Inside the tent at Frieze Masters in Regent's Park, the collectors are increasingly from anywhere but Britain. The 2026 edition is showing more non-Western art, with galleries from North Africa, the Middle East and South Asia taking a larger footprint, and buyers from the Global South are an increasingly powerful presence on the floor. Key to the geographical broadening is Spotlight, the section of solo presentations, where co-organiser Devika Singh — a former Tate South Asian specialist now lecturing at the Courtauld — has selected six galleries specialising in South Asian art.

The boom for Indian Modern art is already visible. Akar Prakar, based in Kolkata and Delhi, sold three of the six works it brought by the 90-year-old painter Ganesh Haloi — drawings around £35,000, larger paintings around £130,000 — mostly to Indian collectors, including the Mumbai collector Dara Mehta and the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art. Akara Modern, exhibiting at the fair for the first time, pre-sold two wooden wall-based works by Piraji Sagara to Indian collectors at £40,000 to £250,000, with another sculpture going to an Indian buyer and a final piece to a non-Indian one.

Marrakech and Casablanca's Loft Art Gallery, also new to Frieze Masters, is showing the Moroccan modernist Mohamed Melehi and sold Untitled (1967), an early example of his wave patterning, for €180,000, with two other pieces reserved. Dubai's Lawrie Shabibi sold two works on paper by the late Palestinian-Persian artist Maliheh Afnan for £30,000 to £40,000, with a larger work on reserve for a museum, while London's Alison Jacques is showing exiled Filipino artist Pacita Abad to interest but no confirmed sales so far.

Sales were mixed by day two, with some galleries reporting interest and reserves rather than confirmed turnover — a more deliberative clientele, and US collectors mostly arriving at the weekend ahead of Art Basel Paris. The contrast also remains stark: Sotheby's offers a Cy Twombly drawing at £150,000–£200,000 while Fereydoun Ave's works at Dubai's Gallery Isabelle are all under $30,000, and a Maruani Mercier amber Josef Albers stands at €1.5m against the headline sale — Hauser & Wirth's Jan Brueghel the Elder still life, sold on VIP day for around £5m. Frieze Masters runs until 18 October.