Opening the international art calendar each January, London Art Fair has long occupied a particular position within the ecology of global fairs: less spectacle-driven than its continental counterparts, yet deeply attuned to the rhythms of British collecting and institutional dialogue. For its 38th edition, taking place from 21–25 January 2026 at the Business Design Centre, the Fair leans into this role with renewed confidence, foregrounding material experimentation, modernist legacies and socially engaged practice across its programme.
This year’s edition feels notably cohesive, anchored by a Museum Partnership with the National Trust that places architecture and lived modernism at the heart of the Fair’s intellectual framework. Drawing from the collections of two landmark London homes – Ernő Goldfinger’s 2 Willow Road in Hampstead and Patrick Gwynne’s The Homewood in Esher – the presentation brings together surrealist and post-war abstract works by artists including Max Ernst, Rita Kernn-Larsen, Henry Moore and Prunella Clough. Shown alongside original furnishings and design objects, the display resists nostalgia, instead positioning modernism as an ongoing conversation between space, objects and ways of living.
This emphasis on material intelligence resonates strongly throughout the Fair. In the Main Fair section, blue-chip Modern British names – Francis Bacon, Barbara Hepworth, Frank Auerbach – sit alongside works that foreground tactility and process. Sculpture, print and painting are all approached as languages shaped by labour, resistance and time.
From the left: Cecil Beaton, Alberto Giacometti, Paris, October, 1956, image courtesy of James Hyman Gallery; Jordy Kerwick, Untitled, 2024, image courtesy of VIGO Gallery; Lynn Chadwick, Sitting Woman in Robes III, 1987, image courtesy of the artist and Pangolin London.
The Platform section, curated by Dr Ferren Gipson under the title The Unexpected, sharpens this focus further. Gipson’s long-standing engagement with craft, gender and material hierarchies is evident in a selection that privileges textiles, ceramics and hybrid practices. Here, materials traditionally relegated to the margins of fine art are reclaimed as vehicles of political, spiritual and ecological inquiry. Works made from beeswax, discarded ballet shoe offcuts or layered ceramics insist on slow looking, asking viewers to go beyond for and also consider origin, touch and transformation.
Encounters, meanwhile, remains one of the Fair’s most vital sections. Established to support emerging and international galleries, it brings a necessary unpredictability to the Fair’s otherwise measured tempo. This year’s edition spans geographies from Mexico and Japan to Ukraine and Turkey, with artists engaging themes of memory, displacement, queer temporality and ecological fragility. The curatorial thread of “radical care”, articulated by curator Pryle Behrman, feels as a structural principle, in the choice of materials, in collaborative modes of making and in works that foreground vulnerability as strength.
From the left: Angelo Brescianini, 4 SHOTS, Glass, 2005-2010, image courtesy of Aria Art Gallery; Celia Fernandez, Alone In The Crowd, 2024, image courtesy of the artist; Hiromi Murai, The Midpoint, 2024, image courtesy of Tache Gallery.
Beyond the galleries, the Fair’s partnership with Visit Tampa Bay introduces a more experiential dimension. London-based artist Rose Electra Harris presents a specially commissioned installation informed by a research trip to Florida’s Gulf Coast. Harris’s practice – intuitive, process-driven and grounded in emotional response – translates place into abstraction without resorting to literalism. The result is a work that speaks to travel as sensory encounter, echoing the Fair’s broader interest in how environments shape artistic thinking.
Photography, too, is thoughtfully woven into the Fair. Vintage and contemporary works by figures such as Cecil Beaton, Bill Brandt and Vivian Maier sit alongside newer photographic practices, reinforcing the medium’s enduring relevance in shaping visual memory and cultural narrative.
From the left: Tria Giovan, Children on Clinton Street, 1986, image courtesy of Crane Kalman Brighton; Li Yuan-Chia, Untitled (Banana skin in scarf), late 1980s, image courtesy of England & Co; Nick Mek, White Sands, image courtesy of Crane Kalman Brighton.
Taken as a whole, London Art Fair 2026 offers a measured, intelligent platform where material, history and contemporary urgency are held in productive tension. In doing so, it reaffirms its position not merely as a marketplace, but as a space for sustained cultural conversation, one that begins the art year with thoughtfulness rather than noise.
Author: Lina Ress
Lead image: London Art Fair 2025. © Sam Frost.
