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Swiss Institute presents its Live Benefit Auction 2026
Albert Oehlen Untitled, 2022, acrylic, oil and varnish on canvas, 36 x 36 in. Courtesy of the artist.
For its 40th anniversary Swiss Institute presents its Live Benefit Auction, featuring works by Albert Oehlen, Nairy Baghramian, Theaster Gates, Joan Jonas, and others. Registration is now open online through Indy.auction.
Albert Oehlen Untitled, 2022, acrylic, oil and varnish on canvas, 36 x 36 in. Courtesy of the artist.
Swiss Institute presents its Live Benefit Auction 2026
Swiss Institute marks its 40th anniversary this year with a Live Benefit Auction featuring works by Albert Oehlen, Nairy Baghramian, Theaster Gates, Joan Jonas, Greg Parma Smith, Gabriel Kuri, and Raúl de Nieves. Founded in 1986, Swiss Institute is an independent non-profit space for international contemporary art on New York's Lower East Side.
Committed to the highest standards of curatorial and educational excellence, Swiss Institute serves as a platform for emerging artists, catalyses new contexts for celebrated work, and fosters appreciation for under-recognised positions. The anniversary year places the benefit auction within four decades of exhibitions and programming, all presented free of charge.
The auction brings together a selection of internationally acclaimed artists whose practices span painting, sculpture, and installation, such as Albert Oehlen's Untitled piece. Oehlen is an internationally renowned artist known for his dynamic compositions, distorted imagery, expressive brushwork, and creative synthesis of figuration and abstraction. Untitled condenses a multitude of Oehlen’s aesthetic achievements. In the work, he uses various sizes of brush strokes to paint abstract forms in candy hues, creating luminous fields that are cut through or smudged into by darker forms. Oehlen’s work has been collected by several public institutions, including Museum of Modern Art, Museum of Contemporary Art, Art Institute of Chicago, and Tate.
Greg Parma Smith presents Universal Blood Flower Rising, a piece which belongs to a celebrated body of work that investigates optical effects, playfully suspending the viewer between flatness and depth. Born in 1983, Parma Smith has had work showcased internationally in institutions such as Musée d’art moderne et contemporain (MAMCO), University of Applied Arts Vienna, and MoMA PS1.
Greg Parma Smith, Universal Blood Flower Rising, 2022, oil on canvas, 28 × 22 × 1 ⅛ in. Courtesy of the artist and Hoffman Donahue, New York
The auction also features a work by Joan Jonas, titled Fish. Jonas is considered to be one of the leading voices of the post-war era, and an exponent of video and performance art. Fish is a unique piece created in 2022, in which Jonas captures her subject with characteristic immediacy to convey the natural world in gestural strokes. Jonas’ work is held in the public collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and Tate Modern, London.
Joan Jonas, Fish, 2022, watercolour on paper, 10 x 6 in. Courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery.
Nairy Baghramian showcases Dwindler, a 2026 work created with glass, zinc coated metal, and coloured epoxy resin. This work belongs to the acclaimed Dwindler sculpture series, which consists of fragmented, floor-to-ceiling, hand-painted and curved glass tubes held together by galvanised fittings sealed with epoxy resin. The series gained international recognition through its presentation at the Crystal Palace of the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid in 2018, as well as at the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019, where it extended along the entire façade of the Arsenale.
Nairy Baghramian, Dwindler, 2026, glass, zinc coated metal, coloured epoxy resin, 82 x 40 x 47 cm. Courtesy of the artist.
Pots Used to Be Free is presented by Theaster Gates. Gates has forged a singular and profoundly expansive vision of art, uniting conceptual formalism, sculpture, performance, land art, and urbanism. Theaster Gates (b. 1973, United States) lives and works in Chicago, Illinois. Gates has presented solo exhibitions at Prada Home, Milan (2026); LUMA, Arles (2024); Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Houston (2024); Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond (2024); New Museum, New York (2022); Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas (2022); Perez Art Museum, Miami (2020); and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2019).
Theaster Gates, Pots Used to Be Free, 2026, stoneware with wood ash glaze, 33 x 24 1/2 in at widest point. Courtesy of the artist.
The final lot of the auction is a piece by Gabriel Kuri titled thank you tray (shock waves 1). Kuri is globally celebrated for transforming the overlooked systems of everyday economic exchange into sharply distilled sculptural propositions. In this monumental work in powder-coated steel, the artist enlarges the familiar form of a restaurant tip tray to architectural scale, elevating an object associated with fleeting transactions into a site of formal and conceptual reflection. Kuri’s work is held in the public collections of Tate, London; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Centre Pompidou, Paris; MCA Chicago, Chicago; and The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Gabriel Kuri, thank you tray (shock waves 1), 2022, powder-coated steel, magnets, 141 x 215 x 8 cm. Courtesy of the artist.
To view the full lot details, and to register to bid, visit the auction page.
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