Conde Contemporary at Chicago Art Fair 2026
October 7–10, 2026 | THE MART, Chicago | Booth 3702
León con Guacamayas | Pablo Santibáñez Servat
This October, Conde Contemporary heads to Chicago for the inaugural Chicago Art Fair at THE MART, presenting four artists whose work is very different at first glance: Andrés Conde, Natasha Kertes, Kevin Sloan and Pablo Santibáñez Servat.
There is, however, a thread running through the exhibition.
It isn't a shared style, medium or even an obvious subject. Rather, each of these artists creates a world that operates according to its own internal logic. The familiar is altered just enough to make us reconsider what we're seeing. Beauty draws us in; narrative complicates what we find there.
Andrés Conde brings the visual language of popular culture into collision with history, politics and mythology. His paintings are immediately legible and often seductive, but beneath their polished surfaces lies something less comfortable: power, revolution, desire and the way images become inseparable from the stories societies tell about themselves.
Kevin Sloan constructs elaborate natural worlds in which animals, plants and man-made objects coexist in scenes that feel both impossible and strangely inevitable. His technical precision gives these imagined environments credibility, while their quiet absurdity and underlying ecological tension resist a single interpretation.
Pablo Santibáñez Servat works in a different register. His meticulously painted figures inhabit environments filled with symbolism, ornament and visual references that move freely across centuries. The figures in these paintings occupy spaces that seem to belong neither entirely to the present nor the past. They are contemporary without being tethered to contemporary time.
Natasha Kertes treats photography as both image and object, often altering the conditions through which her subjects are seen. In Silver Rain, an editioned lenticular photograph, the image changes position as the viewer moves before it. Its surface appears scratched, rough and damaged, while the nude female form behind it remains pristine and hauntingly beautiful. The contradiction is characteristic of Kertes' practice: beauty is carefully constructed, then complicated through material, process and presentation.Together, the four artists create a presentation in which beauty is not the conclusion but the point of entry.
The connections are sometimes immediate and sometimes barely visible: between the natural and constructed world, the contemporary and historical, perfection and damage, seduction and unease. No single visual language unites the booth. The thread is there, but it remains deliberately transparent.
Chicago Art Fair
The inaugural Chicago Art Fair brings a curated selection of international, national and regional galleries to THE MART, with presentations spanning painting, sculpture, photography, mixed media and other contemporary and modern work. Conceived as an intimate, gallery-focused fair, its emphasis is on creating direct connections among galleries, collectors and Chicago's broader creative community.
Conde Contemporary
Booth 3702
October 7–10, 2026
THE MART
Chicago, Illinois
Featured artists: Andrés Conde · Natasha Kertes · Kevin Sloan · Pablo Santibáñez Servat