In a rare appearance outside of its traditional Armory Week schedule, SPRING/BREAK has expanded both chronologically and territorially with a new show in downtown Brooklyn, aptly titled the BKLYN IMMERSIVE. Installed in an arts and event space on the ground floor of the “City Point BKLYN” development, this iteration is focused on a small selection of large-scale immersive installations rather than the endless rooms and corridors of art fair fare characteristic of SPRING/BREAK’s previous outings.

One work of note is Takashi Horisaki’s Social Dress New Orleans – 10 Years After, an architectural installation created in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Horisaki coated the walls of a flood-ravaged building with latex rubber and let it set, undisturbed, for two years. Upon its removal, these latex casts held an archaeological record of the building’s history in layer upon layer of flaked paint, plaster, lathe, and even a fish skeleton that somehow got embedded in a wall. Suspended from the ceiling according to the house’s original floor plan, the floppy rubbery walls present a ghostly yet physical memory of a space that would otherwise be forgotten.

Another installation inhabiting a place between physicality and ephemerality is Material World, a selection of works by the “Material Girl” collective, a group of female-identified artists working at the intersections of sculpture and digital media. Their installation references the Vaporwave aesthetic, an online subculture that utilizes (and fetishizes) obsolete technology in the creation of digital works that are shared across social media platforms. The collection of thirteen works contains some standout pieces, such as Claire Lachow’s ludditemeet.space, a digital video (shown on a vintage CRT computer monitor) that explores themes of digital plasticity and the malleability of online identity. One particular scene is a documentation of a digital performance in which a body, rendered in 3D through the open-source “MakeHuman” program and embellished with text taken from bank slogans, is variously transformed and deformed as the music from the video game The Sims plays, slowed down to a dirge. In the center of the space is Devra Freelander’s Venusian Alpenglow, a puddle of polystyrene and exoxy resin that visually references Lynda Benglis’s floor works from the 1960s and 70s. The puddle is painted with a retina-searing fluorescent enamel that gradually shifts from yellow to red-orange, unnaturally intense colors that should only exist in the additive colorspace of a computer monitor rather than in the physical world.

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Thank you, dear Holland, for bringing some civilization to New Amsterdam. The European Fine Art Fair is familiar to collectors and trade as Maastricht, the southern Dutch border town that has hosted the fair, on and off, since 1988. TEFAF has now joined the global franchising trend that gives us Basel in Miami and Hong Kong and other geographical marketing wonders. The fair had reportedly been looking for a big enough US venue – Maastricht takes place in cavernous fair grounds – for some time. In settling upon the unique charms and strategic location of the Park Avenue Armory they have come up a cropper.

If you think you are familiar with the Armory from the countless fairs staged there, the transformation of the landmarked drill hall will take your breath away. TEFAF are beneficiaries of the top notch restorations of the Armory that have been taking place recently, but they have brought their own style sensibility to bear on the Victorian interiors. By compressing the entrance lobby they have carved out new exhibitor spaces on the first and second floors. Whiting out the regimental paraphernalia behind semi-opaque cloths was a super classy move. The galleries lucky – or tony – enough to secure these eccentric spaces have been able to exploit the sheer theatricality of these backdrops to spectacular effect: Di Donna, for instance, with what they bill as a Surrealist banquet, in which such later visual-edibles as a Wayne Thiebaud rubbed salon-hang shoulders with canonical Surrealist treasures. The Palazzo Fortuny in Venice came to mind for the way modern and antique treasures were offset with at once sumptuous and raw décor in this and other rooms, Hauser & Wirth’s for instance.

The median quality of materials on view at TEFAF was pretty staggering, but consistently there was the pleasurable frisson of antique and modern juxtaposed, of blue chip taking its chances with a given new discovery or revival. Some stands were cabinets of curiosity, some haute bourgeois living rooms, some museum quality white cubes, and the back and forth between these various experiences added to the sense of a well-ordered visual feast. Black African, pre-Cycladic and modern furniture were first amongst equals amidst the eclectic mix on offer.

Stand outs for this visitor: a louche, mannerist portrait by Otto Dix at Richard Nagy of London, standing guard to a packed display of Klimt and Schiele drawings; a spare, elegant pairing of Barbara Hepworth and Bridget Riley at another London dealers, Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert; mouthwatering Egyptian carvings and trinkets at Charles Ede; a powerfully focused selection of Carmen Herrera from around 1950 at Lisson; fascinating Russian and Ukrainian works from the late Tsarist and early revolutionary period, 1890-1934 (a to-die-for early Kandinsky on incised wood) at James Butterwick; a wall-mounted bureau by Jean Prouvé from his Villa Saint Clair, with Laffanour Galerie Downtown from Paris. Quite the coup was to be found at Bernard Goldberg, presenting three Thomas Hart Benton mural-sized canvases from a suite (the remainder of which are now in the Nelson Atkins and Terra museums) painted early in his career to show prospective clients, scholars propose, that he had the chops to handle mural commissions. Another really memorable booth was Hidde van Seggelen’s where early works by Dutch neo-conceptualist Pieter Laurens Mol were to be savored. (An ’80s star, he was a discovery for me.) At once learned, thoughtful, playful and exquisitely crafted, Mol felt perfect as a solo presentation at this truly connoisseurial fair.

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This year, in its press communications at least, Frieze New York touted a number of galleries showing feminist artists and under-appreciated women of various important movements. This is a newly fashionable area of connoisseurship and does indeed provide an Ariadne’s thread through the labyrinth of a major international art fair

Part of the job of the gallery in this context is to educate the collector through convincing presentations of historic, lesser-known artists. In that sense I was happy to see Mary Corse (b. 1945) at Lehman Maupin. Corse was part of the male dominated Light and Space movement in California in the 1960s, and while I would have liked to experience some of those early works, I enjoyed her new freeway inspired paintings incorporating glass microspheres commonly used to brighten highway signs.

Another pioneer of past movements is the fabulous Kiki Kogelnik (1935-1997), an Austrian Pop artist shown by Gallery Simone Subal. She was a sophisticated colorist who made idiosyncratic imagery that sets her apart stylistically from more familiar male Pop Artists like Tom Wesselmann or Roy Lichtenstein. The gallery organized a great exhibition, managing to curate a representative overview of her work within the constraints of an fair space booth. Kogelnik’s yellow wall sculpture Untitled (Breast) (1986), next to an untitled black and yellow India ink drawing from 1965, is one of the sweetest moments in the fair. Nearby, the artist’s large oil and acrylic paintings (Untitled) Figures, 1972 and 1981, have a Vuillard-esque patterning that predicts some of the work being made by artists in New York right now.

I also learned of Yugoslav-born Hungarian performance artist Katalin Ladik, (b.1942) whose work from the 1970s was on display at Espaivisor. She overlaps with artists like Hannah Wilke and Yoko Ono and seeing a small amount of photographic documentation made me want to know more about her.

This year Frieze also offered plenty of booths with well-known women, for whom little introduction is needed.

Stephen Friedman, for instance, offered Huma Baba’s Castle of the Daughter (2016), a female fertility figure made of cork, styrofoam, wood, and paint. The piece has the totemic presence of Kara Walker’s A Subtlety (2014), though, of course, at a smaller scale. As an object it is experiential in that the burnt wood has a scent and the artist uses a surprising mix of disparate materials – all to amazing effect.

Sylvie Fleury at Salon 94 was another high point of the fair, in particular her life-sized Gold Cage PKW. Made of thick brass bars with a small opening just large enough to pass a food tray to an incarcerated human, it’s a frightening little space. It reminded me of recent protest slogans “Free Melania”, and though created in 2003, the reference to the proverbial kept woman is more pertinent than ever.

Also at Salon 94, male photographer Lyle Ashton Harris authored a self-portrait as Billy Holiday in Blue Billie (2003). Though small in size, it is especially powerful because Harris is able to mine the narrative of personal hardship linked to Holiday, while simultaneously enacting a double play on gender. We know Holiday’s familiar face, but Harris’s embodying of her actually deepens our understanding of the singer, because he gets at her pathos by way of empathic interpretation, just as any good actor can.

Lorna Simpson at Hauser & Wirth also employs blue, in a series of paintings made especially for the fair. By appropriating images from her collection of vintage Jet and Ebony magazines, she presents glamour as a failed project. Her painting Black & Ice appropriates the face of a young beauty holding a cocktail with a come-hither expression. It’s a mixed blessing being beautiful and vulnerable, the piece seems to say; the collaged text and painterly blurs of blue and violet get at the truly scary circumstances a young woman faces as an intoxicated sex object.

At Galerie Lelong Nancy Spero’s Sheela-Na-Gig At Home (1996), is an installation of ready-made bras, slips, and panties that hang on parallel clotheslines. Spero mixes realism with mysticism by interspersing small drawings of the goddess Sheela Na Gig among the clothes. This domestic theme in the work of such a well-known practitioner of feminist art in New York as Spero overlaps interestingly with younger English artist Tracy Emin, who has a number of strong pieces at the fair. Her subtle, sewn drawing on canvas at Loran O’Neill Roma is a seductive artwork both in subject (nude beauty in bed) and form. A small wall at White Cube is a place to pause and consider her abortion memorabilia from 1990. A glass case holds the artist’s hospital bracelet, medication, and bandages. Placed next to a related group of watercolors, the piece is confessional and personal, and in that sense it seems an act of generosity to her audience.

Another woman who blends art with life is Susan Cianciolo, at Bridget Donahue. A large group of her collaged works on paper hang salon style on two walls. But these are rather like souvenirs to the artist’s meatier work in fashion production and relational aesthetics and come across as less serious. A taste of her core practice is in the two floor based sculptures that look like grungy work desks and double as pedestals for fabric and bric-a-brac assemblages she calls “kits”. There is a reference to Cianciolo’s daughter Lilac, who may have been playing inside the boxes with the various pieces of clay, foam core, rhinestones, paper cups and other assorted objects. Though I’m not totally comfortable with Cianciolo being categorized as a feminist artist – her work lacks anger, which to me is an essential component of political art – I like that she presents fashion as high art, and I appreciate the radicality of leaving everything so unfinished.

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Perhaps due to an eleventh-hour change of venue from Federal Hall to a small ground-floor room in SoHo, the second iteration of Portal Art Fair looks a bit rushed and disjointed: none of the works on view are labeled with titles, materials, or prices. Even so, 4heads, the non-profit group organizing the fair (the same group behind the annual Governor’s Island Art Fair) has packed a diverse selection of work into a less-than-optimal space, featuring artists — either previous fair participants or selected from an open call — working in painting, small-scale installation, and sculpture (sorry, media art fans, there are no video pieces to be seen here). Some works of note include a grouping of photographs by Martina Kändler depicting rooms and hallways shot in the style of a broken CCTV camera. She built small-scale environments out of paper and lit them in a variety of ways to produce the series of six works shown here. Across the room is a duo of large (for the space, at least) paintings by Grant Stoops, titled Clowny Guy and Soul of a Clowny Guy. Meticulously rendered in oil paint on board, a golem-like figure variously made of clay or jelly confronts the viewer against a stark white backdrop in one panel and from a shadowy abyss in the other. See THE LIST for information about this and the other fairs happening around the city this week.

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Salon Zürcher is the ground hog of any art fair week in New York City. Zürcher, on Bleecker Street in Noho, has a longstanding tradition of opening up its premises to form a micro-fair, either with neighborhood galleries or with galleries from around the world. Kicking off Frieze Week is the second iteration of Salon Zürcher Africa gathering five galleries showcasing art from Africa from Addis Ababa, Nairobi, New York and Paris. See THE LIST for details of other fairs around New York City this week.

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