The Best Art at Frieze New York, Future Fair, NADA and Esther III
Source: The Wall Street Journal
The spring art fairs offer a whirlwind chance to take in works in every style and medium--from rococo- and Renaissance-inspired paintings to digital sculptures that destroy themselves.
New York--Do I recommend going to four art fairs in 24 hours? Not really, especially if you have other pressing tasks on your to-do list like sleeping and eating. But even if you skip a marathon art-viewing session this week, there's plenty to enjoy emong the whirlwind of fairs dotted across the city like tornadoes on a Kansas plain.
Frieze is the biggest name in town, where the most prestigious galleries roll out their wares alongside rising exhibitors hoping to make it to the next level. The event was a bit more reserved this year than in recent outings, no doubt due to the fact that many dealers, enthusiasts and artists are still recovering from jet lag after returning from the recently opened Venice Biennale. But while La Serenissima may have claimed a bit of Frieze's energy, the art here still sings.
Music was central to two contemporary Dada sculptures, which are also sure to be among the most Instagrammed works this week. At Anton Kern, David Shrigley's "Gong" (2012) does exactly what it says on the tin--or rather powder-coated steel. The massive instrument, labeled across its front, is even more fun to strike than it is to look at--though I hope the exhibitors brought earplugs for those manning the neighboring booths. Also percussive yet much quieter is Anri Sala's snare drum, dangling upside down from the ceiling at Esther Schipper. Its internal speaker plays a rumbling soundtrack that sends the drumsticks attached to the instrument flittering, giving the sense of a ghostly presence tapping out a brooding dirge.
While Frieze New York is a decidedly American fair, the best work here looked outward. The group presentation at OMR's booth was a lush journey into the wilds of Mexico. Pia Camil's series of paitings used vibrant foliage from the jungle in which she lives--and specifically the plantain trees outside her home--as the backdrop for neon nudes whose eroticism and vampire-fanged mouths suggest the cycles of death and rebirth that are omnipresent in that untamed land. These are paired with the organic wooden sculptures of Claudia Comte, the curvaceous surfaces of which echo the lively plants of Matisse's cut-outs, and touching bronzes by Geles Cabrera. They focus on motherhood and love, with rounded forms cradling one another and calling to mind the work of Henry Moore. The 99-year-old artist--long excluded from the mainstream, male-dominated art scene in Mexico, and who only had her first major retrospective last year--is a quiet yet forceful fount of tenderness.
Also deeply rooted in the natural world are the paintings of Kelly Sinnapah Mary at James Cohan. Living in Guadeloupe, Ms. Sinnapah Mary is an Afro-Caribbean artist who is also the descendant of Indian indentured workers brought to the island by the French after slavery ended. She channels this background into paintings that combine these cultures into a surreal, unified whole. Scenes from local tradition and folklore meet multiheaded figures and animals that echo Hindu deities, while Western symbols--a Christian church, a golden retriever puppy--crop up across an impressive polyptych set in the fields her forebears worked, the same land on which she now lives.
The Pan-African ceramic sculptures of Akinsanya Kambon, shown in a joint presentation by Marc Selwyn and Ortuzar, are stunning raku works that embrace traditional aesthetics from Africa and are inspired by histories--real and mythological--from across that continent. Most impressive is his "African Warrior Queen" (2012-15), which features a powerful rider atop a horse and is a composite of four rulers: Queen Amina of Zaria, the first female ruler of Zazzau; Queen Nzinga Mbande, who resisted Portuguese subjugation during the height of the slave trade; Kandake Amanirenas, who fought against Roman expansion; and Yaa Asantewaa, who went to war against British colonial forces.
The most outward-looking art at the fair, however, is that of Karla Knight, whose paintings at Andrew Edlin are focused on extraterrestrial life and UFOs. In diagrammatic canvases that look like otherworldly computer chips, she writes her own invented language and creates charts and instructions inscrutable to the viewer--not a problem since they're meant for nonhuman entities. In the lineage both of outside artists obsessed with aliens and of painters like Hilma af Klint who have looked to communicate the incommunicably spiritual in their work, these sharply detailed pieces are as absorbing as they are mysterious.
Around the corner from Frieze, Future Fair dedicates itself to more emerging voices, but after several years where the work has declined in ambition I was worried that it might become a skippable event. Now I'm pleased to report that celebration is in order--Future has returned to its scrappy, exciting roots.
Diane Briones Williams's textiles at Official Welcome inject international flair into Western art history by rendering traditional scenes--landscapes, still lifes and genre paintings--in needlepoint, then adding elements that touch on the artist's Filipino heritage. A farmer in a salakot (a traditional hat) looks to harvest rice from a pond where mallards take flight in an image that would have been at home in a 1990s Eddie Bauer catalog; a pair of indigenous Aetas stroll by a cozy thatched cottage; a carabao lows in front of a historic windmill. These charming scenes show that championing one's identity need not always be polemic.
Also looking to art history is Colette LaVette, whose canvases at Gillian Jason ape rococo stylings in swirls of impressionistic paint. Cherubs, animals and fleshy nudes are captured--mid-rapture--as they're whipped about in topsy-turvy images where it's impossible to tell up from down. Despite the chaos and movement, the naturally pigmented palette provides a soothing calm, and we're happy to be swept away. And at Blumka Contemporary, Karl Orion draws on Dutch Golden Age still lifes in his nature scenes that invert the genre, instead showing nature's dominance over man in thei precisely rendered flora and fauna that symbolize the artist's psyche.
Drawing not from the past but the up-to-the-minute present, NowHere's presentation of exonemo presents a critical view of technology. A series of panels are mounted with small computers that run through random numbers--some 30 per second--and compare them to a secret number in the system. When the computer lands on a match, a switch is triggered and a hatchet falls forward, destroying the computer itself. Thumbing its nose at the blockchain while offering a technodystopic vision of the Freudian death drive, it's conceptual art with a serious message that refuses to take itself too seriously.
Also noteworthy here is the presentation by OCD of Nadia Younes. Her detailed, beautifully lighted painting, of humble industrial scenes of corrugated ductwork, draped construction tarps and snaking wires, elevate these humble, utilitarian objects into tactile formal experiments. And at Elijah Wheat Dave Tavacol's wall sculptures, mixing leather, paint, porcelain and everyday objects, sensuously but not explicitly reflect on bathhouse culture.
Nearby, NADA is another fair dedicated to younger galleries and newer voices, though this year the presentation was more staid than in recent memory. Still, with so many exhibitors present--some 120 of them--highlights emerged. Voltz Clarke staged an impressive booth whose lush wallpaper blended into the similarly adorned frames of Ruth Owens. Inside these irregular geometric shapes, delicately painted images depict happy black families in idealized scenes. Augmented by lights inside the frames, the images offer a hopeful reconsideration of troubled race relations in the past--one outcome of which was the kidnapping of the artist at a young age.
