PATRON’s Dallas Art Fair Round-Up

The Dallas Art Fair 2026 returns to the Fashion Industry Gallery from April 16 through 19, bringing together a mix of international and domestic galleries for its eighteenth edition. Anchored by a Preview Benefit supporting the Dallas Museum of Art, Nasher Sculpture Center, and Dallas Contemporary, the fair continues to function as a central point of exchange during a week that extends well beyond the fair floor.

Among returning exhibitors, Make Room Gallery presents a group of fourteen artists, including Dallas-based painter Sophia Anthony. Her work constructs interior scenes that feel at once familiar and slightly unsettled, drawing from cinematic framing and art historical references. Domestic spaces become sites of tension, where the composition suggests as much outside the frame as within it.

Material experimentation carries across several booths. David B. Smith Gallery brings together Laura Ball, Justin Favela, Gustav Hamilton, and Linda Nguyen Lopez in a presentation that moves between painting and sculpture without settling into either. Ball’s mineral pigment works render endangered flora with a precision that leans toward the surreal. Favela continues his dialogue between craft and cultural reference through piñata-based constructions, including a deconstructed mobile that draws loosely from Alexander Calder. Hamilton extends ceramic glazing into painterly territory across flattened forms, while Nguyen Lopez’s porcelain works shift into a new wall-mounted format, emphasizing surface and movement.

Painting remains a dominant throughline elsewhere, though approached through varied material strategies. Yuri Yuan’s Echo places a solitary figure within a muted landscape informed by traditional ink painting, while Andrew Sendor’s Portrait of Whitman at The Flumzy Ranch renders a horse on matte Plexiglas as a kind of encounter rather than a straightforward image. Malaika Temba’s woven and painted compositions position the figure between textile and photograph, and Julian Lombardi’s saturated surfaces allow forms to move between abstraction and figuration without settling.

At Yossi Milo Gallery, a broad presentation includes work by Samuel Fosso, Meghann Riepenhoff, and Shikeith, spanning portraiture, process-based photography, and material-driven image-making. A nearby grouping featuring Haley Josephs, Ben Tong, Caro Deschênes, and Dylan Vandenhoeck keeps the focus on intimate-scale painting, where shifts in tone and composition reward slower viewing.

Digital work enters through Solos Gallery, which includes new releases by Jan Robert Leegte and Tyler Hobbs, extending the fair’s scope beyond physical objects. These projects unfold on a different timeline, but remain tied to the same systems of circulation and attention that structure the fair.

Local and regional galleries bring a different kind of continuity. Conduit Gallery maintains its long-standing commitment to emerging and established artists through a program that moves across drawing, painting, and installation, while Cris Worley Fine Arts presents a multigenerational roster that reflects its role in shaping the city’s contemporary art landscape over the past two decades. Erin Cluley Gallery continues its focus on emerging and mid-career artists working across traditional and alternative media, often extending beyond the gallery through public-facing projects.

Other Dallas spaces operate with a more focused scope. Pencil on Paper Gallery highlights a group of artists working across painting and figuration, while Nature of Things presents a more concise curatorial approach centered on emerging practices and regional histories. Valley House Gallery & Sculpture Garden brings a longer historical perspective, with its program bridging early Texas work, modernism, and contemporary practice.

The Fort Worth contingent adds further dimension. Artspace111 continues its decades-long focus on Contemporary Texas Art, maintaining a direct connection to regional artists, while William Campbell Gallery presents a program that moves between abstraction and regional identity, reflecting a broader dialogue between local context and national reach.

Elsewhere, Meliksetian | Briggs includes work by Dave Muller, Areum Yang, and Helen Bermingham, where text, sound, and layered visual references intersect across painting and mixed media. Kerlin Gallery returns with Daniel Rios Rodriguez’s Born Under Saturn, continuing the artist’s longstanding presence within Texas audiences.

Morgan Lehman Gallery brings a painting-forward presentation that leans into layered, narrative-driven abstraction. Works on view suggest a focus on surface and accumulation, where color and gesture build compositions that feel both constructed and atmospheric, often carrying a sense of interiority without resolving into fixed imagery.

At Spinello Projects, the presentation moves between figuration and landscape, often grounded in personal or symbolic imagery. Marlon Portales’s The Gardener (2025) centers a solitary figure within dense, flowering vegetation, where branches partially obscure the body and flatten the space. Across the booth, Portales’ works maintain a narrative sensibility shaped by place and memory, where natural elements and human presence intersect.

Luce Gallery focuses on painting that emphasizes light, rhythm, and repetition. The works operate through subtle shifts in tone and surface, where variations across a series become central to how the images unfold, rewarding slower viewing rather than immediate impact. For instance, Hugo McCloud’s use of single use plastic doesn’t reveal itself on first reflection.

Sears-Peyton Gallery presents landscape-based painting that leans toward abstraction, where natural forms are distilled into fields of color and atmosphere. The works suggest place without fixing it, often relying on shifts in light and composition to structure the image.

Secci Gallery introduces a more materially diverse presentation, with works that move between sculpture, painting, and hybrid forms. The booth reflects a broader European approach to object-making, where process and material often take precedence over strict medium boundaries.

Zidoun-Bossuyt Gallery presents a focused selection of figurative and narrative-based work, often centered on identity and contemporary life. The paintings and mixed media pieces shown balance direct imagery with stylized form, maintaining a clarity that contrasts with more abstract presentations elsewhere in the fair.

Cadogan Gallery continues its emphasis on structured, architectural painting, where geometry and landscape intersect. The works suggest built environments and imagined spaces, often rendered through precise compositions that prioritize balance and spatial tension.

Luis De Jesus Los Angeles presents a materially diverse grouping that moves between abstraction, figuration, and process-driven work. The selection includes compositions that emphasize pattern, surface, and repetition alongside more spatial, landscape-adjacent imagery, creating a rhythm across the booth that shifts between dense visual information and quieter, atmospheric passages. The presentation reflects the gallery’s broader program, where conceptual and material concerns are held in balance without settling into a single formal direction.

As in previous years, the fair’s scale allows for a more measured pace. Works are given room to be seen without the density typical of larger fairs, and conversations tend to unfold directly between galleries and visitors. Dallas Art Fair continues to prioritize where the work, rather than its framing, carries the weight.