As auction houses hemorrhage staff and mid-tier galleries fold weekly, Frieze New York 2025 emerges as a battleground where art must justify its existence in an age of economic contraction and emergency. This year's edition—scaled back but intellectually ferocious—abandons market cheerleading for something more urgent: a reminder of art's capacity to translate catastrophe into meaning.

The fair arrives just days after the announcement of its sale by parent company Endeavor to Hollywood mogul Ari Emanuel. The $200 million deal, which is expected to close later this year, includes Frieze magazine; Frieze art fairs in New York, Los Angeles and Seoul; the fall Armory Show in New York; and EXPO Chicago.

Housed again at The Shed, the 2025 edition of Frieze New York features over 65 galleries representing more than 25 countries, balancing international heavyweights like White Cube and Kurimanzutto alongside New York stalwarts Gagosian and Zwirner. This year's expanded Focus section, curated for the second time by Lumi Tan, welcomes seven first-time participants including Champ Lacombe from Biaritz; G Gallery from Seoul, and Voloshyn Gallery from Kyiv.

Beyond the fair, Frieze Week coincides with institutional shows featuring heavyweights Amy Sherald at the Whitney and Rashid Johnson's Guggenheim retrospective as well as competing fairs TEFAF, NADA, and Independent.

As uncertainty persists and pessimism looms, Frieze New York 2025 offers works capable of performing triage on the wounded global art culture—each work leveraging technical mastery toward actual repair rather than decorative distraction. In a market where speculative bubbles deflate daily, these artists offer something increasingly precious: artwork that functions as both diagnostic tool and healing technology for civilizational rupture.

Here are six that should not be missed:

James Cohan, New York

In a thrilling collision of historical violence and spiritual redemption, Tuan Andrew Nguyen's solo booth transforms the detritus of war into objects of transcendent beauty. James Cohan gallery presents Nguyen's latest work, harvested from actual artillery shells recovered from Vietnam's Quảng Trị province.

The circular composition Scars ripples with oxidized turquoise and umber tones, punctuated by alarming slashes of day-glo safety orange that rip across the brass landscape like fresh wounds. These aren't merely aesthetic choices. Each element of Scars emerges from the literal transmutation of unexploded ordnances from what was once the site of history's largest aerial bombardment.

The dragon-scale texture evokes Vietnamese mythology where dragons symbolize protection, growth, and mastery over rain—a pointed reference to America's Operation Popeye, which weaponized weather through cloud-seeding along the Ho Chi Minh Trail during the Vietnam War.

Nguyen, born in Ho Chi Minh City in 1976 and emigrated as a refugee to the United States in 1979, has collaborated with locals and demining organizations to recover these lethal materials. His artistic practice transcends mere repurposing – these pieces aren't just transformed visually but metaphysically, tuned to specific healing frequencies through collaboration with sound healers.

His kinetic sculptures, "Outburst" and "Tremor" (both 2025), echo Alexander Calder's mobiles while embodying karmic balance through perpetual motion, creating sonic environments intended for spiritual healing when activated by gallery attendants.

Through this alchemical transformation of war's remnants, Nguyen creates work that doesn't merely document trauma but actively participates in repairing it – art that doesn't just represent history but metabolizes it.

Sherrie Levine Disrupts Mondrian

David Zwirner, New York

David Zwirner's booth stages a subversive intervention with Pictures Generation icon Sherrie Levine's intellectual provocations, featuring the debut of her latest series alongside the seminal 1983 work "After Piet Mondrian: AP2." The fair presentation serves as a precursor to Levine's upcoming retrospective at the Aspen Art Museum running June through September.

The exhibited chromogenic print—a flat, deadpan re-photography of Mondrian's grid compositions taken not from originals but from art book reproductions—hangs like a specter haunting modernism's claims to authenticity. This deliberate distancing from the "original" through mediated copies forms the conceptual backbone of Levine's practice, creating work that exists as both homage and critique.

In the featured chromogenic print, Mondrian's iconic neoplastic language of primary colors and black grid lines remains instantly recognizable yet fundamentally altered through Levine's appropriative lens. The work's clinical framing and photographic flatness strip away the tactile qualities of Mondrian's brushwork, transforming his spiritual geometry into something more sinister—perhaps capitalism's endless reproduction of cultural signifiers.

Levine's new "After Piet Mondrian Inverted" (2024) series continues this disruption by color-inverting modernist masterworks, while parallel appropriations of Picabia's "dot paintings" and Stieglitz photographs extend her institutional critique across the modernist pantheon.

Born in 1947 in Hazleton, Pennsylvania, Levine rose to prominence in the Pictures Generation, whose members deployed appropriation as a critical strategy against the dominance of mass media and modernist mythmaking. Her work now resides in every major museum collection from MoMA to Tate, institutionalizing the very institutional critique that defined her conceptual project. In an era of AI-generated images and blockchain authenticity, Levine's decades-long interrogation of copy versus original feels more urgently prophetic than ever.

Wanda Koop’s Twilight Landscapes

Night Gallery, Los Angeles

Night Gallery drops another disruption into Frieze's blue-chip ecosystem with Canadian master Wanda Koop's long-overlooked plywood paintings from 1983-90. The historically significant "No Words (Landscape)" (1989) anchors their booth—a twilight dreamscape where nature appears simultaneously threatened and transcendent, split across a diptych that refuses wholeness while demanding contemplation.

Painted during Reagan-era environmental rollbacks, Koop's 8-foot square composition vibrates with premonitory anxiety. Her verdant otherworld, rendered in muddy army greens punctuated by hallucinogenic yellow skies, presents nature as both endangered and resilient. A lonely tree stands sentinel on the left panel while ominous dark pools—possibly industrial runoff—ripple across a landscape that feels both specific and mythological.

The work's divided structure serves as both formal innovation and environmental warning—beauty fractured but not destroyed. Koop's gestural brushwork combines impressionistic technique with unsentimental observation, creating surfaces that hover between representation and emotional response. The painting's horizontal seam becomes a metaphysical fault line, suggesting natural systems on the verge of collapse.

Born in Vancouver in 1951 to Russian Mennonite refugees, Koop developed her singular visual vocabulary from Canada's vast wilderness and her motorcycle journeys across North America—experiences that hardened into a formal language that predates contemporary eco-critical art by decades. Her pragmatic use of construction-grade plywood—initially bartered for her paintings—transformed economic necessity into aesthetic advantage, its industrial flat surface rejecting the precious conceits of fine art while speaking directly to environmental degradation.

This U.S. debut of Koop's historical works precedes her upcoming solo exhibition at Arsenal Contemporary NYC, co-presented with Night Gallery. Her paintings currently command prices between $100,000-250,000—substantial yet undervalued for an artist whose prophetic environmental vision feels increasingly urgent as climate catastrophe unfolds.

Jennie C. Jones Weaponizes Minimalism

Alexander Gray Associates, New York

Alexander Gray Associates' booth delivers a sonic gut-punch with Jennie C. Jones's "Red Tone #10 (with various sharps)" (2025)—a work that turns minimalism's austere language into something dangerously alive. The painting's saturated cadmium field, perfectly square and flush-mounted against a thin black edge, initially reads as pure color-field abstraction. Look closer: subtle ruptures in its surface reveal architectural felt, not canvas, as its substrate.

This isn't mere visual formalism; it's acoustic insurgency. Jones employs industrial sound-absorbing materials that literally consume sound waves from the surrounding environment, transforming the white cube into a dampened zone where conversations become muffled and the chaotic din of commerce recedes. The work operates as both object and apparatus—a stealth device weaponizing silence in capitalism's noisiest spectacle.

The painting's title—a music theory reference to sharp notes—echoes Jones's consistent mining of experimental jazz histories. Its saturated red conjures associations with both danger and the corporeal, suggesting bleeding bodies, emergency signals, and the revolutionary aesthetics of political resistance. Within its rigorously formalist presentation lurks a coded language of avant-garde sonic practices.

Jones, who studied at Rutgers and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, recently stunned critics with her Metropolitan Museum of Art Roof Garden commission—a vindication after decades of institutional blindness to Black women's contributions to minimalism. Her practice deliberately bridges the segregated histories of visual abstraction and experimental sound composition, forcing a renegotiation of modernism's exclusionary narratives.

"Red Tone #10" embodies her evolving technique—transitioning from fiberglass panels to architectural felt, materials developed not for artistic purposes but for acoustic engineering in high-end architectural spaces. The work thus performs a class critique even as it seduces with its impeccable formal rigor—a Trojan horse of institutional critique disguised as pristine abstraction.

Stefania Batoeva's High Voltage

Champ Lacombe and Company Gallery, Biarritz, France

Champ Lacombe and Company Gallery stages an electric disruption with Stefania Batoeva's "It's love" (2024)—a gestural body bomb detonating in acid-yellow psychological space. The Bulgarian-born painter's work hangs like a feverish wound in the antiseptic fair atmosphere.

Batoeva's frenetic figure—rendered in charcoal scrawls and painterly slashes—collapses against a bisected field of searing yellow and clinical blue. The subject's identifiable human elements (red shoes, hints of limbs) dissolve into nervous abstraction, while a ghostly double-image creates a trembling temporal effect. This disintegrating body, both falling and floating, reads less as portraiture than as emotional seismograph—recording intimacy's aftershocks in real time.

The canvas vibrates with a distinctly Eastern European anxiety that recalls Batoeva's Sofia upbringing—the electric yellows and insistent line work evoking both psychological claustrophobia and liberatory escape attempts. Her formal training in sculpture bleeds through in the way mass and negative space fight for dominance, undermining figure-ground relationships with an almost architectural sensibility.

Born in 1981 in Bulgaria's post-Communist transition and now Paris-based, Batoeva maintains an outsider's perspective that translates into visual voltage. After studying sculpture, she pivoted to painting while maintaining a sculptural sensibility evident in her brushwork's dimensional attack. Her recent exhibitions at Public Gallery (London) and Nicodim (LA) established her as a painter capable of transfiguring autobiographical elements into universal emotional frequencies.

In "It's love," Batoeva transforms relational collapse into visual ecstasy—the figure simultaneously breaking apart and becoming something wilder, freer, and more necessary than its original form. It's the perfect art fair paradox: a painting about disintegration that somehow holds everything together.

Rodrigo Hernández's Bat Rehabilitation

Madragoa, Lisbon

In a darkened corner of the show, Lisbon's Madragoa gallery stages a necessary intervention with Rodrigo Hernández's "Se vider, se disperser #2" (2025)—a painted manifesto that elevates one of society's most maligned mammals to ecological savior. This meticulously rendered oil-on-wood depicts a golden-furred bat approaching a vermillion heliconia bloom against obsidian darkness, its translucent wing membrane frozen mid-flutter like some Darwinian haute couture.

The work exists as both naturalist observation and coded political allegory. Hernández resurrects Aesop's fable of the bat trapped between warring factions of birds and beasts—ultimately condemned to nocturnal exile for its ambiguous loyalties. Yet this contemporary reframing inverts the moral punishment into evolutionary advantage, presenting the bat's liminality as adaptive brilliance rather than character flaw.

Technically, the painting deploys hyperrealist precision against theatrical chiaroscuro—the bat's fur rendered with almost fetishistic attention while the velvet darkness surrounding it suggests both night sky and gallery interior. The heliconia's dramatic red and yellow petals function as both actual sustenance and symbolic beacon, suggesting nature's persistent hospitality even toward creatures human society has demonized.

The ecological subtext pulses through every brushstroke. The painting doesn't simply anthropomorphize its subject—it challenges viewers to reconsider pandemic-era vilification of bats by highlighting their essential role in pollination, the very interaction Hernández captures with scientific fidelity and emotional resonance.

Hernández, whose practice spans installation, sculpture and painting, has consistently explored themes of biological outsidership and evolutionary adaptation across exhibitions in Mexico City, Basel and Madrid. This latest series emerges as his most politically urgent—advocating for ecological interconnection during climate collapse by elevating marginalized species into emblems of resilience.

Frieze NY 2025: Do Not Miss These Six Artists

Christie’s Spring Auction: Modernism’s Greats on the Block