The vibrant pulse of  Mexico City’s cultural renaissance didn’t miss a beat during La Semana de Arte (Art Week) (February 4-9, 2020), tenaciously ticking throughout the city from the mega blockbuster Zona Maco fair to the edgier Feria de Arte Material, and onto neighborhood streets enlivened by a heady stream of  exhibitions. Besides the fairs, Mexico City’s new-millenial status as an international art hub was evident in the growing community of young expat artists and gallerists drawn to  warm sunshine, an inexpensive lifestyle and, most important, an openness to diversity. Add to this the fluid and bustling mix of international galleries with emerging and well-established Mexican venues and you have a juggernaut; a brisk global marketplace enticing collectors and art aficionados of every stripe.

The annual Material Art Fair, in particular, allows one to view all these elements afloat in a cultural petri dish of sorts; to watch an evolving art organism spread its tentacles from this indigenous landscape to New York, Berlin, London, Stockholm, Tokyo and beyond. This cultural mashup was much on display in an eccentric performance that took place on the  sun-drenched  Plaza de La República. Paloma (2020), by Estonian artist Kris Lemsalu (b.1985), in collaboration with her American husband, musician Kyp Malone and Mexican designer Barbara Sánchez-Kane, was organized by arts performer and producer Michelangelo Miccolis.  It featured a  bicycle-propelled figure of a giant paloma, a bird-symbol of peace made with  Acapulco chairs and lilies, set against the  Monument to the Revolution. Malone’s amorphous instrumental accompaniment to the plaintive refrains of Mexican singer  Luis Pablo, spirited this fantasy dove from the summit of the plaza down to the Frontón Mexico, the Material exhibition space. Lemsalu and Sánchez-Kane, dressed in lavender suits embellished with plastic eggs, followed behind strewing lily petals towards an appreciative crowd.

Hoping to create a niche for lesser known Latin and international artists, Brett Schultz, Creative Director of the Material Fair, and his current partners, Isa Castilla and Rodrigo Feliz, have grown the shoestring project begun 2014. It took guts to time this exhibition to run simultaneously with Zona Maco and  insist on affordability. But so was it great marketing strategy to welcome international well-recognized  gallerists to participate, giving them a venue for their own emerging artists that large numbers of collectors were unlikely to otherwise see.

And no other fair looks like Material. Counter to the  generic-fair labyrinth of white cubes, Material occupies the Frontón México, an Art Deco jai alai arena imaginatively reconfigured to echo street markets, a procession of open stalls  where vendors hawk everything from vibrant embroidered wearables to car parts. Three levels of scaffolding— a series of  Piranesi-like catwalks, ramps and stairs— support exhibition booths flanking narrow walkways around the perimeter of each floor. These simultaneously  open and intimate spaces foster easy hands-on camaraderie, something  reflected in the exhibition’s focus on the physical connection between the artist and the art object. Hence the Material title.

This casual and playful ambiance encourages easy visual conversations between the emerging and the arrived. For example, textile artists Cecy Gómez (b.1992) and Yann Gerstberger (b.1983) recall their ethnic roots as ancient craft and modernist art respectively. Muy Gallery,  a recently formed initiative promoting the works of  Native artists, represents Gómez who preserves the weaving traditions and mythologies of her Tsotsil-Mayan community in a direct, naive style. Nevertheless, her unique fabric works —made on cloth from traditional skirts worn by indigenous women, and with natural plant dyes—convey contemporary feminist and ecological themes. Works by French artist Yann Gerstberger (b.1983) represented by the well-established gallery, OMR,  are by contrast elegantly conceived in the visual language of early modern abstraction. For his enormous tapestry, Untitled (2020), he hand-dyed burrs of cotton mops, glued them to vinyl and combined them with local  fabric finds to create imagery steeped in Yoruba  ritual and Nigerian folklore.

Mexico-based galleries accounted for twenty-five percent of the exhibitors. Other stand-outs among these venues included LuLu gallery, a small gem co-founded by Chris Sharp who selected a series of gorgeous paintings by Argentine-born artist Santiago de Paoli (b. 1978). De Paoli’s small luminous canvases consist of sensuous, erotic and eerie abstract figures recalling early modern isms, but dwell in a surreal world of their own. Stepping from here into the installation by Irak Morales (b.1981) crossed the line between sensual eroticism and porn. Represented by Neri/Barranco, a Mexican project billing itself as a “nomadic gallery with no physical space,” Morales’s work comments on pulp porn as, he said, “a young Mexican man’s source of sexual information in the 60’s.” His multi-media installation, “Deme 3×5, con tode y pallevar!!!” (2020) included cut-outs  from vintage pornographic  comic books, some shaped as pork-chops suspended from the ceiling as mobiles, others plastic-wrapped around  Mezcal  bottles, or collaged within the frames of religious altarpieces.

Political commentary was most notable in an interactive project by Mexican artist Erick Beltrán (b.1974) at Labor gallery, known for controversial art. Visitors to his installation, Nothing But the Truth (2020), were invited  to write down a lie in an open notebook. Throughout each fair day these lies were compiled, printed as giant posters in a  variety of typographies, and plastered to every inch of exhibition wall. Writ large lies, little and grandiose, merged and, like our daily confrontations with distorted social and network media news, they read as new alternative truths.

Gabriel Orozco’s (b.1962) work, Tracing Money (2020) at the internationally  well-established gallery Kurimanzutto politicizes the graphic form and symbolism of money.  Orozco made prints from layered banknotes— double exposed transparencies merging the currency images of different nations into single blurred composites. Along with drawings, this extensive installation contrasts paper bills as historical and cultural symbols; their ephemeral qualities disturbingly underscoring the existential fluidity of money as a global vehicle of power.

Exhibiting international galeries represented works by Mexican artists and those from their own countries.  New York’s Thierry Goldberg Gallery  featured paintings by Mexican artist Maria Fragoso (b.1995) and included a  triptych featuring an extended family crowded around a typical Mexican dining room, La Peor es Nada (The Worst is Nothing) (2017), unmistakably alludes to the Last Supper. In it Fragoso meshes a comical depiction of loving and dysfunctional family life with the tradition  of Mexican mural painting.The pull of one’s culture is also embedded in works by the team of Lina Mazenett (b.1989)  and David Quiroga (b.1985), Colombian artists represented at Instituto de Visión in Bogatá, a gallery that seeks to trace the Mexican roots of conceptual thinking in Latin America. The artists’ jewel-like reliefs replicating Aztec designs are made of green circuit boards mimicking the brilliant patina of fine jade.

Yngvild Saeter (b.1986), the solo artist featured at Stockholm’s Andréhn-Schiptjenko gallery, makes much scarier outsized jewelry-inspired sculptures from motorcycle parts that she reconstructs, paints and embellishes with feathers, chains, metal spikes and metal rivets. Saeter says these works relate to the euphoric life/death moment she experienced during brain surgery when she momentarily “died,” then revived. She recalls that mystical lapse as a vision in which she was surrounded by motorcycles. Thus did the  biker cult fuel her art: otherworldly helmets, masks, breast plates and shields, the regalia of punk or gothic vampires, perhaps, but like the artist’s strange ordeal, as alluring as they are terrifying.

Milan-based gallery Clima featured the startling work of Italian artist Matteo Nasini (b. 1976) who also channels the dream world, but  from a clinical perspective. His installation of sculpture and tapestry sources data from encephalograms taken while a subject is dreaming. Using a variety of hi-tech software he translates these data into sound, tapestry, and porcelain sculpture using a 3D printing process. Nasini’s intriguing practice eerily suggests that our thoughts have a hidden structural armature, that they are not as ephemeral as we think, and that we can somehow render them immortal as sculptural form. If this boggled your mind, and if you needed a break from cerebrally processing the riotous visual party of this art fair, you would happily aim for  Aria McManus’s (b.1989) Relieviation Works (2017). McManus, an artist and product designer, created an installation for Los Angeles-based gallery AA/LA: a seemingly mundane office environment with hidden healing mechanisms including  a calendar with deliciously edible date pages, and an illuminated name plate radiating the physical and mental nourishment of sunshine.

Coincidentally,  the current Whitney Museum exhibition in New York, Vida Américana, which explores the  impact of  Mexican muralists — Clemente, Orozco and Riviera—on American art, bows to both Mexico City’s vibrant art moment and the art historical importance of its cultural heritage. But it’s perhaps more important that the city is today a magnet for contemporary art and artists, not because of cheap space, sunny days, and hungry collectors, but because of the rationale driving such efforts as the Fiera de Arte Material: from its architecture to its openess to diversity, it represents a metaphoric ideal for a much needed world without walls.

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Contingency plan, backup, second string, or—in the case of the former Volta art fair—Plan B. Due to structural issues with the West Side piers, Volta was forced to suddenly cancel its 2019 iteration. The fair’s organizers declined to relocate to a different venue, citing the potential damage such a move could do to their “brand image”, although it’s unclear what they imagined might be worse than looking like they don’t care about their exhibitors. Some of the former fair’s participants quickly put together an alternative—putting Plan B in effect—in Chelsea, including space provided by David Zwirner. Plan B is an art fair stripped down to the model’s essentials. Absent are the usual accoutrements veteran fair-goers have grown used to seeing, such as VIP lounges, overpriced refreshments, and – ahem – walls.

Without partitions separating a gallery’s space from its surroundings, Plan B’s atmosphere less resembles the white cubicles of the Volta of yore as it does a group exhibition at a gallery. Each exhibitor’s allotted space is loosely demarcated, and it’s up to the viewer to determine which artworks belong together. Takiru Shiferaw’s Money (Cardi B) (2018) stands in the middle of the floor and could belong next to any of the works surrounding it. Alaina Simone Incorporated intended that it be viewed alongside USNEA: Material/Form Test (2019) by Tahir Carl Karmali, a wall-based installation of draped mosquito netting and pulp made from immigration paperwork. Perhaps, in an alternate reality with lax structural regulations, the two would have shared a little niche at Volta, secluded from the rest of the work in the fair, but as things are, they share the gallery with everything else.

Other exhibitors have less ambiguous boundaries: Frodo Mikkelsen’s four silver-plated skulls, shown by SFA Projects, aren’t likely to be lumped in with any other space’s offerings. Each skull supports a small domestic landscape scene, like a house with trees and a yard or a hunting lodge in the woods. These scenes have hidden secrets, though: One house has a dinosaur skull underneath it (a skull buried in a skull), and another house sits atop a cache of gemstones, visible through the skull’s eye sockets.

Slag Gallery’s space is packed with a variety of paintings, small and large, by Dumitru Gorzo. His Slant series features colorful shapes and patterns painted on otherwise brooding figures and scenes. The contrast between melancholy underpainting and vibrant surface interventions makes the results look like the work of multiple artists, like the Chapman Brothers’ infamous alterations to original prints from Goya’s Disasters of War. One layer responds to another with playful parody, as with the bug-like features added to figures in Slant 5 and Slant 2, or more abstractly: Slant 6 is divided up according to the spatial logic of Francis Bacon, with a scaffold of lines isolating the figure’s head from the rest of the composition.

Okeksiy Sai’s digital prints on aluminum, shown by Kyiv’s Voloshyn Gallery, combine form and content in a unique manner: his blocky, pixelated scenes of office life are rendered in Microsoft Excel, a spreadsheet program transformed into an artistic tool. Excel provides the user with a malleable matrix that can hold combinations of text, numerical data, and in this case, blocks of color. Close up, each of Sai’s works looks like a block chart with an undecipherable color-coding scheme labeling areas of multi-lingual text, numbers, and code snippets. Scenarios of office life emerge with distance, mundane scenes made in a mundane program, made extraordinary by their overwhelming conceptual tedium.

Art fairs can be dreary particularly to those of us who are obligated to attend them several times a year and pretend to be excited by each one. Plan B, however, feels genuinely exciting even to this jaded art fair attendee. The minimalism enforced by sudden re-organization lends Plan B a unique sensibility among the Armory Week offerings. The fact that it was successfully put together on such short notice is testament to the dedication of its organizers and participants, and perhaps that palpable sense of commitment is what makes Plan B stand out amid the art fair scene’s vapid decadence.

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March 8–11, 2018
Spring Studios, 50 Varick Street
New York City, independenthq.com

Unless they make some changes in the way they do business I’ll likely skip the Independent art fair in future years. It is a shame because the fair is close by where I live and attracts galleries I like to follow. But there is at least one fair too many to do justice to them all in Armory week. Sheer irritation places the Independent on my black list.

First off, the labels! Or, rather, the pretentious and insulting lack thereof. While some galleries are professional enough to identify the relevant details with the work, or at least, when it is a solo presentation, to emblazon the artist’s name somewhere and then have a readily accessible checklist to hand, way too many leave visitors in the lurch.

The other problem with Independent is the sunlight. Some works were simply impossible to look at, it was so bright. I love natural light, but the choice at the fair was between blackout shades or no shades, and for art you need shades that diffuse natural light. 50 Varick Street is a beautiful venue, but for an art fair effective blinds need to be installed.

There’s old-fashioned logic to not publishing prices: Dealers want a conversation with potential collectors. Plus they want to see what shoes they are wearing before quoting a price. (That’s a joke, by the way, although not necessarily so far from the truth.) But withholding the artist’s NAME is just bad manners.

Some of us have limited time and patience, going around so many fairs in one week. You see something by an artist who is new to you and you want to start the learning process straight away, text and image hand in hand. You see something you half think you know: You have to humiliate yourself by asking who it is? Whether the driving factor among gallerists is laziness or elitism, such coyness is self-destructive.

On the ground floor I saw some interesting work at a Spanish gallery and had to ask who it was. Of course, it was a Spanish name. To say it went in one ear and out the other is unduly flattering to my ears. Too bad for the artist they “represent.” Intriguing paintings by a Belgian, Harold someone or another, whose name and that of his gallery were not available to be photographed went straight to Instagram except my post got lost (bad reception I guess.) The gallery assistant completely agreed that it is absurd not to have his name on the wall,  having spent the last five days repeating the same info incessantly. It was, however, represented on the spine of a book, she pointed out, on a coffee table in a corner of their booth.  Another artist I was pleased to discover, Augustin Delloye, was fortunate to have his name scribbled by a five year old on the wall. I didn’t notice if Elisabeth Kley had a label with her stunning installation at CANADA. I did notice the sunlight, however.

I can’t be bothered to start lecturing gallerists on how to do their job, but they sure made it frustrating trying to do mine.

This afternoon things (almost) came to blows with the handsome brute pictured here. The name of the young LA-based artist this Berlin/Cologne dealer was showing with an LA partner being absent, I went to the desk in search of the checklist, photographing a relevant page—and, I’ll admit, leaving the page open quite deliberately as a way of saying “put a fucking label on the wall, losers”. Looking more closely at the work I was intrigued by one in particular and wondered after its title. Returning to the table I found that the checklist had been closed up and a book emphatically placed on top of it by a dealer whose expression was one of  exasperated housekeeping. “May I look at the checklist please.” “Certainly, just leave it neatly when you are finished with it.” “Are you trying to keep the artist’s name a secret?” Checklist snatched violently from visitor’s hands and replaced under book,. Raised voices and snapshots ensue.

I guess that unfiltered sunlight was starting to get to people!

Regarding the mystery artist at the top of this page, do a reverse image search if you are curious. Googling “Harold,”  “Belgium” and “Independent,” meanwhile, yields Harold Ancart, showing at Clearing, a gallery in New York and Brussels, as detailed in the caption, above. But seriously, people, LABELS!

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Art Dealers Association of America The Art Show at the Park Avenue Armory

February 27 to March 4, 2018

Don’t wait until next week to get into fair mood: This year, for venue scheduling reasons, The Art Show, the ADAA’s annual outing at the Park Avenue Armory, precedes the onslaught on the piers—the other Armory. And, like years past, it’s proving to be the place for aesthetic delectation.

I simply don’t know where to begin, there are so many fabulous exhibitions packed under this drill hall, so I may as well begin at the beginning: Cheim and Read’s solo display of new sculpture by the redoubtable Lynda Benglis that greets you at the entrance. Turn left, as supermarkets have discovered most of us do, and you get a revelatory display of landscape sketches by Myron Stout at Washburn Gallery, along with one of his trademark black and white painted iconic shapes: the nervously breezy, feather-stroked perceptual landscapes done in Provincetown, Mass. in black Conté send you back to the hard-edged abstraction with renewed intensity.

Brian Washburn told me they discovered a box of these drawings when they moved downtown recently hidden in plain sight in a painting rack. A metaphor, in a way, for The Art Show experience, where in one box after another (the booths) treasures from the past reveal themselves. Just over the aisle, Peter Freeman, Inc. have Mel Bochner paintings from the early 1980s that, if you are more familiar with his word pieces, will come as a surprise: Shaped canvases bursting with geometric forms dispatched with neo-expressionist gusto. Bochner first painted these images on regular shaped canvas, the sales assistant told me, and then determined the right irregular shape from the resulting form. Their surfaces reminded me of his contemporary, Terry Winters, represented elsewhere at the fair in a group show at Matthew Marks.

Hirschl and Adler, nestled in the corner, are in an appropriately intimate, almost closeted space for their show, Americans 1943: Realism and Magic Realism. This marks the 75th anniversary of a show of that title at MoMA. Sunday communist Osvaldo Louis Guglielmi delivers an allegory of corruption and resistance in The American Dream, 1935, that suggests that only the settings have changed in the interim. All the same issues are in place: horny CEOs, marginalized minorities, put upon protesters and an unloved statue.

Speaking of minorities, African American artists feature prominently amongst stand out solo booths in this year’s fair, including some historic rediscoveries. Michael Rosenfeld Gallery celebrates the achievements of abstract painter William T. Williams, while Galerie Lelong & Co showcase the lyrical gestalts of southern painter Mildred Thompson with Magnetic Fields, a series from her last decade. “Years ago, I had a dream about an event in space” she wrote in a 1992 statement. “Feeling fortunate to see this event, I stayed to look at it in detail.”

Detail is the essence of the experience of Harmony Hammond’s riveting textured grids in the Weave Paintings at Alexander Gray Associates. Not that one is seeking to survey the fair in identity categories, but another openly queer artist, Nicole Eisenman, makes play with a two-person display with Andy Warhol at Anton Kern Gallery. Their brochure quotes Andy Warhol as saying “If only one day my work could be shown in an art fair booth alongside the work of a radical lesbian”, which ambition Eisenman has obliged in a display where master and acolyte are not always easy to tell apart.

Intensity of detail and exquisiteness in finish are also determining factors in appreciation of Lynn Herhmann Leeson’s early work at San Francisco’s Anglim Gilbert Gallery, Dotty Attie’s works at P.P.O.W. and new drawings by Amy Cutler at Leslie Tonkonow. The balance of aesthetic and mechanical precision in Thomas Chimes 1970s metal box constructions are aptly contextualized at Philadelphia’s Locks Gallery display with Alexander Calder and Joseph Cornell. But the last and abiding delectations in the final aisle were of a more rough-hewn nature: Milton Avery at Yares Art, sumptuous and fulsome collages by Biala at Pavel Zoubok, and the take home dream of this visitor, the ravishing quietude of James Bishop with San Antonio, Tx. gallerist Lawrence Markey, where color and space seem to be breathed onto the page.

ADDENDUM: Posted as a featured item from THE LIST on Sunday, March 4

So natural is the tendency of commercial galleries to hedge bets and pack their stands with variety that many art fairs have color coded sections put aside for solo spots. Not so ADAA’s The Art Show at Park Avenue Armory, now in its 30th year, which through natural selection, it would seem, affords a hearty mix of group and solo presentations. Two standout stands that eluded my round up earlier this week exemplify these respective models. Jill Newhouse, whose gallery specializes in historic works on paper as well as contemporary works in different mediums, showcased a fine selection of drawings by Pierre Bonnard along with a tightly hung, intriguingly diverse group of living artists working in the Bonnardian spirit. The six living painters – curated by Karen Wilkin – included Larry Poons, Graham Nickson and Rachel Rickert. Danese Corey, meanwhile, opted for audacious singularity in presenting just one massive eight-foot high bronze sculpture by William Tucker, Meru, 2015-2017. The intricacies and folds of Tucker’s massed modeling and the demands of this complex form to be seen, fully, in the round could detain the discerning visitor as long as the salon hung massed ranks of intimate works at other stands. It is just not quite so easy to take it home.

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Salon Zürcher is to fair weeks what New Hampshire is to primary elections. Armory Week 2017 kicks off Monday with the 16th edition of this boutique fair, an early bird special that hands the keys to Zürcher’s Bleecker Street premises to six galleries from Paris, Brussels, Oslo, Provincetown (MA) and Hangzhou, China, whose Inna Art Space’s booth is pictured here.

Tuesday, February 28: Moving Image New York at The Tunnel, 269 11th Avenue

Jefferson Pinder’s Afro-Cosmonaut/Alien (White Noise) is, according to his gallery, Curator’s Office of Bathesda, Md., “an escapist video narrative that ends in destruction when the protagonist plummets back to Earth after a mystical space journey. Like the doomed Icarus of Ancient Greek myth, the epic fall comes after reaching a brilliant zenith that is both mesmerizing and lethal. This white-faced Butoh-inspired performance is a crude metaphor of the civil rights legacy. Taking cues from experimental films, Pinder plants himself within the work, asking the viewers to watch the images of propulsion and power.”

Wednesday, March 1: Spring/Break Art Show, 4 Times Square

Spring/Break was the most anarchic and exuberant of the fairs back in the days when it was staged in the old USPS administrative offices – a David Lynch-like time-capsule of New Deal bureacracy. Now Spring/Break has been given a break in the form of two floors of a glass and steel high-rise 22 stories above Times Square. But there is no corresponding corporateness in the resulting display. The organizing principle remains: each room has its own curators who sometimes include the exhibiting artists themselves. It was gratifying for artcritical to see some of its own writers among the curators. Eric Sutphin, for instance, has brought together an inspired coupling of New York School painter Rosemarie Beck, who was active from the 1950s onwards with classically sourced, abstractly composed multi-figure compositions, and contemporary mannerist, Angela Dufresne, with her swirling, voluptuous, cinematic scenes. Each display has a neat little office of its own, with spectacular views of the midtown skyline. Too spectacular, sometimes, as it can overwhelm what’s on view. Inspired, therefore, was the decision to hang works in the blinds-drawn windows in one mini show, Thing Gap Method, selected by artcritical writer Megan Liu Kincheloe and featuring Sophia Flood, Sascha Ingber, Kelly McCafferty, Sarah Tortora and Kincheloe herself, whose Dice (2017) is pictured here. DAVID COHEN

Thursday, March 2: The Armory Show at Piers 92 & 94

It’s a good year for texture. Well, so is any year probably, and a good year for anything else if all you want to do is scatter evidence for some such glib hunch amidst the labyrinth that is the city’s biggest art fair, conceptual bread crumbs, so to speak, to trace your way back to the front door. But as the first piece to grab my eye was a fabric work by Jayson Musson at Philadelphia’s Fleisher-Ollman texture became my trail. Next stop, a cunningly camp “salon” for Florine Stettheimer, presented by Jeffrey Deitch, showing latter-day acolytes of the society heiress pioneer of the American avant garde where a 1990s shlock horror wedding cake of impasto by the unjustly forgotten Thomas Trosch abstractly emulated Florine’s Harlem beach scene that presides over the display. From there it was texture everywhere, whether the geological encrustations of Bosco Sodi, preponderant in the fair and to be seen, for instance, at Galeria Hilario Galguera of Mexico City, Blain Southern and Paul Kasmin; the very 1950s-looking sculpted netted grids of Michelle Grabner at James Cohan; or the painterly reliefs of Miguel Barcelo at Thaddeus Ropac. The tactility can even manifest vicariously, as in the Vik Muniz Isis print of a strangely mottled version of Picasso’s The Dreamer, at Edwin Houk. Haptic experiences grounded the gaze amidst the accelerating flow of spectacle. DAVID COHEN

Featured item from The Armory Show 2017: Mernet Larsen at Various Small Fires

Various Small Fires, the Los Angeles gallery, has a solo show of preparatory sketches by Tampa, Florida-based painter Mernet Larsen in the Presents section of The Armory Show 2017. Larsen, who also has a work on view at James Cohan Gallery’s booth at the same fair, has only recently come into her own since retiring from a distinguished career in art education, memories of which pervade her frequent return to the motif of the faculty meeting. Rooted in an earlier abstract practice as well as explorations of Japanese prints, Larsen’s jocular imagery thinly disguises her fascination with unconventional perspective systems. She pursues radical spatial solutions that eschew conventional single-point perspective in favor of parallel perspective, reverse perspective and eccentric, seemingly improvised but in fact rigorous fusions of different systems within the same work. By destabilizing the location of the viewer, sometimes indeed to the point of inducing vertigo, she forces us to know, rather than merely see, the situation. DAVID COHEN

Friday, March 3: VOLTA NY at Pier 90, 12th Avenue @ 50th Street

Ruth Hardinger’s striking Volta display at David&Scheweitzer Contemporary draws together disparate forces: the artist’s passionate environmental activism, her longstanding affinity with Mesoamerican culture, and historically informed, critically sharpened investigations of working methods. These are all felt in works such works as Bundle of Rights, a sculpture in plaster and rope, and Reading the Clouds, a tapestry collaboration with Mexican weavers, seen at the Piers. Meanwhile, back at the rancheros, that is to say 56 Bogart Street, the same gallery presents an ongoing retrospective overview of Hardinger work in different media. There are tapestries, a calendar, hanging works in paper and assembled sculptures. Obsessive-compulsive minimalist hatch drawings worked on varyingly rough and smooth surfaces are installed in a grid that conforms to the Golden Rule. Dating from the 1970s, this work manages to resonate with a recent, altogether more robust and spontaneous cast concrete and found slate sculptural arrangement. What binds these efforts across the decades is the humble yet inventive presentness of their maker. DAVID COHEN

Saturday, March 4: The Art Show at Park Avenue Armory, 643 Park Avenue @ 66th Street

The New York art fair scene can be confusing to the uninitiated: the most prominent fair, The Armory Show, takes place at a convention center on the Hudson while the Park Avenue Armory hosts an unrelated fair of its own, The Art Show by the Art Dealer’s Association of America. The work shown in the actual armory tends to be more conservative than the offerings of most of the other fairs, but there can be some surprises. PPOW’s booth this year is devoted to the work of Betty Tompkins, an artist who has been painting portraits of the pudendum for over forty years. Today she is best known for her colossal coital canvases, but her smaller works on paper, such as “Censored Grid #1” from 1974, provide a more intimate view of an intimate act. ROMAN KALINOVSKI

Independent (Art Fair) at Spring Studios, 50 Varick Street

Memo to Independent Art Fair, organizers and exhibitors alike: Enough already, put up some labels.

In the early days of the Basel Art Fair (the real one, in Basel, Switzerland) galleries would get an official reprimand from the all-powerful committee if the labels didn’t include prices. Dealers complained that having to ask was an icebreaker with collectors. But to have to ask who the artist is – never mind the title, medium, date? This is elitist, pretentious and anti-intellectual. To the innocent “general public” this says, this isn’t for you folks. To professionals it is impertinent and irritating, putting one in the humiliating position of asking when you half-know and gobbling up precious time in doing so. For new, unknown artists with foreign names it is a total downer: who is going to remember it, next time? And for collectors, having to beg for basic information has all the novelty and subtlety of a robo-telecall.

Despite this mishegas. Independent is still one of the most pleasing visitor experiences, thanks in no small measure to the gorgeous venue. My epiphanies on this visit were mostly three-dimensional for some reason: Beverly Buchanan’s shack constructions at Andrew Edlin; a bafflingly kinky saddle mounted on a scaffold “horse” by Magali Reus at London’s Approach; and a dynamically voluptuous bronze by the late Hungarian-born Norwegian sculptor Ervin Løffler, exquisitely installed by Oslo gallery VI, VII with works in dye on canvas by young New Yorker Landon Metz (Photo: Sebastiano Pellion) DAVID COHEN

Sunday, March 5: NADA New York at Skylight Clarkson North, 572 Washington Street

A work by Brenda Goodman presented by Jeff Bailey at NADA, the New Art Dealers Association, 2017 fair. NADA was founded in 2002, launching its first fair that year in Miami. This year sees some changes in its New York outing: the time slot has switched from Frieze Week to Armory Week, and they have a new venue in west Soho. In tune with the self-styled progressive profile of the association, half of ticket sales are to be donated to the ACLU. DAVID COHEN

This year’s iteration of the NADA fair was probably the most visually exhausting of the art fair week group, with dozens of galleries competing for attention in micro-booths that barely allowed one person to stand comfortably inside. Most of the galleries were from around New York but there were some international standouts, such as a selection of digital prints by Chris Dorland, courtesy of Super Dakota gallery from Brussels. Dorland’s glitchy work, made using a broken scanner and printed on eight foot tall aluminum panels, offered something monumental and digital in a fair that leaned towards the modest and traditional. Pictured: Untitled (corporate cannibal), 2017. ROMAN KALINOVSKI

Monday, March 6: Spring/Break Art Show, 4 Times Square

As befits the most youthful of the fairs, Spring/Break has an extra 24 hours of energy and determination than the others: it is the one fair in Fair Week that makes it to the Monday of the next. And here is an artist who knows how to capture zest. Aneta Bartos, whose dad Zbigniew Bartos has a lifetime of competitive bodybuilding behind him. Naturally, it was to her that he would turn, aged 68, to capture his musculature in its last glory. A room of buff, nicely toned father-daughter photographs takes home trophies for audacity and composure. DAVID COHEN

The post All Our Blurbs from Art Fair Week, March 2017 appeared first on artcritical.

February 28

March 01

Moving Image New York (Wednesday) at The Tunnel
269 11th Avenue between 27 & 29th, New York, NY

11AM-8PM; FREE

Spring/Break Art Show (Wednesday) at SPRING/BREAK
4 Times Square entrance on 43rd Street, New York, NY

11AM -6PM; $

The Art Show: Art Dealers Association of America (Wednesday) at Park Avenue Armory
643 Park Avenue @ 66th Street, New York, NY (212) 616-3930

Noon-8PM; $

March 02

Art on Paper Fair (Preview) at Pier 36 at Basketball City
299 South Street, New York, NY

6-10PM; $

NADA New York (Thursday) at Skylight Clarkson North
572 Washington Street, New York, NY (212) 594-0883

$; VIP Preview by Invitation: Thursday, March 2, 12–2pm; Opening Preview by Invitation: Thursday, March 2, 2–4pm; Open to the Public: Thursday, March 2, 4–8pm

Scope New York (Thursday: Preview Day) at Metropolitan Pavilion
125 West 18th Street, New York, NY (800) 563-7632

Invitation or Platinum VIP 3-6pm, VIP | Press Preview 6-9 pm, $

Clio Art Fair (Opening) at Clio
508 West 26th Street Floors 5 & 9, New York, NY

6-9PM; VIP Opening Reception; $

Moving Image New York (Thursday) at The Tunnel
269 11th Avenue between 27 & 29th, New York, NY

11AM-4PM; FREE

Spring/Break Art Show (Thursday) at SPRING/BREAK
4 Times Square entrance on 43rd Street, New York, NY

11AM -6PM; $

The Armory Show (Thursday) at Piers 92 & 94
711 12th Avenue @ 55th Street, New York, NY

Noon-8PM; $;

VOLTA NY (Thursday) at Pier 90
12th Avenue @ 50th Street, New York, NY

Noon-8PM; $; The invitational fair of solo artist projects; http://ny.voltashow.com

The Art Show: Art Dealers Association of America (Thursday) at Park Avenue Armory
643 Park Avenue @ 66th Street, New York, NY (212) 616-3930

Noon-8PM; $

March 03

Independent (Art Fair) (Friday) at Spring Studios
50 Varick Street, New York, NY

Noon-7PM; $; http://independenthq.com

Art on Paper Fair (Friday) at Pier 36 at Basketball City
299 South Street, New York, NY

11AM-7PM; $

NADA New York (Friday) at Skylight Clarkson North
572 Washington Street, New York, NY (212) 594-0883

11am–7pm; $

Scope New York (Friday) at Metropolitan Pavilion
125 West 18th Street, New York, NY (800) 563-7632

11 am – 8 pm, $

Clio Art Fair (Friday) at Clio
508 West 26th Street Floors 5 & 9, New York, NY

10AM-8PM; FREE

Spring/Break Art Show (Friday) at SPRING/BREAK
4 Times Square entrance on 43rd Street, New York, NY

11AM -6PM; $

The Armory Show (Friday) at Piers 92 & 94
711 12th Avenue @ 55th Street, New York, NY

Noon-8PM; $; https://www.thearmoryshow.com/

VOLTA NY (Friday) at Pier 90
12th Avenue @ 50th Street, New York, NY

Noon-8PM; $; The invitational fair of solo artist projects; http://ny.voltashow.com

The Art Show: Art Dealers Association of America (Friday) at Park Avenue Armory
643 Park Avenue @ 66th Street, New York, NY (212) 616-3930

Noon-8PM; $

March 04

Independent (Art Fair) (Saturday) at Spring Studios
50 Varick Street, New York, NY

Noon-7PM; $; http://independenthq.com

Art on Paper Fair (Saturday) at Pier 36 at Basketball City
299 South Street, New York, NY

11AM-7PM; $

NADA New York (Saturday) at Skylight Clarkson North
572 Washington Street, New York, NY (212) 594-0883

11am–7pm; $

Scope New York (Saturday) at Metropolitan Pavilion
125 West 18th Street, New York, NY (800) 563-7632

11 am – 8pm, $

Performance: Martha Friedman: Two Person Operating System created in collaboration with Susan Marshall at Andrea Rosen Gallery 2
544 West 24th Street, New York, NY (212) 627-6100

2-6PM; FREE

Clio Art Fair (Saturday) at Clio
508 West 26th Street Floors 5 & 9, New York, NY

10AM-8PM; FREE

Spring/Break Art Show (Saturday) at SPRING/BREAK
4 Times Square entrance on 43rd Street, New York, NY

11AM -6PM; $

The Armory Show (Saturday) at Piers 92 & 94
711 12th Avenue @ 55th Street, New York, NY

Noon-7PM; $; https://www.thearmoryshow.com/

VOLTA NY (Saturday) at Pier 90
12th Avenue @ 50th Street, New York, NY

Noon-8PM; $; The invitational fair of solo artist projects; http://ny.voltashow.com

The Art Show: Art Dealers Association of America (Saturday) at Park Avenue Armory
643 Park Avenue @ 66th Street, New York, NY (212) 616-3930

Noon-7PM; $

March 05

Independent (Art Fair) (Sunday) at Spring Studios
50 Varick Street, New York, NY

Noon-6PM; $; http://independenthq.com

Art on Paper Fair (Sunday) at Pier 36 at Basketball City
299 South Street, New York, NY

Noon-6PM; $

NADA New York (Sunday) at Skylight Clarkson North
572 Washington Street, New York, NY (212) 594-0883

11am–5pm; $

Scope New York (Sunday) at Metropolitan Pavilion
125 West 18th Street, New York, NY (800) 563-7632

11 am – 7 pm, $

Clio Art Fair (Sunday) at Clio
508 West 26th Street Floors 5 & 9, New York, NY

Noon-6PM; FREE

Spring/Break Art Show (Sunday) at SPRING/BREAK
4 Times Square entrance on 43rd Street, New York, NY

11AM -6PM; $

The Armory Show (Sunday) at Piers 92 & 94
711 12th Avenue @ 55th Street, New York, NY

Noon-6PM; $; https://www.thearmoryshow.com/

VOLTA NY (Sunday) at Pier 90
12th Avenue @ 50th Street, New York, NY

Noon-5PM; $; The invitational fair of solo artist projects; http://ny.voltashow.com

The Art Show: Art Dealers Association of America (Sunday) at Park Avenue Armory
643 Park Avenue @ 66th Street, New York, NY (212) 616-3930

Noon-5PM; $

March 06

Spring/Break Art Show (Monday) at SPRING/BREAK
4 Times Square entrance on 43rd Street, New York, NY

11AM -6PM; $

The post The Art Fairs This Week: A Cheat Sheet from the Editors of THE LIST appeared first on artcritical.

The post A Look Back at a Preview: Frieze New York 2016 appeared first on artcritical.

A “common crossing” is a ubiquitous railroad switch. Laid down horizontally, inserted in the railroad tracks, these ‘frogs’ guide trains crossing from one line to the next. Just as Duchamp transfigured an ordinary men’s urinal into an artwork, by rotating Fountain ninety degree out of the everyday world, so by revolving her ‘frogs’ into a vertical position, Vitale thrusts these bulky readymades into our art world. How strange that these banal artifacts, transformed so minimally by the artist who has chosen them, can thus become affecting works of art.

The post FRIEZE WEEK PICK OF THE DAY: Marianne Vitale at Contemporary Fine Art, Berlin at Frieze appeared first on artcritical.

Frieze is at Randalls Island, through Sunday, May 8. See “The List” for visitor details

The post FRIEZE WEEK PICK OF THE DAY: David Humphrey at Fredericks & Freiser at Frieze appeared first on artcritical.