Don't Miss These Five Standouts At Expo Chicago

Expo Chicago has returned to Navy Pier with a leaner footprint and a sharper sense of focus. The 13th edition of the fair brings 130 exhibitors to Chicago this week, drawing museum directors, curators, and collectors into a more concentrated version of the event than in recent years. That reduction in scale has not diminished the range on view; if anything, it has made the strongest presentations easier to find.

At Patel Brown, the Winnipeg-based duo Michael Dumontier and Neil Farber, who once worked with Marcel Dzama in the Royal Art Lodge collective, are showing paintings and sculptures that pair image with deadpan text. Their work has a comic precision that lands quickly: one sculpture stacks fictitious books, including a spine reading“Famous on the Inside,” while another painting includes the title“Itinerant Lothario.” Prices at the booth range from $1,000 for smaller works to $40,000 for large paintings.

Les Enluminures is offering a very different kind of object: the Grammont Missal, an illuminated manuscript from Belgium dating to around 1510–20, priced at $575,000. Created for Jan de Broedere, abbot of the Benedictine abbey of Grammont, the 13-inch-high volume is one of two surviving parts, with the other held in a Glasgow library. Sandra Hindman, the gallery's founder and president, said the book had lost two paintings over the centuries, but both have now been located in private collections, restoring the volume to completeness.

Elsewhere, Pao Houa Her's photographs at Bockley Gallery bring a more explicitly historical and political charge. The Hmong American artist, whose family fled Laos after siding with the Americans during the Vietnam War, presents portraits of men in military regalia, including relatives who fought on the U.S. side. Her work is formally restrained, but the subject matter carries a quiet force, especially in light of the continuing struggle for benefits faced by Lao-American veterans and the recent targeting of Hmong communities in the Twin Cities, where the artist is based. Her editions of three are priced between $12,000 and $17,500.

Night Gallery is showing Robert Nava's paintings, which embrace a deliberately rough-edged visual language, with prices reaching $200,000. At Anton Kern and Regen Projects, Aliza Nisenbaum's portraits range from $20,000 to $200,000, extending her interest in community, labor, and public-facing image-making. Nisenbaum also painted a large indoor mural for the Chicago Public Library branch associated with the Obama Presidential Center, linking the fair back to a major civic project in the city.

Taken together, these booths suggest why a smaller fair can still feel expansive: the range runs from manuscripts to contemporary painting, from historical memory to institutional commissions, and from modestly priced works to six-figure objects. At Expo Chicago, the most memorable presentations are not necessarily the loudest, but the ones that hold their ground with clarity and conviction.

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