ArtRio has opened in Rio de Janeiro because the upcoming Brazilian elections create an environment of rigidity for a market in any other case exhibiting indicators of progress. The sixteenth version of the honest options 76 collaborating galleries, largely Brazilian.
This 12 months’s honest is happening in opposition to a backdrop of political uncertainty. A number of attendees on the preview on Wednesday (16 September) wore stickers supporting Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Brazil’s left-wing president. Lula is up for re-election in early October in opposition to most notably Flávio Bolsonaro, the son of former president Jair Bolsonaro, who’s serving a jail sentence for plotting a coup after dropping the 2022 election. Simply earlier than the honest opened, Brazil’s Supreme Courtroom was embroiled in a tumultuous, politicised battle over corruption probes that many interpreted as a proxy for the facility battle between Lula and Bolsonaro.
The strain over Brazil’s polarised politics has made some collectors extra cautious about spending forward of the elections, some on the honest stated, echoing attitudes expressed by some collectors within the US earlier than the 2024 elections. Maria Luz Bridger, ArtRio’s inventive director, tells The Artwork Newspaper galleries had been already making gross sales at a pre-preview dinner on Tuesday night time.
“I am a little bit bit stunned, as a result of there will likely be an election in two weeks, so usually it’s totally unsure. However the market is doing rather well,” Bridgers says. “That is what the dinner is for—to have a extra cozy expertise between our largest collectors and the galleries.”
The honest’s predominant part, Panorama, options established galleries acquainted to the worldwide art-fair circuit, together with Mendes Wooden DM, Nara Roesler and Galleria Continua, in addition to sellers lively inside Brazil. A smaller pavilion, dedicated to solo and duo shows and establishments, backs onto sea close to Rio de Janeiro’s Marina da Glória and options smaller works, typically at extra inexpensive worth factors. Most exhibitors are from Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. One part, devoted to modern Brazilian practices, and galleries from cities similar to Brasília, Vitória and Belo Horizonte that spotlight the range of Brazilian inventive practices, contains textiles, woodwork, beadwork, ceramics and combined media.
Anna Bella Geiger’s A Rota do Bicho da Seda n. 5 (2026) Courtesy the artist and Mendes Wooden DM
Brazilian artwork seems to have drawn the eye of Sheikha Al-Mayassa bint Hamad Al Thani, the chairperson of Qatar Museums, maybe probably the most highly effective collector on this planet, with an acquisition funds that has been estimated to be round $1bn. Al Thani stopped by forward of the unique pre-opening dinner, and her attendance marked the primary time ArtRio had acquired what Bridger described as such an necessary collector from the Center East.
Brazil, the biggest nation in South America, boasts Latin America’s second-largest artwork market, a historical past of manufacturing a number of the continent’s most well-known artists and enjoys a powerful home base of collectors that continues to develop. In response to the latest International Artwork Market Report printed by UBS and Artwork Basel, Brazilian sellers reported a 21% enhance in gross sales year-on-year in 2025. In a survey of collectors carried out by Artwork Basel and UBS in 2025, Brazilian collectors reported the very best share of being new to artwork accumulating, with 23% having begun accumulating throughout the earlier 5 years. That determine aligns with ArtRio exhibitors’ experiences, Bridger says, including that a lot of final 12 months’s contributors stated they bought to new collectors.
One of many few galleries from exterior Brazil at ArtRio is Tomás Redrado Artwork, a Miami-based gallery devoted to Latin American artwork. It’s collaborating within the honest for the primary time, and its founder and director Tomás Redrado says the gallery already had a powerful collector base in Rio de Janeiro, which has helped the gallery commercially on the honest.
“These collectors have supported us lots, and so we predict we have been very fortunate in that sense,” Redrado says. “Different individuals have requested for lots of catalogues and have not confirmed or are nonetheless considering.”
Tomás Redrado Artwork’s stand incorporates a collection of works by the artists the gallery represents, together with three by the Argentine artist Guadalupe Reyna, who is predicated in Miami and works with encaustic portray utilizing wax from bees. Her subject material typically offers with female figuration whereas additionally commenting on colonisation, just like the introduction of European honeybees to the Americas within the early seventeenth century.
Brazilian collectors, Redrado says, are “very acutely aware of the artists they help and the explanations that join them with these artists and their galleries”, including that they’re typically politically aligned with the messages of the artists they acquire.
Many Brazilian artists discover politics of their practices, and work proven on the honest isn’t any exception. On show at Mendes Wooden DM’s stand is A Rota do Bicho da Seda n. 5 (2026) by Anna Bella Geiger, a 93-year-old multidisciplinary artist who is taken into account a dwelling legend in her hometown of Rio de Janeiro. The work addresses bodily and ideological borders, imagining the Silk Street as a metaphor for a community that strikes past such divisions.
Osvaldo Carvalho’s Público Alvo (2020) Courtesy the artist and Janaína Torres Galleria
One of many extra hanging work at ArtRio is Osvaldo Carvalho’s Público Alvo (2020), displayed at Janaína Torres Galeria’s stand. Translated as Goal Viewers, it depicts the brutality of Brazil’s police power in a few of Rio de Janeiro’s most uncared for neighbourhoods.
“The targets are primarily younger Black boys and Black males, they’re seen as risks,” says Luisa Moser, the gross sales and liaison lead on the gallery. “The one approach that the arm of the state enters these communities is thru violence, to not give assist.”
Three works on the gallery’s stand come from Carvalho’s Balada collection, developed after a number of areas close to his studio had been focused by gun violence. He started portray the scenes and enclosing bullets discovered on the websites between the works and their frames. When the work are moved, the bullets are jostled and repositioned throughout the body. Works within the collection “query the banality of violence”, Moser says, and the way in which the general public grows desensitised over time.
There are precedents for Brazilian artists addressing well timed political points. At its Rio de Janeiro gallery in Botafogo, Pinakotheke is recreating a 1954 exhibition by which Brazilian artists confirmed works solely in black and white to protest a authorities import coverage that made it troublesome for artists to entry overseas artwork provides.
Rio de Janeiro occupies a definite place in Brazil’s artwork scene. Whereas São Paulo is house to the nation’s largest focus of economic galleries, outstanding collectors, the largest honest and probably the most closely-watched biennial, most of the most well-known Brazilian artists are primarily based in Rio.
“A very powerful artists are from Rio, however on the time there have been no galleries, they went to São Paulo,” says the vendor Anita Schwartz, who based her eponymous gallery in Rio almost 30 years in the past and was among the many first to open an area within the Gávea neighbourhood, an more and more outstanding hot-spot for artwork. “Increasingly more every year, it is turning into greater, greater. With the start of the (ArtRio) honest, it created an environment and now we’ve got a market that grows loopy 12 months by 12 months.”
The increasing native collector base can also be bringing new audiences to the honest, says Márcio Botner, the co-founder and director of A Gentil Carioca, one of many galleries based in Rio (it additionally operates a location in São Paulo).
“The native market is necessary, and it’s rising,” he says. “You may have a brand new market and new individuals coming in it’s important to educate.”
ArtRio, till 20 September, Marina da Glória, Rio de Janeiro
