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It may seem obvious, but it bears repeating: When it comes to what’s shown in galleries, market value and artistic merit do not always correspond. Just because an artwork is worth a lot of money doesn’t mean it’s good, and just because an artwork is good doesn’t mean it’s worth a lot of money.
Such are the cruelties of the market. Not that anyone who cares about art ever forgets them, of course, but the paradox has become increasingly hard to ignore over the past half decade, especially when it becomes to young artists.
On the auction block, the success of artists under the age of 40—ones whose styles have not fully matured—has led to the formation of an entire market category, nebulously called the “ultra-contemporary,” with works selling for hundreds of thousands of dollars and, in some cases, even more than that. (Some market observers say the category’s boom is already going bust.) Mega-galleries, meanwhile, are starting to take on artists who have yet to turn 30, putting them on a stage formerly reserved for the established, the well-known, and the market-tested.
And so, when one talks about these rising stars, one speaks about dollar signs and auction records. One does not often discuss the work itself, then. How good is all this art, really? Six gallery shows in New York, all solos for artists under the age of 45 with auction records of nearly $200,000 or higher, provide an opportunity to make that assessment. With the exception of one of these exhibitions, the picture is not a pretty one.
Park’s impressive method of accumulating images is intended to enrich the psychology of her female figures, who might normally appear flat if encountered in a magazine. But the density of the pile-up masks the fact that the ideas behind it are not entirely fleshed out. These new works say nothing that was not already said by Park’s Pop influences.
Still, these drawings display a closely attunement to market manipulation that has helped shape Park’s own career—her auction record of $484,300 was set in 2022, when she was only 26. (The 2020 drawing responsible for that record is aptly titled Is It Worth It?) Artists are commonly thought to be secondary characters in their own market; Park attempts to assert otherwise with Try Me (2026), a drawing in which a grinning woman is pictured against a playing card. She holds a giant heart with both arms, her breasts drooping over its ridges, and stands above text reading “We’ve got your game!” Park has played her ace, but I’m not won over.
Through October 10, at 501 West 24th Street
Like Park, Cristina BanBan examines the female form as seen through the eyes of others, though BanBan’s area of interest is art history, not advertising. Her newest canvases, many of which are grandly scaled, display nudes who peer back at their viewer with a mix of indifference and suspicion. Though adorned with bikinis and bras, BanBan’s women look back to the ones seen in canonical art, with the fleshiness of Peter Paul Rubens’s models and the almond-shaped eyes of Pablo Picasso’s figures.
But whereas both of those painters tended to offer naked women for the sake of visual pleasure, BanBan attempts something different. She often paints her women with thick contours, then allows her materials to drip and run beyond the borders she has set out in advance, making her work appear raw and unruly. She also layers her women, stacking arms, thighs, and eyes in a way that suggests both intimacy and confrontation.
This formula closely recalls the one engineered by Jenny Saville, who has utilized a similar mode in her revisionist takes on the female nude since the 1990s. Saville, it should be noted, was the world’s most expensive female artist until last year, with one painting memorably selling for $12.4 million in 2018; the auction record for BanBan, who is in her late 30s, was set in 2023 and stands at around $198,000. If you cannot afford a Saville, you may be able to buy a BanBan for a fraction of the price.
Through October 31, at 547 West 25th Street
BanBan’s Skarstedt show finds a parallel in this much-hyped outing for George Rouy, who, at 32, has already gained representation with Hauser & Wirth, one of the world’s biggest galleries. Like BanBan, Rouy takes up the nude, creating processions of people in their birthday suits who blend and blur. Unlike BanBan, however, his naked figures are largely androgynous and missing their heads, making it even more difficult to access the psychological states represented.
To some extent, this is on purpose: Rouy’s process involves porting images found online into Photoshop, editing them, and then painting compositions based on the results. He has described a fascination with all that technology has wrought upon its users, remarking in a glowing Curbed profile that published this month, “It’s all 1s and 0s now.” His paintings, which have sold for more than $300,000 at art fairs, might be read as statements about dehumanization, with his figures dissolving into a mishmash of greyish limbs and genitalia. The black and maroon scrawls placed on top of these figures would then mark an attempt to return some warmth to these images, according to that logic.
But the abstract marks are done with such tidiness that they barely even register as handmade, and as a result, the paintings come off as bloodless. Neither disturbing enough to jolt as a kind of body horror nor vibrant enough to come alive, Rouy’s paintings are easily forgotten as the kind of slick, large-scale works one expects to see in a mega-gallery nowadays. For better and for worse, they look nice in a white cube setting.
Through October 17, at 542 West 22nd Street
Were one to go solely based on the painting of a hand holding a lit match that sold at auction for $477,000 this past May, Joseph Yaeger might be dismissed as yet another forgettable figurative painter. Not so, as this fabulously odd exhibition proves. The subjects here run the gamut from a breastfeeding adult man to a woman with a finger shoved deep in her throat; both rendered in layers of watercolor applied to a base of filmy gesso. Even in a climate where a surfeit of lowercase-s surreal painting has made it tough to tell the style’s adherents apart, Yaeger’s art stands out as something truly bizarre. He is the real deal.
Yaeger, who has never before had a US solo show despite hailing from Montana, is working within the Pictures Generation paradigm, singling out images that belong to old movies—or at least feel like they might. Shearing them of any context, as Cindy Sherman and Richard Prince did before him during the 1970s and ’80s, he presents femmes fatales and ominous baddies in mysterious situations that defy explanation. Often, he’ll also elongate his images, so that heads stretch to fill his unusually sized pictures. As a result, material that is not inherently evil—a man puffing on a cigar, for example, in What you’re waiting for has already happened (2026)—starts to feel off-kilter and menacing.
What makes Yaeger’s paintings really tick, though, is the detritus trapped under his gesso: USB cords, dirt, old paint tubes, and more, all of which remains visible beneath his warped heads, causing them to appear lumpy and even more misshapen. In that way, Yaeger’s paintings are about the rot inherent in the images we consume daily. It’s a topic best addressed in Only one underneath (2025), in which two hands prepare to peel away a layer from a person’s face. Here, we might be looking at a monster. Then again, maybe it’s just a step in a person’s skincare routine.
Through October 31, at 515 West 24th Street
Vojtěch Kovařík’s paintings and sculptures are about myths, both as they relate to the past and the present. He focuses on the heroes of Greek and Roman lore and renders them in a pared-down style closer to socialist realism—something he should know about, as an artist born in the Czech Republic not long after the fall of the Soviet Union. It’s a tendency most evident in Keeper of the grain (2026), a terracotta relief showing a figure in a toga-like robe who holds wheat. Per the exhibition’s release, that figure might either be Demeter, goddess of the harvest, or an udarnik, a hard-working laborer central to the Soviet ethos.
This is a sturdy concept for an entire body of work, but most of the other paintings in this show don’t bear it out. Take Born of the Sea (2026), in which a nude woman rises from clear ocean waters and combs her hair. Based on the title, one can infer that this is Aphrodite, but without the name, it merely looks like yet another Picasso-inspired nude, not that we are necessarily in need of more of those. Scrubbed of so much detail that this woman is even missing her nipples, Born of the Sea could really be about anything.
Kovařík is not a bad technician: He sometimes mixes sand into his acrylic, cleverly emphasizing areas of warm color by surrounding them with chunky, dark paint. But, like other artists surveyed in this roundup, he hasn’t quite nailed down what it is that he wants to communicate. If his work really is about mythmaking, it rarely shows through in these works, whose pleasantness may be one reason Kovařík’s auction record stands at $378,000.
In a recent interview with W, Emma McIntyre said that her abstractions are “often about weather systems,” noting that in New Zealand, the country where she was born in 1990, “everything’s corroded by the elements. Everything’s leaking, moldy, damp and rusting.” Though her paintings never exactly depict meteorological phenomena, they could indeed be said to be intentionally deteriorated. Midway through making them, she’ll often apply a layer of oxidizing liquid, causing the work to rust as she is painting.
That effect is most obvious in one of her new works, Solve et coagula (all works 2026), in which blotches of red are surrounded by jaundiced masses made possible by her iron oxide. Some of the red forms appear bruise-like, giving the work a corporeal quality that is made even more explicit with another painting made without the use of oxide: This iliaster flowers like the wind, in which one large breast and the semblance of a stomach emerge from a thin, drippy crimson background. McIntyre made the work by positioning herself à la a female figure in a Titian painting and pressing herself against her canvas. In so doing, she establishes a connection between her own body and her art, showing that both are subject to change.
McIntyre, whose work started selling for upward of $200,000 at auction last year, is on to something here—but the farther she moves away from rusting oxides and shifting bodies, the more her art struggles to differentiate itself in a playing field crowded with forgettable abstraction. Fleeting stains of pine green and greyish blue come off as Frankenthaler lite; rows of circles made by applying bubble wrap for one smaller work are equally unconvincing. Yet just as McIntyre’s works are going through a metamorphosis, it’s worth remembering that young painters are themselves still developing—even when they’ve hit the big leagues. The market may make its decision early on about which artists are worth remembering, but it cannot trap them in amber.