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This year’s edition of the New Art Dealers Alliance fair, the city’s pre-eminent show for up-and-coming galleries, boasts 92 booths and several strong exhibitions by hometown favorites, including the photo-painter Dietmar Busse at Fierman (4.04); Hesse Flatow’s (4.01) show of elegant, offbeat sculptures by Amanda Martínez and Alina Tenser and mixed-media paintings by Emma Safir; and an excellent display of fanciful sculptures by John Newman at the downtown gallery Europa (1.04). But the most exciting part of the NADA fair for me was scanning the exhibits for promising visitors and new arrivals, like Matéria, in town from Detroit; Patel Brown, from Toronto and Montreal; and the debut galleries Foundry Seoul, from South Korea, and Strada, which were included by the curator Simon Wu in a special “Curated Spotlight” section.
Matéria 4.11
The Detroit-based photographer Jova Lynne, here staging a solo exhibition called “Mitosis,” lost her mother to Covid — but her mother’s identical twin survived. Lynne’s warm but understated photos of her aunt with her face hidden behind leaves or under a trailing corona of white shells, or with her whole body blurred out, create a tantalizing sense of loss, cultural as well as personal. They also reveal a secret of the craft, namely that you can make an image very evocative by paring down its context in the right way. A trombone covered in wax, along with other accompanying small sculptures, suggests an esoteric ritual waiting to be enacted.
In this presentation by Marigold Santos, every painting of an “aswang,” or shape-shifting character from Filipino folklore, combines a crisp graphic pop with an extraordinary amount of detail. Female figures made of floating red roots or ghostly, marbleized flesh pose against patterned backgrounds with their faces concealed. The images look perfectly clear from a distance, but you’ll find so many more details as you approach that you may begin to doubt your eyes — or reality.
Foundry Seoul 3.15
There’s no shortage of science fiction painting these days, here at NADA or in general. But it’s rare to see work as thoroughly and distinctively strange as these acrylic and gouache paintings on Korean hanji paper by Jongwan Jang. Squid-headed figures in lab coats inject fish with pink dye and cradle docile geese in front of giant mushroom-capped trees while solemn weasels look on. Somehow the strangeness isn’t too strange, though — instead of wondering what it all meant, I was content to enjoy the way it felt.
Strada 2.11
Two life-size figures molded into irregularly-shaped concrete panels wear low-key, introverted smiles in this pair of fresco-like wall pieces by Hunter Amos. They seem to inhabit the ecstasy of dancing, or of fashioning art — but the energetic loops with which they’re rendered, and the reddish-brown color they’re painted, make them look like the Marvel Comics mutant known as the Thing as done by Diego Rivera. It’s a surprisingly compelling mash-up of genres and mediums.
NADA New York
Through Sunday, 548 West 22nd Street, Manhattan; newartdealers.org.
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