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“Money is no object,” states a sly little text painting by the artist Ricci Albenda in this year’s edition of Frieze New York. Which, of course, isn’t true. At any art fair, as at any trade fair, money is the object. Put another way, in this context all the objects on view basically equal cash. And anyone allergic to the “political,” never mind the “activist,” in contemporary art will find a refuge here.
But for casual visitors to Frieze New York — now in its 12th year and its second season at the Shed in Hudson Yards, through Sunday — the whole cash question can be moot, at least after you’ve paid your $76 general admission fee for the weekend. Most of us are just window-shoppers, strolling the aisles for information and pleasure (which for me are often identical), and this year’s fair offers plenty of both.
The size of the show feels right, 60-plus booths spread over three floors. The setting is open and light, the exact opposite of the bank-vault dankness of last season’s Armory Show at the Javits Center. (The Armory Show is now a Frieze franchise, so maybe that will change in September.) And within the narrow formal range of cash-and-carry goods that art fairs were conceived to accommodate, there’s some variety. You even see it in booth designs.
Pace Gallery has come up with an absolute whitest of white-box settings — it makes you feel like a walking smudge — for a pairing of Robert Mangold’s shaped paintings and Arlene Shechet’s abstract sculptures. (Shechet will cap a notable career with an opening of monumental work at Storm King Art Center, a sculpture park in upstate New York, this weekend.)
Contrastingly, David Zwirner’s booth has the scuffed-up look of a college dorm lounge, with scroungy, loose-threads sculptural sofas by Franz West (you can sit on them) and madcap graffiti-ish objects by Nate Lowman tumbling across the walls.
Painting is big in the show, as it is all over town. The recent onslaught of figurative work seems to have subsided a bit, though there are some interesting examples here, notably a radiant diptych of gold-clad goddess-like figures by the São Paulo artist Rosana Paulino at Mendes Wood DM. Abstraction is ubiquitous in galleries and online. A lot of it looks like hotel-room art, and your eye slides over it. Standing in front of massive new gestural Sterling Ruby paintings at Gagosian, I felt I wasn’t learning anything about the genre that I didn’t already know.
I had the opposite reaction to a rosy 1989 Mary Heilmann painting titled “Our Lady of the Flowers” at Hauser & Wirth, which to me has the feeling this artist’s work often does, that nothing quite like it had happened before.
But the media that consistently caught my eye in this Frieze were textile and collage, and work that took them beyond their traditional boundaries. Ortuzar Projects’ booth is a place to linger, with a show by the Buenos Aires-based Feliciano Centurión (1962-1996), who turned embroidery and knitting into an intimate record of a brief, intensely lived gay life. Likewise, a stop at A Gentil Carioca, a Rio de Janeiro gallery, is a must for the sight of the dynamic but utterly unalike woven work of three very different artists, Laura Lima and Vivian Caccuri, both from Brazil, and Ana Silva from Angola.
Using cut-up strips of Amazon delivery boxes, the Brazilian-born Clarissa Tossin, represented by the Los Angeles gallery Commonwealth and Council, makes weaving almost indistinguishable from collage (her work is also featured in the current Whitney Biennial). And collage itself, in one form or another, is everywhere: in Beatriz Cortez’s dense assemblages of bird feathers at the same L.A. gallery; in rich, riotous Joan Snyder paintings incorporating dried flowers, fruit and herbs at Canada and Thaddaeus Ropac); and in a matchbox ensemble by Antonio Tarsis at Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel, adding yet another Brazilian artist and gallery to Frieze in an international art season dominated by the name of a Brazilian curator, Adriano Pedrosa, organizer of the current Venice Biennale.
The fair even has a research project on collage, as a form, in an exhibition at Kukje Gallery by the Korean artist Haegue Yang who, with words and images, traces the history of the cut-paper medium as a global phenomenon with secular and religious applications.
Yang’s solo is one of several in the fair, and one of the more interesting. Also worthy of attention is a selection of exquisite small sculptural heads by the self-taught New York artist Reverend Joyce McDonald at Gordon Robichaux; and a mini-survey of work by Seung-Taek Lee, a Minimalism magician of recycled matter, at Gallery Hyundai. Alex Katz delivers a blithesome splash of tangerine-colored nature images at Gladstone; and Jenkins Johnson has a volcanic suite of paintings by the veteran San Francisco artist Dewey Crumpler, which link, among other historical subjects, two lucrative European enterprises: the Atlantic slave trade and the Dutch tulip trade.
Tulips! Manhattan has been Tulip City over the past couple of spring weeks, as I was reminded by Crumpler’s paintings and, at Tina Kim Gallery, by a fantastically meticulous collage made of pressed tulip petals by the American artist Jennifer Tee. Frieze, like most big art fairs, is a cattle-call phenomenon, about high visibility and competitive moreness. But what I often take away is the memory of small idea-packed things, some eye-grabbers, some hard to spot. Tee’s tulip collage is one; here are a few more:
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At Anton Kern, a painted ceramic figure by the Polish artist Pawel Althamer depicting his son as the youthful Buddha who, stunned by sudden wisdom, has thrown off his clothes and sits waiting to see what’s next. (Althamer’s New Museum retrospective in 2014 was one of the most moving the museum has done, yet we’ve rarely seen this artist in New York since.)
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At Andrew Edlin, a pairing of works by Beverly Buchanan (1940-2015) and Thornton Dial (1928-2016), two Southern artists who, career-wise, passed each other in the night but were on the same bright beam.
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And at Andrew Kreps, where the Albenda hangs, is a tiny abstract painting, titled “Kaddish 3,” of an image of what looks like rising smoke, by the Israeli-French artist and philosopher Bracha L. Ettinger.
Even the most modestly scaled of these items could go for a bundle at Frieze. (A different, larger Salcedo fetched $1.25 million at last year’s fair.) And all are reminders of realities in progress, right now, just beyond the art world’s gold-armored walls.
Frieze New York 2024
Through Sunday at the Shed, 545 West 30th Street; frieze.com.
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