EXPO CHICAGO has undergone some changes this year. Frieze, EXPO’s recent buyer, is front and center in signage, and new director Kate Sierzputowski had to contend with an accelerated timeline to prepare the fair and a smaller passel of galleries from years past (this year sees EXPO down from 170 galleries to 130, along with a cut to public and local programs). Yet much of this doesn’t matter for art fairs, which are geared mainly for collectors, and EXPO Chicago is no exception to this maxim. A fair is not the place to look closely and carefully, unless you’re buying and need to keep a close eye on your merchandise. This, however, does not negate the possibility of finding real beauty in the sea of financial speculation, or work that against the odds compels you to look at it closely, carefully, with everything you've got. Like Frieze, EXPO’s Focus section, where many younger galleries present, offers some of the most promising and compelling works of the entire fair.

Red Arrow Gallery: Annie Brito Hodgin

At Nashville’s Red Arrow Gallery booth, Annie Brito Hodgin’s unnervingly pale and interchangeable women cavort, writhe, and scratch their way into a surreal legacy of figure drawing. With verve similar to Dorothea Tanning’s lonely girls and women, Hodgin’s oil-painted figures find themselves railing against the narrative confines of biblically inspired scenarios, like scenes from the life of Noah or the temptation of Eve by the serpent in the Garden of Eden. When I say Hodgin’s women “rail”, what I mean is that though they are often identical, nude, fallible, and frail, there is a sense that they don’t completely accept the contours of the stories they are placed within. In Samson and Delilah/The Philistines are Upon You (2026), numerous blond women look upon each other with suspicion as they grasp imposing scissors in defense; in Balaam’s Donkey (2026), one redhead brandishes a butcher knife upon a second redhead riding a third redhead. The woman being ridden with blood on her flank seems either relieved by the appearance of a rescuer or happy to have a woman on top of her. With saturated jewel tone colors that further lend the scenes a sense of deep unreality, Hodgin’s acceptance of the Bennett Collection Acquisition Award for The Creation of Eve (2026), to soon be placed on view at the Muskegon Museum of Art, signals that the party is just getting started. 

M. LeBlanc: Mindy Rose Schwartz; Peter Fagundo

In Chicago-based M. LeBlanc’s booth, Midwestern heavyweights Peter Fagundo and Mindy Rose Schwartz show a selection of work exemplifying the themes that they’ve grappled with throughout their practices: what constitutes the self, the cacophony of modern life, living amidst the material traces of memory, and the production and reproduction of desire. For Schwartz, these queries have long been processed through the form of sculpture or assemblage, with her immense Self Portrait as an Aromatherapy Candle (1999) as a particularly striking example of how we imbue the ownership of objects as a reflection, a facet of the self. The gradients of Schwartz’s multi-layered wax structure merge from a honey coral to a pearly opalescent, topped with shreds of potpourri in shades of dark magenta and emerald. For Fagundo, desire is represented in the image of silver screen star Catherine Devenue, the subject of multiple paintings included in the booth. Inspired by photographer Helmut Newton’s 1970s era images of the star, Fagundo treats his source material as an exercise in repetition, taking Newton's moody lighting for his own noir-tinged oils, like in Terminal (2025), Mercury (2025), or Wavelength (2024), three paintings that ask viewers to question, alongside the artist, what they want.

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Yehudi Hollander-Pappi: Daniel de Paula

There’s also the phenomenal solo presentation of Daniel de Paula through São Paulo’s Yehudi Hollander-Pappi Gallery. With conceptual pieces like Bodies (2026–), which consists of a group of a thousand liter water tanks holding “clouds” from the vapor run-off of data centers and other industrial cooling systems in the San Francisco Bay Area where neoliberal economist Milton Friedman’s ashes were also scattered, the display is a devastatingly sharp site-specific response to not just the history of Chicago, but the social, political, and financial implications of EXPO CHICAGO happening in this American moment. Friedman, known as the “father” of the Chicago School of Economics (a branch of economic thought championing monetarism and free markets that originated at the University of Chicago), makes another appearance in de Paula’s Free To Choose A Fatal Attraction (2026) in which the cover of one of Friedman’s books is installed next to the exhibition cover of the 1982 exhibition catalog for A Fatal Attraction: Art and the Media through UofC’s Renaissance Society, a show centering on America’s systems of consumption and consumerism. Alongside a shard of rock taken from the summit of Jakobshorn, a mountain in the shadow of Davos, Switzerland, the location of the annual World Economic Forum, de Paula’s work presents a blistering dialogue on the systems that dictate the movement of our daily lives. 

Rivalry Projects: rocki swiderski

In turn, Buffalo, New York’s Rivalry Projects offers the thoughtful ecological concerns of Tucson-based artist rocki swiderski. swiderski takes what they call “unstable sites” as points of departure to explore how the landscape of their primary residence functions as the foundational material for the tangible and ideological struggles of our time. With a border that is a militarized zone of conflict and conduct, and terrain that suffers from near-constant drought and extreme weather exacerbated by climate change, the country’s southwest region exists as both place and idea, the borders of the two notions in constant fluctuation. Considering this instability through sculpture, paintings, and works on paper, swiderski paints both what they see and imagine when they grapple with the complications of their current home. swiderski’s 2025 Puddle series is especially gripping: works on paper in acrylic and gouache that showcase fragments of landscapes both real and imagined. Each piece presents reflections of trees, grass, and sky in puddles of saturated color at various angles. swiderski’s Puddles resemble the territory lines of a map and call to mind the artist’s own musings on the presence of scum in, on, and around water; scum for swiderski isn’t just the presence of dirt on liquid but raw material that impacts how and what a person sees. The metaphor here feels achingly appropriate for the southwest is a land under constant scrutiny, negotiation, and surveillance.

Superposition Gallery: Helina Metaferia

The nomadic Superposition Gallery, project of artist and curator Storm Ascher, resides in borrowed spaces of cities like Miami, Los Angeles, and New York. This borrowing is an effort for the gallery to meet communities where they are, sharing art rather than participating in the gentrification of these same places by its presence. In Superposition’s booth, Ascher shares artist Helina Metaferia’s solo presentation By Way of Revolution, a collection of new and older work, including mixed media collages, sculptures, and single-channel video documentation of an institutional performance. A new brass sculptural work Metaferia created for EXPO, Crown (Makeda) (2026), is included in the space and serves to extend the logics of mixed-media collage Headdress series (2021–) from a few years back in which activists and other notable Black women are adorned with crowns created from archival material depicting Black history, specifically the history of Black women and femmes. The word makeda here is Ethiopian in origin and said to be the birth name of the Queen of Sheba, a non-Israelite woman in the Hebrew Bible who sought knowledge for its own value. Upon the crown are etchings of smiling Black children, along with what could be the outlines of barrier-breaking politician Shirley Chisholm, besides the words “a woman for president.” Metaferia’s work is a potent reminder in this political moment of the power of archives, memory, and history in safeguarding the self and the collective. History, all of it, needs to be collected, raised, and remembered. 

Like most art fairs, EXPO is what you make of it: if you manage to look past the sheen of wealth, you can find a plethora of works made with intention, dedication, and thoughtfulness.

EXPO CHICAGO Contemporary Art Fair runs from April 9 through 12, 2026.