The Dallas Art Fair opened yesterday (April 10) to an eager hometown crowd that turned out in force to make their annual purchases, reaffirming the city’s status as a strong regional hub. While very few out-of-state collectors traveled for the fair, American and international dealers showed up to court Dallas’s growing base, offering a snapshot of their programs, rekindling relationships and angling for acquisitions by the region’s well-stocked museums and foundations.
The vibes throughout the day leaned heavily toward “family and friends” as art enthusiasts and collectors filled the corridors of the FIG building starting around noon—only to grow more packed by evening as the Dallas Benefit Gala crowd arrived. It’s a kind of scene rarely spotted at regional fairs in the U.S., save perhaps for in Chicago, but one that will likely become more familiar going forward, given the now daily news pieces about America’s latest moves toward protectionist isolationism. Dallas offered a look at how fairs can survive and even thrive as they become more reliant on their local collector bases. By the numbers, Dallas and its metro area offer fertile ground as the city continues to attract new wealth amid Texas’ outsized economic surge—now boasting a GDP north of $2 trillion and ranking among the largest economies in the U.S.
SEE ALSO: Observer’s Guide to What Not to Miss During Dallas Art Week
“Growth in vitality is what keeps us going,” Dallas Art Fair director Kelly Cornell said at the press preview, highlighting the fair’s role in the fast-evolving cultural and art ecosystem of the city. What really stood out in Dallas was the museum acquisition prize—an annual initiative from the Dallas Art Fair Foundation that funnels fair finds directly into the Dallas Museum of Art’s permanent collection. Now in its ninth edition, this year’s prize funded the acquisition of seven works by Sanlé Sory, Alexa Kumiko Hatanaka, Fu Xiaotong, Tina Girouard, Eduardo Sarabia and Eri Imamura. Nearly $100,000 was granted for acquisitions this year alone, bringing the total contribution to $965,000 to date. Quite an impressive number for this local fair with national ambitions.
Some major sales were closed on opening day, but these were concentrated on standout works and quality offerings across the fair circuit. New York gallery Berry Campbell placed a 1969 Lynne Drexler within the first hour for $75,000, riding the wave of renewed interest in the artist driven by recent auction results and a major show that just opened at White Cube in Hong Kong. Known for reviving attention around overlooked female abstractionists, the gallery also placed a composition by Perle Fine later that day for $175,000.
Well-established L.A. dealer Susanne Vielmetter, at the Dallas Art Fair for the first time, told Observer that she was very impressed by the audience’s knowledge and sophistication: “The response to our booth has been fabulous, with a lot of interest from both artists, so we feel we are close to several sales.” For its inaugural display, the gallery presented a striking dialogue between new abstract works by Elizabeth Neel and the extremely tactile ceramics by Bari Ziperstein. Neel’s expressive works were priced in the $55,000-60,000 range ahead of her new collaboration on the East Coast with Jack Shainman.
Among the artists selected for the acquisition prize, Japanese Canadian artist Alexa Kumiko Hatanaka was featured by Toronto-based Patel Brown Gallery, with a range of works by the artist in bidimensional and tridimensional forms between the booth and the staircase leading to the fair’s second floor, which was dedicated more to emerging names and discoveries. Bringing traditional Japanese painting and printmaking techniques to the 3D and multimedia level, Hatanaka’s work retraces unexpected correspondences between Japanese maritime and Inuit culture. The gallery will dedicate a solo booth to the artist at the Armory Show in New York, confirming their presence despite the looming threat of tariffs on both sides.
Mexico City power dealer gallery OMR has been tapping into Dallas and its scene for a while, resulting in some recent shows at Dallas Contemporary, which contributed to the acquisition of Eduardo Sarabia’s Untitled (Peyote), 2024, by the Dallas Museum of Art, where it will become part of the museum’s permanent collection. The gallery also sold several other works during the day by emergent artists from their program, like Ana Montiel and Pablo Dávila, alongside stalwarts like Gabriel Rico, who was the honorary artist at the fair’s Annual Collector’s Dinner.
Among the handful of major international galleries participating, Perrotin reported a few early sales from its salon-style booth, which featured a selection of artists from its global program. On the preview day, the gallery sold works by Nick Doyle, Leslie Hewitt, Young-Il Ahn, Jean-Michel Othoniel and Gabriel Rico. The gallery also introduced the work of Nancy Graves to Dallas, marking its first collaboration with the Nancy Graves Foundation ahead of an exhibition opening on April 23 at its New York location. “We were happy to place the work of Nancy Graves on the first day of the fair with a local Dallas collector,” commented Peggy Leboeuf, a partner at Perrotin. “It was really great to see the positive reaction to Nancy’s work and the excitement around her practice. People were happy to see the work again after so long.”
Other galleries with ties to the local scene also saw immediate results, like Brooklyn-based CARVALHO PARK. Though this marked the gallery’s Dallas Art Fair debut, founder Jennifer Carvalho was born in the city, making the return something of a homecoming after she left at fifteen to study ballet in New York. Among the standouts in that booth was Rachel Mica Weiss’s sculpture Where do we go from here?—a gummy-looking slab of Portuguese rosa marble suspended on the wall, cinched with twenty-seven locks and not a single key in sight—a quietly loaded metaphor that landed hard. The piece sold within the first hour for $30,000, along with every other work by Weiss. “This is a personally important fair for me, as I was born in Dallas,” Carvalho told Observer near the day’s end. She was going to speak about Weiss’s work the next day at the Nasher Sculpture Center—a fitting close to a warm, well-earned return. “I’m always struck by the care and responsibility collectors here bring to shaping their collections. Today held the most engaged conversations I’ve ever had on a VIP preview day.” By evening, the gallery had also placed a work by Guillaume Linard Osorio for $24,000 and another by Maximilian Rödel for $22,000.
Among the other newcomers, young Miami-based dealer Andrew Reed showed several miniature, delicate but extremely poetic paintings of cinematic views by Dan Attoe, all priced under $10,000. By the end of the day, the gallery secured a number of placements for Attoe’s paintings, as well as other works by Alexis Rockman and Kate Bickmore, and suggestively dreamy, suspended atmospheres of the unconscious by Gonçalo Preto, shown alongside historical photographs by Laurie Simmons.
Also debuting at the fair was the dynamic Los Angeles gallery Make Room, which came to Dallas to cultivate institutional relationships while supporting the scene. The gallery pre-sold a work by South Korean artist Sun Woo ahead of the opening, when it placed other works by Leo Frontini and several by Linn Meyers. On Saturday, the gallery is organizing a studio visit with Dallas artist Sophia Anthony—one of the highlights of the fair’s VIP program aimed at showcasing the grounded and lively community of artists who have chosen to make the city their base, reinforcing the strong links between the fair and the local art scene.
Numerous dealers participating in the Dallas Art Fair were returning exhibitors who have already cultivated relationships in the region and are coming back to deepen ties with local collectors—who, as fair director Kelly Cornell explained in her recent interview with Observer, are often not the globe-trotting types seen at other fairs across the country or abroad. “They have the fair’s week marked on their calendars as a key moment for expanding their personal collections,” Cornell said, underscoring how the fair represents, for most of them, the primary moment when they make their annual art purchases.
Still, Nicodim partner and global director Ben Lee Ritchie Handler was a little perplexed by the evening; he’d expected more of the pandemic-era buzz to carry over into their second year at the fair. In the booth, the gallery presented two striking new sculptural works by Isabelle Albuquerque, alongside large works by Moffat Takadiwa and pieces by Emily Ferguson, Liang Fu and Igor Hosnedl, among others. He acknowledged, however, that Texan collectors tend to be slower-burning and remained hopeful that more sales would come through by Sunday.
Similarly, Italian dealer Eduardo Secci, another returning exhibitor, lamented the slower pace compared to previous years while remaining hopeful that some of his collectors in the region would show up over the weekend. For the gallery’s eighth presentation, SECCI featured a curated selection of works by emerging and established artists, including early seminal pieces by Chico Da Silva, along with others by Patrick Alston, Alin Bozbiciu, Daria Dmytrenko, Etsu Egami, Dan Flanagan, Kevin Francis Gray, Abul Hisham, Jordy Kerwick, Jeremy Lawson, Jason Martin, Alfredo Pirri, Giuseppe Stampone, Yves Scherer, Levi van Veluw and Didier William.
Mrs. founder Sara Maria Salamone confirmed that this is a slower-paced fair, where sales can still happen in the very last hours on Sunday. For its second year at the fair, the Queens-based gallery presented a conversation between Nevena Prijic’s intriguing blend of abstraction and ancient symbologies and Lily Ramírez’s densely layered works on paper. By the end of preview day, the gallery had sold a work on paper by Lily Ramírez for $25,000 and another smaller piece for $6,300. Overall, Salamone—like most dealers in Dallas for the fair—agreed that the local collector base takes time to cultivate. Showing up year after year is key.
Cristin Tierney Gallery’s founder told Observer she was expecting to see an uptick in sales over the weekend, as this is a lower-pressure fair, and more collectors wait until after the preview to finalize purchases. Early on, the gallery placed two works by Ryan McGinness with private collectors, and there was strong interest across the board—including multiple inquiries for works by Diane Burko, David Opdyke, Malia Jensen and Sara Siestreem (Hanis Coos).
This year marked the tenth year at the fair for Montreal-based Blouin Division, which brought (among other pieces) works by Canadian Indigenous artist Renee Condo, who recently had a show during Frieze Los Angeles at Night Gallery. Reinventing and reimagining traditional techniques, Condo creates panels with large beads glued into resin to form symbolic compositions that explore the relationships between all things, revealing concepts of harmony, reciprocity and entanglement. Often the result of collaborative work with family members and friends, Condo’s pieces embody quiet but enduring Indigenous knowledge in tangible, visual forms that speak to the profound interrelational and interdependent nature of existence.
Also returning to Dallas, Piero Atchugarry sold a toothpick piece by Chris Soal for $19,800 and four smaller works by Radenko Milak for a collective $14,400. The gallery closed the day with a few additional sales, including a work by Guillermo Garcia Cruz for $11,500, another piece by Radenko Milak for $41,000 and a work by Emil Lukas for $40,000.
Dallas Invitational offered an alternative hotel-fair experience
Now in its third edition, the Dallas Invitational—launched by local dealer James Cope—delivered a more intimate, sharply curated alternative to the main fair. Staged inside the luxurious rooms of the Rosewood Mansion on Turtle Creek, the fair offered a select group of international galleries the chance to engage with the space itself by staging works in unexpected dialogue with the interiors and architecture. Though the hotel setting drew comparisons to Felix in Los Angeles, the mood here was decidedly more subdued, trading party energy for the kind of quiet that favors actual conversation.
Still, opening day results were mixed. Despite a well-attended champagne reception the night before, most dealers reported a sluggish start, holding out hope for the weekend. For some, however, the fair’s softer, unhurried pace was a welcome breather after the back-to-back grind of Hong Kong and Milan.
“Dallas is a slow burn but always ends up being a success,” CLEARING founder Olivier Babin told Observer (the gallery has participated since the first edition). “So many great people came through yesterday,” he added, confirming the caliber of the local collector base. The New York- and Brussels-based gallery presented a mix of younger and more established voices from its program, including a new whimsical painting by Robert Zehnder, a more intimate, poetic reflection by Japanese artist Shota Nakamura and sculptures of eerily distorted objects by Brooklyn-based artist Nicholas Sullivan, who engages in both material and philosophical investigations of the symbolic meaning behind an object’s function.
During the champagne preview the night before, London’s Vardaxoglou Gallery was already making moves—placing an early Frank Bowling from the 1960s, priced in the six figures, into a major Dallas collection. A subtle yet significant canvas that prefigures Bowling’s later, more explosive abstractions, it may have been the most expensive sale across both Dallas fairs during the previews. By day’s end, the gallery was also fielding serious interest and had on reserve works by younger artists, including a soft abstraction inspired by London’s skies by Lewis Brander, a finely rendered graphite piece by Niamh O’Malley and a conceptual take on landscapes by Tanoa Sasraku, whose solo show opens at ICA London in October 2025.
Among the fair’s more established names, David Nolan took a suite on the ninth floor for a joint presentation with Marc Selwyn Fine Art, spotlighting the visionary mysticism of Guatemalan artist Rodolfo Abularach (1933-2020), whose volcanic eruptions channel the earth’s raw energy, while his staring pupils double as cosmic portals to the universe’s deeper secrets. “Very prominent local collectors have responded and acquired his works in the last couple of days. He is the star of the show,” Nolan told Observer. Abularach will be the subject of two solo exhibitions at both galleries this coming June as the dealers work in tandem to bring attention to his uniquely rich imagination and launch the first monograph dedicated to his work.
Around Abularach, Nolan presented a selection of works on paper by land artist Michelle Stuart, recent sculptures and drawings by Jorinde Voigt, historical sculptures by Mel Kendrick, delicate minimal abstractions by Brazilian painter Paulo Pasta, a plastic collage by Enrico Baj and works on paper by classic masters such as Léon Polk Smith, Brice Marden, Jay DeFeo, Eva Hesse and Joseph Cornell. Also on view is a series of works by American artist Chakaia Booker, who currently has a one-person show at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.
For those looking for discoveries, Chicago-based gallery Good Weather used the rooms and the courtyard to present both disquieting and whimsical assemblages of caged paintings by Tokyo-based conceptual artist COBRA (a co-founder and director of XYZ Collective) alongside works by Pei-Hsuan Wang, Dylan Spaysky, Jerry Phillips, Hunter Foster, Nancy Lupo, Inga Danysz and Max Guy. The gallery placed one of Lupo’s explorations of mundane materiality with the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth as part of the Dallas Invitational Acquisition Fund.
Meanwhile, New York-based Lomex showcased the work of Japanese artist Yoshitaka Amano, known for his fusion of Viennese Secessionism and traditional Japanese illustration. Renowned for his illustrations and well-established in Japan, his works here were priced between $65,000 and $100,000, with those on paper starting around $10,000. A recent show of Amano’s work just closed at the gallery’s New York location, while his exhibition at Palazzo Braschi in Rome remains on view through October.
Another New York gallery, Bureau, presented a thoughtfully curated selection featuring longtime collaborators like Erica Baum, Vivienne Griffin and Julia Rommel, alongside emerging voices such as Kate Spencer Stewart, Ian Miyamura and Thiang Uk, who currently has his New York solo debut in the gallery’s lower level. The entire presentation revolves around two main themes: a focus on text and written language through painting, ink drawing and photography, and the diverse spaces abstract painting can evoke—from the architectural and concrete to the emotional and numinous.
The quality of presentations at the Dallas Invitational was strong—arguably worthy of more first-day sales than it delivered—but here, too, dealers remained optimistic, expecting a busier weekend when the local collectors made their annual rounds.
Overall, amid the tremors of the trade war, there was a quiet consensus: the landscape has shifted in the country, and sales expectations—like everything else—will need to be recalibrated.
The Dallas Art Fair and the Dallas Invitational run through Sunday, April 13, 2025.
