Don’t Leave DAF Cologne Without Seeing These Five Artist Booths

The eleventh edition of Discovery Art Fair Cologne is one of the most diverse the fair has seen to date. Painting, sculpture, photography, mixed media, urban art, making a considered selection in all that abundance is a genuine challenge. The five booths below stood out, each for a reason entirely its own. They are listed in no particular order.

Oliver M. Pavic – Booth D16

Oliver Pavic’s paintings have always operated on a fault line between beauty and unease. Born in post-communist Yugoslavia and trained as an architect before painting claimed him entirely, he arrived in London and then made his way to Picardy, France, and somewhere along the way, a 2008 Francis Bacon retrospective at Tate Britain changed the direction of his practice irreversibly. You feel that debt in the work, but Pavic has found his own terrain. His recent Solace series marks a quieter, more inward turn — deconstructed figures rendered in oil, built up with palette knife and accumulated layers that seem to hold time rather than simply depict it. There’s an architectural precision underneath the apparent rawness. These are paintings that take their time to reveal themselves, and reward yours.

Oliver M Pavic booth

Agata Schubert-Hauck – Booth B14

A wall of masks greets you at Agata Schubert-Hauck‘s booth: several dozen small works, each a face rendered in bold, gestural strokes. The effect is immediately arresting and quietly unsettling. In her Masken series, Schubert-Hauck is less interested in portraiture than in an anatomy of a deeper kind: the face as a surface that conceals more than it reveals. Her references are not individual but universal, the mechanisms and patterns operating in every human face, regardless of who is behind it. Unlike Bacon, whose distortions are powerfully personal, her approach is typified, almost archetypal. Stand in front of these works long enough and you start wondering which of those faces belongs to you.

Agata Schubert-Hauck booth

Anja Ernsberger – Booth D17

Anja Ernsberger‘s Heads & Hands series grew out of something very intimate: the non-verbal language she developed with her son, a communication built from gesture rather than words. At DAF Cologne 2026, she is showing the hands, just the hands, and the effect is striking. Painted in acrylic and graffiti spray on canvas, the gestures range from tender to defiant, from reaching to withdrawing. A language that was private becomes, at this scale and in this palette of hot oranges and deep teals, something universal. There is a physicality to these works that makes you want to reach back.

Anja Ernsberger booth

Anna Lagosch – Booth F14

Anna Lagosch works at the intersection of painting and object, with shaped, layered geometric works that refuse to sit still on the wall. Her references are the great geometric abstractionists, Mondrian’s rigorous fields, Imi Knöbel’s reduced spatial structures, but her practice takes those foundations somewhere more restless. The edge is the real subject here, and the space between forms. Works in soft yellows, powder blues, and teal, with inset or projecting rectangles, feel simultaneously like paintings and like proposals: what if the frame were the image? What if the back were the front? The booth is immaculate and quietly provocative — the kind that lingers.

Anna Lagosch booth

Carola Dewor – Booth D9

Sometimes what you need at an art fair is simply a beautiful painting. Carola Dewor, who trained at the Universität der Künste Berlin during the era of the Neue Wilden, has spent decades developing one of the most recognizable practices in atmospheric interior painting. The spaces she depicts, rooms suffused with dim greenish light, windows giving onto nothing in particular, objects that carry the weight of an absent presence, are painted with a confidence that only long commitment produces. No tricks, just acute colour sensitivity, atmospheric depth, and a genuine love of what painting can do. Collectible in the truest sense.