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“Money isn’t any object,” states a sly little textual content portray by the artist Ricci Albenda on this yr’s version of Frieze New York. Which, after all, isn’t true. At any artwork honest, as at any commerce honest, cash is the object. Put one other method, on this context all of the objects on view principally equal money. And anybody allergic to the “political,” by no means thoughts the “activist,” in modern artwork will discover a refuge right here.
But for informal guests to Frieze New York — now in its twelfth yr and its fourth season on the Shed in Hudson Yards, by means of Sunday — the entire money query may be moot, not less than after you’ve paid your $76 common admission charge for the weekend. Most of us are simply window-shoppers, strolling the aisles for info and pleasure (which for me are sometimes similar), and this yr’s honest affords loads of each.
The dimension of the present feels proper, 60-plus cubicles unfold over three flooring. The setting is open and lightweight, the precise reverse of the bank-vault dankness of final season’s Armory Show on the Javits Center. (The Armory Show is now a Frieze franchise, so possibly that can change in September.) And throughout the slender formal vary of cash-and-carry items that artwork gala’s have been conceived to accommodate, there’s some selection. You even see it in sales space designs.
Pace Gallery has provide you with an absolute whitest of white-box settings — it makes you are feeling like a strolling smudge — for a pairing of Robert Mangold’s formed work and Arlene Shechet’s summary sculptures. (Shechet will cap a notable profession with a gap of monumental work at Storm King Art Center, a sculpture park in upstate New York, this weekend.)
Contrastingly, David Zwirner’s sales space has the scuffed-up look of a faculty dorm lounge, with scroungy, loose-threads sculptural sofas by Franz West (you may sit on them) and madcap graffiti-ish objects by Nate Lowman tumbling throughout the partitions.
Painting is massive within the present, as it’s all over city. The latest onslaught of figurative work appears to have subsided a bit, although there are some attention-grabbing examples right 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 on-line. A number of it appears like hotel-room artwork, and your eye slides over it. Standing in entrance of huge new gestural Sterling Ruby work at Gagosian, I felt I wasn’t studying something concerning the style that I didn’t already know.
I had the other response to a rosy 1989 Mary Heilmann portray titled “Our Lady of the Flowers” at Hauser & Wirth, which to me has the sensation this artist’s work usually does, that nothing fairly prefer it had occurred earlier than.
But the media that constantly caught my eye on this Frieze have been textile and collage, and work that took them past their conventional boundaries. Ortuzar Projects’ sales space is a spot to linger, with a present by the Buenos Aires-based Feliciano Centurión (1962-1996), who turned embroidery and knitting into an intimate file of a short, intensely lived homosexual life. Likewise, a cease at A Gentil Carioca, a Rio de Janeiro gallery, is a should for the sight of the dynamic however completely unalike woven work of three very completely different artists, Laura Lima and Vivian Caccuri, each from Brazil, and Ana Silva from Angola.
Using cut-up strips of Amazon supply containers, the Brazilian-born Clarissa Tossin, represented by the Los Angeles gallery Commonwealth and Council, makes weaving nearly indistinguishable from collage (her work can be featured within the present Whitney Biennial). And collage itself, in a single kind or one other, is in every single place: in Beatriz Cortez’s dense assemblages of fowl feathers on the identical L.A. gallery; in wealthy, riotous Joan Snyder work incorporating dried flowers, fruit and herbs at Canada and Thaddaeus Ropac); and in a matchbox ensemble by Antonio Tarsis at Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel, including yet one more Brazilian artist and gallery to Frieze in a global artwork season dominated by the identify of a Brazilian curator, Adriano Pedrosa, organizer of the present Venice Biennale.
The honest even has a analysis undertaking on collage, as a kind, in an exhibition at Kukje Gallery by the Korean artist Haegue Yang who, with phrases and pictures, traces the historical past of the cut-paper medium as a world phenomenon with secular and non secular purposes.
Yang’s solo is one among a number of within the honest, and one of many extra attention-grabbing. Also worthy of consideration is a collection of beautiful small sculptural heads by the self-taught New York artist Reverend Joyce McDonald at Gordon Robichaux; and a mini-survey of labor by Seung-Taek Lee, a Minimalism magician of recycled matter, at Gallery Hyundai. Alex Katz delivers a blithesome splash of tangerine-colored nature photographs at Gladstone; and Jenkins Johnson has a volcanic suite of work by the veteran San Francisco artist Dewey Crumpler, which hyperlink, amongst different historic topics, two profitable European enterprises: the Atlantic slave commerce and the Dutch tulip commerce.
Tulips! Manhattan has been Tulip City over the previous couple of spring weeks, as I used to be reminded by Crumpler’s work and, at Tina Kim Gallery, by a fantastically meticulous collage manufactured from pressed tulip petals by the Dutch-Indonesian artist Jennifer Tee. Frieze, like most massive artwork gala’s, is a cattle-call phenomenon, about excessive visibility and aggressive moreness. But what I usually take away is the reminiscence of small idea-packed issues, some eye-grabbers, some exhausting to identify. Tee’s tulip collage is one; listed here are a couple of extra:
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At Anton Kern, a painted ceramic determine by the Polish artist Pawel Althamer depicting his son because the youthful Buddha who, surprised by sudden knowledge, has thrown off his garments and sits ready to see what’s subsequent. (Althamer’s New Museum retrospective in 2014 was one of the shifting the museum has accomplished, but we’ve not often 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, handed one another within the evening however have been on the identical vivid beam.
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And at Andrew Kreps, the place the Albenda hangs, is a tiny summary portray, titled “Kaddish 3,” of a picture of what appears like rising smoke, by the Israeli-French artist and thinker Bracha L. Ettinger.
Even essentially the most modestly scaled of this stuff might go for a bundle at Frieze. (A special, bigger Salcedo fetched $1.25 million ultimately yr’s honest.) And all are reminders of realities in progress, proper now, simply past the artwork world’s gold-armored partitions.
Frieze New York 2024
Through Sunday on the Shed, 545 West thirtieth Street; frieze.com.
