You’re Invited: West West at the National Arts Club

I'd love for you to join me, Maryam Eisler and Alexei Riboud in a couple weeks at the National Art Clubs in New York for West, West – for a conversation about the American West through the lens of photography.

We'll be exploring how Maryam and Alexei reimagine the mythic frontier of the West as a space for imagination and creative renewal, while also connecting their contemporary vision with past filmmakers, photographers, and painters from the NAC's permanent collection.

✨ Collector Opportunities ✨

Looking for your next great piece to add to your collection? We’ve got some original works from two artists whose work we’ve been loving lately, Ben Mazey and Zena Blackwell. Click their photo below to explore available works and email Carrie for more details!

🗽 Seen City Guide to NYC

ICYMI - we launched our Seen City Guide to NYC this month! I’ve lived in New York twice as an adult, and both times the museums and galleries became my churches, my late-night bars, my refuge. I could lose whole weekends in the halls of MoMA and PS1, or spend an evening wandering Chelsea.

When I moved back to New York to run Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery after five years away, I had to rediscover the city’s art haunts all over again. It wasn’t easy to figure out which galleries were worth visiting, or how the programs had shifted.

That’s why I’ve written this guide: to help you cut through the noise and navigate New York’s art scene today — a city with more than 1,400 galleries and countless museums — without the overwhelm.

📰 Set the Seen

• 12 Artists to Watch in 2026

• Alejandro Cartagena Photographs at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

• U.K. pledges $2 Billion for Arts Funding (FINALLY)

• Louise Bourgeois’s Art Can Still Enthrall

• Humanity’s oldest known cave art has been discovered in Sulawesi

📺 What to Watch

💬 From the Seen Collector WhatsApp Group ⤵️

Top Picks from London Art Fair

Hey Londoners! I know it is dark and January. And after the flurry of fairs at the end of 2025—which somehow felt like 100 fairs in 60 days—you’d be forgiven for wanting to skip this one.

But take my word for it: don’t skip the London fair (even though I usually do).

Yes, it’s a mixed bag—as are most fairs that aren’t Basel or Frieze—but today delivered some genuinely good discoveries, alongside some encounters with familiar artists whose work surprised me in all the right ways. That Tracey Emin portrait! Also - I now need a house big enough to have that Gordon House.

From 120 galleries at the Business Design Centre, Islington (N1 0QH), these are my picks.

Oh and - top tip - start in the Encounters section—curated by Pryle Behrman—and work your way back to the front. You’ll have moments where you think I’ve lost my mind, but trust me.

Paul Anthony Smith, Lands Abroad at Timothy Taylor

22 January — 28 February 2026

This is the gallery’s debut solo exhibition of work by Paul Anthony Smith in London and it’s everything we need in a dark, gloomy January.

15 Bolton Street London W1J 8BG.

Philippe Garner: New York- All Seasons + Summer Still Lifes I-V at Hamiltons

28 Jan 2026 – 14 Mar 2026

The second solo show of photographs by Philippe Garner at Hamiltons. Garner captures the technicolor pulse of everyday life—the moments we so often overlook. His compositions are sensual and nostalgic, effortlessly photogenic without ever feeling staged.

The exhibition brings together vibrant colour works made in New York between 2000 and 2018—“the American city that has proved my most frequent and insistent subject,” as Garner notes—alongside Summer Still Lifes, photographed in the south of France during the summers of 1983 and 1984 and presented in the gallery for the first time.

For decades, Garner’s own photographic practice remained largely private. Publicly, he was instrumental in shaping the photography market, serving as Head of Photography at several auction houses and leading the first-ever photography-dedicated auction at Sotheby’s in 1979. Behind the scenes, he was photographing quietly and obsessively—learning from the masters, refining his eye, and building a body of work that is only now coming into view, positioning him as an important voice in contemporary photography.

13 Carlos Place, London, W1K 2EU

Rodney Graham: Who does not love a tree? at Lisson Gallery (8 Feb - 11 April)

Rodney Graham’s 15th show with Lisson Gallery explores the late artist’s longstanding relationship to the natural world through two major bodies of work related to trees: the large-format photographs of upside-down Oxfordshire Oaks (1990) and a two-screen, immersive video environment entitled Edge of a Wood (1999). Stemming from his use of both the camera obscura and the cinematic techniques associated with movie-making, these two early meditations on the tree as both solitary, spectacular object and as a performative, brooding presence, will be accompanied by a new ‘accidental novella’ in 100-word bursts, such as the above, by author Max Porter (known for Lanny and Grief is a Thing with Feathers among other books).

Edison Peñafiel: Me pongo el sol al hombro y el mundo es amarillo (I put the sun on my shoulder and the world turns yellow) at The Frank C. Ortis Art Gallery (29 Jan - 11 April)

Some works do not reveal themselves immediately. Not because they conceal something, but because they require time, attention, and presence. I Put the Sun on My Shoulder and the World Turns Yellow unfolds in this way—not as a closed image or a linear narrative, but as a space activated through the body. Seven monumental curtains suspended at the center of the gallery form a porous, traversable environment. As visitors move among them, images overlap, interrupt, and reappear. There is no single vantage point from which the work can be fully grasped. Seeing requires movement, pause, and choice.

Luigi Ghirri, Felicità, Thomas Dane Gallery (23 Jan–9 May)

Thomas Dane Gallery presents Felicità, an exhibition of works by Italian artist Luigi Ghirri, shown across the gallery’s two Duke Street spaces. Curated by Alessio Bolzoni and Luca Guadagnino, it marks the gallery’s second major presentation of Ghirri, following Colazione sull’Erba in 2019.

Ghirri is one of those artists who has been endlessly referenced, exhibited, and written about—yet somehow still feels completely of the moment. The works on view, many never previously exhibited or published, underline just how contemporary his thinking still feels. As he once put it, photography was for him “a language for seeing and not for transforming, hiding, or modifying reality.” That belief runs quietly through the exhibition.

Moving between cropped maps, postcards, interiors, signage, and the familiar landscapes of Emilia-Romagna, Ghirri turns the everyday into something quietly radical. The images feel simple, almost offhand, but they’re carefully composed and deeply considered. Felicità reminds us that Ghirri wasn’t just taking pictures of the world—he was thinking, constantly, about how we see it.

📚 The Bookshelf

*this section contains affiliate links to Bookshop.org that help support Seen.

💬 The Seen Podcast

Your bi-weekly source for artist interviews.

• Behind the Seen with Esther Kim Varet: Apple Podcasts | Spotify

• Have You Seen Rob Strati: Apple Podcasts | Spotify

  Listen on Apple Podcasts, or Spotify, or search for ‘Seen” wherever you listen to podcasts.