through materials and processes in a shared inversion of the anthropocentric perspective.
Trejbalová’s multidisciplinary practice unfolds as an ever-expanding exercise in world-building, where image-making is intricately linked to scientific inquiry and the speculative realms of science fiction, reshaping our understanding of the more-than-human ecosystems to which we belong. A glass sculpture inspired by vegetal and floral life becomes an ecosystem in itself, imagined, evoked and already alchemically alive within its own process of formation.
Bąk embraces the causality of collaboration with the inherent properties of materials, both physical and symbolic, adopting a form of feminist materialism that acknowledges the natural transformation of matter and energy. A small textile sunflower—a cast that crystallizes the ephemeral beauty of an organic form—incorporates mirrored spheres that draw the viewer in while subtly subverting their relationship to this ghostly trace of a natural entity. The booth also included a soft bas-relief by Polish artist Eliška Konečná, who is currently presenting a solo exhibition at the gallery. Prices ranged from €2,000 to €10,000.
The best of Paris Internationale
Paris Internationale debuted in Milan in a raw, industrial space: three floors of an unfinished commercial building near Centrale station. Having reportedly secured the location only weeks before opening, the last-minute setup led to a looser booth structure, allowing exhibitors to take entire walls or sections rather than tightly defined stands. Many of the participating galleries were from Italy and neighboring countries, reflecting the short lead time. Several came from France, including founding member Crèvecœur, which staged a compelling dialogue between Inès Di Folco Jennismall’s softly drafted physiognomies and the suspended photographic moments of Julien Carreyn, alongside more conceptual works.
Visitors are greeted by Anna Franceschini’s uncanny installation of headless wigs trembling as if alive, presented by Vistamare, while Galerie 1900-2000 brought two full walls of drawings by Leonora Carrington, priced accessibly between €5,000 and €6,000—multiples that, despite their appeal, remained largely unsold by Sunday, perhaps due to the fair’s still raw atmosphere. Across the floors, a younger generation of Italian and European artists stands out with particular strength. What follows are some of the most compelling discoveries from this inaugural Milanese edition.
Francesca Minini presenting Ambra Castagnetti.">Ambra Castagnetti with Francesca Minini
With a double presence at miart and Paris Internationale, Francesca Minini here spotlights the work of Italian artist Ambra Castagnetti, presenting a group of hybrid sculptural figures suspended between the natural and the atrophic, embracing the tension between the two as a generative possibility. Her work revolves around the body as an unstable and fragile structure, yet one that remains malleable and open to continuous processes of inner and outer metamorphosis.
Working across a plurality of materials and media, Castagnetti constructs bodies suspended between reality and fantasy, the physical and the imagined that open hypotheses for hybrid modes of existence that respond to the unease of contemporary life. Body and mind, and the relationship that binds them, emerge as central axes in her practice, conceived as sites of transformation and emotional and symbolic passage.
Studying medical anthropology—a field concerned with how cultures understand the body and illness and how these ideas shape ethical systems—Castagnetti’s works often evoke states of suffering and violence inflicted on and within the body, frequently emerging from forced fusions of organic and artificial matter. Rooted in an inquiry into identity, her sculptures explore the strain between the natural body and its extensions, shaped by processes of so-called “civilization,” while proposing alternative systems of knowledge and spirituality capable of easing the tensions this friction produces. Within this framework, the artwork becomes a site of mediation across past and present, taking the form of fragments that resemble both the debris of a dystopian future and the remains of a lost utopia.
Andrea Salvinio and Lizzi Bougatsos with Ermes Ermes
Maintaining its sharp curatorial focus, the Rome-based gallery Ermes Ermes is revisiting the work of Italian artist Andrea Salvino (b. 1969), who rose to prominence in the early 2000s and has recently been rediscovered following his inclusion in Massimiliano Gioni’s exhibition “Nuovi mostri,” organized by Fondazione Trussardi in 2024. Salvino’s blending of folklore, suburban daily life and archetypal mythology generates a cinematic imaginary in which figures like Jane Fonda turn into a borgata girl, or Pinocchio reappears as a contemporary local child, all carrying subtle allusions to political extremism, historical memory and mass culture. Engaging with the contradictions of the present, Salvino reveals recurring patterns of human behavior, tracing how history continues to echo and repeat through recurring characters across geographies and times.
The gallery has positioned the works at accessible price points to encourage new acquisitions, with a monumental piece priced at €25,000. An unexpected, carefully curated pairing with New York-based artist Lizzi Bougatsos further reframes Salvino’s practice, situating it within a broader discourse on the body in its relational, performative and narrative dimensions. Both artists’ practices intersect with anthropological inquiry, approached with a sharp, often ironic sensibility even when addressing trauma, social unrest and cultural tensions.
Ying Bo with Current Plans
The Hong Kong-based nonprofit platform Current Plans joined the fair at the last minute, invited during Milan Art Week by one of the founding galleries. Despite the short lead time, their presentation is tightly curated and quietly affecting. Notably, they are among the very few Asian spaces across all three Milan art fairs, and the only one at Paris Internationale. The booth featured a series of intimate, poetic memory cases by Hong Kong-based artist Ying Bo, which may recall Joseph Cornell yet carry a distinctly Hong Kong sensibility, rooted in the dense stratification of material traces and historical moments that defines the city itself.
Titled “Inkblot Fit,” the mixed-media series originates from the aftermath of Typhoon Mangkhut in 2018, when
“Inkblot Fit” moves beyond representation to engage the viewer’s inner landscape of displacement and loss, merging micro and macro histories into a single visual field. Considering how 2018 marked a turning point for Hong Kong, the works, geological and mnemonic in their materiality, function simultaneously as historical documents and as vehicles for processing trauma, articulating a new collective sense of history as the city entered a rapidly shifting phase.
Emma Masut and Nicola Martini at Clima
Clima has established its reputation as one of the most research-driven galleries with international resonance. At Paris Internationale, it presented a young Italian talent fresh out of the Bologna Accademia: 25-year-old Emma Masut, whose somber palettes and atmospheres and the subtle, mostly symbolic psychological charge of her figures recall 1970s American painters such as Lee Lozano. Her paintings stage a sense of human oppression in an industrialized environment.
The gallery pairs her intimate-scale works with the alchemical sculptural explorations of Italian artist Nicola Martini, whose practice unfolds at the intersection of sculpture, chemistry and philosophy, treating matter as something constantly in flux. His sculptures function as sites of ongoing transformation, evolving through processes of oxidation, sedimentation and decay. Rather than imposing a fixed form, he sets conditions that allow materials to follow their own internal logic: surfaces crack, discolor, crystallize or collapse, revealing time as an active agent within the work. By covering the gallery’s walls entirely with bitumen, he effectively nullifies the white cube, turning the space itself into a material environment that generates contrasting emotions and associations.
Martini is also behind the striking exhibition currently on view at the gallery, paired with Japanese artist Kenji Ide, where he again coats the walls in bitumen, extending these concerns to the architectural scale. His works often appear minimal at first glance yet carry a latent complexity, quietly registering chemical reactions, environmental conditions and the passage of time. Gallery founder Francesco Lecci pointed to the growing presence of international collectors in Milan, many of whom have been attending the fair and are beginning to engage with the gallery, even as he acknowledged that it may take time for that interest to translate into acquisitions.
Anna Franceschini at Vistamare
Headless blonde wigs convulse on mechanical structures, uncannily evoking a body already turned into a machine. Active as both a visual artist and filmmaker, Anna Franceschini investigates the agency of objects and the cinematic potential of display, treating things as actors on a stage. Rather than using film to represent reality, she approaches cinema as a method of thinking where movement, light, framing and editing become tools to reconfigure perception, extending beyond and before the screen into the way we experience the world. Echoing the legacy of the avant-garde Ballet mécanique while drawing from William Gibson’s science fiction novel Neuromancer, VILLA STRAYLIGHT (2019) unfolds like a dance in which desire and deception blur—one where the sequence of gestures, the order of elements and even the beginning or end remain elusive. Presented also at the last Quadriennale—the most important survey of Italian art, held at Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome every four years—this work subtly queers the engineering behind the spectacle, as mechanical movement takes on choreographic qualities. Even the most unexpected pairings generate new associations and meanings, emerging through a network of shifting dialectical relations that underlie the dynamics of both cinematic storytelling and the narrative construction that accompanies our daily experience.
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