From Million-Dollar Paintings to Impossible Cars: Inside the Art World This Week

The art world rarely stays in one lane for long. This week, New York’s Armory Week brought million-dollar sales, surreal cars, and a new sculpture by Solange Knowles, while museums in Paris and New York announced major exhibitions that look closely at artists, histories, and ideas that continue to shape contemporary art. Elsewhere, Tyler Mitchell received one of the art world’s major prizes, and the Brazilian painter Lucia Laguna was remembered following her death at 85. From gallery floors to museum walls and unexpected collaborations, here’s what caught our attention this week.

Joan Mitchell Painting Leads Early Sales at The Armory Show 2026

The Armory Show’s 2026 edition opened its VIP preview on September 24 at New York’s Javits Center, with galleries reporting strong sales across the fair’s opening hours. The headline transaction was a Joan Mitchell painting sold for more than $2 million by Michael Rosenfeld Gallery to a private collection.

The fair brings together 242 exhibitors from more than 30 countries, with its program divided into four sections: Galleries, Focus, Presents, and Platform. The 2026 edition runs through September 27.

The opening-day sales extended well beyond the Mitchell work. Galerie Maximillian sold Rashid Johnson’s Untitled (Large Mosaic) (2025) for $175,000 and Jonas Wood’s Five Bonsais (2024) for $125,000, while Nara Roesler sold Sheila Hicks’s The soft side of my nature (2025) for $260,000. Other reported sales included works by Inka Essenhigh, Dhewadi Hadjab, Stuart Davis, Zanele Muholi, and Kathia St. Hilaire.

Michael Rosenfeld Gallery’s presentation focused on 20th- and 21st-century American art, with artists including Mitchell, Benny Andrews, Richmond Barthé, Louise Nevelson, Lee Krasner, Alma Thomas, Norman Lewis, and Betye Saar.

Prune Nourry to Take Over Paris’s Petit Palais With “Visionaries”

French artist Prune Nourry will transform Paris’s Petit Palais this autumn with Visionaries, a new exhibition opening October 20 and running through January 24, 2027. The project will extend across the museum’s permanent collection galleries, forecourt, and gardens, placing Nourry’s work in direct dialogue with the institution’s historic holdings.

At the centre of the exhibition are 18 female sculptors from the late 19th and early 20th centuries whose work has been overlooked or underrepresented in conventional art history. Over the course of a year, three art historians researched the artists’ writings and photographic portraits, including Käthe Kollwitz, Nancy Elizabeth Prophet, Hélène Bertaux, Jane Poupelet, Selma Hortense Burke, and Sarah Bernhardt. Nourry has responded by creating a new portrait of each woman.

The exhibition will open on the museum’s forecourt with Mothership, a monumental hybrid figure combining the form of a pregnant woman with the rusted hull of a ship. Inside, the 18 new portraits will be presented alongside around 20 earlier works from Nourry’s Holy Daughters and Venus series, creating a conversation between her contemporary practice and the Petit Palais collection.

The project also draws attention to a gap within the museum itself: women remain significantly underrepresented in its sculpture holdings. By bringing these lesser-known artists back into view through new commissions, Nourry’s exhibition connects the museum’s historical collection with a contemporary reconsideration of who gets remembered in art history.

Nourry, who was born in Paris in 1985 and works between Paris and New York, is known for combining sculpture, installation, and performance with research across fields including genetics, sociology, anthropology, and archaeology.

Brazilian Painter Lucia Laguna Dies at 85

Brazilian artist Lucia Laguna, known for her layered paintings of gardens, homes, and urban landscapes in Rio de Janeiro, has died at 85. She died at her home in Rio on September 20, according to her gallery, Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel.

Laguna came to painting relatively late in life. Born in 1941 in Campos dos Goytacazes, she spent three decades teaching Portuguese and Latin before studying at Rio de Janeiro’s Escola de Artes Visuais do Parque Lage in the 1990s. Her first solo exhibition opened in 1998, while her inclusion in the 30th São Paulo Biennial in 2012 became an important moment in the recognition of her work.

For more than four decades, Laguna drew inspiration from the immediate surroundings of her home and studio in Rio’s northern suburbs. Her recurring series-including Paisagem (Landscape), Jardim (Garden), Estúdio (Studio), and Pequenos Formatos (Small Formats), returned repeatedly to gardens, fences, houses, power lines, and fragments of the city.

Her distinctive process was collaborative. Assistants and students would first build up canvases with layers of acrylic paint and imagery, after which Laguna would transform the surfaces with masking tape and oil paint. Through repeated additions, divisions, and erasures, familiar landscapes gradually became fragmented and semi-abstract compositions.

Laguna received major recognition in Brazil, including the PIPA Prize in 2011 and 2015 and the CNI-SESI Marcantonio Vilaça Prize for Visual Arts in 2006–07. Her work entered collections including MASP, MAM São Paulo, MAM Rio, and the Museu de Arte do Rio. In 2026, she held her first solo exhibition in the United States at Galerie Lelong in New York.

Her later paintings reflected another change in her surroundings after she moved from the home and garden that had shaped much of her career to an apartment in Rio’s Laranjeiras neighbourhood. Windows, doors, tiles, and denser urban views became increasingly prominent in the work.

Read more : Five Bookshops to Visit in Paris

The Met to Stage Major Felix Gonzalez-Torres Survey in 2027

The Metropolitan Museum of Art will present Felix Gonzalez-Torres: The Spaces Between next summer, marking the artist’s first major New York survey since 1995. The exhibition will run from June 10 through October 18, 2027, bringing together more than 40 works spanning installation, painting, photography, sculpture, and video.

The exhibition will feature several of Gonzalez-Torres’s best-known works, including “Untitled” (Perfect Lovers) (1987–90), his paired clocks that gradually fall out of sync; “Untitled” (Go-Go Dancing Platform) (1991); and “Untitled” (Revenge) (1991), a pile of blue candies that is continuously replenished.

Rather than keeping the exhibition within a single contemporary-art gallery, the Met will place Gonzalez-Torres’s works throughout its permanent collection galleries, bringing them into conversation with objects and spaces spanning thousands of years of art history. The presentation will extend from Egyptian and medieval art galleries to historic British interiors.

Organized in collaboration with the Art Institute of Chicago, the exhibition will also examine the impact of the AIDS crisis on Gonzalez-Torres’s practice. His works frequently used ordinary, replaceable materials—candies, paper, clocks, light bulbs, to explore ideas of time, intimacy, loss, memory, and participation.

Born in Cuba in 1957, Gonzalez-Torres moved to New York in 1979 and became a member of the politically engaged collective Group Material. He died from AIDS-related complications in 1996 at the age of 38. His work has continued to gain institutional attention, with major exhibitions taking place internationally this year.

Tyler Mitchell Wins $250,000 Crystal Bridges Prize

Photographer Tyler Mitchell has been awarded the $250,000 Don Tyson Prize for the Advancement of American Art by Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. He is the sixth recipient of the prize and the first to receive it under the award’s new structure, which increases the prize from $200,000 to $250,000 and changes it from a biennial to an annual award.

Established by the Tyson family in honor of the late Don Tyson, the unrestricted prize recognizes artists and cultural institutions working across mediums whose practices influence how American art is viewed, understood, or experienced.

Mitchell’s selection reflects the breadth of his practice across photography, film, publishing, fashion, and exhibition-making. Born in Atlanta in 1995 and now based in Brooklyn, he studied film and television at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. In 2018, he became the first Black photographer to photograph the cover of American Vogue, creating the September issue portrait of Beyoncé.

Beyond fashion photography, Mitchell’s work frequently focuses on Black life, intimacy, leisure, family, and belonging. His images draw heavily on memories of growing up in suburban Georgia and often use domestic and pastoral settings to construct more expansive representations of Black experience.

The Don Tyson Prize has previously been awarded to artists and organizations including Deborah Willis, Nicholas Galanin, vanessa german, Project Row Houses, and the Archives of American Art.

Read more : Five Bookshops to Visit in Paris

MSCHF Turns Lexus Vehicles Into Surreal Sculptures for Armory Week

Brooklyn-based conceptual art collective MSCHF is bringing two radically altered Lexus vehicles to New York for Armory Week, turning familiar cars into surreal sculptural objects.

The works, Circle Car and Twisted Car, are part of “Motomorphosis,” a collaboration with Lexus opening at Chelsea Industrial. The exhibition pairs each altered sculpture with the original vehicle it was based on: a Lexus RZ450e is transformed into Circle Car, its body looping nose-to-tail into an impossible circle, while a Lexus RX450h+ becomes Twisted Car, its form stretched into a dramatic longitudinal twist.

MSCHF calls the works “Form Cars,” describing them as an inversion of the automotive industry’s traditional “Concept Car.” The project draws from the visual language of 3D animation, where objects can bend and stretch freely, as well as earlier artists who have treated the automobile as an artistic medium.

Despite their surreal appearance, the sculptures were constructed using conventional auto-body techniques. Steel armatures were built up with thousands of individual pieces before being finished with paint and Bondo, with some original Lexus components incorporated into the works. As MSCHF’s Kevin Wiesner put it, “they’re sculptures, not cars.”

For Lexus, the collaboration is part of its “Electric Made Art” initiative, which frames vehicle electrification as a creative medium rather than simply a technological function. Motomorphosis opens to the public on September 24 and will be on view September 25–26 during Armory Week.

Solange Knowles to Debut Her First Public Large-Scale Sculpture in New York

Solange Knowles is moving further into visual art with her first publicly presented large-scale sculpture, set to debut during “Unfinished Projects” at New York’s High Line.

Organized by Google Chrome, the exhibition runs September 24–27 at the High Line’s Chelsea Market Passage. Knowles is one of three artists invited to bring an unfinished idea into the physical world, alongside musician PinkPantheress and NFL quarterback Joe Burrow. The project will also include an online digital component.

Knowles’s sculpture explores “how we process space and structure” and will intentionally remain unfinished during the exhibition. Visitors will be able to see the work alongside the process behind it, reflecting the exhibition’s focus on how ideas develop rather than simply presenting completed objects.

Although this marks a new step into large-scale sculpture, Knowles has a longstanding relationship with visual art and sculpture. She has spoken extensively about the influence of sculptor John Chamberlain, whose work she first encountered at the Chinati Foundation around 2008 or 2009. Her own practice has also included performance, film, curation, and installation, including Metatronia at the Hammer Museum in 2018.

Beyond her music career, Knowles founded the creative agency and archive Saint Heron in 2013 and has presented work at institutions including the Guggenheim, Chinati Foundation, Elbphilharmonie, and the Venice Biennale. Her latest project brings these interests together, placing sculpture, public programming, and artistic process at the center of her newest work.

Conclusion

From Joan Mitchell commanding more than $2 million at The Armory Show to MSCHF turning Lexus cars into impossible sculptures, this week offered plenty of reminders that contemporary art can take almost any form. At the same time, the upcoming exhibitions of Prune Nourry and Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Tyler Mitchell’s recognition, and the passing of Lucia Laguna brought the conversation back to artists, their practices, and the histories they leave behind. And with Solange Knowles stepping into large-scale sculpture, the boundaries between music, performance, design, and visual art continue to blur in interesting ways. There’s clearly plenty more to watch as the season moves forward.

Explore the current open calls and submit your work: apply.artstoheartsproject.com