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The Best New Discoveries of Milan Art Week 2026

In the strongest presentations, material, narrative and experimentation converged, with Italian and Milan-based artists emerging as the week's most urgent voices.

Milan is arguably one of Europe’s fastest-growing cities—particularly in real estate, where the house-price-to-income ratio now hovers around 12.5, surpassing London, according to the Financial Times. Its status as an arts destination is also growing, with an annual art week that now boasts a small constellation of fairs that, alongside a growing network of galleries and art spaces, animate the city. The city’s main fair, miart, still feels relatively regional in both its offerings and its reach: 60 percent of participating galleries were from Italy and 40 percent international, with very few from the U.S. or Asia (some withdrew at the last minute). Independent platform MEGA Art Fair, inspired by Basel Social Club, and the newly launched Milan edition of Paris Internationale, extended the art week offerings, even as that week felt curiously muted thanks to the arrival of the city’s globally dominant design week immediately after. Moving rapidly from fair to fair—facilitated by longer hours and, in the case of MEGA, more flexible, extended formats—Observer identified the strongest presentations and the artists collectors should be following.

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Despite more room to breathe, Miart’s main section ultimately felt overwhelming—lacking a curatorial thread that might have encouraged visitors to pause rather than drift aimlessly through its loosely arranged presentations. The random sequencing of exhibitors could, generously, be read as a nod to this edition’s theme, “Jazz,” but the strongest work was in the two curated sections split across separate floors. Modern and historical works were placed in dialogue with contemporary names in “Established Anthology” upstairs, while the ground-floor “Emergent” section yielded some of the week’s most compelling discoveries.

Eni Mizukami with Ehrlich Steinberg

Among the few American galleries in the main fair, L.A.-based Ehrlich Steinberg presented a solo booth of materially articulated yet poetically fluid, dreamlike paintings by Japanese artist Eni Mizukami. The works translate a stream of symbolic language from the subconscious into flows of color and delicate gesture, operating at once on a personal and collective level. A range of symbols, motifs and references surfaces: mythological imagery (snakes, swords, angels) intertwines with more physical and sensorial suggestions, such as disembodied and enlarged hands and feet, alongside elements drawn from contemporary daily experience and references to pop and urban culture. Any sense of linearity or consequence is suspended: layer upon layer, this subconscious material accumulates across the painting’s surface through liquefied brushstrokes alternating with paste-thickened paint and recurring forms. The result is a temporal, almost mnemonic dimension, as the work absorbs and reconfigures this symbolic language through imaginative epiphanies that emerge and recede.

Although Mizukami may be a new name for many, her work has already entered important collections, including the taste-shaping Rubell Family Collection in Miami. Priced between $2,500 and $9,000, several works were placed ahead of the fair and continued sales during the opening days. The presentation as a whole attracted a mix of collectors, from an existing U.S. client who already owns a large painting by Mizukami to new European collectors encountering the work for the first time.

Theresa Büchner with MATTA

Young, experimental gallery MATTA, a recent and interesting addition to the Milanese ecosystem, presented a solo booth at miart featuring works by Theresa Büchner. Black-and-white prints depict fragmented, dissected bodies in uncanny framings and contorted positions, conveying the discomfort and anxiety of individual existence given the pressures of contemporary urban life. What Büchner offers is a disenchanted observation of the contemporary existential condition, suspended between flesh and psyche and life and death.

Büchner’s practice is less concerned with producing stable forms than with tracing how meaning is constructed, performed and quietly unsettled. Working across........

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